Dueling 5e
When you are wielding a melee weapon in one hand and no other weapons, you gain a +2 bonus to damage rolls with that weapon.
Dueling 5e: Fighting Style Review
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
While I like the idea of Dueling for fighters, paladins, or rangers, I just haven’t ever seen a duelist character come together and be that satisfying or rewarding to play. It fits alongside the “sword and board” build fantasy, the longsword in one hand and a shield in the other, but you aren’t getting something that powerful or interesting for going this direction.
When I think duelist, I think of a rapier wielding fencer or a lone warrior with a single blade in hand engaging in an intense fight to the death with another single entity. Nothing about Dueling has anything to do with either. It is a simple payoff for wielding any one handed weapon, and not two-weapon fighting.
Which leads to my next issue with it: the comparative options put you in a clearly higher damage spot, and by a good bit. A greatsword or maul are each out damaging any single handed weapon by almost double, and two-weapon fighting gives you off-hand shortsword attacks for a similar outcome, even before fighting styles. The secret text of Dueling is that instead of using either of those tools, you’re allowed to wield a shield simultaneously, which in no way shape or form fits the broader spectrum of iconic weapon wielding duelists. The trade off you’re making is access to a better damage output which can be further improved by two excellent fighting styles for a Shield with less of the damage dropoff.
To make matters worse, Protection is an incredible Fighting Style for this archetype to pick up, granting you a consistent new reaction while wielding a shield, which again, is the only mechanical reason to consider Dueling in the first place. To want Dueling, you have to specifically be a shield wielding fighter, ranger, or paladin that prioritizes their damage output over getting new tools to help maximize your action economy. It takes a typical front line defender archetype and asks you to prioritize damage, and have that prioritization not scale with crits, level, or any other meaningful build options.
Dueling is a Fighting Style at its worst. It fails to deliver on many of the play pattern fantasies people want to take it for, is mechanically deeply boring, and is outclassed damage wise by almost every other comparative option. Its real value doesn’t even come with the represented text, and more or less requires using a shield to be considered at all. If you fit the specific niche archetype where you want to play the shield wielding frontliner that wants to just hit slightly harder with your spear or longsword, Dueling is for you. It's not for any of the skirmishing or one on one duelist archetypes; there just isn’t any incentive to go that route outside of the fantasy, and that fantasy is critically unsupported.
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