#also I can finally be a pirate now since it’s a class in 5e

[everylittlepiecelove13]

working on creating a character for a dnd campaign I’m gonna play soon and it’s so fun 😭

[rerollpodcast-blog]

Why are there so many grapplers?

If you’ve been playing for a while, then I’m guessing at some point you’ve played with someone who played “a grappler” character. Even if you haven’t, the internet is full of stories and anecdotes of players that build their character around the grappler mechanic (in fact one of my players’ grappler died and he just made another grappler). Now, I’m not badmouthing them, but it did get me wondering: why is the grappler so ubiquitous? I spent a lot of time thinking about this and I think that the underlying answer actually has a lot to say about the way we play and think about martials in 5e. To explain why, we’re going to have a look at the differences between magical and martial classes, the shortcomings of the latter, and how to make life more interesting for your martial players.

Jackie Chan: the epitome of a martial

First, let’s look at the way magical classes are set up. Let’s say you wanted to create a new magic-based character. In terms of playstyle, you have quite a lot of options. You can be the blasty-mage that throws fireballs and lightning bolts. You can be a healer, supporting the party and tending to their wounds. You can be a Loki-like trickster, focusing on illusions and charms and deception. You can be a summoner, or a shapeshifter. Or you can focus on utility and be able to change terrain and crowd control your foes. You get so many options as a mage, and that’s not even counting the many ways you can mix and match your spell lists, or the completely different mechanics that each magical class has on their own.

Martials on the other hand are considerably more limited. Their options boil down to essentially: do you want to use two handed weapons, do you want to use an offhand weapon, do you want to use a ranged weapon, or do you want a shield. And even after those exciting choices, they largely all play the same way: run up to/away from something, roll a d20 and then do some damage. Compared to mages, martials just can’t compare in terms of playstyle options. Hell, just look at what’s available to a level 1 wizard compared to a level 1 fighter. The wizard gets to pick 9 spells from a list of 65. Fighters get to pick 4 weapons from a list of 36, most of which do the same thing or are inferior versions of each other.

Now at this point you may retort: “but flavour wise, the classes feel different.” And you are right on this point, but it is very discouraging when your flavour choices don’t reflect in your gameplay. The mysterious, Loki-like, illusion-specced mage plays very differently to the trigger-happy, fireball throwing mage. On the other hand, we have both the gallant longsword-wielding Champion Fighter and the savage warhammer wielding Berserker Barbarian who just run up to things and hit them for 1d10+STR mod damage.

Martials end up feeling like the mechanical equivalent of the Mass Effect 3 ending

 And that’s where I think grapplers come in. Mechanically speaking, grapplers just feel different to traditional martial gameplay. Rather than roll a d20 and compare to AC, you have a contested roll-off against your DM; that’s an exciting tension beat. Instead of inflicting damage, you inflict a status; that opens up new strategies. You get to move your target, you get to set up your target for co-operative attacks. I don’t think people play grapplers because they’re inherently fun to play, they play them because there aren’t many other variants of a martial to explore. The grappler just feels different, and most importantly, feels like a uniquely martial style of gameplay; it’s not like Gandalf ever did judo. But what do we do about this? How do we “fix” the martial classes to make them feel like individual classes? How do we make the martial classes feel like they’re more than just different flavours of attacks? Well in my opinion, there are three main methods: items, techniques, and environment.

 First up, let’s look at items. Items (especially homebrewed ones) are a really easy way to tailor a character to a certain playstyle vision since you can let them do literally anything. Of course, the type of items you give is important. If you want to play into a flavour archetype, you need to look beyond just adding more damage, it needs to either play to their strengths, overcome their weaknesses, or synergise with their mechanics. It’s probably why the “blink dagger” is such a classic item to introduce for a rogue player. It lets the rogue be sneaky, be agile, zip around, and most importantly: stab people. The mechanics of the item fit with the flavour of the character. It makes a rogue play uniquely like a rogue.

It helps here if you already know what your player wants out of their character. For example, I had a (revised) ranger player whose backstory involved them being the fantasy equivalent of a secret agent. So, I gave them a bow that could attach special arrowheads like Hawkeye, turning them into more of a stealth-infiltrator-utility character. That player went wild with that bow, using it for everything from long range shackles, smoke bombs, and grappling hooks. They even opted to keep it after bows that did more damage became available. I’d like to think it’s because it let them feel uniquely like a ranger; stealthing around and setting traps, playing with cunning rather than pure strength.

Slightly disappointed I didn’t see a USB arrow

 Now, items are all well and good, but they do have their limitation in that they require a bit of knowledge of what your players want already, require some skill in homebrewing, and are largely DM driven. After all, we’re trying to make enticing options for creating martial characters, but your player won’t know what items they’re getting when they create their character. Instead, let’s look at something that’s largely player driven: techniques. When I say techniques, I’m referring to abilities that aren’t hard-written into the rules of D&D but are instead flavourful abilities that players ascribe to their actions and require the DM to adjudicate effects on. For example: the ranger that asks if they can shoot at a flying creature’s wings to bring them down; that would be an example of a technique. It’s not something that’s strictly in the ranger’s abilities or in the rules for flying, but it would make sense from an in-game perspective.

Techniques like these can be extremely useful for when players want to feel like their individual strengths make a difference in-game. A bow toting ranger may be able to make that shot at the enemy’s wings, but not the axe wielding barbarian, and you want to reward those strengths and creative thinking. I have a barbarian/enforcer rogue player that has a spear that lights itself on fire. Originally my intent with the item was just that it sets creatures on fire for extra damage. Ironically however, she’s used it for just about everything except that. She’s done everything from creating sparks to blind people, lighting explosive materials on fire, melting gears in a construct’s arm to disable them, and stabbing it in an ogre’s back to ride them around Batman-on-a-mutated-henchman style. None of these are strictly in the rules, and thus required me to come up with a ruling and a check on the spot. I like to encourage her to request these techniques though because they let her play her barbarian-rogue the way she envisioned them; a swashbuckling pirate that likes fighting dirty.

Dale Gribble knows what I’m talking about

Our final differentiation method is one that let’s both the player and the DM control the input: the environment. In a way, the environment is like a combination of the above two methods, it’s like providing a short-term item that creative players can make a technique with. And its so easy to implement too, just describe your battlegrounds more. You certainly don’t need to come up with a list of potential actions that your players could use with every single item in the room like you were coding a video game, your players will come up with it for you. All you need to do is make sure your players know that they’re fighting in more than a featureless void and they’ll get to work. Indeed, my best players even start asking me if there’s certain objects in the room, just so they can enact some crazy plan they’ve come up with. Nine times out of ten, I’ll say yes, just to see what they do.

The best part about using the environment is that different classes will see the environment in different ways, and utilise it depending on their strengths. The agile rogue may see a hanging chandelier as a convenient method to get across the room, while the eagle-eyed ranger may see it as a heavy object to shoot down on their enemy. The brazier of coals can be knocked over by the cunning fighter to slow the enemy, or the savage barbarian can throw their foe into it to cook them alive.

This is going too far though

 So, now we know three good methods for providing class differentiation. But, here comes the tricky part: convincing your players to use them. You see, the methods are not overly difficult, and I would argue that a lot of them are more fun than just vanilla attacking. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, attacking just seems to be the strictly better option. Why take a creature down by shooting its wings, when you can just take it down by killing it? Why bother knocking over a brazier to slow down your enemies, when you can just stab them? In other words, what’s the incentive to be creative?

Personally, I like to encourage it in a few ways. First, is that I don’t make fights overly punishing. When players know that they don’t need to optimise every single action to come out victorious, they feel the freedom to mess around a bit more and go for the fun plays. That barbarian-rogue I mentioned before? Sure, she’s done all those cool things; but she’s also failed at a whole lot more. But, punishment is rarely anything more serious than if she had missed an attack, so she feels free to try again another time.

The second is the inverse of the first. When my players try something out of the ordinary, I like to reward them. If they attempt a technique as an action, I will make sure that the successful result is at least as useful as an action spent attacking. If my fighter knocked over that brazier of coals, my minions will over-react, taking the long way around, or attacking in a way that lets the fighter knock them back into the coals for even more damage. Nothing kills a player’s enthusiasm quite as much as pulling off what they thought was a great move, only to find out it achieved next to nothing.

Finally, I like to encourage creative fighting by joining in on the fun myself. Particularly noteworthy NPC’s have special weapons and items that make them feel like more than just vanilla damage dealers. My NPC’s attempt big plays just as much as my players do, and mess around with the environment like a player would. I’ll admit, I’ve even thrown a few NPC grapplers at my players just for the fun of it. Not only does seeing the DM do these methods assure the player that it’s okay to do them, it also inspires them to try their own things.

 I hope that this has helped inspire you and your players to explore the potential of the martial classes again. Instead of resorting to one-note tricks like playing a “grappler,” try to use items, techniques, and environments to bolster creativity, and let martial classes really shine. So many times, I’ve heard people complain that martials are just plain boring compared to all of the options that magical classes have. And while it may be true that magical classes get many more options than martials, I’ve found that once you give martials anything to work with, they end up using it even more creatively than the mages do with their spells. So, work with your martials, and maybe we can finally remove all these luchadore stories from the front page of Reddit.

[jennawynn]

I love creating D&D characters. 

Wynn (3.5) is my Paladin of St. Cuthbert. She’s my most fleshed out (and an inspiration for Tor from the Holy Knight fic). Her family was killed (all but her sister who was soon captured by slavers and killed in a failed rescue attempt) when she was young and after accidentally killing someone with her bare hands while black-out drunk, she tried to kill herself, but was saved by what she believed to be the Saint himself. He told her to fight and get her vengeance against those who do evil and create orphans and killed her sister (slavers). She’s a barely contained ball of rage (to the point that when the aprty gained gestalt abilities, she’s now half barbarian). She was a good person before becoming a paladin, probably neutral good, but she sees herself as nothing more than a tool to be used and a martyr to her cause. She’ll fight and fight until she dies on the battlefield and barely even considers herself a person. She is now LN with some good tendencies but her Oath to the Saint and the Saint’s Law comes before anything else. She’s evened out quite a bit during her travels (particularly after picking up two other paladins of the Saint- one of which isn’t anymore), but she was very quick to judge, quick to take charge, and always assumed she was right and best for the job regardless of circumstances. She’s also very much a protector and would rather die than see any innocent get hurt. She uses a shield and mace combo, but her shield could be considered her primary weapon and has a lot of the shield related feats and spells that allow her to use it as a secondary weapon. Nothing a good shield bash and mace to the face can’t solve. LOVE her. Love playing her. 

Hank (a non-system with minimal dice) was a Navy vet who lost his lower leg and worked as a mechanic in the 1930s. It was a supernatural investigation team hired by Howard Hughes, but Hank wasn’t really a good fit, regardless of how interesting I found his character. He was obviously a bit modeled on my own Navy/mechanic experience, but also on The Sand Pebbles, a Steve McQueen movie about an American boat in China about that time period. He was basically a metal bender which made his job as a mechanic a bit easier. His reluctance to go seeking out the weird meant I had to bench him and create

Rafe! He was a shape-shifter and a movie star. He was a street urchin and an orphan who got into the seedy underbelly at a young age and worked mostly as a conman. When he got his shape-shifting abilities, he used them to work his cons. Sometimes he’d pose as a woman and seduce a banker, then as her husband to blackmail him or demand retribution. I think he was my first explicitly bi character (though Wynn is dating a gender-fluid shapeshifter herself, I’m not sure where she’s at with self-identifying since she sees the other personalities as parts of the male standard personality as opposed to individuals). He was very charismatic and fun to play.

Hurricane Henri (3.5) for a one-shot we played. She was a pirate by trade and a rogue/sorcerer/stormcaster by class. She was a flirty character loosely based on Isabela from Dragon Age. She liked to sing shanties about mermaids and talk about the people (largely women) she’d slept with. (Romance tends to be a big part of the game with this particular group.) I only got to play with her for one session, but I loved her. She was so different from Wynn but awesome too.

Cyan (Call of Cthulhu d20) is for a different group from all the others. She’s another highly charismatic character (I didn’t realize how often I play those). She’s a queer actress/singer/dancer who has been on Broadway, in movies, and on television. She’s based a bit on Anna Kendrick with some twists and has a bright blue pixie cut (a la Pink but Blue). Eventually if she can get her teammates to agree, she wants to liveblog their dungeon delving on Periscope or something similar. She’s kinda snarky, mostly because she tends to get underestimated or mocked, but if she likes you, she’ll have your back no matter what. She’s a 5′2 scrappy little shin-kicker who takes point and acts like the tank of the party (which I also play a lot of). 

Finally, my newest character (and if you’re in my group, stop reading because this part is secret!) Her name is Ovuk (5e) and she’s a half-orc enforcer for a cartel. She’s actually a charismatic (!) ranger (hunter) named Yevelda, but she speaks in grunts and gestures and simple words and phrases, allowing people to assume she’s a stereotypical barbarian. (Doesn’t hurt that she carries a greataxe and pretends to be really angry when she fights... and actually has a short temper.) She never uses her magic if she thinks it will be noticed. She was once the face of a group back in her homeland, but a job went bad after she passed out drunk with the mark. Both the mark and her boss blamed her and assumed she stole the trinket. She was exiled and is currently hunted, so she’s in hiding by assuming a new identity (as a stupid brute barbarian) and making money breaking kneecaps so she can pay off her debts and stop being hunted. It’s a one-shot so I’m not sure she’ll ever be ‘discovered’ while we play, but it should be fun. She’s CN and will always choose money over friendship because money is power and might makes right.