1 New Fighter Archetype - The Gladiator
4 New Combat Manuevers
1 New Weapon - The Reinforced Net
1 NPC Statblock for an Expert Retarius
Historically most competitive warriors have been lightly armored, Dexterity based, fighters. These brave souls needed to avoid getting hit in order to have anything like a successful career. This is why we feel tanky barbarian-like builds are actually all wrong for making gladiators.
This martial archetype is intended for use in conjunction with the Fighter class options as presented in the Players Handbook and Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. It is an attempt to enable players to recreate the standard types of ancient roman gladiators without limiting players to those types. This structure, with the fighting styles and feats from the books above, is equally able to create a modern prize fighter or a competitive fencer as well as the more typical sand and sandals circus dweller. Hopefully we’ve managed to create a framework that allows the creation of some interesting competitive fighters, whilst remaining balanced and not overloading on complexity.
- from the publisher's blurb