In which we create a simple polearm specialist for use in Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons.

Remember when Dungeons & Dragons loves polearms? My old orange-spined Player’s Handbook couldn’t get enough of them. To this day I crack a whimsical smile when I see a fauchard for sale at the Home Depot. Why? Because Fauchards and Glaives and Billhooks were the stuff of adventure, dammit.

A polearm is a beautiful thing. Attach something to the end of a long hand. Hit fools with it. What do you attach to it? Oh anything, really. Lots of polearms look like they started out life as farm or orchard tools re-purposed for slaughter. Those that showed promise eventually developed into refined, elegant, knightly implements of slaughter.

One problem that came up with some frequency was that of specialization. If an adventuring warrior were to specialize in the use of, say, the Bec de Corbin, he has put himself in a bit of a corner. With such a dizzying assortment of polearms available, what are the odds that a given villain, henchling, or long-buried hero of old would have a matching magical weapon? Warriors benefit tremendously from having enchanted armaments, and picking the wrong specialization is troublesome. Type V Dungeons & Dragons addresses this by doing away with specialization in the first place. Instead there are optional feats that lend themselves towards various broad categories of weapons and fighting styles. Whether you use shortbows or longbows or crossbows or thrown darts you can benefit from Sharpshooter. Similarly there is a Polearm Master feat that applies to most long-stick-intensive weapons.

Four feats are of particular interest:

• Great Weapon Master – This grants a bonus action to attack upon landing a critical hit or felling an opponent, plus the option to take a penalty to hit in exchange for more damage. Polearms are typically heavy weapons wielded in two hands, so this would apply to a polearm-swining lug just fine.
• Polearm Master – This grants a bonus action to attack with the butt-end of your polearm and grants a reaction attack when opponents enter within reach. Clearly this feat is best-used by characters that do not have a lot of other opportunities to trigger a bonus action or reaction.
• Shield Master – Has a few benefits for Dexterity-based saving throws and allows a bonus action to shove an opponent. You can wield a Quarterstaff one-handed, so technically you can benefit from both this and Polearm Master at the same time. Why this combination doesn’t apply to spears is beyond me, as the spear-and-shield combination is literally a classic. Bronze-age classic.
• Sentinel – Reduces the movement of anybody hit by an opportunity attack to zero for the turn, denies opponents the ability to Disengage safely, and allows a reaction attack against opponents that attack one’s allies. This is 5e’s melee lock-down mechanism, presumably present for the benefit of people who enjoy computer games and Type IV D&D.

The use of feats poses certain challenges, though. Most classes gain a feat at 4th, 8th, and 12th level, at the cost of foregoing an attribute score improvement. To select a feat is to pay an opportunity cost, and to pay dearly at that. One could invest three feats in Polearm Mastery, Great Weapon Mastery, and Sentinel, and thus become a heavy-hitting melee specialist locking down a 25′ swath of the battlefield. This combination sounds lovely, but your Dwarven Paladin isn’t going to have all the pieces in place until 12th level, at which point frankly your campaign is probably already over. It seems to me that, generally speaking, more than one feat is hard to justify for a typical campaign. Unless we get our feats for pennies on the dollar, that is! And boy, do I have a deal for you!

Start out by looking at the call-out on page 31 of the Player’s Handbook, the Variant Human option. Instead of taking +1 on all of your attributes, take +1 to each of two attributes of your choice and pick up a feat at 1st level. Lovely, we can start our adventuring career with part of our gimmick already in-hand. Now we can get our third feat at 8th level instead of 12th. But that means we won’t get to bump up any of our attributes, like the all-important Strength or Constitution, until 12th level. Assuming we’ll be retired or dead right around then, that’s still a bit of a delayed gratification.

Behold, another solution presents itself. Tucked away on page 70 is an under-rated character class called the “Fighter.” The Fighter, you must understand, is a newfangled specialist class introduced in 1974 that is supposed to be rugged and skilled in the use of arms. In 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons they have the distinction of gaining attribute improvements (and additional feats) at levels 4, 6, 8, 12, 14, and 16. This means we can have three feats at level six. That’s half the level as our baseline, leaving opportunities to maybe pick up a couple of bonuses before being put out to pasture.

We’ve picked a race (Human) and a class (Fighter), so it’s time to divvy up some starting attributes. I’m a fan of the standard array, as point buy leads to min/max abuses and cancer of the soul. All of our polearm trickery won’t be of much use if we aren’t hitting our targets, and none of our thematic weapons have the “finesse” quality, so our primary concern is Strength. Dexterity need not be of any great concern, as we can get by using heavy armor. Constitution is tremendously important for anybody whose primary role in combat is getting stuck in with the hostiles, so we’ll make it our secondary concern. Intelligence is lovely for anybody in the real world, but if you were really smart you’d get yourself a good steady job that doesn’t involve getting stabbed. Low priority. We could say the same about Wisdom, but some of the more concerning magic effects in the game use Wisdom for a saving throw, and skills like Insight, Medicine, and Perception all key off of this attribute. Tertiary priority. Charisma is of similar priority as Intelligence. Both are nice to have but non-essential to this gimmick. We assign 15 to Strength, 14 to Constitution, 13 to Wisdom, 12 to Charisma, 10 to Dexterity, and 8 to Intelligence. We apply our Human bonuses and end up with a statline of Str 16 Dex 10 Con 14 Int 8 Wis 14 Cha 12.

As a Fighter we’re entitled to a fighting style at level 1. Archer, Duelist, and Two-weapon don’t really apply well here. Duelist would if we were to use a Quarterstaff, but I want to go with a more traditional polearm aesthetic, so that leaves us with Defense, Great Weapon, and Protection. Protection allows you to use your reaction to impose disadvantage under some circumstances. We’re already looking to use reactions from other sources, so that isn’t so handy. Great Weapon fighting style lets us re-roll 1’s and 2’s on damage dice when using a two-handed weapon. That’s nice, but it’s just a little extra damage. We take Defense for a flat +1 to armor class. With no shield or Dexterity bonus and likely to be stuck in the scrum, we can use all the help we can get in that department.

For a background we’ll be boring and pick up Soldier. We roll some dice and see that we spent time as a Standard Bearer in the military, are always polite and respectful, we value “might” as an ideal, feel that those we fight with are worth dying for, and our hatred for our enemies is blind and unreasoning. This also gets us proficiency in Athletics and Intimidation as well as tool proficiency in one type of gaming set (Chutes & Ladders) and vehicles(land). For our Fighter skills we pick up Perception and Insight. Because we’re clearly some kind of social butterfly. For our free Human skill, we pick up Animal Handling. It goes with our land vehicle proficiency and suits our delicate nature.

At last, we pick up equipment. From the Fighter starter package we get chainmail armor, two Martial weapons (a Glaive and a Warhammer), two handaxes, and an explorer’s pack. From our background we get and insignia of rank, a trophy taken from a fallen enemy, a set of bone dice, a set of common clothes, a belt pouch, and ten gold coins.

At 1st level we look something like this:

From the outset he’s reasonably tough, is capable of laying out two attacks per round in melee for 1d10+3 and 1d4+3. Outside of a fight his athleticism is useful for physical challenges and at least not a liability socially. Let’s roll him forward to 6th level:

Pole Dancer

Human Battle Master Fighter 6 Soldier Background Lawful Evil Attribute Value Bonus Save Str 18 +4 +7 Dex 10 +0 +0 Con 14 +2 +5 Int 8 -1 -1 Wis 14 +2 +2 Cha 12 +1 +1 Skills: Animal Handling (+5), Athletics (+7), Insight (+5), Intimidation (+4), Perception (+5), Cook’s Tools Languages: Common, Orcish Hit Points: 52 Armor Class: 19 (Plate + Fighting Style) Initiative: +0 Speed: 30 Weapons: Glaive (+7 to attack, 1d10+4 damage) twice plus Glaive (+7 to attack, 1d4+4 damage) as bonus action, Warhammer (+7 to attack, 1d8+4 damage) twice, Handaxe (+7 to attack, 1d6+4 damage) twice Other notable features: Polearm Master feat, Sentinel Feat, Military Rank, Second Wind (recover 1d10+1 hit points as bonus action), Defense Fighting Style, Action Surge, Combat Superiority, Goading Attack, Lunging Attack, Trip Attack, Four Superiority Dice (d8), Student of War (Cook’s Tools), Extra Attack, Ability Score Improvement (Strength) Notable Equipment: Plate Armor, Glaive, Warhammer, 2 Handaxes, Explorer’s Pack, Lieutenant’s Bars, Hobgoblin Warrior’s Headdress, Bone Dice, Common Clothes, Belt Pouch, 10gp

At this point we could have taken Polearm Master, Sentinel, and Great Weapon Master feats, but the benefits of Great Weapon Master are a bonus attack under limited cirmstances and a bonus to damage at a heavy attack penalty. Bringing Strength up to 18 makes a lot of sense for getting more value out of it when we eventually pick it up at 8th or 12th level.

The Battle Master archetype is selected because we’ve more or less set ourselves up around being tricky in a fight. Being able to decide to trip an opponent during a reaction, extend from 10′ reach to 15′, or steal an opponent’s attention all fit nicely with a melee Swiss Army Knife approach to the world.

On the road to a typical campaign’s end-game, he’ll get another ability score bump or two, some magical arms and armor, a fifth Superiority Die, and maybe four more maneuvers, see his Superiority Die bump up from d8 to d10, and get a third attack per round with the main end of his weapon. With any luck he’ll have a broad range of implements with which to ply his trade during this time, from his first Glaive to a Halberd or two, maybe the DM will let him have a Ranseur or Bill Hook or Partisan. Who knows?

In which we continue our task, undertaken previously, to flesh out four 5th-edition Dungeons & Dragons characters whose stats were generated by a straight 3d6-in-order die roll in a public forum.

When last we left out intrepid heroes, they were hapless first level scrubs with the barest smidgeon of backstory, the most raggedy of starting equipment, and subnormal randomly-assigned statlines. They still have the random statlines, but now we’re going to check in on them at level 7.

Seven levels into a campaign, characters have seen a fair amount of action. They’ve developed and matured into their roles. Assuming none of them died and ignoble death at the hand of kobolds before level two (not a great bet) they should have come into their own. The spellcasters can cast 4th-level spells. The Fighter can attack multiple times per round. The Rogue has twice the Expertise skills and is dropping Sneak Attack damage like nobody’s business.

The Champion archetype is horribly underrated. For our clumsy Half-Orc buddy here it gets him half his proficiency bonus, rounded up, added to any ability checks he doesn’t already get proficiency bonuses for. That would include initiative. Speaking of which, the Alert feat (selected at 6th level) fixes what is likely a long-standing pet peeve in the Initiative department.

Hoo boy, do Bards get a lot of stuff. Her extra cantrip (Message), access to Invisibility, and Expertise in Stealth lets her pass up the Rogue as the de-facto scout of the party. With spells like Heat Metal and Dimension Door she can be a huge help in overcoming combat and non-combat challenges. And attacking twice per round for more damage than the Fighter isn’t such a bad thing to fall back on. Song of Rest helps everybody in the party recover hit points more quickly during breaks in the action, saving valuable Cure Wounds castings. Jack of All Trades (Jill of All Trades?) is like an improved Remarkable Athlete. With a +7 on initiative rolls, she stands a very good chance to drop a Faerie Fire or Heat Metal on an opponent in time for it to assist the whole group for the whole encounter.

Our Scheming Wizard was originally specified as an Evocation specialist. There are always supposed to be better things for a Wizard to be doing than laying down raw damage, but if you’re running an Evoker and don’t prepare Fireball every day once you’re able to, you’ve been wasting everybody’s time. Shape Spell lets him steer the mayhem away from his allies. Potent Cantrip doesn’t do us a lot of good, as there are only a couple of cantrips that even allow for saving throws. We could pick up Acid Splash or Poison Spray as our fourth cantrip, but I’d rather just write that feature off and pick up Ray of Frost instead. Unlike our Tambourine Bard, the Wizard may have any number of additional spells in his spellbook.

No surprises here, the Rogue is a straight-up killer. He has the hit points to hang with the Fighter up front in a fight, and is sneaky, smart, and athletic enough to deal with a wide variety of challenges. Having another party member with Expertise takes a bit of the shine off of him. Depending on the kinds of magical resources these goons came across during their adventures, the capabilities and responsibilities of each character could shift around dramatically. Picking exactly what would compliment each character best would be cheesy, so I refrained from doing so. It should be fair to assume they’ve got a handful of magical weapons, a few wondrous items, and several single-use potions, scrolls, and such.

This certainly isn’t the set of characters I’d expect the people in my play group to come up with, given the option of a 27-point buy or standard array, but there’s something to be said for skipping past the careful planning and asset management side of character creation and diving headfirst into play. In a high-lethality campaign it’s nearly as important to whip up a new character quickly as it is to produce a highly-effective one. There’s fun to be had during character creation, but far more to be had in playing with the results, right?

In which we continue our task, undertaken previously, to flesh out four 5th-edition Dungeons & Dragons characters whose stats were generated by a straight 3d6-in-order die roll in a public forum.

Today we’ll assign our party members some backgrounds, assign personality traits, bonds, ideals, and flaws. The goal here is to create playable characters that will work well together.

Pretty straightforward. We’ll want to pick up a background that compliments everybody else, plus two skills from the Fighter list. He’s proficient in Intimidation by dint of being a badass Half-orc. Rawr.

Plenty of skills to pick. Three from Bard, two from Half-elf, none of those restricted to a list. With four musical instruments to choose from, I think it would be prudent to pick something small, something big, something high-class, and something a little down to earth. Drums, Dulcimer, Flute, Lute, and Viol all look good from the PHB’s list of tools, but we can do better. We’ll stick with Drums (applying this to the Tambourine), switch out the Dulcimer with the Harp, replace the Flute with the Clarinet, the Lute with the Guitar, and the Viol with the Cello. Who doesn’t like a classy Half-elf lady rocking a cello? Nobody I want to game with, that’s who.

Wizards aren’t exactly your classic skillmonkey. They get their way by book-reading and bending the rules of reality. I shifted him from Guild Artisan to Guild Merchant because a Wizard on a Cart travelling from town to town peddling his murderhobo friends’ ill-gotten gains strikes a chord with me. Much more so than having his sweating away in some workshop all day.

Six skills, a set of tools to pick from being a Dwarf, two skills to have Expertise in… A lot of wiggle-room here. I went ahead and picked Mason’s Tools just to stay in stereotypical Dwarf territory. Let’s put the pieces together.

We’ve got an Entertainer and a Merchant. Clearly they should be able to handle the “face” duties between them. The Wizard already has the essential Insight and Persuasion skills. Round this out with Deception (using his pick-anything Human skill) and he’s got the makings of a proper con artist. From the Wizard list he gets intellectual with Arcana and Investigation, two Intelligence-based skills one rightly expects the party Wizard to keep on lockdown. As the token smart guy in the group, he opts to spend his feat on Skilled, picking up History, Nature, and Religion.

Our Bard has Acrobatics and Performance. Though she is quite charismatic, her poor Wisdom makes her somewhat of a liability diplomatically. Others are likely to pull one over on her, so they’ll try to let the party Wizard take care of that stuff. Leaning on her strengths, we’ll select Stealth and Sleight of Hand. This will help her tag along with the Muscle Rogue for scouting purposes. Speaking of which if she’s going to be sticking her neck out, proficiency with Survival and Perception will help cover for her poor Wisdom. A little, at least. That leaves one skill to assign. You never know when the DM is going to rule that Acrobatics isn’t the right tool for the job, so we give her Athletics to round things off.

The Fighter historically hasn’t had a lot to add to the mix, but it need not always be so. He only has one attribute that has a bonus and a skill associated with it. Athletics. We’ll want that. Several backgrounds offer this as a skill, but at this point I’m looking at the Fighter’s poor-but-not-terrible Wisdom score and thinking he may be able to cover gaps there, too. We select the Folk Hero background, picking up Animal Handling and Survival proficiency. The Wizard’s got a mule but isn’t particularly good with it. Now we have two characters that are kind-of-sort-of good with the beast of burden. For the Fighter skills we pick up Athletics and Perception. The Bard is already proficient with Perception, but having multiple players rolling is kind of like automatically having advantage just by keeping the party together.

With only eighteen skills in the system we’ve got a pretty good variety of skills covered by the time we get to the Rogue. He has four skills from an exhaustive Rogue skill list and two more from a background. Several of the backgrounds grant skills that overlap with the Rogue skill list. With the Wizard covering the party “face” and general smarty-pants duties, the Rogue is going to be overlapping what the Fighter and the Bard have already select. Athletics is important to the Muscle Rogue’s operation, he’ll take it and select it as one of his Expertise skills. For scouting purposes Stealth and Perception are vital. Investigation will help provide the all-important second pair of eyes on a conundrum. Each of these is on the Rogue skill list, so no need to pin ourselves down to a background just yet. How about Acolyte? This picks up Insight and Religion, and gives us some opportunities to have a more socially-adjusted Rogue than one might normally expect.

On to more intangible matters. Personality traits. Ideals. Bonds. Flaws. Background features.

Our Folk Hero Half-orc should have a defining event. We can roll randomly, but I love the idea of a clumsy-ass lunk rescuing people during a natural disaster. He nearly drowned himself saving a family from a flooded river. He benefits from Rustic Hospitality wherever he goes. For a Personality Trait we select “I misuse long works in an attempt to sound smarter.” It’s very important to give the right kind of impersonation, you see. For an Ideal, we select Respect: “People Deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.” For a Bond we select “I protect those who cannot protect themselves.” This ties in entirely too cleanly with his fighting style. I’m simple like that. His flaw will be “I have a weakness for the vices of the city, especially hard drink.” Drunken Fighters are the best Fighters.

Our Entertainer Bard gets one to three Routines. Since she’s so dexterous, it makes sense that she would have excelled as a Dancer, Juggler, or Tumbler. Taking all three seems a bit excessive, so we’ll take her performance-related skills (other than Performance) and tie them in. Acrobatics matches with Tumbler, her various musical instrument proficiencies match with Instrumentalist, and Sleight of Hand goes well with… Fire-eater. What’s Fire-eater doing on that table? How can you possibly expect me to not select that? She gains the By Popular Demand feature. Everybody loves a fire-eating gymnast that plays the guitar. For a Personality Trait we select “I get bitter if I’m not the center of attention.” This should provide some good intra-party drama. For an Ideal we select Creativity: “the world is in need of new ideas and bold action.” That’s the kind of ideal that leads to a life of adventure. For her Bond we select “I idolize a hero of the old tales and measure my deeds against that person’s.” Watching a player develop the story of her ancient hero strikes me as Good Stuff. For a Flaw we play up her poor Intelligence and Wisdom with “I have trouble keeping my true feelings hidden. My sharp tongue lands me in trouble.”

Our Merchant Wizard needs to have a core competency, business-wise. Presumably as a merchant, not an artisan, this would just be the business he’s most familiar with, not the sole commodity he’s working with. With proficiency in Arcana and Investigation, it seems he’s be keen on calligraphers, scribes, scriveners, cartographers, surveyors, and chart-makers. Yes, that’s two selections from the list. File your complaint at the Guild Hall. Ask for Steve. He gains the Guild Membership feature. I assume that means he gets medical, dental, vision, a solid pension, and a lawyer if anything comes up in the commission of his guild job. For a Personality Trait we’ll pick “I always want to know how things work and what makes people tick.” He’s outgoing like that. For an ideal we select Generosity: “My talents were given to me so that I could use them to benefit the world.” If he’s calling the shots, it will be in the DM’s interest to have him at least think of himself as the good-guy. For a Bond we take “I owe my guild a great debt for forging me into the person I am today.” Again, this is mostly throwing the DM a bone. If the guild needs something, this guy’s going to want to do right by them. For a Flaw we select “I’m quick to assume that someone is trying to cheat me.” Paranoid players are good players.

Finally our Acolyte Muscle Rogue gains the Shelter of the Faithful feature. For a Personality Trait it’ll be “I see omens in every event and action. The gods try to speak to us, we just need to listen.” For an Ideal we’ll take Faith: “I trust that my deity will guide my actions. I have faith that if I work hard, things will go well.” For a Bond we select “I would die to recover an ancient relic of my faith that was lost long ago.” We want him motivated to work with these crazy people. For a Flaw, “I am suspicious of strangers and expect the worst of them.” This should lead to a fair amount of violence, if your D&D group is anything like mine.

Where we stand:

Our Fighter’s not much good at his skills, and will be getting by mostly on his ability to take a hit. Heavy armor is a big plus here, as it ignores what would otherwise be a big hit to his Armor Class from his lack of Dexterity.

Oddly, her dismal Intelligence isn’t terribly likely to be a huge problem for our Bard, provided she’s got the Rogue or Wizard anywhere nearby to help out. She’ll be able to sneak around with the Rogue, is capable of dishing out damage in melee combat, and can provide solid spell support.

Party face and mob boss. Owns their transportation. Can lay down a variety of spells useful in and out of combat. If he weren’t so fragile he’d hardly need the rest of the group.

Get this Dwarf into some medium armor and you’re in business. He can take a hit nearly as well as the party Fighter and just needs a little more Armor Class than the starting equipment for his class provides. He provides most of the skills the Wizard needs to get your typical dungeon-delving job done with a little security and support from the Fighter and Bard.

In our final installment we’ll jump forward a few levels and see what these goons may look like once they’ve got a full complement of class features.