Fighter Martial Archetype: Samurai 5e

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

The fantasy of the lone warrior with a single blade and an indomitable spirit in the face of overwhelming odds: this is the core and heart of the Samurai subclass. Almost none of the subclass actually delivers meaningfully on that fantasy, but it instead delivers potent generic fighting features that any genre or style of fighter can weaponize to do stupid amounts of damage.

3rd Level: Bonus Proficiency and Fighting Spirit

Bonus Proficiency instills the feeling of a samurai’s reputation and lore beyond the martial in theory by giving you a single bonus skill from History, Insight, Performance, or Persuasion alongside a bonus language. The skill proficiency is nice to have, certainly, especially when paired with Elegant Courtier at 7th level, but because Elegant Courtier only bolsters Charisma (Persuasion) checks, you’re highly incentivized to take that here. If you already have it, though, the skill selection is pretty reasonable with Insight and Performance both also being fairly easy to use skills day to day.

One bonus skill doesn’t really convey much of the fantasy on its own, though. You can get these skills from a background; with no mechanical advantages to them, any generic charisma based character with any class can outperform you in this field. You don’t get any new ways to highlight why your means of persuasion differs from anyone else's.

Fighting Spirit offers you a three times a long rest Reckless Attack with no downside: that’s really good, especially when you’re multi-attacking. At 3rd level it's fairly unimpressive, but past 5th it’ll feel great to use when you don’t have advantage.

My core problem with Fighting Spirit is it is both incredibly powerful, yet broad and applicable to basically any character. There isn’t a lot of flavor coming from Fighting Spirit; you just are great at hitting stuff basically whenever you want to be. The bonus temporary hit points are fine and all, but ultimately unimpressive in the broader scope of the feature. Ranged bowmen can get about as much out of it as a melee combatant, leaving this open to basically any kind of fighting style you’d like.
This isn’t entirely a bad thing, but it does lead to this subclass feeling generic to me. Fighting Spirit could be renamed any number of features to represent any other kind of martial prowess, and wouldn’t be out of place on a base fighter with zero flavor attached to it otherwise. This could be a Champion fighter feature and I wouldn’t bat an eye.

Still, the long rest shift in resources here does help the subclass fit in better at a wider variety of tables that are running fewer encounters between long rests, giving the option a more “nova” kind of feeling at those tables, while still performing well at the short rest based tables running six or more encounters per long rest off the back of the core classes features.

7th Level: Elegant Courtier

Elegant Courtier: what an odd duck of an ability. Nothing else in this subclass nor the fighter base class cares even a little bit about Wisdom, nor does the option bolster your Charisma beyond offering you this boon and a bonus skill. Fighters tend to care about Strength and/or Dexterity and Constitution; having a reason to invest in one of the mental ability scores is great, but this payoff is so minimal it's hard to justify sinking Ability Score Increases into it over just take more feats to empower your busted Fighting Spirit feature.

The bonus saving throw proficiency is fine and all, but given that one of your upper tier core features is Indomitable anyway I see this as ghoulish overkill. I’d much rather see a charm or inspiring effect here, some way to convey their courtley grace and use that to navigate socially in a different way than those around them. As it is, this reads kind of like a flat +1 or 2 to your Charisma (Persuasion) checks, and that’s just not enough of a new thing to do for me to get excited about it.

10th Level: Tireless Spirit

Tireless Spirit resolves a resource problem that the subclass can start to have as the game gets higher level and tables start to actually pace out more fights between long rests. Getting a use of Fighting Spirit every fight as long as your out encourages you to nova often and expend Fighting Spirits quickly so you can get more back when you head into subsequent fights.

This kind of feature is an important upgrade, but the kind of play pattern it encourages, once again, doesn’t scream Samurai to me. It wants you to recklessly throw your resources out, not take focused, measured approaches to fights. It wants you to go crazy and attack with advantage all the time to stretch your resource pool as far as it can go, and not in a way that helps you change up or get extra benefits that empower fights beyond just hitting more. It's good, for sure, and will keep you constantly feeling like you just can attack and burn your Fighting Spirits whenever you want, but I don’t feel like it's contributing or empowering any specific fantasy. It's just a generically good tool to help nova based characters with less punishment down the road.

15th Level: Rapid Strike

Rapid Strike might be the first genuinely interesting ability Samurai offers: you trade advantage for an extra attack. That’s an interesting trade off you’re probably always taking. It helps that the extra attack is usually being made with advantage because if you had advantage on one attack you probably have advantage on all your attacks, meaning it's really only upside. This one sells the fantasy a bit more than the Fighting Spirit abilities to me, as quick successive blows that leverage your advantage to me feels like honed mastery and less generic “better at attacking”, but not by much.

Again, Rapid Strike is a very powerful ability. This will often just feel like another extra attack. Getting advantage isn’t hard, especially when you can just toggle it on with a bonus action. A lot of characters like knocking things prone, frightening, blinding, or paralyzing enemies. If you’re playing alongside a character that wants to provide any of these conditions or other semi-supportive abilities, you can just go crazy with attacks here.

18th Level: Strength Beyond Death

Strength Beyond Death truly feels like a Samurai feature to me: a fighting spirit so intense death literally can’t stop you. It's a shame that the most thematically appropriate ability the subclass offers that sets it apart most from “person who attacks well” comes as its 18th level capstone. Getting an immediate extra turn is crazy powerful, and with the Second Wind ability you’ve been rolling with for the entire game, it's pretty clear how you can mitigate going unconscious while still continuing to smash the crap out of whatever threatens your life.

All Together

Samurai I think would be a better base subclass for new players than Champion. It has a simple mechanic and play pattern that fits well on basically any kind of fighter you want while providing you a small amount of meaningful decisions. Beyond a pretty bad 7th level feature and the capstone, nothing about this subclass screams Samurai to me. It could just as easily be named any other generic warrior type and I’d go “yup, that sounds right”. There aren’t any duelist bonuses, nor any ways to define the “indomitable spirit” outside Strength Beyond Death. The social element is a bonus skill and a bonus to one kind of skill check using an Ability Score you don’t really tend to care about that much.

You can do powerful things with Samurai. Advantage on all attacks on command is nuts, and getting to convert one attacker's advantage into another entire attack will make you feel like an unending flurry of blows. Sharpshooters and Great Weapon Master builds getting more attacks with +10 to damage is ludicrous, and crit fishing with half-orcs when you’re making five attacks with advantage a round will end up feeling like you’re critting every other turn at minimum. If that’s what you’re in the market for, this subclass will deliver, but it’ll still have all the pain points fighters have come to know when playing the game outside of combat, which is a pretty major detriment to the subclass to me.

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