OSSR: Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords

[phlapjackage]

Sharp Claw (Ex): Once you have performed the lesser legacy ritual at 11th level, you find that Tiger Fang is perfectly balanced for use with Tiger Claw maneuvers. As long as you have a Tiger Claw stance active, you deal an extra 1 point of damage with all your melee attacks, including strikes, made with Tiger Fang.

Is that actually what it looks like? An ability for a PC that is 11th+ level that adds 1 pt of damage ?

[jt]

3.5 had already got me into the habit of skipping all flavor text and only reading the mechanics, so I didn't notice at the time, but wow this book really is packed full of word salad flavor. It would've benefited from cutting all of that in favor of more mechanical content, even boring procedural shit like dual-progression prestige classes and something that lets you use maneuvers with a bow.

Since a campaign I ran was so heavy on ToB classes, I gave out ToB-flavored items. There was a sword that knew a pack of 1st-level Desert Wind maneuvers and used them at its discretion (helpful, but with no regard to friendly fire). And that's dead simple and interesting, as opposed to the actual ones that are dull in needlessly complex ways.

[Username17]

Is that actually what it looks like? An ability for a PC that is 11th+ level that adds 1 pt of damage ?

Yeeah. It's a conditional +1 to damage that requires you to jump through a bunch of hoops to acquire and then has further conditions to be active during combat. And it's part of a style that sometimes asks you to make attacks with multiple weapons, but the +1 damage only affects the part where you attack with one of them. It's like looking into a kaleidoscope. A kaleidoscope where all the moving colored bits are failure.

It's difficult to wrap your brain around the Weapons of Legacy, because everything about them is so bad. It's like there was a brainstorming session where everyone contributed various ideas of mechanics that could be used to tweak progressions for scaling magic items, and they decided to include all of them without making even a token attempt to ensure that the end result actually had level appropriate outputs.

There are rituals to perform that have GP costs to unlock things. You take various penalties to unlock other things. You havea trickle of new powers show up, but it doesn't add up to anything. At the end of the day, it doesn't do level appropriate things. Like, attuning Faithful Avenger (the Devoted Spirit Falchion) makes you spend hit points to gain an enhancement bonus to Constitution (which gives you back hit points, except it doesn't because the idea that a high level Crusader was going to go to war without an enhancement bonus to Consititution is insane), but after all that weird accounting, you'd still just rather have a regular level appropriate flaming sword.

-Username17

[Ignimortis]

It's difficult to wrap your brain around the Weapons of Legacy, because everything about them is so bad. It's like there was a brainstorming session where everyone contributed various ideas of mechanics that could be used to tweak progressions for scaling magic items, and they decided to include all of them without making even a token attempt to ensure that the end result actually had level appropriate outputs.

There are rituals to perform that have GP costs to unlock things. You take various penalties to unlock other things. You havea trickle of new powers show up, but it doesn't add up to anything. At the end of the day, it doesn't do level appropriate things. Like, attuning Faithful Avenger (the Devoted Spirit Falchion) makes you spend hit points to gain an enhancement bonus to Constitution (which gives you back hit points, except it doesn't because the idea that a high level Crusader was going to go to war without an enhancement bonus to Consititution is insane), but after all that weird accounting, you'd still just rather have a regular level appropriate flaming sword.

-Username17

Just out of interest, since you guys seem to have done just about everything from 3.5 in your own, usually better way, has anyone here ever tried to fix Weapons of Legacy? Because on paper, it's a good idea, it's just that it sucks so bad mechanically that nobody cares anymore.

[Ancient History]

The general idea of a weapon that upgrades as you go up in level is an idea so basic that they made a couple classes out of it, namely Soulknife and Kensai, and others to various lesser degrees. It's a no-brainer. The execution is a little tricky though - D&D likes the idea of people finding magic swords in hoards, or of taking them off their defeated enemies. If you can just find a bunch of them, then you have the same "Oh, another +1 sword" problem. Level-up-with-you weapons work best when there's a relative scarcity of them, so that you don't just trade them out.

And, of course, as physical objects they can be taken away. If the weapon represents a good chunk of your abilities, that's bad.

Ironically, they recognized this in early D&D3 with the item familiar rules - but item familiars were both cost-intensive and didn't provide level-commensurate abilities.

Earthdawn did a decent job at tackling the thematic idea of leveling-up your weapon, but because of the system it has a few drawbacks to standardization and is better suited to a more open system. Given how blatantly Weapons of Legacy ripped it off, I'm not sure an "investing XP into your sword to make it more magical" system is actually the way to go for a strictly level-based game like D&D...but I'm not sure if there's a good alternative.

[DrPraetor]

Enhancement bonus treadmills are the problem and never the solution.

You may care about a Flaming Broad Sword of Giant Slaying, and you may make a heartbroken decision to pick that up instead of your Keen Battle Axe, which you've been using for 3 levels, but this should never be about the sword being +3 while the axe is only +1.

If you want generically-magic weapons to provide some bonus, at the very least the bonus should be fixed or fixed to your level rather than treadmilling. This also tends to emphasize the more interesting properties that magic weapons can have - a vanilla +3 long sword is, among other things, boring.

[Ignimortis]

Enhancement bonus treadmills are the problem and never the solution.

You may care about a Flaming Broad Sword of Giant Slaying, and you may make a heartbroken decision to pick that up instead of your Keen Battle Axe, which you've been using for 3 levels, but this should never be about the sword being +3 while the axe is only +1.

If you want generically-magic weapons to provide some bonus, at the very least the bonus should be fixed or fixed to your level rather than treadmilling. This also tends to emphasize the more interesting properties that magic weapons can have - a vanilla +3 long sword is, among other things, boring.

Pretty much what I'm thinking, yes. I suppose that using levels for raw enhancement bonuses and letting weapons have all the cool things would work best. (yes, even Flaming, because while it's boring +1d6 fire damage, it's a FLAMING SWORD HEHE SWEET™). That way you might actually have a golf-bag of weapons, because a +1 Flaming longsword is no longer as much strictly worse than your +4 Keen longsword - they're both +4 if your high-level ass holds them.

[Username17]

Just out of interest, since you guys seem to have done just about everything from 3.5 in your own, usually better way, has anyone here ever tried to fix Weapons of Legacy? Because on paper, it's a good idea, it's just that it sucks so bad mechanically that nobody cares anymore.

The Magic Item system that K and I worked up was to have Enhancement Bonuses automatically scale to the character using them, with weapons costing more gold (or becoming unpurchaseable with gold) because of whatever abilities they had beyond that.

So the basic +X sword started as a minor magic item and remained a minor magic item and never stopped being a minor magic item and it was +1 when you were level 1 and it was +3 when you were level 9, and so on and so on. A lesser magic item might be a flaming +X sword or a frost +X sword or whatever. It costs significantly more than a +X sword and the benefit is that it does some rider damage. But the important thing is that while it costs a lot of money for a 2nd level character, it doesn't cost a lot of money for an 8th level character. 8th level characters could just jolly well have a bunch of weapons and switch between caustic swords and holy swords depending on opposition, because they could actually afford to have a bunch of minor and lesser magic items and still invest in land and forts and henchmen and boats and whatever. To make that latter part actually happen, we instituted the "wish economy" which was that every magic item costing more than 15,000 gp (that is: every "major magic item" that couldn't be wished for without using the totally broken 3.5 wish revision) wasn't something you could purchase with gold at all.

This created another problem, which was that if people can in fact afford to have a toybox full of magic items because they no longer have to spend every dollar they own on upgrading their sword, armor, and cloak, then the fact that Ioun Stones exist implies that players are just going to "go wide" and surround themselves with slotless cock rings and nipple clamps of stackable power. For that, we instituted an 8 item limit - that you had 8 slots to power magic items with.

Now that covers most of what Weapons of Legacy promised and didn't deliver. You still care about finding new magic items, but pretty much everyone at level 10 is going to have the basic "math fix" magic bonuses the game expects you to have. And when characters hit lord level, they start having disposable money that they could use to live lavish lifestyles, invest in ships and armies and castles and shit, or in some other way actually interact with the high level landscape.

What we didn't make a satisfactory fix for is disposable magic items. The 3rd edition Scrolls, Potions, Wands, and Martial Scripts aren't one of your 8 bonus items, but they do add to your power somewhat. And we never did come up with a system to make scroll racks and potion bandoliers be something that didn't strain the game from multiple angles.

-Username17

[NineInchNall]

I don't know if anyone mentioned this, but it grated in an otherwise entertaining write-up.

Every level you can trade one maneuver for another, and you will usually elect to take one of your lowest level maneuvers and trade it in for one of the highest level you can attain. And every other level you get a new maneuver, which again usually will be one of your highest level.

You get to trade on every even level starting at 4th. So several sections of the rants are just, kinda, nonsense.

[Hicks]

Just out of interest, since you guys seem to have done just about everything from 3.5 in your own, usually better way, has anyone here ever tried to fix Weapons of Legacy? Because on paper, it's a good idea, it's just that it sucks so bad mechanically that nobody cares anymore.

Kinda. Tho Frank and K did the book of gears rewrite for magic items, I later did Scaling Magic Weapons which better fit the theme of a weapon growing in power with you like Inuyasha's Wind Scar or non-terrible weapons of legacy.

To be fair, I got the idea from Mr. Sinister, but mine are not compatible with his because I believe his are... overbalanced(?) and too weak to care about.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords

Wrapup


That's a wrap! A sword handle wrap. Get it?

AncientH

I guess we should start this off by acknowledging that whatever new and solid ideas that the writers of Tome of Battle brought to the book, they also brought themselves. A lot of the things that are good about the idea and execution of maneuvers is about how it differs from the rest of D&D, and a lot of the things that are bad about the book are being just like other D&D books - especially the monstrous bloat of fluff on just about fucking everything, but especially egregious for the classes, magic items, and monsters.

...and none of that is very surprising. Late 3.5 D&D had arrived at that shovelware plateau where the books almost wrote themselves, and all you had to fill in was the requisite slots of feats, classes, magic items, etc. - and the info density had gotten so low that they were filling more pages with less ideas. So a fair chunk of the criticism of the book isn't really the new system it was presenting, but just the shitty paint-by-numbers way they approached it. This was a novel system, and honestly they could have done a lot more to embrace that instead of trying to present it as yet-another-player's-option book.

Even the missed opportunities are pretty par for the course. By the time TOB came out, there were multiple potential subsystems they could have tried to hook into it - psionics, incarnum, spellcasting, all the Tome of Magic alternatives, warlocks - and that's not counting any of the Races books, or setting material from Forgotten Realms or Eberron. And while there's a little of that in here scattered about, for the most part TOB barely touches on or interacts with any of it...which is a missed opportunity, but a pretty understandable one, because while this wasn't quite a lame duck product, it was released in 2006 and the next edition was out in 2008.

The thing is, D&D is one of those games without a single consistent setting or metaplot, so the release schedule is usually a bizarre and ill-managed. White Wolf might have shot its dick off with ending the World of Darkness, but there was at least an ending, a sort of plan to wrap up the current slate of game lines and start on the New World of Darkness. D&D 3.x never had anything like that, its final product rolled off the line with all the sense that it would keep on publishing forever...pretty much like AD&D did.

And what D&D needed was less a 4th edition than a 3.75 edition. Because a lot of the basic ideas in a lot of their later products are sound, but poorly implemented. Those are kinks that could have been worked out by making them more part of the core gameplay - imagine a Fighter who was called a Fighter, but in addition to Bonus Feats also got to pick maneuvers like a Swordsage. Imagine if instead of straight Wizards and Sorcerers, you had Warlocks and Beguilers. I think there was a way forward where warriors were a lot less linear and wizards a lot less quadratic...but we never actually got there. Which is sad.

Frank

Tome of Battle exists as a proof of concept more than it does an actually functional game expansion. Fairly crucial questions as to how the ever living fuck any of this shit is supposed to work are left unanswered. People have been playing with this book for a dozen years, but extremely important holes have to be filled in with mind caulk to make that happen. For fuck's sake, the most effective of these classes is the Crusader, and the Crusader reaches a “depends on the meaning of is” argument on the third turn of every battle starting at level 1!

Now the big question is whether the Tome of Battle is proof of concept that Orcus “could have worked” and the answer of course is that it does not. There are some pretty serious hurdles in the way of Tome of Battle working as it was written, and only some of that can be laid at the feet of Mike Mearls and Rich Baker being very bad at their jobs.

The elephant in the room of course is the question of “What happens when the combat music isn't playing?” Obviously that was a big problem for Orcus and it was still a big problem in Flywheel and it's historical reality that when 4th edition actually landed there wasn't any acceptable answers to that questions. But it's perhaps equally important that the stuff Tome of Battle took from Orcus was incomplete, and that fleshing it out was going to take a lot more text. The model of needing special maneuvers to use two weapon fighting would require enough relevant maneuvers that a character could fill out their maneuver list and actually fight with two weapons. And what about archery? Or spear fighting? Or mounted combat? Or any other combat style that isn't running over and smacking your opponent with sword Final Fantasy style? When you think of the explosion of maneuvers that would have been necessary to cover a reasonable number of fighting styles in this system... well.... it's a lot.

This is another place where we look at 4th edition and see how it ended up failing in the particular way that it did. A 4th edition “build” takes up an enormous amount of text space. Making enough “power cards” so that you can play a crossbow sniper or sneaky guy with a morningstar or small warrior with a long spear or anything else not covered in the extremely narrow power selection in the 4e PHB fills up like 12 actual pages. Obviously, it would be trivial to create a higher information density than that, but realistically was Orcus ever going to be streamlined into something that could possibly fit a decent number of character concepts into a Player's Handbook? I'm not sure. But Tome of Battle isn't proof of concept that they could do that, the information density in Tome of Battle floats on water.

AncientH

I don't know if there was a demand for this book. But the basic idea was definitely there that there were deficiencies in the game that the book was supposed to address. And they had been there for some time, because there had been several previous efforts to give Fighter-types things that it was presumed they would want: combat tricks.

The thing is, D&D has always been resistant to let Fighters just throw some fire on their swords.

I had to re-write this paragraph several time, talking about the simulationist-vs-fantasy divide at the core of the game and how it's still reflected in games like Shadowrun, but let's focus on Tome of Battle.

I fully believe that the people writing this were not trying to be too revolutionary. That they were building a system they thought had the minimum number of moving parts. Because they didn't want you to spend Psi points or expend your focus when using a maneuver; they didn't want that level of choice. There are no X variables for damage in the maneuvers, everything is static, fixed. This is the simple version. And in that it follows the basic philosophy of Tome of Magic and Warlock and a lot of other ideas the presaged 4th edition and all that was wrong with it:

They were scared of their own creation.

D&D3 grew too big and complex too fast for the designers. They didn't want a GURPS-style build-your-own-class system, they wanted something that a couple of twelve-year-olds could pick up and play out of the box, with spell cards and maneuver cards sold separately. So Tome of Battle is really a very very dry run for what they really wanted to design:

They don't want an RPG, they want a tabletop game.

Frank

It's kind of amazing how underdeveloped this book is. The fact that really basic questions about ability interaction and timing and basic character progression go unanswered is something that to a first approximation can be laid at the foot of the quality of technical writing (which is very low). But then you get to stuff like using two different game terms for the same concept while simultaneously using the same word for different concepts and that really seems like a development issue.

And that's not even an exaggeration! A Swordsage has “readied” maneuvers, which refers to maneuvers in her hand. A Crusader also has a hand and also has “readied” maneuvers, but her readied maneuvers are in her deck and the maneuvers in her hand are called “granted” maneuvers. I can see various ways you could get there, like probably the Swashbuckler originally had some kind of deck and hand mechanics and they ended up shaving it down until they just had a hand and a used pile, but if that's what you're going to do you need to fucking adjust your nomenclature accordingly. It's totally unacceptable for different characters to use different words for their hand while also using the word other characters are using for their hand to mean something else entirely. That's just obviously unacceptable.

The Development lead on this project was Mike Mearls, and the amount of phoning it in done by the development team is very difficult to even wrap your mind around. If anyone was in any position of authority who actually knew or cared about Dungeons & Dragons and had paid any attention to this book, the entire Development team would have been fired on the spot. But of course what actually happened was that Jesse Decker, Stephen Schubert, Andy Collins, and of course Mike Mearls himself kept being allowed to develop 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons. With the predictable total failure of vision and nuts-and-bolts design and development that historically turned out to be.

AncientH

Is it wrong to be mad at people for being bad at jobs they love? Because people basically grew up with D&D3. It was the D&D for an entire generation. It wasn't their parent's D&D - AD&D 2nd edition was a dinosaur and you'd be hard-pressed not to know it - and it was a huge step forward in game design, warts and all.

But they kept shitting on it. And it's hard to say if they were even having fun while doing that.

Warhammer comes to mind as a comparable product: the product quality skyrocketed with the invention of word processing software, photoshop, and cheap Chinese printing. But the powers that be still manage to shit the bed in the quest for more money.

Frank

Tome of Battle was shovelware intended to make use of some design documents that had already been scrapped for a book whose only purpose was to fill a hole in the release schedule for an edition whose death warrant had already been signed. That it's full of word salad designed to meet page count criteria and procedurally generated content that uses text but doesn't increase play space is sadly to be expected. Wizards of the Coast had decided for various book distribution reasons that they wanted 150+ page hardcover books rather than the smaller softcover <100 page books like Sword and Fist. Getting all the real content into a Sword and Fist size book would have been trivial, and you can really tell how little effort was spent in pumping it all up to a 158 page hardcover shelfbreaker.

The true test of viability of this design direction would have been what it looked like once someone had attempted to use any kind of economy of language at all. Like, obviously you don't need nearly seven fucking pages to explain one of these fucking classes. You just obviously don't need that. But the very incompleteness of this book still weighs heavily on the project.

Let's be honest: a Martial Adept doesn't get enough maneuvers to make interesting decisions most of the time. The action economy is such that they generally arrange to have one strike to use per turn for the combat and they don't have any “left over” for weird shit like disarming maneuvers or covering retreats. Having Martial Adepts who had some fucking variety in their actions (as is obviously the intent of having Paladins shuffle their decks in the first place) would require larger hands attached to larger decks. But if Paladins and Fighters have bigger decks and hands, they also need bigger card collections, which in turn means more maneuvers to choose from. You can get a lot of redundancy out of there by getting rid of the stupid Nine Swords framing and just letting people pick level appropriate powers, but you're still going to need somewhere between double and triple the maneuvers the book actually contains. Something like 12 maneuvers per class per level – which works out to nearly four hundred of the fuckers just for those three classes.

Now you could cut these down enormously. If a maneuver was like sixty words instead of over one hundred and fifty, you could still get it down to like thirty pages or less. For example, here is a maneuver that I literally picked at random (note that I'm here to discuss information density and not the fact that this maneuver is insultingly terribad for the level you get it):

SUPREME BLADE PARRY Iron Heart (Stance)
Level: Warblade 8 Prerequisite: Three Iron Heart maneuvers Initiation Action: 1 swift action Range: Personal Target: You Duration: Stance
You drop into a relaxed pose, allowing your defenses to &#64258; ow naturally and easily. Your blade lashes out to absorb or deflect each attack you face, blunting the force of your enemies’ blows.
As a student of the Iron Heart discipline, you learn that a simple &#64258;ick of the wrist or turn of the blade can transform a deadly strike into a wild miss. In battle, you enter a steady rhythm that makes you frustratingly difficult to fight. You disrupt each attack with a perfectly timed counter, leaving your foes’ strikes weak and ineffectual. While you are in this stance, you gain damage reduction 5/— against any opponent that does not catch you flat-footed. To gain this benefit, you must be proficient with the weapon you carry. You gain this bene&#64257;t while unarmed only if you have the Improved Unarmed Strike feat.

That's 168 words to say this:

Supreme Blade Parry
Level 8 Fighter Stance
While in this stance, you have DR 5/- while you threaten at least one square.

And that's 22 words. I don't think you necessarily have to cut things down that severely, although you possibly could. Two or three times that length is a completely reasonable target. And if that was your target, you could get a class worth of maneuvers into about 10 pages. Is that enough? It depends.

2 pages for the character class and 10 pages for their associated power cards is suspiciously similar to the 12 pages dedicated to a 4th edition class and powers. If your classes are as narrowly focused and defined as 4th edition classes you've just made the 4th edition PHB and failed at life. But if we're talking about 60 word powers instead of bloated multi-paragraph pieces of word salad that's 125 powers per class instead of 83 (the number of powers Rogues get in the 4e PHB, including the Paragon Paths), we have room for a PHB that delivers a decent number of playable characters.

Or at least, it potentially could, provided that your maneuvers and powers are things of general utility and not “the basic 4th level sword strike, but usable when fighting with 2 daggers.” Even taking control over our destiny and trimming the fact and focusing maneuvers on things of general interest and giving players access to enough maneuvers that they have meaningful choices to makes during character generation and during play, we're still just factually running quite close to the edge of falling over into being 4e and essentially unplayable garbage.

The maneuvers concept is just really greedy. It takes up a lot of page space for the amount of action it provides. Even if you consciously use economy of language and avoid getting lost in the weeds of shit no one cares about, it's still hard to get everything into a reasonable space. If you had 13 classes at 12 pages for their descriptions and power lists, you'd use up 156 pages just on that, which is half the player's handbook. That's doable, but only barely. The 3.5 Player's Handbook has a spell list that goes on for 108 pages and class descriptions that go on for 36 pages – for 144 pages in total. And most people would agree that 3.5's spell descriptions are tedious and over long.

AncientH

At the start of this, I was talking about design philosophy when creating player abilities - and my own personal thoughts are, you as a designer want to give players abilities that expand their play options. Throwing some fire on your sword is a cool combat trick. It works in ChronoTrigger or Secret of Mana or Final Fantasy, where it only comes up in combat and in otherwise inaccessible.

But most of D&D isn't about combat. I think we've hammered that home about six times now, but it bears repeating the one final time. Do these abilities actually expand character options very much? They give you some combat tricks, but they all pretty much boil down to different ways to hit people with your sword. And it could have been more than that.

Frank

According to the people actually making 4th edition while they were at least pretending to think that was a good idea, the order of operations was this:

• Baker pitches Book of Nine Swords
• Baker decides to have Book of Nine Swords be a book of “powers for Fighters.”
• Mearls and Baker decide to use the Paladin, Swashbuckler, and Fighter from Orcus as idea mines for Book of Nine Swords.
• Mearls and Baker convince the rest of the Orcus design team to scrap the entirety of Orcus and start over from scratch with Flywheel.
• Mearls and Baker finish Book of Nine Swords.

So the fact that a lot of the book seems half-assed or even perhaps quarter-assed and left languishing in some design or development in-between state is understandable. The leads on the project had tabled and passed a vote of no confidence in the project four months before it went to print.

But it's interesting to me that all the weird framing about an ancient elf city called Whiteraven that no one gives a shit about came first. The book was greenlit on the basis that Baker really wanted to write fanfiction about ancient Elvish swords. The shit no one cares about was the first part, and the part everyone cares about was filled in madlibs style after the authors stopped liking the project and just wanted it to die.

The things that catch fire in people's minds aren't the weird bullshit flavor text that got the book greenlit, it's the basic mechanical structures they took from Gutschera that they ended up being so offended by that they redlit the entire project.

Which is really where we were at. The people who made 4th edition were so badly out of sync with what the public wanted that everything they thought was good was so bad that people didn't even read it, and the stuff they thought was irredeemably awful was just good enough that people were curious and wanted to know more.

Which answers more than a few questions about how 4th edition got to be so very very bad. The people making it really were exactly that clueless about what worked, what didn't work, and what people wanted to see in a new edition. The reason that 4e looks like it was designed by Russian agents trying to systematically destroy the value of the Dungeons & Dragons brand is because the people on the design committee were so bad at their job that that might as well have been the case.

AncientH

Yes, you could make a Tome of Battle heartbreaker. But why the fuck would you want to?

If there was a set of RPG commandments, some of them should include:

1) Combat shouldn't be boring.

2) All characters should be able to contribute to the success of the group.

...and that's basically what TOB is meant to accomplish, even if the designers didn't apparently fucking understand that. And it failed. It failed to even understand what it was about. There's no bandaid to fix it. TOB would need to be gutted and rebuilt from the ground up to be both functional and accomplish a tenth of its intended ability. Why not just build your own system at that point?

TOB isn't heartbreaker material because there is no heart to break. Nobody had any investment in this book, not even the people writing it.

Frank

After the shock of Fighters getting nice (or at least, less bad) things wore off, a majority of people warmed to the idea that this is where Dungeons and Dragons was going. And most people assumed that it was going to be the foundation of 4th edition. That is historically not what happened, but you can see how things might have been better if it had.

I do say “might have” because of course the maneuver cards concept is only just barely possible to chop down into a sufficiently digestible format to allow for this concept to fit into a Player's Handbook to cover a decent number of character classes.

Consider a 4e power:

Distracting Wound Distracting Wound Master Infiltrator Attack 11 You strike from the shadows, delivering a wound that distracts your foe and makes him drop his guard. Encounter &#10022; Martial,Weapon Standard Action Melee or Ranged weapon Requirement: You must be wielding a crossbow, a light blade, or a sling. Target: One creature you have combat advantage against Attack: Dexterity vs. AC Hit: 2[W] + Dexterity modifier damage, and the target grants combat advantage to you and all your allies until the end of your next turn.

That's 83 words, which is half as much word text as a Tome of Battle word salad. And it could clearly be shrunk further. Just taking out the restrictions that keep it from being used by a decent array of characters would shrink it considerably.

This could have been the way forward. But only if the people making it registered that its fundamental problems and limitations even existed. The chucklefucks making 4e would have made a terrible game whether they jettisoned Orcus or not.

AncientH

Restrictions is the key word here. A lot of the problem with this whole book is restrictions. You can't use this discipline with that weapon. You can't do this and that. You can't do this or that. You can do this, but only for 1 round, and if somebody attacks you, and if Lucky the Leprechaun kissed your pot of gold within the last fortnight. This whole book is about telling you "Yes, you can throw some fire on your sword," and then proceed to make the process as difficult and shitty as possible.

Because Fighters can't have nice things. And it took them 158+ pages to tell you that.

[jt]

Wonderful review, thanks for doing it.

I actually disagree that maneuvers scale poorly content-wise; while you'd need twice as many to give these three classes enough stuff to actually do, once you reached that point you'd have enough for several more classes. Putting everything into schools and giving different classes different mechanics for accessing different subsets of them is a strong way to do procedural shoveling. The Dread Necromancer and the Beguiler are some of the best-designed classes in the edition, and they're mostly just pulling subsets off existing spell lists: you could do another 27 classes if you did all the Beguiler-style school pairs. Similarly you can come up with some reason why you'd want a Devoted Spirit + Desert Sun maneuver list and crank out a new class.

Of course, to really fit all the content you need to fuel a class explosion, you'd need to double the number of schools to cover all the schools the Ranger, Barbarian, and Rogue are supposed to be pulling from. Which, stacked with the other time I said you'd need to double the number of maneuvers, is a shitload of writing. And still doesn't get there if they keep making needlessly narrow "only if you're wielding two weapons" restrictions like you point out.

Unfortunately, 4E went even more narrow than this and didn't only do "only if you're wielding two weapons" but also gave every class a unique power list, so they couldn't just write a new first-level package and give you half the Ranger list and half the Sorcerer list.

---

Considering the other late 3rd edition books that look like playtest materials, here's my guess for what Orcus was:
[*] Everyone uses maneuvers with different hand-management mechanics. Maybe the spell schools have bigger effects that are supposed to be granted with weaker hand-management mechanics, or maybe everything gets hammered down into encounter powers.
[*] Spellcasters use a relevant skill roll (Spellcraft, Nature, Religion, Truenaming) instead of an attack roll. Hopefully this means there are also maneuvers keyed off skills like Stealth and Athletics that let Rogues and Barbarians have nice out-of-combat abilities (I'd expect them to fuck that up more than anything, but I think that may have been the intent based on things like Truenamer and that ToB school with the Jump checks).
[*] Various buffs, effects, and even class features take up an item slot. The Monk gets a bunch of movement abilities as long as they're not wearing shoes, the Barbarian's rages take up their chest slot. (I don't know why, but they seemed very concerned with permanent abilities and tried several approaches like this to address it.)

[Username17]

I actually disagree that maneuvers scale poorly content-wise; while you'd need twice as many to give these three classes enough stuff to actually do, once you reached that point you'd have enough for several more classes. Putting everything into schools and giving different classes different mechanics for accessing different subsets of them is a strong way to do procedural shoveling. The Dread Necromancer and the Beguiler are some of the best-designed classes in the edition, and they're mostly just pulling subsets off existing spell lists: you could do another 27 classes if you did all the Beguiler-style school pairs. Similarly you can come up with some reason why you'd want a Devoted Spirit + Desert Sun maneuver list and crank out a new class.

The issue is that the Warlock needs their own spell list. More broadly, functionally different resource management systems will choke and die on different kinds of powers. Let's be real here: Orcus got scrapped because of the horrid realization of what happened with the Paladin's in-combat reshuffle and healing maneuvers. I don't know what exactly the last straw was, but I suspect it was probably some playtester realizing that if they kept flogging a regenerating Troll they could heal all the other player characters at 2 hit points a round until everyone was healed to full. Everyone decided at that point that they weren't having fun any more. But we all realize that for any character that uses charges in any meaningful way that Healing Strike would be a power of very little impact. Indeed, that actually is a power in 4e, and no one fucking cares because everyone has such a small number of power slots.

If you want to give characters functionally different resource management systems, which you do, you're going to want to give them different abilities that use those resource systems. The guy whose firebolts never run out has to have some kind of limit compared to the guy whose firebolts cost psionic power points, which means that the actual power card they are using can't be the same. Well, not exactly the same, obviously the two firebolts might be very similar and the Warlock's at-will Eldritch Fire Bolt might differ from the Psion's Mind Fire Bolt only in name and range and cost - but you still have to write a new power description because they are not exactly the same.

The broad issue is that different cooldown times interact with time skips and montages in a fundamentally different way. The Wizard, Beguiler, and Dread Necromancer are all on a "daily" cooldown schedule, so figuring out what they can manage in a week or a month is easy. The Warlock is on a cooldown time of seconds, meaning that you have to consider how much time the character spends eating food and wiping their ass when determining what they can do during downtime.

The effect of different resource systems on combat is fairly minor. Beguilers rarely run out of spell slots during combats and if their cooldown was changed to hourly or ten minutely their combat acumen wouldn't change very much. But their out-of-combat abilities would go insane. Charm Monster lasts more than a week, and the number of slots per day you can devote to it determines how big a thrall army you can have. If you got uses back faster than daily it would have an enormous impact on how many little dudes you had working for you.

When you change the fundamental way characters interact with ability cooldown, you have to do real design work in making new abilities that fit with that system and real development work in making those systems and abilities play nicely with each other. Blindly copy/pasting abilities from one resource management system to another is virtually certain to make the game crash and burn - as the Crusader's did the moment the playtesters encountered a troll.

Even within combat, there are abilities that it's OK to have if the next round you're going to do something else and not if you're going to spam the attack button. The obvious is Stunning Attack. It's totally fine to spend an action doing some incremental damage and robbing an opponent of their turn. Once. If you do it three rounds in a row, the game has officially become boring as shit. The inverse is also true, an ability that is "hit your target with this three times to complete alternate wincon" would be potentially OK for a character who is actually able to attack with it three rounds consecutively, but would clearly be useless for a character who was required to use a different power in round 2.

4th edition's decision to give every class a non-overlapping power list was mysterious because the classes all lived on the same shitty resource system and they obviously could share powers if that's what you wanted them to do. But if you actually made the classes interesting and different, sharing powers would be very dangerous and giving every class their own hard list would make a lot more sense.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

So the basic +X sword started as a minor magic item and remained a minor magic item and never stopped being a minor magic item and it was +1 when you were level 1 and it was +3 when you were level 9, and so on and so on.

Out of interest, is that a permanent upgrade, or was that dependent on being wielded by a high level character? If a high level character and a low level one swapped weapons for some reason, would the low level one get a powerful weapon and the high level one get a less powerful one? Or, if you took a weapon from a dead high level character would it be pre-charged beyond your level?

[Omegonthesane]

So the basic +X sword started as a minor magic item and remained a minor magic item and never stopped being a minor magic item and it was +1 when you were level 1 and it was +3 when you were level 9, and so on and so on.

Out of interest, is that a permanent upgrade, or was that dependent on being wielded by a high level character? If a high level character and a low level one swapped weapons for some reason, would the low level one get a powerful weapon and the high level one get a less powerful one? Or, if you took a weapon from a dead high level character would it be pre-charged beyond your level?

The scaling bonus of a Magic Sword under Tome rules is entirely based on the level of the person currently wielding it. So swapping weapons with a high level character won't give you a sword with bigger numbers on it. (I hesitate to say "more powerful" since the actually interesting effects of a sword might have more of an impact.)

[maglag]

When you change the fundamental way characters interact with ability cooldown, you have to do real design work in making new abilities that fit with that system and real development work in making those systems and abilities play nicely with each other. Blindly copy/pasting abilities from one resource management system to another is virtually certain to make the game crash and burn - as the Crusader's did the moment the playtesters encountered a troll.

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

Gives +1 to attack and damage rolls every time you crit.

Explicitly stacking with itself.

Lasting until you spend one minute without scoring any crits.

And coup de graces are automatic crits.

So basically as long as you have some time to set up and a bag of rats, you can enter combat with +X to all attack and damage rolls, where X is the number of turns you can afford to spend cutting rat throats as you soak yourself in their blood to power yourself up.

Heck, you can keep it going and growing all day long as long as you remember sacrifice one rat every minute. Every hour a whooping +60 to attack and damage rolls. At the end of a 8-hour workday that's a disgusting +480 to attack and damage rolls.

And yes works for all attacks, melee, ranged, whatever. See that dragon? Now you don't.

All at fucking level 1.

[nockermensch]

Every hour a whooping +600 to attack and damage rolls. At the end of a 8-hour workday that's a disgusting +4800 to attack and damage rolls.

And yes works for all attacks, melee, ranged, whatever. See that dragon? Now you don't.

All at fucking level 1.

I fixed it for you. Since you can make one CDG/round, the prep time for Blood on the Water goes on much quickier.

[maglag]

Well yes but bathing yourself in rat blood every round means you can't actually move which limits your options, gotta keep an equilibrium between mobility and power. You'll also burn through rats faster.

Unless you get the rest of the party or some minions to build you a wheeled altar or something and they cart you around as you power up yourself in rat blood. With four digits worth of bonus damage you'll basically be a mobile hyper cannon that can vaporize any fortress/mountains at the maximum distance for your ranged attacks.

Just make sure those rats keep coming to keep you supplied.

[erik]

A subdued unconscious troll is probably easier to power up on. CDG with a shuriken or something every round.

Easier than the cleric with a farm and a wand of death knell. I recall when I first got my 3e phb and was trying to figure out how to solo the red dragon great wyrm example critter. Cleric with lots of death knells to beat SR was my answer.

[jt]

Frank - you can solve that by having different schools have powers of different weight tiers (roughly at-will, roughly 5 minute rest, roughly 8 hour rest), and handing them out with recovery mechanics appropriate to the tier.

Which does mean you need yet more schools full of spells/maneuvers/powers if you want to cover the same conceptual thing in different weight classes. If you want at-will blaster powers for a Warlock, you can't reuse the daily-appropriate Evocation list and have to write a whole new school. But you'd hopefully immediately make a Duskblade and an Arcane Archer that use that list in different ways. My point isn't that this isn't bloated, because it sure as hell is, but rather that this is an effective use of a giant bloated system, if that's what you're making (which is what WotC would like to do).

Also if, having done exactly the power tiers system I described, you then panicked about subdued trolls and bags of rats and Wizards with 5-minute workdays, you might decide to burn it all down and rewrite it so everyone has powers at every recovery weight. And I'm not convinced that necessarily has to be terrible, but I'd avoid it anyway having seen how it turned out for 4E.

[Username17]

Frank - you can solve that by having different schools have powers of different weight tiers (roughly at-will, roughly 5 minute rest, roughly 8 hour rest), and handing them out with recovery mechanics appropriate to the tier.

Well... no. Resource management systems are an important, but by no means exhaustive set of potential pitfalls. There is also questions of synergy and certainty that can become problematic.

Imagine three powers: Celerity, True Strike, and Finger of Death. These three powers respectively: Allow you to trade a power use and a minor action for an extra standard action, allow you to trade a standard action for your next standard action succeeding, and spend a standard action to have a low odds attack that instakills an opponent. If you are allowed to have all three powers together, then every battle where you have access to all three of them begins by you doing a little dance and having the enemy leader fall over dead.

With the exception of Celerity, none of those three is particularly problematic, and I'd be kind of weirded out if your game didn't have them. And indeed, if your Ranger had non-magic themed versions of those called Burst of Speed, Take Aim, and Heartseeker, no one would bat a fucking eye. But having all three of them on the same character in a reliable way is obviously a problem. And those aren't even weird shit combos like the thing where you regenerate combined with the thing where you ignore non-lethal damage.

If you have two characters with at-will combat maneuvers but one of them draws cards from a big deck and has to improvise with what they get and the other has a small hand that they get to spam powers out of - there are a lot of game straining combos that you'd be OK with the first guy pulling off sometimes that would be just stupid in the hands of the second character who just spammed the combo every round.

The number of times an ability could potentially be used in a day is certainly a major issue in what kind of resource management system it should be allowed to be accessed by, but it's not the only issue. How it interacts with the other abilities already on that list as well as how it reacts with the level of certainty the resource management system offers in what abilities can be used on any particular turn of the battle can also be crucially important.

Once you have abilities that are more interesting than "2[W]+Stat damage and target gets -2 AC for a turn" they have to be considered from more than one direction before determining whether they are remotely appropriate.

Which does mean you need yet more schools full of spells/maneuvers/powers if you want to cover the same conceptual thing in different weight classes. If you want at-will blaster powers for a Warlock, you can't reuse the daily-appropriate Evocation list and have to write a whole new school. But you'd hopefully immediately make a Duskblade and an Arcane Archer that use that list in different ways. My point isn't that this isn't bloated, because it sure as hell is, but rather that this is an effective use of a giant bloated system, if that's what you're making (which is what WotC would like to do).

The issue isn't that you couldn't imagine dividing the powers up into schools and creating classes that split up those schools differently. It's that none of the schools that D&D has historically had actually work for that. The Beguiler and Dread Necromancer don't get full Wizard schools, they get specific selections off of the Wizard list - some of which aren't even from the schools they nominally specialize in.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

It's obviously true some abilities can't be shared across resource management systems or even across classes with the same system. It's also arguably true that there are some abilities that could be shared without problems. It's possible that the your could write a Firebolt power that's shared between the Fire Mage and Wizard classes and causes 0 balance problems, perhaps even in a way that takes less page-space than writing a separate power for those two classes.

[maglag]

Clerics and wizards use basically the same spellcasting system but have some spells gained at different levels because fuck you.

There's also team monsters having the whole SLA system where they can use spells while ignoring all components either X/day or outright at will while caring little for spell level. Like an Efreeti can use Wish 3/day while ignoring the extra costs at level 8.

There was also the Mirror Mephit from Expedition to Demonweb Pits that's a 4 HD outsider that comes with a Simulacrum SLA because why not.

Or candles of invocation for 5k gold.

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.

[Username17]

It's obviously true some abilities can't be shared across resource management systems or even across classes with the same system. It's also arguably true that there are some abilities that could be shared without problems. It's possible that the your could write a Firebolt power that's shared between the Fire Mage and Wizard classes and causes 0 balance problems, perhaps even in a way that takes less page-space than writing a separate power for those two classes.

You definitely could use less page space by having the basic firebolt be listed once and the differences for how classes interact with it spelled out in the text. The line "Long Range for Warmages." is four words, and considerably less book space than rewriting the entire power in the Warmage list (even including the extra 2 words needed in the heading to note it is also on the Warmage list).

The question of whether you should do that is one of clarity. The 3.5 Player's Handbook has 605 spells in it in a big alphabetical list and I pretty much guaranty you that even now that you've been playing this game for 15 actual years that if you opened up that book and started reading in the middle of the spell list you'd come across some spell you had forgotten was even there. Like quench, transmute metal to wood, or song of discord, where you are like "How long has that been there?" The spell list is a sprawling mass and it's entirely possible that you might have a choice between two spells whose descriptions are separated by one hundred pages.

For all of 4e's many many problems, it is at least mostly pretty clear what powers you have access to as a Warlock. The list is horrible and not nearly long enough, but it is at least easy to find all the relevant powers. If there had been enough Warlock powers written, it still would have been easy to find them.

Now the big issue is what the hell you do when you add more content. When you make the Ninja and Samurai classes, the Ninja will probably have some maneuvers very similar to maneuvers to the Rogue; and the Samurai will probably have some maneuvers very similar to the Paladin. It's certainly tempting to go the 3e route and have the Ninja get "Backstab: as a Rogue" or some shit. But again for clarity, it's probably better to reprint the ability in full, and put it into the Ninja maneuvers list. The big pitfall with that is if you want the Ninja to have something that is almost the same as the Rogue's Backstab maneuver and then you call it "Backstab" even though it's not actually the same maneuver. That gets confusing as fuck. See: the entire 4th edition Monster Manual.

But yes, bottom line is that expanding the power list from a big alphabet soup to a series of class lists does use up page space that you can only barely afford. But the advantages in presentation and clarity are real if you stick to consistent nomenclature while doing it.

-Username17

[Username17]

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.

The 3.5 team were really in deep on the idea of encounters being self contained things. The whole idea of moving the duration of bull's strength and owl's wisdom from 8 hours to 8 minutes was that they wouldn't extend from one encounter to another. The fact that you could still have them last multiple encounters by doing dungeon clearance like SWAT teams where you move directly from cleared rooms to uncleared rooms was something that Andy Collins never seems to have understood. As far as I can tell, he was still in denial that people did that in 2010.

-Username17