[OSSR]Sword and Fist

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Sword and Fist
A Guidebook to Fighters and Monks
By Jason Carl


I'll take Swords for $400 Alex.

AncientH:

The request being made, Frank and I have decided to oblige.

Back in the dawn of time...well, 2001...Dungeons and Dragons had a new edition. A clean slate, on which a new generation of gamers could express their skills and creativity. They pushed out the core books - and then when time came for the first supplement, determined to show what they had learned they produced...this.

FrankT:

At 96 pages long, Sword and Fist is going to be a short review. There are eight people on the Additional Design and Development line, which covers pretty much the entire creative staff, but only one author. This book is pretty much written by one dude, edited by another dude, and then everyone on the A team sent in a feat or something so that everyone could get to put this book on their CV. Jason Carl is basically “some dude.” He was brought in to do game design from the Magic the Gathering team. And in that capacity he was policy director for Organized Play, not a game designer as such. He would later pinch hit for various connect the dots books like Champions of Ruin.

This was 3rd edition D&D's first core supplement, so it's more than a little bit weird to me that they turned over most of the work of defining how the format was going to look to “some dude” rather than entrust it to anyone actually in the inner circle. But that's what they did. And honestly, I can't say that any of their actual inner circle members came up with any substantive improvements in layout for the later books. Even the naming convention is better here than when they let it break down. Sword and Fist is a cooler name than Defenders of the Faith, and it's a much cooler name than Complete Warrior. From a layout standpoint, the book is pretty much organized the way all 3e and 3.5 books are. And to the extent that even Pathfinder books deviate from this formula they suffer for it. You wouldn't think that a book that was so obviously done by the C-Team on a budget of “whatever was in the couch cushions plus the leftover pizza from last night's game” would be particularly influential, but it definitely was.

As to how much the Additional Design and Development crew put in, I honestly have no idea. I suspect not very much, and people like Andy Collins and Monte Cook just handed in whatever the minimum amount of material they had lying around on their desks to get their name on the book. Heck, Andy Collins literally handed in some work that he had already published, in that the new exotic weapons article he wrote for Dragon Magazine #275 was folded into this book as his contribution. Some of this stuff looks like it might have been originally written for 2nd edition AD&D, or at least written by someone too new to the edition to know what the fuck. But it really wouldn't surprise me if James Wyatt figured out a way to pay himself as much or more than the book's main author.

AncientH:

In all honestly, Sword and Fist much more closely resembles the thin, softcover supplements of AD&D - or pretty much any other RPG in the 90s - than it does the hardback shoverlwear shelfbreakers of later in the edition. What it is, I think, is that the powers that be at Wizards of the Coast and White Wolf et al. hadn't yet come to terms with the advantages of the publishing revolution that was getting books printed for cheap using the tears of orphans in China, or the marketing advantages of hardback and glossy paper. I mean, they were starting to get that idea, because the 3.0 core books were actually beautiful, sleek, and sexy compared to the AD&D hardbacks, which were pretty much all shipped going soft around the edges. But they hadn't learned that lesson yet, and some of them haven't learned it still.

FrankT:

There are five chapters to this book, and we'll be ranting about one per post. So, six posts altogether. Plus maybe an afterword rant.

AncientH:

I don't know how rant-worthy this book is. Everybody was new to the edition. It's a bit like ranting about the first expansion set to Magic: the Gathering. Nobody really knows what they're doing yet.

But it was a very different time, 2001. AD&D was still doing residual sales, there were groups resenting the change to d20. Dragon and Dungeon Magazine were still alive, and had slush piles you could have filled sourcebooks with (and they did!) It was fresh and exciting, in a way that I have a hard time remembering what the sensation was like. When there was a universe of possibilities open, all of your life ahead of you and your gaming group...

...fuck, what happened to us?

Introduction


Every single page of this book has been pirated more times than your favorite celebrity sex tape.

Clerics, wizards, and rogues notwithstanding: warriors win battles. Let glorious victory fall upon the shoulders of those few: the fighters and the monks!

FrankT:

Let's unpack that bit of crazy in reverse order. The first thing to note is that this book is in fact about Fighters and Monks specifically. Not martial classes in general. And since this is 3rd edition, the Fighter and the Monk are the two classes that get the most martial bonus feats. So expansion books have feats chapters because Sword and Fist had a feat chapter, but Sword and Fist had a feats chapter because it happened to be about the two feats classes. If it had been about Rogues and Barbarians or whatever, it probably would have had a “shit to do with skill points” chapter instead, and the course of D&D shovelware would have been forever altered.

The second thing of course is that Monks and Fighters are in reality the worst classes. By kind of a lot. There's no real appearance of understanding of this fact by the author here, I think that the worst classes got the power creep options first pretty much randomly.

Anyway, this introduction tries to sell us on the idea that Fighters and Monks are connected because they have only their martial prowess to protect them, and it's super weak tea. There are 11 classes in the basic book and Fighters are more similar to: Rogues, Barbarians, Paladins, and Rangers in probably that order than they are to Monks. Both conceptually and tactically, this pairing makes very little sense. I don't know if it was chosen because they had a cool name or just they selected two classes out of a fucking hat or what.

AncientH:

Fighters are weaksauce more or less because of heredity. In AD&D, Fighter was the default class. Not smart enough to tote a spellbook, not dexterous enough to pick pockets? Here is your sword. Go have fun, fighter guy!

How that translated into Fighters in d20 being weaksauce I don't entirely grok. I mean, we covered the 3 hit point thing, but I think on a more fundamental level the designers thought that Fighters had a combination of versatility and specialization which made them attractive and equal to whatever challenge might come up.

In point of fact, I think those same dipshits thought Fighters were overpowered. I mean, we've gone through the rant before about linear warriors and quadratic wizards, but the fact that Fighters were better than wizards at level 1 made the balance-meisters itch for their nerf-bats. Which, I think, is part of the reason that feats are individually so shit, and why there are such lengthy fucking feat-chains and -groups that crop up.

FrankT:

All the material herein is brand-new and pertains to the new edition of the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS® game.

This is an outright lie. A considerable amount of this material is actually conversions from 2nd edition crap. And some of it was previously printed in Dragon Magazine 275. I suspect that Jason Carl actually thought he was telling the truth, and that his draft either did not include the material from the higher ups, or he he had no idea that Andy Collins was double submitting his material like a naughty naughty boy.

AncientH:

Well, the stats would all have been new...mostly. But drawing material from Dragon Magazine was a typical AD&D-thinking tactic for quickly producing material by repurposing something from somewhere else. Hell, that's where Pages from the Mages came from, and that was only 6 years before this book came out.

FrankT:

While there's a lot of verbiage wasted on reminding you that you can change these rules if you want like it was a 2e book, and it does pimp the essentially worthless Hero Builder's Guidebook, there isn't a lot to hate here. The book is intended to give options rather than take them away, and it says so right in the introduction. You can see that the people making this game were not really sure what to do with it, so there's pretty much just a pile of whatever character development options Jason Carl could think of. Some of these were popular and got repeated in later books even when that didn't make sense. But the alternate class packages never really came into being. We'll get to that in more detail in Chapter 4. The long story short is that we probably didn't get Pathfinder style Archetypes in every expansion book from Tome and Blood onwards because the alternate classes were mysteriously put in the tactical advice section and DMs thought they weren't real rules.

AncientH:

That's putting it generously; alternate classes were given less weight than optional kits in AD&D. However, late in 3.+ edition alternate classes and substitution levels were rediscovered and they went hogwild for them.

The immediate prototype for a lot of the material in this book should also be understood as the 3.0 Dungeonmaster's Guide - with its completely optional prestige classes and shit. It's not quite a blueprint, but it's what people grabbed onto because prestige classes were one of the major innovations of the edition; before you had dual-classing and multi-classing, but for most players it was single-classed for life. And if you were old enough, that class was Elf. Actually having options and decisions to make was novel and it went to a few players' - and designers' - heads.

FrankT:

Next up: Feats.

[Mechalich]

In point of fact, I think those same dipshits thought Fighters were overpowered. I mean, we've gone through the rant before about linear warriors and quadratic wizards, but the fact that Fighters were better than wizards at level 1 made the balance-meisters itch for their nerf-bats. Which, I think, is part of the reason that feats are individually so shit, and why there are such lengthy fucking feat-chains and -groups that crop up.

I think at this point in the design cycle many of the designers had no idea just how much they had already nerfed fighters (and martial classes in general) compared to spellcasters vis a vis 2e. Combine that with an inherent conservatism in initial power creep options - which is probably a good thing ultimately, better to introduce a bunch of weak sauce options right away rather than risk some massively destabilizing build in the first splatbook - and you end up with a bunch of really lame stuff.

[Antariuk]

Man, I'm really looking forward to this review. I also noticed that I have Sword and Fist lying around here, with all the other 3E softcover splats... never opened them before. Now I'm not sure I ever want to.

[erik]

Spoiler alert, if you have fucking 15 year old RPG books from 4 editions ago (more if you count 3.p) that you've never opened, then yeah, you probably never will crack that spine. But don't blame it on a review, obviously you're hoping for a spot on hoarders someday.

Even my books that I'll never use, I at least read to see if they had any merits or ideas worth using.

[Prak]

I tend to hoard RPG books. I have a 440 page $50 shalfbreaker called Fantasy Imperium that I picked up when the book store I worked at went out of business and the owners said "Ok, we've taken the stuff we think we can sell at cons and stuff, the rest is up for grabs." I'm still friends with one owner and her husband who was the manager, and he occasionally goes through his book collection and puts a big pile of graphic novels and game books. My general stance is "I will always take books," so I tend to let the rest of the group pick through first, or just do a small look through for stuff I specifically want, and then take whatever people don't want.

But... my book collection fits on one of those eight cube shelf ikea bookcases, and that collection of old Champions books I've gotten this way have helped me pay bills while between jobs, so... whatever.

[Antariuk]

Spoiler alert, if you have fucking 15 year old RPG books from 4 editions ago (more if you count 3.p) that you've never opened, then yeah, you probably never will crack that spine. But don't blame it on a review, obviously you're hoping for a spot on hoarders someday.

I got all of the 3E softcovers cheap as a bundle when I started playing D&D in late 2008. I just never got around to read them, and none of my players were ever interested in them either. Hoarding them for money was never something I planned to do.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Sword and Fist
Chapter 1: Feats and Skills


The word “Feat” actually means an impressive action you do, like bending steel would be a feat of strength. In 3e D&D, a feat is a minor advantage that you have, like having a boob window. This bizarre failure of nomenclature has now been in place for a sixth of a century and two generations of gamers have a weird understanding of the word “feat.”

AncientH:

Feats were one of the major advantages that Fighters had, since in the course of 20 levels they got access to some 18 feats (7 for levels, 11 bonus feats). Even Monks got 4 bonus feats (including Improved Unarmed Strike) in the first six levels. That made these classes pretty much the only viable characters to pursue some of the longer and more involved feat-chains that were available, and ideally would give them a level of combat versatility that no other character could match.

Well, that was the thinking, obviously. The problem is that even with 11 bonus feats, the Fighter still has lots of dead levels, while the spellcasters are gaining new spell slots at every level. New feats and feat chains came out so often that you could never "catch 'em all", and there was always a reasonable chance of being stuck with the wrong or useless feat when a newer and better supplement came out. This was especially true for Monks, because designers liked to write underwhelming martial arts techniques as feats with bullshit prerequisites.

So for example, Ki Blast was a feat basically restricted to 8th-level monks or fighters who had taken the right feats, and essentially replicates a 3rd-level spell that thereafter doesn't improve with level. You wanted to be Goku, but you ended up being Yamcha.


Dragon Ball: Where if you live long enough, you'll be Goku's babysitter.

It actually got worse because the small, static bonuses provided by Weapon Focus and Weapon Specialization were seen as overpowered, in that the Fighter could actually hit opponents a majority of the time, even when the wizard couldn't stab a rat to save their lives. This, of course, led the designers to whip out the nerf stick.

FrankT:

Feat Chains were a bad idea, but throughout 3.x, the writers just kept making them bigger and harder to use.

The Feats chapter is only 7 pages, but it's influential enough that we'll probably end up talking about it more than some of the later chapters.

Anyway, back in the 1970s, and yes that is seriously where our story starts, the Fighting Man was the generic character who had no abilities. He was simply his stats and equipment, with numbers that rose somewhat as he leveled. All the other classes were basically that plus some kind of abilities. Fighting Man was also the class that you defaulted to if you didn't roll good enough stats to be any of the other classes. Needless to say, that didn't sit well with a lot of people, so things to make warrior characters individualized and bad ass started coming out before we even declared D&D to be advanced.

And a lot of those were shit like alternate classes like the Barbarian and the Cavalier that were “like a Fighter, but way better” and even old standbys like the Paladin fit into that category. But another option that was thrown around a lot in unofficial sources was to give Fighters lists of bonuses to choose from. Under Cal Tech rules, Fighters got “fighter abilities” that were shit like bonuses with a specific weapon or some extra hit points or whatever.


My dad played D&D with feats before I was born.

Official lines produced weapon specialization and weird shit to spend your proficiencies on like Blind Fighting and Ambidexterity. And when 3rd edition went back to the selectable bonuses well with Feats, the basic point of comparison was pretty much a 2nd edition AD&D Fighter who had cashed out for all that weapon specialization and blind fighting and shit. So what we ended up with was a character who had very few “skills” (which are the things that 2nd edition NWPs that weren't cashed in for more ways to be better at stabbing one way or another turned into) and more “feats” (which are the things that the various stabbing bonuses people scammed out of 2nd edition turned into).

Now there are various objections we can raise to how they did all this, but the really salient issue is that the various options that feats are standing in for were tradeoffs that were originally sold as being balanced with characters who could be reasonably described as having no abilities at all. Yes, Weapon Specialization was flat better than not having it, but you were still giving up some of your weapon proficiencies to get it. So the initial presented power level of feats was... not high. You got +1 to hit with a specific weapon or 3 extra hit points or some fucking thing. If you gave out literally every feat in the 3e basic book to a Fighter at first level, they still wouldn't be all that exciting. When players of the game talk about feats, we often talk about how many of the feats are so crap that you wouldn't care if you had them or not – the “chaff feats” like Monkey Grip, Improved Sunder, and Prone Attack. But such was the line of development that those were actually the feats that were operating at the intended power level; feats that Voltroned into something that would let Fighters keep up in the damage race like Improved Overrun and Power Lunge were actually mistakes, and a flustered Skip Williams later tried to stealth errata them into oblivion.

AncientH:

Most of the feats in this book are level-specific, without coming out and specifying a character level like they did with some of the Player's Handbook II nonsense. Instead, it used Base Attack Bonus as a default kind of "you must be this tall to select this feat" approach. For fighters, who improved in BAB each level, this was straightforward; other classes had to look at their charts. Of course, that chances that your Sorcerer would desire or qualify to take Circle Kick were minimal, but making even shitty options available was obviously the right move. Because in D&D 3.0, it was well-acknowledged that players could make mistakes, and there was an opportunity cost to each option. That's fine.

For the rest...eh. You get feats like "Dodge Blow" which give a minimal expansion of utility. You get some really wonky feats that require a thorough understanding of the action economy and status, like "Expert Tactician" and "Close-Quarters Fighting" (if feats were MtG spells, "Close-Quarters Fighting" would be close to Icy Manipulator in font size). And there was shit like "Extra Stunning Attacks" which gave you...more stunning attacks. Y'know, if you had those. Given that Monks started using stunning attack usages as a sort of half-assed secondary economy to fuel their admittedly unimpressive martial arts, this makes slightly more sense than it seems at the time...but it's still not very good.

In addition to prerequisites, feats were organized into categories. General feats were open to everybody, Fighter bonus feats could be taken as bonus feats by Fighters...you get the idea. Except Monk bonus feats weren't labeled as such as a standard category. This probably seemed like a good idea, but what it meant was that already fairly limited abilities were further restricted (well, more like strongly encouraged) to particular classes.

There are also unlisted prerequisites. Take, for example, Shield Expert:

You use a shield as an off-hand weapon while retaining its armor bonus.

Prerequisite
Shield Proficiency (PH) , Base attack bonus +3,

Benefit
You may make an off-hand attack with your shield while retaining the shield's AC bonus for that round.

Normal
Using a shield as a weapon prevents you from gaining its AC bonus for the round.

This is a feat that really demands Two-Weapon Fighting. Because making off-hand attacks without Two-Weapon Fighting is a mug's game. Hell, even fighting with two weapons is usually a mug's game. And I strongly suspect this is a callback to an AD&D combat hack where the fighter carried two shields, which were used for defending and shield bash at the same time. Or double shield bashes.


All feats should just be cards. Makes them simpler.

Shield-combat in d20 is actually really bizarre, because it was defensive item you could hit people with, and that made it complicated. For example, you could enchant a shield for an improved armor bonus, and you could enchant a shield for an improved combat bonus, or you could do both - because the two were not equivalent. Which always begged the question (to me), how the fuck are you supposed to annotate that? Is it a shield +3/+4 flaming? I don't know! It's a mystery. And it's one of those mysteries that gets weirder when they finally brought out the rules letting Soulknives create psychic shields...but that is far in the future. This is 2001.


Yeah yeah, hail Hydra.

FrankT:

We can't discuss the feats in this book without talking about Eagle Claw Attack. What it does is allow you to make weapon sunder attacks with unarmed attacks or shield bashes. That's useless for a bunch of reasons. The first reason is that if you destroy your opponent's weapon that amounts to a relatively small debuff and it reduces the treasure you get later and is generally a worse idea than tripping an opponent or stabbing them for hit point damage. The second is that weapons defend themselves with hardness and a significant hit point reserve, so low-damage/high frequency attacks like shield bashes and unarmed flurry strikes are quite worthless for sunder strikes even if sundering was in general a good idea. But the really really important reason is that in 3rd edition rules you can make a sunder attack with any slashing or bludgeoning weapon, and shield bashes and unarmed strikes are both bashing weapons so Eagle Claw attack “allows” you to do something that by the rules you could do anyway. This feat has no effect at all even if the action it supposedly modifies was one you would ever want to take, which from a tactical optimization standpoint you never will.

At the time, various people tried to mind caulk this shit into doing something. Some people tried to claim that unarmed strikes and shield bashes weren't “really weapons” despite being on the weapon table and thus ineligible for sunder attacks or that the feat let you ignore hardness despite saying no such thing. Or whatever. Basically, people had a hard time accepting that there was a feat in the book that literally had no effect at all. But of course there was. And the reason there's a feat that does nothing at all is that neither the author nor the people around the office submitting the notes from their dream diaries to get book credits are all that familiar with how the rules to the then new edition actually work. So various feats are way above or below the intended balance point simply because of a lack of awareness of how these effects interact with the rest of the game. This lack of awareness extends to the rest of the book of course, and this is not the last worthless rule in the book, just the most obvious.

The intended balance point of the material in the book is quite low – it's all supposed to be balanced with the Core Fighter and Core Monk, which are of course the worst classes in the game. But they were so bad at
hitting that target that Sword and Fist was hailed as an improvement in the game – by taking the things that failed to hit their targets by being much better than that, the game was much improved as Martial characters could compete better and at higher levels than before. This book moved things in the right direction, but it was absolutely an accident that this was true.

AncientH:

I think "Eagle Claw Strike" was supposed to be combined with shit like "Fist of Iron."

Prerequisite
Improved Unarmed Strike (PH) , Base attack bonus +2,

Benefit
Declare that you are using this feat before you make your attack roll (thus, a missed attack roll ruins the attempt). You deal an extra 1d4 points of damage when you make a successful unarmed attack. You may use this feat a number of times per day equal to 3 + your Wisdom modifier.

1d4 is not a lot of damage. Granted, at Level 1, that is the entire range of the Wizard's hit points, so it is not nothing, but the higher up in level you go, the less that extra 1d4 matters. And 1d4 is generally enough to sunder a light one-handed weapon or buckler, provided it isn't made of something special like metal. But the idea of giving any character a damage bonus was enough that they tacked on some riders, to prevent it from getting out of control, which is just silly.

FrankT:

A successful attack roll during a charge allows you to inflict double your normal Strength modifier in addition to the attack's normal damage. You provoke an attack of opportunity from the target you charged.

OK... that is not standard nomenclature. There are a lot of ways to read that based on the fact that strength modifiers are already included in the normal damage of attacks and that using weapons two handed or off-handed modifies the Strength modifier. But the median reading is certainly that when you charge and you power lunge with your fucking reach weapon aned have a Strength of 18 you do an extra 8 damage and don't get an attack of opportunity back against you because you have reach and ha ha ha. That probably doesn't sound like all that much – and in the big scheme of things it is not. But at the levels where Fighter types were reasonable life choices (basically level 6 and less), that's the kind of significant damage boost that you'll actually care about. With your trusty +1 Glaive, that's the difference between reliably one-shotting a Bugbear and not. A reach fighter with Power Lunge could keep up and smack down enemies to a surprisingly high level.

Obviously, Fighters being in any way effective made the designers clutch pearls and dive for the fainting couch. When it came time for Skip Williams to issue definitive rulings on how that shit worked, he shat all over it. Specifically he claimed that the double normal strength modifier in addition to normal damage actually meant instead of your strength modifier as modified by the handedness of your weapon. So our 18 Strength glaive fighter would gain 2 damage on a charge rather than 8. And that is stealth errata that completely erased the feat from being a thing anyone would ever use for anything.

But if you just ignored that shit, or never even knew about it because there was a lot less interneting in 2001, you had enough of these miswritten errors that you could string together and make a character that could pull their weight out to like 10th level or so. The intended balance point of these feats and class features didn't add up to anything close to the assumed power level of a character past level 3 or so. I have no idea how the designers though Fighters were supposed to behave at 8th and 10th level, their actual suggestions don't work at all.

AncientH:

A lot of these feats are so specialized, you wonder what they were thinking. Pin Shield, for instance.

You know how to get inside your opponent's guard by pinning his shield out of the way.
Prerequisite
Two-Weapon Fighting (PH) , base attack bonus +4,

Benefit
This feat can be used only when fighting against an opponent who is using a shield and who is your size or one size category bigger or smaller than you. When making a full attack action, you may give up all your off-hand attacks. If you do, you momentarily pin your opponent's shield with your off-hand weapon, and all your remaining attacks during the round are made with your primary weapon (with the normal penalties for fighting with two weapons), and your foe gains no Armor Class benefit from her shield until the end of your action. You cannot use this feat if you are fighting with only one weapon.

This is a combat trick whose utility is so marginal, you wonder why there needs to be a feat for it. It should just be a standard maneuver that any asshole character can try. Skipping ahead a couple chapters (fuck you, it's my review and I'll do what I want), you have to ask yourself how many characters are going to use any of the five Chariot feats (Chariot Combat, Chariot Archery, Chariot Charge, Chariot Sideswipe, Chariot Trample)?


Maybe orcs?

The chariot is just not going to be your standard adventurer's battlefield weapon. Those things are hard to fit in a dungeon corridor, much less take down a flight of stairs. Which is okay, if you're doing a low-level simulationist game - and hell, that's what a lot of D&D players still thought it was.

FrankT:

To an even greater degree than Feats, adding new skills to the game really fucks the players. If you add a new skill, the number of skill points the players have doesn't change, and the character's coverage of the playspace shrinks. Sword and Fist spends about a quarter of a page adding new knowledge skills. If that were a thing anyone believed in, it would be terrible. But what actually happened is that the basic reality that people don't get enough skill points to spend them on Knowledge: War in addition to everything else meant no one bought these stupid things and everyone pretended it never happened. I have no idea what the difference between Knowledge Mathematics and Knowledge Engineering was supposed to be in real games, and neither did anyone else. Future books in the series skipped this shit.

AncientH:

I've never understood why Bluff added the Seduction trick in this book. I could see it in Song & Silence, because that deals with bards and rogues. What the fuck is a Fighter or Monk going to do with it? Seduce the enemy in mid combat?


"That not right."

But they already covered Bluff (feint) in the Player's Handbook so...what's left? Rhinohiding? At least the Sense Motive tricks are the kind of thing that Conan would do, although (combat prediction) has the marked downside of not actually being useful in combat.

Actually, you rarely see games where you stand idly by and watch others fight each other. It's a strong part of the Sword & Sorcery genre, but the PCs like to be at the heart of the action, and they don't appreciate sitting around listening to how others are sweating and bleeding that much. Which is a pity.

FrankT:

The new uses for skills section has pretty much nothing to do with Fighters or Monks. Honestly I think that what we're looking at is some extra text from various skills that was in an earlier draft of the PHB and got cut for one reason or another. I think the “seduction” use of Bluff got cut for not being “family friendly” enough, and the “who's who?” use for Gather Information was probably cut for just not being different from the basic “learn shit” use of the same skill. All in all, these abortions of skill ideas work out to 2 pages and that's with a lot of doodles on them. So I suspect that this was pretty much one of the members of the A-team just handing in some scraps from the cutting room floor.

And that's the whole chapter. Next up: Prestige Classes.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Sword and Fist
Chapter Two: Prestige Classes


So I'm a meat warrior now, I armor myself in meat.


I'm a Blue Raja. And that means I throw... forks? And my outfit is still green and yellow rather than blue. Look, it all makes sense if you know your Forgotten Realms history...

AncientH:

"How'd you do that?"
-Redgar

This is the actual quote the opens the chapter. It raises more questions than it answers. Redgar, of course, is one of the iconic D&D characters for 3rd edition - but you'd be forgiven for not having remember that. Opening quotations have a long history in RPGs, but I'll be damned if I can think of one more useless than this one.

Prestige classes were introduced in the Dungeon Master's Guide, where they were hideously misunderstood, and this book, in producing additional prestige classes, was obviously based on those in the DMG. Which is why they're pretty much all 10-level classes with about three levels worth of material.

FrankT:

When Prestige Classes were first introduced, the understanding was that the player and the DM would work something out and let them play a prestige class specific to the campaign. So you'd end up being a Squirrel Lord or a Savior of Geldenberg or something. It was a campaign reward like getting a an artifact sword or something – after some mid level adventure your levels are just better and give you better bonuses. It's an advancement of sorts, in the sense that people really liked fucking around with them, but it's rather obviously shitting all over the concept of levels being equally valuable – which is the foundational concept on which open multiclassing (and thus Prestige Classing) was justified. So Prestige Classes are in a way self refuting. It's a circular argument where the premises contain the conclusion that the premises are false.


She knows it's multiclass.

Anyway, as more and more prestige classes got printed, the assumption that the DM was going to work with you fell by the wayside. And the more that assumption got binned, the more the demand for official prestige classes grew. It was a preview of the 4e Build problem – if it takes several pages of content to provide game mechanical legs for a narrow character concept, the fact that there are millions if not hundreds of thousands of of possible narrowly defined character concepts means that the number of pages demanded for such mechanical jiggery pokery is deeper than the supply could ever be. This book was the first step down that enticing, yet ultimately unfulfilling path. Already in 2001 we had the beginnings of “build culture” with people figuring out how to chain these different official prestige classes together in an order that would get them where they wanted to be at some specific level.

And chain them they did! Each Prestige class is based on the core classes, but turned up a notch. We're not talking about turning shit up to 11 here, but it's all just slightly but noticeably better than what you get with the core classes in the basic book. At least, that's where the balance point is supposed to fall, obviously there's some stuff in here that falls above and below that target. But here's the deal: the basic classes in 3e are, for martial characters at least, quite front loaded. You get saves and bonus feats and shit faster at low levels than you do at high levels. So even if a class was simply “Fighter,” you'd rather take the first two levels of Fighter over and over again than take levels 3+. So all the Prestige Classes that are “basically a fighter, but supersized and part of a meal deal” have a great tendency to be things you'd really rather take a level or two of and then fuck off to another one. Min/max characters of the period (martial ones at least) tended to have like 6 character classes by level 10. And they only barely held on next to single classed Wizards because of the Linear Warriors issue.

The game designers ranted about how massive multiclassing was munchkinism that was destroying the hobby, but the reality was just the opposite – characters with many different classes and prestige classes were closer to the balance point of both monsters and casters than the shitty single classed Fighters with weapon specialization the designers kept claiming you should be playing. It was very weird. And what's even weirder is that even though this book is now old enough to get a learner's permit and start driving a car, James Jacobs at Pathfailure is still making that same dumb argument.

AncientH:

Indeed. Of course, it helps that the D&D crew at this point were still catering to AD&D ideas, which is why the very first prestige class we get is the Cavalier, loosely based on one of the D&D fighter-classes. "Cavalier" sounds a lot like "Cavalry," and that is because it's a horse-mounted warrior. And this represents another major issue with the D&D system - it was generally completely independent of any of the settings (except in the case of setting-specific prestige classes), and as a consequence they were often completely incompatible setting-wise.

It's not just a question of asking "How many Cavaliers are there in the campaign setting?", but a question of "when do you become a cavalier?" Because cavalier is just a regular English word. You can call any asshole on a horse a cavalier. Were the Mongols cavaliers? You could certainly have ongols with levels in the Cavalier prestige class. What special role does the Cavalier play? Well, it's a mounted expert. So is the fucking Paladin, for that matter, and his mount can probably eat your mount.

It probably seems like I'm splitting hairs, but think of how Earthdawn handled the same issues - you could be a warrior or you could be a Warrior adept, and those were two completely distinct and understandable roles, which make complete sense within the context of the setting. But a cavalier? Are you talking about any old asshole on a horse, or a member of a special prestige class? WHO KNOWS!

FrankT:

This chapter is 28 pages long and covers 19 prestige classes. This is a much better ratio of material to space than you got later. I mean, later books would try to give you 8 prestige classes in 38 pages, and those pages were physically larger in hard backed books. Indeed, if you kept up that rate of production and information density, I hold that you could have probably gotten nearly full coverage of common character concepts by the end of 3.5's run. But of course the actual history is that they instead elected to fill each subsequent book with more lugubrious text and less actual character archetypal coverage.

Anyway, the list here is Cavalier, Devoted Defender, Drunken Master, Duelist, Fist of Hextor, Ghostwalker, Gladiator, Halfling Outrider, Knight Protector of the Great Kingdom, Lasher, Master of Chains, Master Samurai, Ninja of the Crescent Moon, Order of the Bow Initiate, Ravager, Red Avenger, Tribal Protector, Warmaster, and Weapon Master. Many of those are concepts which by all rights could be playable from first level. Indeed, not only have some of those literally been kits or classes playable from first level in previous editions, but the half-assed alternate versions of Fighters in chapter four straight up has a couple of those as 1st level options rather than prestige options. I don't even know what the conceptual difference between a Fighter who is prestige classed into Gladiator and a Fighter who has taken the Gladiator class option package is supposed to be.


Well, other than that.

Another issue is the whole “Lasher” issue, where some of these character concepts are in fact not very indicative of high level adventuring. This shit was still a problem even in 4th edition with Paragon Classes like “Dagger Master” so it's not like it's an easy problem to solve. But the issue is that there is a lot of room for something to be “demonstrably better” than another thing and still be demonstrably worse than something else. It's almost like there's a mathematical proof that you can define a point that is between any two other points. So there's all this room to be simply better than a low level spear catcher, but still not conceptually able to contribute meaningfully against titans or undersea dragons or whatever the shit it is that the high level Wizards are playing with.


I don't really care how good you are with a dagger at this point.

This book doesn't address this issue at all, and there are basically no classes in the book that have much to contribute to a high level campaign. This further leads to more incentives to bug out of these classes and chain together a level or two of a bunch of these things. A tenth level capstone ability for a prestige class comes online at character level 15 or higher depending on class prereqs. The monsters at that level are transdimensional demon ghosts from space. The Wizard is casting greater planar binding and mass charm. And the capstone of Halfling Outrider is that you get a 5th daily use of your defensive ride ability, and the capstone of Master Samurai is that you get to bypass damage reduction with your sword on three attacks per day instead of only two. It's difficult to imagine what a Halfling Outrider or Master Samurai would have to do in the medium-powered fucking superheroes game that is high level D&D, but this book didn't even try to get us there. The good prestige classes have abilities that you really notice around 7th level and the bad ones have abilities you might care about around 2nd level. And none of these classes have anything to offer a character who is 11th level or higher. But they are all 10 levels long, and the latter half of all of these classes is a waste of space.

The idea of using “capstones” to lure players into staying in class or prestige class pretty much comes from here. Not because this book much used the concept – the only thing I would actually qualify as a capstone is the final level of Warmaster gives you “Huge Castle” where you get an awesome house and can retire – but because designers and not a few board denizens were offended that people responded to these clear incentives to take one from column A and one from column B by doing that. Rather than the more “role playing” answer of being fucking grateful that you were allowed to write Knight Protector of the Great Kingdom on your character sheet and stick with it all the way to the end (at the end you get +1 to a skill roll once per day, that is not a joke). So later books included capstones that were supposed to encourage you to stick with these classes. And that mostly didn't work either, both because the capstones had a tendency to be weird and dumb, and because actually people don't generally play to 15th level anyway, so who gives a shit what happens when you hit your PrC capstone? What needed to happen was to have classes give abilities that were appropriate for the levels you got them at. And this book had no plans to do that, and only ever gave you that kind of thing on accident.

AncientH:

One character with a capstone - and one of the most-remembered classes from this book - is the Drunken Master.


You don't have to go home but you can't stay here.

Mostly intended for Monks, who gets lots of little abilities, the Drunken Master pretty much followed suit, with a variety of booze-fueled minor powers that tops out with the Breath of Flame, which is a 3d12 flame attack that consumes one drink worth of booze. Which isn't...bad...but the problem is that all these abilities in this class should basically be realized at 1st level if your character concept is "Drunken Master." It's the major problem with the "You start out at level 1" concept. Basic competence or the realization of any character concept takes a comparatively long time to master, but by the time you get there the threats aren't what you should be fighting.

The problem is that the narrative material which D&D is based on presumes that the characters start out more-or-less competent. It's much less Eragon and Star Wars, much more Punisher or 24. Characters like Conan do experience growth, in between stories, over a period of years, but they never start off as rubbish amateurs, they start off as competent and sometimes exceptional individuals who become absolute badasses. But even absolute badasses like Conan generally don't go planeswalking. Conan is still a mortal dude. If it bleeds he'll kill it, but he never breathes water or walks on fire.

But D&D is stuck with both progressive levels and a low fantasy ideal where players are going to be throwing down with dragons with more magic in their little talon than Smaug had in the whole of The Hobbit. So the threats AND the PCs advance asymmetrically. At a certain level, you don't get any XP for killing kobolds, because you've killed so many kobolds that they aren't a threat any more. Even at relatively low levels magic can overcome a lot of clever traps and shit which would normally require effort and cleverness on the parts of PCs. So you get Prestige Classes that are woefully underpowered and poorly conceived.

FrankT:

What, then, is the difference between a feat with dumb prereqs and a prestige class ability with dumb prereqs? Well... none. If a class gives out a bonus feat at first level (like Great Cleave on the Master Samurai or the straight up Bonus Feat on the Tribal Protector), it generally also comes with a trivial secondary bonus. For example: the Master Samurai gets a +2 bonus on Tumble checks, despite usually being a heavy armored warrior who will never ever tumble in combat and gives zero fucks. But if you considered the Knight Protector's Defensive Blow feature to be a feat at the end of the Cleave chain I wouldn't fault you for that analysis. The Gladiator's “Improved Feint” class feature was later written into the game as a feat... called “Improved Feint.”

None of these prestige classes really do anything that is much distinct from the pile of feat mediated bonuses you get as a martial character in 3rd edition. And if you get to 10th level or even 6th level, the only way you're going to be pulling your weight is if you figure out a way to Voltron this shit into something useful as a gestalt. You'd think that this would have caused great soul searching with the 3e design team and created a radical overhaul of how warriors interacted with level progressions. But, well, it did not. Even really obvious shit like “Fighters should get as many or more feats at 5th level as they get at 2nd level” remained heretical thought all the way through 3.5.

AncientH:

Let's talk about the Master Samurai for a minute.



The Master Samurai is a prestige class generally for Fighters hitting 6th level. It is based on the traditional samurai of Japan, so focuses on mounted combat and archery as well as the bastard sword (which was used in place of the katana, because Oriental Adventures wasn't out yet).

It is also completely separate from the Samurai general class, because that came later. And this is the problem. The Master Samurai as presented here is a simulationist creation based on a historical category of combatant in a foreign culture. It has nothing to do with any setting of D&D, at least until they shoehorned Rokugan in.

So it is entirely possible to be a Samurai, but not qualify to be a Master Samurai. Or to be a Master Samurai but not a Samurai. Or to be playing a European-style Cavalier who decides to dip into Master Samurai. From a game mechanics perspective, there's no issue - it's like having different cards with "Elf" and "Elven" in the title in Magic: the Gathering. But from a play perspective, it's annoying; it takes you out of the game, it fucks up any setting, and if any of the Japanese gave a damn about the wholesale pillaging of their heritage, it would probably piss them off too.

FrankT:

Being an effective warrior meant collecting the bonuses that stacked together into something awesome. So there was the San Diego Supercharger, who stacked a bunch of charging damage bonuses with various effects that allowed them to get multiple attacks whilst charging to do huge damage. There was the Tripstar, who generally used a spiked chain and used knockdown effects to lockdown an area. There was the Gattling Archer who used a bunch of rate of fire boosting effects plus some damage boosting effects to pull off similar damage to the Supercharger. There was a shield using guy and I genuinely forget how it worked but I think it had to wait for the Cleric book to give them ways to turn otherwise useless Paladin turning into massive bonuses to AC, Saves, and Attacks. And like a couple others. My memory of early 21st century min max exploits is starting to dim.

But the point of all this was that the things you were expected to do by the designers were woefully inadequate and it took a lot of work and math to make a fighter who wasn't a pile of ass. Meanwhile, the Wizard could just cast web and walk away. It meant the thing the game tried to sell you on – where Fighter was a basic class that you let the DM's girlfriend play, and Wizard was a master class that the neckbeard math wiz masterminded was exactly backwards.

It also meant that things like Order of the Bow Initiate had instant place in builds because shooting fools with giant piles of arrows was a useful build, while shit like Lasher was just sort of puzzling. And you'd think that Master of Chains would be a thing because tripstars were a thing, but actually that class required you to have six feats to get in, and three of those feats were feats that a trip fighter didn't really care about (Weapon Focus, Weapon Specialization, and Improved Disarm). And the abilities they picked up mostly didn't synergize with the kind of area locks a tripping chain fighter actually wanted to do.

AncientH:

The Red Avenger and Ninja of the Crescent Moon are both based on the manipulation of ki, and they try to encourage its use by giving you more uses-per-day of ki abilities the more levels in the class you have. This is basically the prototype of the Monk and Ninja stunning fist-uses-per-day feats and class features, and the Ki pool in Pathfailure.

And it ultimately relates the desire for a power point pool - basically what they came up with for psionics - but a reluctance to actively engage with the concept, because what they didn't want was for players to play with having one pool of ki that you spent on umpteen different abilities from different classes. At least, that's the justification they used later - Pathfinder actually embraced that a bit - early on, I think they just understood that some abilities should have something to do with your Prestige Class level to encourage you to max it out.

FrankT:

Of the 28 pages in this chapter, a clear super majority, like 75-80% is totally wasted space. Nevertheless, players used this chapter. A lot. It filled a need that 3e didn't know it had, and once that need was recognized, it sent the game down the wrong path for like a decade or more. Pathfinder is still making mistakes today that are directly retraceable to poor decisions made in response to the successes and failures in this chapter.

Next Chapter: Loquacious Essays and Empty Pontification.

AncientH:

Also noticeable is what is missing in this chapter: what do you do when you finish off a prestige class? There was a vague suggestion in the DMG that the 10 levels of a PrC were just that...a suggestion. Even the Epic Level Handbook played with the idea that you could have more levels. Of course, players didn't care about what the hypothetical 11th level of Drunken Master was. No one was going to get that far.

[Prak]

RE: Chariots- actually I could see some basketweaver who thinks they're a minmaxer playing a halfling with a dog chariot or something. Because D&D (these days) actually sort of encourages stupid shit like midgets with dogsleds in dungeons.


....and now I sort of want to turn the Iditarod into a dungeon...

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Sword and Fist
Chapter 3: Worldly Matters


Google says this image is relevant. Trust the Google.

FrankT:

This chapter is 13 pages and is dedicated to fluff. First we get a bit about Fighters and Monks in the world, and then we have a bit about some organizations that have Fighters and/or Monks in them. This was always going to be a trippy and difficult writing assignment: Fighters are the most generic and flavorless class and it is logical to assume that there are Fighters in pretty much every group of humanoids and giants regardless of ideology, culture, or technological sophistication. Monks are the most weirdly specific character class in the PHB and probably the character class that DMs had the hardest time swallowing character backstories for. Like, more than expansion classes or setting specific classes. You would probably get less shit playing a Samurai or an Artificer than a Monk. I know it's a core class, but it's a fucking weird core class that fits oddly into D&D and everyone knows it.



So when it writes a “Fighters in the World” piece, that is a waste of space, because Fighters are everywhere and you already know about soldiers and warriors and knights and shit. There's no information that piece can give you. Then when it goes into the “Monks in the World” it's equally a waste of time because no rant it could give about how fucking Monks fit into the generic D&D world would have much impact on how Monks fit into the specific world that your DM is actually envisioning when you sit down to play D&D. But it's actually a double waste of time, because this essay is basically about how Monks train in Nanda Parbat and dispense fortune cookie wisdom to their compatriots.


Try working this into your character background so that you can take 2 levels of Monk at level 5 for the Save bonuses and Feats to qualify for a PrC. Just fucking try.

Racial issues are discussed for both classes in a manner which uses up word count and makes me sad. The author pretty much thinks that all Monks should be Humans, which makes this section worse than useless. Such as this section had a purpose, it should have been to provide ammunition to the player who wanted to play something to throw at a skeptical DM. Instead it lists various reasons why Dwarves shouldn't be Monks. Like seriously, this section had one job.

AncientH:

It's doubly bullshit when you remember that D&D had no default setting to begin with - a few references to Greyhawk notwithstanding - so all of this information didn't actually apply to to the Forgotten Realms or Dark Sun or basically any other setting, official or otherwise. Amazingly, the D&D folks never seemed to have understood that they were writing setting-specific material for a game which was basically JUST an engine with no setting, and continued to produce this crap sourcebook after sourcebook. At least GURPS knew what they were doing.

On top of that, some of this material is just...retarded. Case in point:

Most fighters do not have any structural organization built into their class

Well, no shit. Unless they take Leadership as a feat, Fighter is plug-in-play in any organization. Nothing about any of that is inherent in the class at all.

FrankT:

I'm just gonna admit that I have never read all the way through the organizations. Like, paragraph 5 of the Knights of the Watch description could totally be an early draft of one of those sasquatch erotica pieces and end with “The Aristocrats!” and I would never know. They are so amazingly dull that I can't get through them. Never have. Probably never will.

The organizations in the chapter are: The Fists of Hextor, The Knight Protectors of the Great Kingdom, The Knights of the Watch, The Ravagers, and the Red Avengers. The problem here is that these are Greyhawk organizations and Greyhawk is kind of stupid. But also that even within that context we're seeing versions that have had their rough edges sanded down to make them less out-sticky if you put them in some other campaign world. But once that's been done, there's no reason for them. Like, how are the Knights of the Watch or the Knight Protectors of the Great Kingdom different from a group of Knights that you made up forty seconds ago? I could read the whole description and I still couldn't tell you.

Part of this is just how bad the names are in Greyhawk. Like, I literally spent years believing that the Knight Protectors of the Great Kingdom were just intended to be a peg you could slot into whatever kingdom you had in your home campaign world that was at least pretty good. But actually, that's a specific kingdom in Greyhawk that is actually fucking called “The Great Kingdom.” How fucking pathetic is that?


The Great Kingdom has a coat of arms and fucking everything. And I still don't care.

But the real bottom line is that none of this is either specific or general. That makes it useless to use as a campaign building block when making my own world, and also useless to convey information about a specific campaign world that it is nominally drawn from.

The Knights of the Watch formed several centuries ago to defend the lands of their people against the incursions of the savage tribes who struck from the dry steppes to the extreme west.

How many centuries? What homeland? What tribes? What steppes? What the fuck?

There's no entry point to these things. It's been generalized enough that I don't care about it but not generalized enough for me to make it my own. I crawl through this shit for a while and then I just give up.

AncientH:

Struggling to come up with anything for this chapter, I decided to say something about the art. Unfortunately, I wasn't quite sure who was doing the art, so I rechecked the front of the book. Dennis Cramer is now Justine Mara Anderson, and while I recognize her art I don't actually remember any of it from this book, so I don't care. The artist who actually has most of the interior art for this book is this person:



Which, after much wrangling, I finally identified as a completely uncredited Wayne Reynolds.

Also, I would like to point out that the writer Jason Carl was obviously writing this particular bit on fumes, because this is the beginning of the section on the Red Avengers:

Red Avengers
"We live only for vengeance."

The Red Avengers exist for only one reason: vengeance.

Don't argue with me, boy.

FrankT:

And that's the chapter. It's only 13 pages, and I don't think anyone ever gave much of a damn about the
contents of any of them. Next up: Chapter 4: The Game Within A Game: Colons.

[Kaelik]

Part of this is just how bad the names are in Greyhawk. Like, I literally spent years believing that the Knight Protectors of the Great Kingdom were just intended to be a peg you could slot into whatever kingdom you had in your home campaign world that was at least pretty good. But actually, that's a specific kingdom in Greyhawk that is actually fucking called “The Great Kingdom.” How fucking pathetic is that?

Fucking This.

[Mechalich]

It really didn't help that, as stupid as Greyhawk is (was? does it technically still exist?), at no point during 3e did anyone bother to produce a Greyhawk book, which meant that if you hadn't played Greyhawk in 2e there was no context to any of this crap and no easy way to look it up.

[Starmaker]

Which, after much wrangling, I finally identified as a completely uncredited Wayne Reynolds.

The picture itself is signed in the lower-right corner. I think the convention was to not credit signed pictures, no matter how ambiguous the signature.

[deaddmwalking]

There were two Greyhawk books in 3.0.

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/284 ... er-30?it=1

There was also another called 'Gazateer' that was different and much, much, shorter.

The Gazateer was 32 pages of text with several poster-maps. The Living Greyhawk Gazateer was 192 pages and didn't have any maps that weren't printed within the book.

[Ancient History]

Which, after much wrangling, I finally identified as a completely uncredited Wayne Reynolds.

The picture itself is signed in the lower-right corner. I think the convention was to not credit signed pictures, no matter how ambiguous the signature.

Yeah, Wayne Reynolds' personal fucking rune doesn't help much.

[OgreBattle]

Kind of sad reading this, all the hopes for a new edition dashed with the retardation of what a Fighter and Monk is expected to do in 3e.

[Koumei]

FrankT:

There was a shield using guy and I genuinely forget how it worked but I think it had to wait for the Cleric book to give them ways to turn otherwise useless Paladin turning into massive bonuses to AC, Saves, and Attacks.

You need Charisma and Strength of 13+ which you fucking have if you're a Paladin (well I guess if you've already made the bad choice to be a Paladin you're on the path to make more bad choices but whatever), and Power Attack. These are the requirements, and you then take Divine Might and Divine Shield (both from Deities and Demigods). "Spend one Turn/Rebuke Attempt, gain [Charisma Bonus] to your (damage/AC, depending on feat) for [Charisma Bonus] rounds." There's also one that does it to your Saves, and yes you can double-dip that with "Being a Paladin". At that point you can just crank Charisma above all else and the only thing you don't add Charisma to in combat is attack rolls.

Smite Evil (Su)

Well there you go.

So at level ten, you could be rocking a Charisma of 20 with a nice item, and then, get this, you can add +5 to your AC and damage rolls. Why aren't you creaming yourself with excitement yet? Yes, given your armour and shield, you probably DO have a good Armour Class. Nobody fucking cares though.

Works well in the NWN games of course, where you can get items of +10 Charisma, and where "Epic Divine ____: double the bonus and duration" is a thing, and where "run up and smack a dude in the face" is defensible for your whole career. Also where you know the game goes into Epic levels so you can just put four Paladin levels on a Sorcerer, Auto-Still every spell, and stand there in Full Plate with a Tower Shield and Divine Shield for an AC of "Go fuck yourself".

My favourite PrCl in that book is the Weapon Master. Or it was until I read what it is in the book as opposed to "In the NWN games where they lower the requirements and make the abilities solid power-ups for your critsplosion builds".

[Ancient History]

[OSSR: Sword and Fist
The Game Within A Game


Dance Time!

OK, we may be getting a little surreal with the opening pictures. Just gonna do a bit where we do as many of these pictures with Scooby Doo stye art as possible. For no reason.

AncientH:

"Most battles are won before a single blow lands. Your wits are your greatest weapon."
- Ember

These quotes still head chapter sections, and this is one of those where you can't tell if they're being deep or shallow. On the surface, Int is not usually a Fighter or Monk's primary attribute, unless they're heavily invested in Combat Expertise and some more exotic feat/class combos. One level beneath that, D&D 3.0 was basically a tactical minis game, so there is something to be said for actually thinking through how to attack a monster before going all Leroy Jenkins. But one level beneath that, it's actually about the player's wits in building their character. If you build a character to be a tank, you don't use them as a lancer. So it all comes down to how intelligent the player players the character, not how intelligent the player character is.


I think the Scooby Snacks have steroids in them.

FrankT:

It's tempting to call this 17 page chapter the “shit that didn't fit in the other chapters chapter” but it actually contains a couple of feats (Large and in Charge and Multitasking) which could very easily have gone in the Skills and Feats chapter. Why didn't they? They might have been deliberately held out of the skills and feats chapter because they were intended for NPCs (although if that's the case, why include feats that have a prerequisite of 7 Monk levels? Zing!), or they might have been introduced after Chapter 1 was already typeset. I dunno. I do know that this random collection of essays chapter is hard to find information in because there is no rhyme or reason for what is and is not in the chapter or in what order this information should come.

The first bit is the alternate Fighter classes. These are basically Fighters with different skill lists. Because get this: the PHB Fighter's skill list is way too fucking restrictive. It points out that to be a Duelist you need Tumble, to be a Pirate you need Balance, to be a Desert Raider you need Hide, and fucking none of those are on the basic Fighter class list. This book's suggestion is basically that you should make a custom class skill list for every Fighter based on their warrior concept. The example warrior concepts are: Duelist, Pirate, Gladiator, Warrior Monk of Shao Lin, and Desert Raider. Wait, Warrior Monk of Shao Lin? What the shit? How is that not a Monk? And why are we talking about specific real world Earth groups in the middle of a D&D book. Can I be from the Yankees baseball team now?


The Shaolin Warriors of the Wu Tang Clan and Bill Murray obviously can't be represented easily with the Fighter Class from the PHB.

This section is about as close as WotC ever came to admitting how badly they fucked up the Fighter class. They don't list a single concept that doesn't require an ass tonne more skill points than Fighters get and also lean heavily on skills that aren't on the Fighter list. Over and above issues where the Fighter isn't getting super powers to take on the super villains the party faces at high level, the Fighter lacks the skills and proficiencies required to be recognized as a competent person at low levels. The logical conclusion to this section existing at all is that Fighters needed to have a much wider and deeper access to mundane problem solving abilities. And that's just to realize first level character concepts. But what's odd is that while this case was made eloquently and irrefutably in the first fucking expansion book back in 2001, even two half editions later the Pathfinder Fighter still doesn't have access to stealth, perception, diplomacy, sense motive, or acrobatics and still only has two fucking skill points. Fifteen years later, and we still haven't gotten the powers that be to acknowledge that you should probably be able to play a marine or a desert raider out of the box as a fucking Fighter.

AncientH:

This is actually a preview of Unearthed Arcana more than anything else, and I'd bet my second-favorite testicle that the author pitched it as one of those "expanding the playspace" things.


Because the d20 engine can do many things besides dungeoneering.

It also recognizes a lot of other basic problems with the Fighter class - like how to handle the Undead, and the importance of building your character to achieve a Prestige-Class goal. One sort of wonders what would have happened if they had carried this idea further...


Ruh roh.

FrankT:

Shaggy has got advice.

Probably the biggest way this book contributed to the execrable build culture was to provide hard coded incentives for doing it. But another way was that it had a short essay telling you to do it. It's called “Advancement: Wise Choices” and it's basically about how you should look up Prestige Class prereqs and plan your feats out levels in advance so you meet the requirements on time. Which is the correct way to navigate the way PrCs worked, but the fact that you're admitting that this is the case means you probably should have put the breaks on this shit. Because “builds” is a crap way to play the game, and admitting that it's optimal is equally admitting that you've fucked up your design.

But that is not all the advice! There is advice about actually playing the game. Starting with a bit called “How to Fight Nearly Anything (And Survive)” and it's... hit and miss. It starts with a bit on how opponents with reach should have their attacks of opportunity minimized, and it presents some ways to do that (draw out the AoO with a high defense character, sit back and use ranged attacks, that's basically it but there are somehow four bullet points here because reasons). And then there's a tirade about fighting the Undead that doesn't make any sense. Like, seriously no sense. It's not really based on how the rules work, or even how the rules worked in 2n edition AD&D. It seems like it's based on how the gaming culture of the early 90s expected you to behave with respect to Undead and Clerics in 2nd edition AD&D. It's all very weird.

Once you have entered combat against these foes, remember that they do not share many of the weaknesses of living creatures. You cannot soften them up with sword and fist in preparation for the wizard's sleep spell – the undead are not susceptible to that spell.

You can't soften up anything else for a sleep spell with sword and fist, that spell is all or nothing, you asshole.

And finally, there's a bit on how enemy fliers require you to get wings or a bow. And then there's a bit on how you should probably run from very powerful enemies. Not Shakespeare, but perfectly serviceable essays and reasonable advice for a new player. Only the Undead section seems to be based on memes that were a decade old at the time of writing and also wrong even when they were new.

AncientH:

The thing is Fighters in D&D aren't all buckling their swashes and fighting humanoid minions and goons; they're fighting all sorts of critters with weird powers and tactical advantages. Your basic flyer that can do a flying charge and be out of range of retaliation can be a severe obstacle if you're just a dude with a sword. And if that sounds slightly complicated to visualize, it's because D&D 3.0 could honestly be claimed to be a scam to sell miniatures.


Jinkies. I'll be in my bunk.

This is so blatant that in the next section they break out the grids to show you how Cleave works, exactly like if this was a tactical minis game.

FrankT:

The tactics section is relatively well thought out and someone has crunched the numbers reasonably well. What they haven't done is really looked at the Monster Manual and internalized what the opposition really is and
what it can do. So all the stuff about when it's mathematically better to Flurry or Power Attack and how you can take advantage of diagonals with 5 foot steps and shit is totally accurate. But there's this weird assumption that Tordek is likely to drop a fucking Fire Giant with a fucking melee attack. And that is not going to happen. Fire Giants have three digits of hit points, Tordek isn't going to do shit.


Fucking around with optimal power attacking and remembering your five foot steps generates relatively minor differences. At the end of the day you're still a 15th level character swinging for 20 points of damage and even minion level Giants laugh in your fucking face.

My guess is that the author had not actually played the game past level 4 or so and just sort of assumed that Fighter tactics would scale appropriately at higher levels. They do not. The discussion about iterative attacks from full attacking at higher level is particularly tone deaf. I don't think anyone in the office really realized how severely they had nerfed extra attacks from Fighters in 3rd edition. I also don't understand why those nerfs weren't rolled back by the time 3.5 came around, let alone by the time Pathfinder was a thing. But in 2001 I can kind of get how someone might still think that getting a 3rd attack at minus fucking ten at 11th level was a real thing you'd care about.

There's a couple of combat examples with 7th level characters picking away at each other for like a d6+3 at a time and shit. It's all completely theory craft, because if you counted the number of rounds that a fight with a Gorgon on team monster and a Wizard on team player actually took, off hand attacks with a masterwork short sword at 7th level would be prima facia absurd.

AncientH:

There's a lot of shit about monks, including a table of Flurry of Blows probabilities and some stuff on Monstrous Monks which is basically a preview of Savage Species (is Ted even still around anymore?)

You'll notice a lot of this shit was lacking from Complete Warrior. I don't think that was an accident, but I do wonder what the feedback was like that they decided to move away from the consumer advice, tables and charts, and double down on feats and prestige classes. My guess is that the vast majority of players skipped this section, since 90% of the material was "fellate Mister Cavern" to get it into play, while the prestige classes and feats were "official."


...and that's how I started dating the Dungeonmaster!

FrankT:

There are three optional rules at the end of the chapter. There's one about countering Tumble that your DM probably experimented with for a while and ultimately scrapped because despite all the whining, the fact that Tumble just sort of works for ninja characters is not a big problem. There's one about counting Mighty Composite Longbows as the same as Longbows for the purpose of weapon proficiencies and weapon focus and cleric favored weapons and shit, which you probably did not realize was an optional rule because fucking everyone plays like that. And finally there's a thing about letting people not automatically fail on Disarm checks if they have two empty hands, which you probably do not know whether your table is using because who the fuck Disarms at all? And if anyone did make a Disarm build, obviously they would use a Spiked Chain or a Heavy Flail because obviously.


Which one is real!?

AncientH:

It needs to be said that a lot of the thought that goes into builds depends strongly on the type of game you're going to be playing. To go back to what Frank said earlier about disarms - in my straight-up dungeoneering games, if you can hit your target disarming is a special situational topic at best. Getting Orcus to drop his wand might be worth it, but there's few other situations where it'll be a major issue, because in D&D pretty much every monster will fight to their last hitpoint - or beyond - and there is no quarter gained or asked. So from a hack'n'slash mindset, disarming isn't very good or useful.

But if you're in a different sort of game, where you're trying to get opponents to surrender (and if they will surrender, like they value their lives or something), disarming could be a very valid tactic. The problem is, D&D is not really designed for those sorts of games. I mean yes, you could do it - mostly at low levels - but we're talking low, low levels. Like, "don't bring a dagger to a sword fight" levels. And while most of the literature supporting D&D usually talks about fighting guards without killing them and disarming people rather than fighting exotic monsters and hacking them to death, you can see how somebody thought this was a good idea. But the game progresses way too quickly through levels 1-4 for it to really be a major part of the game...unless all your games end before level 6. Which I would believe.


Errol Flynn over there is supposed to be Shaggy in the new comic. You're not in the Mystery Machine anymore, dude!

FrankT:

Next up: Tools of the Trade.

That's the last chapter.

[Longes]

I don't really care how good you are with a dagger at this point.

Well, he does in fact kill that titan with a sword...

[GâtFromKI]

I don't think anyone in the office really realized how severely they had nerfed extra attacks from Fighters in 3rd edition. I also don't understand why those nerfs weren't rolled back by the time 3.5 came around, let alone by the time Pathfinder was a thing.

It's not a simple problem.

Starting with 1 attack and gaining an extra attack is obviously a 100% increase to your Damages Per Round; and gaining 100% DPR at level up is far too much: it basically means that FP+1 monsters aren't just "difficult", they are out of reach because you need to deal twice damages to beat them.

AD&D, and I guess the editions before it, toyed with the idea of having 3 attacks per two rounds; so when you level up from 1 attack per round to 3 attacks per 2 rounds, it's only a 50% DPR increase - far more reasonable. But you know the problems you have with "3 attacks per 2 rounds".

So D&D3 toyed with attacks penalties: at level 6, you gain a whole attack, but this second attack doesn't use your full bonus so it's not a 100% DPR increase. And you can use two weapons or flurry or rapid shot, but you have some penalties so it's not a 100% DPR increase again.

It doesn't work very well either, but... I guess nobody had a better idea when developing subsequent editions ? (although you could use a more complex BAB table: +6/+1, then +7/+3, +8/+5, +9/+7, +10/+9, +11/+11/+6, etc).

[virgil]

The penalty for the second attack isn't the problem. Tactics like Rapid Shot, TWF, and the like work on a -2/-2 basis and worked fine; and +0/-5 is close enough to compare.

The problem happens at the third and fourth attacks, with penalties of -10 & -15 respectively. Penalties of that size should make the attacks useless. And if your attacks are reliably hitting *with* that kind of penalty, then you're probably fighting a mook.

[GâtFromKI]

The problem happens at the third and fourth attacks, with penalties of -10 & -15 respectively. Penalties of that size should make the attacks useless.

Yeah, but having a third attack at -10 looks reasonable when you already have a second attack at -5. But you're right, the game should also work with a BAB of +11/+6/+6 and +16/+11/+11/+11, and this makes the BAB table easy to remember.

[ishy]

The penalty for the second attack isn't the problem. Tactics like Rapid Shot, TWF, and the like work on a -2/-2 basis and worked fine; and +0/-5 is close enough to compare.

The problem happens at the third and fourth attacks, with penalties of -10 & -15 respectively. Penalties of that size should make the attacks useless. And if your attacks are reliably hitting *with* that kind of penalty, then you're probably fighting a mook.

Well, unless attack bonuses rise faster than armour does. So while at lvl 6, your normal one has a good chance of hitting and the -5 has a okay chance of hitting, while at level 11, your normal attack always hits, your second attack has a good chance of hitting and your third has a okay chance of hitting (this way if you only get one attack you can also dump a lot more into power attack)

[OgreBattle]

Is there any awesome trick a warrior can pull off by landing three or four attacks on one target in one round, like something with tripping or grappling or stunning fist

[virgil]

Well, unless attack bonuses rise faster than armour does. So while at lvl 6, your normal one has a good chance of hitting and the -5 has a okay chance of hitting, while at level 11, your normal attack always hits, your second attack has a good chance of hitting and your third has a okay chance of hitting (this way if you only get one attack you can also dump a lot more into power attack)

This is the situation you need to consider. If your third iterative can reliably hit, then you can afford a 10 point Power Attack that will make this third attack near-useless. It takes a rather restricted set of circumstances for that third iterative to be a better option than using more Power Attack; especially once you start getting more attacks from effects like haste that are tied to your highest attack.