2024 D&D Build Guide - Fighter Champion

Champion Fighter's Helm September 16, 2024
dnd dnd-5e build-guide

This guide will show you how to build a simple but effective Fighter with the Champion subclass using the D&D 2024 Player’s Handbook. The Fighter is a martial class meaning it relies more on physical weapons than spellcasting, and martial classes are often more heavily armored than spellcasters. The Champion subclass is straightforward and effective.

This guide contains downloadable PDF’s for the character at levels 1, 4, 6, and 8. That should be enough to get you through a lot of gameplay if you’re starting a new campaign at level 1. I believe that both the Fighter class, and Champion subclass are contained in the 2024 D&D Free Rules! Even better!

Remember, this is just a guide, you don’t have to follow everything to the letter!

Imagination

In my head I imagine the Champion Fighter as a knight of the round table, the king or queen’s personal bodyguard and champion, or a knight in shining armor doing good across the land. A classic fairy tale hero.

Build Philosophy

The main philosophy behind this build is simplicity. It relies on a single 2-handed weapon and uses the Champion sub class, a historically straightforward class. As others have said before me, the Champion subclass takes the base Fighter and makes everything about them a little bit better.

Your goal as a martial class, specializing in up close melee combat, is to put yourself on the front line, keeping the enemies away from your more vulnerable allies. In D&D, being in melee range of someone generally means that you can get an opportunity attack if they try to move away, so try to “lock down” as many enemies as you can.

You will also have limited ranged abilities to pick off the stragglers, but you’ll excel at up close melee.

Champion Fighter's Armor

Building the Fighter at Level 1

At level 1 the Fighter gets Strength and Constitution Saving Throws, can use all armor and most weapons, Our Fighter will rely on Strength, so we’ll focus on traits and abilities that compliment that.

For a Fighter’s Core Traits we want the Athletics and Intimidation skills. While Intimidation uses Charisma, which we wont be strong with, but there aren’t any other skills that we can take that depend on strength. So before the sword comes out, try using your words!

For our Fighting Style we’ll take Great Weapon Fighting which pairs beautifully with our weapon of choice, the aptly named Great Sword! The Great Sword rolls 2d6 for damage, and the feat allows us to treat any 1 or 2 rolled, as a 3. That means the weapon does a minimum of 6 damage before we factor in any bonuses.

We also get Second Wind which is a great bonus action ability to regain some hit points in or out of combat. If you’re in combat and don’t have anything to do with your bonus action, try topping our your HP.

Finally we need to select 3 Weapon Masteries. Weapon Masteries give your weapons some added oomph. Some trigger on hit, miss, or have other conditions. For the first Mastery I chose the Great Sword since that will be our primary weapon. The graze Mastery makes it so that when we miss, we still deal a little bit of damage to the target. This is great for when you’re fighting a single target, and especially a spellcaster if you’re trying to interrupt their concentration.

The second Weapon Mastery is for the Javelin since we’ll get some as starting equipment and it is a strength based range weapon, albeit with limited range. So if you can’t reach your target, lob a javelin at them, and trigger the Slow Mastery if you hit them. This reduces their speed by 10, which may help you catch up to them if they’re trying to run away.

The third Weapon Mastery is a bit of a toss up, so feel free to change it, but I went with the Greataxe for the Cleave Mastery. Cleave let’s you attack another nearby creature if you hit your first target. Take out the Greataxe if you have a horde of goblins nipping at your ankles. (Note that you don’t start with one, you’ll have to buy one when the DM allows).

Champion Fighter's Sword

Background Selection

The background can be an integral part of your back story and how you would like to roleplay your character. Feel free to select something more suitable to your ideas for this character, just keep an eye on what ability score increases you’ll get. The feat is generally less important as all of them are useful.

For the Background Origin I chose Farmer, picturing a strong farmhand who aspired to be a noble knight, and ventured out to fulfill his dream.

The background nicely fits with the mechanics of the Fighter, providing the Tough feat which simply provides an additional 2 max HP at each level. For ability scores I increased the Strength by 1 and Constitution by 2.

The Farmer Origin also provides proficiencies with Animal Handling and Nature, as well as the Carpernter’s Tools.

Species

Species is another one that you can change freely. All species are powerful in their own way.

For species I chose the classic tried and true Human. Humans get Heroic Inspiration back on a Long Rest. They also get an additional skill, for which I chose Persuasion. Hopefully our Knight is Noble and chooses Persuasion before Intimidation.

The highlight of the Human is their additional Origin Feat. Use this to add some more flavor to your build, or go with something like what I chose: Savage Attacker. With Great Weapon Fighting we already can’t “roll” lower than a 3 on our attacks, but Savage Attacker allows to roll the damage dice 2 more times in an attempt to get one or both dice at 4 or more!

Napkin math time: On a d6 die, you have a 50% chance to roll 1-3 or 4-6. So the odds are in your favor that each time you hit and roll damage, you’ll get at least one die at 4 or above, and maybe even both. Imagine these rolls:

Languages can be whatever is available to you, I chose Elvish and Goblin. Maybe you studied Elvish in your free time after the farm work was done, and learned Goblin from befriending Goblins who wanted to raid your farm.

Champion Fighter's Gauntlets

Abilities

For abilities I went with Standard Array, which is good for most people starting out. That gives us these values to apply how we want to our stats: 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8.

I chose:

I definitely recommend keeping the Strength and Constitution values, as those are core starts which effect a lot of your abilities and your HP. They’re probably now boosted to 16 if you went with the Farmer Origin.

Side note: Bonuses from stats are gained from every 2 levels of a given stat. Meaning that a 10 and 11 are essentially the same. The only major difference comes when you’re trying to plan a character build and the “half-feats” you’re going to choose. Half-Feats give you a special bonus as the feat, but also give you an ability score increases of 1 to a chosen stat.

For the other 4 values, you can switch them around as you choose. I chose 13 for Charisma to match the feeling of a friendly knight who comes to your rescue. 10 for dexterity since it’s not too important for use since we’re relying mostly on strength. Wisdom is 12, just cuz. And Intelligence is our dump stat at 8.

Maybe your knight is a bit of a bookworm or has aspirations of spell casting? Switch the stats around.

Champion Fighter's Greaves

Equipment

For starting I chose the Chain Mail/Great Sword option to make this build easy to setup. For the Farmer equipment I chose the item set and not the gold. That way you don’t have to think too much about what else you would have brought with you from your old life.

And that’s it for level 1. Go start saving the king, queen, or even the kingdom! Read on for when you level up!

Level 2

At level 2 you gain the Fighter’s infamous ability Action Surge! It let’s you take one additional “regular” action. In practice that means you can probably double up on your main attack action, which above 5th level grants extra attacks. So for example, at 5th level you could attack twice, and then use Action Surge to attack another 2 times! It gets even better later on. You also gain Tactical Mind at level 2, which let’s you use Second Wind to instead help you pass an ability check.

Level 3

At level 3 you gain Improved Critical where you can crit on a 19 or 20, instead of just a 20. So now your base crit chance is 10%! You are also now a Remarkable Athlete and you have Advantage on Initiative rolls and Strength (Athletics) checks. You can also move a little bit when you crit.

Level 4

Level 4 is your first ASI (Ability Score Improvement) which you can use to instead take another feat: Great Weapon Master. This can be used to increase your Strength to 17, and gives you even more damage when you hit with your Great Sword. The feat also provides Hew, when you crit, you also get to use your bonus action to attack once with your Great Sword.

Level 5

This is a fun level up! You gain Extra Attack which let’s you attack twice when you use your Attack Action.

Whenever you activate your Second Wind with a Bonus Action, you can move up to half your Speed without provoking Opportunity Attacks.

Level 6

Another ASI will be used to take the half feat Heavy Armor Master, which can be used to bring your strength to 18. It also provides Damage Reduction which provides, you guessed it, damage reduction from regular melee attacks.

Level 7

At level 7 you get another Fighting Style. Blindsight is pretty cool and may come in handy in a pinch.

Level 8

Another ASI brings our Strength to the normal limit of 20! Our Strength bonus is now +5.

And beyond

From here on out feel free to use future ASI’s on whatever you think is most helpful, or take feats like Resilient to boost your Saving Throws in other areas.

PDF’s

Below are links to the sample character’s on D&D Beyond. They’ll be around for as long as I maintain the subscription. I have also provided PDF’s of the sample characters, which will never go away as long as GitHub exists.