The Fighter is, in a lot of ways, the simplest D&D class. It focuses primarily on doing something that everyone can do - attacking with a weapon - and doesn't even really make its weapon attacks do anything special - you just get to do more of them, and you get ways to enhance your weapon-attacking-skills.
At a base level, the Fighter has only three unique abilities: Second Wind, Action Surge, and Indomitable, and your subsequent levels are just about giving you more uses of those skills. You have two features that other classes get as well, namely Fighting Style and Extra Attack, with the former being granted slightly earlier (letting you choose a standard weapon loadout at level 1 instead of waiting for level 2 like Rangers and Paladins) and then giving you more Extra Attacks once you get into tier 3, and again when you get your level 20 capstone.
Thus, I think there's a lot of pressure on Fighter subclasses to bring something interesting to bear - which makes it good that Fighters get five levels in which they gain a subclass feature rather than the standard four (Clerics do as well, but the level 8 one for them is always either Potent Spellcasting or Divine Strikes, which practically makes it a general class feature). (Indeed, I think that the biggest failing of the Purple Dragon Knight is that it doesn't really add anything beyond those base fighter features.)
Now, before we get into what I think they could do with subclasses, I want to take a look at one particularly prominent and popular subclass: the Battle Master.
Other than the Beast Master, which got a pretty thorough redesign to make it viable in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, Battle Masters simply got expanded with the addition of new maneuvers.
Battle Master maneuvers have a lot to recommend them: it gives the player more options for customization, and it doesn't even require the investment of a secondary stat (though let's revisit that, potentially). They also have the satisfying Divine Smite energy of being able to use many of them after you've hit, so they don't feel wasted. And on top of it all, you have a fair number to use and get them back on a short rest, making it feel like you can be fairly liberal in their use - which I think is a good thing for a subclass, as it sucks to get something useful that you can only do like, once.
The flavor of Fighters in contrast with other classes is that you're the true master-of-arms - someone who has been very thoroughly trained and, with the exception of a couple subclasses, can hold your own against magic-users purely through your skill.
So, should Fighters just all get Maneuvers?
This is an argument I've made before, but given the development of the game and a new edition (or half-edition) coming in a couple years, I really think that maneuvers are a strong enough mechanic that you can build them into the base class. Fighters could be "the class that gets maneuvers" as their identity.
You wouldn't even need to remove the existing features - you could either make Second Wind, Action Surge, and Indomitable into features you just get at a certain level and then have them, or you could turn them into maneuvers that all Fighters learn.
Furthermore: consider how this could affect the design of future subclasses. Having the existing framework of maneuvers, you could turn a lot of subclass features into maneuvers. Maybe an Eldritch Knight has various maneuvers that have explicitly magical effects? Perhaps Arcane Archers' magical arrow shots are now a type of maneuver. Maneuvers have already shown themselves to be very versatile - there are some that are designed for social encounters rather than combat - and so I think you could do a lot with them.
The one downside, I think, is the other side of the fact that this makes the class more "interesting." Right now, if you are not confident about learning a ton of complex D&D mechanics, the Champion Fighter is a fantastic option for you to be able to play a fairly capable and strong character who nevertheless doesn't need to make a lot of complicated decisions in the middle of a fight. Maneuvers by their nature increase the number of decision-points a character has during their turns. So, the question is: do we need to preserve the Fighter as the refuge for simple mechanics?
Setting that aside:
I actually think that the three subclasses in the current PHB are pretty solid representations of classic Fighter archetypes. The Champion is the pure "I hit things" type, while the Battle Master is the tactician. And then the Eldritch Knight both reminds players that you can be a bit more than just "good with weapons" and can have a little extra flavor in there.
If the Battle Master were to be somewhat sublimated into the base class, though, what would be a good option for the third subclass? I do think it would be good to emphasize that a Fighter is just as effective as a ranged class as a melee one, though I don't know that I really like the Arcane Archer that much as a subclass. Indeed, I kind of like that all three of the PHB subclasses can be built for ranged or melee combat. On a conceptual level I feel like the Samurai is a cool option here, though I don't think the subclass has been popular enough to warrant its inclusion. We might instead have to build a kind of new Battle Master - perhaps one that, now that its maneuvers are a class-wide thing, could be one that has various battlefield-control abilities, like allowing allies the reposition or ways to lock down enemies? It's a thinly-sketched idea, to be fair.
One of the challenges of a major class rework to one of the most central classes, though, is that it could eat into 5.5's intended "backwards compatible" system. I don't know how you'd make, say, a Rune Knight work with this - whether it'd be overpowered by increasing the power of the base class or underpowered because the base class might now be expecting the subclasses to bring more specific maneuver options.
Another thing I wonder about is the DC for maneuvers. The fact that it's based on your Strength or Dexterity (whichever is higher) is very nice for the player - that's going to be their highest stat anyway - but on the other hand, given that Paladins need that secondary investment in Charisma and Rangers need it in Wisdom, and, indeed, currently Eldritch Knights need a bit of Intelligence to make their spells harder to resist, does that seem fair?
On the other hand, perhaps the game has moved in such a direction that requiring that secondary stat investment is now considered too harsh. I don't know.
Obviously, my proposal for how to redesign the Fighter is far more radical than the other shifts I've suggested, and in particular that would make the goal of backwards-compatibility harder. We don't really have a great sense of how WotC intends to allow for that backwards-compatibility - in decades past, they had extensive pdfs that explained how things could be converted between 3.0 and 3.5, so maybe we'll see these more extensive reworks, and just give us the instructions on what needs to change.
The digital game world, especially in the internet era, has allowed far more fine-tuning tweaking. As we've seen, WotC has embraced the power of errata to rework some of the cultural aspects of D&D, though I think they've been very hesitant to use any "functional errata" (i.e. changing mechanics) given that this is still a game where people use physical books they purchased years ago to run it. On the other hand, the whole point of releasing new core rulebooks in 2024 is to be able to make this very sort of big, sweeping change. So we'll see.
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