The following maneuvers are available to the Battle Master archetype of the fighter class.
New Maneuver; The Art of Battle. The flair and style of your attacks are undeniable, when you make a weapon attack on your turn you may expend one of your superiority die, adding the your Charisma bonus to your to hit and the superiority die roll + your Charisma bonus to the damage roll for the attack.
New Maneuver; Blood on the Sand. When you hit a creature with a weapon attack, you can expend one superiority die perform a flourish ending with an attempt to make an additional strike. Choose a target, which may be the same as your initial attack or another within your reach, then roll a Charisma (Perform) check against the creature's armor class. If you are successful, you deal damage normally for your weapon and add the roll of your superiority die to the damage.
New Maneuver; Blood, Sweat, and Cheers. A brilliantly executed attack reinvigorates you, knowing such will bring you accolades and honor. When you hit a creature with a melee weapon attack you can expend a superiority die. You add the superiority die roll + your Charisma modifier to the attacks damage and gain a number of temporary hit points equal to the die roll + your Charisma modifier.
New Maneuver; Covered in Glory. You can make dazzlingly brazen attacks without leaving true openings in your defense. When you hit a creature with a melee weapon attack, you can expend one superiority die. You add the superiority die to the attack's damage roll and may add your Charisma bonus to your Armor Class until the beginning of your next turn.
New Feat; Bloody Showman
Prerequisite: Charisma 13 or higher and proficiency in the Perform skill.
You have trained to perform before crowds in gladiatorial games, learning to use dramatic maneuvers to gain their approval.
Here, I've tried to build on some of the infrastructure created with the Battle Master and the associated Martial Adept feat to create a broader opportunity for a face-type fighter. The body of ideas I draw from for martial types reaches as far back as AD&D and, without even getting into the weird quasi-magical options, provides a fairly broad range of paths and deep pool of powers. While there is already some support for the warlord former class concept that could use expansion, I chose to add an additional concept within the archetype; using the idea of the gladiator entertainer-fighter, which has shown up across editions and widely in media, I've added maneuvers that allow the character to obtain benefits for themselves using Charisma with an otherwise role-play oriented skill. Together, you emphasize the mechanical underpinnings of a face type character, specifically playing to the Bard. Alternately, it gives a performer/face type character some mechanical combat teeth to reach for without being able to overshadow a more focused character.
The final thing I did was a power fix for the warlord concept. The Commander's Strike power, as written, is awful- using far too many resources for the effect. Because I was already working on emphasizing Charisma and related skills I decided to make it less reliable for more power. Without the check I would likely make it still require the target's reaction.
New Maneuver; The Art of Battle. The flair and style of your attacks are undeniable, when you make a weapon attack on your turn you may expend one of your superiority die, adding the your Charisma bonus to your to hit and the superiority die roll + your Charisma bonus to the damage roll for the attack.
New Maneuver; Blood on the Sand. When you hit a creature with a weapon attack, you can expend one superiority die perform a flourish ending with an attempt to make an additional strike. Choose a target, which may be the same as your initial attack or another within your reach, then roll a Charisma (Perform) check against the creature's armor class. If you are successful, you deal damage normally for your weapon and add the roll of your superiority die to the damage.
New Maneuver; Blood, Sweat, and Cheers. A brilliantly executed attack reinvigorates you, knowing such will bring you accolades and honor. When you hit a creature with a melee weapon attack you can expend a superiority die. You add the superiority die roll + your Charisma modifier to the attacks damage and gain a number of temporary hit points equal to the die roll + your Charisma modifier.
New Maneuver; Covered in Glory. You can make dazzlingly brazen attacks without leaving true openings in your defense. When you hit a creature with a melee weapon attack, you can expend one superiority die. You add the superiority die to the attack's damage roll and may add your Charisma bonus to your Armor Class until the beginning of your next turn.
New Feat; Bloody Showman
Prerequisite: Charisma 13 or higher and proficiency in the Perform skill.
You have trained to perform before crowds in gladiatorial games, learning to use dramatic maneuvers to gain their approval.
- You learn three maneuvers of your choice from among those available to the Battle Master archetype in the fighter class. If a maneuver you use requires your target to make a saving throw to resist the maneuver's effects, the saving throw DC equals 8 + your proficiency bonus + your Strength or Dexterity modifier (your choice).
New Feat; For the Crowd
The art of the gladiator is to use dramatic moves to defeat their foes and, more importantly, impress their audience.
- After you use a maneuver from the Battle Master archetype you may make a Charisma(Perform) check against DC 20 as a bonus action. If you are successful you regain a superiority die. You may not attempt to use this ability after that maneuver again until you finish a short or long rest.
House Rule; Commander's Strike On your turn you can use a bonus action to direct one of your companions to strike. When you do so, chose a friendly creature who can see or hear you and expend on superiority die. Roll a Charisma (Persuasion) check against a DC of 15 and, if successful, that creature can immediately make one weapon attack, adding the superiority die to the attack's damage roll.
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4e is dead now (as much as such ancients ever truly die). However, it did delve into the idea that melee combatants can be as interesting as spellcasters, and both can be balanced against one another. This is part of a long standing conflict in game design, and the source being the Linear Fighter Quadratic Wizard (LFQW, also called QWLF or QWLW ) syndrome. The idea that we can have an aligned progression between the two types of class seems not only perfectly reasonable, but fundamental to me. Most discussions of D&D, and all discussions of LFQW, revolve around the fact that there is a specific window in which the options and power available across the party are at their most interesting. Prior to that window one group is striving to come into its own while the other shines and after the window that group leaves the other behind for good. This is nonsense to me. It's bad design. Fortunately, it's something that has been looked at for several editions of D&D. Unfortunately, WotC has a habit of shackling themselves to arbitrary distinctions their players have long since abandoned. Just remember; only divine magic heals. Except when a bard does it.
My homebrew falls into a few subcategories but, nearly always, it comes back to one overarching theme; supporting concepts that don't have enough to make them mechanically interesting in cannon mechanics, or are missing key pieces. An interesting result of that is I often end up working heavily on the edges of non-combat aspects of play. While D&D frequently focuses on the combat aspect of the game, probably a result of its origin as Chainmail and an outgrowth of miniature wargaming, dismissing the non-combat aspects is a disservice to the evolution in gaming that has happened since, as the reaction to 4e showed.
Another thing 4e's development focus did was crystalize and talk about the refinements to gamings' understanding of the combat elements of play. This was most clear in the implementation of the two axis of role and power source. What 4e could not do, with its hyper-focus on the dungeon and particularly combat, is bring this sort of discussion to the other areas of play. These are, however, where a large portion of the interest in a character can be generated through multi-dimensionality. If when all you have is a hammer everything looks like nails, then when all you have are attacks everything looks like combat. The key, though, is something that 4e was close to; the concept of functions within a party. While the striker/controller/leader paradigm of roles was outstanding for combat, like the rest of 4e, it was almost purely focused on combat and needed a second axis for non combat interactions. Unfortunately, as interesting and useful for classification and conceptualization as the power sources were, they don't do anything in games.
This speaks both to the experience of playing 4e and to the experience of playing a fighter or fighter originating class (Paladin, Ranger) across editions. Where the Paladin and Ranger bring in some additional non-combat options, they generally leverage their crossbreeding (cleric and druid, respectively) to get that. Meanwhile, where we have long recognized the linear nature of the fighter, what we have not as frequently discussed is the relative one-dimensionality of the class. Wizards and clerics, even aside from their proliferation of spells, tend expand into non-combat roles. The combat role of augmentation (including healing) has several uses outside of combat, while the role of knowledge source is often purely non-combat. Similarly, rogues act as another type of knowledge source as well as obstacle remover. Virtually any class can serve as the party "face," the charismatic go between, though some classes are much better served due to their class's focus.The most traditional being, of course, the Bard.
While it's not "wrong" for a player to want to remain within the lane of their class, it does become problematic when the class doesn't support attempts to sacrifice specialization in one area of the game in order to shift into other areas. While there's nothing, strictly speaking, that prevents a player from taking their characters down these roads there's also nothing that supports it. For example, the Eldritch Knight requires Intelligence for its archetype powers, but lacks proficiency with the Arcana or other "knowledge" skills which would open that discovery function to it. Here is a clear opportunity within the framework of the class/archetype to expand the non-combat interest of a fighter which has been passed on. While the fighter is able to pick up the Skilled feat (assuming the option to use feats is available) this is a choice which has to be made at the expense of two points of ability improvement or another feat which may more clearly support the character's existing strengths. And this is how fighters end up pigeonholed in their singular function.
One of the most interesting innovations to come out of 4e was probably the warlord class. This is, in no small part, because the Leader role so clearly moves a character out of the single traditional dimension of the fighter and into the social dimension. It's also why I was very interested in seeing them develop a martial controller (and disappointed that they refused to), because I assumed such a class would move into the scouting/knowledge domains of play. There is a direct 1:1 correlation between an ability being emphasized for combat effectiveness and being built towards, and thus available for, non-combat play and, suddenly, we had martial characters which were reaching out for areas of play they had not traditionally touched on.
The fact that the warlord seems to have been folded back into the larger fighter class in 5e as the Battle Master archetype is probably for the best. This isn't because the warmaster couldn't stand on its own as a class, but because the fighter desperately needed the infusion of new material.
My homebrew falls into a few subcategories but, nearly always, it comes back to one overarching theme; supporting concepts that don't have enough to make them mechanically interesting in cannon mechanics, or are missing key pieces. An interesting result of that is I often end up working heavily on the edges of non-combat aspects of play. While D&D frequently focuses on the combat aspect of the game, probably a result of its origin as Chainmail and an outgrowth of miniature wargaming, dismissing the non-combat aspects is a disservice to the evolution in gaming that has happened since, as the reaction to 4e showed.
Another thing 4e's development focus did was crystalize and talk about the refinements to gamings' understanding of the combat elements of play. This was most clear in the implementation of the two axis of role and power source. What 4e could not do, with its hyper-focus on the dungeon and particularly combat, is bring this sort of discussion to the other areas of play. These are, however, where a large portion of the interest in a character can be generated through multi-dimensionality. If when all you have is a hammer everything looks like nails, then when all you have are attacks everything looks like combat. The key, though, is something that 4e was close to; the concept of functions within a party. While the striker/controller/leader paradigm of roles was outstanding for combat, like the rest of 4e, it was almost purely focused on combat and needed a second axis for non combat interactions. Unfortunately, as interesting and useful for classification and conceptualization as the power sources were, they don't do anything in games.
This speaks both to the experience of playing 4e and to the experience of playing a fighter or fighter originating class (Paladin, Ranger) across editions. Where the Paladin and Ranger bring in some additional non-combat options, they generally leverage their crossbreeding (cleric and druid, respectively) to get that. Meanwhile, where we have long recognized the linear nature of the fighter, what we have not as frequently discussed is the relative one-dimensionality of the class. Wizards and clerics, even aside from their proliferation of spells, tend expand into non-combat roles. The combat role of augmentation (including healing) has several uses outside of combat, while the role of knowledge source is often purely non-combat. Similarly, rogues act as another type of knowledge source as well as obstacle remover. Virtually any class can serve as the party "face," the charismatic go between, though some classes are much better served due to their class's focus.The most traditional being, of course, the Bard.
While it's not "wrong" for a player to want to remain within the lane of their class, it does become problematic when the class doesn't support attempts to sacrifice specialization in one area of the game in order to shift into other areas. While there's nothing, strictly speaking, that prevents a player from taking their characters down these roads there's also nothing that supports it. For example, the Eldritch Knight requires Intelligence for its archetype powers, but lacks proficiency with the Arcana or other "knowledge" skills which would open that discovery function to it. Here is a clear opportunity within the framework of the class/archetype to expand the non-combat interest of a fighter which has been passed on. While the fighter is able to pick up the Skilled feat (assuming the option to use feats is available) this is a choice which has to be made at the expense of two points of ability improvement or another feat which may more clearly support the character's existing strengths. And this is how fighters end up pigeonholed in their singular function.
One of the most interesting innovations to come out of 4e was probably the warlord class. This is, in no small part, because the Leader role so clearly moves a character out of the single traditional dimension of the fighter and into the social dimension. It's also why I was very interested in seeing them develop a martial controller (and disappointed that they refused to), because I assumed such a class would move into the scouting/knowledge domains of play. There is a direct 1:1 correlation between an ability being emphasized for combat effectiveness and being built towards, and thus available for, non-combat play and, suddenly, we had martial characters which were reaching out for areas of play they had not traditionally touched on.
The fact that the warlord seems to have been folded back into the larger fighter class in 5e as the Battle Master archetype is probably for the best. This isn't because the warmaster couldn't stand on its own as a class, but because the fighter desperately needed the infusion of new material.
Here, I've tried to build on some of the infrastructure created with the Battle Master and the associated Martial Adept feat to create a broader opportunity for a face-type fighter. The body of ideas I draw from for martial types reaches as far back as AD&D and, without even getting into the weird quasi-magical options, provides a fairly broad range of paths and deep pool of powers. While there is already some support for the warlord former class concept that could use expansion, I chose to add an additional concept within the archetype; using the idea of the gladiator entertainer-fighter, which has shown up across editions and widely in media, I've added maneuvers that allow the character to obtain benefits for themselves using Charisma with an otherwise role-play oriented skill. Together, you emphasize the mechanical underpinnings of a face type character, specifically playing to the Bard. Alternately, it gives a performer/face type character some mechanical combat teeth to reach for without being able to overshadow a more focused character.
The final thing I did was a power fix for the warlord concept. The Commander's Strike power, as written, is awful- using far too many resources for the effect. Because I was already working on emphasizing Charisma and related skills I decided to make it less reliable for more power. Without the check I would likely make it still require the target's reaction.
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