Prerequisite: Strength 13 or higher
You’ve developed the skills necessary to hold your own in close-quarters grappling. You gain the following benefits:
- You have advantage on attack rolls against a creature you are grappling.
- You can use your action to try to pin a creature grappled by you. To do so, make another grapple check. If you succeed, you and the creature are both restrained until the grapple ends.
Why am I only reading your comment now? I've just finished an encounter in which I succesfully grappled an Ancient Dragon. I could have tried to knock it prone as well...probably succeed. ALTOUGH I did attack it and if I didn't we might have not survived and my allies didn't arrive for multiple turns (the room was chocked because allies in the front git terrified by the dragon and the allies in the back couldn't move foward properly). But I would have looked pretty cool, to know I've not only grappled a gargantuan dragon and pulled her back at her tail, but that I've also knocked it over like a sack of stupid scaly potatoes.
This feet needs a hardcore revamp.
My home brew rules
- Gain +5 to Athletics (similar to Alert and Observant)
- Successful grapple checks do unarmed weapon damage (monks get their normal unarmed damage)
- You have advantage on attack rolls against the creature you are grappling.
It works in three ways - firstly a monk grappling you is gonna flurry your face into hamburger. A half orc rogue with just a boat load of strength is going to bum rush like an extra from Oz. Taking the feat, saves you the trouble of having to shove your victim prone to get the advantages you deserve.
As written, taking this feat and using it as written in a straight up grapple ... makes you even more vulnerabl
My house rule to “fix” this feat is simple.
Replace everything with: “While you are grappling a creature they are also restrained”.
This still gives you the advantage on attacks and removes the need to use a second action to do something that is usually worse than shoving. So it basically saves you one action and also allows your ranged buddies to shoot the guy you’re holding still for them. It’s also simple, flexible, and makes sense. Considering grappling is a fairly niche combat action that requires free hands think it should be about on par with “weapon master” type feats and for RP reasons yeah you’re just a great oppressive grappler.
It would also make sense adding a stat boost like +1 STR or +5 athletics to make it easier to grapple; but this feat would be plenty appealing even without that.
As I understand it, the role of grappling between armoured opponents was historically used in conjunction with daggers, to pierce the armour. So if the point of grappling is viewed that way, advantage to attack grappled enemies makes sense. The other option "unlocked" with the feat is presumably a representation of an advanced grapple of a different kind. I've played a single game with the system of Lamentations of the Flame Princess and I have to say that I prefer the system of only "minor" weapons being able to be used by all parties involved in a grapple (natural weapons like teeth, as well as daggers and knuckledusters). That seems to represent the historical function (in medieval European knightly combat at least) more faithfully.
Between two humanoid individuals of equivalent proportions (which I realise is far from all that can be grappled, even within the medium category), it seems that grappling someone on the ground from a hunched over position would be a significantly different state than being up close to them, both upright. Maybe its wrong, but my mental image of the grappling situation I mention above is close together, struggling for control, not with one's hand idly dragging someone's lapels as they slide along behind you. It seems that restraining someone on the ground with one hand is not adequately similar to grappling them while both upright for this to really make sense. Now, while as I understand it, one can in fact prevent someone from standing up from the floor with a hand applied to their chest from a position hunched over them (not accounting for them attacking you from a prone position, rather struggling to get up), but this does not seem to put the grappler in a position to attack anyone else efficiently, given their awkward stance. The grappler feat's new maneuver seems to represent actually grappling up close with the target on the floor. Now, the loxodon and simic hybrid's special grapples, as well as the many other varieties between system supported grappling partners (the size deviation within categories as well as grappling out of size categories and further, entirely different body shapes) does complicate this, since these grapples don't really fall into what I'm talking about. I suppose the saurian grappling in Dragon's Dogma might approximate the advanced grapple between different body types?
Here's a thought: What if someone lathered their arms in mud, grappled someone, and then another character cast Transmute Rock to turn the mud into stone? Would the grappled character and grappler be restrained?
Restrained means your movement is 0, so you can do everything except move away from your target. but being grappled means they can’t move and any attack or melee spell they try to do has disadvantage, and with the feat you get advantage on attacks against them.
i cant add this to my character and I don't own any digital copies of anything on D&DBeyond! help please!!!!!!!!!
Does your character have A STR of 13 or higher?
How have you tried to add it?
This feat is better then it seems. The biggest problems devaluing this feat are flanking variant rules and playing fast and loose with cover rules.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules/combat#Cover
So if you were to play without flanking you could grapple and then position yourself in cover and then pin.
Imagine a fighter popping up from behind a wall, grabbing an enemy and dragging that enemy behind the wall to pin it in place. The fighter give that enemy advantage, but only on thr fighter who probably has a higher ac. In exchange your entire party can unload on the enemy with advantage.
If I would add any feature to this feat it would be "moving a grappled target does not half your movement"
Pity grappling reduces your movement to half, and pinning reduces it to zero. I want to make a monk in a cat mask who can do this:
https://youtu.be/j4-Lqj_dlDU?list=PLhWm0-BiWMIHRk6qh9SvX2ePxjY47-XIl&t=130
This needs a +1 to STR or CON at my table to make it worth it. Would perhaps entice people into playing a grappler for sure.
I kind of want to write up a Tiefling Warlock/Barb or Monk grappler to take advantage of Unarmed Resilience and Hellish Rebuke + Armor of Agathys with the Tavern Brawler and Grappler feats. Sure, target, beat on me I dare you.
Got 3 separate ideas for the Grappler feat
Option 1 - Grappler is not good enough by default to be a feat so it shouldn't be one in the first place
Option 2: Gives STR based melee characters a means to add CC into their arsenal
Option 3: Opens the door for the Grappler feat to be flexible and powerful depending on how many special attacks you want to sink into it.
So I've determined the biggest benefit of this vs shove prone. ALL attacks get advantage whereas prone has to be within 5ft.
Also if you have 2 free hands, you can grapple/restrain 2 people in reach.
Yeah I just let players pin if they want to. No feat, just a very mild mechanic anyone can use if they really want.
It would of been nice if this feat had something like:
Tavern brawler gives you a bonus action grapple
Shield Master gives you a bonus action shove
Grappler would give you a bonus action to make one unarmed strike
Edits I think this deserves:
1) It has Strength 13+ or Dex 13+ as a requirement
2) You can choose to increase an ability score increase of 1 for either Strength or Dex.
3) The second grapple check is a bonus action, not an action.
4) You can apply pressure to a choke or pressure point by using an *action to make a strength check on a creature that you have grappled and restrained, causing 1d4^ force damage on a successful check. Just go and watch some Brazilian jujutsu videos if you want to know what I mean.
* If point 3 is rejected, turn the action in point 4 to a bonus action.
^ Open to suggestions on the exact amount of damage caused. I'm fairly sure calling it force damage is valid.
Otherwise, this feat is not only underpowered, but a liability.
+1 STR would balance this out
It's ridiculous Tavern Brawler gets +1 STR and trained fighter nothing.
The pin is almost useless but ADV on all attacks once grappled is pretty awesome - but those are STR rolls so again it needs the +1 STR imho.
I'm so-so on this feat; I like the idea of it, but the execution makes it a hard sell without an ability score increase.
While advantage against a grappled target is nice, you don't have any easier way to grapple (like Tavern Brawler's bonus action grapple) which means you're giving up an attack before you can receive any benefit. At least on characters with Extra Attack you can grapple first then attack with advantage if it succeeds but it makes this a bit fiddlier than it ought to be, and less useful on characters without Extra Attack (or a multiclass that delayed it).
Meanwhile the restrained effect seems good until you remember that you can always shove someone prone, which they can't get up from while grappled (you can't stand up if your speed is zero) and this gives basically the same bonuses. The only real benefit of the restrain option is that it gives your party advantage against the target at any range, whereas as being prone only gives advantage for melee attacks (and gives disadvantage to ranged). If restraining didn't require another grapple check it might be better, but even then it's not amazing, as you also restrain yourself (so enemies have advantage against you as well).
This feat also gives you no better chance at actually succeeding on grapple checks; this means that to really make the most of it you kind of have to play a Barbarian or find some other way to give yourself advantage on grapple checks (Rune Knight, Enlarge etc.).
So yeah, overall it's a bit disappointing, and not worth a lost ability score increase unless you've got a character built specifically with getting this in mind (or a variant human who can take it right away). Even on a Barbarian built for grappling I don't know if I'd take it (since Barbarians only get five ability score increases); I'd just use Rage for the grapple advantage, grapple then shove to pin (and gain regular advantage) and maybe use Reckless Attack until the target is down. This gives basically the same benefits except that you might have one or two rounds where enemies have advantage against you too.
My preferred fix would be to remove the grapple check to restrain (since you're also restraining yourself) and add the following bullet point:
This means that you don't need to be Raging, Enlarged etc. to get advantage on grappling/shoving so it's still of some benefit even to characters who can already get advantage, and opens this feat up more to characters that usually can't such as Monks, Rangers etc., even if they have lower Strength than Dexterity (though they'll still want a decent amount to take the feat, plus athletics proficiency to make the most of it).