Dexterity is crazy strong, second only to charisma. (if you have alot of NPC interaction in your campaign)

Dexterity:

• Gives you extra damage, primarily on ranged weapons which are generally more useful than their melee counterparts.
• Increases your initiative rolls
• Increases your AC
• Its tied to the most some of the most useful skills in the game
• Helps you versus the majority of saving throws.

Compare this to Strength which allows you to deal a marginal increase in damage only if you choose to wield a two-handed weapon(forfeiting a shield) and helps you out with one skill. Yeah I get it has alot to do with Carrying Capacity and such but the vast majority of DMs I’ve come across pay encumbrance no mind.

But nerfing is never fun for the player and considering we as GM’s have the capability to scale the difficulty for each encounter I say we do something else.

We buff the crap out of everything.

Weapons:

First of all we need to address the fact that Strength weapons aren’t anywhere near strong enough to compete with Finesse and Ranged weapons.

I’ve got two changes in mind, one is to the Two-Handed and Versatile Weapon Properties and the other to Hit points.

(Variant) Two Handed Weapon Fighting – Damage Bonus:

Meaning if you are wielding a Greatsword with a +7 in Strength your Damage roll will look like 2d6+14.

Explaination:

There just isn’t enough reason to justify playing a strength based fighter outside of flavor. You are better off going dexterity every time. If you choose to use a shield then the rapier is just as good as a longsword/warhammer etc. etc. If you choose to forgo a shield(lowering your AC) you get to raise your average damage by about 1-3 depending on which weapon you choose.

Health Points:

Now that change to weapons will make level 1 even more lethal than it currently is. You can already one shot most starting classes by just wielding a greataxe and rolling well. But if you don’t like your early game to be too lethal you can use one or both of these HP changes.

(Variant) Hit Points at 1st Level:

Meaning a Barbarian with +4 CON would start with 19 HP(3+4+12); a wizard with +0 Con would start with 9(3+0+6).

(Variant) Strength Hit Point Bonus:

So in other words:

Explaination:

Generally when one thinks of the buff warrior they also picture them being pretty resilient. And while this change to probably doesn’t completely compensate for failing the plethora of dexterity saving throws just seeing a higher HP total on the page really sells the idea.

Initiative:

It’s always bothered me that only one stat modifies initiative. So in my efforts to “nerf” dexterity this seems like the most logical place to start. This change is simple.

(Variant) Initiative:

Dexterity measuring the speed of your body.

Intelligence measuring how quickly you can come up with the correct first course of action.

Wisdom measuring how quickly your mind indentifies the danger.

Explaination:

These three combined not only make sense but are generally stats valued by the more roguish classes. So the precedent ideal of speedy rogue/monk/ranger is still kept intact.

Not to mention it makes the mental stats more appealing for non-traditional classes. Which is always a good thing in my mind. This does generally increase initiative rolls amongst most character builds. Except the classic meathead with High Strength and Con and low mental stats.

But what screams buffoon more than entering a fight extremely late?

~ All right that’s what I got. Lemme know what you think in the comments below or @TLCStageHazard. If you’re interested in other homebrews here’s a Druid that specializes in healing.