Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords
You'd think this literary allusion would be all over this book, but it's not.
The actual front cover of Tome of Battle is extremely uninteresting and you wouldn't think this would be one of the most important and divisive books of 3.5.
AncientH
The request was made, and so we answer it. Not without a degree of trepidation; Frank and I already suffered through an OSSR of Tome of Magic, and this book is arguably worse in many ways.
Frank
The Tome of Battle is a shovelware project nominally written for Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 and released in August of 2006. It contains 3 character classes and a single newish resource mechanic, all compiled into a sprawling piece of text bloat used to fill up a 158 page hardback. But despite the fact that it contains very little in the way of what you could generously call content, it was hugely controversial and considered extremely important by D&D enthusiasts both at the time and in retrospect. Structurally, it looks very similar to any of a number of bullshit books from late in the 3.5 development cycle like Dungeonscape or Races of Destiny, but this one was different and everyone knew it – though it wasn't actually revealed why it was different for a couple of years.
The obvious backstory is that Dungeons & Dragons has operated with a “Linear Warriors / Quadratic Wizards” paradigm for so long that it is the actual source of that description. Every level the Fighter gets measurably but slightly better at stabbing fools in the face, while the Wizard learns new spells which are substantially more powerful but don't lose access to their old spells. This makes them gain power and versatility as they go up in level. And the spells at higher level aren't more powerful in the sense of “being slightly better with a sword” but in the send of “turning elephants into mice” type shit. And people who played D&D had various ways of coping with this fact, which in many ways included either denying this obvious fact or claiming that it somehow wasn't a flaw in the system. Tome of Battle presented a paradigm with Quadratic Warriors – characters who were skinned like Fighters but who got to learn new vistas of special powers in a conceptually and mechanically similar setup as the Wizards. Obviously this is a potential solution to the Linear Warriors / Quadratic Wizards problem, but you can imagine how people who had convinced themselves that the previous paradigm was good would flip their shit. A lot of shit was flipped when this book came out.
The less obvious backstory is that Tome of Battle was cobbled together from an early draft of 4th edition D&D that was then scrapped. There's a bit of the backstory here, but basically the lead designer (Richard Baker) and lead developer (Mike Mearls) of Tome of Battle were on the Project Orcus design team and in February of 2016 they decided to convert the prototype of the Fighter, Swashbuckler, and Paladin from that edition-under-development into their 3rd edition as the Tome of Battle's Warblade, Swordsage, and Crusader (respectively). Two months later, Mearls and Baker convinced the rest of the Orcus design team to scrap Orcus entirely, but they still went ahead and published the bits they'd co-opted into the Tome of Battle under their own names four months after that.
As you might imagine, Tome of Battle caused an incredible amount of controversy, much more than some random piece of decadent late period D&D 3.5 shovelware typically did. While the WotC forums had the occasional person who just couldn't shut up about Psionics or kept writing about Magic of Blue or whatever, but mostly those books got tossed into the pond, made a few ripples, and were mostly forgotten about except as dumpster diving fodder for obscure and dubious builds on the char-op forum. But Tome of Battle made big waves. It came out swinging with some slaughtering of some sacred cows in order to address actual known problems of D&D. But it was also weirdly clumsy.
The conversion to 3rd edition rules wasn't actually complete, and the whole book didn't quite gel. Also it was still a shovelware book that had expanded a design document that was maybe 30 pages at most to a sprawling 158 shelf breaker by filling it up with ramble text. There was certainly ample ammunition for the haters – but there was also ample ammunition for the supporters. The Orcus project was obviously concerned with addressing actual problems that D&D actually had – and even this watered down bit of castoffs shows that there was some real design going on in WotC R&D before they scrapped it all and made the trainwreck that was 4th edition D&D.
So as we go through this book, we'll try to highlight areas where the pedigree becomes obvious – rambletexts added to pad page count, pieces where the proposed mechanics weren't 100% converted to be 3.5 compatible, and glimpses into what the Orcus project might have delivered as a 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons had the creators of this book not managed to convince the rest of the team to abandon the project and make a half-assed incomplete game with bad math in a tremendous hurry now that their entire design and development time was less than 2 years.
AncientH
Being a wizard is a power fantasy. The original concept of the mage in D&D was a bookish nerd whose vast intellect unlocked the ability to change the world around them - to restructure reality to suit their needs. And D&D delivered on that fantasy. There are relatively few high-level fighters in the NPC roster for the first three editions, but even a mid-level wizard could potentially dabble in things humans were not meant to know or breed red dragons and shih tzus together or something. Owlbears don't just happen: a wizard did it.
A wizard did it.
In the fantasy fiction that fed into D&D, warriors are usually killing evil wizards and sorcerers. Conan the Cimmerian made a habit of this, and he wasn't alone. Magicians were often allies or NPC-types rather than the main protagonists, because magic was usually mysterious and powerful and rare. This played into the power fantasy, and still does. So when D&D let players be wizards, they had an immediate issue: the balance point between what a fighter could do versus what a mage could do.
At the low-end, they tried to make the wizard weaker by giving them shittier attacks and fewer hitpoints. As thing progressed, fighters got more HP, better attack bonuses, sometimes access to fighter-only feats/proficiencies/etc. Every class could fight, but the Fighters were the best at fighting.
Well, nominally. Until the wizard could fry them before they could get close, or summon something that the fighter couldn't beat. Because the higher up you go in level, the greater the threats - and there are some things that can only take damage from magic. A magic weapon might help balance things out, but a Fighter is has to rely on luck for one of those to drop into their laps. The higher up you go in level, the worse the Fighter gets. Until at 21st level they get 3 hit points.
The magic-vs.-mundane fight is an old one in RPG circles; a lot of simulationist-minded types dislike the idea of mundanes needing magic to stay relevant...and it's not restricted to RPGs. Plenty of people wonder why the Avengers has a supersoldier, a god of thunder, a guy in power armor, a Hulk and...two human spies with some gadgets. There's a disconnect there, and not all the team members are able to contribute equally against all threats.
Which a lot of people are surprisingly okay with, to a point. That point is usually Superman. Once you have a character that is better at all the other characters at whatever it is they're supposed to do, you wonder why the hell you're here. Fighters don't want to just be the guys that pick up the kryptonite cursed items so the wizard doesn't have to do it. They want to contribute. And that's a tricky proposition, without nerfing wizards entirely - which is in part what Tome of Magic was trying to do: work on a way to have something that felt like a wizard but with less versatility and raw overpoweredness at high levels. The other side of the equation is to boost Fighters to the same point.
Earthdawn tried to get around it by giving everybody magical powers, and it worked okay. There was still a bit of a curve, especially at high Circles where the spells can get nuts, but it was an approach to a known problem.
This is another one.
Frank
After the un-numbered Introduction, the book contains 8 chapters. One of those chapters is the 48 page sprawling mess that is the maneuvers list. That one will probably take a post or two to rant about. The rest of the chapters are mostly pretty empty both conceptually and actually, and can be gotten through in much less than a post. For fuck's sake, the “monsters chapter” is literally just three monsters. I predict that the review will manage to put other bits into that part.
The Introduction of this book is three pages long, and is pretty much entirely made of lies. This book was an alternate path of development for a future edition that the lead designer and lead developer had already convinced the rest of the team to scrap. They were back converting it to an edition that they had already gotten the go-ahead from the higher ups to discontinue. It was, in short, a lame duck book in two ways. But the introduction does not say “This is a piece of design that we have personally lobbied to cancel that we are inadequately converting into an edition that we have also personally lobbied to cancel.”
AncientH
Two things to point out here:The world of the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS game is filled with characters who pursue the ways of battle. Barbarians destroy their foes in berserk frenzies, and rangers are masters of the hunt. Paladins rely on their virtue and courage to sustain them against their opponents. Fighters master an array of special maneuvers and attacks to overcome the monsters and villains they encounter. But the highest of a warrior’s arts is the Sublime Way—the secret
lore that teaches a fighting character how to meld his inner strength, training, and discipline into the perfect weapon.
The Sublime Way is not magical—at least, not in a normal sense. It is a fighting system that harnesses a student’s discipline and determination through knowledge, practice, and study. A master of the Sublime Way can perform martial exploits that are nearly superhuman—and, in fact, some of them actually transcend the natural.
1) Despite multiple attempts over the years to pad out the initial roster of core classes with alternate (and arguably more interesting) characters like Dragon Shaman, Hexblade, Ninja, Scout, Divine Mind, Soulknife, Spellthief, etc. none of them are presented here - and that's typical of the edition. Bloat had gotten to the point that nobody even bothered to try to promote the various options that were out there, either because they were too shit or marginal to bother with.
It's interesting to think what a D&D 3.75 soft reboot would have looked like if underperforming classes like the Fighter were retired and in its place you had options like Psychic Warrior, Hexblade, and Soulknife - classes still focused on combat, but with individual gimmicks and abilities. It doesn't solve the linear/quadratic problem, but it would have muddied the waters a little - especially if Sorcerer/Wizard had been retired in favor of Warlock, Shadowmage, and Dread Necromancer.
2) The emphasis on not magic is to maintain the mundane/magic divide, which is a token out there for fans that have sand in their craw about that. Which is weird, because if you dig into European history and mythology and suchlike, there's a fair number of warriors that learn how to cast at least one or two spells and have magic weapons and do impossible feats. But you get people that declare all such fantastic martial arts crap smacks of anime and manga...and so there's a weird almost racist undercurrent to the detractors.
Because D&D is traditionally set in a quasi-medieval Europe, and that is White Mythic Space. It's not like there weren't plenty of black people in medieval Europe - Moors in Spain, Turks in Eastern Europe, traders from Egypt, North Africa, and the Levant in pretty much all the major cities, some from as far away as India or potentially China - and there had been for centuries. There were black Africans in Roman Britain. But Tolkien doesn't have any in Lord of the Rings (the Southrons being explicitly invaders), and Robert E. Howard's Conan stories have the racial politics of 1930s Texas, so...it gets weird. Fans, sometimes without realizing it, get an image in their heads of a setting where everybody is white and doing their own European culture thing with no foreign influences whatsoever. Which is a racialist fantasy. And they resist anything that they think doesn't fit into that fantasy...which, because of the prominence of super-powered martial arts in anime and manga, they associate with Asia.
But, c'mon. Have you read some of the shit in Irish legends?
Frank
Perhaps the biggest negative reaction to the Book of Nine Swords was people who felt that it was obviously unbalanced. Certainly anyone who had convinced themselves that Fighters and Barbarians were a reasonable balance point to have would be given clear evidence that the characters in this book were more powerful than that. The characters in this book are more powerful than the Fighters and Barbarians of the 3rd edition PHB. That's not a qualified statement on my part, they simply are more powerful, in a simple and fairly dramatic fashion. They start pretty similar, and then when Fighters get their equivalent of three hit points the Warblade gets to gain access to new vistas of power and ability. You might think then that the introduction would be a good place to head off criticism of that sort, perhaps by explicitly drawing parallels to Druids and Wizards for whom this Linear/Quadratic growing power imbalance with the core swordsmen already existed. Instead, they fanned the flames of that sort of dissent as badly as if that had been their actual goal. The very first non-italicized paragraph explicitly states that warriors of the “Sublime Way” (that is: characters from this book) are “higher” than Fighters, Paladins, and Barbarians. Explicitly. It calls out specific character classes from the PHB and mentions that the character classes in this book are better.
I'm really not sure what the hell they expected to happen at this point. You can rather easily make the case that the Sublime Way isn't a bad thing to put into Dungeons & Dragons. Indeed, you can make a pretty compelling case that the Warblade is still significantly less powerful than any of the full casters that players normally play. At high levels the Wizards are summoning demons and teleporting across the continent, and while the Sword Sage is doing things far more impressive than hitting people with his sword now with an extra 2 points of damage, he isn't mastering time and space and collecting a harem of demon wenches or whatever. The authors of Tome of Battle decided not to do that. They played up the fact that they were making a power creep book – and then immediately get lost in the weeds about how they never came up with particularly satisfying fluff for fucking any of this shit.
You don't need to use magic to set your sword on fire in a fantasy setting.
The second paragraph pitches us the thing that would go on to being the Martial Power Source in 4th edition – a vague idea that some people would get vanilla action hero abilities instead of having an actual reason that they had superheroic abilities. So you can do level appropriate stuff that's nominally on par with what the wizards and psychics and shit are doing, but you aren't channeling divine energies or using magic or focusing your own psychic power or being a supernatural creature or anything. You are able to threaten metal giants that are one hundred feet tall because you are skilled with a sword and for no other reason.
There are obviously people who disagree with me, but the whole idea of warriors becoming “as powerful” as dragons and demons from a character level standpoint without letting them actually have powers is ludicrous. It created a world of cognitive dissonance. You tell me that these Martial Adepts can chop a stone wall in half, but they don't have super strength, they don't have magic sword swings. It's just the old adage “How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice.”
There are many easy enough ways to have a warrior with a sword be as powerful as a dragon or a titan, but you kind of have to commit to them actually having that much power.
Now D&D has Cloud Giants who are twenty feet tall and live on solid clouds. And the level system directly tells us that every single 13th level character is supposed to be comparably powerful. It's not like there isn't room for swordsmen who fight at that level by having super powers. There are plenty of heroes and monsters in legend who can float around on their own clouds and punch out a giant. But the Martial Power Source – and its predecessor the Sublime Way – tried to get there without going there. You can win an arm wrestling competition with a giant, but you aren't actually as strong as a giant. How the fuck is that supposed to work? No one knows. No one could ever explain it, and only the shittiest of 4rries invading from Something Awful even pretended it wasn't a massive shit sandwich of cognitive dissonance.
This resulted in the second complaint leveraged against this book: that it was “Too Anime.” Which isn't precisely right. Characters in the Final Fantasy generally do just plain “have powers” as explanations for why they have powers. Crono explicitly has lightning magic, so the fact that he flies around and chops dragons in half with his katana isn't for “no reason.” But it's very telling that we are two paragraphs into the book and we've already given two big reasons for potential fans to slam this book shut.
AncientH
There is an organic way to approach this, and that's just to have a cut-off for (demi)human potential. If human strength caps off at 18, for example, 19+ is superhuman. Which isn't a stupid or weird thing. Anime actually embraces this basic concept all the time.
Shonen Jump thinks you just aren't trying hard enough.
How you get to be superhuman isn't as important as the fact that you're there. That's what (Sp), (Psi), and (Su) tags on abilities are there for. Even the (Ex) tags are stretching things a bit. And it's not like D&D hadn't already embraced he idea that NPCs are crap, NPC classes are explicitly weaker than PC classes. So there's no reason not to embrace this as a way forward.
There were, of course, other ways forward. Sheer martial badassery has a certain appeal to it, and people that obtain superhuman skills and powers just by training hard is cool. But they could have gone other ways with it. You could be a Juicer who has special abilities based on steadily downing magical potions, and your body is changed to adapt to the strange and terrible chemicals you ingest regularly. You could be augmented with grafts and obtain superhuman powers that way. You could make a pact with a fae and instead of channeling your warlock invocations like they do, you channel them through martial invocations that give you superhuman powers. Maybe you willingly trap a demon within your body, and when you let it out during a demonic rage you transform into an infernal engine of destruction that's able to go toe-to-toe with dragons.
And those are still just a few possibilities. There are a shitload of potential ways to up your game...and they didn't want to go that route. It didn't fit with their conception of what a Fighter/Barbarian/Paladin could be.
Frank
The explanation for why Dungeons and Dragons uses charges for its spells and shit is not very deep. D&D came out of a table top wargame, and the magic users in that game had spell cards that they could play during the course of the battle. But that's not an in world explanation. Hell, it's not even an in game explanation. It's a historical explanation based on the context that Dungeons & Dragons used to be different and also used to be an outgrowth of a different kind of game altogether. And back in the 1970s, Gygax's explanations for why magic users used fire-and-forget spells was pretty bad. You “memorized” spells and then you forgot them when you cast them. And you could memorize the same spell more than once so you could cast it more than once. It was super dumb. And because that explanation was dumb, most of the D&D variants people made in the 1970s used some variant or another on Spell Points instead. It's not abstractly better or more balanced or anything, it's just that people were rebelling against a resource management system that had a clunky in-character explanation for how and why it worked the way it did.
Which gets to a larger point, which is that the explanations for these mechanics in-world matter in an RPG in a way that they don't in other forms of games. Like, in Monopoly the answer to why the Battleship isn't faster than the Flatiron is “Who fucking cares?” But in a roleplaying game, you don't have to keep moving in a clockwise fashion. You can stop and interact with the other characters and the environment. Because your pawns can move left or right just by you asking them to. Every part of the world is something that you could potentially focus on and interact with in novel ways. The question “how does this work for the characters in the story?” is absolutely crucial. It's a role playing game, you don't have to solve the riddle on the door, you can burrow in through the wall. Or whatever.
After 4th edition doubled and tripled down on ignoring in-character and in-world explanations for how or why anything happened, people came up with the fancy terminology “Dissociated Mechanics” to discuss this particular problem. But of course, when Tome of Battle came out in 2006, such terminology hadn't been invented to be discussed by the design community. Instead we were left with the simple fact that the explanation for how and why the resource systems of the character classes in Tome of Battle worked were inadequate and vaguely insulting.
In Orcus, characters work like a deck of cards. They have super powers that come online when they are drawn out of their deck and go into a used pile that gets reshuffled and managed in various ways under various circumstances. That's a perfectly reasonable way for a game to work, and there are certainly glimpses that show the game aspect of this might have worked pretty well if they'd spent more time listening to Gutshera and less time fucking around. But making this all work as a role playing game would have required the abilities to interact with the world. Ironically, the problem here was that it was too much Chess and not enough Anime. Can your superior martial arts strikes let you hammer in nails well? Can you use your leap attack to get boxes off of high shelves? What the fuck? When Ranma ½ isn't straightforwardly about puberty and gender dysphoria it's about using martial arts in novel ways to compete in bizarre contests of various sorts for comedic effect. Most adventures involve Ranma figuring out how to use their martial arts skills to make butter sculptures, ice dance, or play baseball. And while I doubt that those specific questions are ones likely to be asked in your particular dungeon crawl, the fact that you could answer such questions is what sets Dungeons & Dragons on a different level from board games.
In Tome of Battle, the character classes get resource management systems that have been lifted from the Orcus playtest package. And that's kind of it. The explanation for how any of it fits into the world when the characters are doing anything else than having swordfights with ogres is... pretty limited.
That's pretty much all you get. There are “small moments” of like insight or whatever and then those have game mechanical effects. It's not very inspiring, and was the kind of thing that ended up getting 4th edition accused of being “basically an MMO” two years later. And the thing is: it's not necessary. Coming up with explanations for resource management systems that aren't terrible isn't all that hard. 3rd edition D&D famously ditched the idea of “memorizing” a spell and called it “preparing” a spell. You didn't “forget” a “memorized” spell, you “used up” a “prepared” spell. The resource mechanic was identical, but the explanation was simple and easy to explain. And then the mechanic became an associated mechanic with verisimilitude and it was good. It wouldn't be very hard to come up with an explanation for why the Martial Adepts power system worked the way it worked, but Mearls and Baker weren't invested enough to even bother trying. And it definitely hurt this book's reception. How could it not?Book of Nine Swords wrote: the maneuvers of a Sublime Way master represent small moments of clarity, self-knowledge, piety, or perfection.
AncientH
It's really weird to think that one of the primary stumbling blocks of D&D is a failure of imagination, but that's really what we have here. It's not even that Shadowrun already had physical adepts and Earthdawn already gave everybody magical powers, it's that the tiniest toe dipped into the idea that fighters can have nice things too was so fucking taboo that that they felt the need to load it up with restrictions and caveats instead of just embracing that shit.
Honestly, they didn't even need to create maneuvers and try to hamfistedly apply Vancian spellcasting to a martial milieu. If they just let caster level = character level and let Fighters dip into a small list of spells as they leveled so they could throw some fire and lightning on their sword, that would go a fair way to balancing things right there. But they wanted to do things the hard way, which is why we got Tome of Battle.
Frank
The Glossary defines 13 terms relevant to the Sublime Way (but does not attempt to define “Sublime Way” because go fuck yourself) and takes most of a page. Some of these concepts are somewhat pointless. Like, you have an “initiator level” that functions like your caster level for purposes of martial adept maneuvers, but pretty much everything about this system would be better if every single time Initiator Level was referenced it just made a function call to your character level or base attack bonus or something. It's best looked at as a fairly cargo cultish attempt to convert this into 3rd edition rules. Crap like caster levels getting way out of line with character levels was a known problem and despite the fact that this book was made from the corpse of playtest documents for a new edition, they didn't take any time at all to try actually address any of the problems that people knew 3rd edition had.
This is quite simply very low hanging fruit. But Mearls and Baker weren't really interested in trying to fix 3.5, they weren't even interested in getting playtest data from the people at large. Contrary to what they'd claim once this book proved unexpectedly popular, they weren't trying to float ideas to inform the development of 4th edition. This book was DOA and they'd already killed the project four months before it was even released. So you'd think they would be taking time like this to check to see if people would accept abilities that triggered off of BAB instead of class level or something equally obvious – and you'd be wrong. These people weren't looking for feedback at all. This isn't a matter of sending out test balloons, this is a matter of trying to look busy and still draw a paycheck.
If you think of this entire event as The Producers, but for RPGs, a lot of decisions make a lot more sense.
AncientH
This as much as anything reminds me of part of the problem with Truenaming. The idea that skillchecks would somehow balance out the fact that powers were level-based disregards how badly served D&D3.5 was by its skill system, and the numerous and cheap boosts available. You can sorta see how in a different life they might have thought of this as something every class had to deal with - pay attention to what the key skills were for whatever your flavor of ability was - but again, it went nowhere. And we know what 4E did with skills.Key Skill: Every martial maneuver is tied to a skill, such as Balance, Concentration, or Jump. Sometimes key skills come into play in the initiation of a maneuver, but mostly they represent the ideals around which their respective disciplines are centered.
Frank
I'm not going to bother giving you the play by play on the italicized story sections. The framing device of the book is that there are nine legendary artifact swords that people have based martial arts schools around. This is super dumb because it limits the scope of the book tremendously. Instead of being a basic alternate take on warrior characters, it's like Elothar Warriors of Bladereach.
The final bit in the introduction is a sidebar that rants about how they are taking bits from martial arts movies and anime and video games to make a blended genre that incorporates aspects of East and West. It's not exactly a bad sentiment, it's just extremely... Poochy the Dog. When this book tells me that it's “not your parent's D&D” I'm just like “Dude, my parent's D&D was heavily houseruled Caltech rules that was maintained in three ring binders, I haven't been playing my parent's D&D since 1989.” But for all they are talking a big game about inclusiveness, this is all just very tone deaf. The fact that you think it's weird to have ninjas and kung fu monsters alongside noble paladins is why you shouldn't have been allowed to write an edition aimed at a younger audience. For fuck's sake, the Monk was in the Player's Handbook in 1978 – before I was even born.
I think the big issue here is that no one on this project seems to have any idea what characters do in source material. They aren't name checking Hercules and Cú Chulainn or even characters in modern fantasy novels like Wheel of Time or Jhereg books. The only things they specifically name check are videogames: Soul Calibur and Final Fantasy. And while those are reasonable pieces of source material, they aren't weird or surprising. And more importantly, they don't extrapolate to what characters are actually supposed to do at high levels.
Obviously, Soul Calibur is a reasonable piece of source material for D&D characters.
AncientH
I'm going to save my higher level rant for later, but I think it's worth emphasizing that D&D 3.x's focus on combat - especially square-based combat in a plot to sell minis - strongly emphasized a split between combat abilities and non-combat abilities which very much disenfranchises any character class which focuses almost exclusively on combat, because the majority of their abilities have no application outside of combat and any resource they spend on acquiring said abilities comes at the opportunity cost of their combat ability, which is their only fucking marketable ability. So you get trapped in a spiral where the Fighter is only good at fighting because if the Fighter does anything else then they're less good at fighting, and if the Fighter isn't good at fighting then what the fuck is the point of being a Fighter?
Frank
Next up: Chapter 1. That's the part where we actually talk about the character classes.
