I'm writing a fighter subclass to update a player's master thrower character from 3E to 5E. I came up with this feature:
When throwing a dagger at a creature within 20 feet, you exercise enough control over the blade to treat the throw as a melee attack instead of a ranged attack if it would be more beneficial to do so.
This simultaneously does a lot of things that I like for the subclass. It lets them ignore disadvantage from close combat, attack prone targets with advantage instead of disadvantage, and use the shove and grab actions to emulate master thrower tricks. But obviously, it's kind of weird and very open-ended. So what are the rules consequences from this that I'm overlooking?
My first thought was to look at Fighter(Battlemaster), but then I remembered you were building this as a fighter subclass, not a rogue subclass.
If you built this as rogue you'd have to know how you wanted Lunging and Sweeping Strikes to work with it, but as a fighter... I think mostly any issues are going to come from mutliclassing or feats.
If you took Martial Adept to grab Combat Maneuvers, then my note above applies. on lunging strike and sweeping strike. not that they can't/shouldn't mesh with this, you just need to think about them.
- Barbarian: All the base class abilties would trigger with this ability if you used Str and not Dex:
- Rage would add the rage bonus to the damage (normally it's not supposed to)
- Reckless attack would function even though it's normally only for melee attacks
- Brutal Critical 1/2/3 would all work to add extra crit damage dice even at range
- Subclasses:
- Berzerker's Frenzy would work, though you should just be doin TWF instead
- Monk
- Stunning strikes out to 20' with a dagger throw since it triggers on melee weapon attacks
- Paladin
- Rogue
- Subclass
- Swashbuckler
- Fancy Footwork: you could throw daggers at someone and THEN run by them and they wouldn't be able to make Opp. Attacks
- I mean you could always run up to someone attack and then keep running RAW, but maayyybe there's a situation where this would apply.
- Spells:
- Blinding, Searing, Staggering, Thunderous, Wrathful Smite would all work to 20' with this ability as they are "melee weapon attack" and Range Self
- Booming Blade/GFB - shouldn't probably work, but you might be asked because of Multiclassing or Magic Initiate or something.
Basically anywhere a rule specifies a melee weapon attack or a melee attack, this ability would allow it to trigger. I can't think of them or find them all, above is just some examples I thought of quickly.
I also don't know that any of these are a "problem", just things that would work that wouldn't otherwise.
Of note would be that it could count as a Monk weapon for a multiclassed character, allowing a Fighter / Monk to make effectively ranged attacks and apply their class features to them - so you'd be able to substitute your Martial Arts damage die for the dagger's, and could Stunning Strike an opponent from 20 feet away.
Dagger is already a simple weapon so it is already a monk weapon and qualifies for all the martial arts die ext. I think Stunning Strike is the only real shift I could find in the class.
