Day 6 of my Adventure Calendar! For 24 days, up until Christmas, I plan to release a lil bit of RPG content. Want to join as well? Join the jam!
Image: Screenshot from En Garde by Fireplace Games
Today, a little 5e homebrew rule that I used in a campaign. It might work for OSE etc. as well, but hey, I’m not going to do all the work!
My campaign featured a daring Rogue Swashbuckler named Luciano. Having played a swashbuckler myself, I generally really like how it fulfills the promise of the fantasy; you’re a great one-on-one duelist.
When outnumbered, obviously, Luciano would be in trouble. Now, within game balance, that’s relatively fair; rogues aren’t meant to be front-liners.
However! There is another part of the swashbuckler fantasy that isn’t really addressed here: flynning. Whenever a movie sword fight is clearly focused on hitting each other’s swords instead of actually delivering killing blows, that’s flynning. Sort of. Go read the article.
So, I made that into a little rule:
Flynning
When engaged with more than one enemy creature within melee range, Luciano can choose to make a melee attack roll with his rapier against each of them as an Action.
On a hit, the opponent does not take damage, but instead suffers 2 effects:
Retreating from Luciano automatically triggers a weapon damage roll, even when disengaging.
Attacking Luciano is done with Disadvantage.
This effect lasts until the start of Luciano’s next turn.
Succeeding on the initial hit roll basically means that Luciano has bypassed his opponent’s defenses, and is just toying with them/keeping them occupied. It becomes harder for an opponent to attack successfully (Disadvantage) and turning their attention elsewhere is immediately punished (damage roll).
The balance here is that for this to work, Luciano needed to get himself into trouble. What also helped, is that the player really understood what we were going for with this rule, pulling it out at interesting and appropriate times.
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