Conspicuously, the Spell Sniper feat is not about this. The EK can do it if you really squint, but the better bet is a bow-wielding ranger. A whole lot of players looking at the Eldritch Knight and the Blade-pact warlock, and trying to figure out the best way to use them for this task.During the D&D Next public playtest, a few Themes/Specialties/feats that could move a character in this direction.4e seeker class, in the Player’s Handbook III.Not checking my books right now, but I’m pretty sure there were 4e paragon paths for an Arcane Archer concept.3.0/3.5 Arcane Archer prestige class (elf and half-elf only).Lucion Paul Gygax creates Melf, presumably in the early 1970s, and Melf creates Melf’s acid arrow and Melf’s unicorn arrow.Mortimer Weisinger and George Pepp create Green Arrow in 1941.After all, you did this to avoid spellcasting, so EK is out, and Champion and Battle Master were deliberately stripped of thematic weight.Īnd that, little UA article, is how you were born.Īs far as I know, the lineage of the Arcane Archer is, approximately: What do you do if you want to play a knight but don’t want the thematic weight of an Oath or the gameplay of smites, channeling, and spellcasting? You probably choose fighter, and if you’re playing 5e, maybe you start looking for a cleaner fit for your concept than Champion, Battle Master, or Eldritch Knight have to offer. Those classes in turn take on lives and themes of their own, as you now know if you’re thinking about arguing with my list of famous fighters and which class they should be. D&D has tried breaking these out into more classes, so the design can drill down into greater detail, which is how you get the paladin, ranger, barbarian, monk, and rogue.

It’s tough to pull together a class from Beowulf, Buliwyf, Conan (what class is Conan? Barbarian, ranger, rogue, fighter… yes to all), d’Artagnan, John McClane, Joan of Arc, William the Marshal, William Wallace, William Tell, William the Conqueror, Bill the Butcher, Lancelot, Miyamoto Musashi, Captain America, Lyudmila Pavlichenko… and so on. Eventually, I’ll map that statement forward in detail, but 3.x has to be the high-water mark of “fighter as tabula rasa” – just look at all those bonus feats, and the wide-open “yes you can” of proficiency in all simple and martial weapons, armor, and shields. Much as D&D has long defined races by their difference from humans, other classes seem defined by their separation from the fighting-man. The original fighting-man class is even more devoid of features – the perfect tabula rasa for any hero who accomplishes deeds through physical prowess rather than magic (because there was no thief class at the time). The thing is, the fighter is the most universal archetype in all of fiction, to say nothing of fantasy fiction.

It’s possible to draw the impression that the Champion is the more resilient brute, trained in the School of Hard Knocks, while the Battle Master is the refined, formally-trained warrior poet (or other form of artistic expression), but even that is reaching.

There are features in each that aren’t explicitly about weapon-induced murder, but even those don’t do a lot to communicate theme. Nor do other classes intentionally strip their archetypes of setting context, as the Champion and Battle Master have been. Now, I can’t honestly say that each class’s archetypes have an identical level of complexity – compare the barbarian’s two and the monk’s three – but only in the fighter class is there such a yawning gulf of difference. I had been hoping to save this conversation for an eventual “History of the Fighter Class” series, but instead, I’m doing it today. This has informed later subclass designs, and it makes today’s UA a challenging contrast. To talk about them, though, let’s first step back and talk about how the Player’s Handbook fighter archetypes are imagined on a different axis than any other set of subclasses. This week in Unearthed Arcana, Affleck & Damon present four new fighter archetypes: the Arcane Archer, the Knight, the Samurai, and the Sharpshooter.

Unearthed arcana sharpshooter