OSSR: Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords

[Wiseman]

This brings me to another point. 1/encounter limitations were a terrible idea. Replacing them with 1/minute serves about the same purpose without also involving horrendous amounts of metagaming.

[maglag]

You seem to have missed the Blood in the Water stance.

Bag of Rats tricks have been with us since people noticed the interaction between Whirlwind Attack and Great Cleave. Blood in the Water is more abusable because it lasts for multiple rounds and does more than instakill one adjacent opponent per bag of rats. But we also know that Blood in the Water wasn't something that the designers noticed or cared about when writing this book or deciding that it needed to be condemned.

Funny thing is, Whirlwind attack was fixed in 3.5 since it gained a clause that using it meant you gave up on any extra attacks. Besides, it was a two-piece combo.

But Blood in the Water is a 1-piece combo that explicitly states that it stacks with itself ad infinitum, so I find it really hard to think the devs didn't do it on purpose. Although I can buy that they just forgot that coup de graces count as auto-crits.

This brings me to another point. 1/encounter limitations were a terrible idea. Replacing them with 1/minute serves about the same purpose without also involving horrendous amounts of metagaming.

I recall the binder having a bunch of their abilities in 5-round "cooldowns".

[Iduno]

So just saying, doesn't seem like the designers had any shits to give about proper power distribution in 3rd edition and just threw stuff at the wall.

And also all editions that aren't 3rd.

[Username17]

This brings me to another point. 1/encounter limitations were a terrible idea. Replacing them with 1/minute serves about the same purpose without also involving horrendous amounts of metagaming.

Defining things in terms of scenes and story beats isn't necessarily wrong. It's just incompatible with exploring a dungeon that is drawn on graph paper.

As long as you're tracking some of your story in seconds and feet, trying to track some other parts of your story in chapters and scenes is not going to work. Or at least, it's not going to work easily. When talking about Heinsoo's disastrous 4e D&D, it's hard to not keep going back to his more successful project Feng Shui - which did in fact use narrative timing and narrative locations. In that game the spotlight explicitly and directly skipped from interesting scene to interesting scene and the distances and directions between important locales was handwaved and ignored.

Is that wrong? No. It works for some games, especially games aspiring to a "lighter" play style. I would argue that it's a pretty poor fit for Dungeons & Dragons, which is a point you could make over and over again for so many of the design choices they attempted to run with for 4th edition.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

For Dungeons and Dragons, you want a ruleset that is capable of abstractifying stealth missions and commando raids differently.

In D&D, every time you walk down a hallway, knock down the door (with or without alerting the occupants), and fight the monsters in the room, you want to handle it in detail.

If you were playing an Assassin's Creed RPG, you'd want to handle sneaking down every hallway in the king's palace in the same way. But in D&D, you don't - you want to handle the commando raid (in which you're going to fight most of the opposition sooner or later, it's just a question of terms of engagement) on a square-by-square and hallway-by-hallway basis, but you want to abstractify stealth missions and long distance travel. Significantly, this is because everyone in the party is a small-unit combat expert - while the knight is going to be twiddling his thumbs a bit on the non-combat stealth mission.

Inevitably, adding such an abstraction layer leads to some elastic units of time. If I roll a navigation test and it effects "this journey" - do I benefit from owl's wisdom? The proper answer, I think, is to design the abilities in your game so that the question doesn't come up.

[jt]

I'm okay with "encounter" or "scene" as shorthand for "recovered after a five minute rest" or something similar to that, as long as this is actually written down somewhere prominent.

I'm actually not that sure that per-encounter abilities were ever actually a good idea though. Things like the ToB recovery mechanics and dragon breath recovery have some drama to them because they introduce a pattern of strong and weak turns. If you have true per-encounter abilities though, you just blow all of those then either the combat is over (and your other abilities are meaningless) or the combat is not (and now it's slow).

Also to back up Frank's point on nobody having read the entire spell list - the entire character-optimization community missed that casting Awaken on trees is goofy powerful; colossal is just moderately above-average size for an oak tree. It's not the strongest thing in the game or anything, but they're permanent and stronger than Black Tentacles or the party's fighter for 250xp a pop. And that's a spell that starts with an A.

[Windjammer]

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 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.

This is historically inaccurate. Frank Brunner was the original designer for the entire book and delivered a COMPLETE manuscript to WotC. Rich Baker then transformed Brunner's manuscript into something else entirely - something that was a lot closer to (what turned out to be) 4e. Mike Mearls had next to no input on the actual design stage, and was only there to add very insubstantial changes in the name of development at the tail end of the production.
The source of this information is a couple of PNs I personally exchanged with Frank Brunner in 2008; our hope was to run a behind the scenes feature (for a German RPG magazine) on the gestation of this book. Unfortunately, the feature never materialized.
In short, Tome of Battle was intended to be a 3.5 supplement, and designed as such, but was transformed by Rich Baker to be something else entirely - a 4e test run, much like the 3.5 supplements the Denners detest, and rightly so.

[Username17]

I have no doubt that Frank Brunner feels that his baby was wronged by whatever was done to his baby. However, I don't think the evidence is much in the favor of his timeline. Frank Brunner gets third author credit on the Tome of Battle that actually got produced. And here is James Wyatt's description of what happened in the "middle of the development process" for something that ended in February 2006:

This recommendation accompanied a rather difficult stunt accomplished in the middle of the development process: Baker, Donais, and Mearls translated current versions of the Orcus I mechanics into a last-minute revision of Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords. It was a natural fit, since Rich Baker had already been treating the Book of Nine Swords as a “powers for fighters” project. The effort required to splice the mechanics into 3rd Edition were a bit extreme, but the experiment was worth it.

Tome of Battle was actually printed in August of 2008. Presumably the draft had been done for months, but the Orcus I cannibalization happened months before that.

The "Nine Swords" framing was clearly there before they started pulling in ability refresh mechanics and shit, but no one cares because the stuff about an ancient Elvish citadel called Whiteraven is the part of the book no one even reads. Seriously, whenever it starts word salading you about the lineage of fighting styles, people just skim the book until the mechanics start again.

The really baffling thing is that despite the Orcus material being by far the most well received part of the book, Baker and Mearls did this in April of 2006:

"One Development Week Mid-April, 2006"
In what I’d judge as the most productive weekof the process to date, not that anyone would have guessed that beforehand, Mearls and Baker figured out what was going wrong with the design. We’d concentrated too much on the new approach without properly accounting for what 3.5 handled well. We’d provided player characters with constantlyrenewing powers, but hadn’t successfully parsed the necessary distinctions between powers that were always available and powers that had limited uses.

Note: this petition to end Orcus is still four months before Tome of Battle was released to mixed but positive reviews. And Races and Classes was written in 2007 when they were proud of the direction that 4th edition was going.

I have no doubt that Frank Brunner was pissed off about the direction people took his work. But as far as I can tell no one would have liked the book he was making anyway. And people that weren't involved attribute much more impact to Baker and Mearls than Frank Brunner does.

Edit: It's important to remember that Mike Mearls was lead Developeron Tome of Battle, and the level of development of that book is shockingly bad. Whatever he was actually doing, he wasn't doing his nominal job - which was to make sure that the nitty gritty details of Tome of Battle added up. The fact that we have multiple terms used for the same important game mechanical concept and somehow also manage to use the same terminology to refer to two importantly distinct game mechanical concepts is something that shouldn't pass even a first pass of developer oversight. That that shit made it into the final product means the entire development team was pretty much ignoring their development duties entirely.

So it's pretty easy to square the statements by James Wyatt that Mearls was one of the guys who converted Orcus to Tome of Battle and the statements by Frank Brunner that Mike Mearls basically did jack shit. He didn't do basically any part of his actual job, but he may well have contributed significantly to the "sell Gutscherra's Orcus work for real money without attribution" project.

-Username17

[Ferret]

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.

Way late to the party, but stat this out for me?

[Ancient History]

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/cr ... ieceValues

Use-activated or continuous wondrous item is Spell level × caster level × 2,000 gp, and a A 0-level spell is half the value of a 1st-level spell for determining price.

So a wondrous item for an on-demand cantrip/orison would be 1,000gp. Except there's a that for an item with no space limitations, you multiply the entire cost by 2, so it's 2k gp anyway.

[maglag]

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/cr ... ieceValues

Use-activated or continuous wondrous item is Spell level × caster level × 2,000 gp, and a A 0-level spell is half the value of a 1st-level spell for determining price.

So a wondrous item for an on-demand cantrip/orison would be 1,000gp. Except there's a that for an item with no space limitations, you multiply the entire cost by 2, so it's 2k gp anyway.

Why would you care if your out-of-combat item takes a slot? It's for out of combat. Just remove one of your combat items and equip the out-of-combat item, heal up and then equip back the combat item.

[Ancient History]

...because the claim was that a slotless magic item could do X, and then the question was how would you build that item, and I posted the math. Whether it's a cockring of healing or an amulet of papercut repair doesn't matter a damn to me.

[Koumei]

An automatic-resetting, touch-triggered trap of Cure Minor Wounds costs something like 750GP so that's even cheaper (and slotless). +1000GP for being DC 25 to find (this is not something you're adding, it's just a fact for level 0 magical traps), -1000GP for having a Save DC of 10* (elect to fail your save) so you're back to 750. If you specify that you disarm it through a simple means then you can probably keep the DIsable Device DC to 20 ("Disarm a trap") and thus no cost modifier. If you argue that "putting your finger inside this stapler" still requires an attack roll for the spell (which does normally need a melee touch attack) then you could reduce the price by up to 1K for a bargain value of -250GP.

(Note that crafting the trap will still cost you 250GP and 20XP. So good luck with buying such a thing at the calculated price.)

*The lowest possible for someone to actually cast the spell in the first place.

[maglag]

Ah yes, traps are the best way of getting at-will utility spells in 3rd edition, a good chunk of the basis of the Tippyverse.

[Schleiermacher]

But those rules are patent nonsense.

Using them, it costs less to make an infinite healing engine than to build a covered pit.

Anyone designing in good faith should just quietly pretend those rules don't exist, until someone writes a better trapmaking system.

[maglag]

Noncasters and fullcasters aren't anywhere near balanced against each other either, but plenty of people consider the stronger fullcasters to be the right point of balance.

Something that everybody does seem to consider too cheesy are the discounts for needing a certain skill and class/alignment to use an item which can shave off a whole 40% from the cost. Never seen those used even in theoretical discussions let alone actual play in either side. If the players crafted the items themselves it would basically be free since of course they would pick something they already qualify for, and in the enemy side it would be really dickish if the orc warlord's bling only works for CE characters with ranks in basketweaving.

[Schleiermacher]

It doesn't particularly matter whether any particular output is "too powerful" or not when the criticism is that the system makes no sense and the outputs are one step removed from completely arbitrary.

[deaddmwalking]

I do think that the magic item creation rules are worthwhile to explore - they're a microcosm of the bigger problems that plague 3.x.

In an ideal world, you'd want a system that creates reasonable outputs. Trying to put all magic items on a cost schedule based on the power of the item (using spell level and caster level) makes intuitive sense. There are times where an item that does 5d8+15 points of healing is better than one that does 1 point of healing - but there are also situations where one isn't appreciably more valuable than the other. An item that allows at will fireball costs the same as an item that allows at will illusory script.

In our heartbreaker, we haven't instituted a hard count limit on magic items (ie, we do not use slots). However, all characters have a limited resource to activate spells and special abilities. A wizard that wants to activate their item that grants fireball is using the same resource they could use to cast a spell they know - the warrior can use it instead, but only until he uses up his resource. Some items that have a permanent effect reduce the availability of this resource. If you are low-level, you may not fully activate your item - if you're decked out like a Christmas tree you may not have any of this resource available to activate some of your abilities. So far, it has worked pretty well for us, but we haven't really codified the costs of items yet. It's very clear how to cost an activated item; it is less clear how to cost an always on item. So far it has been ad-hoc - perhaps if we have enough of them we'll create a relatively clear rule.

[Ancient History]

There were some great ideas in 3e's magic item creation system, in that it took a step out of the dark ages of AD&D and formalized item creation and requirements with actual formulae. You could create a lot more magic items in 3e than in any previous edition of AD&D, and while they weren't balanced (see bullshit about traps above), and suffered some further issues with wealth by level guidelines (eventually leading to Magic of Blue, Weapons of Legacy, and other failed attempts), it was still a huge step forward, and if they could have ever worked out the kinks it would have been a major component of a 3.75 edition.

[JonSetanta]

Indeed, my mistake on the slotless multiplier, but regardless...

It's a cheap way to heal your whole party between battles to the point wherein HP is a "per encounter" resource rather than per day.
As it should be.

And you can do it very, very early on.

[Zaranthan]

Using them, it costs less to make an infinite healing engine than to build a covered pit.

To be fair, that's a pit that you can't find with a blind man's cane. You need a class feature to even be allowed to attempt the skill check. Assuming an even spread of the 11 PHB classes, I know lots of people who would pay lots of money for the ability to hide a safe from 10/11ths of the population.

That said, I see no reason to be fair to the creators of 3.X's trapmaking systems. It's a bunch of rubbish and I get better results from my players saying "I've <a pile of crap>, can I rig up something to stab someone when they open that door?" and me responding "yeah, that sounds cool. It takes you half an hour to rig it up."

Something that everybody does seem to consider too cheesy are the discounts for needing a certain skill and class/alignment to use an item which can shave off a whole 40% from the cost.

It's still less cheesy than the Drow magic items that dissolve when exposed to daylight. At least the "strand of prayer beads, but only usable by a Neutral Evil Barbarian with 10 ranks in Use Rope" can be scrapped for a wish-economy magic item you might actually want.

[maglag]

Using them, it costs less to make an infinite healing engine than to build a covered pit.

To be fair, that's a pit that you can't find with a blind man's cane. You need a class feature to even be allowed to attempt the skill check. Assuming an even spread of the 11 PHB classes, I know lots of people who would pay lots of money for the ability to hide a safe from 10/11ths of the population.

There's also the bit where it's a pit with a perfect drainage that will endure the eons. Durability costs premium.

Something that everybody does seem to consider too cheesy are the discounts for needing a certain skill and class/alignment to use an item which can shave off a whole 40% from the cost.

It's still less cheesy than the Drow magic items that dissolve when exposed to daylight. At least the "strand of prayer beads, but only usable by a Neutral Evil Barbarian with 10 ranks in Use Rope" can be scrapped for a wish-economy magic item you might actually want.

If you've got your personal houserules for scrapping magic items for other magic stuff, there's zero reason why they can't be applied to drow loot too, just keep it inside a sealed bag or travel at night or teleport or something. And in the meanwhile the drow loot can still be used inside dungeons just fine. Which you know is half the name of the game.

[nockermensch]

Noncasters and fullcasters aren't anywhere near balanced against each other either, but plenty of people consider the stronger fullcasters to be the right point of balance.

Something that everybody does seem to consider too cheesy are the discounts for needing a certain skill and class/alignment to use an item which can shave off a whole 40% from the cost. Never seen those used even in theoretical discussions let alone actual play in either side. If the players crafted the items themselves it would basically be free since of course they would pick something they already qualify for, and in the enemy side it would be really dickish if the orc warlord's bling only works for CE characters with ranks in basketweaving.

For the record, I actually met a group that plays using these rules on Discord (in Portuguese). My metaphorical jaw dropped, of course. Then I noticed that they keep rolling loot normally, and realized that that aspect was just a munchkin move on an already monty haul campaign. The same dudes use retraining rules to change pre-requisite feats of prestige classes their characters enter to something better, which IS RAW but in rather bad taste.

[Koumei]

Pretty sure the RAW on retraining is that if you retroactively fail to qualify for a prestige class you already have, then you lose all the "features" of the prestige class. I can't remember if they specify what does and doesn't count as a "feature" or if you just have to guess whether your HP suddenly goes down.

Note that this means if you reach tenth level of Dragon Disciple, you become a half-dragon, thus gaining the Dragon Type and failing to meet the prerequisites, at which point you lose all of the above. I know, that's like level 15 and involves someone choosing to be a Dragon Disciple. Outside of NWN1-2 builds where it's the bees' knees.

They also didn't specify that you regain them if you regain the prerequisites. If you assume you do though, then that means the tenth level Dragon Disciple creates a paradox that sucks the universe into a black hole or something.

[TiaC]

Pretty sure the RAW on retraining is that if you retroactively fail to qualify for a prestige class you already have, then you lose all the "features" of the prestige class. I can't remember if they specify what does and doesn't count as a "feature" or if you just have to guess whether your HP suddenly goes down.

Note that this means if you reach tenth level of Dragon Disciple, you become a half-dragon, thus gaining the Dragon Type and failing to meet the prerequisites, at which point you lose all of the above. I know, that's like level 15 and involves someone choosing to be a Dragon Disciple. Outside of NWN1-2 builds where it's the bees' knees.

They also didn't specify that you regain them if you regain the prerequisites. If you assume you do though, then that means the tenth level Dragon Disciple creates a paradox that sucks the universe into a black hole or something.

The 3.0 DMG has that rule, but they took it out in the 3.5 DMG, probably because they put the Dragon Disciple in the DMG. However, not everyone got the memo, because Complete Warrior has that rule again. Some people argue that by the rules of source precedence used in 3.5, you can ignore CW or have it only apply to the PrCs in CW. It is a stupid rule when applied to PrCs that can disable themselves.