I love the Class Acts feature in Dragon. The fluff parts, which usually describe some organization or guild or school, don’t interest me that much. It’s the new player content that interests me. By the same token, I love the [Class] Essentials feature, not so much for the optimization and strategy bits but for the new powers and feats, which serve to fill in gaps in the possible applications for a character class.

Between these two columns and other odds and ends, the game grows incrementally, with each addition ultimately serving to make character creation more flexible and allowing characters to be more tailored to a specific concept, without dramatically altering the game itself.

A case in point is the new Class Acts: Fighter article, which serves up a brief description of a school of fighting that emphasizes flexibility and familiarity with multiple weapons.

It contains one new feat, Weapon Master, which allows you to extend the benefits of Weapon Focus and Weapon Expertise (both of which are prerequisites) to all your proficient weapons. It’s a good feat… useful but not overbalancingly powerful. It might be tempting to compare it in terms of “Wait, so you can get expertise and focus with every weapon a Fighter can use by taking three feats?”, compared to spending two feats per weapon… but realistically, you can’t use more than two weapons at a time and in the absence of a feat like this there’s very little reason for a Fighter to not focus on one weapon. By itself, it makes a character who dual wields different weapons that much more viable by saving them a feat. They’ll still spend one more feat on weapon-fu than a character who uses a single type of weapon, and that’s without getting into weapon-specific specialty feats.

That’s the feat in and of itself. However, the article includes a number of powers with “Weapon Master” in their name. Each of them have the following mechanics: they allow the Fighter to switch weapons as a free action as part of the attack (sheathing and drawing a new one), and they have a variable special effect depending on whether the Fighter is wielding an axe, heavy blade, mace, or spear/pole. Suddenly being expertised in more than two weapons makes sense.

The remainder of the powers in the article come in two other categories: new stances, which seem to be particularly Defendery (upping the Fighter’s defenses or allowing the Fighter to take on risk/damage to protect allies and/or end the fight sooner), and shield maneuvers.

Taken together, the new feat and the power selections would allow you to make the flexible weapon master described in the fluff. But just as the real appeal of LEGO sets is in the way you can take the pieces from them and add them to your collection to make exactly what you want, so, too, is that the real magic of these articles.

Above, I mentioned the advantages of the Weapon Master feat for a dual-wielding character. While the Weapon Master powers let you switch off between weapons for free, they don’t require it. You could make a character who uses a mace in one hand and a sword in another, using a two weapon attack power for one at-will and the Weapon Master at-will power for the other. With the growing number of melee classes that have two-weapon builds, there are a lot more options here than just a Tempest Fighter.

And said character could still take full advantage of the weapon-switching properties of the Weapon Master attack.

And then, there’s the possibility of using the Weapon Master powers while still specializing in a single weapon… making the name and its singular case a little more literal. At level 1, the new at-will power Weapon Master’s Strike provides the equivalent of a new power specialized for any of four of the major weapon groups, with the quick-draw/quick-change effect as icing on the cake.

For instance, if you’re playing as a spear-and-shield Fighter, you could choose to ignore the fact that they’d also give different bonuses if you chose to use a sword or axe or mace, or keep one of those as a back-up weapon. A Hybrid Fighter/Rogue with Ruthless Ruffian talent could pick up a great positioning power for mace. Any Defender using a spear could benefit from the added “stickiness” of the spear’s effect under Weapon Master’s Strike, which allows an opportunity attack if the target shifts after being hit. Actually, since Fighters already have the ability to make an attack if an enemy shifts, other classes might benefit more from this. A Bard who uses a mixture of bow and sword powers and who has Combat Virtuoso could take one of the Weapon Master encounter powers in order to be able to switch from ranged to melee quickly in a pinch. Actually, that’s true of any character, but that’s one of the builds that will have the easiest time switching between bows and swords, stat-wise.

Even if 4E hadn’t brought improvements to the feel of other classes, it would win major points from me for actually making Fighters interesting.