Fighting with Shields

Yesterday, Wizards finally released a new D&D Insider subscriber-only article that I've been waiting to see for some time: Fighter Shield Options.  Not long after 4th Edition was released, I couldn't get the silly notion of a character wielding two shields out of my head.  It had just the right sort of pulpy ridiculousness that games like D&D are good for.  (I tend to be a fan of ridiculous things, fictional or otherwise, so long as they're not blatantly offensive.)

Sometime after I'd considered the idea, I thought about how I would make it work.  Should it be as simple as a feat or as complex as a new class?  I kept coming back to the idea of either a multiclass path, similar to the Spiked Chain Mastery path in the Playing Shadar-kai article from Dragon 372, or a paragon path with some key requirements.  I hadn't settled on what the requirements should be; one version of the paragon path had these prerequisites: "Any martial class or defender role, proficiency with light shields and heavy shields."  Some versions required proficiency with the spiked shield, while others granted it.

What's interesting about the new "Class Acts: Fighters" article is that none of the new feats, nor the paragon path provided, grant a character the ability to wield two shields, even though the paragon path is specifically designed with features which require a character to be wielding two shields.  On the other hand, the only reference of being unable to wield two shields is in the description of the spiked shield in the Adventurer's Vault, not in the Player's Handbook or any other Core materials.  The problem is that wielding two shields doesn't further boost one's defenses: since shields provide shield bonuses to your defenses, rather than untyped bonuses, two heavy shields merely overlap and grant the same bonus to AC and Reflex as one heavy shield (disregarding any features which might increase this).

The paragon path in the article circumvents this by allowing a character to increase the bonus from one of their shields while wielding two shields.  This amounts to the same as wielding one light shield and one heavy shield (and gaining bonuses from each), so one can never have bonuses as high as two heavy shields conceptually could grant, but it's more than we had before.  In any case, the article does introduce new magic items, all of which are enchantments for any shield which allow that shield to be used as a melee weapon, in addition to other benefits.  The assumption of this article seems to be either that there is, in fact, no rule against wielding two shields — merely that there's normally no benefit to doing so — or that shields which can be used as weapons, such as these magic shields or a spiked shield, do not count toward the number of shields you're using, if we trust the rule introduced in the spiked shield's description.

One thing that's clear is they're finally planning to add weapon enchantments for the spiked shield, as any of these new magic items could apply, though they only go through the upper paragon tier so far; there are no such items for the epic tier yet.  Perhaps we'll see some new enchantments later, while we wait for these updates to be added to the Character Builder and Compendium on May 4.  The essential design scheme seems to be for a character to wield a heavy shield and a spiked shield simultaneously, though in a sense, the spiked shield has been made virtually obsolete by these enchantments.  Since they can be used on any shield, the spiked shield doesn't have a substantial purpose past 1st level, unless your character has the need for a shield with the light blade and off-hand properties.  I'm sure they'll create new rules and errata for all these things later in the year.  In the meantime, at least it's a step toward something I've wanted to see for a while.