Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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I'm about to start a new campaign, and I really don't want martials, especially fighters, to depend on the one +X weapon. And I also think, full spellcaster are just sooo much more powerfull in general. So I just wrote this.
It was quite the challenge to make rules that weren't over-riding any class/subclass features...
Would love opinions.
Martial Mastery
Level 1 Martial Class Feature
This feature is designed for Dungeons & Dragons 5.5 / 2024.
Martial Classes
For this feature, the Martial Classes are:
Martial Level
Your Martial Level is the total number of levels you have in Martial Classes.
Paladin and Ranger levels count fully for this feature. There are no half Martial Classes.
Martial Mastery Bonus
Your Martial Mastery Bonus is based on your Martial Level, as shown in the Martial Mastery table.
Martial Durability
Your Hit Point maximum increases by an amount equal to twice your Martial Level.
If your Martial Level changes, your Hit Point maximum changes accordingly.
Martial Attack and Damage
When you make an attack roll with a weapon or an Unarmed Strike, you gain your Martial Mastery Bonus to the attack roll and to the damage roll of that attack.
This bonus doesn’t stack with a magic bonus to attack and damage rolls from a weapon or similar effect. If more than one such bonus would apply to the same roll, use only the highest bonus.
Death Saving Throws
You gain your Martial Mastery Bonus to death saving throws.
An issue I have is that it doesn’t really solve the issue in the first place. Sure the martials are certainly tankier, but the spellcasters still have far more versatile and encounter ending spells like Teleport, Banishment or Cloudkill.
Theres really nothing to help bridge the utility gap, which in my option is a lot larger than the gap in combat.
I totally agree. However, my goal isn't to make martials have more utility; it's to make them less dependent on magic weapons and give them a bit more survivability.
I'm not really sure what these rules are supposed to solve. Since you'll be DMing, you can give the martials a +2 Flame Tongue, for example, which would certainly be easier than giving your players more rules to remember.
Also, the Death Resilience thing is basically pointless. a 5th level martial will likely have around 40-50 hit points, so the chance of them actually taking enough damage to be subject to the instant death rules is tiny.
Death Resilience is too long yeah. I removed it.
What I am trying to solve: Is exactly not giving them +2 weapons. I don't really hand out magical items randomly to player, they usually need to earn/craft it and magical items in my game aren't really a permanent thing. Baddies love looting players when they are all down, zents love stealing those as well, etc.
And I actually want Martial NOT to have to relly on them, but still be able to use them if they actually have them.
Do I understand correctly? You routinely have TPKs where the baddies loot the players but don't kill them? Why? Why don't the baddies kill them or capture them and sell them as slaves?
If peasants are stealing magic weapons then surely there is just a huge massive black market for magic weapons as any half-baked pickpocket can get get their hands on them, so the players should be able to easily buy new magic weapons no? Or they could simply hunt down the peasants, kill them, and take the magic weapon back?
Also martials don't rely on magic weapons to keep up, in 5.5e the "resistance to non-magical blah blah" is gone so magic weapons are entirely unnecessary. Are you not just HBing rules to fix your already HB rules? If martials don't need magic weapons, they why are so many people trying to steal them?
Also how are the PCs so vulnerable from being stolen from? Doesn't the party have anyone with a decent passive perception? Don't they have anyone to cast Tiny Hut or Alarm while they are sleeping?
Martial Durability is basically giving all the listed classes the Tough feat for free. Not criticizing, just pointing it out for estimating how big the benefits are. The whole thing is basically 1 free feat, plus a scaling bonus (+1 at levels 5/11/17) to attack+damage that doesn't stack with magic weapon bonuses. There's also the bonus to death saves, but if you've got casters around, the benefit there is probably very small (Healing Word, I'm looking at you...).
I feel like this would fit well in a campaign that is heavily story-focused, where the party rarely has more than 1 or maybe 2 combat encounters in a day, and gets a full Long Rest every night. In a game like that, when the casting classes can just burn a spell slot on every round of combat, casters will outshine martials every time. (Not trying to tell anybody how to run their game, but the classes just aren't balanced for that style of play.) So if you don't want to limit Long Rests to address that situation, this isn't a bad alternative.
So, i did a bunch of math a while back. I dont have the notes for it, but basically what i rememeber, is monster ac basically keeps pace with proficiency bonus until around level 10 or so. And then monster ac starts outpacing proficiency bonus by 1, then 2, then 3 points. So, it seems like a martial build maxes out their score quickly, they can keep pace until level 12, at which point, their overal chance to hit is going to statt going down because monster ac is going up faster than the character build can keep up.
I believe that the "suggested" magic item reward progression happen to nearly perfectly compensate for this lag so that a martial's to hit stayed roughly the same as they leveled up, as proficiency bonus went up, and as monster ac went up.
A lot of folks like to quote the dmg that says you dont HAVE to give players magic weapons or magic items. Thats true, but if you do that, the fighters chance to hit peaks at around 75% with a str score of 20, around level 8, i think, and then will hold for a couple levels and start to drop. By level 20, the chance to hit was something like 60%
Honestly, i dont understand the dms who are fascinated with severe scarcity of magic items. Its a fantasy game. People play it to play wizards and use magic items. If you make magic items scarce, your hurting martials. If you want to help martials keep up with casters, give them a +1 at level 8, a +2 at level 11, and a +3 at level 14. Give or take a level.
The dms who say they like to "toughen up" their players by making magic items scarce? I usually resond with dude, we're a bunch of nerds around a table scribbling numbers and rolling dice. Probably in an air conditioned room.
Also, use 2024 rules, which made a bunch of changes to try to help martials. Weapon masteries help. 2024 monster manual removed almost all "resist non magic weapon damge" which was a stupid rule that totally hurt only martials.
“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” — Voltaire
Your interpretation is massively exaggerated, but you get the idea. Magic items aren't "permanent" in my games.
Thank you for this point of view. That is actually my problem. My campaigns have story intensive and there's not a lot of combat. So yes, spell casters are massively powered. I totally get your point and it makes total sense. I guess I could try to weave more of the story into actual battles.
To be more precise, it's just how our games always end up. I stick to what seems right in the narrative story, and to me, and the players, it doesn't make sense to have a load of magical items. Looks like it's really a table preference after all.
I actually run the same kind of game, so I get it. What I ended up doing (if you don't mind me offering an un-asked-for suggestion) was to sometimes make Long Rests less frequent. I had suggested to the players that I was thinking of making a Long Rest be a day off from adventuring, rather than 8 hours of rest. They didn't like that idea, but they proposed what we're actually doing now:
From time to time, I give the group notice when they're about to start a "story dungeon" -- which needs a better name, but let's run with it -- and they will get their next Long Rest at the end of it. Basically, it's a short adventure designed to be kind of like an open-air dungeon, with "one adventuring day" worth of content, even though it's spread out over a few days or a week. We started out by doing it with travel between towns, and it worked well, so now we're doing it a bit more. And of course, actual dungeon-style parts of their adventures are not changed.
Like I said, it's a suggestion you didn't ask for, but I figured I'd throw it out just in case it helps at all (maybe in combination with whatever buff you end up giving to martial classes).