Two-Weapon Fighting That Doesn't Suck (& Other Feats) [D&D 3.5, Feats]

[Ziegander]

@Tarkisflux: what?  So are you suggesting have TWF be just one attack, and then ITWF grants a second attack, and GTWF is a third?  Only with these, having three weapons would be two extra attacks with TWF, four with ITWF, 6 with GTWF, etc.?

No, he's worried that multi-weapon fighting is too good I think. And I am too, to a certain extent. Let's take a look at how it works:

Without the Improved Multiweapon Fighting feat, a monster with Bite (one-handed Primary) and two Claw attacks (light Secondary) swings in with three attacks at -2 with the Bite and -2 for each claw. So far, nothing crazy. An Eleven-Headed Hydra, with 11 Bites, one of them Primary, the other 10 Secondary, swings in with eleven attacks at -2 with the first one and -4 with all of the others. Seems okay.

With the Improved Multiweapon Fighting feat that same Hydra can hit with all 10 Secondary Bites on an attack of opportunity, and can sacrifice four or more of his Secondaries to ignore the penalty for fighting defensively and cash in on +1 more to AC per attack sacrificed. Of course, without the feat the Hydra could still attack with all 11 as a standard action or at the end of a charge, but the free AC is still nice.

A caster can't give himself the Improved Multiweapon Fighting feats via Heroics because they aren't Fighter Bonus Feats (which reminds me, I need to specify that the other feats are), so in order to take advantage of them he'd have to literally take the feats. Seems like the caster probably has better feats to take.

I could be convinced to increase the penalties for Multiweapon Fighting, but I think it's probably okay as is.

[Tarkisflux]

No, I'm suggesting that ITWF remain as is (granting secondary attacks on charge, AoO, and iteratives), but IMWF be changed to look more like it. So if you wanted to use a primary and two secondary weapons on a charge or AoO, you would first take ITWF and then take IMWF to get the additional secondary attack. Here, I'll just the borrow the format from Ziegander's post and write it up:

Improved Multi-Weapon Fighting
Prerequisites: Improved Two-Weapon Fighting, Dex 17
Benefit: Whenever you make a standard melee attack, a charge attack, or an attack of opportunity that would grant an off-hand attack, you also gain an additional attack with a different secondary weapon. This weapon may be a weapon wielded in a different arm (if you have more than 2), a different limb (like blade boots), or even worn (like armor spikes). If you do take this additional secondary weapon attack, each of your attacks suffers two-weapon fighting penalties. In addition the penalties to your attacks for fighting with two weapons are reduced by 2 (to a minimum of -0). Remember to add only half your Strength modifier to off-hand damage rolls.
Special: This feat may be taken multiple times. Each time you select this feat you gain 1 additional secondary attack. You may never use a secondary attack to attack with a weapon already used as part of the attack at your current attack bonus.

The writing there is rough and rather sucky, but hopefully it gets the point across. Instead of just taking IMWF and getting an extra weapon that you don't care about to act as your "primary" (so you can sacrifice it to use all of the attacks you do care about), you would have to keep taking extra feats to get extra attacks with your extra limbs. So a thri-kreen could take ITWF and wield two greatswords, or he could take ITWF and IMWF twice and wield a longsword and 3 shortswords. But the one with 4 swords would be able to hit with his primary and then have 3 chances to hit with a secondary to trigger one of the later TWF effect feats.

And while I was writing this up, Ziegander came in and posted...

Ziegander, were you intending to replace Multiattack with Improved Multiweapon Fighting? Cause I totally missed that, and I'm not sure that works at all because of the manufactured vs. natural attack progression distinction. Let me know if I need to write more on that, cause I know I'm sorta shortchanging it now, just out of time for a bit and want to hit post.

[Ziegander]

Ziegander, were you intending to replace Multiattack with Improved Multiweapon Fighting?

Yeah, yeah.

Cause I totally missed that, and I'm not sure that works at all because of the manufactured vs. natural attack progression distinction.

Yeah, that's why I wrote new rules both for Two-Weapon Fighting and then different new rules for Multi-Weapon Fighting. Multi-Weapon Fighting is the catch-all for PCs fighting with more than two weapons and for monsters fighting with more than two natural weapons. In fact, a monster with only two natural weapons (if there is such a monster), can use the Two-Weapon Fighting rules as far as I'm concerned (though it could gain up to 6 more attacks than it used to have).

The goal was to have the PCs and monsters attacking with more or less the same sets of rules. The set of rules for attacking with one weapon, the set of rules for attacking with two weapons, and the set of rules for attacking with more than two weapons.

If that were fully implemented, it would give some monsters two or three more attacks with the Primary weapons, but it would also impose penalties to their attack rolls that they didn't normally have. Natural weapons would have to be designated as "two-handed," "one-handed," or "light."

[Tarkisflux]

That seems a bit... excessive... but I'm not sure if I'm just knee-jerking. Aren't the multi-natural weapon monsters set up with a higher pile of damage / extra attacks in order to make up for their lack of iteratives in the first place? Yes, I am aware I am probably assigning more designer capability than is due, but I use more NPCs than monsters with natural attacks in games and lack a bit of familiarity with how they actually play out.

So I'm sort of assuming that you have that experience here. Aside from the unified mechanics part, do you have an argument for the benefit of giving most things in the MM additional iterative attacks and pounce and multi-strike AoOs?

[SorO_Lost]

How's this for math: If both of them have a Str modifier of +13, then the guy with a two-handed weapon deals 2d6+19 + Power Attack (meaning I failed at math too, but at least I didn't fail three fucking times in a row)

I see, amazing the difference between saying the total is wrong opposed to explaining the THF value is incorrect isn't it?

Your example of "the typical two-handed Barbarian" is already capable of one rounding every CR 10 monster. Does it matter at this point if another super-strong TWF deals 50 more damage?

Hows this. Killing a monster in one round is different than killing everything in your reach each round. The TWF version practically seeing no reduces hit chances but sees a very noticeable inflation to damage spread out over a wider and more applicable area, such as multiple targets.

I also believe that saying something else is broken or over powered isn't an excuse to write poor material that is even worse. Like casters have time Stop, so mundanes can stop time for six rounds in a row as a fix!

See also this
Do I give a shit that if this gives casters that wish to capitalize on it yet another way to trivialize melee? No. It's already really easy for casters to trivialize melee without these rules, so why should I care?
Moments ago you rose a point about giving fighters a nice thing and after repeatedly pointing out all you made it easier for casters your mind has changed to fuck it, casters are broken anyway.

EDIT: And not that you'd notice, because you don't actually read the material I put up before you lose your mind over it, I actually did make changes to the rules in the OP based on your first post. Abusing rules that grant extra attacks in the round was something I didn't think to account for and was definitely not in the spirit of what I was trying to accomplish, so I clearly spelled out that you only get off-hand attacks equal to the number you are allowed by your Base Attack Bonus.

And this is the first edit I've seen. I neither go back and read old posts (unless they are useful) nor does the board's "new" feature care to rehighlight edits to previous posts. This is especially important given that I'll read a thread's recent replies and more often that not post later given time constraints in real. Which also defines my limits on attention, well that on how much I care about the subject or how unimpressive the other poster is.

I am glad that you changed additional number of attacks to be based on and limted your BAB. It may seem minor but it is has a HUGE impact in it's functionality and it was my largest issue with things.