The Gaming Den

deanruel87 wrote:HOWEVER, upon further consideration I feel that you may have a very cool idea there. The idea being, for this Fighter, instead of saying "heres a bunch of feats, get the tricks you want" to instead offer .....like...... Ability bundles. To allow every Fighter to just pick a few tricks and then automatically get specialist-level capabilities in those areas. So options could be "Charger, Archer, Mounted Charger, Mounted Archer, Grappler, Tripper (or controller or whatever we called it), Two Weapon Fighter, Defender" and each of those would come with a list of abilities unlocked at certain levels. Meaning they would operate a lot like Tome Feats. Except it would just sort of be like getting all the abilities you would need to be good at the thing that you wanted to do.

So are these still mutually exclusive options? It doesn't matter a lot, because the good ones tend to be exclusive anyway (grappling vs. archery)--but it's still good to know. Robilar's & Karmic are the kind of things you're going to want to grab from levels rather than bonus feats, because they work with pretty much everything but archery. Same deal with Two-weapon Fighting (which stays in style as long as you can use bullshit weapon spikes with your dwarven warpike).

And, yeah, I was forgetting a few viable options. Grappling is definitely worthwhile before everything gets too big or magical. "Defensive" is not, and I think the only way to make it worth thematically is to combine it with Locking Grapple, Great Throw, Karmic Strike, and the like.

Finally, don't forget the Complete Warrior tactical feats. Those things can be awesome if you can get them. I can't imagine a 'defensive' style that didn't include elusive target.

Before I come back with a much longer post later in the day I just wanted to mention that I actually had a player use a very effective "defensive" style which simply mixed AC to high to hit with the Feat "Stand Still" and some relocation abilities. This meant he could force enemies to deal with the "Tank" and it was pretty great. Go into a room first, hit a few big people that can't leave and force them to waste their actions fighting you and accomplishing nothing while the party goes about their business.

This class seems like it will hit feat starvation before reaching 20th level.

Ok to try and get some groupthink on this. What are the Fighter models that DO function and what are the ones we DESIRE to function. Then I can work on putting ability bundles together for them and make this a super functional class.

So things like: Ubercharger, Mounted Charger, Grappler, Reach-weapon-tripper-and-controller, Archer, Ummmmm, TWF-attack monkey, Defender?

Theres something very very honest and straightforward about this as a class design. To say right up front "Here are the 10 archetypes of this class that actually function in this game. Pick two. You can do those from now on".

It also occurs to me that mobility options are a big problem for most fighter types, even the very optimized ones. It's just a problem that at high levels people won't fight you and don't have to. So perhaps also a series of abilities that are available to everybody that are movement abilities of varying kinds. Like free moves, and teleports, and jumps, and wuxia flight options and whatnot. It just seems like it would actually go a long way towards high end play to just be confident that you actually would get to hit people