Hello guys, I'm in the process of creating a medium sized addon to Pathfinder Core (only, so no APG!) to use as my house rules. I have made a seperate feat tree for additional two-handed fighting, redone the TWF to make it easier to do basic TWF* but have some different feats to add on to gain special TWF techniques (like Rend), but now I am revising shield bashing.
To be blunt I'm not a fan of the TWF shield basher and I want shield bashing to have its own seperate feat tree. What I'm thinking of is to allow a shield bash to replace any normal attack. This way a shield basher would not be reliant on having enough Dex to support the entire TWF chain, nor would it have to deal with TWF penalties. Shields would no longer be using the offhand, but it would be a unique weapon to replace your standard attacks on the fly (without penalties). But you would not get any 'extra' attacks from TWF/the offhand. What do you think of this? What would be nice as an 'addon' to a shield bash (in the form of a feat) if I go this way?
Now my plan is to give the shield bash its own benefits, like Shield Bash. The idea is that with every attack, a warrior has a choice whether or not to use a shield bash (and there should be enough incentive to actually use a bash). One of the feats I'd like to add is a single 'free' shield bash attack per round, say you get the feat at BAB +6, and of course the defense focused feats from the APG are nice. The idea is to make this feat structure less Dex based, and perhaps even mix a little Con into this as a requirement. What are your thoughts about this?
As far as flavour is concerned, I think my 'replace normal attack' solution works well, as fighting with a shield offensively is, as far as I know, a lot more natural than fighting with two weapons.
*My revisions for TWF were, in retrospect, quite similar to what Kirth Gersen had in his house rules posted in this forum.