Hello adventurers of all shapes and sizes! Welcome to my spellbook and thank you so much for checking out the 21st episode of our feat series. Today we’re going to be taking a look at one of the most poorly named dnd 5e feats in the game. Today we’re going to be taking a look at dnd 5e grappler. Grappler is found in the players handbook so everyone should have access to it and i can alsmost guarantee you’ve read over this probably half a dozen times.
Before go any further let me give you a brief explanation as to what feats are and how they work just for you newer players out there. So feats you essentially get one every four levels instead of your ability score improvement you get to choose which one you want. Ultimately comes down to your own character and playstyle but if you decide to go for the feat, they’re essentially extra features, abilities and traits you can give your character to make them a little bit more personalized and tailor them to how you want them to be used. Some of them are better than others circumstantially but most of them come down to playstyle and the type of campaign you’re running. With that out of the way let’s take a look at grappler.
Description
It might be worth noting that there is a prerequisite for this and that’s that you have to have a strength of 13 or higher and the description reads as followed.
You’ve developed the skills necessary to hold your own in close-quarters grappling. You gain the following benefits: You have advantage on attack rolls against a creature you are grappling. You can use your action to try to pin a creature grappled by you. To do so, make another grapple check. If you succeed, you and the creature are both restrained until the grapple ends.
Now there’s a little bit unpack there all right! Let’s take a look at the walkthrough and let’s break this down a little bit.
So the advantage on creatures are grappling is you know what that’s actually pretty nice not gonna lie. Your party members if memory serves already have advantage against it but neither here nor there you do as well. So really cool and you can use an action to restrain a creature. You make an another grapple check and then you’re both restrained until the grapple ends. So that’s pretty cool! it’s a good way to remove a big bad enemy out of combat and i’ll let it give you my personal thoughts on it.
Thoughts
So the reason why earlier i mentioned it was one of the most poorly named feats in the game. Is it doesn’t really make you better at grappling at all. You know like if there was a third bullet point that said you have advantage and all grappling checks. Then it would be worthy of the name but that’s not really what it does. It makes you better at attacking creatures that you are grappling. Which is okay i guess and you can pin a creature down as grappling make them restrained which is also okay i guess, i just can’t imagine a lot of classes that would really benefit from that.
I mean i think the monk would really be the only one and even then there’s better ways of playing a monk, this is a great one to pick for flavor and it’s s great one to pick if you want to test out a new style of play or if you want to be more sticky and stuff like that. Then you know what i could see this working out but i really wish it gave you advantage on those grappling checks at the very least or gave you a way to like do a choke hold there’s something like that right!
Wrap Up
Anyways that’s my personal thoughts on it and i might be wrong it could be amazing honestly i’ve never used it so i’m really not in a good position to be able to give you advice one way or the other but reading it doesn’t seem all that great.
If you have any ideas though, if you’ve used it to any degree of success in the past i’d really love to hear it down below and i know everyone else would checking this article would as well. This is one of the most underused feats in 5E but it is one of the most frequently read ones as well.
So maybe this is something we’re not quite understanding, if you could put it down in the comments and shed any light on this situation i’d really appreciate it. So thank you so much in advance and as always happy adventuring everyone.