u/GhostwheelX

I feel like I've seen a few great weapon fighting style alternatives on the subreddit over the last day or so, so I figured I'd throw my own version in the ring as well.

Great Weapon Fighting (Fighting Style)

When you roll weapon damage on an attack you make with a melee weapon that you are wielding with two hands, the minimum amount of damage done is equal to the average damage that weapon does, rounded up. For example, a great axe has an average damage of 6.5; therefore, if you roll a 3 on the weapon damage roll, you would instead do 7 points of damage before any modifiers from ability scores, magical effects, and so on.

So what exactly does this mean mathematically? On average, this increases the damage of a greataxe by 1.75, which is pretty close to what dueling gives, but more importantly it stops the bad feeling of using a greataxe, and rolling a 1 or 2, something that the original fighting style was supposed to help with, except you could always roll that again.

I've recently seen a whole bunch of ideas for reworks of the ranger, so I figured I throw mine into the proverbial ring as well.

This diverges significantly from the way rangers have worked in 5e, or even in previous editions, but hopefully it makes sense once I go through the logic.

Okay, so let's start with the premise; rangers are the paladins to the druid's cleric. They are the defenders of nature, druidic guardians where the druids are the priestly class for nature. And what is a defining trait that druids have that no other full caster has? Wildshape on tap.

Now, we don't want to give the ranger actual wildshape. That's already what the druid has, and what makes them special. But it gives us a foundation to base something similar.

Now, what do druids wildshape into? Beasts. Beasts are about as natural as you can get, alongside plants. And what creature has both beastly and humanoid forms? That's right, lycanthropes.

Here we have reached the crux of the idea. In my opinion, rangers should focus on a rage-like mechanic where they adopt the likeness of various animals. Each subclass could tap into a different animal. Conclave of the Werewolf. Werebear. Wereraven. Wereboar. Werecoyote. And so on.

Many of these have deep lore that we can draw on, whether it be Norse, Celtic, Native American, Greco-Roman, or Chinese.

So give them the basic warrior chassis, which means Extra Attack. However, when they first choose a subclass, they choose which totem animal they take the form of, and gain abilities based on the chosen form.

There could be some abilities shared by all rangers while they are beast-shaped (shifted? morphed?) such as gaining temp hp at the start of each turn (kinda like fast healing that lyncanthropes tend to have, but not as broken). However, beyond that each gains their own abilities based on the subclass chosen.