OSSR: Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords

[TiaC]

The Swordsage really isn't a swashbuckler. It seems to be a catch-all for all the not-quite-mundane and sneaky types. Its schools show this. It gets the blasty, throw some fire with your sword type of gish-flavored school, the meditative focus willpower school, the martial arts with throws and holds school, the shadowdancer school, the generic hit things school that everyone gets, and the TWF school. So, if all these schools worked as well as they should, then you could make a Duskblade, a Monk, a Shadowdancer/rogue or a swashbuckler. They don't, but you can see what they were going for.

• The Crusader selects a deck of 5 cards and every turn they draw two cards from that deck. When they run out of cards (which they will do on turn 3), they reshuffle and start over. Now what happens to the maneuver cards still in your hand when you reshuffle isn't entirely clear, so what happens on turn three when you are asked to draw two cards from a deck of one is somewhat vague.

It's not quite as confusing as that. The Crusader only draws one card per turn, so you never end up unable to finish your draw, and in the talk about withheld maneuvers, it says that "a new pair of readied maneuvers is granted to you. Randomly determine which of your maneuvers are granted and which are withheld." which isn't great, but seems to say that other than that pair, they are withheld.

[Thaluikhain]

Eh, looking at this more from a AD&D perspective, bit old fashioned me, when I think about a fighter but with magic stuff, my first thought would be the Paladin. Couldn't you just give the Paladin more abilities to make it competitive with wizardy types, keep the concept, just expand and improve it? And given that Paladin abilities tend to be more focused on demons and undead than say, lobbing fireballs, you could adjust the proportion of demons and undead to balance Paladins with fireball mages.

Though, you are stuck at lawful good, you'd might end up cheapening the concept by letting evil players have their version (and neutrals, or just not allow neutral players).

EDIT: Also, tags.

How does that fix the fighter?

I was thinking you give up on that, you just say the Paladin is close enough.

[Ancient History]

The only thing that makes the Paladin really acceptable as a character concept is tradition. It's incredibly narrow in focus (Lawful Good theist gish), and if it wasn't core people would say it sucks. The only real advantage is that it's a fighter-type that can cast healing spells and buffs, which is absolutely enough - if it were better balanced. As it is, spellcasting doesn't come online until you're 4th level if you have high enough bonuses. And it has dead levels and probably a few class features (Mount) you don't want.

The Paladin is not the template of a good gish class. With enough extra options and feats it might aspire to be the starting chassis of a half-decent build. But it's not something you want to use to design other things around. The Crusader and Incarnate might not be great, but they at least cater to a few different alignments.

[Ignimortis]

This and the 4E OSSR at the same time? It's like Christmas. Which I guess is seasonally appropriate.

Imagine me waking up on my birthday and finding a freshly started OSSR of my favourite 3.5 book here!

Yeah, if you just took tier 3 off of JaronK's list, renamed a few things, and filled in the obvious gaps, you'd get by far the best game in this rules-heavy D&D-clone space. There's lots of important design work that could and should be done to improve on 3.5's formula, but you wouldn't have to, because the competition is not even close. Which after a decade just makes me feel embarrassed for everyone involved.

Thousand times yes to this. I remember learning that Pathfinder existed...and then realizing that they didn't fix anything wrong with 3.5. And then I realized that Paizo still sold books like hot cakes, because while 3.5 and its' closest derivations are flawed, they're still better than most things on the market, and ten years after 3.5 lost official support there's still no proper successor.

Still, making a 3.5 version balanced around high T3 of JaronK's list would probably resolve a lot of problems with the game. Not all of them, but probably more than half.

[Iduno]

Eh, looking at this more from a AD&D perspective, bit old fashioned me, when I think about a fighter but with magic stuff, my first thought would be the Paladin. Couldn't you just give the Paladin more abilities to make it competitive with wizardy types, keep the concept, just expand and improve it? And given that Paladin abilities tend to be more focused on demons and undead than say, lobbing fireballs, you could adjust the proportion of demons and undead to balance Paladins with fireball mages.

Though, you are stuck at lawful good, you'd might end up cheapening the concept by letting evil players have their version (and neutrals, or just not allow neutral players).

EDIT: Also, tags.

How does that fix the fighter?

Could you just rename the fighter to "trap option" and call it a day?

Edit: beaten

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Tome of Battle

Chapter Three: Blade Magic



Our music today will be Tiger Style by Wu Tang Clan. NSFW, obviously.

AncientH

For all the card-shuffling mechanics and feat nonsense which determine how the new subsystem interacts with the existing systems of D&D, Tome of Battle was going to live and die on the spells maneuvers, including whether or not they were any good and whether or not you got access to them. D&D3 had already successfully shown with the Sorcerer and the Psion that being able to access a specific subset of powers on demand rather than a more generic hodge-podge of powers they had to prepare in advance was a viable concept, so that part of the heavy lifting was already done.

They just had to be cool and useful. This might be chapter 3, but this is the hook.

Frank

Before we can get to the maneuvers, this book explains how they work some more with a 10 page chapter. Now you may be wondering how that is fucking possible considering that the description of how you decide what maneuvers you have access to and when you can use them again was two chapters ago. The answer to that is that there's a lot of prerequisites and ranting about the different schools of sword not-magic.

Every maneuver has prerequisites. You have to be high enough level to use it, which is referenced but not defined back in the character classes. Most higher level maneuvers have a prerequisite number of other maneuvers from the same school you have to have before you can take them. Note: after the first couple of levels a majority of the maneuvers you know will be “up trades” where you exchange a maneuver of a lower level for one that's level appropriate to you now; and while it is crucially important whether the maneuver being exchanged counts as one of your “X maneuvers of Y School” when upgrading, the book doesn't seem to bother explaining whether it does or not. A lot of words are expended on some very simple concepts, but actual questions you have when actually trying to make these characters are generally ignored. It's not “like” they never bothered trying to make these characters, it is literally exactly that they never bothered trying to make these characters. Schools of maneuvers have an associated skill, which probably was supposed to be important at some point, but it really isn't.

The question on how uptrading works isn't a minor thing. Let's consider an example 6th level Warblade. They know six maneuvers, and before turning sixth level, they have one first level, three second level, and two third level maneuvers. They can then trade one of the first or second level maneuvers for one third level maneuver if they want. They probably do want to do that. But there's the thing: there are five martial schools that Warblades have access to, and if you wanted either of the White Raven maneuvers (which you do), you need to have the prerequisite of having one White Raven maneuver. So the question of whether you need to meet the prereqs during the trade rather than just before and after is a really big deal.

Aside from the senselessly baroque means of determining whether you're allowed to take a particular maneuver, and the repeated attempts to get me to give a flying rat's ass whether a particular strike that does bonus damage is shadow style or tiger style, there's very little meat here.

AncientH

The "uptrading" thing is both an answer to the issue with Psions, Sorcerers, etc. where picking your powers at lower levels may not give you the abilities you need at a higher level; this was also something sort-of addressed in Tome of Magic where your lower-level abilities were supposed to upgrade as you leveled up. All three are expressions of chasing the quadratic dragon, trying to keep the character's abilities viable as they increased in level.

The prerequisites are probably the most obvious difference between maneuvers and spells. You don't need X Illusion spells to take shadow magic as a Sorcerer, for example, and this really feels like a bit of an artificial limitation to get players to devote most of their maneuvers to one discipline or another...which they could have done a lot more easily if they'd just had Martial Adepts which were the equivalent of specialist wizards, with forbidden schools and bonuses.

I feel at this point I should talk about different ways D&D3 tried to implement martial arts previously, like the styles in Oriental Adventures, but I'll be honest they really don't have any comparison to this as far as I'm aware.

Frank

This books uses a lot of text to tell us that things that aren't spells are not affected by people's spell resistance. Also that they aren't affected by arcane spell failure and that the “casting” can't be interrupted. Things that you wouldn't think would have to be said at all, and indeed don't.



Martial Powers, which despite the fact that that is 4th edition terminology is what this book explicitly calls them at some points, are conceptually equivalent to Wizard spells only in the level and power structure. They are not actually spells in any other sense. It's an action that has a level-based effect and its charge is expended when it is used, and that's about where the comparison to spells ends. There's no particular reason to think they'd be disruptible and definitely no reason to have a separate heading to talk about each thing that actual magic spells do in D&D that these maneuvers don't do.

Basically it looks like the authors of the book got lost in the weeds of the game balance justification for these things as being a source of real confusion for the process of using them. That sort of confusion is certainly possible, but really the very most any of this needed was a heading “Maneuvers aren't spells” that simply ran through a list of all the signature D&D spell properties that maneuvers didn't have.

AncientH

To be fair, they go through pretty much the exact same shit for psionic powers, incarnum soulmelds, and I think artificer...uh...<looks up> infusions, among various and sundry other options. Spells are the basis for so many effects in the game that players and designers both get fixated on them and how they work.

Sortof.

You still don't see a lot of discussion of cross-pollination. It's presumably kosher to combine any unarmed attack maneuver with a use of Stunning Fist, or for a Soulknife to use any maneuver that requires a sword with their mindblade, etc. It's a little more ambiguous about trying to do an unarmed attack with maneuver and trying to deliver a touch spell. I also can't see anything where it says if you can initiate a maneuver while raging.

So kind of a "anything not forbidden is allowed?" Maybe?

Frank

The Book of Nine Swords uses 4th edition's timing system. Maneuvers generally speaking are Standard, Minor Swift, or Interrupt actions. And people didn't especially notice because while this was all pretty much gibberish if you were reading this just after the Player's Handbook, D&D 3.5 had increasingly but gradually adopted an action system that was pretty much like this. Tome of Battle is pretty much the first book that is written from the ground up assumption that the action economy looks like this, and it works well.

I talk a lot of smack about 4th edition D&D, but the action economy is genuinely streamlined in a way that's mostly pretty OK. The only complaint I really have is that the limit on reactions to one per turn really limits design space since you can't have rider effects for bonus movement and shit. Also, there's a lot of weird incompatibilities between things that use Minor Actions that trod on each other's toes in dumb ways. In this instance, every reaction is a “counter” maneuver, and every swift action is a “boost” maneuver, and people being limited to one per round works well in this book.

What's interesting to me is that of the few genuinely good things you can say about 4th edition, many of them were locked in before people even started to work on the draft that became the released version of 4e. Tome of Battle was based entirely on Orcus, and clearly uses the Move/Minor/Standard paradigm. But what's even more interesting is the fact that while this system worked pretty OK in 4e, it worked considerably better in Tome of Battle. And that's precisely because the whole Minor Swift Action was an afterthought that didn't appear in the basic rules. It meant that the cost of using a Boost was exactly and exclusively that you used up a card in your hand, it didn't have an additional variable cost of freezing you out of using one of your other Swift Action options, because you didn't fucking have any. On the flip side, in 4th edition they gave out various Minor Action options all over the place, so powers that used Swift Actions were sometimes freezing you out of doing important shit. But you know, sometimes they weren't.

The big issue is one of Boosts. A Boost takes a Minor swift action, which in 3.5 you probably won't be using for anything else because the action type didn't exist when the core rules were written. A Boost that does anything at all is simply a raw powerup for what you could be doing that turn. However, every turn you use a Boost (or a Counter for that matter) is a turn where you're likely to be using 2 maneuvers instead of 1. That means that for Sword Sages and Warblades, the cost of Boosts and Counters is that it is less rounds of combat before you run out of cards in your hand and have to spend a round refilling your hard. Crusaders never run out of cards, so the only cost to having Boosts and Counters in their deck is that if they draw too many of them they don't have a Strike to use. The Crusader thus just always wants to have enough Boosts and Counters in the mix that it's not possible for them to fail to draw a Strike. That's a somewhat interesting matter of deck management, and the authors of this book don't talk about it. At all.

AncientH

In general, martial maneuvers and stances that create supernatural effects are transparent to magic or psionics. However, martial maneuvers rarely interact with spells or powers.

You need a couple other books to actually parse this.

Combining Psionic And Magical Effects
The default rule for the interaction of psionics and magic is simple: Powers interact with spells and spells interact with powers in the same way a spell or normal spell-like ability interacts with another spell or spell-like ability. This is known as psionics-magic transparency.

Psionics-Magic Transparency
Though not explicitly called out in the spell descriptions or magic item descriptions, spells, spell-like abilities, and magic items that could potentially affect psionics do affect psionics.

When the rule about psionics-magic transparency is in effect, it has the following ramifications.

Spell resistance is effective against powers, using the same mechanics. Likewise, power resistance is effective against spells, using the same mechanics as spell resistance. If a creature has one kind of resistance, it is assumed to have the other. (The effects have similar ends despite having been brought about by different means.)

All spells that dispel magic have equal effect against powers of the same level using the same mechanics, and vice versa.

The spell detect magic detects powers, their number, and their strength and location within 3 rounds (though a Psicraft check is necessary to identify the discipline of the psionic aura).

Dead magic areas are also dead psionics areas.

Which is probably a point where it's nice to say that we don't have to deal with "psionic maneuvers" or "incarnum maneuvers" or any of that shit.

Frank

In general, you get new maneuvers and stances by going up in level and having your level-based numbers of maneuvers and stances go up. Also, starting at level 3 you can and therefore generally do trade one of your lower level maneuvers for a higher level maneuver every level (normally this will be one of your lowest level maneuvers being traded for one of your highest level options, save for a few outlier maneuvers that are wildly better or worse than other options).

There's also an incoherent rant about designing new maneuvers at a merely ruinous cost in time and XP that further requires a skill check that in turn requires you to cheat up some skill bonuses to have a reasonable chance of success. Which then goes back to the DM to make something up basically. There isn't actually any real guidelines as to what a maneuver should be capable of at any particular level. If you make a 3rd level strike, what can it do? What should it be able to do? The authors don't know and don't care, how could I possibly answer that question?

AncientH

Every one of the 9 disciplines has one key skill and 4-6 weapons, mostly non-exotic. If they ever expanded this thing, I'd fully expect to see some race-specific disciplines, just to make sure Elves get nice things. There doesn't seem to be a lot of consistency or synergy between a lot of the weapons chosen vs. the skills chosen. Like, Setting Sun and Shadow Hand both include "unarmed strike" because they're ninja/monk styles, but the key skills are Sense Motive and Hide respectively.

Mostly, these are suggestions instead of anything being hard-coded. Some maneuvers might use the key skill, some abilities reference the weapons, but otherwise they don't play a huge role. Noticeably absent are a lot of favorite exotic weapons and unusual weapons (shields, for example)

Chapter Four: Maneuvers and Stances

Frank

Because of the book's framing, there are nine schools of stabbing people. This is too many to keep track of, and they aren't nearly different enough. Like, I could design nine fantasy martial arts I suppose, but I'd want to make them a lot more different than these are. Like, I don't know what the conceptual difference is supposed to even be between Devoted Spirit, Iron Heart, and Diamond Mind. Those sound exactly the same to me when you read their names out, and they pretty much sound exactly the same when you read their short, medium, and long descriptions too. And the abilities granted to any of them seem pretty much interchangeable. At 9th level, one of those gets Disrupting Blow, one gets Daunting Strike, and one gets Dazing Strike. Like fucking seriously, without looking at the page I have no fucking idea which one goes to which discipline and even if you swapped the effects of the different attacks I wouldn't spot it. One of those gives your opponent a potentially significant penalty for 10 rounds and one makes your opponent lose their action for one round, can you guess which is “Disrupting” and which is “Daunting?” Fuck.


These Swords look suspiciously similar.

The fact that there are nine of these fucking things also ill-serves the book in terms of how many maneuvers are actually written. A Warblade at 14th level has potentially three 7th level Maneuvers. None of the disciplines have three 7th level Maneuvers. It's literally impossible to be a 14th level Warblade who does a single discipline. And 7th level maneuvers require that you have three other Maneuvers in their discipline before you can select them. It's actually quite easy to imagine a 14th level Warblade who simply can't select their 7th level maneuver trade-in because they already have both 7th level maneuvers from their favorite discipline and don't have the requisite three other maneuvers in any of the other disciplines.

AncientH

It's worse than that because the disciplines also don't have any sort of balance as far as number of maneuvers per level. There are two Devoted Spirit maneuvers at 2nd level - that's it. Desert Wind has four. Why does Desert Wind have four? Because they're mostly about setting shit on fire, and those are easier powers to write.

A natural question you might ask is how maneuvers line up against spells of the same level. Well, when it comes to combat-oriented, damage-dealing spells...they do okay at low levels. A 3rd level Sor/Wiz spell is fireball, which does 1d6/level (at 6th level, that's 6d6); the 3rd level Psi power energy burst does 5d6 damage; the 3rd level Psychic Warrior power Exhalation of the Black Dragon deals 3d6 damage to a close target; the 3rd level Desert Wind maneuver Fan the Flames is a ranged touch attack deals 6d6 fire damage. I'll let Frank rant about this in more detail, but if you were below class level 6 I'd say your mystic martial artist would probably at least hold their own with a Psychic Warrior, Psion, or Sorcerer/Wizard.

Outside of that? Well, there's no utilitarian spells, not unless you're using Stone Dragon's Fury to turn big rocks into little rocks or Leaping Dragon's Stance to help jump over a wall or something, which is more "getting creative with things" than anything else. It's kinda like how you can be an almighty sorcerer that knows how to cast a fireball but can't actually light a candle.

Frank

This is a White Raven.

Your music for this particular part of the rant will be Eliza's Aria. Not because it's one of the greatest pieces of classical music of the 21st century, although it is. But because it's from an Australian Ballet about swans. In English a “black swan” is an idiom referring to an unprecedented or probably impossible event. But importantly there actually are black swans. They just live in the Southern Hemisphere and they aren't weird or special, they are just over there. If you go far enough away from England, black swans are just a normal thing that exists.

Which gets to the White Raven Style. It's a kind of stupid name. White ravens are simply an uncommon but not abnormal coloration of Ravens. White Raven was by far the most popular power set in this book, because it has some very good mechanical effects. Weirdly, in 4th edition they incorporated a bunch of references to White Ravens, possibly inaccurately thinking that people thought the name White Raven was really cool. We did not. White Raven abilities were sought after because they manipulated the action economy and were very very powerful. White Raven Tactics literally trades a Swift Action for your ally getting an extra Move, Standard, and Swift action. If they spend that Swift Action on White Raven Tacticsing right back things get super stupid.

AncientH

Some of the disciplines are specific to one martial class or another, which seems...counterintuitive to me. If you're going to make it so only Swordsages take Desert Wind, then why not just have a Swordsage list and be done with it? Does Desert Wind need to be a separate discipline? Fucked if I know.

In one of their occasional confusing choice of nomenclature, a number of the Devoted Spirit maneuvers are named "Aura of X" - these have nothing to do with the actual concept of auras, which is a complete different game mechanic used by the Dragon Shaman and other classes, or any other use of the word "aura" on the part of any subsystem of D&D. In a better world, an aura would be a keyword which would interact with other keywords, so that you could do things with it. But here, it's just a generic title. Boo, hiss.

Frank

The biggest question when it comes to game balance is “are fifth level maneuvers the equal of fifth level spells?” And the answer is no. I mean, it's not even close. It's not remotely close. A fifth level maneuver is like a single Stunning Fist attack from a 10th level Monk. It's basically just whatever. If Dazing Strike was pretty much exactly what it is now except that it was a 2nd or even 1st level maneuver, I don't think anyone would notice or care.

This is why the balance argument for Tome of Battle is actually pretty easy. While the maneuvers are structured in levels similarly to how spells do, they aren't as powerful as spells. Even the “broken” ones that manipulate the action economy aren't as stupid as what Conjurers, Necromancers, and Enchanters can get up to with minionmancy.

There is broadly no real idea of what a maneuver is supposed to be capable of at any particular level. In a general sense, 4th level maneuvers are mostly better than 2nd level maneuvers, that isn't always or exclusively the case. Basically this all works as a proof of concept more than an actual system.

Which of course is the major tragedy of all of this. This did act as a proof of concept. Despite the half- or quarter-assed implementation, it's very obvious that both the maneuvers and stances and the weird card hands of maneuvers were totally viable. The experiment works – at least as a proof of concept – and the people in charge of it canceled the project anyway.

AncientH

Some of these seem...weirdly unfinished. Case in point:

SHIELD COUNTER
Devoted Spirit (Counter)
Level: Crusader 7
Prerequisite: Two Devoted Spirit maneuvers
Initiation Action: 1 immediate action
Range: Melee attack
Target: One creature

As your opponent prepares to make his attack, you bash him with your shield and disrupt his attempt.

As an immediate action, you can attempt a shield bash against an opponent you threaten. This attack is made with a –2 penalty. If your shield attack hits, your target’s next attack automatically misses.

You can use this maneuver immediately after an opponent declares an attack, but you must do so before the attack’s result has been determined

Some notes:
1) Nowhere does it say that you have to have a shield as a prerequisite for this maneuver. It just assumes that if you want to do this maneuver, you have a shield at hand, and that the enemy is close enough to bash.

2) Shields are not weapons associated with the Devoted Spirit style.

3) Does this apply against casting spells? Backstab attempts? Can you use it as many times per round as you have maneuvers? How does this work with being flat-footed or surprised?

Some of these might have been answers buried in the previous ten pages of rules, but fucked if I'm going to dig through them. I'm still wondering why the Devoted Spirit has shield maneuvers. This isn't necessarily a bad maneuver, except that at 7th level it's just letting you hit somebody before they hit you - provided said person is within hitting range and you have a shield. Honestly, at 7th level I would expect you to be able to deflect fireballs or something

Frank

The Maneuvers list is 48 pages long, and there's a lot of shenanigans in here. Probably the whole next post will just be us talking about it more.

[maglag]

Noticeably absent are a lot of favorite exotic weapons and unusual weapons (shields, for example)

The spiked chain is right there in Shadow Hand.

Nobody ever cared about any of the other 3.X exotic weapons.

Also shields aren't classified as weapons in D&D, they're classified as simply shields. You can attack with them yes, but can't, say, give them weapon magic enhancement because they aren't weapons in the first place.

Some notes:
1) Nowhere does it say that you have to have a shield as a prerequisite for this maneuver. It just assumes that if you want to do this maneuver, you have a shield at hand, and that the enemy is close enough to bash.

2) Shields are not weapons associated with the Devoted Spirit style.

3) Does this apply against casting spells? Backstab attempts? Can you use it as many times per round as you have maneuvers? How does this work with being flat-footed or surprised?

1) That's why it says you "can" attack with a shield. If you don't actually have one, you just wasted your maneuver and action.

2) Because, again, they aren't classifed as weapons in D&D in the first place, you can't have a flaming vicious shield just like you can't have a sword of fortification.

3) Depends if the spell is an attack or not (check invisibility's text, some spells break it and others don't). You can't ready the same maneuver multiple times and only have one immediate action per turn so can't spam it. You also cannot use an immediate action if you are flat-footed. C'mon, those are things covered in the very basic srd!

[CapnTthePirateG]

White Raven ALSO let you fantasize about being a badass leader of men whose mastery of tactics empowered the team and let you play a master strategist. Sure, nobody cared about the flavor of White Raven but people did like the idea of 4e warlords.

[Ancient History]

Not that this is any excuse, but it's been a long time since I thought about any of the nitty gritty bits with D&D3 combat arms and armor, and I always manage to forget how many moving parts it has. Especially since I'm pretty sure I had a character that actually took Shield of Thought and many of the stupid shield feats. Which probably deserves a commentary at some point about how many weird incremental feats were devoted to the relatively marginal practice of the shield bash, especially with the apparent armor/weapon discrepancy.

Fuck, this reminds me of Hackmaster where there was a specific build about dual-wielding shields so you could get double the AC bonus and just hit people with them. Urgh.

[deaddmwalking]

@Maglag - you're wrong. You can enchant a shield as a weapon. But none of the AC bonuses apply to the weapon or vice versa. You could have a +2 light shield +3 flaming burst - people didn't do it because it was stupidly expensive and you lost the shield bonus when attacking with it.

A shield could be built that also acted as a magic weapon, but the cost of the enhancement bonus on attack rolls would need to be added into the cost of the shield and its enhancement bonus to AC.

There were also a lot of other exotics that were important. Basically anything that you could apply racial weapon familiarity to was often used. I remember making a dual-wielding parrying elven-thinblade wielding character. He was not a drow.

[Dean]

Shields are weapons, they're listed under "Weapons" in the list of weapons in the PHB. Tower Shields are not so make of that what you will but light and heavy shields, both spiked and not, are listed under "Weapons".

[Username17]

I've had two different characters who used the Dwarven Waraxe. One was a Dwarf, and got to use Martial Weapon Proficiency to use it, and it was strictly better than the Battleaxe. And the other was a Wizard who was non-proficient regardless and only used it to make coup de grace attempts where again it was strictly better than the battleaxe. I didn't have much in the way of static bonuses, so I was better off with the Dwarven Waraxe than with the Pick for the same purpose.

True story.

-Username17

[Koumei]

If you look hard enough you can find weird exotic weapons in books that have specific reasons you want to use them: scorpion claws specifically because you're a grappler, the scourge-as-presented-in-a-dragon-article-and-not-the-shitty-CWar-one because it only does 1d3 damage but "for every attack you would normally make, you instead make three attack rolls" (Hi, Sneak Attackers! Hi, guys with huge Strength Bonuses!), a few other "I can't believe it's not a spiked chain" types (Meteor Hammer), "warhammer but better" (Greathorn Maul?), or if you're in a "strict RAW game, I don't care what you THINK it should be" then the Scorpion whip which apparently does 1d43 damage for a Medium character.

So... you're looking for niche instances but some of them can sometimes be useful or "it'd be nice if something gave me proficiency with that for free". Maybe having these martial schools cover a broader array of exotic weapons and explicitly giving you proficiency with all weapons keyed to a school for which you have at least one maneuver.

Also, I knew a guy who made his own Fiendish-Style flavoured one. Which was another supernatural Swordsage style one, but themed around words that 4E Warlocks ended up stapling to the names of their powers. "Weave of Phlegethos", "Gelugon Strike" etc. But his spelling was atrocious, and almost every instance of "Fiendish" became "Finnish". I asked someone from a neighbouring country (who therefore would in no way be biased and would absolutely provide an insightful reply) who said "same thing".

[maglag]

Shields are weapons, they're listed under "Weapons" in the list of weapons in the PHB. Tower Shields are not so make of that what you will but light and heavy shields, both spiked and not, are listed under "Weapons".

With a "special" clause and telling you to go look at the armor section, but ok I admit to have misremembered things. Seems like they can actually be magicked as weapons, it's just a defensive enhancement that won't apply to attack/damage rolls.

So... you're looking for niche instances but some of them can sometimes be useful or "it'd be nice if something gave me proficiency with that for free". Maybe having these martial schools cover a broader array of exotic weapons and explicitly giving you proficiency with all weapons keyed to a school for which you have at least one maneuver.

Even Frank can only remember a whooping two times he bothered using a non-spiked chain exotic weapon, one of those was in an homebrewed games where the exotic weapon was made martial so it wasn't even an exotic weapon anymore and the other was for the lulz since when was the last time it mattered what you use to coup-de-grace somebody, they're already helpless, punch them in the balls for style points. So that's still not caring, that's a statistic error at best.


Mind you there's actually been quite a lot of homebrew disciplines made out there and a good chunk of them cover those obscure exotic weapons somebody out there cared for at a moment.

[TiaC]

Even Frank can only remember a whooping two times he bothered using a non-spiked chain exotic weapon, one of those was in an homebrewed games where the exotic weapon was made martial so it wasn't even an exotic weapon anymore and the other was for the lulz since when was the last time it mattered what you use to coup-de-grace somebody, they're already helpless, punch them in the balls for style points. So that's still not caring, that's a statistic error at best.

If you are going to try being a rules lawyer, it would help to know the rules.

Weapon Familiarity: Dwarves may treat dwarven waraxes and dwarven urgroshes as martial weapons, rather than exotic weapons.

[jt]

The only thing that makes the Paladin really acceptable as a character concept is tradition. It's incredibly narrow in focus...

Gish character concepts often have surprisingly narrowly defined abilities. Heal, buff, smite evil: Paladin. Telekinesis, suggestion, an exotic magic weapon crafting feat: Jedi. Animate dead, wears black: apparently enough to be a Death Knight. And these are popular ideas that people are happy with in practice.

That doesn't mean every single one of them should get a unique class, because you're right, the paladin class is hella narrow. But it does suggest that most of the gish classes should have narrowing options built in. You can definitely do a full-featured and distinctive gish for every Wizard school, and fit them in one class writeup without too much headache. Similarly, a better Paladin might be entirely built around their god's domains.

[Emerald]

Because of the book's framing, there are nine schools of stabbing people. This is too many to keep track of, and they aren't nearly different enough. Like, I could design nine fantasy martial arts I suppose, but I'd want to make them a lot more different than these are. Like, I don't know what the conceptual difference is supposed to even be between Devoted Spirit, Iron Heart, and Diamond Mind. Those sound exactly the same to me when you read their names out, and they pretty much sound exactly the same when you read their short, medium, and long descriptions too. And the abilities granted to any of them seem pretty much interchangeable. At 9th level, one of those gets Disrupting Blow, one gets Daunting Strike, and one gets Dazing Strike. Like fucking seriously, without looking at the page I have no fucking idea which one goes to which discipline and even if you swapped the effects of the different attacks I wouldn't spot it. One of those gives your opponent a potentially significant penalty for 10 rounds and one makes your opponent lose their action for one round, can you guess which is “Disrupting” and which is “Daunting?” Fuck.

I think this complaint is somewhat overblown, as (A) the schools are pretty obviously different when you look at their actual capabilities and (B) magic has a similar issue.

Regarding (A), you get a good sense of the disciplines once you actually play an initator, or at least start looking to build one. Devoted Spirit is the healing, alignment-smiting, and melee control/tank discipline that's basically "paladin lite;" Iron Heart is the multiattack, self-buffs, and parrying discipline that's basically "fighter lite;" Diamond Mind is the Concentration-focused, action-manipulating, single-huge-attack discipline that's basically the stereotypical samurai.

Regarding (B), there are eight schools of magic with names that aren't immediately obvious as to their theme and function ("Abjuration" and "Evocation" and such are fairly archaic, "Conjuration" and "Evocation" sound the same on the surface, "enchanting" means making and item while "Enchantment" is mind magic, and so on), and there's overlap in spell effects too (Conjuration gets a lot of the same blasting Evocation does, sadly; Enchantment, Illusion, and Necromancy all get [Fear] spells in subtly different flavors; Abjuration is a grab-bag school of effects that could also go in other schools, and so on), and they even list maneuvers in the summary list by level and then by school like wizard spells are laid out in spell summary lists.

So yes, the discipline flavor text sucks and the names are unclear in places, but once you start actually using the stuff in play the problem effectively goes away.

Outside of that? Well, there's no utilitarian spells, not unless you're using Stone Dragon's Fury to turn big rocks into little rocks or Leaping Dragon's Stance to help jump over a wall or something, which is more "getting creative with things" than anything else. It's kinda like how you can be an almighty sorcerer that knows how to cast a fireball but can't actually light a candle.

There's some more utility scattered around there. Desert Wind grants limited flight and enough fire resistance to deal with environmental effects; Diamond Mind lets you detect invisible things; Shadow Hand gives you invisibility, short-range teleportation, and air and water walking. It's nowhere near spellcaster levels of versatility, obviously, but it's definitely head and shoulders above most martial types.

Some of the disciplines are specific to one martial class or another, which seems...counterintuitive to me. If you're going to make it so only Swordsages take Desert Wind, then why not just have a Swordsage list and be done with it? Does Desert Wind need to be a separate discipline? Fucked if I know.

Probably for more playtesting purposes. In 4e as published, every single class has its own unique power list, but powers are similar enough that all of the cookie-cutter powers like "XdY plus Z stat plus push N" or "N attacks for X[W] damage" or whatever have to be reprinted in endless slight variations, which is a pretty darn inefficient way to do things. Instead of the Fighter getting Sure Strike for Str+2 vs. AC for [W]+Str damage with a melee weapon and the Ranger getting Careful Attack for Str/Dex+2 vs. AC for [W]+Str/Dex damage with a melee/ranged weapon, they could just have a power list (call it the "Accurate" list or the like) with [stat]+2 vs. AC for [W]+[stat] as an available power, along with other powers with attack boosts or rerolls or similar accuracy-boosting mechanics.

So it's entirely possible that in Orcus they did try to group the multiattack powers here, the mobility powers there, the defensive ones over there, and so forth, so in addition to a handful of class-specific powers they could say that e.g. Fighters have access to the Accurate, Multiattack, Shields, and Debuffing power list and Rangers have access to the Accurate, Archery, Dual Weapons, and Skirmish power list, which gets you ToB where you have 9 disciplines parceled out to 3 classes and some are shared while some are unique to a given class.

[Username17]

Yeah, I don't know why maglag keeps insisting on own goaling himself so hard, it's kind of weird. I thought bringing up two perfectly reasonable reasons to use an exotic weapon that don't involve actually spending a feat on EWP was pretty much the mic drop on that part of the discussion. And I still do.

Anyway, the specific Paladin of AD&D through to 3e D&D is indeed way too narrow. But Final Fantasy Tactics has Paladins that happen to be evil and no one thinks that's weird. It's pretty easy to just do a Paladin class that doesn't have an incredibly narrow faction requirement on it. It's a perfectly reasonable term for heavy warriors who glow and shit. Frankly, it's a better term for the Cleric than "Cleric" is. And I'd suggest ditching the Cleric and making the Paladin generic.

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

If you ditch the Cleric, what replaces the healer?

[Chamomile]

You can replace a healer with a magic item that casts healing spells at the same rate per day that the Cleric does. If you're playing the Cleric as a healer, they're basically just an expendable reserve of extra hit points. That's not a class, that's a medkit. You can still have support classes in general. Handing out buffs and temp HP and such is an actual combat role that makes sense. The healer, though, is someone who has to choose between using their expendable resources to actually do stuff or else as a bucket of bonus HP for everyone else.

[erik]

If you ditch the Cleric, what replaces the healer?

Hopefully a wizard.

Back in the day when I played Living Greyhawk it seemed like almost a rule that every party had to have a cleric. Whenever people mustered there was always at least one doof who insisted we needed a cleric. One of my most successful and most fun adventuring parties was in a module that reportedly had sweet rewards for arcane casters, so we played with a table of 6 arcane casters since nobody wanted to take the hit and miss out. We roflstomped every encounter so bad, we didn't need healing.

[CapnTthePirateG]

Crowd control is a hell of a lot more effective than healing, because you just don't take the damage.

[JonSetanta]

I see your points.

And for 1000 gold you can get a slotless magic item that casts Cure Minor Wounds on the whole party 1 HP at a time between battles so there's no worry about resting to heal.

[Username17]

If you ditch the Cleric, what replaces the healer?

I would assume that the Paladin would still have healing abilities. The Cleric is a bad class conceptually because there's no reason for devotees of different religions to have the same role. You expect priests of Crom to be basically Berserkers, priests of Thoth to be basically Wizards, and priests of Azathoth to be basically Cthulhu. The fact that you have a flow chart for what kind of channeling and what kind of domains different Clerics get is a tacit admission that those characters shouldn't be sharing the same class space.

A Priestess of Lolth should be a Necromancer who happens to have religious authority and a Priestess of Sune should be an Enchantress who happens to have religious authority. And so on and so on.

In any case, healing should be available to sufficient numbers of characters that if you don't have a healer you still aren't in the position of telling one of the players that they "have to play a Cleric". They ideally should be able to play a Paladin if they wanted to be a warrior with healing, but also a Necromancer if they wanted to be a wizard with healing, or an Alchemist or Bard if they wanted to play a hybrid with healing. If healing is to be a necessary ability, it needs to find itself distributed across every supported class archetype so that players can have the healing the party needs without being forced to play a type of characters they don't want to play.

This is why the 4e Leader role was exactly wrong. If you're going to have Defenders, Strikers, and Controllers, you should have examples of Defenders, Strikers, and Controllers that have mission critical abilities. If trapfinding is mission critical, you should have Defenders and Controllers that can do that. If healing is mission critical, you should have Strikers and Controllers that can do that. If dispelling curses is mission critical, you should have Defenders and Strikers that can do that. And so on and so on.

-Username17

[jt]

It might be cleanest to make the Heal skill able to cure actual hit point damage. Then half the party takes it and whichever healer is still standing patches everyone up when the combat is over. Use something like healing surges to limit the total healing per day if you want to use damage as your fatigue mechanic.