D&D: Five Combat Styles You Can Build a Character Around
Making a new character? Here’s five different things you can do in combat that you can make your whole personality. Well. Character, anyway.
While you can make a character that relies on just their class or their species for an identity, elf fighter, dwarf wizard, dragonborn paladin, the list goes on, that can get to be conceptually limiting after a while. After all, there are only twelve classes in the Player’s Handbook. And once you’ve played them, you know their whole deal.
And while you can do things like “have a personality” or “a backstory that informs your decisions” it’s also just as viable to make a character all around doing one thing really well. It’s like the classic archetype of having a spellcaster and someone big and beefy to stand in between them.
Here are five “combat styles” for lack of a better word, that you can use to make your next character.
Big Damage
Every party, without exception, needs to have someone who is really good at hitting things really hard. Whether that’s with weapons or spells or more likely some combination of class features, spells, weapons, and items that was never intended to work together, but now that it does, the numbers get big.
And that’s where this character type comes in. You might think this archetype is like a Barbarian getting in there and hitting with a greataxe, but that’s a very basic interpretation. We’re talking maxed out magic missiles or scorching rays + conjure minor elementals to dish out eye-watering levels of damage. Or playing a wild combo of like five different classes and subclasses from multiple sourcebooks to max out every hit.
Whatever the method, this character hits things so hard they stay hit. Every party needs at least one, but probably several.
Locking Down Enemies
Of course, all that damage doesn’t matter if you get overwhelmed or picked off or your character gets killed before your weird build comes online. Well, that’s where Locking It Down comes into play.
This is a character that some might call a “battlefield controller” but really, what they succeed at is shutting down one or more enemies, for basically the whole fight. Whether your deal is knocking enemies prone and reducing their speed to 0 so they can’t stand up, isolating enemies with magic spells, or just pumping enough stunning fists to make sure that nobody ever gets a turn again, these characters are all about removing a powerful enemy (or enemies) from the fight, usually in a single turn, so that you can win the fight and then gang up on whoever it was that got shut out in the first place.
Mobility
This type of character is all about staying in motion. Mobility is important. It means you can reach those enemy spellcasters staying out of range of your big beat stick character, or get to someone wounded to shove a potion down their throat before they die again.
Playing this character often means taking a class that enhances your basic mobility, like Monk or Barbarian or Rogue, but it can also mean things like picking up spells like Misty Step that let you teleport around, or playing a Tabaxi to get your speed up into the stratosphere.
Heals
Sometimes you gotta be the one keeping everyone alive, no matter how hard they try otherwise. A good healer, in D&D, knows that they have a mix of preventative healing and reactive healing. But you have an eye on the fight and the well-being of your buds. This can be a very nurturing combat style, or you can revel in the thrill of controlling the life and death of every party member at your whim.
Just as long as you actually do heal them when they need it.
Make Everyone Better
Finally there’s the “well now everyone’s better” archetype. These are your characters who have buffs, both magical and mundane, that make everyone in the party better. Whether you’re handing out hastes to characters that hit hard, or empowering strikes, or simply using your class features to make saving throws better, when you’re the kind of character who lifts everyone up around them, you often find your way to the very center of attention. And combat. So make sure you’re on good terms with the Healer.
What’s your favorite way to build a character?
