OSSR: Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords

[deaddmwalking]

On the other hand, an adamantine dagger can be used by anyone in the party - potentially several people. And technically you could probably just use an arrow (60 gp) (it is unclear whether an arrow used as a melee weapon suffers the break chance that ammunition fired from a bow does). And of course, the cost of adamantine is the same whether you put it on a dagger or a Greataxe, so the weapon isn't really a problem.

And usually adamantine weapons just show up.

[JonSetanta]

I'd love to see a Tome remake of the ToB classes, maybe just one big class like the Tome Monk that uses Maneuvers or Stances or maybe both to better effect than Mearls ever thought of.

[RobbyPants]

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

Diseases don't but poisons have a duration of one minute. The effects on round 0 and 10 are typically instantaneous, but the creature is considered "poisoned" for one minute. If not, Neutralize Poison does next to nothing.

I'd love to see a Tome remake of the ToB classes, maybe just one big class like the Tome Monk that uses Maneuvers or Stances or maybe both to better effect than Mearls ever thought of.

Frank did the Crusader five years ago.

[Ancient History]

On the other hand, an adamantine dagger can be used by anyone in the party - potentially several people. And technically you could probably just use an arrow (60 gp) (it is unclear whether an arrow used as a melee weapon suffers the break chance that ammunition fired from a bow does). And of course, the cost of adamantine is the same whether you put it on a dagger or a Greataxe, so the weapon isn't really a problem.

And usually adamantine weapons just show up.

There is, as I pointed, a very weird inconsistency with how much access each class gets to DR/limit breaks. If you use your straight Monk as the default (wealth by level guidelines be damned), Ki strike (magic) is 4th level, Ki strike (lawful) is 10th, and Ki strike (adamantine) is 16th. That leaves out plenty of stuff like silver and cold iron, but the whole point of DR is supposed to be letting you punch above your level by using a special substance/enchantment to bypass DR...and access to that in spells, powers, and class abilities is just all over the fucking place.

Why is Ki strike (adamantine) 12 levels higher than ki strike (magic)? There aren't a lot of monsters in the base book that even have DR XX/adamantine. Golems, mainly, and they start out at CR 7. Like a lot of D&D3, it's a really questionable early piece of design which is then made worse by subsequent material that ignores the basic math and puts commensurate abilities available to characters at much lower levels.

[JonSetanta]

]I'd love to see a Tome remake of the ToB classes, maybe just one big class like the Tome Monk that uses Maneuvers or Stances or maybe both to better effect than Mearls ever thought of.

Frank did the Crusader five years ago.

Given how Tome of Virtue was never compiled into one huge document, I missed it.
Thanks.

Now.... are there any Ninjas?

[maglag]

On the other hand, an adamantine dagger can be used by anyone in the party - potentially several people. And technically you could probably just use an arrow (60 gp) (it is unclear whether an arrow used as a melee weapon suffers the break chance that ammunition fired from a bow does). And of course, the cost of adamantine is the same whether you put it on a dagger or a Greataxe, so the weapon isn't really a problem.

And usually adamantine weapons just show up.

There is, as I pointed, a very weird inconsistency with how much access each class gets to DR/limit breaks. If you use your straight Monk as the default (wealth by level guidelines be damned), Ki strike (magic) is 4th level, Ki strike (lawful) is 10th, and Ki strike (adamantine) is 16th. That leaves out plenty of stuff like silver and cold iron, but the whole point of DR is supposed to be letting you punch above your level by using a special substance/enchantment to bypass DR...and access to that in spells, powers, and class abilities is just all over the fucking place.

Why is Ki strike (adamantine) 12 levels higher than ki strike (magic)? There aren't a lot of monsters in the base book that even have DR XX/adamantine. Golems, mainly, and they start out at CR 7. Like a lot of D&D3, it's a really questionable early piece of design which is then made worse by subsequent material that ignores the basic math and puts commensurate abilities available to characters at much lower levels.

A candle of invocation costs 5k gold (less than twice the price of an adamantine dagger) and can basically do anything you want.

3rd edition kinda terrible at distributing things over the levels since the core books.

Now that I think about it kinda weird you were complaining about maneuvers being all over the place when spells are also all over the place. There are plenty of crappy spells at every level and several "I'll be preparing this every day for the whole campaign no matter how much I level up" spells out there.

[Ancient History]

Now that I think about it kinda weird you were complaining about maneuvers being all over the place when spells are also all over the place. There are plenty of crappy spells at every level and several "I'll be preparing this every day for the whole campaign no matter how much I level up" spells out there.

The difference being that there are spells all over the place, while the maneuvers list is comparatively tiny and an individual's collection of maneuvers is minute compared to even a sorcerer's spells known. So not only is a martial adept picking from a much smaller list, but they have far fewer picks involved - so bad options stand out more.

[Koumei]

After some point (I want to say "the first batch of Complete books"), they should have leaned more towards "adding low-cost options to characters you already have". One of the eight dragon-themed books had a power up for Sorcerers where they make pacts to get Spell-Like Abilities that they don't have (by spending spell slots which they have a lot of, and money which is much of a muchness). Weapons of Legacy was stupid and terrible but you could take one of those without spending a feat or class level.

Shadow Magic should have been "make a roleplaying decision and give up X thing, now you have Special Shadow Magic Which Does A Thing". True Naming shouldn't have been a whole class or a skill. And so on for Binders, Blue Magic, Weeaboo Fighting Magic, and whatever else.

Now.... are there any Ninjas?

Kaelik made this one.

I made this one.

[Ancient History]

After some point (I want to say "the first batch of Complete books"), they should have leaned more towards "adding low-cost options to characters you already have". One of the eight dragon-themed books had a power up for Sorcerers where they make pacts to get Spell-Like Abilities that they don't have (by spending spell slots which they have a lot of, and money which is much of a muchness). Weapons of Legacy was stupid and terrible but you could take one of those without spending a feat or class level.

This is one of those fundamental RPG design problems that a lot of people don't give much thought to. I like to point out Shadowrun as a good example of a game that has fairly rigid roles (street samurai, decker, magician, rigger, etc.) with supplements that specifically cater to those roles (Street Samurai Catalog, Virtual Reality, Grimoire, Rigger's Black Book), but the nature of the game is such that few of those books are absolutely exclusive to those roles - a magician can pick up a gun or get a cyberware implant, a decker can drive a car, a street samurai can punch a spirit in the face and sell the foci they rip off the magician's dead body, or do a simple search on the Matrix with a cyberdeck, etc.

D&D is...less forgiving with dipping. The whole point of having classes is to keep some ability or combination of abilities exclusive to that class, because the class is the role and you don't want to be in a situation where you design one class which is just objectively better than another class because it does everything that class does and more - which is a problem that D&D already runs into at the mid-high tier of quadratic wizards, anyway.

So yes, when introducing a new system (artifice, incarnum, psionics, shadowmagic, martial maneuvers, etc.) you absolutely want them to be accessible and awesome at entry level for established characters. Dipping doesn't just have to be easy, but it should be attractive enough by what's offered to make players seriously consider doing it versus not doing it.

WotC was scared shitless by that. And that's in part because they were gutless and hated to give you anything really cool at entry cost, and in part because D&D3 was such a mess and so complicated as far as what options were available that nobody knew what was the effective level for any particular effect.

Shadowrun made dipping relatively easy because the costs, for most characters, was relatively low to get buy-in: a couple skill points and a few hundred nuyen and your Street Samurai or Street Shaman could punch deck. Not well - not enough to encroach on a dedicated Decker's turf - but well enough to do relatively simple things and be expected to accomplish them.

For D&D3, costs are higher. Generally, you needed at least a feat to dip, and there weren't many of those. If you were lucky, there might be some alternate class feature you could retrain into, or a magic item you could just buy. High-end costs generally involve taking levels in another class, and that requires both a lot of opportunity cost and a fair bit of math and planning - if you're a 4th level fighter, is it worth it to take a level in Swordsage versus another level in Fighter? What are you giving up, and what are you gaining? Etc.

Sometimes they tried to make the costs lower - trade out Paladin levels for Blackguard levels at 1-to-1; have half your non-martial adept levels count toward your initiator level for maneuvers - but they were never consistent on that kind of approach, and they needed to do more of it anyway.

[JonSetanta]

Kaelik made this one.

I made this one.

Thank you, saved for my archives.

[Orion]

poisons have a duration of one minute. The effects on round 0 and 10 are typically instantaneous, but the creature is considered "poisoned" for one minute. If not, Neutralize Poison does next to nothing.

Remove disease "cures all diseases that the subject is suffering from." Remove Blindness/Deafness "cures blindness. . . whether the effect is normal or magical in nature." Remove Fear says that "If the subject is under the influence of a fear effect when receiving the spell, that effect is suppressed for the duration of the spell."Lesser Restoration "dispels any magical effects reducing one of the subject’s ability scores. . . . It also eliminates any fatigue suffered by the character, and improves an exhausted condition to fatigued" Remove Paralysis "can free one or more creatures from the effects of any temporary paralysis". D&D spell templating is a mess, but there is enough consistency here to make a few inferences.

• Conditions with durations are usually described as "effects" or "conditions."
• Spells that remove conditions are generally described either as "curing" something or as getting rid of an "effect."
• Most of these spells explicitly refer to the ongoing nature of the condition -- the character is "suffering" something, "under the influence" of something, or needs to be "freed" from something.

How does Neutralize Poison compare?

You detoxify any sort of venom in the creature or object touched. A poisoned creature suffers no additional effects from the poison, and any temporary effects are ended, but the spell does not reverse instantaneous effects, such as hit point damage, temporary ability damage, or effects that don’t go away on their own.

Neutralize Poison does not "cure" poisons, does not refer to a "condition," and does not call poison itself an "effect." It prevents the target from suffering additional effects "from" poison and it ends "any temporary effects." The state of having been poisoned is not described as an effect but as something that might generate effects. Since a poisoned creature may or may not be under "any" temporary effects, we can assume that "poisoned" is not itself a temporary effect. This is consistent with the DMG, which defines the effects of poisons on page 296 and omits "poisoned" from the list of conditions on page 300. Although Neutralize Poison does use the word "poisoned" once, I think the balance of evidence suggests that this is natural english meaning "having been exposed to poison" and not a keyword meaning "suffering the poisoned condition."

[erik]

I'm with Orion. It's a mistake to call the time between initial poison damage and secondary damage its duration.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Tome of Battle

Chapter 5: Prestige Classes



Your musical accompaniment will be the Baddest Man Alive.

AncientH

I'm not feeling very well, but I haven't sneezed up any blood since this morning, so let's do this...

Prestige classes are important because by and large they are one of the major entry points for established characters looking to dip into a NEW THING, and as a major goal for new characters looking to develop their characters based around NEW THING. As such, it is almost critical in D&D3 that prestige classes exist and have something awesome if NEW THING is going to be A THING.

Because otherwise, what the fuck's the point?

Frank

At 36 pages you'd think this chapter would be almost as important to the book as the 38 page maneuvers chapter. You'd be wrong. This is 36 pages to cover 8 prestige classes. That's more than four pages per class. There isn't even one class per sword for their nine swords paradigm.

We've talked about how ridiculously poor the coverage was for Prestige Classes in the reviews of other 3.5 books. And that tradition carries over to Tome of Battle in full. If you think of the number of directions you could plausibly want to take even a class as myopic and rail-fixed as the Crusader at high level, you'd need an absolute truckload of prestige classes to cover even a tiny percentage of it all. What if you want to be a Crusader that is a leader of men, or one who summons Angels? What if you want to be a Crusader who does Crusader shit with one of the six martial disciplines that Crusaders don't normally get? And so on and so on and so on. You could sit in a bathtub and think for 10 minutes and come up with twenty high level concepts for martial adepts, but at four and a half pages per prestige class that would be 90 pages of shovelware just to cover a single naked brainstorming session.

Prestige classes as 3rd edition defined them were not the way forward and couldn't be the way forward. It wasn't a matter of people not making enough prestige classes or that the prestige classes they made were shit, or that there was too much shovelware filler text padding out each class – though of course all of those criticisms are totally fair. It's that on a deep conceptual level you are never ever going to be able to write enough character classes to cover the design space.

Lest we forget, the argument for Prestige Classes is inherently self refuting. If after six levels of being a Ranger you want to punch out and become a Lord of Beasts or something, why wouldn't you want to punch out again before completing the 10 level Lord of Beasts progression? The Elothar Warrior of Bladereach was made as a joke, but it was also serious criticism of the prestige class concept and a serious statement on the nature of the biographies generated by Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. Elothar has life changing events happen every level, because that is what actually happens to D&D characters. The fact that he falls in love with a Drow sorceress and gets an artifact sword is presented humorously, but we weren't kidding. That's what it's actually like. Each Prestige Class tries to take a single life changing event and drag it out for 5 or 10 levels, but actual D&D characters are going to go fighting Giants among the clouds next level and travel to the bottom of the sea to save the Sea Sluts from the disciples of the Devil Shark the level after that.

AncientH

I don't know when exactly the rot set in, but at some point either they thought they were making too many prestige classes, or that the prestige classes weren't getting enough roleplaying development. The problem being that there was no single setting, this shit was all being brought out of the blue, and...and they really never wanted to cover what classes and prestige classes meant within the game. D&D3 was the ultimate success of roll vs. role, and I think a lot of the fucking designers either didn't get it, or found out they couldn't sell it.

You just can't introduce yourself as a 3rd level Swordsage in D&D like you could be a 3rd level Swordmaster in Earthdawn. You could call yourself an assassin regardless of whether you had any levels in the Assassin prestige class, and no-one would look at you funny. They assumed that a lot of the difference between, say, wizard and sorcerer made it into the in-game dynamics, but there wasn't any real reason for it to do so, in-game. Fuck, they never talk about the development of classes in-game the way that Vampire could talk about the dudes that invented certain Disciplines. Who created the Archmage prestige class? Fuck knows! Doesn't matter!

So before we even get started, there's a certain amount of suspension of disbelief that goes into these things. You have to have a level of commitment into wanting something that the martial adept prestige classes have to offer. There needs to be, at minimum, a killer app or payoff to investing in these things.

For the most part, there isn't.

Frank

Our presented 8 prestige classes are:

• Blood Claw Master – for people who want to get a little more pseudo-mystical with their Tiger Style. Complicated math to try to make double-dagger style work. It still doesn't work for reasons we've already mentioned.
• Bloodstorm Blade – for Warblades who want to throw their swords at people. Surprisingly terrible at this.
• Deepstone Sentinel – If you've managed to go ten levels deep as a fucking Stone Dragon specialist, you can pick up some actual earth-themed magic and still not care. You're 11th level and fighting Giants with melee attacks that go twenty feet, and you can make the ground difficult terrain for 5 feet all around you.
• Eternal Blade – as an 11th level Elf Crusader or Warblade, you can cherry pick some maneuvers off the Warblade or Crusader lists.
• Jade Phoenix Mage – poorly combine martial maneuvers and arcane spellcasting.
• Master of Nine – attempt to take maneuvers from at least six different disciplines, which is basically impossible to do in a level appropriate way.
• Ruby Knight Vindicator – attempt to be a Cleric of Wee Jas and a Crusader at the same time. This doesn't work at all.
• Shadow Sun Ninja – attempt to multiclass as a Monk/Swordsage, which is basically as bad an idea as that sounds.

Aside from the fact that pretty much none of these classes are particularly good, there's the unsubtle reality that if you read out the character concept at second level, no one would think it was really weird. The Shadow Sun Ninja is just a Sword Sage that hits people with unarmed attacks. Conceptually that's a first level character concept.

AncientH

I already mentioned that dabbling into martial maneuvers with feats is possible-but-difficult; qualifying for these classes generally requires at least two maneuvers and a stance. So while it's just possible to dip into some of these without taking a level in Warblade, Crusader, or Swordsage, odds are against it.

The question you really might have for these is why. The Bloodclaw Master kinda evokes the Shifter nonsense from Eberron, but it's a parallel development to your regular martial adept class, not an exact extension - so you can actually gain fewer maneuvers this way than if you continued as a straight Swordsage.

The Bloodstorm Blade's highest ability is:

Blade Storm (Ex): At 10th level, you can hurl your weapon as a full-round action to make it seem as if you are attacking a dozen foes at once. You become the center of a storm of steel as your thrown weapon flies out to strike a foe, returns to ricochet harmlessly off you, then flies out to attack another foe. You can make a ranged attack with a thrown weapon at your highest attack bonus against as many targets as you wish. You can attack each target just once with this attack, calculating range and cover penalties from your position on the battlefield.

This is the level 8 Warblade maneuver Lightning Throw, minus the damage bonus. It's literally a shittier version of a maneuver you might already have if you hadn't taken this class and just pumped levels into Warblade.

I'm not sure how they managed to fuck up Jade Phoenix Mage. A martial adept/arcane spellcaster gish seems like a no-brainer: focus on touch spells, throwing fire or lightning on your sword, etc. And to be fair, they do give you Arcane Wrath (Su) at 1st level, which lets you channel arcane spells directly into melee damage. Other than that...meh. Top level ability lets you blow yourself up (but you get better). Nifty, but willing to give up two caster levels?

Also, I'd like to point out something: you think, with the direct equivalency they've been pushing between caster levels, manifester levels, and initiator levels, that they'd be the same in the classes - that the Jade Phoenix Mage would have +1 caster level/+1 initiator level. This is not the case. Instead you have one (1) initiator level, but your total maneuvers/stances known/prepared i a cumulative fustercluck determined by all the classes you have taken. So if you're a Fighter 8 and take a level in Swordsage, you still have the maneuvers known/ready as a level 1 Swordsage - but you can pick which maneuvers you want as though your initiator level was 5. I can see why they did that, but it's wrong and I hate them for it.

Master of Nine, if you add it up, in five levels you get 8 maneuvers and 2 stances, and can ready an additional 5 maneuvers. If you're a mid-level Swordsage, that might look attractive. You don't actually care about most of the class abilities. They're gravy on just having more maneuvers available, provided you somehow manage to squeeze into the class prerequisites.

Ruby Knight Vindicator...has anyone ever played one of these? I mean, Wee Jas is the goddess of magic and death. She doesn't have many paladin to begin with, much less Paladin/Crusaders, but that's pretty specifically what they want it to be. Not even a Blackguard/Crusader option, shit. Bitching aside, there's enough not-terrible abilities for a 3-level class, stretched out to ten levels.

Shadow Sun Ninja isn't really compatible with the Ninja class. Boo, hiss. On the other hand, this is completely within normal D&D parameters of not knowing what the fuck to do with ninjas. There are some very weird abilities in this class which would be much niftier at lower levels: Flame of the Shadow Sun, for example, would be great at 2nd-or-3rd level (in character), because your sorcerer could ping you with a ray of frost and next turn you could fry somebody. But at 6th-or-7th level?

The top power of the Eclipse Ninja is to maybe turn into a vampire, which they say is a straight ticket to NPCdom and I say sounds like free character advancement.

Frank

The interesting thing about these shitty things is not how they mostly don't work or how they hilariously fail to give out level appropriate abilities, it's the extent to which the writers bend over backwards to prevent themselves from accidentally giving a player a meaningful ability. It's not just that they are waiting to let people cast extremely limited 1/day passwall spells until they get to 11th level (note: actual Wizards could cast passwall 3 times per day without limitations at 9th level and they don't do that because passwall isn't actually very good). That is a thing they taunt you with, but the real kick in the nuts is the bizarre mental gymnastics this book goes through to keep the Eternal Blade's spirit guide from being remotely useful. It's a little floating spirit guide that talks to you, and for no fucking reason it can't see around corners. I mean, what the actual fuck?

This sort of preemptive nerfing of anything that might possibly have any utility outside the combat minigame where people are hitting each other with hammers is fucking mind blowing. It's so incredibly bad. It's like these assholes were deadly allergic to making a role playing game.

It's totally incomprehensible. It's not like they were making a computer game and had to come up with bullshit reasons why things couldn't have non-combat utility. They were, nominally at least, making a fucking role playing game. Things could just be allowed to affect the world around them in normal ways. You have a fucking Dungeon Master who can adjudicate shit like that, you don't have to pre-program every possible interaction.

This right here is why 4th edition was terrible. Because the people making 4th edition thought this was a reasonable thing to do. They thought spending time actively thinking up ways to reduce the interactability of the world around the player characters was an important thing that they needed to be doing. This is the worst thing in any edition of Dungeons & Dragons other than the racist bits, and these dumb assholes were sitting around brainstorming ways to impose it on more parts of the game.

AncientH

As long as we're on the subject of prestige classes...my earlier rant about initiator nonsense is a good an excuse as any as to why Crusaders/Swordsages/Warblades generally don't go in for prestige classes: because the opportunity cost of not straight leveling is that you don't get any more maneuvers. It's not like a Sorcerer or Wizard where you can dip into Eldritch Knight and everything is cool even though you lose a level of casting ability: your growth as a martial adept basically stops, because of the wonky way they worded all the maneuver abilities. Sure, your initiator level and Base Attack Bonus might continue to increase, but you don't gain any more maneuvers until you slink back to one of the core classes.

They actually designed a system where multiclassing was worse than normal...and I don't even know if that was deliberate.

Frank

The rules for how prestige classes that increased your access to maneuvers and stances work are confusing. A big part of that is that they are incomplete. Important questions that do not appear to be answered include:

• If you take a Prestige Class that increases your initiator level for a Martial Adept Class, are you allowed to trade-up one of your known maneuvers like you would be able to had you gained an actual Martial Adept level? That's a really big deal, because after a few levels, more than half the maneuvers you know are trade-ups, and if the prestige classes stop you from getting those they are extremely terrible.
• If you take a Prestige Class that increases your initiator level for a Martial Adept Class and you have more than one Martial Adept Class, what the fuck happens?

These aren't obscure questions, several of the prestige classes only really make sense for multi-classed Martial Adepts, and every Martial Adept leans heavily on maneuver tradeups. A typical Martial Adept will get one 4th level Maneuver as a newly learned maneuver, but they will have two opportunities to buy a 4th level Maneuver as a trade-up. So if you have the option of going into one of these classes when 4th level Maneuvers are the cutting edge thing, it's a pretty fucking important question whether you get one or not.

AncientH

We haven't talked about any of the fluff surrounding these classes because it's rubbish, really. You don't care, the people writing this obviously didn't care, no one cares because basically no one is going to play these things, and even if they did they wouldn't care about the fluff because the inherent concepts are all weak as shit. Seriously, of all the combat-oriented gods in the Greyhawk pantheon, Wee Jas was their go-to for a divine/martial adept mix. Piss off.

Chapter 6: The Nine Swords


Where we again expect that there will be some kind of literary reference to the fact that “Nine Swords” means tragedy and we are again disappointed.

Frank

One of the fundamental issues with a Dungeons and Dragons-like game is that of the magic item treadmill. Characters need a series of events and a series of power-ups to maintain tension and player interest. But to keep the game from devolving into player-side smackdowns the threat is constantly increased as well. You keep fighting bigger giants and older dragons, so if you don't keep getting access to more powerful magical swords you are falling behind.

For better or worse, the game allows you to replace your +2 magic sword with a +3 magic sword and assumes you are going to. Which can be fun, but sometimes rubs people the wrong way when the +2 magic sword had emotional significance. Or to put it another way: getting a new shiny magic sword is fun, but having to get a new shiny magic sword is a source of stress.

Also, sometimes people want to keep the magic items they get at low level. They have sentimental value and shit. So if people need to have a +3 magic sword later in the game, why not just give them a +3 magic sword right away and have that be the first and the last sword upgrade? Well you get a problem because the game doesn't expect you to have a +3 sword early on – leaving you “too powerful” against the early opposition and then if you aren't getting more powerful swords (because you already have your forever sword), the opposition gradually catches up to you, meaning that over the levels where you get to the point it expects you to get the +3 sword you're actually making negative progress.



It's a thorny problem, and one which doesn't actually have solutions that can please everyone. Give out new slightly more magical swords “on time” and people who grow attached to any of those swords in particular will feel like things are being taken from them. Give out slightly more magical swords too fast or too slow and the game becomes easier or harder. Give out slightly more magical swords exactly on time and people don't even feel thrilled when they get sword upgrades because they become expected. There's simply no way to please everyone.

The Weapons of Legacy was an attempt to please everyone. The concept was that you get a magic weapon early, and then it levels up with you. Which means you ideally aren't getting magic items too fast or too slow and you aren't having to throw away your prized possessions because it's still good to go eight levels later. And... that didn't actually work out. There's a bunch of reasons for that, partially it's just that the math was bad and the weapons of legacy weren't actually appropriate weapons at higher levels. Elothar, Warrior of Bladereach gets an artifact sword that is far beyond what the wealth by level guidelines offer because that is the kind of thing you actually need at high level to keep up with the Jones. But it's also the same problem we talked about with the Prestige Classes – that things change as you go up in level and have new adventures and fight new enemies, so things that you might expect to be important in a few levels could end up irrelevant to where you actually are. It's a cooperative storytelling game, and there are five or six contributing authors, your plot outline that you wrote at level 4 isn't very likely to match up with where you're at at level 12. I had a game that started in Lithuania and ended up doing huge temple raiding scenarios – in Borneo. Every descision made sense at the time, but by the time you make enough group decisions you wouldn't really be able to predict where anything was going to go.

So for a lot of reasons, Weapons of Legacy mostly get thrown away and replaced with shinier new magic swords anyway, which is worse than the status quo because there's an extra flavoring of betrayal because the Weapons of Legacy were explicitly sold to you with the idea that you wouldn't ever have to throw them away.

AncientH

Earthdawn tried to solve this issue by having thread magic items: the items had powers that unlocked dependent on how many XP you invested in them, and theoretically any item could be a thread item if you Named it and wove a thread to it and used it to do awesome stuff. There's a literal magic item that's a sock that one dude used to kick a Horror with, and the sock started giving a bonus to kicking Horrors.

D&D though, is a bit more like ChronoTrigger: the expectation was that as you went along, you could just buy or find better weapons. And at any given time you might actually debate whether you want the one that had less attack power but more damage, or offered a higher critical chance or whatever. D&D, though, likes to pretend that magic is still mysterious and rare despite the overwhelming evidence to the opposite.

But why did you throw ice on his sword?
Because he's immune to fire!

So, Weapon of Legacy. Which was crap and no-one used it, and appear here because...I don't know. Seriously, straight artifacts would be better.

Frank

Among the many sins of Weapons of Legacy was to try to somehow convince people that the weapons were “balanced” against weapons that didn't grow and explicitly got thrown away after a few adventures when the player characters got a golden tridents to replace their silver one or whatever the fuck.


Just sayin.

So there's all kinds of really complicated math shit with these fucking weapons, and no one fucking cares. At the end of all of it, the weapons in question are actually hot garbage, but that's not even the point. You wouldn't use weapons this complicated in a D&D game even if they were well made.

AncientH

Just to make things confusing, the sword name is the name of the Discipline...sometimes. I don't pretend to understand why they did that, except that maybe different people were writing these independently and not everybody got the memo.

Some of the sword abilities actually reference a few of the maneuvers from the associated disciplines. You'd still never use these things. FFS, Umbral Awn (Shadow Hand) tops out as a +2 ghost touch dagger. THat's not even a goddamn sword!

Chrono has a goddamn sword!

The thing is, they treat these weapons like they're badass, but Tiger Fang (Tiger Claw) tops out as a +1 keen kukri. You'd be wary of that at 3rd level.

And the thing is...all of this shit is totally unnecessary. You didn't have to name the nine styles after nine specific blades, and you didn't have to stat those blades out. They could have just been mythical. Anything you came up with at your tabletop is better than the crap that these assholes were paid to write.

Frank

Next Up: Moar Magic Items.

[Blicero]

CharOp people used to care a lot about the Ruby Knight Vindicator ("Windicator"), I remember. The PrC's interaction with the swift action economy was lauded. Example paeans: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthre ... Windicator

[Orca]

The ruby knight vindicator gets the ability at 7th to trade a turn/rebuke undead attempt for a swift action. Apparently at no action cost. That's good just as written and there are character builds which abuse it to do weird and sometimes impressive things. If Wee Jas was anything like popular or even had the potential to be popular, or if the PrC was less linked to her it'd be a good PrC.

BTW, the usual entry to ruby knight vindicator would be cleric/crusader rather than any kind of paladin.

[Orion]

If you take a Prestige Class that increases your initiator level for a Martial Adept Class, are you allowed to trade-up one of your known maneuvers like you would be able to had you gained an actual Martial Adept level? That's a really big deal, because after a few levels, more than half the maneuvers you know are trade-ups, and if the prestige classes stop you from getting those they are extremely terrible.

There is no ambiguity here. Each of the base classes has a paragraph called "maneuvers" which describes how they learn maneuvers, what disciplines they can pick from, and when they get to switch up. Unlike prestige classes that grant spellcasting advancement, these prestige classes don't have a function call to any text from the base class. They come with their own "maneuvers" paragraph that doesn't grant any upgrades. Since they don't draw from the same disciplines, it's not really clear how that would work. Fortunately, it doesn't really matter, because those upgrades really aren't important. You might assume that learning fewer high-level maneuvers would be a bad thing, but martial adepts will know a lot more maneuvers than they can ready. All that matters is getting enough level-appropriate maneuvers to fill out your ready slots. There are a bunch of low-level maneuvers so good they never expire. A Level 11 Warblade can ready 5 maneuvers, potentially of levels 6/6/5/5/5. A Warblade 6/Prestige Class 5 will probably also ready 5 maneuvers, of levels 6/5/4/3/3. You are never ever going to stop readying Moment of Perfect Mind and Iron Heart Surge, and you're never going to feel bad about Action Before Thought or Sudden Leap, so this is completely fine.

[jt]

One of the funniest theoretical optimization builds was a ruby knight vindicator too (though unfortunately a lot of the details died during repeated forum wipes). Cancels a persistent footsteps of the divine to get an absurd movement speed, then uses Tornado Throw or Ring Of Fire to turn that into damage. RKV's ability to generate swift actions, plus the greater celerity spell, can let you use this multiple times. A cohort who's used the embrace the dark chaos / shun the dark chaos shuffle to get a bunch of extra uses of turn undead can donate you extra turning to do all of that more.

I actually had someone planning on picking up an RKV in a campaign, though of course he wanted a real god instead of Wee Jas, and I would've obliged. And we had Warblade into Bloodstorm Blade too.

[Emerald]

The Bloodstorm Blade's highest ability is:

Blade Storm (Ex): At 10th level, you can hurl your weapon as a full-round action to make it seem as if you are attacking a dozen foes at once. You become the center of a storm of steel as your thrown weapon flies out to strike a foe, returns to ricochet harmlessly off you, then flies out to attack another foe. You can make a ranged attack with a thrown weapon at your highest attack bonus against as many targets as you wish. You can attack each target just once with this attack, calculating range and cover penalties from your position on the battlefield.

This is the level 8 Warblade maneuver Lightning Throw, minus the damage bonus. It's literally a shittier version of a maneuver you might already have if you hadn't taken this class and just pumped levels into Warblade.

Lightning Throw lets you attack everyone in a 30-foot line, Blade Storm lets you attack everyone within maximum range of your thrown weapon (which is a minimum of 50 feet for an improvised thrown weapon and can get up to e.g. 400 feet with Far Shot and a distance light hammer) in any direction. Yes, you take range increment penalties and miss out on the bonus damage, but it's not strictly inferior by any means.

As long as we're on the subject of prestige classes...my earlier rant about initiator nonsense is a good an excuse as any as to why Crusaders/Swordsages/Warblades generally don't go in for prestige classes: because the opportunity cost of not straight leveling is that you don't get any more maneuvers. It's not like a Sorcerer or Wizard where you can dip into Eldritch Knight and everything is cool even though you lose a level of casting ability: your growth as a martial adept basically stops, because of the wonky way they worded all the maneuver abilities. Sure, your initiator level and Base Attack Bonus might continue to increase, but you don't gain any more maneuvers until you slink back to one of the core classes.

They actually designed a system where multiclassing was worse than normal...and I don't even know if that was deliberate.

Did you...not notice the Maneuvers Known/Maneuvers Readied/Stances Known columns in the class tables?

Bloodstorm Blade aside (which doesn't gain maneuvers or advance IL and seems to have been intended as a PrC for fighters with Martial Study for some reason), every PrC grants several new maneuvers and stances--and except for the Ruby Knight Vindicator, each gains 1 maneuver known at 1st level, so a Crusader 5 or Warblade 5 gets a new maneuver whether to level to 6th in their class and swap a maneuver or take a level in a PrC and gain a new one--and allows you to access maneuvers from disciplines you don't normally have access to.

Just to make things confusing, the sword name is the name of the Discipline...sometimes. I don't pretend to understand why they did that, except that maybe different people were writing these independently and not everybody got the memo.

The only sword sharing a name with its discipline is Desert Wind and that's because, as noted in its description, it already appeared under that name in Weapons of Legacy. Presumably the weapon inspired the discipline, though I don't know why they didn't name the the discipline something similar in that case like Tiger Claw vs. Tiger Fang; maybe they figured a maneuver named "Holocaust Cloak" was fine given the Princess Bride reference, but a "Desert Storm" discipline was a bridge too far.

[Ancient History]

As long as we're on the subject of prestige classes...my earlier rant about initiator nonsense is a good an excuse as any as to why Crusaders/Swordsages/Warblades generally don't go in for prestige classes: because the opportunity cost of not straight leveling is that you don't get any more maneuvers. It's not like a Sorcerer or Wizard where you can dip into Eldritch Knight and everything is cool even though you lose a level of casting ability: your growth as a martial adept basically stops, because of the wonky way they worded all the maneuver abilities. Sure, your initiator level and Base Attack Bonus might continue to increase, but you don't gain any more maneuvers until you slink back to one of the core classes.

They actually designed a system where multiclassing was worse than normal...and I don't even know if that was deliberate.

Did you...not notice the Maneuvers Known/Maneuvers Readied/Stances Known columns in the class tables?

I should have specified non-ToB prestige classes. I thought that was kind of evident when I went on about Eldritch Knight. If a martial adept takes levels in a non-martial adept class, their initiator level goes up but nothing else does. It's not like being a caster.

The only sword sharing a name with its discipline is Desert Wind and that's because, as noted in its description, it already appeared under that name in Weapons of Legacy. Presumably the weapon inspired the discipline, though I don't know why they didn't name the the discipline something similar in that case like Tiger Claw vs. Tiger Fang; maybe they figured a maneuver named "Holocaust Cloak" was fine given the Princess Bride reference, but a "Desert Storm" discipline was a bridge too far.

I still maintain it's all stupid.

[Emerald]

As long as we're on the subject of prestige classes...my earlier rant about initiator nonsense is a good an excuse as any as to why Crusaders/Swordsages/Warblades generally don't go in for prestige classes: because the opportunity cost of not straight leveling is that you don't get any more maneuvers. It's not like a Sorcerer or Wizard where you can dip into Eldritch Knight and everything is cool even though you lose a level of casting ability: your growth as a martial adept basically stops, because of the wonky way they worded all the maneuver abilities. Sure, your initiator level and Base Attack Bonus might continue to increase, but you don't gain any more maneuvers until you slink back to one of the core classes.

They actually designed a system where multiclassing was worse than normal...and I don't even know if that was deliberate.

Did you...not notice the Maneuvers Known/Maneuvers Readied/Stances Known columns in the class tables?

I should have specified non-ToB prestige classes. I thought that was kind of evident when I went on about Eldritch Knight. If a martial adept takes levels in a non-martial adept class, their initiator level goes up but nothing else does. It's not like being a caster.

It wasn't, actually, since the paragraphs before and after were talking about the ToB PrCs. But still, I don't think it's really that different; in both cases, a wizard or warblade who goes into a PrC that advances their subsystem advances normally, and a wizard or warblade who goes into a PrC that doesn't advance their subsystem stops advancing it. The only difference is that there are bazillions of wizard-advancing PrCs and few warblade-advancing ones, and that's due to which was published first rather than the subsystems themselves.

At least if the martial adept dips a non-advancing PrC and slinks back to their base class they have some advancement with the way initiator level works. A Wizard 5/Bad PrC 5 who takes another level of wizard is effectively a 6th-level wizard with 3rd-level spells and CL 6, but a Warblade 5/Bad PrC 5 who takes another level of warblade is effectively an 8th-level warblade with 4th-level maneuvers and IL 8.5, so the lack of maneuver-advancing PrCs is somewhat mitigated.

The only sword sharing a name with its discipline is Desert Wind [...]

I still maintain it's all stupid.

No arguments there.

[Ancient History]

At least if the martial adept dips a non-advancing PrC and slinks back to their base class they have some advancement with the way initiator level works. A Wizard 5/Bad PrC 5 who takes another level of wizard is effectively a 6th-level wizard with 3rd-level spells and CL 6, but a Warblade 5/Bad PrC 5 who takes another level of warblade is effectively an 8th-level warblade with 4th-level maneuvers and IL 8.5, so the lack of maneuver-advancing PrCs is somewhat mitigated.

That's how they wanted it to play out, but the Wizard/Bard at least qualifies for prestige classes that let them improve their caster level - the Warblade never has that as an option. Fuck, if they had just allowed +1 caster level to apply to Warblade shenanigans like they did Warlocks, that would have been interesting. Maybe nobody wants to play a Swordsage/Acolyte of the Skin, but the potential to do that kind of thing would at least be nice.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Tome of Battle

Final Countdown: Magic Items

AncientH

We've been pretty negative about Tome of Battle so far, because it's the ghost of what could have been a much better system slammed together into a half-assed piece of shovelware that still amazingly manages to whet people's appetites for a world where fighters don't suck fighters suck less...

...but let's be honest here. There's a lot of crap in D&D3.x, and the vast majority of it will never see live play at a given table. There is stuff in this book that people like and use and if it isn't perfect...or even sometimes functional...well...it's there. Which is sort of what people want from a game. More stuff to play with.

Frank

At just four pages, the Magic Items “chapter” could honestly have been an appendix. Or just incorporated into the immediately preceding chapter that was also about magic items. Why there is a “Chapter 7: Magic Items” in this book is a question that is significantly more interesting to ponder than what the contents actually are.

If you've ever played Dungeons & Dragons and imagined a magic item that a warrior character might like to own, you've probably done more conceptual work for magic items that could go into a book like this than the actual authors did. The people writing this book were trying to color in the lines, to produce things that fit into the cost structure that 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons had locked itself into for its wealth by level system.

The problem with this is that the wealth by level system, while mathematically “elegant” in its own way, was actually pretty bad. There's all kinds of conceptual problems with it, like how the need to spend every last gold piece on increasingly magical swords, boots, and shoulder pads crowded out the possibility of the game ever going anywhere at high levels because no one has any wealth “left over” to concern themselves with land or armies or ships or castles. 100% of your funds has to go into the “better swords” pile, and then you literally can't have nice things. But even on its own terms it hammers itself into the Linear Warriors / Quadratic Wizards thing where the expected moneys do not go far enough to get swords good enough for the Warrior types to not get constantly dunked on by mages and monsters.

So before even writing this chapter, it probably would have been a good idea to have a designer discussion about where to go with the whole magic item economy rather than continue to fuck a chicken that had already been thoroughly discredited. But that wasn't the remit of this book at all, and the Magic Item chapter is contractually obligated to continue trends that were already known to be bad. The chance to do a major overhaul on magic items was reserved for 2007's Magic Item Compendium, which was a trainwreck of its own. That was where Andy Collins did one of the installments in his multi-year campaign to get us to really care about buying marginal upgrades to various body slots like we were outfitting Agents in the old game Syndicate.


Syndicate was bizarrely ahead of its time, for fuck's sake it is now 25 years old. But it's not a role playing game and doesn't aspire to be.

AncientH

Magic swords, armor, shields, amulets, etc. have a long and pedigreed history in D&D, and the fact that a lot of them were basically just random fucking drops up until 3rd edition and that the magic item creation system(s) in AD&D were a fucking sham meant that it was totally possible to get up to 16th level and only have a +3 pike and that was kind of a legendary item. Magic items were, very much, a way for other PCs to begin to approach some of the basic utility of spellcasters in that many magic items did more than just give you better numbers, they extended your utility in some way...and not just in combat.

Because it wasn't all about fighting.

So, first thing to know about this one is that there is absolutely none of that in this couple of pages. We're all combat, all the time, and fuck the very idea that a Swordsage might want, I dunno, a Diplomacy bonus, or a Desert Wind player resistance to fire. Granted, there are already magic items for that kind of thing...but the thought would be nice. Unfortunately, even if you wanted to squeeze that kind of item in this section, the super-inflated item descriptions of late D&D3.5 totally prevented that - the long, rambling, unnecessary lore could have been excised and fit in 30 DMG-style concise entries. But we didn't get that.

Frank

Martial Scripts are bizarre. The cost is through the roof, and the flavor is weird and bad. You read some stereo instructions which then catch on fire and then you get to activate a maneuver or stance for one encounter that takes place in the next hour. Now the thing most people get hung up on is that that's completely retarded. But I think it's no less important to note that the primary use of that is to get yourself into a Martial Stance when you're not actually a member of a Martial Adept class and don't have stances. And in that case, the fact that it lasts “one encounter” rather than a fixed amount of time is a big problem.


Before they could give a shit, they'd first have to take a shit.

The core issue here is that even while writing books for 3rd ediiton in 2006, their heads really weren't in the game. The designers had just started working on Flywheel, the game that would ultimately become 4th edition D&D. And while that game was horrible, it also split up time in a fundamentally different fashion. The periods of “encounter” were explicitly referenced and defined – in a way that they genuinely weren't in other editions of the game.

Now, there's something to be said for the “screen writing” style of gaming where the “encounters” are explicit because things are genuinely divided into “scenes.” Games like World of Darkness and Fate dip their toes into those waters from time to time. It does however, raise real questions in the context of a role playing game. Like, what if your character needs to get across town quickly but they aren't in a “chase scene,” it's just important how much time passes while they go from point A to point B? Or more generally, what happens when you need to know what happens during any montage or time skip? Characters do things off camera, and when you define their abilities in terms of how long the camera is on them, you also need to define them in terms of periods when the camera is not on.

4th edition, of course, never got around to doing that. What happens “in between” set piece combats and skill challenge encounters is basically anyone's guess. And you can see that fundamental lack of conception that this blind spot was even a problem way back in 2006.

AncientH

The thing about Scrolls is that there are some spells you might need that you don't have, especially if you're light on casters. Dispel magic, remove curse, cure blindness, wish...really basic stuff that moves the game forward. Who the fuck cares if you can use a martial maneuver or not? They're only good in combat, and even the really good ones aren't going to one-shot the Tarrasque, so their utility is really weirdly specific - you want to quickly read these things right before the single definitive battle and then hope you've got an opportunity to use the damn thing before it expires. Even fucking potions are more useful.

Frank

The basic idea of items that let you use maneuvers is kind of obvious once you decide to define martial maneuvers in the first place. The only thing you'd really care about is the specifics of how they work. I've read these fucking crowns and cloaks and shit like seven times through and I'm genuinely not sure how the fuck they're supposed to work.

The core issue is that Martial Adepts have these card management systems. So how an extra maneuver works with the resource systems is absolutely crucial. The text in here goes on about how a “Crown of White Ravens” does not in fact have any bird motifs on it at all, but it doesn't mention the hands and decks and stuff. So apparently you put on whatever special clothing for a 24 hour period and it puts an extra card... in your suitcase. It doesn't put the card into your hand, it doesn't put the card into your deck, or your discard pile. It doesn't put the card into a place where you could actually use it. It's just nebulously “known” which is not actually useful during encounters – it just meets prerequisites for getting new maneuvers. But... do these articles of clothing even do that? I'm not actually sure.



There's a whole sidebar about how players who weren't martial adepts could wear a Ring of the Diamond Mind to learn Diamond Mind Maneuvers but... what? What does that even do? If you aren't a Martial Adept, you don't have a hand of maneuvers. It adds a card to a sideboard for use in transferring to a hand of cards for playing that you don't have.

All kinds of threads popped up on charop boards about various ways to “abuse” the crown of white ravens by slapping maneuvers onto characters who didn't otherwise have a way to spend relevant action types. But the reality was that this required a lot of assumptions because the authors didn't actually explain how the fuck that was supposed to work despite demonstrably ruminating on the fact that people might want it to do so. This is basically because this book isn't particularly developed. The nomenclature and consistency of language really isn't there.

AncientH

We get two new weapon abilities: Aptitude Weapon and Martial Discipline Weapon. These are...weird.

The idea behind Aptitude Weapon is that if you have Fighter feats like Weapon Focus, Greater Weapon Focus, Weapon Specialization, etc., then those all apply to the enchanted weapon, even if it isn't your chosen weapon. So if I'm a Fighter/Wizard with Weapon Specialization (Ray), and I pick up an Aptitude Sword, I can apply my bonuses to that sword like it's a ray. That sounds super arcane, because it is; it also doesn't provide any proficiency with the enchanted weapon because that is an entirely separate enchantment. Also, if you happen to have weapon focus feats applicable to the Aptitude Weapon, you get a small bonus. Which is nice?

The thing about Aptitude Weapon is that you pick up an old weapon in a tomb or dungeon and suddenly you can use it. I approve. It's arcane and you'd never enchant a sword like this yourself, but whatever.


Tombrobbing is a grand tradition.

A Martial Discipline Weapon gives you a small bonus if you use it to do maneuvers affiliated with the discipline it's associated with. This gets a little arcane, again, but you can see what they're going for:

Thus, a martial adept could have a +1 Stone Dragon Shadow Hand greatsword. In the hands of someone who knows maneuvers from both disciplines, such a weapon would provide a +3 bonus on attack rolls. If the wielder were actually using maneuvers from both schools—for example, a Stone Dragon stance with a Shadow Hand strike—it would provide a +7 bonus on attack rolls. Most martial adepts use this extra bonus in conjunction with feats such as Combat Expertise and Power Attack, or with maneuvers that decrease their chances of hitting a foe in exchange for some other benefit.

Keep in mind, a +1 Stone Dragon Shadow Hand greatsword is the equivalent of a +3 weapon, but it only really has benefits when wielded by a martial adept with at least one of those styles and...that's it. I mean, thematically you can make use of that, and in exchange for this specialization you might be able to squeak out a slightly-higher bonus, so it's not useless just...oddly specific.

Final Countdown: Monsters


It would be deeply weird if Valkyries didn't already have stats in 3rd edition. But of course they did, because there's a statline in Deities and Demigods.

Frank

The Nine Swords Monsters chapter is 8 pages and covers 3 monsters. One is a new flavor of Rakshasa. One is a n alternate take on the Valkyrie. And the third is a floaty flaming suit of armor with a bullshit name generated by drawing Scrabble tiles out of a bag. Like how they named Canada (“C eh?... N eh?...”)

Now obviously, that's a fucking terrible level of information density. The classic Monster Manual structure is to have a page or two for each monster or race of people. And that's because that's plenty for rules and a picture and enough flavor text to make something not-terrible or maybe even vaguely interesting. We ranted about 3.5's gross decadence of shovelware word salad, where the format become bloated and unusable and just metasized across the page and onto other pages before. But this is really bad. There's a whole chapter for “monsters” and it only covers three monsters.

Like, this isn't fucking hard, right? You could have nine totem animals that do something relevant for each of the disciplines. And they'd only need a quarter page of actual text, because “why you should care” about a Fu Lion that teaches Fu Lion Pounce to aspiring martial adepts is rather self explanatory.


Tiger Style!

AncientH

I think our arguments on this one are pretty close to our kvetching on the monsters in Tome of Magic: unnecessary, ill-conceived, and why? I mean, the idea that monsters interact with the subsystem too, but different, is just a bad design criteria that needs to die. It's okay to have a monster that eats spells, but you generally don't need six monsters that cast spells in different ways. That's why we have shorthand like "Casts spells as a 6th level sorcerer" etc.

Also, I think it's worth pointing out that there's nothing about how HD interact with initiator level, so I have to assume the Rakshasha have effective IL of zero.

I think the joke with the Naityan Rakshasha, which can change shapes to gain access to a couple maneuvers and stances, is that it's best possible advancement is probably Mindspy from Complete Warrior.

Frank

Why did late era 3.5 decide that the Rakshasa were a tribe that needed a whole bunch of variants? I don't actually know. Like, we certainly could go the full Hinduism thing and elevate Rakshasa to the level of Demons and then have a bunch of them of various strengths and shit. That would have been a defensible life choice.


Hundred handed demon king of Lanka in the house!

But D&D didn't actually commit to that. Instead, we just have the same Tiger Head fuckers from the AD&D monster manual. Only for some reason various monster books and monster chapters kept asking if we wanted new entries for “basically the same Rakshasa, but like with a different weapon or something.” It was super weird and dumb.


Not a bad monster, just what the actual fuck do we need nine different monster entries of basically this for?

AncientH

The sad thing is, they actually have a sidebar on that:

ANOTHER RAKSHASA?
Is the original rakshasa enough for your game? If you’re familiar with the rakshasa presented in the Monster Manual III supplement, do you draw the line at having three? In either case, consider using the naityan rakshasa by keeping it constantly in one style shape as the creature’s natural form and removing the change shape ability. (Losing change shape doesn’t significantly affect the naityan rakshasa’s CR.) In this way you can use the hellfire hunter, earth serpent, night creeper, and elusive adversary each as a new monster. If you do so, you should change the creature’s damage reduction to something that doesn’t remind players of the rakshasa but that is equally uncommon.

Look, variety is the spice of life, but this is just laziness.

The other monsters are the Reth Dekala, a race of lawful evil outsiders consumed by Vilefire (which doesn't do vile damage, it's half fire/half acid); and the Valkyrie, a race of chaotic neutral outsiders that can clap their wings together. No, seriously, it's a major ability.

...they couldn't get a dragon or something? Or a kung fu golem? Maybe a low-level fire elemental with Desert Wind abilities? Lazy shits, I'm telling you.

Frank

Next up: Wrapup.

AncientH

And for anyone celebrating, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy Hanukkah!

[DrPraetor]

Hanukkah ended back on December 10th.

That's a lot of weak sauce, but one infuriating lack of cross-polination that I'd like to verify - the Tiger Style legacy weapon from chapter 6 doesn't have the martial discipline weapon power for Tiger Style?

For some reason, I find that more nails-on-the-chalkboard painful than the numerous other missteps.

[Ancient History]

The other legacy weapons usually allow you to use their style's maneuvers in some fashion - but not Tiger Fang! This is the only power that actually references the Tiger Claw maneuvers:

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.

[Wiseman]

Why did late era 3.5 decide that the Rakshasa were a tribe that needed a whole bunch of variants? I don't actually know. Like, we certainly could go the full Hinduism thing and elevate Rakshasa to the level of Demons and then have a bunch of them of various strengths and shit. That would have been a defensible life choice.

Ironically, pathfinder did that.

https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monst ... /rakshasa/