Gator Grips

Greetings adventurers!

Reptiles are amazing creatures once you give yourself the chance to understand them. Few have that kind of patience though and often see them as a nuisance. I would argue instead that we should learn from these cold-blooded creatures and see what can be gleaned from their practices. They’ve survived for thousands of years without our intervention, so perhaps we should owe them more than a passing glance of disgust. One particularly fascinating creature to me was the quintessential sit-and-wait predator, the alligator. So much to learn.

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Design notes from Matthew:
When I say that I approach the 5E and PF2E designs as completely different exercises, I’m not sure everyone believes that until I get to something like this where they’re completely different items essentially in how they perform and function. I always try to make sure to make the best item for the system, but that sometimes means that I essentially write two completely different styles of item in one week. That’s just kind of the nature in balancing for two systems though.
On the 5E version, this is very much a basic tool offering the trip functionality and some better odds at actually making a grapple stick. One of the things about 5E is that the grapple system is contested and split between athletics and acrobatics meaning that most creatures will have a higher modified ability to escape a grapple. This means any additional bonus to those checks has an outsized importance in gameplay. Couple that with modified unarmed strike damage and a trip function, this makes the 5E version relatively powerful though it reads less exciting.
On the PF2E version, I needed to be careful not to step on the toes of gauntlet users. That’s why I chose not to include unarmed strike damage or to really even make these weapons. Instead I needed to find something else to balance around so I went with improving your trip abilities to do additional damage and also offer the opportunity to trip without a free hand meaning you can have someone grabbed, be holding a weapon, and still trip which is something you can’t do normally. That plus the bleed puts the power on a different action, which I think is a fun option.

Sometimes a word triggers an item and sometimes a name comes first. In this case, this was just Fernando saying he wanted to make something with this name and we decided that we could write mechanics to that pretty easily. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to work in different orders based on what we have in our heads.

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