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taltamir
2010-01-12, 02:31 AM
I noticed on page 28 of tome of battle the unarmed variant has this to say:

ADAPTATION
The name “swordsage” naturally implies a character who carries a sword or weapon of some kind. However, a swordsage works very well as a supernatural martial artist of almost any school or origin. To create a monklike character with a tremendous array of fantastic moves and strikes, give the swordsage the monk’s unarmed strike progression and remove his light armor profi ciency. If you prefer, you could instead emphasize the magical talents of the swordsage by giving the swordsage the ability to learn arcane spells in place of maneuvers of equivalent level. In general, spells from the schools of abjuration, evocation, and transmutation are most appropriate for a swordsage of this type, especially spells with a range of personal or touch. The arcane spell is “cast” as if it were a martial maneuver. In this case, you should remove the class’s light armor profi ciency and reduce the swordsage’s
Hit Die to d6.

So by giving up armor proficiency and reducing the HD to 6, he can have an array of maneuvers, known wizard/sorcerer spells, swap out the prepared ones in 5 minutes, cast each once per encounter, and recharge any spent one with one full round action mid encounter? oh, and they are Ex abilities and thus immune to dispelling, counterspelling, anti magic fields, null magic zones, etc.

This seems to carry many advantages over the sorcerer and even some over the wizard. I guess a big drawback is the lack of metamagic since its not actually spells, what are drawbacks are there?
Couldn't you just spam timestop? Heck you could spend the first round of timestop recharging your time stop, allowing you to have perpetual timestopness.

Glimbur
2010-01-12, 02:33 AM
The largest drawback to this plan is your DM punching you.

Maybe if you carefully limited the spells an Arcane Swordsage could choose from it would only be powerful... I guess with enough limits it could be weak; there are enough bad spells out there. But any spell in the game as encounter powers? Ridiculous.

Djinn_in_Tonic
2010-01-12, 02:38 AM
Firstly, it's listed as a possibility, not as anything approved. It's a rough suggestion.

I don't think for a minute that the RAI (there's definitely nothing even resembling RAW for this idea...in fact, it has almost no rules at all) intended the spells to be anything but Spell-like abilities. I'd also think any DM allowing this would put careful tabs on the spells selected to prevent things like the above Time Stop spam.