Martial overhaul

This martial overhaul is a comprehensive rework of all melee weapons, fighting styles and weapon feats. Additionally, certain basic rules about combat are also getting a refresh and update.

A few basic tennents have been laid out. The first is that the themes and fantasy of your weapon should not limit your mechanical choices. For this, every size and property option has three entries. Additionally, feel free to rename entries to anything you like, for example, a rapier would be a shortsword, and a battle axe would be a longsword.

The second is that dexterity is a more powerful attribute than strength, so their offensive choices have been limited.

The third, is that fighting styles have been reworked to represent styles of fighting, not weapon specific bonuses.

Finally, feats have been tweaked to account for the changes

Overhaul to Combat Rules

The first and most important change is the addition of extra in combat actions. This is to give extra options to people either caught on the front lines, or those wishing to diversify their fighting. You may perform these actions with any weapon you are proficent with.

Block: A person using both hands to wield melee weapon(s) may block as an Action. Roll your weapon(s) Damage Die, and gain a bonus to AC equal to the result until the start of your next turn.

Feint: Perform a Fient instead of a melee attack. Until the start of their next turn, the target gains no benefit from their shield.

Lunge: Perform a Lunge instead of a melee attack. When you move at least five feet towards your target, you may attack once with reach. The next attack targeting you has advantage to hit.

The second main change comes to when you are fighting with both hands occupied. These focus on rewarding strength, and improbing two weapon fighting.

Two-handed weapons: When wielding a melee weapon in both hands, you add 1.5x your strength modifier to the damage roll. This does not apply when using dexterity to make attacks.

Two weapon fighting: When you are wielding two weapons with the light property, you can use a bonus action to make a number of offhand attacks equal to the number of attacks you make with the attack action. These attacks do not apply your attribute modifier to damage.

Weapons

Weapons are where the most obvious and first changes were made based on observations. The first Observation is the pure power of Dexterity as an Attribute. Starting from Defence, the most obvious note is that light and medium armour allow a user to reach to within 1 AC of heavy armour at much less cost and weight.

As such, there is no real defensive trade off for emphasising dexterity. Dexterity adds to initative, an obvious source of power, and previously, dexterity based melee weapons existed up to d8 damage die: Equivilent with all one handed strength based weapons.

As such, builds such as 'dexterity paladin' were effective. To counter the power of dexterity in initative, ranged combat and skills, strength based weapons will always be able to reach a die higher than their corresponding finesse siblings.

The updated weapons table features new properties.

Ferocious: This weapon is highly dangerous when the size and strength of the wielder can be brough to bear against targets who require little aiming. When you have advantage on an attack roll you make with strength, this weapon deals 1d4 extra damage of its type.

Readied: This weapon requires two hands to control and maintain threat with. If you take one hand off the weapon to perform another action, you must interact with object to gain the benefits of wielding it in two hands.

Versatile (x): While you are wielding the weapon with two hands, it gains the properties within the brackets.

For flavour, each of these weapons can be renamed and reflavoured as you wish. If a weapon does not fit the mechanics it has assigned, simply note the mechanics, and rename as you like. My inital start for much of this overhaul was dissatisfaction at the melding of flavour and mechanics.