Has any D&D edition ever made a class or subclass that gave the "mundane skill monkey with plenty of skills, despite a lack of true magic" role to the "character with a heavy weapon and full plate armor" class fantasy?
It is usually the "dinky weapon and light armor" class fantasy that gets plenty of mundane skills because of legacy reasons, right?
What I envision here would sacrifice some of the raw fightiness of a fighter, but instead be amazing at Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma skills, like a well-educated general or warrior-monarch.
Maybe a less combat-support-y, more skill-support-y 4e warlord? 5e valor bards have actual magic that can be countered, dispelled, or antimagic'd, so never mind those.
3.5 and Pathfinder did this with Tome of Battle/Path of War, and you don't even have to sacrifice any fighty ability because the designers of these systems realized that martials needed help.
Noah Kelly
Eh, only sort of for Tome of Battle. They beefed the low skill points up to 4+Int, but the selection of skills is still pretty limited; the actual skill-focused Swordsage class is for light armor.
Bentley Thompson
Where are the 6 + Int, heavy armor, Intelligence/Wisdom/Charisma skill monkeys in Tome of Battle and Path of War?
Jackson Ramirez
>5e >take rogue >take away their stealth and sneak attack stuff >give heavy armor and martial weapons done, who gives a fuck about balance if you're playing d&d
Josiah Nelson
D&D won't ever allow "jocks" in heavy armor to be useful for anything other than beating faces. It's even worse when you realize those spellcasting and skill-monkeying classes usually have ways to patch up their durability and offense while "heavy", Strength and Constitution focused martials usually have no easy way of increasing their utility.
Jason Long
5e, sort of. Everyone gets the same number skills from class and background (2+2), except rogue and bard, everyone gets the same racial options, but fighters get more ASIs to get feats to spend on Skilled or Prodigy (if certain races). There also aren't that many skills, so even if you don't get as much as if you've trully optimized for number of proficiencies, you can easily end up with 9 or 10 skills without multiclassing.
Jacob Myers
>class fantasy What the hell is this?
Carter Hernandez
The fantasy one has when playing a class. Have you never put words together and derived meaning before?
Joseph Walker
What people imagine the class to be as opposed to actual mechanics and gameplay of it. The mental image. What cool things you want to do with it, heroes you want to emulate, cool pictures you want to use. You know, the "fantasy" of the class.
Parker Cox
Why not choose a class that has investigation/skill monkeying as it's primary focus and stat/feat it in such a way that it can effectively use a sword and armour? It's probably not perfectly efficient but I imagine that your goal here isn't perfect efficiency.
Pathfinder has the Inquisitor class right? They're more cleric based though.
>someone points out how balance was actually fixed in 3e/pf >3.pf hater moves the goal posts so he can keep complaining
Joshua Scott
Why are you falling for his bait and arguing with the idiot to begin with.
Noah Garcia
Actually, I'm reading through these a bit more and they seem like bad ideas.
Grayson Harris
5e lets you cheat a little between backgrounds & feats. A level 1 variant human fighter can start with vehicle and gaming set proficiencies, a couple languages, a crafting set proficiency & skills in animal handling & medicine. Add a feat & you can add more languages or more proficiencies.
Or just play a Str rogue. Sure it's not optimal, but neither is skillmonkey fighter.
Josiah Collins
But clerics get to be jocks in heavy armor if they want and still have a wide array of supernatural problem-solving powers.
Brody Ramirez
>All that >Not just going for Guild Artisan background, so you can be a member of the Cartographer's Guild, a place that has a bunch of old-ass maps that you could rifle through on a lazy Sunday afternoon until you find something with a big, red X on it >"GUYS, GET YOUR SHIT, WE'RE GOING ON AN ADVENTURE"
Nicholas Garcia
Okay, let's play a game of "what Colette is actually bitching at this time"
aaaaand >5e valor bards have actual magic that can be countered, dispelled, or antimagic'd, so never mind those.
So, let me guess - you were in the game and GM had THE ABSOLUTE AUDACITY to dispel your magical little girl character's spell?
Kevin Watson
This is what any other character gets. It doesn't make a skill monkey.
Levi Barnes
Yeah, because 5e strictly limits skill expertise. Only so much I can do without homebrewing, fampai.
Josiah Brown
The difference between a skill monkey and a regular character is far smaller in 5e than most editions. You won't have Expertise, Jack of All Trades or Reliable Talent sure, but you will have a whole bunch of viable skills unless you specifically build to limit them.
Dominic Rodriguez
Warder is an Int class that gets 4+
Jayden King
Expertise, Jack of All Trades, and Reliable Talent ARE what make a skill monkey.
They're better than skill proficiencies because they're some of the few ways to jack up your skill bonuses beyond dinky levels.
Oliver Sanders
They also need lots of Str and Con and their Knowledges aren't that good. Warders aren't as good skill monkeys as they seem.
Samuel Turner
Of course they're what make a skill monkey, I'm just saying you're not going to be hurting for skills at all unless you play a STR/CON Barbarian, and even then that's just because your stat bonuses don't line up with the skill roster. With Backgrounds basically giving you two free skills in whatever you want, tool proficiencies (which looking at Xanathar's do stack with skill proficiencies), stat bonuses actually mattering, and the same amount of class skills for almost everybody, you can easily played a highly skilled character without being a skill monkey.
Colton Anderson
Ehhhhhh.
>stat bonuses actually mattering, and the same amount of class skills for almost everybody Doesn't that mean a Str/Con melee fighter in plate will have shit skills anyway?
Easton James
A good fighter should have at least something decent other than STR and CON, especially with their high amount of ASI's. I mention Barbarians because they hyperspecialize stat-wise into the two stats that don't matter for skills.
Adam Johnson
Their ASIs are their class features though and they usually get blown on crap like GWM/PAM/SS.
Rogues don't have to give up class features for Expertise and Reliable Talent.
Luis Roberts
Again, you're not going to be the skill monkey. I'm not saying you'll be as good as the Rogue. Rogue is all about skills, that's all they focus on past sneak attack, of course they're going to be better than your character doing multiple other things. But the character described is just a mundane character with a bunch of skills, and that's easily doable. You won't be a skill god like the Rogue, but you'll be more than able to make a highly skilled character.
Also Fighters don't really need the GWM/PAM/SS unless you're going into extreme DPR optimization. If you want to use your ASI's on stats that will give you better skill bonuses, you will not in any way be making yourself a burden on the team.
Adrian Martin
Is there any pressing game design reason for "skill monkey" niches to normally be relegated to rogues and roguish spellcasters across D&D?
Jayden Lee
And even if you blow your ASIs on those, you won't be skill monkeying like a rogue or bard anyway.
And you'll be fighting worse than them.
Nathan Phillips
Fighters don't need GWM/PAM just to keep up with Rogues and Bards in battle, but if you want a character that is as highly skilled as a Rogue but also can do everything a Fighter can, you might as well play a Knowledge Cleric and conveniently forget you have spells.
Carter Jenkins
Actually, 5e fighters kind of do this. The Champion subclass gives you a bonus to any physical skill check where your proficiency doesn't already apply, the Battle Master gets proficiency in any one set of tools and this funky "know your enemy" ability, and with any subclass you can trade one of your seven ASIs for the Skilled feat.
Colton Rivera
>Champion >good Wow.
>Battle Master Wow, one set of tools! And one of the narrowest abilities in the book!
Cooper Reed
>5e defense force scrambling on 'Str fighters are good at skills, guys!'
Cooper Carter
You've got a d12 hit die, good fort saves and high AC, so you don't really need Con to be all that high.
It's the way it's always been so grognards will scream if you do things any differently. Really every character needs to be able to contribute both in and out of combat.
Robert Stewart
Why has nobody posted the Vanilla equivalent to OP's pic?
Nathan White
Not true, warders without good Con are awful at doing the tank job.
Liam Moore
...
Tyler Powell
>"I'd like to do a build" >"Here's how to do a build" >"haha look at these fucking nerds"
Skill proficiencies in 5e are pretty useless at low levels anyway. Training in a field gives you what, a 10% advantage over someone untrained? Even if the skill is something like history or medicine.
Not that the 'apply incremental +1 bonuses across an array of 20-odd skills' method is any better.
Andrew Torres
>Skill proficiencies in 5e are pretty useless at low levels anyway. So you're acknowledging that it's still dogshit to try that kind of build out, got it.
Hunter Bell
What would break if you gave a 5e rogue proficiency with martial melee weapons, medium armor, and heavy armor and let Sneak Attack work with the first attack from a martial melee weapon each round?
Oliver Ramirez
D&D has this thing where "skilled" means agile/dexterous. Heavy armor usually doesn't play well with that.
That said, I think you could make a heavy armor Thief in 4e without too much of a problem, though it'd cost you a bunch of feats.
Jack Foster
The 4e 'Everyone gets 1/2 level, training is a flat +5' was pretty decent. Meant that no one was ever at 'Can't ever try' but also meant that experts had an advantage.
Mason Jackson
SW SAGA edition perfected it by limiting "expertise" to another +5 (for a total of level/2 +10) instead of letting it run wild like 4e did.
Xavier Ward
Well, you can get up to 15 proficiencies (and 1 expertise) with a pure fighter, unless I misunderstood some rules.
2 from background 2 from class 1 from Variant Human race 1 (+1 Expertise) from Prodigy human racial feat, free with the Variant Human 3 from Skilled feat 6 from various feats found in UA "Feats for Skills" (you can sacrifice some of those for an Expertise-like doubling of the proficiency in skills you're already proficient with)
If playing a skill-heavy and combat-light campaign, this should work quite well. Not as good as if you'd make the char into a Rogue or Fighter with some Rogue levels, but still.
Logan Baker
You're also level 20, a shit fighter, and still a shitier skill monkey than a rogue.
Jose Long
Technically level 19, and the fighting ability might not matter depending on the campaign.
I don't have any excuses for being worse than the rogue though. That's on Wizards.
John Moore
Rogue mastermind with the heavily armored trait and building str instead of dex.
Grayson Brown
Don't you have to take TWO feats for that?
Christopher Harris
Could be a dwarf. Then it's one feat I think.
Charles Jackson
Still stuck with a rapier.
Jack King
>someone posts dandwiki expecting to get replies >he does
Nolan Morris
>someone points out how balance was actually fixed in 3e/pf No, someone pointed out an option that was a push in the right direction. The best you could hope for in a martial class was still Tier 3 at best and you still can't be an effective tank and skill monkey due to the fact that most of your class was build around physical damage and surviving physical attacks.
Sebastian Barnes
>mundane skill monkey with plenty of skills, despite a lack of true magic Hmm... Warlord can sorta pull that off in 4e, Fighter too with some work. The Warlord will generally want to multiclass Bard for that one, which granted, is a tad of magic, but it can get access to pretty much all skills in the game that way, and it was Intelligence and Charisma as substats, meaning it can definitely pull that off. Then you have the possibility of going kinda odd and using an Eladrin Int+Cha Warlord with Swordmage MC and Intelligent Blademaster (only picking things which need basic attacks/lazylord stuff), which will net you a total of some... 6 skills right out of the gate without much work, which can grant you the ability to cover just about anything you want.
The Fighter requires a heavy focus on Wisdom (which isn't bad at all for Fighters, but generally that is paired with an interest in Dexterity for the sake of Polearm Momentum), multiclassing as Ranger, and being Human, with a decent background. The end result is that you can have good stats in Athletics, Endurance, Insight, Dungeoneering and Nature without really suffering for anything.
Kevin Lee
The ears of anyone standing within sixty feet of a grognard.
