When you use your action to Dash, you can use a bonus action to make one melee weapon attack or to shove a creature. If you move at least 10 feet in a straight line immediately before taking this bonus action, you either gain a +5 bonus to the attack’s damage roll (if you chose to make a melee attack and hit) or push the target up to 10 feet away from you (if you chose to shove and you succeed).
Charger: When Push Comes to Shove
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
A minotaur puts its horns down and bullrushes the enemy ogre, smashing into its gut and knocking it flat on its ass. The halfling knight valiant charges into insurmountable odds, longsword in hand, ready to defend their people. Wind is knocked out of the necromancer’s lungs as the half-orc smashes her quarterstaff into his stomach, launching him off the balcony he commands his legions from.
I’m a sucker for the reckless charge look. Something about staring down a villain and launching yourself at them with fervor entices me. Charger exists to facilitate that fantasy, and while it scales horrendously, if you’re playing a game you don’t expect to go into the upper tiers, it can be a blast to play with.
The play pattern Charger opens up is simple; you run at somebody, smash into them, and get rewarded for it. +5 bonus damage is a massive boon if you’re only making single attack rolls each turn. Five is roughly a bonus d10 damage to any weapon you can charge with, plus you get the benefits of having a way better range of engagement. The issue with this play pattern is it asks you to spend basically all elements of your turn engaging with it; you’re spending your action and movement dashing, and your bonus action becomes your attack action.
You then have to wonder what actual classes would be able to easily play with Charger. Monks, rogues, and rangers all have things they like doing with their bonus action, especially when fights break out. Barbarians sometimes don’t need to be spending their bonus actions each turn, but a lot of builds and subclasses involve getting extra stuff to do with your bonus action like the Berserker’s bonus action attack. Plus, barbarians want to be entering a rage, meaning the same turn you’d probably want to be engaging a fight with a dash you also want to be spending your bonus action on raging.
The other classes that might consider it are paladins and fighters, both of whom get extra attacks at 5th level. If you’re taking this as a 4th level feat, you’re getting one level where it isn’t costing you an entire attack to get the bonus charge damage. You’re not often going to need to dash to engage a fight; a lot of the time you can get on top of something and start swinging within the first round. In those fights, you’d much rather make more attacks than take one attack with a bonus d10 damage.
What makes this basically unusable to me is its competition. Great Weapon Master and Polearm Master both fit a lot of the same fantasies, but have a more flexible boon you can commit less of your build to while providing massive benefits. If you’re looking to improve a melee combat build, both of these options continue being great, and Great Weapon Master radically improves, as you gain levels. Charger just gets worse and worse as the opportunity cost keeps going up.
If you’re building a variant human you want to dive into battle fast and hard, Charger will shine. That’s basically it, though. If you’re level four or higher, Charger just asks you to commit too much of your turn to it. You’ll be better off with something else that works in tandem with your other features.
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