The Fighter WIP

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I've been lax on posting my work on this blog, mostly focused on running my weekly game. At this point I rarely make new rules, just mostly rewriting and formatting. One change I have made is to make the choice of a specialization to follow occur earlier at 4th level instead of name level. It doesn't make a huge difference because in practical terms the pattern I'm following is give out one ability specific to the specialization at 4th(such as use spell scrolls for thieves) and everything else at name or higher. The reasons for doing this are varied, but it boils down to giving players choice. Back during the 5e playtest, D&D Next, one of the things I always liked about the rules presented was the whole idea of waiting to choose a subclass until 3rd level, now the published rules were less consistent on when this happened for specific classes, but the idea of starting with something basic and then building complexity as you level was always appealing to me. We already have this to some degree in Classic D&D with the proto-prestige classes of the Companion Set, and so for a while I was happy to leave it at that for a while. In building more of these specialist classes for my players, I've found a solution is to let the classes specialize earlier  to keeping them from branching out too far to the point where they need to to be their own class altogether before they are tied down to a single archetype. This way I can keep the low level classes relatively few in number and broad in scope, mid and high tier characters can be more specialized. I'm making the break at level 4 because that point is already built into Classic D&D with the Basic and Expert Sets, so we can have have Basic classes that go from level 1-3, and Expert classes that go from level 4-36. 

So with that, I've kinda been focusing on rewriting the Basic classes to fit this new model. My plan is to have a small booklet for each class(the fighter book, the cleric book, the rogue book, etc) presenting the Basic Class and all the Expert Classes available at level 4. I've just finished redoing the basic fighter, and the first fighter expert class, The Hero. The Hero is your default weapon master fighter (I was going to use the name Man-At-Arms until just this last week I remembered the level title for a 4th level fighter is Hero and liked it better as the example of the standard fighter progression), next I need to do the crusader(the paladin), the avenger, the ranger , the berserker, and I have a few other ideas. but meanwhile here is what I got so far:

For info on the ability requisites read this post.  For weapon specialization and weapon mastery, I will have to make a separate post, but essentially I took the To Hit bonuses from weapon mastery and and separated them it into a separate ability called weapon specialization(somewhat inspired by AD&D). All classes get weapon specialization at different levels, and only fighters have access to weapon mastery. Its a topic for another time. 

 The special abilities of the Hero are pretty much all taken from the Fighter Combat Options in the Companion set with a few tweaks. 

Cleave is a combination of the Smash ability and the ability of the fighter in OD&D to make multiple attacks against mooks, I've found this to be a good balance in play without giving out completely unlimited attacks. 

Defend is just a renaming of Parry, and I turned into a deflect ability instead of an AC bonus for the same reason I made that exact same change to the weapon mastery charts; basically I want AC to be mostly an aspect of armor, and if the weapon is doing the defending I want the gameplay to reflect that. 

Disarm is pretty much unchanged

Multiple Attacks is also pretty much unchanged. For a while I was having multiple attacks by both PCs and monsters only apply to separate targets, if you had 2 attacks you couldn't attack the same person twice. I was doing this to represent the abstractedness of combat in dnd, but it really ended up being a complication that wasn't worth it in gameplay, so I've gone back to the old method in the last few months.

Fighting Styles is something I came up with to give more options in weapon mastery, for those that might want to not just specialize in a single weapon. I first floated the idea in May of 2023. And its seen some playtesting in my game(not every style though) but I've been a bit unsure of if I wanted to make it available to every PC or just fighters. With this redesign of the Fighter I am satisfied with making it exclusive to the Hero Expert Class, though I may give certain styles as a bonus ability to other Expert Classes(like Swashbuckler rogue class will have Dirty Fighting). Fighting Styles allows different flavors of fighter without having to create a whole new subclass/Expert Class. Want to play a mounted warrior? Play a Hero with the Lancer Fighting Style, no need to make a million Horse related Feats or non-sensical magical overpowered abilities(looking at you, Cavalier). I'm still thinking of adding a Marksman fighting style for archers(though I do like the idea of the Hero being more melee focused, maybe leave the archery to the Ranger), and am still open for other options if they occur to me, but think I've covered good variety

And as a teaser, this is the description I've written for the Crusader: "A Fighter may join a Crusading Order out of piety, or as a way to atone for a past life of sin. No matter the reason for their devotion, a Crusader acts as the earthly power that spreads the message of The Church."