It Takes Class – Brawler

Class archetypes are hideously underutilized. They are a powerful tool to tailor classes to specific playstyles, or to give them powerful abilities while making those abilities inaccessible to other classes that may be able to exploit them though multiclass archetypes.

With this in mind, welcome to It Takes Class, wherein I bring you class archetypes to do anything from granting classes more flexibility to trading that flexibility to specialize greater than any have before.

In this third volume of It Takes Class, we take a look at the monk! Kind of. There's an idea in the community (at least the circles I'm in) that some classes create mechanical quarantines, and by their sheer existence prevent some mechanics from being used on other classes. Fighter with legendary weapon proficiency (broken slightly by the gunslinger), champion with legendary armor proficiency, and most commonly mentioned is monk, which takes the place as the unarmed and unarmored class. There's no reason a fighter or barbarian can't be as good at punching, but explicit support for punching never materialized for other classes as a form of niche protection. At least so goes the theory.

So with that in mind, let's break some quarantine! The brawler is a general archetype, able to be taken by any class capable of gaining master proficiency in any melee weapon. Trade your proficiency with all non-brawling weapons (you weren't using that anyway, right?) for the ability to use your fists in place of weapons with your feats! Want to Double Slice with your hands, instead of having to hold hunks of cold steel? Sure, sounds cool! Prepared to Dueling Parry and Dueling Riposte to punch someone in the jaw? Sweet, makes me wonder why I couldn't before! Broadly, the brawler opens dual-wielding and dueling feats up to unarmed fighters, but even for those of you planning on using Vicious Swing every turn, there's goodness to be found, with the ability to make stronger unarmed Strikes and poaching Follow-Up Strike from the martial artist.

Includes Pathbuilder support! Be aware that the changes made by the brawler broadly only touch feat requirements, which isn't automated by Pathbuilder, and so there is no editing of classes or feats necessary for it to function. As such, the Pathbuilder JSON does not create class archetype versions of classes, and only provides the included feats. I felt it was a waste of effort to create copies of every martial class only to remove some weapon proficiencies that are easy enough to ignore! If you feel different, feel free to make another version and send it my way, and I'll share it alongside my own.

Also includes Foundry support!