Bugbears - Surprise Round, Sneak Attack, and Stacking Reach https://rpgbot.net/dnd5/characters/races/bugbear/#classes

We had a question about Eldritch Claw Tattoo and Bugbear come up last week, I finally remembered to look it up. The consensus seems to be in line how I initially ruled it (the tattoo sets the range to 15, so a bugbear can decide to attack at 10 feet on their turn or 15 feet).

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/wiygak/dms_how_would_you_rule_the_reach_of_a_bugbear/

After re-reading Long Limbed and Eldritch Claw Tattoo, I'd consider changing the ruling.

Long Limbed. When you make a melee attack on your turn, your reach for it is 5 feet greater than normal.

Eldritch Maul. As a bonus action, you can empower the tattoo for 1 minute. For the duration, each of your melee attacks with a weapon or an unarmed strike can reach a target up to 15 feet away from you, as inky tendrils launch toward the target. In addition, your melee attacks deal an extra 1d6 force damage on a hit. Once used, this bonus action can't be used again until the next dawn.

Eldritch Maul sets your "normal" reach to 15 feet, so anything that extends the reach of that is probably fine. We're giving Brudiclad an extra 5 feet of range at the expense of his bonus action (important because Surprise Attack is the bigger deal here).

Plus, there's a fairly significant downside to Eldritch Maul -- since your base range becomes 15 feet, provoking opportunity attacks is much more difficult. Enemies need to outside of your 15 ft range before provoking the attack.

Monsters of the Multiverse also did some weird wording with surprise attack that we'll want to discuss.

Surprise Attack. If you hit a creature with an attack roll, the creature takes an extra 2d6 damage if it hasn’t taken a turn yet in the current combat.

The surprise condition is weird because it prevents you from doing anything on your turn but it doesn't skip the turn:

Surprise If you’re surprised, you can’t move or take an action on your first turn of the combat, and you can’t take a reaction until that turn ends.

So contrary to what it's called, if something rolls a higher initiative than the Bugbear... Surprise Attack does not work on that creature. The older version of the Bugbear would be able to use Surprise Attack but the newer one does not.

You still need to roll well on initiative to make Surprise Attack matter.

The wording on Surprise Attack is important here because of the way I typically do reinforcements -- they should up at the end of the round and have they typically don't get their turn until the end of the next round. This means Surprise Attack applies to them even though it's round N of combat (it's not just the first round).

Long story short.. The Alert feat (or getting any bonus to initiative... :wave: Gift of Alacrity) is important for the Bugbear.