Martial Maneuvers?

Hi all,

Seeing this post here, which repeats a common sentiment of boring martials, I got curious: as a player, what kind of martial abilities would you like to have?

Some examples that come to my mind are: trip-grapple-disarm etc (a debuff), attack all around (a damage multiplier), push/pull opponents (battlefield control), take a hit in place of your ally (again, control/effectively heal) etc. Anything you’d like to add?

Additionally, should those be accessible unconditionally, or limited? Like through feats, class features, subclasses, weapon types or magic weapons?

The most common sentiment is to make the battlemaster's maeuvers the base for it, as it already presents a solid base.

In my opinion, they should be given at character creation as an optional rule for martial classes, with a limited number of uses, mostly because the game is all about balancing and managing resources.

The biggest mistake was locking martial maneuvers behind feats instead of weapon mastery. Polearm feat should be a weapon mastery. So should all the others that involve weapons. It is like if casters had to spend feats to gain spells. Crazy that they thought this was okay.

I would love to swap actions surge for manoeuvres then have action surge as a manoeuvre (extremely expensive one albeit) as a later manoeuvre upgrade.

Or have fighters be the king of opportunity attacks

A recent post had a fun thought experiment: what it casters got spells and spell slots the same way martials get their abilities.

In 3.5, you could overrun enemies, bullrush them, and there was a PrC that let you bullrush enemies up against walls for bonus damage, or a feat to pin enemies to walls with arrows to set their movement to 0.

Throw big stuff to deal aoe damage, blitz type attacks that works on passing their passive perception, using other types of weapons to enhance your main attack, beast like abilites like pack tacticts, chance to prone and deal extra damage if you move 20 ft on a single line etc etc

ever since I read dndnext playtest I wanted to have martials that have a mechanic they can improve aspects like Offense, Defense, Mobility and Control/Support but without a ludo narrative dissonant rest limit

there the game question is "where do you focus on? how do you approach this clash?" because the dice comes back every round, but you can only focus on so much - Big attack? no dice to improve defense and vice-versa

Weapon Masteries are so close, but they're so tied too the offensive approach, there's only 8 and they're tied to weapons for their identity - which I don't care about so it ends up as a net loss

Well, Fighter do get more Feats then other classes, but it isn't enough.

Would love if there was more we could do with environment or if grappling was more meaningful. Like, why does lifting a 1000 kg statue and using it as an improvised weapon only constitute improvised weapon damage? Why does it do no damage if I drop it on someone?

IMO spells above 4th level should absolutely be feat slots.

now that's interesting! kind of like a bard's inspiration, but only for the character, that increases with level. we can go even a step further and limit what aspects a class can use it for. for example ranger can use it for accuracy, barbarian for damage, paladin for defense etc.

the more that i talk about it, the more it feels like there must be a third party book that does this!

Yeah no way is 2 extra feats enough. Most games it's only one extra. Non casters gaining a feat every 2 levels would still leave them behind full casters

Strike the ground with my epic warhammer and send out a shockwaves that will strip the very flesh from my enemies bones in a 20ft radius?

Honestly, this is what we need imo. I see no reason to limit ourselves to things one could sensibly do with a sword while wizards are out here doing wizard things.