OSSR: Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords

[SeekritLurker]

My tiny contribution to the thread:

I think that one of the major reasons that the Tome of Battle was so divisive when it first hit was the fact that Desert Wind was the first discipline up in the alphabetical list. I remember my first look and thinking "What the shit, why is this about dudes throwing fireballs with their swords?"

Had Desert Wind been changed to, say, Scorching Tempest for its discipline name, you would have had people reading Diamond Mind and Devoted Spirit as their first exposure to the concepts, and I think that would have been easier to accept. "Zen focus for massive damage" and "pseudo-paladin" are solid concepts that had DnD precedent. There would have been pushback, but I think the "ZOMG why anime!?!?!" reaction would have been significantly blunted.

So, the reception of this particular book was a failure of editing that didn't need to happen.

[Koumei]

It still annoys me how often people describe something as being "really anime" and yet there are no boobs. Desert Wind is nothing like the anime I watch.

[infected slut princess]

D&D hasn't hot any hot babes with big tits in like 15 years. It's pathetic.

[maglag]

It still annoys me how often people describe something as being "really anime" and yet there are no boobs. Desert Wind is nothing like the anime I watch.

Man boobs in Desert Wind. Plenty of anime with them.



Crusader's right at the start with some good boob plate.



That's a nice rack for what appears to be an halfling/gnome.

What, you want to see more cleavage?



How about some dwarf warblade bikini armor?

[Koumei]

I'm just being facetious. In reality the only anime I watched this season was Gaikotsu Shotenin Honda-San (about a skeleton working in a manga store - which, I might add, also does not appear in this book).

Do we know how much of an Orcus character was going to be handled by cards and how much info you'd get on the "class write-up" page? Like, were they going to go for "Is it an RPG or a deck-building game? NOBODY KNOWS!" crazy thing, possibly with booster packs getting released, and advancement involves drawing cards from the Rewards Deck to add to your personal deck, and some cards are kept not in your deck but just "on your sheet" as the static bonus things? Or was every character still going to have a class that provided some kind of (Proficiency, HP per level, Saves, whatever) and possibly some passive abilities or game mechanics, and then a description on "How this class uses their deck/hand and what cards they're allowed to have"?

[Username17]

Do we know how much of an Orcus character was going to be handled by cards and how much info you'd get on the "class write-up" page? Like, were they going to go for "Is it an RPG or a deck-building game? NOBODY KNOWS!" crazy thing, possibly with booster packs getting released, and advancement involves drawing cards from the Rewards Deck to add to your personal deck, and some cards are kept not in your deck but just "on your sheet" as the static bonus things? Or was every character still going to have a class that provided some kind of (Proficiency, HP per level, Saves, whatever) and possibly some passive abilities or game mechanics, and then a description on "How this class uses their deck/hand and what cards they're allowed to have"?

Orcus wasn't really developed to the point of people having "non-combat" abilities as far as anyone can tell. Unclear if they were even using a skill system or just testing their combat encounter card game. There is only a little evidence that characters had any sorts of abilities outside of their deck. Every class in Tome of Battle has the ability to add a secondary attribute bonus to a defense, which certainly sounds consistent with the kinds of class writeups that they ended up making for 4th edition - but also might just be jibber jabber that Mearls and Baker coughed up so that they'd have something to fill the level progressions that 3e classes demanded and Orcus classes did not.

The smart money is on something pretty similar to what they ended up doing for 4th edition - a small list of starter abilities for each class and then a progression of power cards for everything after that. The Paladin probably had some defined defenses, some weapon and armor proficiencies, their delayed damage pool, and little or nothing else other than their hand of reshuffling Paladin Powers.

-Username17

[maglag]

Looking at the crusader/warblade/swordsage I would say it's a pretty good bet the last option is correct. In particular since classes themselves are a staple of D&D, no chance they would do a completely free system.

That reminds I heard the recovery mechanics were put in at the last moment and most of the designers actually wanted the maneuvers to be once per battle.

[Ancient History]

Review is on hold for a few days as I have to travel.

[JonSetanta]

Review is on hold for a few days as I have to travel.

Safe journeys!

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Tome of Battle

More on Maneuvers

Ancient

Until my task is done.

A prior version of this was eaten by the dark gods of the internet, whom I had offended. So...yeah, my responses on this one will be shorter.

Frank

The Martial Adepts live and die by the maneuvers they perform, and the maneuvers chapter is almost a third of the book. It's appropriate that it gets a bit more ranting.

There are several ways you can look at the maneuvers. You can look at them in terms of how they flesh out the classes, how well they flesh out the disciplines, and what kind of overall balance point we're looking at. Let's go with the last part first, because it's the easiest to talk about it. The balance point is not unreasonable. You can certainly quibble with it, any balance point is going to be kind of hard to get people to agree to when the original PHB classes stratify in such an obvious and extreme fashion. Crusaders are more powerful than Paladins and less powerful than Clerics. Warblades are more powerful than Fighters and less powerful than Dread Necromancers. How either of those classes compare to classes like Rogue that already lived in that middle space depends greatly on how much you care about skill points – or indeed having any abilities that do anything during the part of the adventure where you aren't stabbing goblins in the face. But it also matters how much you care about the ability to be an effective combatant in your eighth fight during a day. The Tome of Battle classes are simply un-matched in their ability to handle large numbers of minor encounters sequentially without rest. If you were going to do an old school dungeon crawl with wandering monster charts and shit, the Crusader would be one of the best classes you could pick.

Which is kind of weird, because as far as I can tell, no one in WotC was seriously suggesting bringing back meat grinder adventures of the old GDQ style. The production of character classes whose main selling point is that they excel in precisely that environment is a weird life choice. But it's also the choice that ended up causing the designer rebellion. Mearls and Baker didn't convince people to scrap Orcus because they objected to Martial Powers or because they were opposed to power cards. Indeed, when they made Flywheel “from scratch” those elements were recapitulated in full. The objection to Orcus was entirely based on the fact that Orcus characters didn't have an “attrition” mechanic and no number of trivial encounters would meaningfully deplete their capabilities. 4th edition had to be rewritten from the ground up and the deck management systems of Orcus all scrapped because Mearls and Baker were personally offended that the Orcus Paladin didn't have a per-day limit on healing. Seems like that would have been an easy thing to fix, but that's not what we got.

AncientH

Keyword: cooldown. Vancian spellcasting and per diem abilities have a cooldown of 24 hours, and that basically set the pace for a lot of D&D. 3rd edition started playing around with trading off versatility for speed with the Sorcerer and Psion - letting you manifest fewer powers more often - and then really double-downed with that on classes like Warlock, Binder, and Shadowmage. Fighter-types didn't have quite the same limits, because they already had more limits in what they could do so needed to be able to pull of combat tricks more frequently - hence barbarian raging and paladins laying on hands multiple times per day.

So the maneuver system makes a lot of sense when you look at it as trying to give fighter-types a fast cooldown system; one less strictly flexible than spell points or psi points, but a lot faster and a lot more limited in scope, since the design spec was to prevent pretty much all of these martial abilities from being used outside of combat.

Frank

We spend a lot of time talking about “levels” and should probably take an aside to rant about that.

Dungeons and Dragons has traditionally had Character levels, Spell levels, Dungeon levels, and Monster levels and had hose not mean the same thing. I mean, in all cases level 2 is more powerful than level 1 and level 3 is more powerful than level 2 (at least in theory). But the amount of power that is added from 1st through 5th level is not remotely the same. There has been a gradual move towards standardization of these terms – in AD&D Clerics and Magic Users had different numbers of spell levels and thus we were supposed to consider “7” to be the biggest number in Divine Magic while “9” was the biggest number in Arcane magic. By 3rd edition, all of the magic had been scaled to 9 spell levels – but still spread across 20 levels of characters.

It is in this point in history that Tome of Battle finds itself. The maneuvers have levels because that is how spells are structured. But the maneuver levels don't correspond with class levels. Again, because that is how Wizards were structured. But of course, the way these are structured makes this all more confusing rather than less. In previous incarnations of Dungeons & Dragons, the classes like Cleric or Magic User would tell you when they got access to new spell levels. The Tome of Battle classes,by contrast, do not tell you what maneuvers you have of different levels. 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.

But it doesn't have to be. And if you attempt to use the shambollic multiclass system, the initiator level, class level, and maneuver level will be weird different numbers and everyone and everything is terrible and sad.

AncientH

At first level, a Swordsage can summon a fire elemental to flank their opponent or throw fire on their sword to burn and stab a fool at the same time. But they can't start a camp fire or have the fire elemental flank a kettle of water to make tea. These are cantrip-level abilities, and zero fucks are given for the fact that the martial adepts don't get them.

Which, to be fair, if you look at the Psychic Warrior as a spiritual forebear of this class, they don't have a lot of utilitarian powers on their list...but there are some, at least. And there's no reason why they couldn't have given them small utilitarian abilities based on having X number of maneuvers from a given discipline. Know two Desert Wind maneuvers and you can set shit on fire with your fingertips. Not hard.

Part of the problem is that the disciplines are just not set up with that kind of focus of concept. Desert Wind doesn't have an Arctic Wind counterpart that does cold damage, even though that's a natural extension of the maneuver abilities. Shadow Hand's shadow jump isn't compatible with the Shadowdancer's shadow jaunt, which just makes me sad, but shadow magic in D&D3 was always a shitshow. No one's even sure what a Diamond Mind or Stone Dragon utilitarian power would really look like, although it would be nice if they maybe meshed with some other classes. But that didn't happen.

A lot of things didn't happen.

Frank

The classes aren't really put together in a way that ensures that they hold together in a particularly functional way. The maneuver prerequisites mean that branching out into a third discipline at high levels is almost impossible, but the lack of available maneuvers in any particular discipline at each level makes staying within a single discipline literally impossible. That's not hyperbole, the 14th level Warblade we mentioned earlier has three 7th level Maneuvers, and 13 total maneuvers and stances. There are only 2 maneuvers of the 7th level for any Warblade-available discipline and they all require at least 3 other maneuvers or stances from the same discipline to have, meaning that you need to have at least 4 total. Each class has nominal access to 3, 5, or 6 disciplines for Crusaders, Warblades, and Swordsages respectively, but in reality by mid-level every character is going to shake down into two disciplines – having it be even theoretically legal for you to take your third 7th level discipline from a 3rd discipline takes an incredible laserlike focus on three-way distribution of power selection, and taking your third 7th level power from your single favorite is impossible because there isn't a third one to take.

So you ask: does having access to exactly two disciplines give you enough breadth of character ability to be a meaningful contributor to adventures? And the answer is basically “No.” But it's important to remember that despite the smack I have talked and will continue to talk about these characters that we're still very much more capable than Fighters or Barbarians out of the Player's Handbook. But we go through the entire list of maneuvers that 8th level Martial Adepts get, and almost all of them are some variant on “attack with extra damage,” “attack with extra accuracy,” or “attack with a rider effect that gives a penalty to your target.” There are a grand total of 3 that let you move around better, either by jumping farther or getting good at pushing people over while moving. And even then getting better at pushing people over does not come with being stronger, just a bonus on the opposed roll to push people over. So it doesn't make you better at smashing through a door or lifting a barred gate or anything.

4e eventually made “utility powers” and “skill challenges” to cover the “everything else” portion of an RPG, which were of course failtastic and had incredibly poor coverage – both pieces of indisputable evidence that they were rushed design that was inadequately developed. If Orcus had any real non-combat systems, Mearls and Baker didn't bother copying them for Tome of Battle and whatever state they were in they got binned with the deck manipulation effects when work on Flywheel started going.

AncientH

Historically, there were people mostly valued for their combat skills: soldiers, guards, gladiators, boxers, mercenaries. So D&D, which comes out of a simulationist mindset, has always had difficulty coming up with ideas for things fighter-types should do outside of combat. Conan was a thief, a reiver, and a pirate among other things before he became a king...and "up" in those cases generally meant ascending to leadership roles, not obtaining some new level of martial ability.

Which isn't an argument against fighter-types gaining progressive abilities, but it does mean that the designers are largely in a grey space - unless they want to borrow off cleric/bard/druid/wizard/psion lists for ideas, and you can see a little bit of that here and there, but nothing utilitarian.

You get a few maneuvers that give the appearance of a basic progression of abilities, like Sapphire Nightmare Blade -> Ruby Nightmare Blade -> Diamond Nightmare Blade, but these aren't strict ability progresses like a Soulknife's mindblade or a Monk's ki strike improving with level, and it's entirely possible to skip powers in the progression (I mean, theoretically; realistically there aren't enough powers and if you want the higher-up ones you'll need most of the lower ones).

Likewise, there are powers that do similar things but in slightly different and weirder ways. Soaring Raptor Strike (3rd level) lets you jump over an opponent and attack for +6d6 damage; Death from Above (4th level) lets your jump over an opponent and attack for +4d6 damage; Swooping Dragon Attack (7th level) lets you jump over an opponent and attack for +10d6 damage... so is Death from Above a typo? Hard to say.

Frank

The number of ability cards being thrown around, both in terms of how many each character gets and how many exist in the book, is too small to show off what this system could be doing. It's not just that at the high levels there are only two powers per level, it's that most of the disciplines only have 2 available powers at second level. Crusaders and Warblades both get one new and two tradeups in the two class levels where each maneuver level is cutting edge, so any maneuver level where a discipline gets only 2 maneuvers is underfilled to allow for specialists to even exist – let alone give any meaningful choices. You can actually lose character generation at level 4, since there are enough first level maneuvers that you could specialize at level 1, but then 2nd level maneuvers have a prerequisite of having 1 maneuver from the appropriate discipline – so if you decided to go all-in on one discipline at level 1 you'd find that at level 4 when you could trade in for a 2nd level maneuver there wouldn't be any for you to get because you'd have both the offered maneuvers from your specialist discipline and wouldn't meet the prereqs to buy a 2nd level maneuever from anything else. Fucking hell that's bad.

But even once you've internalized the need to keep two disciplines in rough parity (which is an emergent property of the maneuver list, the book itself pretends you can be a “Devoted Spirit Crusader” which is flatly impossible), there's still the issue that decks and hands aren't very big.


In Tome of Battle, you always have a tiny hand.

The Crusader is really where the “deck effects” are most interesting,because they are the only class that draws their hand from the deck with the cards face down. But even then you are drawing more than a third (even more than half if you take the appropriate abilities, which you do) of your deck every time you shuffle it. So it's really more like three card monte than poker. If the Crusader doesn't feel like it has a lot of interest or depth, well perhaps that is because it has only ten distinct hands and literally always sees its entire deck in three rounds.

The Warblade has a hand so small that they actually play their whole hand in three turns, then they make a basic attack and draw the exact same cards. If it seems like you're kind of doing the same thing over and over again, it's because that is literally exactly what is happening. Not only does each combat pretty much play out the same way with the same maneuvers played in mostly the same order, but any battle that goes on for more than 4 rounds or so will see things come around and you'll be using the same abilities again. And if it for some reason goes out to 8 rounds... you'll repeat things again.

This system badly wanted there to be more maneuvers to choose from. Both at character advancement and during combats. It really doesn't take much effort to make a card game where players don't use exactly the same cards in exactly the same order all the time. For fuck's sake, if a Crusader's deck was nine cards instead of 5 cards, this sort of bullshit wouldn't be an issue. If the Warblade had enough maneuvers in their deck that they had to make choices when they made their hand that would be something. But they didn't. And indeed there weren't enough maneuvers in the book to present such choices to people.

As it was, the hand sizes and card pools were so limited that if two dedicated min/maxers made an 8th level Crusader, the chances that they'd have exactly the same 5 maneuvers in their deck was very high. They are obviously going to split between Devoted Spirit and White Raven, and there are only four level 4 maneuevers between those disciplines and they know three of them.

This serves as a proof of concept, but only barely. Making this concept sing would have required a considerably larger amount of content. Which in turn means that they probably needed to simply the presentation of individual maneuvers substantially – 38 pages for a woefully inadequate number of power cards for 3 classes doesn't sound like a winning formula to make a complete edition with. And yet, Mearls and Baker's takeaway wasn't that. It was that they didn't have enough attrition effects. Which is a third order problem of this at best.

AncientH

The way the prerequisites is set up is also fairly arbitrary, and renders the Martial Study feat kind of useless - yeah, you can technically dip into a discipline and pick out a single power, but if you're basically only doing the combat trick once an encounter and you're blowing a feat on it, it better be a killer app! Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of killer apps you can dip deep into which are worth it. Inferno Blade (7th level) lets you throw fire on your melee attacks, and the lack of prerequisites feels like a typo.

What they probably needed to do was scrap the new classes and instead put together a bunch of variant classes (a la Unearthed Arcana) or alternate class features for a bunch of fighting classes, so that maybe you're a Monk martial adept who gains initiator levels instead of flurry of blows or something. That would probably require going down to only one maneuver use/reuse mechanic, but it would have given Tome of Battle a lot more range of play.

Frank

So what is the cost of a maneuver? For the Boost and the Counter, the answer is generally just the use of the maneuver slot itself. Warriors don't do anything with Swift actions and Reactions outside of this book, so the Boost and the Counter are “free.” If you have one to use, you should just use it. The only cost is the card itself – any Boost could have been a Strike instead. Strikes are more complex because they use “standard” actions that a warrior was otherwise going to spend stabbing people with basic attacks. The typical Strike maneuver is a basic attack plus. Plus what? Well, plus something. Extra damage, some kind of debilitating rider effect on the target, fucking whatever. That means that at levels 5 and lower, a Strike is pretty much pure gravy. You directly trade “a basic attack” for “a basic attack plus a ham sandwich” a trade that puts you up one ham sandwich.


It doesn't even have to be a good ham sandwich.

When you get to 6th level – that's character level 6 and not class level, dungeon level, initiator level, or maneuver level 6 – you would normally be allowed to make a second basic attack at -5 to-hit. A maneuver still stands instead of the attack action, so the cost of initiating a Strike goes up substantially when you hit level 6. Further, once you hit character level 11, you get another extra attack at -10 that almost always misses, but that's lost too when you use a Strike maneuver and it means that the cost of using a Strike is very slightly higher at level 11+. But the cost of initiating a Counter or Boost is unchanged, and if you wanted to do that over a basic attack and an additional shitty basic attack that is probably going to miss, that is a defensible life choice.

These worsening and indeed nearly worthless extra attacks are there for historical reasons. Back in AD&D, your extra attacks were at full attack bonus and basic attacks were a really big deal because monsters had a lot less hit points. This meant that people felt that those break points were “too big.” In 3rd edition, the extra attacks are shit and no one likes them. It was a failed experiment, and giving out maneuvers that have cool rider effects instead of extra die rolls for extra attacks that usually miss anyway is much better design. Indeed, probably the crappiest thing about the Warblade at high level is that they are still called upon to use these shitty attacks that usually miss on about round 4 of any combat because they aren't allowed to use maneuvers on a round where they refill their hand.

So with that as a backdrop, let's do a little walk through what you get at each level for a Strike:

• Level 1: You can make one attack against two enemies, or heal a d6+1 hit points when your attack hits, or give a +4 bonus to all your allies to attack the enemy you just hit. Those are all good options and strictly superior to what you would otherwise be doing, which is “making a regular attack.”
• Level 3: You can make an attack that does +2d6 damage and ignores damage reduction, or you can make an attack that comes with a free Disarm attempt if it hits, or you can make a regular charge that does +10 damage and ignores attacks of opportunity for movement. All of these are again, strictly superior to making normal attacks
• Level 5: You can make an attack that heals you 3d6+5 hit points, or... what? Despite the fact that 3rd level maneuvers are the ones that come online right about when the cost of using maneuvers is much higher, very few of these strikes are actually worth knowing. Almost every maneuver you'd consider taking at levels 5 and 6 is a Counter or Boost, meaning that right when the cost of using Strikes goes up, the value of “level-appropriate” strikes goes down. I think Warblades are legit supposed to spend exactly sixth level going back to basic attacks and relying on boosts and counters, and that's dumb as hell.
• Level 7: You can attack for +8d6 damage, or you can make an attack against every adjacent opponent and get a +2 attack bonus for doing it, or you can make an attack that negates your target's dexterity bonus to AC until their next turn. That last one is basically shit in most scenarios, and depending on how initiative numbers add up might literally do nothing, but the other two are clearly superior to making a second shitty attack at -5 to-hit in most circumstances. Or at least, in the circumstances they apply in – since obviously an attack that strikes a bunch of enemies and a strike that does bonus damage to one enemy are almost never useful in the same combat.
• Level 9: As mentioned previously, this is where you get several different options that are all giving a rider effect where the target has to make a save or lose a round. Is that good? Sometimes? The saves are very high difficulty, so these usually work. But whether this is better than attacking again and trying to end the fight faster depends on what you are fighting.
• Level 11: Again, almost everything at this level is a Counter or Boost, meaning that you either use the strikes from previous levels or you make basic attacks for a couple of levels. It's weird and dumb.
• Level 13: You can make an attack that does an additional 8 dice of damage to the target and an extra 5 dice of damage to all enemies within 30 feet (and gives all the enemies a trivial -2 attack penalty for the rest of combat). Or you can make an attack that gives a bonus attack to all your allies. This swings the pendulum back to using maneuvers.

No one plays Tome of Battle characters over level 13, so we can move on.

AncientH

It's worth mentioning that ToB is aggressively focused on melee combat, to the point where archery is excluded from pretty much any and all of the maneuvers. Yeah, you can technically use some of the maneuvers if you have an arrow in your hand and treat it as a melee weapon, or throw it instead of using a bow, but actual bows and stuff are right the fuck out. Even a lot of unarmed strikes are kinda frowned upon - keeping in mind a monk's Flurry of Blows is almost explicitly not compatible with strike maneuvers - we're looking at an extremely narrow aesthetic of play.

D&D3 also had many ways for you to throw some form of magic on your weapon or make your own magic weapon - the Soulknife's mindblade, the Incarnum Blade, the Kensai's signature weapon, etc. - and Tome of Battle slathers on a couple more options with maneuvers like Shadow Blade Technique (not to be confused with the Shadow Blade feat, which is something that's easy to do because a lot of these fucking names sound the same). A lot of these different class abilities layer, so you could theoretically have a Soulknife/Swordsage/Incarnum Blade...but instead of having a badass weapon bonded to your soul that no-one can take away from you, you're probably a middling fuckup with a weapon worse than one you could loot from a boss of the same level.

The basic issue is that there was no solid approach to actually incorporating ToB and previous material together in any sort of cohesive fashion. Yeah, you can go dip into Complete Warrior and play a Warblade 5/Gnome Giant Killer 3 or whatever, maybe jump over ogres and stab them and have a great time of it using Tiger Claw maneuvers, but these are all synergies to be discovered, random accidents, not anything designed into the system.

I will say this: the whole initiator level concept, based on the caster/manifester level concept that made prestige classes such hot shit with trade-offs in D&D, has the bare advantage in that you get half-levels as you advance. It's interesting to think what a 3.75 D&D would look like if they extended that to caster classes too - imagine being a Hexblade 4/Swordsage 4 who had an effective caster level 6 and initiator level 6. Yeah, you'd get some munchkins trying to abuse multiclassing, but if you kept the caster/manifester/etc. classes controlled and focused enough, the results could have been...interesting.

Frank

Is the design and development here good? Not really, no.

I'm not really sure what a Warblade is supposed to do with their life. They get maneuvers that let them make small attacks against several opponents and they get maneuvers that let them penalize and gang up on individual opponents. So unless every encounter you're in is against an Evil High Priest and their bullshit skeleton minions, most encounters you are in are going to turn some of your maneuvers into blank cards. The Warblade's hand is so small and their in-combat access to the rest of their deck so limited that often this just means that they will run out of useful things to do with their maneuvers in less than 3 rounds.

The Crusader has theoretically unlimited use of attacks that heal allies, with weird admonishments that they can only be used in actual combats. Which since healing is something that has persistent costs if done outside of combat, it encourages you to figure out a way to drag out combats as long as possible. Like, Crusaders are legit encouraged to use Revitalizing Strike with a a teddy bear on a stick against paralyzed enemies over and over again until all the damage from the encounter is washed off.


Can't stop. Allies still injured.

Sword Sages just feel unfinished. Their hand refill mechanism is so bad that they are required by law to take a feat to let them refresh with a full round action. But that still leaves them spending one round in 5 or so masturbating instead of accomplishing anything. Further, they have a reduced attack bonus and no one can really explain why. They are still using pretty much the same maneuvers that the other Martial Adepts are, they are just worse at hitting with them and have a longer blue screen of death when they run out. I think the problem here is that they started with the Swashbuckler, but because of the “nine swords” framing they were actually looking for a ninja. So they dumped some key features of Swashbuckling and replaced it with inadequately developed Shao-lin shit. It didn't really gel. You'd think that they'd take this opportunity to make the Sword Sage specific disciplines be full of high value stuff, but they really don't.

AncientH

None of the disciplines have a lot of high-value stuff, especially when you realize that high-level play is basically out. While there are a few synergistic effects buried in there - stances that give Jump bonuses when Jump bonuses are the basis for your Tiger Claw leaping attacks - for the most part, things just don't jive.

For example, Iron Heart has two distinct "paths" - one that focuses on killing a single opponent to the exclusion of all others (which, bizarrely, means the maneuver grants a bonus to your opponents for attacking you), and another which is about attacking different people. They're fundamentally alternate directions, and naturally you'd want to focus on one over the other...but the math doesn't quite work, because of prerequisite requirements.

Even some of the stuff that looks high level is bizarrely conditional. For example, the Stone Dragon penultimate power Adamantine Bones (8th level) gives you Damage Resistance 20/Adamantine for 1 turn if you make a successful attack... but keep in mind that somebody could start out with an adamantine arrow, and that adamantine weapon is a 3rd-level artificer infusion, and Touch of Adamantine a 5th level spell that Wizards get at 9th level. Hell, even straight Monks get ki strike (adamantine) at 16th level, when a martial adept would be expected to get Adamantine Bones.

It's just not really a level-appropriate ability, except maybe if you're a Crusader spamming it turn after turn - and even then, if you're going up against level-appropriate enemies they probably have adamantine cock piercings and ignore your DR.

Frank

The access to different disciplines for the different classes seems pretty random. It's pretty obvious that you're looking at the unhappy and incomplete marriage of some weird janky rumination on eastern martial arts as imagined by white people and the design docs for a completely different game. Which of course, is exactly what you're looking at.

The Warblade gets: Diamond Mind, Iron Heart, Stone Dragon, Tiger Claw, and White Raven.
The Swordsage gets: Desert Wind, Diamond Mind, Setting Sun, Shadow Hand, Stone Dragon, and Tiger Claw.
The Crusader gets: Devoted Spirit, Stone Dragon, and White Raven

So the obvious sources of class identity is the disciplines that classes get exclusive access to. Devoted Spirit is a bunch of “paladin powers,” Iron Heart is a bunch of “fighter maneuvers,” and Desert Wind, Setting Sun, and Shadow Hand are all various “eastern flavor” pseudo-mystical nonsense. Of these, by far the most important is Devoted Spirit because it gives you access to the whole combat healing shtick that defines Crusaders, it's pretty good, and its very nature kind of breaks the game a bit with the constant reshuffling system that Crusaders actuallyhave. It genuinely rewards you for dragging out battles long after a sane person would have declared them over, like you were playing Final Fantasy Tactics and trying to milk finished encounters for skill ups.

Iron Heart is a pretty poor fit for Warblades. It's full of “silver bullet” maneuvers that won't affect all your enemies. Like, you get to force your enemy to drop their weapon, but that doesn't do anything when you are fighting a bear. You get to attack multiple enemies at once, but again that doesn't do anything if you are fighting a bear (as in: one bear). These maneuvers seem like they'd go into a class that got to sculpt their maneuver list during combat somehow, but the actual resource management system this game hands out just lets them move cards from their hand to the used pile and back again – if they are stuck with useless maneuvers they are just stuck with them.

Many Warblades end up gravitating to Tiger Style, because there are some reasonably simple damage and mobility maneuvers in there. There's also a whole subtheme of maneuvers which allow and require you to use multiple weapons, which you never fucking use because if only some of your maneuvers benefit you from using two daggers and the other maneuvers don't, you're not going to be able to go a whole combat using all your maneuvers. It's just really bad design. Indeed, the entire attempt to make special strikes that used two weapons in order to support two weapon fighting can be generally dismissed as failed design here. This did not stop them from reusing this concept in 4th edition where it is also terrible.

AncientH

Feats, maneuvers, and character abilities interact...oddly. It's not that you won't find a use for, say, Improved Disarm - you can use the bonus with Disarming Strike (Iron Heart, level 2) for example - but a lot of the feat-chain stuff that was fighter bread-and-butter is, if not invalidated, then rendered very weird to use because of the way the action economy works out. A lot of the time, you'd have to chose between a maneuver or one of the jankier feats or class abilities. You can find stuff that stacks - there's nothing to prevent you from using your Disarming Attack maneuver and, if successful, roll that into Steal and Strike - but you're putting a lot of character resources into weirdly specific combos at that point.

Which, I guess, might be the point. Even with all these martial maneuvers, martial adepts are still succumbing to the fact that they are general characters in outline who have to specialize if they're going to advance - there are still plenty of trap options.

Frank

Stone Dragon is just kind of not good. Also it turns off if you stop touching the ground, so eventually you will be high enough level to be riding a griffin or some fucking thing and then the entire discipline is useless. It might as well not exist, and considering that Crusaders have exactly three disciplines they can choose and one of them is Stone Dragon, it means that literally every Crusader goes deep on White Raven and Devoted Spirit.

White Raven is a discipline that fiddles with other player characters. It gives them bonuses, sometimes even extra actions. How good is it? That depends on a lot of things. Mostly it depends on what the other characters in your party are doing. If the rest of the team have sensibly decided to play Wizards, it probably doesn't do a lot (although it's important to remember at high levels that you are allied with your own griffin mount). If your compatriots are also doing weird melee hybrid setups, White Raven may well be the best set of maneuvers. In any case, there's some stuff where you just plain give the team extra actions, which is strictly better than anything else you could be doing with your life, so investing enough into White Raven to unlock those at the relevant levels is something that every Warblade and Crusader should be doing. And of course, Crusaders don't really have a choice, so whatever.

AncientH

Stone Dragon was basically designed for the Races of Earth type - because presumably dwarves don't jump - and it is shit. But it also highlights something in particular I guess I want to talk about:

Martial adepts are shit for mass battles.

Granted, D&D is pretty shit for mass battles, despite decades of effort. But the the individuality involved in the maneuver selection-and-execution really is not suited to any sort of tight combat formation, much less large groups of martial adepts. Trying to do a large-scale battle with martial adepts would be nuts - yeah, you could maybe fake your way through it, but what a fucking pain in the ass.

I'd also like to point out another thing about Stone Dragon, is that several of its signature maneuvers deal Constitution damage. Which is fair enough...unless you're fighting the undead. And, in fact, there are no maneuvers specifically effective against undead - Desert Wind can throw fire at them, Stone Dragon can maybe knock them on their ass, but it's weird to me that they didn't include at least one token anti-undead maneuver, given that facing the undead is one of the major difficulties a lot of fighter-types face.

Frank

Next up: Prestige Classes. Also the Nine Sword themselves because there isn't nearly as much to say about these shovelware chapters.

[nockermensch]

No comments about Iron Heart Surge? I'm disappoint.

[Ancient History]

We can't cover all the bullshit. There's too much. Iron Heart Surge is the Crusader's fuck-you to clever fighters and de-buffers.

Your fighting spirit, dedication, and training allow you to overcome almost anything to defeat your enemies. When you use this maneuver, select one spell, effect, or other condition currently affecting you and with a duration of 1 or more rounds. That effect ends immediately

Presumably this is meant to overcome all sorts of crap like paralysis, stunning, fear, entanglement, etc. but even under the least generous interpretation if lets you basically heal ability damage, recover temporary lost levels from energy drain, etc. No idea how any of that is supposed to work, in any practical sense, and a more generous meaning let you shrug off basically any curse you're struggling under.

Which is not a terrible idea in principle, just like everybody being able to do a little self-healing is a good idea in principle (Earthdawn did it with recovery tests). Being able to temporarily overcome condition modifiers without waiting for the White Mage to cast the appropriate restore spell is a good idea. In execution ...eh.

[maglag]

IHS is the bullshit, the most divisive maneuver even among fans and everybody has a different opinion on what it does (and shouldn't do).

Like if you're a vampire, can you IHS the sun?

Also there's some utility here and there, like Shadow Hand can make you invisible and Stone Dragon has all the "ignore hardness" abilities which are great for quickly taking care of a chain/lock/door/wall. They're rare yes, but it's still a feast for noncaster standards, in particular when nothing is 1/day.

[Korwin]

We can't cover all the bullshit. There's too much. Iron Heart Surge is the Crusader's fuck-you to clever fighters and de-buffers.

Nitpick, Warblade not Crusader.
Unless the naming sheme is so fucked up, that Iron Heart Surge is not in the Iron Heart discipline/thingy.

[Ignimortis]

We can't cover all the bullshit. There's too much. Iron Heart Surge is the Crusader's fuck-you to clever fighters and de-buffers.

Nitpick, Warblade not Crusader.
Unless the naming sheme is so fucked up, that Iron Heart Surge is not in the Iron Heart discipline/thingy.

Thankfully, it is.

My personal version of it (because anyone who runs a game with ToB has a personal one) is basically the anime trope where the hero says "no, fuck your powers that stop me" and just deletes all conditions apart from Dead on himself, even if they normally can't be deleted or would prevent him from doing that. Is it OP as hell? Yes. Do I care about a non-caster being able to do that? No.

[Username17]

Level 1 of the Iron Heart Surge discussion is that due to a timing issue it doesn't do much of what it is obviously intended to work on. It's a maneuver, so any condition that prevents you from activating maneuvers can't be ended with it. So you're supposed to surge your way out of paralysis or petrification, but you can't.

Level 2 of the Iron Heart Surge discussion is that baleful conditions aren't actually defined in 3rd edition.

Level 3 of the Iron Heart Surge discussion is that early ending of ongoing conditions is a 4th edition thing anyway. And it didn't work very well in that edition.

[Ancient History]

We can't cover all the bullshit. There's too much. Iron Heart Surge is the Crusader's fuck-you to clever fighters and de-buffers.

Nitpick, Warblade not Crusader.
Unless the naming sheme is so fucked up, that Iron Heart Surge is not in the Iron Heart discipline/thingy.

Sorry, I've had about eight hours of sleep in the last 72.

[Orion]

Almost none of the people want to do with Iron Heart Surge actually work, because they nearly all run afoul of the explicit and *extremely* narrow restriction that it only ends a condition with "a duration of one or more rounds." This means that almost everything AncientHistory was talking about is a no-go. Ability damage and negative levels do not normally have durations. Flesh to Stone is instantaneous. Grappling does not have a duration. Entanglement often does, but sometimes doesn't.

Iron Heart Surge is poorly written and there plenty of cases where it's unclear if it should work, but there are even more cases where it clearly doesn't work.

[nockermensch]

We can't cover all the bullshit. There's too much. Iron Heart Surge is the Crusader's fuck-you to clever fighters and de-buffers.

Nitpick, Warblade not Crusader.
Unless the naming sheme is so fucked up, that Iron Heart Surge is not in the Iron Heart discipline/thingy.

Thankfully, it is.

My personal version of it (because anyone who runs a game with ToB has a personal one) is basically the anime trope where the hero says "no, fuck your powers that stop me" and just deletes all conditions apart from Dead on himself, even if they normally can't be deleted or would prevent him from doing that. Is it OP as hell? Yes. Do I care about a non-caster being able to do that? No.

You can't surge your way out of being charmed, dominated or confused (barring the 10% chance of "acting normally" while Confused). It doesn't work against sleeping / dazing / stunning / paralysing / petrifying either.

It works against being slowed / entangled / webbed / poisoned / diseased / ability or level drained / polymorphed and some other non-obvious effects. You can iron heart surge a bigby's crushing hand or prismatic sphere out of existence, for example.

It's a terribly worded maneuver. I don't think the writers intended that level 5 warblades became immune to poisons and diseases that don't kill them in one round, and awesome undead killers (unless said undead are ghouls or liches) but here we are.

---

As for out-of-combat, utility maneuver, some very obvious choices are the teleportation powers from shadow hand. Being able to teleport 50' with line of sight at character level 3 is fun and helps to solve some low level challenges. When I DMed to a swordsage, I ruled that he could do that all day, but he had to spent the next six seconds masturbating concentrating to recharge his maneuvers. He used that on infiltration, teleporting from cover to cover, for instance.

[Ignimortis]

You can't surge your way out of being charmed, dominated or confused (barring the 10% chance of "acting normally" while Confused). It doesn't work against sleeping / dazing / stunning / paralysing / petrifying either.

It works against being slowed / entangled / webbed / poisoned / diseased / ability or level drained / polymorphed and some other non-obvious effects. You can iron heart surge a bigby's crushing hand or prismatic sphere out of existence, for example.

It's a terribly worded maneuver. I don't think the writers intended that level 5 warblades became immune to poisons and diseases that don't kill them in one round, and awesome undead killers (unless said undead are ghouls or liches) but here we are.

I know of the limitations of it by default. However, that basically removes most of the maneuver's purpose and gives it an entirely different use, which feels more stupid.

That's why I said "everyone has their own version of IHS", because as written it's almost unusable and certainly isn't the "heroic willpower moment" it's described to be, and everyone I know who has at some point ran a game with ToB in it, rewrote it somehow.

[Orion]

Diseases do not have durations! And certainly they don't have durations measured in rounds. Poisons do not have durations. Level drain does not have a duration.

[SeekritLurker]

At my table, martial adepts pretty much always take Mountain Hammer, the 2nd level Stone Dragon maneuver that does 2d6 extra damage and bypasses both damage reduction and hardness. The ability to break doors and locks and such is considered a major out-of-combat utility by my players - who don't seem to realize they can do basically the same thing with an adamantine dagger.

Other than that, Swordsages get some fun mobility things - spider climb, teleports, jumps and whatnot. Otherwise, out of combat utility is pretty negligible. Nothing super-impressive, but I guess it sure beats 3 hit points at level 21.

[Omegonthesane]

"a duration of one or more rounds" cannot reasonably be interpreted as "only durations that are literally measured in rounds" - clearly a duration of 24 hours is a duration that is longer than 1 round.

[Orion]

"a duration of one or more rounds" cannot reasonably be interpreted as "only durations that are literally measured in rounds" - clearly a duration of 24 hours is a duration that is longer than 1 round.

Okay. Diseases and poisons still don't have durations at all, in any units.

[maglag]

At my table, martial adepts pretty much always take Mountain Hammer, the 2nd level Stone Dragon maneuver that does 2d6 extra damage and bypasses both damage reduction and hardness. The ability to break doors and locks and such is considered a major out-of-combat utility by my players - who don't seem to realize they can do basically the same thing with an adamantine dagger.

-An adamantine dagger costs valuable treasure and can be lost/destroyed itself.
-An adamantine dagger does not help you that much in combat while Mountain Hammer still flat out ignores all DR.
-An adamantine dagger does just dagger damage so Mountain Hammer will break stuff faster.
-An Adamantine dagger can't chip away other adamantine stuff.
-Being able to break a lock with some random stick or your dick is infinitely cooler than using some expensive dagger.