Hey everyone! I wanted to make a feat that allowed a character to make opportunity attacks while unarmed, but at first didn't know how to flavor it. Then I thought maybe if you could somewhat weaponise your armor and bring that in and that made me think of a thousand more ideas, but stripped it down to this. So here is what I came up with: Armored Arts.

Tell me what you think, is the wording unclear, is it nonsensical, is it completely broken? I will try to accommodate your findings 😀 (English is not my native tongue, so I have just tried to imitate the wording of different rules in this glorious game).

https://www.dndbeyond.com/feats/1535354-armored-arts

Feat: Armored Arts

Prerequisite: Proficiency with medium armor, or heavy armor

Years of combat experience have taught you additional ways of utilizing your armor, granting you the following benefits:

• Increase your Strength or Constitution by 1, to a maximum of 20.
• While wearing medium armor, heavy armor, or gauntlets, you can use your reaction to make opportunity attacks with your unarmed strikes.
• Additionally, while armored this way, you can use your armor to foil an opponents attack. When a creature makes a melee attack with a weapon against you, and both your hands are free, you can use your reaction to try to disarm the creature. The attacking creature must make a Strength Saving Throw, the DC being 8 + proficiency + your strength modifier. On a failure the creature drops that weapon.

EDIT: I have removed the part about opportunity attacks, as IamSposta informed me that you can already do that. 😅 I have have changed the first feature so that it instead grants unarmed strikes to count as attacks with a melee weapon.

EDIT 2: The first feature has been changed again. It has been changed to a bonus action unarmed strike, or Shove attempt, if at first you made an attack action with an unarmed strike.

EDIT 3: The feat has has been changed following the suggestions of comment #6 from IamSposta.

You can already make an unarmed strike as an opportunity attack.

Really? I keep reading that you need a weapon in hand to do that. Is that something from previous editions haunting me?😅

You need a weapon in hand to make an opportunity attack with that weapon, you can’t draw a weapon as part of an opportunity attack. But whether you’re wielding a weapon or not you can make an unarmed strike as an opportunity attack. If you couldn’t then Monks would be at a gross disadvantage.

Alrighty then, I will remove that from the feat 😅 I don't know why I thought that it was something that only monks could do.

Other than the obvious blunder, what do you thing about the feat?

Well, just making a creature drop its weapon is not particularly useful since it costs them nothing to pick it back up again. How about something more like this:

Years of combat experience have taught you additional ways of utilizing your armor, granting you the following benefits:

• Increase your Strength or Constitution by 1, to a maximum of 20.
• While wearing medium or heavy armor, whenever you use your reaction to make an unarmed strike the attack deals an additional 1d4 damage.
• While you are wearing medium or heavy armor, you can use your armor to foil an opponents attack. Whenever a creature hits you with a melee weapon and you have at least 1 free hand, you can use your reaction and try to disarm the creature. Make a Strength (Athletics) check with a DC equal to the creature’s attack roll, on a success you take the weapon from that creature.

That way they can’t just pick the weapon back up. It also gives the player something to roll instead of the DM, which is good because players love rolling dice and DMs have too much of that to do already.

Quote from IamSposta >>

Well, just making a creature drop its weapon is not particularly useful since it costs them nothing to pick it back up again. How about something more like this:

Years of combat experience have taught you additional ways of utilizing your armor, granting you the following benefits:

• Increase your Strength or Constitution by 1, to a maximum of 20.
• While wearing medium or heavy armor, whenever you use your reaction to make an unarmed strike the attack deals an additional 1d4 damage.
• While you are wearing medium or heavy armor, you can use your armor to foil an opponents attack. Whenever a creature attacks you with a melee weapon and you have at least 1 free hand, you can use your reaction and try to disarm the creature. Make a Strength (Athletics) check with a DC equal to the creature’s attack roll, on a success you take the weapon from that creature.

That way they can’t just pick the weapon back up. It also gives the player something to roll instead of the DM, which is good because players love rolling dice and DMs have too much of that to do already.

Fantastic. Thank you very much. Should it be specified that the character would not be wielding that weapon after the successful disarm? Or would that be implied already? 

Why should they not be wielding it?