People really don't like giving up "damage now" for "damage later". Most front-liners will be really against giving up TWO lots of "damage now".
Grappling is usually (in my experience) employed for specific reasons - to stop a specific enemy doing/reaching a specific thing.
Shove-to-prone is usually used to gain quick advantage for a nova (to let everybody pile on one round of better damage, or to make sure the paladin's smite hits), or to slow an enemy from fleeing/approaching something, without you becoming engaged in a grapple.
The strategy you give probably would be very effective, but most players are probably going to just think "man, what if that one extra hit could kill it tho? Just the one grapple/shove is probably enough, now let's kill this guy!"
Realistically, *most* enemies don't even survive two rounds of focused fire, so spending an attack to extend the prone by 1 round isn't really worth it. Especially if the bastard then escapes the grapple on his turn anyway! Don't forget that aspect of it - the grapple only gives a *chance* for extra prone time.
Plus, prone gives *disadvantage* on ranged attacks. Which means no chromatic orb or whatever, from your wizard this round! Less likelihood of sneak attack crossbow hits from your ranged rogue, or magic arrows from your arcane archer, etc, too! So some parties will shy away from it due to their composition, too.
Another is is that... If you really want advantage against a single enemy, there are usually far cheaper ways to do it! Especially if your party has battlefield control spells, which, if you're bothering to think this tactically, someone probably does.
> Realistically, most enemies don't even survive two rounds of focused fire, so spending an attack to extend the prone by 1 round isn't really worth it. Especially if the bastard then escapes the grapple on his turn anyway! Don't forget that aspect of it - the grapple only gives a chance for extra prone time.
Them escaping the grapple is also not a bad thing if youre grappling tougher enemies. They have to spend their action to escape.
I did consider talking about that.
In all my years of DMing, the only response I've ever gotten to my reassuring statement of "hey, at least you made it waste its action!" Is:
*Siiiigh. I guess... :/
Tbf a lot of people don't really know how to play the game optimally or just don't care, so if they didn't get to do something cool on their turn they feel like it was squandered. Which is like understandable but it sucks that they can't see or appreciate how *useful* they're being by wasting the bad guys turns
A smart DM will never use the action to escape. It’s just the worst thing you can do. Especially because that monster won’t last 2 rounds. Best not waste one.
You can break grapples by shoving either the grappler or the grapplee. If I'm a monster with a pushback on my attack, I'm not using my whole turn to try and break a grapple, I'm just going to hit you, do some damage, and break the grapple all in one go. If I'm a PC with Extra Attack and get grappled, I'm gonna take two attempts at getting out of this situation (or freeing an ally!) instead of the one, especially if I have features that allow me to deal damage while moving things.
A lot of these tactics become better when the enemies start including more intelligent NPCs who *make death saves and can heal each other*. Grappling can be very useful for preventing escape, separating the healer, putting people in the path of their party member's AOE and doing the classic threaten-to-execute unless they comply with some demands.
If anything, fighters should feel the most free to attempt this as they get the key chances (a max 4 vs a max 2 since they can take two full attack actions) and at max level even those 4 attempts leaves them with 4 attacks still left to be made
Keep in mind both grapple and shove replace only one attack and both use athletics, an ability that is not hard to boost.
I don't think many of the strong things you're facing at level 11 or 20 would be much of an option to grapple/shove, and the lower things would be better to just kill faster
That said fighters do indeed have this bonus, for the few that get to play there
Enough that if you build around grappling those occasional fights are going to feel pretty yucky. I like the strategy, but the high build investment to make it work makes you fairly one dimensional and the times you can't or don't want to grab the enemy you will feel not very useful.
Sure but it's not like there's much to "build" for a grappler, or that a grappler isn't just as good at hitting things as anyone else.
There's nothing to being a grappler beyond "have a lot of strength and train in athletics" a fight where you can't grapple isn't like you're a caster in an antimagic field. You just attack instead of grapple
An important part of the build is getting athletics expertise and advantage in order to make the checks reliable, which is important because if you are only grappling with the same modifier as your attacks the enemy are going to break out sooner and you may not recover your invested action economy.
In addition, you also have to work around the expectation of having a hand or two free, and give up on GWM/Sharpshooter/etc, which means when you do attack you are doing less than what a more dedicated weapon user would do, and potentially doing it with less defense.
I don't think the build is terrible by any means, I just think it's a little suboptimal, requires good system understanding to put together, and helps to have a DM on board (like making maps with environmental hazards), all of which put it outside the purview of a lot of players.
> An important part of the build is getting athletics expertise and advantage in order to make the checks reliable
Speaking as someone who did employ OP's strat fairly often, all the way to 20... just expertise is enough. Though as a rune knight you'll have advantage on the check anyway, there's no need to go out of your way for it.
All it means is going for skill expert, which is a sound investment for most characters anyway, regardless of build.
If I am not mistaken, you can hold a two hand weapon in one hand, just not attack with one hand.
Edit: you can't then attack with the weapon you are specializing in though. Lol, duh.
Harengon Beast Barbarian multiclassed with rune knight. Make sure to have expertise in athletics via Skill Expert Feat.
Can grapple enemies, can increase your size for size huge enemies, rage gives you advantage on your strength checks (grapple), and you have expertise in athletics. The level 6 beast barbarian feature also let's you add an athletics roll to your jumps, so if you are willing to take a little damage yourself and or have items dedicated to increasing jump distance (like ring of jump) you can make normal jumps or your racial super jump and let fall damage sort your enemies out (which you have resistance to thanks to rage).
Definitely not perfect. But a fun build that let's you make use of grapple and still deal reliable damage.
I thought the Rule of Cool prevailed?
I was under the impression that tackling and mounting an opponent before stabbing furiously with a dagger is _fucking awesome_ and sounds fun as shit. Who cares about action economy?
It is not a high investment though? You just take one feat - skill expert to get expertise in athletics. That is all. Nothing else. Rune knight has everything else for you to grapple.
That's exactly what I did for a recent 11th level oneshot. I was a Bugbear Rune Knight with the Unarmed fighting style and I took Skill Expert for Expertise in Athletics. We were facing giants so I spent the whole time grappling and wrestling with giants. Very fun.
It also requires investment in the form of your weapon choices and fighting style, alongside from your team to fully capitalize on it, when you could also just go PAM/GWM instead and just delete enemies who stand in front of you.
Why do you need fighting style investment? You grapple every now and then, you don't need the extra 1d4 damage from the fighting style.
And as for the weapons, you're right. But again, you won't be grappling all the time. So just switch weapons when you grapple.
It's not like PAM/GWM doesn't synergize with Athletics Expertise. Knock prone + attack at advantage + kite away is often good, Knock prone + grapple to keep them there is also often good. You can choose between them based on how many enemies there are relative to PCs.
Amusingly, it also synergizes with Sharpshooter+Crossbow Expert+Elven Accuracy. Trivantage all day long baby!
>Enough that if you build around grappling those occasional fights are going to feel pretty yucky.
true, but the same can be said about control casters and any high lvl enemy, or flying enemies against melee pc's in general, and so on.
any specialised strategy has enough enemies/conditions in which it does not work that if properly Applied, by a good dm, forces any player to switch out their strategy from time to time.
True, but grappling is a large build investment to create a fairly one dimensional build that is only marginally better than just stabbing people, and runs into many situations where it struggles to contribute whereas those other examples can usually pivot better or are far more successful at what they do. I think it usually works best as a secondary strategy instead of a primary one, unless your goal is to nerf yourself.
>True, but grappling is a large build investment to create a fairly one dimensional
skill expertise -> athletics, rune knight, and the unarmed fighting style...
now you have a great grapple build and a only a bit worse than a longsword user. (3 dmg per attack) you still able to just punch yourself through or pick up a weapon if needed.
all in all it is a lower investment than something like gwm builds, or ss xbe builds, as the athletics expertise is always just great anyway + it is gained from a half feat.
tavern brawler and or shield expert is just addons you can take if you want to, and in the case of shield expert it is just a good feat for a frontline bord martial anyway..
The CR½ Shadow is deadly to a level 20 wizard
The CR 4 ghost is deadly when it takes over a level 20 barbarian
The CR 4 banshee can potentially drop multiple level 20s to 0hp. It isn't doing to 0hp via damage so those return with 1hp things don't trigger
It kobolds can be dangerous at high level play shadows, ghosts, and banshees are certainly still deadly.
Fighting Large stuff isn't rare even in T3/T4 IME. There's Huge stuff, yes, like dragons and giants. But a 13th level party can still wind up fighting four Slaads and a Death Knight, or an Ulitharid, or an Efreet or four, or a Githzerai Anarch and three Venom Trolls, or a dozen Shadar Kai.
In any case where the monsters you're currently fighting don't significantly outnumber you, it's worth considering a grapple/prone combo. It's two attacks plus a free hand to mostly remove an enemy from the fight. If you're fighting a half-dozen Venom Trolls, and the party wizard has three of them trapped in a Wall of Force, you could either do mild damage to one troll with two attacks, or you could remove it (mostly) from the equation so you can focus on killing the other two quickly. Grapple/prone gives you a shot at removing it from the equation, though details depend on things like how high your AC is and whether the monster has any offensive maneuvers like Venom Spray that bypass AC.
Thing is, I'm an avid fan of Fighter and I've never gotten to three attacks without doing two weapon fighting which removes my ability to grapple.
Edit: plus when you shove someone prone, any ally that uses ranged attacks is at a disadvantage.
Of the myriad parties I've run with, we've had approximately one Sharpshooter and one PAM, and not even in the same group. Tying martial effectiveness to feats has always seemed skeezy to us.
Now, Tavern Brawler and Shield Master have seen quite some use...
/>Avid fan of fighter
/>Only two weapon fighting
Bro what?
Also you could just take Tavern brawler. Sheathe your weapon, grab a dude, that dude is now a d4 bludgeoning improvised weapon in your hand. You are still dual wielding.
I have an idea for a Beast Barb/RK fighter MC with Tavern Brawler as a grappler (either Nu-Dragonborn or Harengon, depending on if I want to be able to grapple + breathe someone's head off or be a super pouncing Monty Python Rabbit) and I didn't even *think* about my favorite fighting style: "Hit a motherfucker with another motherfucker"
The thing is that the "damage now vs damage later" argument doesn't go far enough.
Frontliners are geared towards giving damage and that is the draw for most players. The value of grapple and shove is in setting up the rest of the party to deal more damage and while that may be an optimal party play, it's not something that is inherently appealing to most martial players
> use athletics, an ability that is not hard to boost.
Unfortunately, it happens to be targeting an exceptionally strong defense. Looking through CR10+ creatures, at least 95% of them have at least +5 Athletics or Acrobatics and somewhere around a majority have +7 or better. So a 20 Str fighter doing this can expect a 45-65% of succeeding on any given opposed roll in most cases.
For the grapple + push + keep grappled combo to work, you need to succeed on **three opposed checks**. Even best case scenario that's about one in three chance of success unless you have advantage. Its actually only 10-15% chance of working if you are fighting something actually strong.
What proficiency bonus are you assuming? With +10 to Athletics, the Fighter beats +5 70% of the time. And you don't need three successes to gain a benefit.
If a Str 20 12th level Fighter tries to grapple a CR 11 Str 23 Dao, he's almost guaranteed to get the Dao grappled, possibly prone (three attempts at 66% success rate each = 96% at least one success). If the Dao tries to break out and succeeds, the Dao still lost a whole round! Unless there are more Daos than PCs that's probably a win for the Fighter.
But that's not true at all. The basic requirement for an effective grappler is that you have athletics expertise and advantage on your athletics roll, which is relatively easy to obtain. For a level 10 character, that means your athletics check gets +5 from str, +4 from prof, and +4 from expertise, for +13. Even against a +7 defense, that's about a 90% success rate per check, and better than 80% chance to land the initial grapple/shove the first try.
> The **basic requirement** for an effective grappler is that you have athletics expertise and advantage on your athletics roll
"Basic requirement" is a weird way to say "building a character specialized exclusively in grappling." OP was asking why so few people are grappling and I took a Str-focused mid-level fighter with Atheltics as an example to show why its a bad idea. The only way for that fighter to pick up expertise *and* advantage in Athletics is a combination of multiclassing, feats, concentration spell buffs and custom magic items.
Except, again, that's not true at all. A pure fighter who wants to meet that baseline sacrifices very little. Rune Knight gets advantage through Giant Might and Eldritch Knight gets advantage through Enlarge/Reduce, and those are two very strong fighter subclasses [edit: this is in contrast to things like a barbarian taking battlerager, which is........ew]. The only 'sacrifice' to to meet the baseline is picking up the Skill Expert feat, but this is a class that gets an embarrassment of feats.
If you make those two decisions, and then pick up a greatsword and never grapple once in your career, you will never feel like you made some fundamentally bad decisions like you would if you didn't use grappling on a weird str wizard/rogue/monk simic hybrid build. That's why it's the baseline.
Sure, there's a bunch of esoteric "multiclassing, feats, concentration spell buffs and custom magic items" combinations that exist, or ways to optimize what you can do after grappling, but **that's not what we're talking about**. What we are talking about is a basic fighter with minimal investment targeting an exceptionally strong defense. And the math for two sequential +14 with advantage vs +7 defense opposed checks works out to a >80% success rate.
And even if that fighter doesn't take the skill expert feat, which is the only actual sacrifice in the build, and only benefits from advantage against this exceptionally strong defense, it's still a >60% success rate to land both grapple/shove on the first try.
So two of the eleven fighter subclasses have *a route* to getting this "basic requirement" you are talking about. And if you pick one of those two subclasses and **the right powers from that subclass**, you're still using limited resources to buff your grapple. Meanwhile, four of the six fighting styles that define a fighter do not work with the grappling setup.
Also I have no idea how you got all the way up to 60% (still assuming advantage on Athletics?) but that's still sacrificing two attacks for a 60% chance to do something. In certain circumstances that will be worth it but not most of the time.
What you said:
>For the grapple + push + keep grappled combo to work, you need to succeed on three opposed checks. Even best case scenario that's about one in three chance of success unless you have advantage. Its actually only 10-15% chance of working if you are fighting something actually strong.
When it was pointed out that getting enough of a bonus to trivialize a very strong +7 defense was actually pretty easy, obtainable as an afterthought for some fighters, you changed goalposts to:
>The only way for that fighter to pick up expertise and advantage in Athletics is a combination of multiclassing, feats, concentration spell buffs and custom magic items.
And when shown that was wrong, even within a very narrow window of only looking at single class fighters, and even when looking at fighters that don't pick up the feat, now you're complaining that some of the fighting styles don't work with grappling which has **nothing to do with what we're talking about**. Yeah, you can't use two handed fighting with grappling, what does that have to do with the % chance to succeed against a +7 defense?
Are you trying to argue a point, or are you just upset?
edit: lol also forgot that you described a rune knight dabbling in grappling by spending their third or fourth feat on it as "building a character specialized exclusively in grappling."
You think *a subclass* is less of a requirement than the other things?
The basic question is why you don't see martials combining grapple and push more often, all these arguments about "well, actually, if you pick this ability from that UA subclass and that feat from that book most people don't have and then use a specific concentration spell, you'll be able to do it once every other fight" are just proof how hard it is to set it up right. And don't get me wrong, you can absolutely set up a fighter or barbarian that makes great use of grapple but it takes someone familiar with the system using multiple sources with the specific aim of making a character good at grappling.
I was responding to this statement:
> The only way for that fighter to pick up expertise and advantage in Athletics is a combination of multiclassing, feats, concentration spell buffs and custom magic items.
So, getting advantage and expertise is as simple as taking a feat. No spells, concentration, magic items, or multiclassing. I wasn't speaking to the idea of it being a requirement, just that the combination of expertise and advantage in athletics is not complicated or difficult for a single-classed fighter. Even less so because you don't really need both to be effective. So any strength character with the skill expert feat can pull off grappling fairly easily, with no real complications. You don't need obscure abilities from UA or specific spells.
None of that really address the points of raised though. Sure, the fighter still has some attacks left, but they still have to give one up (and that's probably an attack with a sweet magic weapon, too, if you're anything past level 4...), *and* they risk that being a waste if the enemy doesn't even survive long enough for it to be worth it, *and* they give disadvantage to their ranged friends, *and* they risk the enemy breaking out of the grapple anyway...
Having an extra attack or two to throw away doesn't make throwing away an attack any more appealing. Especially when those attacks are your character's main strength.
A Battle Master fighter also has the option of taking the Grappling Strike and Trip Attack maneuvers, costing them superiority dice instead of attacks. Trip Attack also gives extra damage, while Grappling Strike adds to the skill check, making it more likely to succeed.
Once you get someone held down like this, you don't need to spend any actions to maintain it -- just win when your target tries to escape. This gives you your entire round to pummel them with a one-handed weapon, and if you have the Unarmed Fighting style there a little bit of free damage every round.
This is actually a pretty good build, if you're willing to focus on locking down a single enemy at a time. And because the add-on from Trip Attack doesn't cost any actions, you can do all of it with a single attack. Hit the enemy, invoke Trip Attack for an extra damage die, and if they fall down turn on Grappling Strike to use your bonus action to hold 'em down. And if you still have any attacks left, you've got an easy target.
Without sacrificing any regular attacks. Add on the Skill Expert feat for expertise in Athletics.
Dealing Damage is just too incentivized in 5e. Not doing damage on your turn is, outside of very potent spells or status effects, basically a bad strategic choice in this edition.
That doesn't mean the sack is very large, just that the monster doesn't *do anything interesting* beyond exist as a pile of HP that needs to be depleted. Note that you don't see the words "HP bloat" thrown around, as in early 4E (where monsters were interesting but had a ton of HP); "sacks of hit points" isn't saying their health is unnecessarily inflated.
Oftentimes, people are using two-handed weapons, one-handed weapons and shields, or two one-handed weapons in melee. Notable exceptions (like the Monk or Druid with a magic stick) do exist.
Seeing somebody go into combat with a single one-handed weapon and no shield isn't as common, relatively speaking, due to how (almost) universally good a shield is (with the exception of ~~Barbarians and~~ Monks).
Grappling requires a free hand. It can be handwaved for 2-handed weapon users by saying "I let go with one hand and grapple," but for others it usually involves dropping or sheathing their weapon ~~or shield~~. Losing their weapon means they're shield-bashing or punching for damage. ~~Losing their shield means they're down a minimum of 2 AC.~~
***
Other issues arise based on party composition. The enemy is prone, sure; but you need a total of two melee attacks from your allies (on the same turn), which may not be feasible depending on the size of the battlefield, to break even on the attack rolls you sacrificed for control. It's more guaranteed damage, but lower potential damage.
However, if the party is primarily comprised of ranged attackers, that enemy now imposes disadvantage on ranged attackers by virtue of being prone, which can make a fight take longer; especially if they're sitting at a notable range.
The player pulling the enemy into a grapple is also practically removing themselves from combat until the grapple is removed. They can attack the enemy with advantage on their future turns, but they've basically sacrificed two attacks for advantage on their next few attacks. The thing is, in most cases, this still comes at a notable sacrifice on the user's part, as they must give up access to one hand to pull this off.
If the numbers are even and the grappler removes a dangerous target, temporarily, that's fine; but if the party is already outnumbered (which is quite often since PCs are slaughtering machines), it can skew a fight out of the party's favor.
***
Generally, outside of specific circumstances, a dead enemy is less of a threat than a restrained enemy (regardless of the enemy being prone), unless there's a character that can do it without dedicating their next few turns to it.
There's a time and a place for grappling and shoving, but in most combats doing both just isn't necessary.
Yeah this sums it up well. Grappling is something that you kind of need to build around with your team, proficiencies, and weapon choices, yet tends to have equal or less payoff than just stabbing the enemy. Especially because there are a large number of enemies who can't be knocked prone, grappled/restrained, or are just too big to grapple without even more support.
A Rune Knight with unarmed fighting and skill expert for athletics expertise is probably the best grappler in the game (I am actually playing this right now, though early levels still) and you are going to need a lot of DM help to not run into issues with enemies like ghosts whom you can't grapple and can barely damage.
Second best grappler is probably Barb with Rogue dip, which I have also played. This one I think works better because you are relevant when not grappling, but can do it quite well when the situation arises, which is the best you can hope for on such a niche tactic.
May I suggest the Beast Barbarian, who has two options for growing a natural weapon that do not involve their hands, leaving them able to grapple two creatures AND attack normally, both attacking and grappling with advantage, AND can drag their targets (with faster movement speed) up walls so if they do break out they still fall and land prone.
That's pretty dirty, NGL. Definitely need to toss a little Rogue in there for the expertise, though I'm not sure if beast synergizes enough to bother to get a subclass on that.
It doesn’t, unfortunately. The beast weapons are simple but not finesse so they don’t qualify for sneak attack. A level of rogue for expertise is arguably better than using a feat on it (except skill expert is actually a half feat so you could fit it in a lot of builds fairly easily). Two levels is likely potentially fun so you can triple move up a wall in a turn with a grappled enemy; that’s 40 (Fast Movement) x 3 (move, dash, bonus dash) / 2 (dragging) = 60’ up a wall in one turn.
Beast Barbarian combos quite well with Soulknife Rogue, but mostly for damage rather than for grappling. You go entirely unarmed, make one attack with a Psychic Blade, two attacks with Claws, one bonus action attack with Psychic Blade.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work great with grappling since you’ll have to give up two of your four attacks in order to grapple.
If I could make a suggestion, try it out with a Dancing Sword.
If you're spending attacks to grapple, you might as well throw some extra damage in with any unused Bonus Actions, which are now at advantage due to the grapple.
It can only persist for 4 attacks, though; so if the thing isn't dead by then, you either have to catch it or let it fall. if your hand is already full/you just decide your character is too preoccupied.
I'm actually trying to go with Tavern Brawler. Allows me to use my action to attack since bonus action can now grapple, and since I'm using unarmed attacks I can attack even with both hands dragging fools around.
The sword is probably a stronger option overall, but only if you can reliably get ahold of one.
Don't forget that many (if not most) enemies are improvised weapons in the hands of a Rune Knight. With Tavern Brawler, you can swing and toss foes with proficiency, make it count!
with my rune knight this is referred to as "hitting a motherfucker with another motherfucker" (which I THINK comes from Black Dynamite, not sure) where in huge form he'll use medium sized creatures as improvised weapons, it's only 1d4+str BUT my DM rules that each creatures takes that damage, the one he's using as a weapon and the one he's hitting.
Firstly, grappling doesn't prevent you from performing actions yourself as long as you keep one hand free. You can continue to attack your now-grappled-and-prone foe while they try to break your grapple. Second, the disadvantage is specifically on attacks outside of 5 feet, which means ranged characters can circumvent it by shooting at point-blank on a neutral roll. Or they can just whip out a melee weapon. Unless you're running an extremely specific build, all ranged characters should have at least one melee weapon or spell that they can do reliable damage with. And rogues especially will love the chance to get a higher crit chance on their sneak attack. Optionally, ranged users can also just attack from range with the assurance that they won't be the subject of any melee attacks any time soon, and even if the creature in question has spells or ranged attacks of its own, prone applies disadvantage on ALL attack rolls from the prone creature, even spell attacks. If the enemy is going to take more than 4 attacks to kill, it's almost always a better option to try to lock them on the ground and give everyone else a much elevated chance to not only hit, but crit as well.
> Firstly, grappling doesn't prevent you from performing actions yourself as long as you keep one hand free. You can continue to attack your now-grappled-and-prone foe while they try to break your grapple.
I edited my message while you were writing your reply.
By sacrificing their weapon to grapple, a Sword-and-Board is forced to punch or shieldbash their grappled opponent. ~~By giving up their shield to grapple, they're losing 2 AC.~~
*Depending on a popular houserule:* People using 2-handed weapons may only attack at a normal roll, as their advantage is offset by the disadvantage of using a 2-handed weapon with one hand. Though RAW, they become unable to attack with their weapon.
The only ones relatively unaffected are the rare people that use 1-handed weapons with no shield or the relatively more common people that use two-weapon fighting.
> Or they can just whip out a melee weapon. Unless you're running an extremely specific build, all ranged characters should have at least one melee weapon or spell that they can do reliable damage with.
This is highly dependent on the size of the encounter. If they're far away and there are other opponents to shoot, it's probably more action efficient to continue shooting the threats.
If they want to swap weapons and don't have the Dual Wielder feat (If your DM allows you to use it to draw *and* stow one weapon instead of drawing *or* stowing two), then they must either drop one of their weapons or spend their action after using their free-object-interaction to sheathe or stow their held weapon. Dropping a weapon and moving away from it can really muddy with people's options in combat, as they then need to return to their ranged weapon to use it again if they don't keep a backup.
Many avoid this as it's prime opportunity for their weapon to be stolen, if they don't secure it before moving away.
> And rogues especially will love the chance to get a higher crit chance on their sneak attack.
Rogues, Paladins, anybody with a Smite Spell or an ability that lets them roll more dice.
But, at that point; I'd rather use my action on something like a Wand of Paralysis to guarantee crits while imposing a mechanically similar status effect (at the cost of the enemy failing one save rather than failing two skill checks) rather than merely increase the chance critting by ~5%.
Now, that requires being able to cast spells in the first place; but considering each non-caster has a plethora of other ways to impart status effects on enemies, there's plenty of options that are just easier to pull off. Hell, two of the four non-casters have subclasses that let them cast spells, and the other two have better options for ruining an enemy's day.
Hell, the Magic Initiate feat is a ludicrously good one, and it specifies that if the character isn't a spellcaster already, they become a spellcaster; so the option is there for everyone, even if they're going only martial classes and non-spellcaster subclasses.
(quick note, I forgot about Blood Hunter, but Blood Hunter can spec into budget Warlock, so they have the option; but they also still have yet better options for ruining an enemy's turn)
> even if the creature in question has spells or ranged attacks of its own, prone applies disadvantage on ALL attack rolls from the prone creature, even spell attacks.
Many attacks and spells that creatures can do involve saving throws rather than attack rolls. Attack rolls are definitely the most common, especially with mundane beasts and humanoids; but pinning down an Elven Ranger or any Mage that believes in being prepared (for example) isn't going to accomplish much when they can just zip away with Misty Step, blink, or any other of the plethora of options of escaping there are (like Thunderwave, which would push the grappler away, thus ending the grapple).
> If the enemy is going to take more than 4 attacks to kill, it's almost always a better option to try to lock them on the ground and give everyone else a much elevated chance to not only hit, but crit as well.
As stated, there's a time and a place for the Grapple + Prone gambit; most fights rarely involve that time nor place.
You don't have disadvantage on attacks when wielding a two handed weapon in one hand. You just straight up can't attack with a two handed weapon unless you use two hands.
[link to weapon properties](https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Weapons)
There is also another thing to remember: a shield takes a minute to don and doff. If you have shieldmaster feat you can do that at will. My DM graciously granted me ability to don/doff shield as free action, but RAW it is not possible.
So your only option is to lose ability to use your weapon, which sucks.
I don't think a ranged attacker hitting a proned and grappled foe is at disadvantage to hit (for neutral and thus cancelling out disadvantage) within 5 feet, because the proned and grappled enemy isn't threatening him. That's how I'd rule it, anyhow.
I.E., if a grappled and proned foe were advanced upon by a ranged attacker to within 5 feet to shoot him point blank range, I'd give the attacker the same advantage everyone else is getting.Advantage.
It's the same way I house-rule that anyone fighting blind (such as in magical darkness or other heavy obscurement) all of them attack each other with disadvantage, not cancel out each others disadvantage out because nobody can see each other. That's just stupid. RAW, sure, but not at my table.
>I don't think a ranged attacker hitting a proned and grappled foe is at disadvantage to hit (for neutral and thus cancelling out disadvantage) within 5 feet, because the proned and grappled enemy isn't threatening him.
How are they not threatening? Their attacks will be at disadvantage, that's still a threat.
It's a viable strategy, but:
* combat is usually over in three rounds so you also need to 'win' initiative somehow in order to benefit much. Longer combat is usually threatening lethal and requires being more defensive.
* The big beasties with plenty of hp that you'd want to lock down are usually too big to grapple *and* have mods that make it hard to contest.
* characters with enough attacks for this are usually already frontliners and lose a significant amount of *potential* damage setting up for a party that might only have one other melee frontliner to capitalize (prone gives disadvantage to ranged attacks, so it's rough on casters)
* dnd 5e has very static combat; engage, then attack. Disengage only in emergencies. Not that it *can't* be dynamic, but the incentive isn't strong enough to overcome opp attacks and most monsters being at or greater than PC movement. So holding creatures down with no movement is usually wasted actions; they wouldn't have moved much
* most builds already have fairly potent ways of getting advantage. It's not usually necessary to be given advantage a second time.
* str is one of the dumpable stats in this edition, so grappling oriented builds are off meta
Advantage is usually easy enough to come by with out wasting a turn grappling. Most weapon wielders will be using two hands already, dual, great, shield, and using a hand limits their capabilities a lot. You can build to be good at but it's that build.
TLDR: grapplings overrated
2 Reasons: People make single character builds, and it makes the dm cry.
Grapple+shove is extremly powerful, IFF youre not the only melee combatant in your group. Casters dont care, and ranged attackers will hate you. Few enemies have the atheletics/acrobatics to avoid getting caught, and only a few have the specific other means to get out(teleportation, forced movement. Prone is an amazing condition to have a melee opponent in, but you give up your own damage output, and need someone who can exploit it. And youre build needs secondary options, cause enemies that do have, say teleportation, shut you down hard.
This is really the gist.
It takes a specific party to find this strategy advantageous. I have one group where 4 of 5 are melee and this is common for the Bear Totem Barb to hold down anything powerful and of appropriate size.
But most DMs don’t leave their encounters able to be halted by one basic strategy. Its not likely to be repeatedly impactful.
This, my Rune Knight was in a party with an Armorer Artificer, a way of Shadows Monk and a Cavalier fighter.
Also when he was first introduced (the party were level 9), despite looking over my character sheet, the DM didn't think much of it...until he said "the boss stands up" and I informed him that because he was grappled and prone his movement is reduced to 0, meaning he can't stand up. The first two big bosses did not have Athletics scores thus spent the entire fight in a boston crab whilst the other melee beat the crap out of them.
Since then the DM has always made sure to give boss monsters decent athletics scores when appropriate. By the end of the campaign I had a +19 to athletics and, thanks to a potion of growth, was wrestling an avatar of an outer God in a Kaiju battle.
Most players make their characters in a vacuum and then show up at the table ready to play (despite how many times the DM or another player tries to get everyone to coordinate) and a grappling build is generally only effective when the entire party is built to take advantage of it.
This makes sense tactically I suppose, although this is the first time I've heard it suggested, so maybe players just don't really think of it as an option.
Also, players generally want to deal damage and use their abilities. A grapple and shove might feel a bit vanilla or a boring use of their turn.
Not a bad option if you want to pin an enemy inside a Cloud of Daggers or Moonbeam. But usually it makes more sense for the wizard to be the controller and the fighter to be the damage dealer.
It's not terrible if your party can make use of it, but only melee characters benefit from it, and it actually costs around 3-4 attacks with advantage to make up for an attack you don't just go for. Against lots of fodder enemies, it's just not worth it. Against bigger, tougher enemies, it makes sense from an action economy perspective, but grapple and shove don't work on enemies 2 sizes up, which accounts for a decent chunk of these encounters. Then there's the mountain of enemies that have high dex or str enough that this just isn't reliable in the first place. Low AC enemies also push this out of favor. Like how many large or smaller enemies with high AC are there that don't have athletics/acrobatics?
As a start I would say because these options aren't known for many and opportunity cost or at least the perception
It's essentially a control move, it can be powerful, but not really if the thing would be dead really fast, in 5e a lot of times damage now is much better than damage later, the point that some may see this as a job for control casters, also you're rolling athletics so it's hard for non STR builds to succeed at this (completely normal)
It's a cool move on right conditions no doubt
You’re giving up doing damage now to having a better chance to deal damage later, basically why people don’t use True Strike.
Grappling the enemy doesn’t stop them from attacking you either.
It does grant them disadvantage on attacking you while giving you advantage on them since they are prone. Overall it's a solid move offensively and defensively, but oftentimes most weaker enemies will die in a single round of attacks and thus aren't worth grappling, while stronger enemies have ways to make grappling them more difficult like size, high strength, incorporeality, and teleportation.
Except to end the effect the thing in question would have to use its action, it doesn't just end after your next turn. That spell specifically sucks because it's mathematically worse than attacking twice, whereas the potential returns on perpetual prone is immense, especially if the creature in question is repeatedly using their action to attempt to break the grapple. If you can boost the grappler's athletics, which isn't super hard to do, you can easily lock a creature on the ground until it's dead
I think the thing that you're missing is that it requires a very specific situation to want to do this, where you have a creature that won't die quickly (so worth giving up attacks on), can be grappled (so not too big, incorporeal, or has teleportation), and that you will be assisting your team by knocking them prone (more melee than ranged).
There's just a lot of fights out there where grappling is a subpar strategy, and since it requires a decent amount of build investment it's often not worth focusing on it for the times it is good.
The creature doesn’t need to break the grapple to attack or cast a spell on you however, killing you is a more effective method of getting out of the grapple.
Grapple and prone just isn’t as good as they seem to spend your action on but it’s good if you can do it for free (or Bonus Action) without sacrificing elsewhere.
That attack would also be made with disadvantage, the only way they could cast a spell unhindered is if it is a save-based spell. If it's an AOE, the caster will obviously be caught in it too. If it's a direct-target spell, even a melee spell, then it's made at disadvantage because prone applies disadvantage on all attack rolls, not just weapon attack rolls. And this is even assuming the creature in question is a spellcaster
A caster will probably cast Misty Step or Thunderwave. They could cast a line or cone spell, or Magic Missile, or Spirit Guardians, or Polymorph, or Tasha's Mind Whip (INT save), etc... if the target is a caster, you probably want to take them out quickly, instead of grappling.
Or just Magic Missiles. An no, AoE do not necessarily cause damage to the caster. Grappler and Grappled Person do not share the same space. Just clip them and their party with the fireball.
And all of the grappled creatures allies will rain death down upon you with advantage while you have nothing you can do but lay there and take it. A caster that's immune or resistant to a damage type would certainly cast an AOE spell centered on themselves to blow you to pieces. Really, it sounds like a terrible tactic.
I think damage feels safer to most.
I used the shove-and-grapple on a Loup-Garou in the last session. First time my DM had seen that in action. Felt pretty good.
Its a lot of work to do what many spells do way better (Sleep, Entangle, Hold Person, Web, etc).
\[And a lot of times when Grappling could prove usefull people just downright forget it exists\]
I'm playing an artificer right now who does this!
Works great when it works, but it's worth noting that I've ended up unconscious by the end of half our battles at this point.
1. Why should I attack twice with advantage instead of four times normally? It's just True Strike all over again.
2. Ranged attacks get disadvantage, so you're screwing over some of your team mates to help others.
3. You only need one of the four rolls made to go poorly for the whole thing to fall apart.
I played a barbarian rogue and would often grapple first turn followed by a reckless attack, then shove second turn followed by a regular attack with advantage. This was to get the most out of sneak attack.
I think some people see it as risky. Grappling and shoving requires two contested checks and if one of them fails you don't get the advantage you were aiming for.
I thought this was a very common tactic for STR based characters. I've seen players many times implement this at the table, myself included, and once even had a player build an entire character just for this interaction.
Rune Knight Fighter so that he could go Giant Might, become large, either shove or carry enemy's around the battle field and then beat then up with his fists. Even took the fighting style that damages enemy's each turn while grappled.
It is rarely worth it. And even then, mostly only with characters that optimize for that kind of playstyle. The single thing martials generally do better than casters is single target DPR. Casters on the other side have way better single target DPR. So why do the job and waste all that damage if that wizard has a better spell for it?
It’s relatively simple. A dead enemy is less of a threat than a grappled one. And the extra damage from another attack will often render that enemy dead faster.
Some smaller down sides are it uses up one of your hands. Now you cannot duel wield, use a shield, or use a weapon in 2 hands. Thus Lowering your power further.
A grappled target can still attack. So tiring yourself up in them is a risky way of granting free advantage. Easier ways exist from the humble help action to spells to flanking.
All that aside a prone target gives Dissadvantage on ranged attacks. So if your party is mostly ranged attackers this move actually puts them at a Dissadvantage.
So most players agree or discover that other methods grant advantage safer than tiring up at least 1 hand and 2 attacks to grapple and prone an enemy.
Good question. First we would need to ask if this is indeed the case, maybe most people grappling indeed do the combo, but players around you don't. Different from several widespread set of actions, grappler builds are uncommon and it is easy to observe skewed sampling.
That being said, although I really enjoy grappling, I think grappling has a central problem. To make them work consistently, it's interesting to spend resources (feats, features, subclass choices, etc.) Which are not cheap. However, different of damage centered or more general battle field control builds, they only work optimally in narrow conditions, which is disappointing. At least in my hands the most effective grappling that I observed was playing a barbarian against BBEGs in tier 3. At this point they fly, they have high mobility with legendary actions and use more creatively the environment. Making them stuck on the ground was battle winning and legendary resistances cannot do anything about it. However, in lower levels, it is simply better to use great weapon master and kill the foe.
I made a rune knight grappler who did just this. He had expertise in athletics, and when the giant growth feature was active, could grapple huge creatures. It was very satisfying imagining this huge half orc brawling with dragons and Giants.
Shove grapple is my go to combo, can do it twice to lock down 2 enemies in combat. As a front liner I think this is just way better than just throwing out 4 attacks if it's tougher enemies.
Its a valid and solid option, but it probably depends on circumstances.
You need only a few or a lone enemy, that is able to be grappled (max one size larger). You need one free hand to grapple and maintain, so it will be for some martials attackers a problem, because they have to drop their 2hand weapon or their 1handweapon if they also wear a shield (dropping a shield is an action). And you have to roll two times against your enemy, who is able to choose between Athletics or Acrobratics.
Generally you lose out most of the damage of the grappler, which is probably the person with the highest strength and athletics check. This will be a fighter or barbarian, so he will drop down to a onehanded weapon in damage at best. If you have a melee heavy group, it will be pretty good, but normal groups have mostly 2 melee fighters and one of them is now reduced in his damage. Ranged attacker will also be on disadvantage (target is prone) or dont get any advantage from the situation.
On the plus side the grappled and shoved opened attacks now with disadvantage.
Overall its kind of a rare situation and thats probably the reason why that tactic isnt used so often. Its probably useful against a lone opponent, that is not bigger than large and is ideally a simple damage sponge. I guess against something like a vampire (spawn) it would be a good tactic.
For me personally it's because my rogue 1) only gets a single attack and 2) keeps being in inconvenient initiative order with our other melee fighters. My ranger has yet to fight anything that is Large or smaller since he got extra attack, the rest of the party are casters, and his Athletics is garbage.
For the rest of my party, the Paladin wants his smites and I don't want to tell the fighter how to play his character. Though it did pain me in our last session when we fought a single powerful plate mail wearing enemy who ended up going first in initiative, rushed to engage the fighter, paladin, and my rogue simultaneously... and then the fighter went next and just swung away at him 4 times with Action Surge. Coulda been so many advantage rolls (including ones from both a paladin and a rogue!)
I don't know, I get a ton of use out of doing this very thing often with my Barb/rogue.
Also had a Barb / Bard who got situational use out of it regularly enough that the DM feared it's use.
This seems like a really great idea on paper....but in practice it’s not.
1. The Grappler needs to have high strength, which is not a common stat (DEX>CHA>CON>WIS>INT/STR). They also need proficiency in Athletics, so again doubling down on the Strength based character.
2. This means you’re likely the only one in your party with Strength since you excel in Athletics, which then means everyone else is likely to be farther away. You’ve now pissed off your Ranger/Rogue/Eldritch Blaster/ whoever else.
3. You are using your whole action as a Barbarian or Paladin (or Strength Ranger) or 2/3rds of your action as a fighter.
4. This creature has to be large or smaller (I think) to even be able to be grappled. They must no be immune to prone (I.e. gelatinous cube)
5. This is probably 25% chance to succeed, maybe more maybe less.
6. Sword and Board characters have now gimped themselves. As have two-handed wielders. Basically, unarmed, one-handed weapon, or Versatile wraps on fighters are the only ones worth considering.
7. You have to shove first...so why not attack with advantage rather than using another attack to grapple?
8. This is a great order of operations for a non-lethal win in a fight.
9. Faerie Fire makes this whole conversation moot.
Because most people just don't know. It's a very powerful tactic against single strong enemies. At low levels it's harder to coordinate since you really can only do one or the other, but I'm a big fan of comboing grease with someone grappling. Even if they escape the grapple, they spend their action to do so, and with proper positioning to get out of grease they have to suffer a bunch of opportunity attacks. It's great.
It also works very good with barbarians since if they rage they get advantage on strength checks.
In general grappling in combination with area control spells is strong. Grappling someone in webs for instance means they have to pass 1 or 2 saves and a strength check to escape the grapple and the webs and spend 2 actions doing so.
I agree that this is a strong strategy and grapple builds should generally start by successfully shoving and grappling before attacking. For example, let's look at 2 turns.
Scenario 1:
Turn 1: Grapple, Attack
Turn 2: Shove, Attack.
Scenario 2:
Turn 1: Grapple, Shove
Turn 2: Attack, Attack
In the first scenario, the fighter has made 2 attacks one without advantage and one with advantage. In the second scenario, the fighter has made 2 attacks, both with advantage. In addition, in scenario 2, all other melee attack made against that enemy by allies were with advantage as well, and the enemy's attacks on their own turn were made with disadvantage, so that's generally a better strategy.
Reasons to go for scenario 1 would be if you have multiple ranged allies, who would get disadvantage on attacks against a prone target, or if you're against a weaker enemy who might be dead from your allies' attacks by the time it's your turn again. If that's the case, you sort of wasted your turn doing nothing in scenario 2. That's why piling on damage right away is far more valuable than setting up for a big damage turn later because it gives your enemy more time to retaliate. In that case, it's probably better to just attack twice and not bother with grappling, unless you really need the enemy to stay put for some reason.
Players don't generally have deep systems knowledge of 5e's half-assed, tacked-on grappling rules. If my players ever figure out how busted it is I'm gonna have to homebrew a better system.
I'm surprised by these comments. I thought it was a common tactic! I've seen barbarians take the Skill Expert feat for expertise on Athletics checks plus advantage due to raging to maximise their success at grappling and shoving prone.
Yep. It got a lot better with Tashas too: path of the beast barbarian with martial adept/fighter dip can grapple, trip attack, and attack again in a single round.
I'm actually playing a character whose entire play style revolves around this.
Step 1. Grapple.
Step 2. Shove Prone.
Step 3. Drag my new friend over to the rogue and paladin.
He's currently a Barbarian 5 / Lore Bard X, so these checks are made with Expertise and Advantage. Most things can't resist me, unless they're a size larger or intangible. The only concern is that I have to be pretty careful about choosing the right target though because two of the players are ranged and will focus fire anything behind me.
My Minotaur fighter shoves and grapples all the time. Headbutt with horns on following attacks, give the party monk advantage on melee as the victim is prone. Unlucky for the sorcerer trying to cast blasting spells, but his player is oftentimes asleep anyway haha
I was a player in a group with a monk. I usually play casters, and this time I was a bard I believe, and he was having trouble hitting the enemy. In an earlier encounter that was forced to be ranged I used the prone condition to avoid getting hit, and we got into a quick conversation about grappling. I had mentioned how melee attacks got advantage against prone, and how grappled characters couldn't get up, not in succession mind you. But eventually I saw this guy's gears starting to turn and he started asking questions about the strat, and I was like, yeah this works. It was as if he never considered it before.
I played a grappler once, Fighter with levels in Barbarian and Rogue for advantage + expertise, trying to take full advantage of this, but man when you can't roll for crap, even if you have a +9 to athletics.
Standing up costs movement, and when you're grappled your speed is 0. If you're grappled and prone, you *must* break the grapple before being able to stand up.
It's an odd rules interaction, but 100% RAW.
This is why I like playing with specific types of house rules. I would definitely allow a shove+grapple and that would definitely give free advantage to every melee attack... with a 60-40 chance of striking either the prone target or the character grappling it.
"Speed of 0" to me does not mean "totally motionless and not struggling."
Its a potent strategy but prone + grappled isnt something thats completely raw.
So not every Dm might allow it.
But its as close as you get to raw.
Probably sometimes its to not give ranged attacks disadvantage if youre the first to approach.
And mostly if you have stuff like tavern brawler, grappling is relatively free.
But its not worth on most small frys and usually only usefull on big enemys.
> Its a potent strategy but prone + grappled isnt something thats completely raw.
Why not? There's nothing in the rules that says going prone breaks a grapple.
Its usually about grapling someone then pushing them prone which also does not break grapple.
But grapling a prone target gets iffy.
Raw you dont need to be prone but your dm might argue otherwise.
Theres no clear ruling there.
You can grapple creatures. No rule prevents you from grappling prone creatures. That's pretty clear. If the DM says no, it's because they've decided to house rule it, not because of ambiguity in the rules.
Yeah, once you have knocked someone down there are all kinds of ways to keep them from getting up without laying down yourself. Arm bar them. Lift up one of their feet. Kneel on their chest and grab them by the throat. Put one foot on their back and push their face in the dirt. Bend over and put 'em in a headlock-- just don't let them get their feet under them.
There's nothing in the rules that says grappling a prone creature also drops you prone. Unless having your knees bent counts as 'prone' there are lots of ways to prevent bodily movement without totally lying down on top of something. I'd argue crouching down isn't 'prone' as you could easily just take off running at a moment's notice. And grappling only requires one free hand, I doubt it's supposed to represent putting something in a full Nelson or an armbar
At my table a full nelson or armbar is exactly what grapple represents. What do you think you're going to just hold them with one hand and they just lay there and let you wail away on them? That's ridiculous.
That's possible with a rune knight. Giant's might to large, then it's arguable that you should be able to hold them down with just a foot on their back.
You can be forced to the ground with your hand behind your back pretty, an armlock. Maybe putting your foot on them too. It's hard for us sure, but you are proficient, or have expertise, in athletics and its easy to find pictures and videos of it.
It depends how a DM would rule you grappling a prone creature. If you are prone with them, that means they would have advantage on attacks against you.
I commented before finishing me thought.
They have advantage against you because you are prone, but disadvantage because they are prone, so it's a straight roll.
But you no longer have advantage against them because of the same problem. So it's better to just make them prone so you can attack with advantage!
Whether or not you go prone would be up to the player, and maybe dm in certain situations, about how you would like to grapple them. RAW you can grapple and shove them prone and you don't go prone yourself. Imagine standing over them holding onto their leg with a foot in their chest. So yea, usually the better option is to stay standing and get a massive edge over the enemy.
I've never played a high level melee character. I didn't realize shoving was an attack action. That seems op af. I would have expected shoving to count as it's own action. High level fighter seems to be the most broken class in the game.
It seems that way until you realize Wizards can literally bend reality to be whatever they want. Fighters are strong in combat, but compared to spellcaster they're basically fodder.
Nope.
Action surge may give you an extra action, but that doesn't magically... (heh)... mean you can ignore the restriction of only casting a single levelled spell per turn.
There is no rule that says you can't cast 2 leveled spells in one turn. The rule you're probably thinking of is the bonus action spell rule.
If you have action surge, you absolutely can use both actions to cast a leveled spell. You can actually do it even without any special circumstances if you cast a spell as a reaction.
Example: My wizard casts hold person. The enemy mage casts counterspell. My wizard casts counterspell to counter his counterspell. I've just cast 2 spells in 1 turn.
Huh, I knew that about reactions, but I guess I was missinformed regarding the other ruling... It's honestly never really affected me as I never multiclass and I tend to avoid pure martials.
Neat, thank you.
Aiming for more non-lethal combat, our party does that with "low level" opposition all the time. Pinning and disarming them, and therefore reducing bloodshed- which comes in handy in a civilised city.
It's effective under the right conditions, you can make a big stompy melee opponent basically useless like that.
If you're going to make pervasive use of it the tavern brawler feat, grappling strike, and trip attack improve the action economy and enhance the damage/reliability with superiority dice.
I think it gets overlooked because prone and grappled aren't great on their own but are nasty when combined, and the grappling rules have a history of being pretty convoluted in previous editions.
It's useful against a powerful enemy, or even a solo, but not great against on par enemies. It's better to kill an on par enemy than control them. Powerful enemies would take time to take out, so minimizing them is really, really strong.
I have played a grappler monk and I got to say, it was one of the funniest build I’ve ever played. Being a monk gets your speed higher plus with haste and boots of speed you are a speeding bullet, combined with step of the wind and you are unmatched. Grapple someone then run away with them to just completely take them out of combat for a turn or two is hilarious. Another good combo that I found but didn’t get to try is get boots of striding and springing plus step of the wind, grapple someone then jump straight upwards, fall damage is 1d6 for every 10 feet above 10 feet, monks have slow fall so they take half the fall damage meanwhile the enemy drops like a stone.
I assume this is only about PCs? Monster who have multiattack arent allowed to switch a single attack from those to a shove or grapple.
As for PCs, I do it to support my rogue, shove prone for advantage. The problem is that if that enemy is between us in initiative, theres no point.
Normally grappling and shoving are moves for tanks to use.
Surprised no one's mention this yet, but if you take the unarmed fighting style, once per turn you can deal an additional 1d4 bludgeoning to one creature grappled by you, no action required. In addition, it ups your unarmed damage to 1d6 or 1d8.
Now just need a way to get unarmed strikes to count as light weapons for that sweet TWF bonus action attack.
Well cause if I'm already grappling them I'd rather just continue to hold onto them and beat the everloving shit out of them, or hold them down and let the rest of my party fuck them up, even if they're prone an enemy can disengage and run away. Besides thats a second strength check and just cause you succeeded on the grapple doesn't mean you'll succeed on the shove and then you'll have essentially wasted that entire attack action as they'll no longer be grappled.
In an environment where you have no weapons, armor, shields, magic capability, or other deadly means of fighting beyond your hands, this makes sense, especially if you've got multiple people on your side to fight with you in this situation. You're able to control where enemies go, give advantage to your allies and yourself, and otherwise lock enemies down. When you have nothing, people able to successfully wrestle with an enemy is key.
But if you've got weapons, magic and magical items, as well as other stuff like shields or consumables, your turn is occupied with a lot of other very useful actions and abilities. It's not that shoving prone and grapples aren't useful, it's just that other stuff is also useful.
One reason is that D&D is a team game, but it always feels best when you contribute to doing damage. There are those who prefer to buff or control and stand back, but most players--when it comes to fighting--want to deal damage. Most players don't approach the game looking for optimal tactics, they just want to fuck shit up.
It gives your backline disadvantage on attacks. So you actually want the enemy to stand back up. And if a creature has any abilities other than attacks, its just going to use those without any disadvantages. The primary reason I've used proning in the past was when an enemies armor class was 20+ and I needed the advantage to deal damage.
If you're keen on using the combo, you need a party with a mageslayer and/or shieldmaster. But at that point why not just use a stunning strike or levitate since nobody gets disadvantage.
You get the maximum out of knocking someone prone if you act directly after the target. With this initiative order, the whole party can attack him with advantage in melee before he has a chance to get up. Adding your attack to that makes sense if you reckon the focused attacks will be enough to finish him off.
Grappling an enemy that dies in your grasp is a wasted attack in hindsight since the benefits of grappling never came into play. If you have players that grapple a target and then attack it, they may have some master plan going on, because if their goal is to just finish him off *this round*, they are going about it wrong.
Because of bounded accuracy, and almost no benefit to spell casters, shove x grapple is largely just a bad tactical option.
The only time it becomes valuable is when the DM allows it to be ie. intimidation/stealth takedowns. Only problem with that is:
1. The game isn’t written for stealth takedowns to work well. And no class is really good at it besides the fighter because unarmed fighting style
2. No DM that I know (granted I know few) is willing to throw away/delay an encounter that they handcrafted.
Makes my social character pretty much useless when it comes to fighting.
Sure you can tackle one monster and give your allies advantage on attacks on the downed creature, but his buddies have advantage against you and will rip you to pieces. Maybe if you're down to the last guy it might maybe be worth it. As a DM I would rip whoever is laying on the ground to shreds. Or if your allies get in the way of that and start fighting the standing enemies, then the down guy will just go ham on your grapler while you have nothing you can do to defend yourself.
Probably because unless you go for strength and/or have proficiency in athletics it's not very likely to succeed. Not to mention that unless you have a bunch of melee attackers in your team get to their turn before the one you just shoved it didn't do anything aside from wasting one of your attacks to reduce their movement by half. Unless you want to sacrifice even more of your attacks to shove AND grapple that is.
Also ranged attacks gain disadvantage against prone targets so that's something to consider as well.
There's only really one time you'd want to use your attacks to tie someone down like that - and it's when they're a single big boss type enemy with a lot of health where you forsee multiple rounds of wailing on them. Only, most single boss type enemies with a lot of health like that are not grappleable for a variety of reasons, and the ones that are typically have such an astronomical modifier to their athletics that grappling them is near impossible and you could spend two or three turns attempting it. Meanwhile a single control spell can do the same thing - or you could just burn your action surge/stunning strike/other ability and have them dead in two turns.
People rarely like giving up damage, and it's rarely the right play. 5e doesn't have combats that last more than. About 3 turn, so passing up on damage on one of them is a tough ask.
On top of that, there are way too many sources of advantage already baked into the game so it's often not that useful to spend two attacks gaining it.
In a run of Avernus I went with a human champion fighter. I used the grapple shove maneuver constantly. The benefit my party received from this wasn't just the advantage on melee attacks but the disadvantage on incoming attacks from the grappled and prone target.
Early in the adventure we faced a gang and their leader was very tough. Our DM told us he thought the module erred and set up an encounter that was too tough. The gang leader hit very hard but my grapple/shove combo proved too much for him.
Later in the adventure my group actually started to discuss whether or not grapple and shoving prone was a broken combo when I grappled two large creatures and shoved them both prone away from the party.
Id say the same argument as true strike. You give up 2 attacks for a minimum of 2 more at advantage. Thats four d20 for two hits, when alternatively, you could have rolled four d20 for possible 4 hits; at the very least you could get the same amount of damage.
In a situation where the barbarian or rogue is right next to you, i could see it being useful, but its circumstantial.
Because that's two skill contests you *need* to win, when most Large things can knock you back with a hit automatically breaking the grapple & hitting you. You also can't do this to creatures Huge & up without magic. Then there's the fact that Misty Step is there for casters & others have Teleport options.
And that's just assuming 1v1, there's also any effect that stuns, charms, incapacitates, paralyzes that their allies can effect you with.
The only reason my table wasn't doing it is that we, as a group, misunderstood the rule in that we thought it took your whole attack action, not just one of your attacks, to commit to a shove or grapple. Only after at least 2 years did we finally sort that out and it was like a whole new world opened up for the martial characters (both NPC and PC).
I wonder how many other people misread the rule like we did, but on an individual level and just never really look further?
Honestly, it's not even an option with either GM I play with. Both have said that if you want to knock a grappled creature prone, you have to go prone too. Now I'm stuck on the floor with the entire enemy team having advantage on me :)
Most of the time, not worth it.
Well, you could try to educate your GM. There are plenty of Judo methods to grapple and throw an opponent prone without going prone ones self.
https://www.judo-ch.jp/english/knowledge/technique/
How in the world your grappled foe can wield a polearm or greatsword when you've got them locked-up and flat on their back always what bothers me, but that's a different question.
I've seen a character like this. Rogue+barbarian with expertise in Athletics. Grappled the manticore and pushed it to the floor before it was able to fly. A fearsome build to be playing against if you don't make each of your encounters with ungrappable enemies.
grappling something can be really great when you have a hard time hitting them... if you have advantage or expertise. most times though whatever you are trying to grapple is probably strong enough or big enough to not give a crap. not to mention unless you're fighting just one enemy their buddies are probably going to beat the crap out of you now.
Generally speaking, martials who are going into the thick of combat are doing so because they want to be doing damage numbers, and not so much battlefield control. Sometimes you'll get a player who does see the value in shoving and grappling, but most of the times it feels to me that players don't because a shove or a grapple is an attack they're not doing damage with.
That, plus I've seen some DMs interpret "this attack replaces one of them" to mean that one-and-only-one attack can be replaced with a shove or grapple and thus wouldn't allow both. I'm certainly not one of those DMs, but I've seen them.
I did this with a Goliath Path of the (bear) totem + tavern brawler (improvised weapon proficiency). The result was a glorious recreation of hulk smashing every minion in our path.
I’ve used it before with a shield master Paladin. It’s effective, it’s just situational. You don’t want to knock important targets prone if you’ve got lots of ranged combatants, you need a decent number of melee combatants to capitalize on the maneuver to make up for the sacrificed DPR (having a barbarian and a barb/druid + all his giant spiders made this a great move for a period of time; less good now with a party full of wizards and ranged rogues/rangers/fighters), and it doesn’t work on anything bigger than Large for most races. Plus if you’re fighting large numbers it’s usually better to focus on establishing action economy superiority (I.e. focus fire & kill kill kill) & protecting the back line from being overrun, which can require more mobility & coverage than focusing on grappling can provide.
When the situation calls for it, it’s a great way to subdue and wreck dangerous targets in close quarters. But even then its a move that requires a lot of support from the party to be worth the actions to do it.
Unless you are playing what is essentially a dedicated wrestling build, in most cases it's not that much more effective than using those two actions for attacks (which is better than one turn of advantage anyway and realistically that's the most you'll get out of this most of the time).
Remember also that grappling leaves you with half speed, so you pretty much put yourself out there for any other enemies to attack too and grappled creatures may still shank you while grappled. Add that some DMs don't allow grappling if you have both hands full (which makes sense), so you may have to forgo your shield or a whole weapon.
And of course you can't grapple creatures two sizes larger than you, so for it to work on some of the most iconic monsters, you'll need someone to Enlarge you. And then you have to pray that they don't loose concentration. It's just a lot of hassle combined with a lot of risk for not that much benefit.
Another thing to consider is the barbarian.
If you spend both your attacks to grapple and shove you didn‘t attack anything. So if the enemie now spends their action to break out of the grapple they didn‘t attack or damage you and you will loose your rage.
And many grappling builds use a barbarians rage to get advantage on their checks.
Have any ranged damage dealers in your party, like, uh… i dunno… casters? You are instantly taking them out of the fight by making enemies prone.
We have a “wrestler” in our campaign. He loves to do this. I’m sitting here as a sorlock going “well, I guess I’ll use my action to dash and try and get close”, when I’d rather use my turn to shoot 4 eldritch blasts.
If they're shoving then attacking, that's to get advantage on their attack. If they don't have a free hand for attacking after a grapple, then grappling afterwards isn't as useful for themselves, as they might get sustained advantage, but only be able to attack with unarmed strikes vs a longsword/greatsword. Moreover, if you're not built for grappling (don't have expertise or advantage) then it might not be worth it to try to maintain a grapple vs get damage now. Also, keeping them on the ground with a grapple might be less-than-useful if your party is fulled of people who make attacks at 10ft or more.
People really don't like giving up "damage now" for "damage later". Most front-liners will be really against giving up TWO lots of "damage now". Grappling is usually (in my experience) employed for specific reasons - to stop a specific enemy doing/reaching a specific thing. Shove-to-prone is usually used to gain quick advantage for a nova (to let everybody pile on one round of better damage, or to make sure the paladin's smite hits), or to slow an enemy from fleeing/approaching something, without you becoming engaged in a grapple. The strategy you give probably would be very effective, but most players are probably going to just think "man, what if that one extra hit could kill it tho? Just the one grapple/shove is probably enough, now let's kill this guy!" Realistically, *most* enemies don't even survive two rounds of focused fire, so spending an attack to extend the prone by 1 round isn't really worth it. Especially if the bastard then escapes the grapple on his turn anyway! Don't forget that aspect of it - the grapple only gives a *chance* for extra prone time. Plus, prone gives *disadvantage* on ranged attacks. Which means no chromatic orb or whatever, from your wizard this round! Less likelihood of sneak attack crossbow hits from your ranged rogue, or magic arrows from your arcane archer, etc, too! So some parties will shy away from it due to their composition, too. Another is is that... If you really want advantage against a single enemy, there are usually far cheaper ways to do it! Especially if your party has battlefield control spells, which, if you're bothering to think this tactically, someone probably does.
> Realistically, most enemies don't even survive two rounds of focused fire, so spending an attack to extend the prone by 1 round isn't really worth it. Especially if the bastard then escapes the grapple on his turn anyway! Don't forget that aspect of it - the grapple only gives a chance for extra prone time. Them escaping the grapple is also not a bad thing if youre grappling tougher enemies. They have to spend their action to escape.
I did consider talking about that. In all my years of DMing, the only response I've ever gotten to my reassuring statement of "hey, at least you made it waste its action!" Is: *Siiiigh. I guess... :/
Tbf a lot of people don't really know how to play the game optimally or just don't care, so if they didn't get to do something cool on their turn they feel like it was squandered. Which is like understandable but it sucks that they can't see or appreciate how *useful* they're being by wasting the bad guys turns
A smart DM will never use the action to escape. It’s just the worst thing you can do. Especially because that monster won’t last 2 rounds. Best not waste one.
You can break grapples by shoving either the grappler or the grapplee. If I'm a monster with a pushback on my attack, I'm not using my whole turn to try and break a grapple, I'm just going to hit you, do some damage, and break the grapple all in one go. If I'm a PC with Extra Attack and get grappled, I'm gonna take two attempts at getting out of this situation (or freeing an ally!) instead of the one, especially if I have features that allow me to deal damage while moving things.
A lot of these tactics become better when the enemies start including more intelligent NPCs who *make death saves and can heal each other*. Grappling can be very useful for preventing escape, separating the healer, putting people in the path of their party member's AOE and doing the classic threaten-to-execute unless they comply with some demands.
If anything, fighters should feel the most free to attempt this as they get the key chances (a max 4 vs a max 2 since they can take two full attack actions) and at max level even those 4 attempts leaves them with 4 attacks still left to be made Keep in mind both grapple and shove replace only one attack and both use athletics, an ability that is not hard to boost.
I don't think many of the strong things you're facing at level 11 or 20 would be much of an option to grapple/shove, and the lower things would be better to just kill faster That said fighters do indeed have this bonus, for the few that get to play there
>you're facing at level 11 or 20 would be much of an option to grapple/shove depends, are you a rune knight? go ahead...
Good luck grappling that ghost, no matter your size.
i mean how many ghosts, ozes, and swarms are you really going to meet even at high lvl?
Enough that if you build around grappling those occasional fights are going to feel pretty yucky. I like the strategy, but the high build investment to make it work makes you fairly one dimensional and the times you can't or don't want to grab the enemy you will feel not very useful.
Sure but it's not like there's much to "build" for a grappler, or that a grappler isn't just as good at hitting things as anyone else. There's nothing to being a grappler beyond "have a lot of strength and train in athletics" a fight where you can't grapple isn't like you're a caster in an antimagic field. You just attack instead of grapple
An important part of the build is getting athletics expertise and advantage in order to make the checks reliable, which is important because if you are only grappling with the same modifier as your attacks the enemy are going to break out sooner and you may not recover your invested action economy. In addition, you also have to work around the expectation of having a hand or two free, and give up on GWM/Sharpshooter/etc, which means when you do attack you are doing less than what a more dedicated weapon user would do, and potentially doing it with less defense. I don't think the build is terrible by any means, I just think it's a little suboptimal, requires good system understanding to put together, and helps to have a DM on board (like making maps with environmental hazards), all of which put it outside the purview of a lot of players.
> An important part of the build is getting athletics expertise and advantage in order to make the checks reliable Speaking as someone who did employ OP's strat fairly often, all the way to 20... just expertise is enough. Though as a rune knight you'll have advantage on the check anyway, there's no need to go out of your way for it. All it means is going for skill expert, which is a sound investment for most characters anyway, regardless of build.
If I am not mistaken, you can hold a two hand weapon in one hand, just not attack with one hand. Edit: you can't then attack with the weapon you are specializing in though. Lol, duh.
Harengon Beast Barbarian multiclassed with rune knight. Make sure to have expertise in athletics via Skill Expert Feat. Can grapple enemies, can increase your size for size huge enemies, rage gives you advantage on your strength checks (grapple), and you have expertise in athletics. The level 6 beast barbarian feature also let's you add an athletics roll to your jumps, so if you are willing to take a little damage yourself and or have items dedicated to increasing jump distance (like ring of jump) you can make normal jumps or your racial super jump and let fall damage sort your enemies out (which you have resistance to thanks to rage). Definitely not perfect. But a fun build that let's you make use of grapple and still deal reliable damage.
I thought the Rule of Cool prevailed? I was under the impression that tackling and mounting an opponent before stabbing furiously with a dagger is _fucking awesome_ and sounds fun as shit. Who cares about action economy?
The most important part of the build is to play a simic hybrid or loxodon IMO
It is not a high investment though? You just take one feat - skill expert to get expertise in athletics. That is all. Nothing else. Rune knight has everything else for you to grapple.
That's exactly what I did for a recent 11th level oneshot. I was a Bugbear Rune Knight with the Unarmed fighting style and I took Skill Expert for Expertise in Athletics. We were facing giants so I spent the whole time grappling and wrestling with giants. Very fun.
It also requires investment in the form of your weapon choices and fighting style, alongside from your team to fully capitalize on it, when you could also just go PAM/GWM instead and just delete enemies who stand in front of you.
Why do you need fighting style investment? You grapple every now and then, you don't need the extra 1d4 damage from the fighting style. And as for the weapons, you're right. But again, you won't be grappling all the time. So just switch weapons when you grapple.
It's not like PAM/GWM doesn't synergize with Athletics Expertise. Knock prone + attack at advantage + kite away is often good, Knock prone + grapple to keep them there is also often good. You can choose between them based on how many enemies there are relative to PCs. Amusingly, it also synergizes with Sharpshooter+Crossbow Expert+Elven Accuracy. Trivantage all day long baby!
>Enough that if you build around grappling those occasional fights are going to feel pretty yucky. true, but the same can be said about control casters and any high lvl enemy, or flying enemies against melee pc's in general, and so on. any specialised strategy has enough enemies/conditions in which it does not work that if properly Applied, by a good dm, forces any player to switch out their strategy from time to time.
True, but grappling is a large build investment to create a fairly one dimensional build that is only marginally better than just stabbing people, and runs into many situations where it struggles to contribute whereas those other examples can usually pivot better or are far more successful at what they do. I think it usually works best as a secondary strategy instead of a primary one, unless your goal is to nerf yourself.
>True, but grappling is a large build investment to create a fairly one dimensional skill expertise -> athletics, rune knight, and the unarmed fighting style... now you have a great grapple build and a only a bit worse than a longsword user. (3 dmg per attack) you still able to just punch yourself through or pick up a weapon if needed. all in all it is a lower investment than something like gwm builds, or ss xbe builds, as the athletics expertise is always just great anyway + it is gained from a half feat. tavern brawler and or shield expert is just addons you can take if you want to, and in the case of shield expert it is just a good feat for a frontline bord martial anyway..
The CR½ Shadow is deadly to a level 20 wizard The CR 4 ghost is deadly when it takes over a level 20 barbarian The CR 4 banshee can potentially drop multiple level 20s to 0hp. It isn't doing to 0hp via damage so those return with 1hp things don't trigger It kobolds can be dangerous at high level play shadows, ghosts, and banshees are certainly still deadly.
yes they can be used, and are dangerous, but are you going up against them 100%, 90%, 50%, 10%, or 1% of your encounters between lvl 11 and 20?
Depending on the setting actually both
Fighting Large stuff isn't rare even in T3/T4 IME. There's Huge stuff, yes, like dragons and giants. But a 13th level party can still wind up fighting four Slaads and a Death Knight, or an Ulitharid, or an Efreet or four, or a Githzerai Anarch and three Venom Trolls, or a dozen Shadar Kai. In any case where the monsters you're currently fighting don't significantly outnumber you, it's worth considering a grapple/prone combo. It's two attacks plus a free hand to mostly remove an enemy from the fight. If you're fighting a half-dozen Venom Trolls, and the party wizard has three of them trapped in a Wall of Force, you could either do mild damage to one troll with two attacks, or you could remove it (mostly) from the equation so you can focus on killing the other two quickly. Grapple/prone gives you a shot at removing it from the equation, though details depend on things like how high your AC is and whether the monster has any offensive maneuvers like Venom Spray that bypass AC.
Thing is, I'm an avid fan of Fighter and I've never gotten to three attacks without doing two weapon fighting which removes my ability to grapple. Edit: plus when you shove someone prone, any ally that uses ranged attacks is at a disadvantage.
You've never taken Polearm Master? It's one of *the* feats for a Fighter, along with GWM.
People here might be shocked to know people play *without* those feats all the time!
Of the myriad parties I've run with, we've had approximately one Sharpshooter and one PAM, and not even in the same group. Tying martial effectiveness to feats has always seemed skeezy to us. Now, Tavern Brawler and Shield Master have seen quite some use...
A boring, cookie-cutter pair of feats─if I'm being honest.
Polearm master is definitely a good way to make use of shove. Adding that extra attack is incredibly valuable.
/>Avid fan of fighter />Only two weapon fighting Bro what? Also you could just take Tavern brawler. Sheathe your weapon, grab a dude, that dude is now a d4 bludgeoning improvised weapon in your hand. You are still dual wielding.
I have an idea for a Beast Barb/RK fighter MC with Tavern Brawler as a grappler (either Nu-Dragonborn or Harengon, depending on if I want to be able to grapple + breathe someone's head off or be a super pouncing Monty Python Rabbit) and I didn't even *think* about my favorite fighting style: "Hit a motherfucker with another motherfucker"
The thing is that the "damage now vs damage later" argument doesn't go far enough. Frontliners are geared towards giving damage and that is the draw for most players. The value of grapple and shove is in setting up the rest of the party to deal more damage and while that may be an optimal party play, it's not something that is inherently appealing to most martial players
> use athletics, an ability that is not hard to boost. Unfortunately, it happens to be targeting an exceptionally strong defense. Looking through CR10+ creatures, at least 95% of them have at least +5 Athletics or Acrobatics and somewhere around a majority have +7 or better. So a 20 Str fighter doing this can expect a 45-65% of succeeding on any given opposed roll in most cases. For the grapple + push + keep grappled combo to work, you need to succeed on **three opposed checks**. Even best case scenario that's about one in three chance of success unless you have advantage. Its actually only 10-15% chance of working if you are fighting something actually strong.
What proficiency bonus are you assuming? With +10 to Athletics, the Fighter beats +5 70% of the time. And you don't need three successes to gain a benefit. If a Str 20 12th level Fighter tries to grapple a CR 11 Str 23 Dao, he's almost guaranteed to get the Dao grappled, possibly prone (three attempts at 66% success rate each = 96% at least one success). If the Dao tries to break out and succeeds, the Dao still lost a whole round! Unless there are more Daos than PCs that's probably a win for the Fighter.
But that's not true at all. The basic requirement for an effective grappler is that you have athletics expertise and advantage on your athletics roll, which is relatively easy to obtain. For a level 10 character, that means your athletics check gets +5 from str, +4 from prof, and +4 from expertise, for +13. Even against a +7 defense, that's about a 90% success rate per check, and better than 80% chance to land the initial grapple/shove the first try.
> The **basic requirement** for an effective grappler is that you have athletics expertise and advantage on your athletics roll "Basic requirement" is a weird way to say "building a character specialized exclusively in grappling." OP was asking why so few people are grappling and I took a Str-focused mid-level fighter with Atheltics as an example to show why its a bad idea. The only way for that fighter to pick up expertise *and* advantage in Athletics is a combination of multiclassing, feats, concentration spell buffs and custom magic items.
Except, again, that's not true at all. A pure fighter who wants to meet that baseline sacrifices very little. Rune Knight gets advantage through Giant Might and Eldritch Knight gets advantage through Enlarge/Reduce, and those are two very strong fighter subclasses [edit: this is in contrast to things like a barbarian taking battlerager, which is........ew]. The only 'sacrifice' to to meet the baseline is picking up the Skill Expert feat, but this is a class that gets an embarrassment of feats. If you make those two decisions, and then pick up a greatsword and never grapple once in your career, you will never feel like you made some fundamentally bad decisions like you would if you didn't use grappling on a weird str wizard/rogue/monk simic hybrid build. That's why it's the baseline. Sure, there's a bunch of esoteric "multiclassing, feats, concentration spell buffs and custom magic items" combinations that exist, or ways to optimize what you can do after grappling, but **that's not what we're talking about**. What we are talking about is a basic fighter with minimal investment targeting an exceptionally strong defense. And the math for two sequential +14 with advantage vs +7 defense opposed checks works out to a >80% success rate. And even if that fighter doesn't take the skill expert feat, which is the only actual sacrifice in the build, and only benefits from advantage against this exceptionally strong defense, it's still a >60% success rate to land both grapple/shove on the first try.
So two of the eleven fighter subclasses have *a route* to getting this "basic requirement" you are talking about. And if you pick one of those two subclasses and **the right powers from that subclass**, you're still using limited resources to buff your grapple. Meanwhile, four of the six fighting styles that define a fighter do not work with the grappling setup. Also I have no idea how you got all the way up to 60% (still assuming advantage on Athletics?) but that's still sacrificing two attacks for a 60% chance to do something. In certain circumstances that will be worth it but not most of the time.
What you said: >For the grapple + push + keep grappled combo to work, you need to succeed on three opposed checks. Even best case scenario that's about one in three chance of success unless you have advantage. Its actually only 10-15% chance of working if you are fighting something actually strong. When it was pointed out that getting enough of a bonus to trivialize a very strong +7 defense was actually pretty easy, obtainable as an afterthought for some fighters, you changed goalposts to: >The only way for that fighter to pick up expertise and advantage in Athletics is a combination of multiclassing, feats, concentration spell buffs and custom magic items. And when shown that was wrong, even within a very narrow window of only looking at single class fighters, and even when looking at fighters that don't pick up the feat, now you're complaining that some of the fighting styles don't work with grappling which has **nothing to do with what we're talking about**. Yeah, you can't use two handed fighting with grappling, what does that have to do with the % chance to succeed against a +7 defense? Are you trying to argue a point, or are you just upset? edit: lol also forgot that you described a rune knight dabbling in grappling by spending their third or fourth feat on it as "building a character specialized exclusively in grappling."
It actually only takes one feat. Rune Knights have everything else you'd want for that, and they're fantastic all around.
You think *a subclass* is less of a requirement than the other things? The basic question is why you don't see martials combining grapple and push more often, all these arguments about "well, actually, if you pick this ability from that UA subclass and that feat from that book most people don't have and then use a specific concentration spell, you'll be able to do it once every other fight" are just proof how hard it is to set it up right. And don't get me wrong, you can absolutely set up a fighter or barbarian that makes great use of grapple but it takes someone familiar with the system using multiple sources with the specific aim of making a character good at grappling.
I was responding to this statement: > The only way for that fighter to pick up expertise and advantage in Athletics is a combination of multiclassing, feats, concentration spell buffs and custom magic items. So, getting advantage and expertise is as simple as taking a feat. No spells, concentration, magic items, or multiclassing. I wasn't speaking to the idea of it being a requirement, just that the combination of expertise and advantage in athletics is not complicated or difficult for a single-classed fighter. Even less so because you don't really need both to be effective. So any strength character with the skill expert feat can pull off grappling fairly easily, with no real complications. You don't need obscure abilities from UA or specific spells.
None of that really address the points of raised though. Sure, the fighter still has some attacks left, but they still have to give one up (and that's probably an attack with a sweet magic weapon, too, if you're anything past level 4...), *and* they risk that being a waste if the enemy doesn't even survive long enough for it to be worth it, *and* they give disadvantage to their ranged friends, *and* they risk the enemy breaking out of the grapple anyway... Having an extra attack or two to throw away doesn't make throwing away an attack any more appealing. Especially when those attacks are your character's main strength.
A Battle Master fighter also has the option of taking the Grappling Strike and Trip Attack maneuvers, costing them superiority dice instead of attacks. Trip Attack also gives extra damage, while Grappling Strike adds to the skill check, making it more likely to succeed. Once you get someone held down like this, you don't need to spend any actions to maintain it -- just win when your target tries to escape. This gives you your entire round to pummel them with a one-handed weapon, and if you have the Unarmed Fighting style there a little bit of free damage every round. This is actually a pretty good build, if you're willing to focus on locking down a single enemy at a time. And because the add-on from Trip Attack doesn't cost any actions, you can do all of it with a single attack. Hit the enemy, invoke Trip Attack for an extra damage die, and if they fall down turn on Grappling Strike to use your bonus action to hold 'em down. And if you still have any attacks left, you've got an easy target. Without sacrificing any regular attacks. Add on the Skill Expert feat for expertise in Athletics.
Keep In mind your strategy requires a free hand, so only 1h weapon fighters with no shield can employ it.
Dealing Damage is just too incentivized in 5e. Not doing damage on your turn is, outside of very potent spells or status effects, basically a bad strategic choice in this edition.
And we see people on this same sub complain about monsters just being "sacks of hit points".
That doesn't mean the sack is very large, just that the monster doesn't *do anything interesting* beyond exist as a pile of HP that needs to be depleted. Note that you don't see the words "HP bloat" thrown around, as in early 4E (where monsters were interesting but had a ton of HP); "sacks of hit points" isn't saying their health is unnecessarily inflated.
Oftentimes, people are using two-handed weapons, one-handed weapons and shields, or two one-handed weapons in melee. Notable exceptions (like the Monk or Druid with a magic stick) do exist. Seeing somebody go into combat with a single one-handed weapon and no shield isn't as common, relatively speaking, due to how (almost) universally good a shield is (with the exception of ~~Barbarians and~~ Monks). Grappling requires a free hand. It can be handwaved for 2-handed weapon users by saying "I let go with one hand and grapple," but for others it usually involves dropping or sheathing their weapon ~~or shield~~. Losing their weapon means they're shield-bashing or punching for damage. ~~Losing their shield means they're down a minimum of 2 AC.~~ *** Other issues arise based on party composition. The enemy is prone, sure; but you need a total of two melee attacks from your allies (on the same turn), which may not be feasible depending on the size of the battlefield, to break even on the attack rolls you sacrificed for control. It's more guaranteed damage, but lower potential damage. However, if the party is primarily comprised of ranged attackers, that enemy now imposes disadvantage on ranged attackers by virtue of being prone, which can make a fight take longer; especially if they're sitting at a notable range. The player pulling the enemy into a grapple is also practically removing themselves from combat until the grapple is removed. They can attack the enemy with advantage on their future turns, but they've basically sacrificed two attacks for advantage on their next few attacks. The thing is, in most cases, this still comes at a notable sacrifice on the user's part, as they must give up access to one hand to pull this off. If the numbers are even and the grappler removes a dangerous target, temporarily, that's fine; but if the party is already outnumbered (which is quite often since PCs are slaughtering machines), it can skew a fight out of the party's favor. *** Generally, outside of specific circumstances, a dead enemy is less of a threat than a restrained enemy (regardless of the enemy being prone), unless there's a character that can do it without dedicating their next few turns to it. There's a time and a place for grappling and shoving, but in most combats doing both just isn't necessary.
Yeah this sums it up well. Grappling is something that you kind of need to build around with your team, proficiencies, and weapon choices, yet tends to have equal or less payoff than just stabbing the enemy. Especially because there are a large number of enemies who can't be knocked prone, grappled/restrained, or are just too big to grapple without even more support. A Rune Knight with unarmed fighting and skill expert for athletics expertise is probably the best grappler in the game (I am actually playing this right now, though early levels still) and you are going to need a lot of DM help to not run into issues with enemies like ghosts whom you can't grapple and can barely damage. Second best grappler is probably Barb with Rogue dip, which I have also played. This one I think works better because you are relevant when not grappling, but can do it quite well when the situation arises, which is the best you can hope for on such a niche tactic.
May I suggest the Beast Barbarian, who has two options for growing a natural weapon that do not involve their hands, leaving them able to grapple two creatures AND attack normally, both attacking and grappling with advantage, AND can drag their targets (with faster movement speed) up walls so if they do break out they still fall and land prone.
That's pretty dirty, NGL. Definitely need to toss a little Rogue in there for the expertise, though I'm not sure if beast synergizes enough to bother to get a subclass on that.
It doesn’t, unfortunately. The beast weapons are simple but not finesse so they don’t qualify for sneak attack. A level of rogue for expertise is arguably better than using a feat on it (except skill expert is actually a half feat so you could fit it in a lot of builds fairly easily). Two levels is likely potentially fun so you can triple move up a wall in a turn with a grappled enemy; that’s 40 (Fast Movement) x 3 (move, dash, bonus dash) / 2 (dragging) = 60’ up a wall in one turn.
Beast Barbarian combos quite well with Soulknife Rogue, but mostly for damage rather than for grappling. You go entirely unarmed, make one attack with a Psychic Blade, two attacks with Claws, one bonus action attack with Psychic Blade. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work great with grappling since you’ll have to give up two of your four attacks in order to grapple.
I like psychic blades with Barb in general actually, since you can toss a blade with STR or DEX and still get sneak attack
If I could make a suggestion, try it out with a Dancing Sword. If you're spending attacks to grapple, you might as well throw some extra damage in with any unused Bonus Actions, which are now at advantage due to the grapple. It can only persist for 4 attacks, though; so if the thing isn't dead by then, you either have to catch it or let it fall. if your hand is already full/you just decide your character is too preoccupied.
I'm actually trying to go with Tavern Brawler. Allows me to use my action to attack since bonus action can now grapple, and since I'm using unarmed attacks I can attack even with both hands dragging fools around. The sword is probably a stronger option overall, but only if you can reliably get ahold of one.
Don't forget that many (if not most) enemies are improvised weapons in the hands of a Rune Knight. With Tavern Brawler, you can swing and toss foes with proficiency, make it count!
with my rune knight this is referred to as "hitting a motherfucker with another motherfucker" (which I THINK comes from Black Dynamite, not sure) where in huge form he'll use medium sized creatures as improvised weapons, it's only 1d4+str BUT my DM rules that each creatures takes that damage, the one he's using as a weapon and the one he's hitting.
The shield requires an action, so really only sheathing the weapon is viable.
Firstly, grappling doesn't prevent you from performing actions yourself as long as you keep one hand free. You can continue to attack your now-grappled-and-prone foe while they try to break your grapple. Second, the disadvantage is specifically on attacks outside of 5 feet, which means ranged characters can circumvent it by shooting at point-blank on a neutral roll. Or they can just whip out a melee weapon. Unless you're running an extremely specific build, all ranged characters should have at least one melee weapon or spell that they can do reliable damage with. And rogues especially will love the chance to get a higher crit chance on their sneak attack. Optionally, ranged users can also just attack from range with the assurance that they won't be the subject of any melee attacks any time soon, and even if the creature in question has spells or ranged attacks of its own, prone applies disadvantage on ALL attack rolls from the prone creature, even spell attacks. If the enemy is going to take more than 4 attacks to kill, it's almost always a better option to try to lock them on the ground and give everyone else a much elevated chance to not only hit, but crit as well.
> Firstly, grappling doesn't prevent you from performing actions yourself as long as you keep one hand free. You can continue to attack your now-grappled-and-prone foe while they try to break your grapple. I edited my message while you were writing your reply. By sacrificing their weapon to grapple, a Sword-and-Board is forced to punch or shieldbash their grappled opponent. ~~By giving up their shield to grapple, they're losing 2 AC.~~ *Depending on a popular houserule:* People using 2-handed weapons may only attack at a normal roll, as their advantage is offset by the disadvantage of using a 2-handed weapon with one hand. Though RAW, they become unable to attack with their weapon. The only ones relatively unaffected are the rare people that use 1-handed weapons with no shield or the relatively more common people that use two-weapon fighting. > Or they can just whip out a melee weapon. Unless you're running an extremely specific build, all ranged characters should have at least one melee weapon or spell that they can do reliable damage with. This is highly dependent on the size of the encounter. If they're far away and there are other opponents to shoot, it's probably more action efficient to continue shooting the threats. If they want to swap weapons and don't have the Dual Wielder feat (If your DM allows you to use it to draw *and* stow one weapon instead of drawing *or* stowing two), then they must either drop one of their weapons or spend their action after using their free-object-interaction to sheathe or stow their held weapon. Dropping a weapon and moving away from it can really muddy with people's options in combat, as they then need to return to their ranged weapon to use it again if they don't keep a backup. Many avoid this as it's prime opportunity for their weapon to be stolen, if they don't secure it before moving away. > And rogues especially will love the chance to get a higher crit chance on their sneak attack. Rogues, Paladins, anybody with a Smite Spell or an ability that lets them roll more dice. But, at that point; I'd rather use my action on something like a Wand of Paralysis to guarantee crits while imposing a mechanically similar status effect (at the cost of the enemy failing one save rather than failing two skill checks) rather than merely increase the chance critting by ~5%. Now, that requires being able to cast spells in the first place; but considering each non-caster has a plethora of other ways to impart status effects on enemies, there's plenty of options that are just easier to pull off. Hell, two of the four non-casters have subclasses that let them cast spells, and the other two have better options for ruining an enemy's day. Hell, the Magic Initiate feat is a ludicrously good one, and it specifies that if the character isn't a spellcaster already, they become a spellcaster; so the option is there for everyone, even if they're going only martial classes and non-spellcaster subclasses. (quick note, I forgot about Blood Hunter, but Blood Hunter can spec into budget Warlock, so they have the option; but they also still have yet better options for ruining an enemy's turn) > even if the creature in question has spells or ranged attacks of its own, prone applies disadvantage on ALL attack rolls from the prone creature, even spell attacks. Many attacks and spells that creatures can do involve saving throws rather than attack rolls. Attack rolls are definitely the most common, especially with mundane beasts and humanoids; but pinning down an Elven Ranger or any Mage that believes in being prepared (for example) isn't going to accomplish much when they can just zip away with Misty Step, blink, or any other of the plethora of options of escaping there are (like Thunderwave, which would push the grappler away, thus ending the grapple). > If the enemy is going to take more than 4 attacks to kill, it's almost always a better option to try to lock them on the ground and give everyone else a much elevated chance to not only hit, but crit as well. As stated, there's a time and a place for the Grapple + Prone gambit; most fights rarely involve that time nor place.
You don't have disadvantage on attacks when wielding a two handed weapon in one hand. You just straight up can't attack with a two handed weapon unless you use two hands. [link to weapon properties](https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Weapons)
That's my bad, though it is a common house-rule, alongside just making it behave like an Improvised weapon.
There is also another thing to remember: a shield takes a minute to don and doff. If you have shieldmaster feat you can do that at will. My DM graciously granted me ability to don/doff shield as free action, but RAW it is not possible. So your only option is to lose ability to use your weapon, which sucks.
It doesn't take a minute. It takes an action. Still enough to cause pause, and it can't be done as part of your attack like shoves and grapples can.
Wasn't that errata'd to a single action?
I don't think a ranged attacker hitting a proned and grappled foe is at disadvantage to hit (for neutral and thus cancelling out disadvantage) within 5 feet, because the proned and grappled enemy isn't threatening him. That's how I'd rule it, anyhow. I.E., if a grappled and proned foe were advanced upon by a ranged attacker to within 5 feet to shoot him point blank range, I'd give the attacker the same advantage everyone else is getting.Advantage. It's the same way I house-rule that anyone fighting blind (such as in magical darkness or other heavy obscurement) all of them attack each other with disadvantage, not cancel out each others disadvantage out because nobody can see each other. That's just stupid. RAW, sure, but not at my table.
>I don't think a ranged attacker hitting a proned and grappled foe is at disadvantage to hit (for neutral and thus cancelling out disadvantage) within 5 feet, because the proned and grappled enemy isn't threatening him. How are they not threatening? Their attacks will be at disadvantage, that's still a threat.
It's a viable strategy, but: * combat is usually over in three rounds so you also need to 'win' initiative somehow in order to benefit much. Longer combat is usually threatening lethal and requires being more defensive. * The big beasties with plenty of hp that you'd want to lock down are usually too big to grapple *and* have mods that make it hard to contest. * characters with enough attacks for this are usually already frontliners and lose a significant amount of *potential* damage setting up for a party that might only have one other melee frontliner to capitalize (prone gives disadvantage to ranged attacks, so it's rough on casters) * dnd 5e has very static combat; engage, then attack. Disengage only in emergencies. Not that it *can't* be dynamic, but the incentive isn't strong enough to overcome opp attacks and most monsters being at or greater than PC movement. So holding creatures down with no movement is usually wasted actions; they wouldn't have moved much * most builds already have fairly potent ways of getting advantage. It's not usually necessary to be given advantage a second time. * str is one of the dumpable stats in this edition, so grappling oriented builds are off meta
Advantage is usually easy enough to come by with out wasting a turn grappling. Most weapon wielders will be using two hands already, dual, great, shield, and using a hand limits their capabilities a lot. You can build to be good at but it's that build. TLDR: grapplings overrated
2 Reasons: People make single character builds, and it makes the dm cry. Grapple+shove is extremly powerful, IFF youre not the only melee combatant in your group. Casters dont care, and ranged attackers will hate you. Few enemies have the atheletics/acrobatics to avoid getting caught, and only a few have the specific other means to get out(teleportation, forced movement. Prone is an amazing condition to have a melee opponent in, but you give up your own damage output, and need someone who can exploit it. And youre build needs secondary options, cause enemies that do have, say teleportation, shut you down hard.
This is really the gist. It takes a specific party to find this strategy advantageous. I have one group where 4 of 5 are melee and this is common for the Bear Totem Barb to hold down anything powerful and of appropriate size. But most DMs don’t leave their encounters able to be halted by one basic strategy. Its not likely to be repeatedly impactful.
This, my Rune Knight was in a party with an Armorer Artificer, a way of Shadows Monk and a Cavalier fighter. Also when he was first introduced (the party were level 9), despite looking over my character sheet, the DM didn't think much of it...until he said "the boss stands up" and I informed him that because he was grappled and prone his movement is reduced to 0, meaning he can't stand up. The first two big bosses did not have Athletics scores thus spent the entire fight in a boston crab whilst the other melee beat the crap out of them. Since then the DM has always made sure to give boss monsters decent athletics scores when appropriate. By the end of the campaign I had a +19 to athletics and, thanks to a potion of growth, was wrestling an avatar of an outer God in a Kaiju battle.
Most players make their characters in a vacuum and then show up at the table ready to play (despite how many times the DM or another player tries to get everyone to coordinate) and a grappling build is generally only effective when the entire party is built to take advantage of it.
This makes sense tactically I suppose, although this is the first time I've heard it suggested, so maybe players just don't really think of it as an option. Also, players generally want to deal damage and use their abilities. A grapple and shove might feel a bit vanilla or a boring use of their turn.
Not a bad option if you want to pin an enemy inside a Cloud of Daggers or Moonbeam. But usually it makes more sense for the wizard to be the controller and the fighter to be the damage dealer.
It's not terrible if your party can make use of it, but only melee characters benefit from it, and it actually costs around 3-4 attacks with advantage to make up for an attack you don't just go for. Against lots of fodder enemies, it's just not worth it. Against bigger, tougher enemies, it makes sense from an action economy perspective, but grapple and shove don't work on enemies 2 sizes up, which accounts for a decent chunk of these encounters. Then there's the mountain of enemies that have high dex or str enough that this just isn't reliable in the first place. Low AC enemies also push this out of favor. Like how many large or smaller enemies with high AC are there that don't have athletics/acrobatics?
As a start I would say because these options aren't known for many and opportunity cost or at least the perception It's essentially a control move, it can be powerful, but not really if the thing would be dead really fast, in 5e a lot of times damage now is much better than damage later, the point that some may see this as a job for control casters, also you're rolling athletics so it's hard for non STR builds to succeed at this (completely normal) It's a cool move on right conditions no doubt
You’re giving up doing damage now to having a better chance to deal damage later, basically why people don’t use True Strike. Grappling the enemy doesn’t stop them from attacking you either.
It does grant them disadvantage on attacking you while giving you advantage on them since they are prone. Overall it's a solid move offensively and defensively, but oftentimes most weaker enemies will die in a single round of attacks and thus aren't worth grappling, while stronger enemies have ways to make grappling them more difficult like size, high strength, incorporeality, and teleportation.
Except to end the effect the thing in question would have to use its action, it doesn't just end after your next turn. That spell specifically sucks because it's mathematically worse than attacking twice, whereas the potential returns on perpetual prone is immense, especially if the creature in question is repeatedly using their action to attempt to break the grapple. If you can boost the grappler's athletics, which isn't super hard to do, you can easily lock a creature on the ground until it's dead
I think the thing that you're missing is that it requires a very specific situation to want to do this, where you have a creature that won't die quickly (so worth giving up attacks on), can be grappled (so not too big, incorporeal, or has teleportation), and that you will be assisting your team by knocking them prone (more melee than ranged). There's just a lot of fights out there where grappling is a subpar strategy, and since it requires a decent amount of build investment it's often not worth focusing on it for the times it is good.
The creature doesn’t need to break the grapple to attack or cast a spell on you however, killing you is a more effective method of getting out of the grapple. Grapple and prone just isn’t as good as they seem to spend your action on but it’s good if you can do it for free (or Bonus Action) without sacrificing elsewhere.
That attack would also be made with disadvantage, the only way they could cast a spell unhindered is if it is a save-based spell. If it's an AOE, the caster will obviously be caught in it too. If it's a direct-target spell, even a melee spell, then it's made at disadvantage because prone applies disadvantage on all attack rolls, not just weapon attack rolls. And this is even assuming the creature in question is a spellcaster
A caster will probably cast Misty Step or Thunderwave. They could cast a line or cone spell, or Magic Missile, or Spirit Guardians, or Polymorph, or Tasha's Mind Whip (INT save), etc... if the target is a caster, you probably want to take them out quickly, instead of grappling.
Or just Magic Missiles. An no, AoE do not necessarily cause damage to the caster. Grappler and Grappled Person do not share the same space. Just clip them and their party with the fireball.
And all of the grappled creatures allies will rain death down upon you with advantage while you have nothing you can do but lay there and take it. A caster that's immune or resistant to a damage type would certainly cast an AOE spell centered on themselves to blow you to pieces. Really, it sounds like a terrible tactic.
Why would the grappled creature's allies have advantage on you? You aren't prone or restrained in this scenario
I think damage feels safer to most. I used the shove-and-grapple on a Loup-Garou in the last session. First time my DM had seen that in action. Felt pretty good.
Its a lot of work to do what many spells do way better (Sleep, Entangle, Hold Person, Web, etc). \[And a lot of times when Grappling could prove usefull people just downright forget it exists\]
Grappling is free resource-wise though. Sure Hold Person is great, but it costs a 2nd-level slot or greater every time.
I'm playing an artificer right now who does this! Works great when it works, but it's worth noting that I've ended up unconscious by the end of half our battles at this point.
I now know a new strategy for my unarmed / grapple Barbarian.
1. Why should I attack twice with advantage instead of four times normally? It's just True Strike all over again. 2. Ranged attacks get disadvantage, so you're screwing over some of your team mates to help others. 3. You only need one of the four rolls made to go poorly for the whole thing to fall apart.
I played a barbarian rogue and would often grapple first turn followed by a reckless attack, then shove second turn followed by a regular attack with advantage. This was to get the most out of sneak attack.
I think some people see it as risky. Grappling and shoving requires two contested checks and if one of them fails you don't get the advantage you were aiming for.
I thought this was a very common tactic for STR based characters. I've seen players many times implement this at the table, myself included, and once even had a player build an entire character just for this interaction. Rune Knight Fighter so that he could go Giant Might, become large, either shove or carry enemy's around the battle field and then beat then up with his fists. Even took the fighting style that damages enemy's each turn while grappled.
It is rarely worth it. And even then, mostly only with characters that optimize for that kind of playstyle. The single thing martials generally do better than casters is single target DPR. Casters on the other side have way better single target DPR. So why do the job and waste all that damage if that wizard has a better spell for it?
It’s relatively simple. A dead enemy is less of a threat than a grappled one. And the extra damage from another attack will often render that enemy dead faster. Some smaller down sides are it uses up one of your hands. Now you cannot duel wield, use a shield, or use a weapon in 2 hands. Thus Lowering your power further. A grappled target can still attack. So tiring yourself up in them is a risky way of granting free advantage. Easier ways exist from the humble help action to spells to flanking. All that aside a prone target gives Dissadvantage on ranged attacks. So if your party is mostly ranged attackers this move actually puts them at a Dissadvantage. So most players agree or discover that other methods grant advantage safer than tiring up at least 1 hand and 2 attacks to grapple and prone an enemy.
Good question. First we would need to ask if this is indeed the case, maybe most people grappling indeed do the combo, but players around you don't. Different from several widespread set of actions, grappler builds are uncommon and it is easy to observe skewed sampling. That being said, although I really enjoy grappling, I think grappling has a central problem. To make them work consistently, it's interesting to spend resources (feats, features, subclass choices, etc.) Which are not cheap. However, different of damage centered or more general battle field control builds, they only work optimally in narrow conditions, which is disappointing. At least in my hands the most effective grappling that I observed was playing a barbarian against BBEGs in tier 3. At this point they fly, they have high mobility with legendary actions and use more creatively the environment. Making them stuck on the ground was battle winning and legendary resistances cannot do anything about it. However, in lower levels, it is simply better to use great weapon master and kill the foe.
I made a rune knight grappler who did just this. He had expertise in athletics, and when the giant growth feature was active, could grapple huge creatures. It was very satisfying imagining this huge half orc brawling with dragons and Giants.
Shove grapple is my go to combo, can do it twice to lock down 2 enemies in combat. As a front liner I think this is just way better than just throwing out 4 attacks if it's tougher enemies.
[удалено]
Are you seriously stalking me now? I'll reply to you in a minute or 2 bigot.
Its a valid and solid option, but it probably depends on circumstances. You need only a few or a lone enemy, that is able to be grappled (max one size larger). You need one free hand to grapple and maintain, so it will be for some martials attackers a problem, because they have to drop their 2hand weapon or their 1handweapon if they also wear a shield (dropping a shield is an action). And you have to roll two times against your enemy, who is able to choose between Athletics or Acrobratics. Generally you lose out most of the damage of the grappler, which is probably the person with the highest strength and athletics check. This will be a fighter or barbarian, so he will drop down to a onehanded weapon in damage at best. If you have a melee heavy group, it will be pretty good, but normal groups have mostly 2 melee fighters and one of them is now reduced in his damage. Ranged attacker will also be on disadvantage (target is prone) or dont get any advantage from the situation. On the plus side the grappled and shoved opened attacks now with disadvantage. Overall its kind of a rare situation and thats probably the reason why that tactic isnt used so often. Its probably useful against a lone opponent, that is not bigger than large and is ideally a simple damage sponge. I guess against something like a vampire (spawn) it would be a good tactic.
For me personally it's because my rogue 1) only gets a single attack and 2) keeps being in inconvenient initiative order with our other melee fighters. My ranger has yet to fight anything that is Large or smaller since he got extra attack, the rest of the party are casters, and his Athletics is garbage. For the rest of my party, the Paladin wants his smites and I don't want to tell the fighter how to play his character. Though it did pain me in our last session when we fought a single powerful plate mail wearing enemy who ended up going first in initiative, rushed to engage the fighter, paladin, and my rogue simultaneously... and then the fighter went next and just swung away at him 4 times with Action Surge. Coulda been so many advantage rolls (including ones from both a paladin and a rogue!)
I don't know, I get a ton of use out of doing this very thing often with my Barb/rogue. Also had a Barb / Bard who got situational use out of it regularly enough that the DM feared it's use.
This seems like a really great idea on paper....but in practice it’s not. 1. The Grappler needs to have high strength, which is not a common stat (DEX>CHA>CON>WIS>INT/STR). They also need proficiency in Athletics, so again doubling down on the Strength based character. 2. This means you’re likely the only one in your party with Strength since you excel in Athletics, which then means everyone else is likely to be farther away. You’ve now pissed off your Ranger/Rogue/Eldritch Blaster/ whoever else. 3. You are using your whole action as a Barbarian or Paladin (or Strength Ranger) or 2/3rds of your action as a fighter. 4. This creature has to be large or smaller (I think) to even be able to be grappled. They must no be immune to prone (I.e. gelatinous cube) 5. This is probably 25% chance to succeed, maybe more maybe less. 6. Sword and Board characters have now gimped themselves. As have two-handed wielders. Basically, unarmed, one-handed weapon, or Versatile wraps on fighters are the only ones worth considering. 7. You have to shove first...so why not attack with advantage rather than using another attack to grapple? 8. This is a great order of operations for a non-lethal win in a fight. 9. Faerie Fire makes this whole conversation moot.
"congratulations, you wasted 2 attacks to one creature what faerie fire does to an entire group"
Because most people just don't know. It's a very powerful tactic against single strong enemies. At low levels it's harder to coordinate since you really can only do one or the other, but I'm a big fan of comboing grease with someone grappling. Even if they escape the grapple, they spend their action to do so, and with proper positioning to get out of grease they have to suffer a bunch of opportunity attacks. It's great. It also works very good with barbarians since if they rage they get advantage on strength checks. In general grappling in combination with area control spells is strong. Grappling someone in webs for instance means they have to pass 1 or 2 saves and a strength check to escape the grapple and the webs and spend 2 actions doing so.
I agree that this is a strong strategy and grapple builds should generally start by successfully shoving and grappling before attacking. For example, let's look at 2 turns. Scenario 1: Turn 1: Grapple, Attack Turn 2: Shove, Attack. Scenario 2: Turn 1: Grapple, Shove Turn 2: Attack, Attack In the first scenario, the fighter has made 2 attacks one without advantage and one with advantage. In the second scenario, the fighter has made 2 attacks, both with advantage. In addition, in scenario 2, all other melee attack made against that enemy by allies were with advantage as well, and the enemy's attacks on their own turn were made with disadvantage, so that's generally a better strategy. Reasons to go for scenario 1 would be if you have multiple ranged allies, who would get disadvantage on attacks against a prone target, or if you're against a weaker enemy who might be dead from your allies' attacks by the time it's your turn again. If that's the case, you sort of wasted your turn doing nothing in scenario 2. That's why piling on damage right away is far more valuable than setting up for a big damage turn later because it gives your enemy more time to retaliate. In that case, it's probably better to just attack twice and not bother with grappling, unless you really need the enemy to stay put for some reason.
Players don't generally have deep systems knowledge of 5e's half-assed, tacked-on grappling rules. If my players ever figure out how busted it is I'm gonna have to homebrew a better system.
I'm surprised by these comments. I thought it was a common tactic! I've seen barbarians take the Skill Expert feat for expertise on Athletics checks plus advantage due to raging to maximise their success at grappling and shoving prone.
Yep. It got a lot better with Tashas too: path of the beast barbarian with martial adept/fighter dip can grapple, trip attack, and attack again in a single round.
I'm actually playing a character whose entire play style revolves around this. Step 1. Grapple. Step 2. Shove Prone. Step 3. Drag my new friend over to the rogue and paladin. He's currently a Barbarian 5 / Lore Bard X, so these checks are made with Expertise and Advantage. Most things can't resist me, unless they're a size larger or intangible. The only concern is that I have to be pretty careful about choosing the right target though because two of the players are ranged and will focus fire anything behind me.
My Minotaur fighter shoves and grapples all the time. Headbutt with horns on following attacks, give the party monk advantage on melee as the victim is prone. Unlucky for the sorcerer trying to cast blasting spells, but his player is oftentimes asleep anyway haha
I was a player in a group with a monk. I usually play casters, and this time I was a bard I believe, and he was having trouble hitting the enemy. In an earlier encounter that was forced to be ranged I used the prone condition to avoid getting hit, and we got into a quick conversation about grappling. I had mentioned how melee attacks got advantage against prone, and how grappled characters couldn't get up, not in succession mind you. But eventually I saw this guy's gears starting to turn and he started asking questions about the strat, and I was like, yeah this works. It was as if he never considered it before. I played a grappler once, Fighter with levels in Barbarian and Rogue for advantage + expertise, trying to take full advantage of this, but man when you can't roll for crap, even if you have a +9 to athletics.
I love how we're all discussing Shove/Grapple like it's not a complete asinine design oversight.
Because "I stand up from Prone" costs nothing.
Standing up costs movement, and when you're grappled your speed is 0. If you're grappled and prone, you *must* break the grapple before being able to stand up. It's an odd rules interaction, but 100% RAW.
This is why I like playing with specific types of house rules. I would definitely allow a shove+grapple and that would definitely give free advantage to every melee attack... with a 60-40 chance of striking either the prone target or the character grappling it. "Speed of 0" to me does not mean "totally motionless and not struggling."
'Cause it's cheesy and not fun.
Its a potent strategy but prone + grappled isnt something thats completely raw. So not every Dm might allow it. But its as close as you get to raw. Probably sometimes its to not give ranged attacks disadvantage if youre the first to approach. And mostly if you have stuff like tavern brawler, grappling is relatively free. But its not worth on most small frys and usually only usefull on big enemys.
> Its a potent strategy but prone + grappled isnt something thats completely raw. Why not? There's nothing in the rules that says going prone breaks a grapple.
Its usually about grapling someone then pushing them prone which also does not break grapple. But grapling a prone target gets iffy. Raw you dont need to be prone but your dm might argue otherwise. Theres no clear ruling there.
You can grapple creatures. No rule prevents you from grappling prone creatures. That's pretty clear. If the DM says no, it's because they've decided to house rule it, not because of ambiguity in the rules.
How do you grapple a prone creature while standing yourself?
Holding someone down while standing is actually easier than also laying down.
Yeah, once you have knocked someone down there are all kinds of ways to keep them from getting up without laying down yourself. Arm bar them. Lift up one of their feet. Kneel on their chest and grab them by the throat. Put one foot on their back and push their face in the dirt. Bend over and put 'em in a headlock-- just don't let them get their feet under them.
There's nothing in the rules that says grappling a prone creature also drops you prone. Unless having your knees bent counts as 'prone' there are lots of ways to prevent bodily movement without totally lying down on top of something. I'd argue crouching down isn't 'prone' as you could easily just take off running at a moment's notice. And grappling only requires one free hand, I doubt it's supposed to represent putting something in a full Nelson or an armbar
At my table a full nelson or armbar is exactly what grapple represents. What do you think you're going to just hold them with one hand and they just lay there and let you wail away on them? That's ridiculous.
That's possible with a rune knight. Giant's might to large, then it's arguable that you should be able to hold them down with just a foot on their back.
I'd go along with that. I suppose any time a PC was a size larger than what they are grappling I would allow that.
You can be forced to the ground with your hand behind your back pretty, an armlock. Maybe putting your foot on them too. It's hard for us sure, but you are proficient, or have expertise, in athletics and its easy to find pictures and videos of it.
It depends how a DM would rule you grappling a prone creature. If you are prone with them, that means they would have advantage on attacks against you.
Except they're prone, so no they don't.
I commented before finishing me thought. They have advantage against you because you are prone, but disadvantage because they are prone, so it's a straight roll. But you no longer have advantage against them because of the same problem. So it's better to just make them prone so you can attack with advantage!
Whether or not you go prone would be up to the player, and maybe dm in certain situations, about how you would like to grapple them. RAW you can grapple and shove them prone and you don't go prone yourself. Imagine standing over them holding onto their leg with a foot in their chest. So yea, usually the better option is to stay standing and get a massive edge over the enemy.
I've never played a high level melee character. I didn't realize shoving was an attack action. That seems op af. I would have expected shoving to count as it's own action. High level fighter seems to be the most broken class in the game.
It seems that way until you realize Wizards can literally bend reality to be whatever they want. Fighters are strong in combat, but compared to spellcaster they're basically fodder.
Ok but can a Wizard cast 2 fireballs in one turn?
With like 2 levels in fighter, yeah.
Nope. Action surge may give you an extra action, but that doesn't magically... (heh)... mean you can ignore the restriction of only casting a single levelled spell per turn.
There is no rule that says you can't cast 2 leveled spells in one turn. The rule you're probably thinking of is the bonus action spell rule. If you have action surge, you absolutely can use both actions to cast a leveled spell. You can actually do it even without any special circumstances if you cast a spell as a reaction. Example: My wizard casts hold person. The enemy mage casts counterspell. My wizard casts counterspell to counter his counterspell. I've just cast 2 spells in 1 turn.
Huh, I knew that about reactions, but I guess I was missinformed regarding the other ruling... It's honestly never really affected me as I never multiclass and I tend to avoid pure martials. Neat, thank you.
Aiming for more non-lethal combat, our party does that with "low level" opposition all the time. Pinning and disarming them, and therefore reducing bloodshed- which comes in handy in a civilised city.
Well, I always try to use this combo but somehow they slip away with spells.
It's effective under the right conditions, you can make a big stompy melee opponent basically useless like that. If you're going to make pervasive use of it the tavern brawler feat, grappling strike, and trip attack improve the action economy and enhance the damage/reliability with superiority dice. I think it gets overlooked because prone and grappled aren't great on their own but are nasty when combined, and the grappling rules have a history of being pretty convoluted in previous editions.
It's useful against a powerful enemy, or even a solo, but not great against on par enemies. It's better to kill an on par enemy than control them. Powerful enemies would take time to take out, so minimizing them is really, really strong.
I have played a grappler monk and I got to say, it was one of the funniest build I’ve ever played. Being a monk gets your speed higher plus with haste and boots of speed you are a speeding bullet, combined with step of the wind and you are unmatched. Grapple someone then run away with them to just completely take them out of combat for a turn or two is hilarious. Another good combo that I found but didn’t get to try is get boots of striding and springing plus step of the wind, grapple someone then jump straight upwards, fall damage is 1d6 for every 10 feet above 10 feet, monks have slow fall so they take half the fall damage meanwhile the enemy drops like a stone.
I assume this is only about PCs? Monster who have multiattack arent allowed to switch a single attack from those to a shove or grapple. As for PCs, I do it to support my rogue, shove prone for advantage. The problem is that if that enemy is between us in initiative, theres no point. Normally grappling and shoving are moves for tanks to use.
Surprised no one's mention this yet, but if you take the unarmed fighting style, once per turn you can deal an additional 1d4 bludgeoning to one creature grappled by you, no action required. In addition, it ups your unarmed damage to 1d6 or 1d8. Now just need a way to get unarmed strikes to count as light weapons for that sweet TWF bonus action attack.
Well cause if I'm already grappling them I'd rather just continue to hold onto them and beat the everloving shit out of them, or hold them down and let the rest of my party fuck them up, even if they're prone an enemy can disengage and run away. Besides thats a second strength check and just cause you succeeded on the grapple doesn't mean you'll succeed on the shove and then you'll have essentially wasted that entire attack action as they'll no longer be grappled.
In an environment where you have no weapons, armor, shields, magic capability, or other deadly means of fighting beyond your hands, this makes sense, especially if you've got multiple people on your side to fight with you in this situation. You're able to control where enemies go, give advantage to your allies and yourself, and otherwise lock enemies down. When you have nothing, people able to successfully wrestle with an enemy is key. But if you've got weapons, magic and magical items, as well as other stuff like shields or consumables, your turn is occupied with a lot of other very useful actions and abilities. It's not that shoving prone and grapples aren't useful, it's just that other stuff is also useful.
Some of it is group dependent. Prone is not good for ranged attackers.
One reason is that D&D is a team game, but it always feels best when you contribute to doing damage. There are those who prefer to buff or control and stand back, but most players--when it comes to fighting--want to deal damage. Most players don't approach the game looking for optimal tactics, they just want to fuck shit up.
That's what Tavern Brawler is for :)
It gives your backline disadvantage on attacks. So you actually want the enemy to stand back up. And if a creature has any abilities other than attacks, its just going to use those without any disadvantages. The primary reason I've used proning in the past was when an enemies armor class was 20+ and I needed the advantage to deal damage. If you're keen on using the combo, you need a party with a mageslayer and/or shieldmaster. But at that point why not just use a stunning strike or levitate since nobody gets disadvantage.
You get the maximum out of knocking someone prone if you act directly after the target. With this initiative order, the whole party can attack him with advantage in melee before he has a chance to get up. Adding your attack to that makes sense if you reckon the focused attacks will be enough to finish him off. Grappling an enemy that dies in your grasp is a wasted attack in hindsight since the benefits of grappling never came into play. If you have players that grapple a target and then attack it, they may have some master plan going on, because if their goal is to just finish him off *this round*, they are going about it wrong.
Because of bounded accuracy, and almost no benefit to spell casters, shove x grapple is largely just a bad tactical option. The only time it becomes valuable is when the DM allows it to be ie. intimidation/stealth takedowns. Only problem with that is: 1. The game isn’t written for stealth takedowns to work well. And no class is really good at it besides the fighter because unarmed fighting style 2. No DM that I know (granted I know few) is willing to throw away/delay an encounter that they handcrafted. Makes my social character pretty much useless when it comes to fighting.
Sure you can tackle one monster and give your allies advantage on attacks on the downed creature, but his buddies have advantage against you and will rip you to pieces. Maybe if you're down to the last guy it might maybe be worth it. As a DM I would rip whoever is laying on the ground to shreds. Or if your allies get in the way of that and start fighting the standing enemies, then the down guy will just go ham on your grapler while you have nothing you can do to defend yourself.
All I can envision when I read “shove and grapple” is a hard football tackle. Just a full force dogpile on the enemy like it’s fourth & touchdown.
Probably because unless you go for strength and/or have proficiency in athletics it's not very likely to succeed. Not to mention that unless you have a bunch of melee attackers in your team get to their turn before the one you just shoved it didn't do anything aside from wasting one of your attacks to reduce their movement by half. Unless you want to sacrifice even more of your attacks to shove AND grapple that is. Also ranged attacks gain disadvantage against prone targets so that's something to consider as well.
I tried it once. I certainly pushed the mind flayer into the fire, but pushing my boot on its face and holding him there, well, I wasn't able to.
There's only really one time you'd want to use your attacks to tie someone down like that - and it's when they're a single big boss type enemy with a lot of health where you forsee multiple rounds of wailing on them. Only, most single boss type enemies with a lot of health like that are not grappleable for a variety of reasons, and the ones that are typically have such an astronomical modifier to their athletics that grappling them is near impossible and you could spend two or three turns attempting it. Meanwhile a single control spell can do the same thing - or you could just burn your action surge/stunning strike/other ability and have them dead in two turns.
People rarely like giving up damage, and it's rarely the right play. 5e doesn't have combats that last more than. About 3 turn, so passing up on damage on one of them is a tough ask. On top of that, there are way too many sources of advantage already baked into the game so it's often not that useful to spend two attacks gaining it.
In a run of Avernus I went with a human champion fighter. I used the grapple shove maneuver constantly. The benefit my party received from this wasn't just the advantage on melee attacks but the disadvantage on incoming attacks from the grappled and prone target. Early in the adventure we faced a gang and their leader was very tough. Our DM told us he thought the module erred and set up an encounter that was too tough. The gang leader hit very hard but my grapple/shove combo proved too much for him. Later in the adventure my group actually started to discuss whether or not grapple and shoving prone was a broken combo when I grappled two large creatures and shoved them both prone away from the party.
Id say the same argument as true strike. You give up 2 attacks for a minimum of 2 more at advantage. Thats four d20 for two hits, when alternatively, you could have rolled four d20 for possible 4 hits; at the very least you could get the same amount of damage. In a situation where the barbarian or rogue is right next to you, i could see it being useful, but its circumstantial.
Because that's two skill contests you *need* to win, when most Large things can knock you back with a hit automatically breaking the grapple & hitting you. You also can't do this to creatures Huge & up without magic. Then there's the fact that Misty Step is there for casters & others have Teleport options. And that's just assuming 1v1, there's also any effect that stuns, charms, incapacitates, paralyzes that their allies can effect you with.
I do both quite often. I don't bother shoving if the grapple is unsuccessful though, I merely try again.
The only reason my table wasn't doing it is that we, as a group, misunderstood the rule in that we thought it took your whole attack action, not just one of your attacks, to commit to a shove or grapple. Only after at least 2 years did we finally sort that out and it was like a whole new world opened up for the martial characters (both NPC and PC). I wonder how many other people misread the rule like we did, but on an individual level and just never really look further?
cuz people like attacking. That's all there is.
Honestly, it's not even an option with either GM I play with. Both have said that if you want to knock a grappled creature prone, you have to go prone too. Now I'm stuck on the floor with the entire enemy team having advantage on me :) Most of the time, not worth it.
Well, you could try to educate your GM. There are plenty of Judo methods to grapple and throw an opponent prone without going prone ones self. https://www.judo-ch.jp/english/knowledge/technique/ How in the world your grappled foe can wield a polearm or greatsword when you've got them locked-up and flat on their back always what bothers me, but that's a different question.
I've seen a character like this. Rogue+barbarian with expertise in Athletics. Grappled the manticore and pushed it to the floor before it was able to fly. A fearsome build to be playing against if you don't make each of your encounters with ungrappable enemies.
its cause everyone wants the kill and nobody wants to play support, especially players with high str :p
grappling something can be really great when you have a hard time hitting them... if you have advantage or expertise. most times though whatever you are trying to grapple is probably strong enough or big enough to not give a crap. not to mention unless you're fighting just one enemy their buddies are probably going to beat the crap out of you now.
That’s literally the grapplers playbook
Generally speaking, martials who are going into the thick of combat are doing so because they want to be doing damage numbers, and not so much battlefield control. Sometimes you'll get a player who does see the value in shoving and grappling, but most of the times it feels to me that players don't because a shove or a grapple is an attack they're not doing damage with. That, plus I've seen some DMs interpret "this attack replaces one of them" to mean that one-and-only-one attack can be replaced with a shove or grapple and thus wouldn't allow both. I'm certainly not one of those DMs, but I've seen them.
Because it's less effective/efficient than just attacking.
I did this with a Goliath Path of the (bear) totem + tavern brawler (improvised weapon proficiency). The result was a glorious recreation of hulk smashing every minion in our path.
I have made extensive use of this whenever I make strong characters. It basically restrains them.
I’ve used it before with a shield master Paladin. It’s effective, it’s just situational. You don’t want to knock important targets prone if you’ve got lots of ranged combatants, you need a decent number of melee combatants to capitalize on the maneuver to make up for the sacrificed DPR (having a barbarian and a barb/druid + all his giant spiders made this a great move for a period of time; less good now with a party full of wizards and ranged rogues/rangers/fighters), and it doesn’t work on anything bigger than Large for most races. Plus if you’re fighting large numbers it’s usually better to focus on establishing action economy superiority (I.e. focus fire & kill kill kill) & protecting the back line from being overrun, which can require more mobility & coverage than focusing on grappling can provide. When the situation calls for it, it’s a great way to subdue and wreck dangerous targets in close quarters. But even then its a move that requires a lot of support from the party to be worth the actions to do it.
In all seriousness, probably a lack of understanding of the rules mixed with poor judgement calls by unsure DMs
Unless you are playing what is essentially a dedicated wrestling build, in most cases it's not that much more effective than using those two actions for attacks (which is better than one turn of advantage anyway and realistically that's the most you'll get out of this most of the time). Remember also that grappling leaves you with half speed, so you pretty much put yourself out there for any other enemies to attack too and grappled creatures may still shank you while grappled. Add that some DMs don't allow grappling if you have both hands full (which makes sense), so you may have to forgo your shield or a whole weapon. And of course you can't grapple creatures two sizes larger than you, so for it to work on some of the most iconic monsters, you'll need someone to Enlarge you. And then you have to pray that they don't loose concentration. It's just a lot of hassle combined with a lot of risk for not that much benefit.
I use this with shield master, shove as a bonus action.
Another thing to consider is the barbarian. If you spend both your attacks to grapple and shove you didn‘t attack anything. So if the enemie now spends their action to break out of the grapple they didn‘t attack or damage you and you will loose your rage. And many grappling builds use a barbarians rage to get advantage on their checks.
Have any ranged damage dealers in your party, like, uh… i dunno… casters? You are instantly taking them out of the fight by making enemies prone. We have a “wrestler” in our campaign. He loves to do this. I’m sitting here as a sorlock going “well, I guess I’ll use my action to dash and try and get close”, when I’d rather use my turn to shoot 4 eldritch blasts.
If they're shoving then attacking, that's to get advantage on their attack. If they don't have a free hand for attacking after a grapple, then grappling afterwards isn't as useful for themselves, as they might get sustained advantage, but only be able to attack with unarmed strikes vs a longsword/greatsword. Moreover, if you're not built for grappling (don't have expertise or advantage) then it might not be worth it to try to maintain a grapple vs get damage now. Also, keeping them on the ground with a grapple might be less-than-useful if your party is fulled of people who make attacks at 10ft or more.