Class is in session! If you’re looking for a straightforward bruiser, you’ve come to the right place. This week, we take a look at an archetype that allows even the least experienced D&D player to be an absolute terror with a blade. The Champion fighter archetype is power and simplicity in one package.
Story of the Champion
The fighter stood in the hulking shadow of her foe. The ogre snorted, slurping a long tendril of mucus back into its nostril, and spat a glob of phlegm at the fighter. His eyes twinkled with dumb, brutish mirth—but his expression quickly faded as the fighter brought her shield up above her head with remarkable agility. The viscous blob of spittle exploded in a shower of greenish-grey droplets, but the fighter stayed dry.
She lowered her shield and smiled at the giant before her, and drew her longsword from her hip. No fancy tricks. No acrobatic flourishes. Just a single, clean motion, and the sword was leveled at the spot just beneath the ogre’s paunch. Now, she too spit on the dirt at the ogre’s feet.
“Try to keep up,” she sneered.
The Champion is an incredibly flexible archetype that can encompass dozens of different character archetypes. At its heart, the champion is a fighter who wins fights by overpowers foes with raw strength, talent, and determination. This suits warriors without significant formal training, like farmhands-turned-heroes in the vein of Luke Skywalker. It also suits huge, musclebound brutes who have relied on their bulk and intimidating nature their whole life, like Gregor Clegane, the Mountain (from A Song of Ice and Fire). However, fighters who prioritize nimbleness and dexterity over brute strength are still well-served by the Champion archetype. Warriors like Alanna of Trebond (from The Song of the Lioness) began their journey as nimble Champions, using simple-but-effective combat techniques to defeat their foes and endure any hardship.
Champion Features
The Champion archetype represents the spirit of the fighter class distilled to its essentials. Everything in your subclass’s selection of traits is geared around making you hit harder, survive longer, and be the peak of athleticism. The fighter gains access to five subclass features in addition to their fighter class features, gained at fairly regular intervals at 3rd, 7th, 10th, 15th, and 18th level. You can read all of the Champion features for free in the D&D Basic Rules. In summary, your subclass features allow you to:
- Deal critical hits more frequently
- Perform feats of athleticism with incredible ease
- Gain an additional fighting style
- Deal critical hits even more frequently
- Regain hit points while gravely injured
Benefits of Playing a Champion
One of the Champion archetype’s greatest benefits is its simplicity. Players who are new to D&D and want to jump right into the game without fretting over spell selection or complex rules subsystems are able to pick up this character and jump right into the fray. This is because most of the Champion’s subclass features are passive improvements to existing abilities, making them easy to remember. When you gain Improved Critical at 3rd level, you don’t have to use a special action to activate this ability, you just have to remember that you score a critical hit on a roll of 19 or 20 now.
The Champion’s subclass features ramp up gently in complexity as you level up. For instance, the 7th-level feature, Remarkable Athlete, grants a passive bonus to “Strength, Dexterity, or Constitution check you make that doesn’t already use your proficiency bonus.” This is a significant boost in skill power, but I’ve found that new players need to think about it a little bit to understand it. This is a huge boon if you’re playing a clever, worldly fighter and aren’t proficient in key skills like Athletics and Acrobatics. Take a look at your skill list; any skill that uses Strength or Dexterity that you aren’t proficient in will now suddenly increase by half your proficiency bonus. On top of that, there’s one special Dexterity check that comes up all the time in D&D games: Initiative. According to lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford, the bonus from Remarkable Athlete absolutely applies to rolling for initiative.
I love how, even though the Champion doesn’t have to make a lot of tactical combat decisions, the subclass still encourages you to think deeply about the rules and mechanics of D&D. And if you do want to add a bit of extra complexity to your Champion experience, the fighter class gives you two extra Ability Score Improvements that you can spend on feats, instead.
Drawbacks of Playing a Champion
Every strength that a Champion possesses has the potential to be a drawback. If you’re used to playing a wizard or a cleric in D&D, playing a Champion fighter may feel like switching from a manual transmission to an automatic. You no longer have the fine, granular control and tactical options that you once had. The bottom line is, if you like making decisions all the time in combat, and planning your actions two or even three turns ahead, the Champion archetype doesn’t have the tools to make you happy. Next time we return to Fighter 101, we’ll take a look at the Battle Master, a fighter archetype from the Player’s Handbook that has a fine selection of tactical options.
If you’re a D&D player that enjoys unraveling complicated webs of intrigue through deep, intricate roleplay scenes, the Champion archetype may suit you—or it may not, depending on your group. From a certain perspective, the Champion’s loosened focus on combat tactics and turn-by-turn decision making frees up a lot of your mental processing power to add flavor and roleplaying panache to your character, both in and out of combat. In my experience, many wizards and other spellcasters fall into a trap of being defined by what they can do, rather than who they are, since the player is so focused on their spell list.
On the other hand, the fighter class and the Champion archetype give you precious few traits to help your character in roleplaying scenes. If you need to succeed on a Charisma (Persuasion) to gain access to the queen’s audience chamber, you might be out of luck: your class doesn’t give you any bonuses to social skills. You have two avenues of recourse: you can choose to focus your skill proficiencies on non-Strength and Dexterity-based skills earlier on, so that Remarkable Athlete does more heavy lifting for you later on, or you can use some of your additional Ability Score Improvements to gain feats to improve your social skills. Speaking of which…
Suggested Build
If you’re playing a fighter from 1st level, you should choose a race that improves Strength, Dexterity, or Constitution—or both, if you can. You can choose between Strength or Dexterity; fighters that focus in physical strength tend to wear heavy armor and wield large, two handed weapons or one-handed weapons and a shield, while fighters who prioritize in physical dexterity and nimbleness tend to wear light armor and wield ranged weapons or dual-wield finesse weapons. Constitution is important for all fighters, since a high Constitution improves your hit points, making you a hardier front-line fighter.
Half-orcs and mountain dwarves gain a bonus to both Strength and Constitution, making them hardy warriors. Likewise, stout halflings gain a bonus to both Dexterity and Constitution, making them nimble but durable skirmishers. Other races like elves, humans, and dragonborn make for resilient and adaptable fighters. If you want to make a highly versatile Champion, the variant human option grants you an additional feat at the cost of a few ability score bonuses, which we’ll talk about later in this section.
Once you’ve prioritized your physical abilities, you should consider which of your mental abilities are sharpest. Intelligence will give you a deep knowledge of history and academic topics, Wisdom will make you a canny and perceptive warrior, and Charisma will make you a personable or intimidating being. As usual, your character’s background is up to you. You can come up with all sorts of interesting stories and oddball characters by pairing unlikely backgrounds like Charlatan or Entertainer with the typically gruff and martial fighter class, or go for a more standard choice, like Soldier.
Choose EQUIPMENT instead of GOLD at the end of character creation. If you’re playing a Dexterity-based fighter, select light armor, ranged weapons, and two shortswords or scimitars, plus a light crossbow. If you’re playing a Strength-based fighter, select heavy armor, either a two-handed weapon like a greatsword, or a powerful one-handed weapon like a longsword, a shield, and two handaxes. Don’t forget that thrown weapons like a handaxe applies your Strength modifier to its “to hit” and damage rolls, even though it’s a ranged weapon.
You won’t choose your Champion subclass until you reach 3rd level as a fighter, so use this time as a 1st- and 2nd-level fighter to gauge how much fun you’re having. Do you need more complexity and tactical depth in your game? Do you want things to stay this simple and straightforward all campaign long? If simplicity is your thing, stay focused on the Champion. If you feel like you need more options, consider reading about the Battle Master and Eldritch Knight fighter archetypes in the Player’s Handbook.
Feats
Fighters have an understated trait that sets them apart from other classes. They have two additional Ability Score Improvements, at 6th and 14th level, in addition to the Ability Score Improvement every four levels that all classes receive. This allows fighters to max out their key ability score—Strength or Dexterity—faster than other classes, or become more versatile by selecting more feats. While the raw power granted by improving your key ability is always useful, you may want to add a controlled dose of complexity to your Champion by choosing feats. Here are some feats from the Player’s Handbook that fighters should consider.
Also, if you choose the variant human race, you can sacrifice some ability score bonuses to gain a feat at 1st level, as well.
- Alert. You gain a significant bonus to initiative rolls (on top of your bonus from Remarkable Athlete), and can’t be surprised while you’re conscious.
- Actor. If you find yourself lagging behind in a campaign with a significant intrigue element, this feat can help you stand toe-to-toe with bards as a suave impersonator.
- Charger. If you’re a melee fighter and find it difficult to get into melee range, this feat will help you Dash and attack on the same turn. Note, however, that this feat doesn’t let you use your Extra Attack feature while charging. Be sure that you need this feat before taking it.
- Defensive Duelist. If you’re a Dexterity-based fighter and you need some extra defense, this feat will help you parry incoming blows.
- Dual Wielder. Also for Dexterity-focused warriors, this grants you a slight boost to both offense and defense while wielding a weapon in both hands.
- Great Weapon Master. The ultimate feat for melee warriors, this allows you to take a penalty to accuracy in exchange for a huge damage boost, as well as allowing you to cleave through enemies.
- Heavy Armor Master. For the fighter that doesn’t want to die, this feat lets you reduce all incoming bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage by 3 while in heavy armor.
- Mage Slayer. For the warrior that hates magic, this feat helps you destroy spellcasters with ease.
- Mounted Combatant. Jousting knights and high-flying griffon knights want this feat, since it grants you an impressive suite of bonuses while mounted.
- Polearm Master. Fighters who prefer to fight at arm’s length get a boost to both offense and crowd control by taking this feat.
- Sentinel. If protecting your allies from harm is your bread and butter, then this feat lets you punish enemies for ignoring you: the greatest threat on the battlefield.
- Sharpshooter. Like Great Weapon Master for ranged fighters, this feat is a must-have if you fight from afar.
- Shield Master. Fighters that stand tall with both sword and shield in hand need this feat. Among other things, it lets you pull off the iconic image of using your shield to completely block your body from a jet of dragon fire.
- Skilled. If you feel like you’re just a brute with a sword and don’t have the skills or savvy that the rest of your party has, this feat will help you broaden your horizons.
If you want more advice for building a fighter, check out Fighter 101. Have you ever played a Champion fighter? What advice would you give to players that want to make a character like this?
James Haeck is the lead writer for D&D Beyond, the co-author of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and the Critical Role Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting, the DM of Worlds Apart, and a freelance writer for Wizards of the Coast, the D&D Adventurers League, and Kobold Press. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his partner Hannah and their animal companions Mei and Marzipan. You can find him wasting time on Twitter at @jamesjhaeck.
I love the champion. I have a fairly even spit between two classes–a warlock of the fiend and a fighter champion. The champion is basically the most fightiest fighter that there is, with the subclass feature helping you whether you want to bash heads with an axe or pincushion people with arrows. THANK YOU SO MUCH!
Just pointing out that several of the feats listed at the end don't include the name of the feat in question...
Other than that, fine looking article!
This isn't the first time I've seen an article eat bold headers in bulleted lists. (It happened in Barbarian 101, and it's why I no longer name the class features under the "[Subclass] Features" header.) I'll look into this glitch. In the meantime, the feats are now properly named!
I know this is a nitpick, but handaxes are melee weapons. They have the thrown property so they can be used to make ranged attacks, but they would be ranged attacks with a melee weapon.
Love the articles James. Looking forward to thief.
Two more feats for your article if you so desire.
Tavern Brawler. With a normaly unused bonus action you are allowed to gain a more tactical control of the battlefield. Plus the fun fringe benefit of treating your currently held greatsword weapon as a javelin with full proficiency.
Grappler. Normaly considered one of the weakest feats, when used correctly you gain alot of advantage to use with your extended critical . Fun side note, when grappling a similar sized for you are considered to be in 3/4 cover. If one of your foes makes a shoot that falls between your base armor class and your boosted armor class. The cover is considered hit by the attack!!!
Officially feats are an optional feature and you can't count on DMs allowing them, but I've never met a DM that considers them any more optional than any other rule. Also the fighter class makes no sense without them as (unless Eldritch Knight) you only really need 2 ability scores that you will quickly max out. Then at high levels you'll have extra ASIs that are essentially throw aways.
Hey James,
Great article. I discounted Champions as being "too basic", but sometimes that simplicity is a kind of strength. Our group meets tonight for a Session Zero and this would be the perfect class to bring to the table if you needed to build something quick that was still effective. Keep up the great work, love what you're doing.
There is nothing bad about champion but there is nothing great, if you look at the UA brute subclass it is much better but a tad on the over powered side
The overall go to for fighters is battlemaster, it gives you a ability for every playstyle and situation and works with melee weapon as well as ranged weapon fighters, also I think it misses the mark on being a champion, I think it should have some type of inspiration mechanic, maybe take some notes from bard
Gotta say, Mr. Haeck, thank you for making this article!
A lot of people give the Champion a bad rep because it's not as flashy as the other fighter subclasses, but I know first hand that the vanilla fighter option can be anything but. I would also add to the article that remarkable athlete can also allow a dexterity-based fighter to play a more sneaky, skulking, or cunning role when a rogue, bard, or ranger are absent, since it also gives said fighter a slight push in valuable roguish skills like Stealth and Sleight of Hand, which can be rather welcome in the hands of a player who keeps that in mind, or seeks that sort of development.
Other than that, I believe this is a very important article, and I hope to see more people giving the Champion some love!
I want to point out that both Sea Elves and Shadar-Kai, from Mordenkaiken's Tome of Foes, have ability score increases to Dexterity and Constitution.
Start a half orc wielding a halberd. Get polearm master and great weapon master (savage attacker and sentinel are optional)
Now you can use bonus action to attack every turn and if you crit or kill you have full attack if you don't, pommel attack. Also opportunity attacks and heavy dmg.
For maximum effect, get hasted and use action-jackson to start and finish every fight in the same turn.
I like the idea of the champion (a more fighter-y fighter) but I feel like the execution falls flat. The actual added damage of an improved critical range of 19-20 an underwhelming +5% damage. Which is terrible, especially when you look at damage options available to other fighter subclasses like the Battle Master's Superiority Dice and the EK's battle cantrips like Green Flame/Booming Blade. The Brute came much closer to closing the damage-gap with Brute Force, but it never became official.
The half-proficiency is great on paper, but realisitically a Fighter will have proficiency in most STR/DEX skills, leaving only CON, which is a rare skill check. By the time you get the extra jump distance, the Wizard can cast Fly, or some other spell to solve the jumping issue. The only tangible benefit most fighters will feel is a slight boost in Initiative. You can read more about it on this guy's post.
I think that simple classes - of which the Champion Fighter is the most standout example - are often wrongly attributed to be easy to play because that can change dramatically based on the tier and style of game. In less combat-heavy campaigns, combats with more diverse enemies with a variety of tactics and resistances countering certain approaches or higher level games where the party needs to broaden their strategic approaches to problems, the narrow skillset and reduced character mechanics that made the Champion convienient to play become a massive liability as you need to reach out for various feats, items and leverage as much of the environment and characters as you possibly can, which is difficult with how limited the Fighter's kit is out of combat (especially with the Champion). Even in combat it's hard for a Fighter to break away from their usual combat style as they can't switch up their stat allocations, ASIs, Feats and Fighting Styles the way spellcasters (especially of the prepared variety) can alter their spells available.
Overall, I think it's fine for a class to have less mechanical depth, but I still think the features at 7, 10 and 15 could use a buff.
My biggest concern with the Champion is how weak Critical Hits are from basic damage in 5th edition.
Double the dice is a great idea, in theory, but too often it means a critical hit can see you merely adding a single point of damage to the mix.
Level 11 Champion wielding a +1 Greataxe and Str 20 is looking to deal 1d12+6 damage... on a crit, that is too easily just a few extra points, while a level 11 Rogue with Booming Blade is going from 3d8+5d6+6 (+1 Rapier, Booming Blade) to getting 3d8+5d6 extra...
Overall both of these would be dishing out similar damage but a critical hit for the Rogue means so much more compared to the person designed to actually benefit from crits!
I think they should've considered focusing on crits for the champion more, so that instead of Remarkable Athlete (which could've been given at level 3 just fine as well) at 7th they gained something that meant on a critical hit, they double ALL damage (not just the dice).
Take Magic Initiate/Ritual Caster. The find familiar spell will give you a lot of advantage.
Champion is fine for its purpose of simplicity but it is horribly underpowered, which is just sad given its in the Basic Rules. There are so many guides and criticisms on it already I don't have the energy to add my own. But if you are a DM, please try to buff it in some way so that those who choose it don't feel left behind at higher levels. Almost all of this article points to only the strengths of the fighter in general, rather than the subclass.
My only character on D&D Beyond is a Champion. A wonderful character. I like the simplicity of the champion and it makes it a good front line character.
Being simple, it's also a very good character for new players as it doesn't have much complexity to it allowing the new player to get a good handle on the basics before moving on to something a bit more demanding.
I'd suggest giving them some kind of unique magic item or specialized weapon that builds their strengths further, like a weapon that increases further the crit range, so after getting both upgrades it crits on 17-20, or perhaps something like a weapon that when attuned gives you expertise or advantage on a specific ability check (good for combat-heavy or roleplay-heavy campaigns depending on the skill). However, unfortunately such a fix is really just giving the character a band-aid to repair the horribly weak subclass they chose.
Wait, attacking 4+4+1, so 9 times in one turn is weak?
A great article, as always!