Estimated read time: 15 minutes

Project 4ever is a deep dive into everything about Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition and repurposing it for 5e. In this article, we’re going to reference a lot of 4e terminology and philosophy—particularly the importance of combat roles and power sources. Feel free to dig through those previous articles to better understand these concepts!

Today we’re going over the first five levels of the 4ever Fighter class! If you’re already super familiar with what the 4e Fighter offers, feel free to skip to the section, “So, What Are We Stealing?”

Into the Fray

While the 5e Fighter is a broad and flexible class able to perform a multitude of roles in combat, the 4e Fighter is designed to be more focused, excelling particularly in melee combat. You don’t really find or build ranged Fighters in 4e, they’re all about getting up in their enemies’ faces and keeping attention away from the weaker members of the party. They often specialize in keeping an enemy in place by shoving, grabbing, penalizing enemy movement and attacks, and by simply being one of the toughest characters on the battlefield.

While defined as a “martial defender”, the 4e Fighter is also capable of dealing exceptional damage and exerting strong control over nearby enemies. Few characters in any D&D edition are able to lock down enemies as effectively as a well-built 4e Fighter!

Its emphasis on melee combat means that if you’re looking to play some sort of archer, you’re probably looking in the wrong place. Similarly, the 4e Fighter tends to favor Strength and heavy armor, so building a dextrous, nimble warrior is usually better suited to another class such as the Ranger or Rogue.

Martial Exploits

One of the funnest elements of the 4e Fighter is the breadth of options and choices available to it in combat; it never “just” swings a sword.

Drawing on D&D 4e’s narrative of heroic fantasy, the Fighter can accomplish deeds of near superhero difficulty. Most notable of these are the “Daily” powers that allow the Fighter to hit particularly hard, attack multiple foes at once, or even call on its own grit and training to heal itself as it lands a blow.

Here’s one great example:

Simply put, the Fighter makes a devastating attack that, if it hits, deals significantly more damage than usual, rolling the weapon dice two extra times and adding them in as extra damage. And if this particular ability misses, it has the Reliable tag, which means that the Fighter doesn’t expend the daily use of the attack, and can try again at another time of its choice.

This is just one example of a cool option that 4e Fighters can choose. Between different builds, Paragon Paths, and variants of the Fighter class there are scores upon scores of choices to tweak your Fighter just the way you want.

So, What Are We Stealing?

There are definitely some aspects of the 4e Fighter that we can nab and bring over into 5e. With Project 4ever, we’re experimenting in particular with giving each class a defined combat role; in this case, we want the 4ever Fighter to be a good defender. It needs to be tough and sticky above all, with options for decent damage output as well.

Level 1: Hit Dice & Proficiencies

The 5e Fighter is already set up well to be tough. It’s got a d10 hit die, can use heavy armor, and has the Second Wind feature from level 1 to heal itself up a bit once per short rest. We’ll keep the d10 Hit Die, give training with all but Plate armor (for reasons!), and also give training with Light and Heavy Shields. In Project 4ever, it turns out that all characters have a “Second Wind” feature, so the Fighter doesn’t need its own self-heal option at the moment.

We’ve also written up a brand new feature called Formative Training, which gives you a choice between several prominent builds that showed up in 4e: Knight, Slayer, and Weaponmaster.

(Formative Training screenshot)

As you can see, the Knight option unlocks that Plate armor for you, as well as makes you better at opportunity attacks. Extra tanky option!

Slayer simply gives you more damage, letting you lean more strongly towards striker as a secondary or even primary role.

The Weaponmaster gets some additional utility through its option of a “superior” weapon, as well as a bonus to accuracy with that weapon.

Level 1: Combat Challenge

For stickiness (otherwise known as the ability to keep enemies next to you and not just let them walz on past you to geek the mage), we’re stealing the 4e Fighter feature called Combat Challenge. This allows the Fighter to “Mark” any target it attacks, essentially letting that enemy know the Fighter is a threat that can’t be ignored. The marked enemy takes a penalty to attacks against anybody other than the Fighter, and if it chooses to attack somebody else anyways, the Fighter can use its reaction to attack the marked enemy.

The feature also lets the Fighter make this reactionary attack against a marked enemy that shifts—a sort of replacement for 5e’s Disengage action. This goes a long way to ensure that once an enemy is next to the Fighter and marked, it’s not leaving that spot easily.

Level 1: Battle Stances

Here are some choices and some good meat to hang on the bones of this class. It’s all well and good to be able to punish enemy attacks and movement, but what does the Fighter actually do on its turn? The 4e Fighter promised that it would never just “swing a sword”, and we’ve pulled over some choices that will allow the 4ever Fighter to live up to that promise.

Taken from the 4e Fighter’s “at-will” powers, the 4ever Fighter at level 1 gets to choose two stances from a decent list. Entering a stance or changing from one stance to another just takes a Bonus Action, so your Action is free to use to attack your enemies. Each stance gives some sort of a benefit for attacking, most often giving you some kind of a bonus when you hit.

Here are two example stances:

You can see with just these two options how one might sometimes be more favorable than the other. If you’re up against more than one opponent, the Sweeping Stance will let you damage more than just one enemy at a time—which is especially good for clearing out Minions that only have 1 hit point. On the other hand, if you’re taking hits and need some staying power to keep from going down, getting some temporary hit points each round from your Enduring Stance might be the better option.

There are a good handful of other stances, and you can learn more of them as you level up, giving you more options that will be useful for a variety of situations.

Level 2: Talents

The 4e character progression includes a great number of “feats” that are considerably smaller in power and impact than the 5e feats. Still, they’re fun to use in building and tweaking your character, so we wanted to include them. We decided to import them into Project 4ever more or less at the same power level as they are in 4e, but under the name “Talent” so as to differentiate them from the 5e “feats”.

Here are a couple of examples that might be of use to a Fighter:

You get one Talent at level 2, and another one at every even-numbered level.

Level 2: Combat Maneuvers

Here’s some genuine gold as we literally merge 5e and 4e. We take the Combat Superiority feature of the 5e Battle Master subclass, and give it to the base Fighter class at level 2, and replace the options with the 4e Fighter’s encounter powers. Now all Fighters get the fun and versatility of 5e’s Battle Master, which in truth is a 5e subclass that very much draws from 4e philosophies anyway.

Rather than having a “superiority die” that scales up as you gain levels, you instead get to roll the damage dice of your weapon an additional time. So every time you land a hit with one of your maneuvers, you get that damage bump in addition to whatever the maneuver actually does. Nifty!

Level 3: Martial Ethos

Here’s where you choose your subclass, arriving at level 3 as you might expect. Some of these options are 4ever-ified versions of familiar 5e subclasses, and some are actually 4e Paragon Paths adapted to fit this version of the Fighter.

At the moment, we have the Champion, the Reaper, and the Shield Bearer drafted up, but in the future there may be many, many more!

We’re not going to dive super deep into the subclasses right now, but here’s basically what they’re set up to do right at level 3:

Champion: It has the familiar increased critical hit chance from 5e, and also some features to help it be especially good at maneuvering enemies around the front line of combat.
Reaper: This is the two-handed weapon specialist, excelling at cleaving attacks and engaging more enemies at once. If you want to lean more Striker as a secondary role, this is the option for you.
Shieldbearer: Not hard to imagine what it specializes with! It’s the subclass best able to directly protect its allies, and also includes a feature that lets you debuff an enemy you hit with an opportunity attack.

I’ve devoted entire articles to single subclasses before, and probably will again in the future! But for now, let’s move on with these Fighter features.

Level 4: Martial Inspiration

In 4e, every character eventually gains a feature that gives them a bonus when they use their Inspiration. As this feature was originally tied to the 4e Paragon Paths, we first brought them in as subclass features; every subclass granted a feature that combo’d with your Inspiration. After some playtesting and discussion, we changed it to be a feature granted by your class, according to the power source the class draws from. So every martial character, for example, gains the same Inspiration feature at level 4.

Here’s what it looks like currently:

The other martial classes, such as the Rogue, will gain this same feature at level 4. Other classes that draw from other power sources, such as the Cleric or Wizard, have other features that are triggered from using Inspiration.

Level 4: Ability Score Improvement

As per usual with 5e, we’re including the “ASI” at level 4. You get the usual options of increasing an ability score by 2, or two ability scores by 1, but then also a third option: you can increase one ability score by 1 and gain an extra Talent of your choice.

This extra Talent is in addition to the one you get for reaching level 4 (as noted above in the “Level 2: Talents” section).

Level 5: Weapon Prowess

And here is something new! Extra Attack is gone. Gone! Are we crazy or what? Well, before you grab torch and pitchfork, check out what the Fighter gets instead.

Sure, an Extra Attack is obviously more powerful than just getting an additional roll of your weapon damage dice. Right? But consider that this is for every weapon attack you make. Opportunity attacks? You get that extra damage. Readied attacks? You get that extra damage. Combat Maneuvers? You guessed it. It just brings all of your weapon attacks up a tier in terms of damage. It also makes for bigger crits!

Perhaps the biggest consideration in removing Extra Attack is that with the additional options your Fighter gets to enhance their attacks, doing so twice every turn would start to eat up a lot of time at the table. Also, with how Inspiration grants an extra action, having Extra Attack with all the combat options would really make for overly long, complicated turns.

Level 5 Fighter Exploits

Still feeling sad about the loss of Extra Attack? Well, Weapon Prowess isn’t the only thing you get at level 5. Remember those 4e Fighter “Daily” attacks? We’re bringing those in.

Here’s one of the options:

So you’ll see here that we really start racking up our weapon dice. Here at level 5, when you hit with Brute Strike you get your normal weapon dice, plus an extra two rolls from the Exploit, plus an extra roll from Weapon Prowess. So if you’re wielding, say, a greataxe, that’s 4d12 you’re rolling for damage, and presumably adding your Strength modifier to the total.

Sure, you can only do it once per long rest (for now), but it really is a decisive option that can change the course of a battle. Awesome.

Wrapping it Up

That’s what we’ve got for the 4ever Fighter! The first five levels, at least. We’ve got drafts of the next 15 levels, but we want to hear what people think about this first chunk.

So what do you think? Too egregious in removing 5e Fighter staples like Action Surge and Extra Attack? Or do the bonuses to Inspiration and Weapon Prowess make up for that? Feel free to sound off in the comments!

In the next article we’ll do the same with the Rogue class. Make sure to sign up for our newsletter so you don’t miss it!

Until then, happy gaming, and we’ll see you in the Archives!

Designing 4ever: Stealing From the 4e Fighter

Into the Fray

Martial Exploits

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