Advanced Fighting Styles

by JohanHolm

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Advanced Fighting Styles

At level 7, barbarians, fighters, monks, paladins, rangers and rogues learn one of these styles. Feats sharing names with them are not available, but you can take this as a feat.

If you gain this feature again, you learn another style but can only have one active at a given time. You can switch which style is active when you finish a short or long rest. When you gain a level in the class you gained this feature from, you can change out one known style for another.

Crossbow Expert

  • Quick Fingers: Ignore the Loading property, and you don't need a free hand to load one-handed Ammunition weapons.
  • Firing in Melee: Being within 5 ft. of an enemy doesn't impose disadvantage on your ranged attacks.
  • Dual-ish Wielding: Once on each of your turns when you attack with a one-handed weapon and aren't wielding a shield, you may attack with a hand crossbow you're holding as part of that same action.
  • Hefty Bolts: Heavy Crossbows deal 2d6 damage for you.

Dual Wielder

  • Parry: You gain a +1 bonus to AC while you are wielding a separate melee weapon in each hand.
  • Duellist: You may use two-weapon fighting even if the triggering attack wasn't with a Light weapon.
  • Simultaneity: You may take the two-weapon fighting bonus attack as part of each Attack action instead of as a bonus action, and the number of additional attacks increases to two.

Fencing Expert

  • Slash and Dash: When you hit a creature with a melee attack, it cannot make Opportunity Attacks against you during that same turn.
  • Retreating Nick: You can make Opportunity Attacks with melee weapons using Dexterity when a creature leaves the reach you have with that weapon, even if it was your own movement that caused this.
  • Quick Punish: When you make an Opportunity Attack, you may retain your Reaction by lowering your Speed by 10 feet until the end of your next turn. You cannot do this again until the reduction ends, and you cannot lower your Speed below 0.

Great Weapon Master

  • Cleave: Once on each of your turns after making a melee attack with a Strength weapon against one creature, you may attack a second creature within 5 feet of the first as part of that same action. If the triggering attack was a critical hit or reduced an enemy to 0 health, the second attack can target anyone.
  • Graze: If you miss a melee attack using a weapon, you still deal damage of the weapon's type equal to your ability modifier used for the attack.
  • Big Punish: You can use Power Attack when you make an Opportunity Attack.

Polearm Master

  • Buttstroke: Once on each of your turns when you attack with a Sharp Stick (Heavy Reach weapons, plus spears and tridents), you may make an attack with the opposite end as part of that same action. The weapon's damage die for this attack is a d4, and it deals Bludgeoning damage.
  • Brace: While holding a Sharp Stick, enemies provoke Opportunity Attacks when they enter the reach you have with it.

Sharpshooter

  • Keen Eye: Your ranged attacks ignore half and three-quarters cover, and do not have disadvantage within their long range.
  • Target Weakness: When you hit with a ranged weapon attack, gain advantage on your next attack against that target.

Shield Master

  • Bash: Once on each of your turns before or after you make a melee attack, you may Shove with your shield as part of that same action.
  • Interpose Shield: Your shield provides its AC bonus to attacks as normal, plus any Dexterity saving throw you make to take half damage from an effect. If you succeed on such a saving throw while holding a shield, you may use your reaction to take no damage instead. You can choose one ally within 5 feet of you who also gets these benefits.
  • Steady Hands: Donning or doffing a shield only requires an interaction.

Notes and Questions

Why?

TL;DR: Martials scale via feats which is wonky, DM and player preferences strongly affecting class and weapon balance. The goal is reducing the power ceiling of synergistic meta builds while raising the floor for alternatives, avoiding feat taxes but still getting some unique traits and customization based on your loadout.

Sharpshooter and Great Weapon Master can be extremely powerful and overshadow physical damage-dealers that don't/can't use and abuse those (rogue, monk, shield users). Then you add in Crossbow Expert and Polearm Master which give another layer of increased at-will damage that constrains weapon choice. When crossbows get 120 ft. range and none of the usual downsides (dealing with cover or firing in melee), it's generally the singular best weapon.

Banning feats or not knowing about these - or simply wanting to play with the other cool weapons and features available - will pale in comparison. So by effectively restricting each character to one of these scaling feats, I'm trying to remove that combo potential, in addition to preventing noob traps where players would benefit from those feats but don't realize it, and rely less on the DM for class-by-class balance. Combined with power attack, martials will have accessible and consistent ways to contribute damage, with clearer situational niches for the different weapon categories. Note that I've incorporated some weapon mastery benefits from OD&D so it won't be fully compatible with that.

Notes on Styles

  • Crossbows: This now allows dual wielding hand crossbows or using one with a rapier (something the designers have continuously failed to accommodate despite clear intentions), even if using a single crossbow with an open hand is still best.
  • Dual Wielding: Has more work to do than other styles since TWF is weaker already, from my math this seems fine, though maybe too strong for high-level monks or paladins since they get universal damage buffs (both have to sink a feat or dip for the regular fighting style though). Could restrict which classes can access what but I'd rather avoid that.
  • "Great" Weapon Master: Working on 1h and piercing attacks (though not thrown or unarmed) isn't 100% there in flavor or name, but I hate splitting up fighting styles further and restricting builds to such specific weapons. 5e weapons don't fit clean separate categories and covering all of them with their own unique features would be so awkward. The crit/0hp supercleave might not be worth the clunky wording to include.
  • PAM: I excluded quarterstaves since they also function as a focus, but maybe not best for the game. The kind of thing I would allow if a player actually wanted it, and see how it goes. Should it still work with spears? Should Brace be an opportunity attack for Sentinel synergy? OD&D says no to both, I'm not sure.
  • Shield Master: I like the shove part of shield master to give them some control. The rest has slightly clunky wording, was even more-so when I tried to accommodate cover interactions like spells spreading around corners. Maybe needs clarification on whether the adjacent ally has to spend their reaction, but I think it's sufficiently implied.

Missing Styles

  • I don't like grappling as a dedicated build, since they're so dependent on enemy size and condition immunities. Unarmed, whether combined with grappling or stand-alone, overlaps too much with monk for my liking.
  • Throwing can use SS or parts of the melee styles, and I'm not sold on it as a separate dedicated playstyle.

Art Credit

Thanks for Reading!

If you care about maths and comparing between these and to the old feats, I did some here. Otherwise, I'm mostly curious if there's any feel bad interactions or overly restrictive features; removing reliance on bonus actions for example was a big theme, and the desire is that these slot into most applicable builds without much fuss.