Weapon Actions Appendix A: Design Notes

1—Action Overlap. In some cases, two (or more) weapon actions seem to fill a similar niche, but are granted by different weapons and may grant marginally different benefits. Key examples include Brace and Ready, which both require reducing your movement speed for the turn in order to increase your damage output, and Slamming Strike and Trip, which both attempt to inflict the prone condition on the target. In such cases, the actions are typically distinguished by (1) flavour and (2) use cases. Taking the two prone attacks as an example, Slamming Strike is flavoured as a powerful blow that knocks the target to their knees, while Trip is flavoured as nimbly cutting their legs out from under them. This difference is also represented mechanically, with Slamming Strike being more effective against creatures with lower Strength scores, while Trip is more effective against creatures with lower Dexterity.

2—Multi-Target Attacks. When determining whether a class feature, spell, or other effect can interact with the Cleave and Volley weapon actions and, if so, in what ways, it is necessary to pay close attention to the exact wording of the class feature, spell, or other effect in question. For example, if you cast a spell that, as part of its casting, requires making a weapon attack against one creature, you could not replace this weapon attack with a Cleave, as the text of the spell makes clear that it can only ever have a single target. By contrast, a feature such as a Paladin's Divine Smite applies any time you hit a creature with a melee weapon attack, and as such, you could apply a Divine Smite to a Cleave attack.

2a—Divine Smite, etc. Rules-as-written (RAW), it is ambiguous whether a Divine Smite applied to a Cleave attack would deal extra damage to all targets or only to one, due to the use of singular 'target' in the description of the Divine Smite feature. Rules-as-intended (RAI), the single damage rolls for the Cleave and Volley features should mean that bonus damage applied to the damage roll for that weapon attack applies to all appropriate targets of the Cleave or Volley attack.

2b—Hunter's Mark, etc. Spells, features and effects that allow you to deal additional damage to a particular target, such as the Hunter's Mark and Hex spells, only apply their additional damage to the damage taken by that particular target—this extra damage does not 'spread' to other targets of the Cleave or Volley. This is comparable to other effects that roll a single damage roll but may hit multiple targets, such as the Magic Missile spell.

2c—Special Arrows. You can expend special or magical arrows, such as an arrow dipped in poison or an Arrow of Slaying, as part of a Volley weapon action. However, you must expend one such special or magical arrow for each target you wish to be affected by that special or magical arrow. For example, if you had two Arrows of Ogre Slaying and you made a Volley attack against a group of three ogres, you could deal the additional damage for the Arrow of Ogre Slaying to one or two of those ogres by expending one or two of your arrows (respectively), but the third ogre would not suffer any additional damage.

3—Conditions removed by healing. The maimed condition, as well as the non-condition penalties inflicted by the Hamstring Shot, Lacerating Strike, and Piercing Strike attacks automatically end when the target recovers any number of hit points. This intended to reflect the fact that these penalties or conditions represent physical wounds, which are healed when the creature recovers hit points, as well as to acknowledge that some of these conditions are especially penalising for features that have no cost besides limited uses, and as such allowing hostile creatures with access to healing magic or potions a 'get out of jail free' card seemed wise.

3a—Non-condition penalties. Why do some weapon actions introduce new conditions (such as the maimed condition), while others (such as the similar penalty inflicted by Hamstring Shot) do not? Ultimately, I have chosen to introduce a new condition keyword only for penalties which I consider to have further design potential—i.e., conditions I imagine would be useful to have for other features, spells, and effects in the future. This is a subjective decision, and while I have certain criteria for which penalties I choose to make conditions and which I do not, the choice is ultimately arbitrary. If you wish to introduce condition keywords for certain penalties that are not conditions in this subsystem RAW, or to remove the condition keywords from penalties that are, for use in your own game, you should feel free to do so; nothing in the balance or functioning of the subsystem hangs fundamentally on this distinction.

4—Fixed damage for Piercing Strike. The Piercing Strike feature has gone through a lot of iterations, mostly because while I had a clear idea of what I broadly wanted from the feature (weakening a target to damage from successive attacks), the exact mechanics of this feature required some tweaking. My initial proposal included granting the target weakness to piercing damage, but this was quite obviously the strongest of the weapon actions by a large margin and needed some reigning in to prevent game-ending levels of damage when paired with certain feats and class features. An additional d4 damage seemed too high as well, hence the choice for a simple fixed rate of additional damage. I have gone back and forth on whether this fixed rate should be 1 or 2 damage—check back on the main page to see what I left it at last time I tweaked this feature!

5—Improvised Weapon Actions, or lack thereof. As presented here, I have opted to rule that improvised weapons treated as actual weapons (see SRD 5.1, page 65) do not grant weapon actions. This may seem odd, as such improvised weapons are treated as actual weapons for most other purposes RAW. However, I believe the thematic argument here is clear—an improvised weapon does not offer the same subtlety and precision that a weapon designed for that purpose would grant, even if it is broadly similar in shape and form. For this reason, reserving weapon actions for properly manufactured weapons reinforces the improvised nature of the weapon—as well as ensuring that situations in which weapons must be improvised remain appropriately dangerous.

6—Weapon Mastery. The concept behind this feature is that it functionally allows the subclass to treat Weapon Actions as additional 'manoeuvres' that do not contribute towards your number of 'manoeuvres' know. Thus, the focus of this feature is allowing the Weapon Action subsystem to diversify the subclass's tactical repertoire, while allowing the subclass to favourably trade with this subsystem in a way that seems fitting for the wider design philosophy of the subclass.

6a—Once Per Turn. In a previous draft of this feature, I included a 'once per turn' clause to prevent a character with this feature expending a large number of dice to trigger Weapon Actions in a single burst. I removed this clause on the basis that the dice are still an expendible resource, and thus, the number of dice available per rest acts as a sufficient restraint on using these actions—if a character wants to use all their resources to do a big nova in one turn, I see no particular need to stop them here. Similar design considerations apply to the Weapon Flourishes feature.

6b—'Made As Part Of'. Note that the Brace and Ready weapon actions specifically rule that the attack which benefits from their respective effects are considered part of the weapon action for the purposes of other features and effects. As such, you can use this feature to add to the damage of the attack which benefits from Brace or Ready.

7—Hunter's Weapons. This feature was the most difficult of the subclass features to get right, as the Hunter is the only one of the three subclasses considered that does not normally expend any resource to use its tactical martial combat options. This left me with two options—either allow the Hunter interaction with the Weapon Actions subsystem to be resourceless, in line with the other subclass features but at odds with the other features that interact with the subsystem, or else make the interaction with the subsystem resourceful, in line with the other subclasses that interact with this subsystem but at the cost of undermining some of the identity of this subclass. As you can see from the proposed feature, I opted for the latter path in this case, but this feature could be reworked to provide a resourceless alternative.

7a—Resourceless Alternative. The following offers a resourceless alternative feature more in line with the features typical of the Hunter subclass, but somewhat at odds with the other Weapon Action subsystem features. Note that dependent on which action is chosen, this feature may be significantly overpowered relative to other class features—for example, chosing the Volley feature allows a bow-and-arrow ranger unlimited AOE attacks 8 levels earlier than they would normally acquire their Multiattack feature, as well as somewhat undermining that feature.

Also at 3rd level when you choose this archetype, your martial prowess makes you a master of one weapon. Choose a weapon action granted by a weapon with which you are proficient. You can use this weapon action an unlimited number of times between rests, as long as you are wielding a weapon that grants this weapon action and with which you are proficient.

One could imagine various other proposals as well—at one point, I was considering a proposal which would allow you to 'recharge' your weapon actions each time you benefitted from one of your Hunter subclass issues. However, this was both a rulings nightmare (what constitutes as 'benefitting' from a feature, and how can this be succinctly expressed in line with the syntax of 5e effects?), and ran into the same issue as other resourceless proposals—as you could conceivably proc your subclass features every single turn, it would allow you to functionally use infinite weapon actions, which, with certain actions, becomes rapidly overpowered.