Sword and Fist, Part 4

Okay, sorry about the brief detour, but let's continue on. The next part of Chapter 4 talks about Monstrous Fighters and Monks. A bugbear monk is a weird idea, but a possibility. How about a gnoll fighter? Or an ogre mage monk? Or a minotaur fighter? Be afraid. We get a brief discussion on how these characters would be possible in the game, and talking about their advantages as combat classes. We also get a couple of new feats: Large and in Charge, which lets bigger monsters prevent opponents from closing within their reach, and Multitasking, which lets the monster with many arms (at least four) do separate and distinct partial actions in the same round such as attack with one pair of hands, and reload a crossbow or even cast a spell with the other. Nice.

Then we get a couple of sections on flying monsters, natural weapons and speed for monstrous fighters and monks. Oh, and damage for different weapons sizes and monk unarmed attacks, too. That bugbear monk I mentioned? He's doing 1d8 per unarmed strike before any bonuses at first level. Now imagine a frost giant monk. Go on, I dare you.

A couple of sample creatures are included: Gresk, a 4th-level minotaur fighter, and Keiri, a 6th-level ogre mage monk. Interestingly, though they have several additional feats thanks to their class levels, neither of them use any feats from this book; they're all from the Player's Handbook. You would think this would be a perfect way to introduce these feats, but apparently not. Oh, Gresk has the following feats: Cleave, Great Cleave, Great Fortitude, Improved Bull Rush (of course he does; he's a minotaur), Power Attack, Sunder, Weapon Focus (greataxe) and Weapon Specialization (greataxe). He's also got 89 hit points, a CR of 8, does 2d8+9 damage with his greataxe +1, and has a few magic items, too. Including a potion of bull's strength. Because of course he does. This guy would be quite the surprise for a party expecting a typical minotaur.

Next are a section on mounted opponents, and grounded opponents vs. mounted PCs. The first piece of advice for fighting mounted opponents is...kill the mount. Well, that would level the playing field. Which is generally the best plan anyway. Why leave your opponent with a strong advantage? There's a reason the fully-armored mounted knight was the medieval equivalent of a tank. Of course, if you're the one who is mounted, expect your enemy to do the same to you. Lances are great, and there is a Mounted Archery feat if you want to go all Mongol horde on the enemy.

After all that, we get a couple of sample combats. The first is a mounted combat between an evil ranger and a paladin. We get the description of the action in normal type, and the rules-based stuff in italics (telling how the fight unfolds in the dice rolling). Sure enough, the evil ranger (Druga) tries to take out the paladin's mount. He certainly does damage, while Alarion the paladin shows him how's it correctly done by charging and using his lance and Smite Evil to skewer the ranger's horse in one shot. Unhorsed, the ranger is shortly defeated by the power of awesomeness.

The second combat is a straight-up duel between...well, a pair of duelists. One's an evil tiefling, the other is a swashbuckling human. They're both Ftr 7/Duel 4, so they are evenly matched. Reading through this one, it's not Errol Flynn's Robin Hood vs. Sir Guy of Gisborne; it's more like Aragorn vs. the orc leader at the end of Fellowship of the Ring. The movie version. This fight is brutal, with critical hits and all-out attacks; the Expertise feat is used and discarded at different times in the fight, and François (the human) is down to 4 hit points when he finally takes out Shaez with a rapier to the heart. Both fights were graphic, really bringing out the cinematic feel of 3rd edition combat.

The last part of this chapter gives us a few rules variants that look really interesting. First is Counter-Tumbling; if you are trying to Tumble past someone who also has the Tumbling skill, they get to make a Tumble check of their own, and if their result is higher than the DC of what you're attempting to do, their roll becomes your DC. It's not something that will come up a lot, but let's face it: It's not as easy to Tumble past a 10th-level monk as it is a slow and stupid ogre.

Next is a bit of flexibility for Weapon Focus on bows. Specifically, composite bows; it makes sense that if you can use a normal longbow well, you can also use a composite longbow. So, this variant means that you can switch your Weapon Focus from a normal bow to a composite one if you acquire such, without losing the feat. However, you can only do this after moving up a level so as not to affect your attack bonus with the normal bow. I like this; it's not fun to waste a feat on a weapon you won't be using after 1st or 2nd level.

Finally, there's the Double-Handed Disarm. Normally, using a single hand to disarm an opponent gives the defender a two-size advantage on the Disarm roll (an unarmed strike is a Tiny weapon, making it two sizes smaller than a Medium-sized opponent using a sword). If you use both hands, that bonus is negated, and the two hands count as a single Medium-size weapon. Again, a logical and useful rule. I would definitely incorporate this into the game.

And that's it for this chapter. It ended up being longer than I expected, but that was compensated by the shortness of the 3rd chapter. Tomorrow I'll try to finish the book as Chapter 5 is the last one. See you then.