A penalty to combat maneuvers?


Homebrew and House Rules


Would it be reasonable to allow players to make combat maneuvers at -4 without provoking attacks of opportunity? I'm unsure if this will upset balance, since at low levels, -4 is a pretty big risk, but at higher levels, it's almost guaranteed that an enemy that you're trying to bull rush off a cliff will do more than 4 damage on a hit. Combat maneuvers don't see a whole lot of play with my party, since most of them can bludgeon enemies hard enough that combat maneuvers are a waste of time, or magically debuff them harder than any combat maneuver could.


The easiest way to see if it would work for your group is to try it out. Tell your group that as a test they can use combat maneuvers at a -4 without provoking. See how things go. I'd even go so far as to say that each character can once per session perform a combat maneuver at no penalty, without provoking. This is if you really want to encourage maneuvers into play. Another way to encourage their use is to have enemies use them (intelligently) show the options for what can be done with a maneuver. Remember you can take it back pretty easy if you say it's on a trial basis to begin with.


One change I have made is to allow maneuvars that move the target to place them in dangerous positions. What's the point of bullrush if you can't knock the idiot standimg on the cliff off of it? This has made some maneuvars more common, and made positioning and terrain more of an issue.


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If you really want to make combat maneuvers more desirable, the best thing to do would be to ditch the Pathfinder implementation entirely and use the "special attacks" section of the 3.5 rules. The CMB/CMD formulae were set up to make combat maneuvers a lot harder than in 3.5, and many of them have additional limitations to make them even weaker.

If you are unwilling to use the 3.5 rules, there are a number of things you can do to make combat maneuvers somewhat better.

1)Combine the Improved Whatever feats with their Greater Whatever counterparts. Once you take the Improved combat maneuver feat, you immediately get the benefits of both the Improved and Greater feats.
This change actually brings you closer to how it is in 3.5 (many of the benefits of the "greater" feats in Pathfinder are already provided in the "improved" feats in 3.5, without the need to take another feat or gain a certain BAB.)

2)If you don't have the feat, combat maneuvers only provoke AoOs on a failed attempt.

[b]3)Either your strength bonus or your dexterity bonus applies to CMD, but not both. This change puts CMD in line with how CMB is calculated (the default formulae give both bonuses to CMD but only one to CMB, favoring CMD and making maneuvers harder).

4)Keep size bonuses/penalties, but abolish size restrictions:
If you look through the monster books, you'll notice that higher CR monsters are almost invariably larger. RAW, larger characters have two advantages in resisting combat maneuvers. Firstly, larger characters get size bonuses to CMB and CMD. This rule is something you can keep. However, to add insult to injury, many combat maneuvers assert that they are impossible to perform on targets that are a certain number of size categories larger than you, regardless of how high your CMB is!
Oddly enough, this limitation actually harms verisimilitude. In Pathfinder, a small character can be stronger than an elephant. If your character is strong enough to bull rush an elephant in spite of the small size penalties, then you should be able to do it, but RAW arbitrarily asserts you can't. Change this rule. If you have a high enough CMB to use a combat maneuver against someone much larger than you in spite of the penalties, both game balance and verisimilitude are aided if you can do it. This change will make maneuvers more desirable at higher levels, though it will have minimal effect at low levels.

5) Flying creatures are not immune to tripping:
I know this list is mainly for if you don't want to use the 3.5 rules for some reason, but in this case, if you want trip to be useful at all past level six, it is a must. Copying from the Rules Compendium:

Rules Compendium, pg 145 wrote:

A winged creature can be tripped, and if it is, it falls as if it didn’t maintain its minimum forward speed. See Fly, page 92.

(In case you missed it, here are the 3.5 flying rules, including some information which was deleted from Pathfinder due to copy/paste/editing errors.)

6) Any combat maneuver which normally takes a standard action may be made in place of one attack in a full-attack.
Because combat maneuvers shouldn't be second-class citizens compared to damage-dealing.

7) (Optional) Replace the Improved/Greater Combat Maneuver feats by their Mythic counterparts:
If you really want to reward combat maneuvers over damage-dealing, grant all characters with a BAB of +1 or higher the Improved and Greater combat maneuver feats for free. Give them the option of taking the Mythic Improved and Greater combat maneuver feats while nonmythic, when RAW would normally allow them to take the normal feats.

Yes, you can do all of these things at once. The options I listed aren't either-or. I have used all seven of them at once. I have also used the ones that aren't redundant with the 3.5 rules in 3.5. They all work together to make special attacks/combat maneuvers more desirable, and make combat more dynamic and interesting.

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