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Endarire
2012-12-19, 02:37 AM
Greetings, Playground!

Instead of trying to fix the Fighter class, I figured I'd fix his feats in a quick or/and dirty style. For every [Fighter] bonus feat, remove all feat prereqs but keep all other prereqs like BAB, skill ranks, or [Epic] status.

Ta-da!

And this goes for the feats, meaning every creature can benefit from smaller feat chains!

(I swear God inspired me with this. Thanks, Dad!)

Lord_Gareth
2012-12-19, 03:11 AM
It's been tried before. It fixes nothing.

Say it with me everyone: Warblade is the Fighter fix. Warblade is the Fighter fix. Warblade is the Fighter fix.

(To be more specific, the thrust of the problem is that feats are infinitely worse than Real Actual Class Features, and even in the ELEVENTY BAJILLION feats in 3.5 there are not enough - even without pre-reqs! - to help the Fighter overcome their essential flaws and rise above T5. The hypothetical Fighter With Every Feat In the Game that some poor bastard statted out barely managed to be T4, and it was a pretty pathetic T4 at that.)

vasharanpaladin
2012-12-19, 03:17 AM
It's been tried before. It fixes nothing.

Say it with me everyone: Warblade is the Fighter fix. Warblade is the Fighter fix. Warblade is the Fighter fix.



This. A thousand times, this.

nonsi
2012-12-19, 08:47 AM
Say it with me everyone: Warblade is the Fighter fix. Warblade is the Fighter fix. Warblade is the Fighter fix.


hmm... NO.
The maneuvers system is morphed Vancian spellcasting with no material/vocal components and held weapon(s) as focus.

Wrong flavor.

Amnoriath
2012-12-19, 10:12 AM
(To be more specific, the thrust of the problem is that feats are infinitely worse than Real Actual Class Features, and even in the ELEVENTY BAJILLION feats in 3.5 there are not enough - even without pre-reqs! - to help the Fighter overcome their essential flaws and rise above T5. The hypothetical Fighter With Every Feat In the Game that some poor bastard statted out barely managed to be T4, and it was a pretty pathetic T4 at that.)

Actually, no, there are many feats with great options, and even multiple ones(tactical). The problem is with specifically the fighter bonus feats is that many of these feats aren't labeled fighter feats other than the must haves. I noticed this when I made my Incarnate Blade fix. I will concede though that feats are one of the most varied in terms of having actual good value, especially when set in stone and with so few in a character's career.

Grod_The_Giant
2012-12-19, 10:19 AM
It also makes the fighter ridiculously difficult to build, since you now have to plow through all [arbitrarily high number] of feats in 3.5 to find the dozen-odd ones that are actually worth taking.

Yitzi
2012-12-19, 10:39 AM
The problem isn't that the feats are too hard to get, it's that they're too weak. Instead of your idea, it would make more sense to do the opposite: Make feats that are as good as high-level class features and give them high prerequisites.

Lord_Gareth
2012-12-19, 12:15 PM
hmm... NO.
The maneuvers system is morphed Vancian spellcasting with no material/vocal components and held weapon(s) as focus.

Wrong flavor.

Oh spare me, Nonsi. Every time Tome of Battle comes up you bring up the same tired statements about it, and every time we explain it to you the community gets blown off.

For the benefit of the OP: First and foremost, the Warblade is available free-and-legal from Wizards of the Coast here (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ex/20060802a&page=2), and you can also find a free description of all Tome of Battle maneuvers - again free and legal from WotC themselves! - here (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/we/20061225a). That's everything you need to play a Warblade, essentially, and if you have any confusion the community here is pretty conversant in Tome of Battle.

Secondly, I'll state this: yes, the typesetting of ToB maneuvers looks sorta like spells. However, they are not spells, especially in the Warblade's case. A Warblade is just like a Fighter in that both classes represent a martially-oriented character that gains unusual prowess from physical training and dedication to combat. The key difference is that the Warblade is actually capable of holding his own, whereas the Fighter is not. All of the stuff Warblades do with maneuvers, Fighters can already do with feats - it's just that the Fighter is forced to suck at it. Hit multiple enemies? A Fighter uses Cleave (maybe), but a Warblade just initiates Steel Wind. Throw your shield like Captain America? Fighter takes three shield feats from PHB II, but a Warblade just initiates Lightning Throw. The comparisons continue favorably.

If you'd like more Warblade or ToB information, feel free to PM me. I'ma stop de-railing your thread now, since I gave my useful critique in the post above.

Yitzi
2012-12-19, 12:48 PM
Secondly, I'll state this: yes, the typesetting of ToB maneuvers looks sorta like spells. However, they are not spells, especially in the Warblade's case.

They might not be spells, but they play a lot more like spells. Well, at least the maneuvers do; stances are different, and hold far more potential in my opinion. (In fact, the fighter for the system I'm currently working on uses something that's sort of a mix between scaling feats, feat chains, and stances.)


All of the stuff Warblades do with maneuvers, Fighters can already do with feats - it's just that the Fighter is forced to suck at it. Hit multiple enemies? A Fighter uses Cleave (maybe), but a Warblade just initiates Steel Wind.

Whirlwind attack is a far better analogy than Cleave; it's harder to get than Steel Wind and takes a FRA, but is also quite a bit more powerful. Simply changing it to a standard action (or better yet, giving the fighter the ability to move and then take an FRA attack) would probably be enough to compete with Warblade on that aspect of things; if combined with the OP's idea, it would definitely be enough.


Throw your shield like Captain America? Fighter takes three shield feats from PHB II, but a Warblade just initiates Lightning Throw.

Lightning Throw is far more than just throwing your shield, and is fairly high level as a result. It's mainly useful for doing high damage to multiple targets, and that's a role that I feel should be the job of wizards (and evokers in particular). Of course, that requires making other wizards' abilities not even stronger (or banning them); an across-the-board boost to saves without a corresponding increase to save DCs (plus an additional boost for fighters' Reflex and Will saves, further helping the fighter) might be a good approach there.

The problem with ToB is that even if maneuvers are not spells, they feel too much like spells. Better to give fighters stuff that doesn't feel like spells (i.e. it doesn't have limited uses and you have a smaller number of options with another relatively small list of bonuses to take rather than a long list of options) and just boost that stuff to be at whatever tier you're looking for. Throw in the ability to get non-class-based minor abilities so that the fighter class can be purely about combat but fighters aren't useless outside of combat, and you should be able to make a fighter that's around tier 3 (maybe technically a very strong tier 4, but playable in a tier 3 group.)

dspeyer
2012-12-19, 02:28 PM
Does Strikewright (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=182682) solve your too-much-like-spells problem?

Yitzi
2012-12-19, 04:08 PM
Does Strikewright (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=182682) solve your too-much-like-spells problem?

It goes most of the way there, but 2+level is still a lot of options; I'd rather see something with fewer maneuvers known (and perhaps even fewer maneuvers knowable), but more stances, and with more potential insights but only a limited number usable at one time.

Kane0
2012-12-19, 04:32 PM
I still have the Commonly Corrected Classes Compendium running if you want to grab some ideas from there, but I'd agree with most saying that there is no real quick n' dirty fix, and that ToB goes a long way to solving some of the Fighters worries.

willpell
2012-12-20, 02:25 AM
Say it with me everyone: Warblade is the Fighter fix. Warblade is the Fighter fix. Warblade is the Fighter fix.

Yeah, no. Warblade has very different flavor from fighter; he's like the elite special forces commando to fighter's Marine grunt (which doesn't say that the grunt is weaker necessarily, only more of a general grounpounder without the highly specialized skills of the Tom Clancy hero, probably more useful in a straight up firefight and definitely so in a nonstop running battle, but less able to tackle rare and unusual high-stakes missions). Grabbing quotes from the Warblade fluff, a fighter is not a "sword prince"; ask some poor French peasant forced to slog through Napoleon's campaign whether he agrees with "Battle is beautiful". I like warblade flavor for a lot of purposes, but the warblade can't shine unless he has the fighter as background (Warrior doesn't cut it - in fact, given that fighter is so much weaker than warblade, it should probably replace Warrior as the default "no-class class" for NPC combatants).

A warblade gets three maneuvers at first level, and can't do one of them twice in a row (I'm pretty sure I saw a rule saying you can't ready one maneuver three times; they have to all be different). He has to overthink his battles a little, and there are some character concepts for which that's just the wrong flavor. Take for instance the half-black-dragon Fighter 4 in the Monster Manual; what maneuvers would you give him, to make up for the fact that you've disqualified him for his Weapon Specialization feat as well as taking away his 1st and 2nd level bonus feats? Maybe you could make him better for typical adventuring purposes, but he's not built for those purposes (and given that a typical adventurer is a sociopathic hobo with no skills to actually pay the bills and stay alive when there isn't a dungeon for him to loot, that's probably just as well for the half-dragon in question). He's there to be fought, and that means he needs to be good at fighting, no matter how often he has to fight in a given day. He does not need fancy tricks aimed at "covering himself in glory"; he just needs the ability to kill things quickly and efficiently, and for all its lack of versatility, few people complain that the fighter is not good at dealing damage (compared to anything that isn't Tier 1-2 at any rate).

Hanuman
2012-12-20, 03:26 AM
In the world of magic and intrigue an adventurer needs more options than "I attack again."

Even in pathfinder fighters are better off just using compound bows.
I think fighters should ultimately be a leadership and support class, tank n spank while throwing out shouts to grant morale bonuses and setting up plays.

That being said, I find fighters terribly boring. I'd rather tome of battle 100% of the time.

nonsi
2012-12-20, 04:09 AM
Oh spare me, Nonsi. Every time Tome of Battle comes up you bring up the same tired statements about it, and every time we explain it to you the community gets blown off.


1. What do you mean by that ?

2. Not every time. Definitely not every time. This is by no means an automatic reflex. Occasionally, when ToB comes up in Fighter Fix threads, I share my opinions. What triggered my response this time is the fact that you mentioned ToB to someone who's been here since 2004 and has "Bugbear in the Playground" status, so there's no way in the nine hells that he's unaware of ToB. Meaning, this thread is aimed toward a solution that doesn't directly involve ToB or the maneuvers system.

LordErebus12
2012-12-20, 04:17 AM
Ever looked at the pathfinder version (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/fighter)?

willpell
2012-12-20, 04:55 AM
In the world of magic and intrigue an adventurer needs more options than "I attack again."

That is your opinion; I do not share it. For the default style of kick-in-the-door goblin exterminator, "I attack again" is exactly what he wants to do every single time; that's the whole reason you play such a character in the first place.


I think fighters should ultimately be a leadership and support class, tank n spank while throwing out shouts to grant morale bonuses and setting up plays.

Sounds something like a Marshal, war Cleric, or possibly an adjusted Bard of some sort.


That being said, I find fighters terribly boring. I'd rather tome of battle 100% of the time.

Fair enough, and sometimes I agree with you, but Tome of Battle makes playing a warrior suddenly almost as complex and demanding as playing a wizard, and sometimes I just want to bash face and get on with my day. The Warblade lets me do a higher-concept Fighter, just as the Warlock lets me do a simpler and more one-note Wizard if I'm not in the mood to study as though for a college course before playing. It is emphatically NOT a replacement.

nonsi
2012-12-20, 07:35 AM
Ever looked at the pathfinder version (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/fighter)?

The PF Fighter, compared to 3.5e's Fighter, has elevated stats and a total of 3 more feats.

Other than that, it suffers from all the problems as the core Fighter.

PairO'Dice Lost
2012-12-20, 04:33 PM
Grabbing quotes from the Warblade fluff, a fighter is not a "sword prince"; ask some poor French peasant forced to slog through Napoleon's campaign whether he agrees with "Battle is beautiful". I like warblade flavor for a lot of purposes, but the warblade can't shine unless he has the fighter as background (Warrior doesn't cut it - in fact, given that fighter is so much weaker than warblade, it should probably replace Warrior as the default "no-class class" for NPC combatants).

The ToB classes may have a bunch of fancy fluff, but that's mostly to conceal the fact that crusader, swordsage, and warblade were basically intended to be Paladin 2.0, Monk 2.0, and Fighter 2.0 (though the crusader ended up with a slightly different focus than the paladin). If you were to swap the flavor sections of the fighter and warblade, there would be literally no observable difference in-game regarding which class is the glory hound and which class is the tough mercenary or whatever, and no mechanical changes would be required either.


A warblade gets three maneuvers at first level, and can't do one of them twice in a row (I'm pretty sure I saw a rule saying you can't ready one maneuver three times; they have to all be different). He has to overthink his battles a little, and there are some character concepts for which that's just the wrong flavor. Take for instance the half-black-dragon Fighter 4 in the Monster Manual; what maneuvers would you give him, to make up for the fact that you've disqualified him for his Weapon Specialization feat as well as taking away his 1st and 2nd level bonus feats?

First of all, I wouldn't use that character anyway, since Exotic Weapon Proficiency, Weapon Focus, and Weapon Specialization are only possibly worth it at all in a core-only environment. If I had to make a warblade version of him, though, I'd probably go with Wolf Fang Strike, Steel Wind, Moment of Perfect Mind, and Punishing Stance, to replace Two-Weapon Fighting, Iron Will, and Weapon Specialization, and then swap the 12 Cha and 10 Int (since warblade is more Int-focused) and put the resulting skill points into Concentration for a +11.

The first two maneuvers are like TWF but work on a standard action, Moment of Perfect Mind gives him one Will save every few rounds at +11 that doesn't autofail on a natural 1, and Punishing Stance gives him +1d6 damage instead of +2 at the cost of slightly lower AC. On top of that, if he decides to go for a better weapon than the two-bladed sword, he can retrain the Exotic Weapon Proficiency and Weapon Focus to apply to whatever new weapon he chooses. I'd say the warblade version comes out ahead.


Maybe you could make him better for typical adventuring purposes, but he's not built for those purposes (and given that a typical adventurer is a sociopathic hobo with no skills to actually pay the bills and stay alive when there isn't a dungeon for him to loot, that's probably just as well for the half-dragon in question).

The "typical adventurer" being a sociopath with no skills is one of the fighter's major problems, which the warblade averts with its Int focus and better skill selection.


He's there to be fought, and that means he needs to be good at fighting, no matter how often he has to fight in a given day. He does not need fancy tricks aimed at "covering himself in glory"; he just needs the ability to kill things quickly and efficiently, and for all its lack of versatility, few people complain that the fighter is not good at dealing damage (compared to anything that isn't Tier 1-2 at any rate).

The warblade is good at fighting regardless of the number of fights in a given day; its maneuvers can be refreshed every other round if necessary and he doesn't have to ever stop fighting to do it.


That is your opinion; I do not share it. For the default style of kick-in-the-door goblin exterminator, "I attack again" is exactly what he wants to do every single time; that's the whole reason you play such a character in the first place.
[...]
Fair enough, and sometimes I agree with you, but Tome of Battle makes playing a warrior suddenly almost as complex and demanding as playing a wizard, and sometimes I just want to bash face and get on with my day. The Warblade lets me do a higher-concept Fighter, just as the Warlock lets me do a simpler and more one-note Wizard if I'm not in the mood to study as though for a college course before playing. It is emphatically NOT a replacement.

Nothing prevents a martial adept from just attacking again, and in fact a warblade needs to do that to recover maneuvers. You can actually build a warblade with all utility and defensive maneuvers and leave him to just use standard attacks for offense if you really want to.


As for the OP's suggestion, you can go even farther than that and remove all prerequisites including BAB and epicness, and it could do some good at the mid levels. The Martial Monk ACF technically lets you take epic feats if you read it one way (since monks don't have to meet any prereqs for their bonus feats), and in threads on various forums where people ask "Okay, assuming that reading works, what are the most powerful feats the monk can take with this?" even 6th-level monks with three epic feats don't overpower near-level spellcasters. Distant Shot, Infinite Deflection, Exceptional Deflection, Devastating Critical, and similar seem like pretty nice class features for a martial class at, say, 12th-14th level, given what casters are capable of then.

But as Lord_Gareth mentioned, even epic feats are not a good substitute for Actual Class Features once you get past the mid levels. The four feats mentioned above basically boil down to "hit anything you can see," "be immune to small projectiles," "deflect spells," and "SoD on a crit," which can be done or approximated with scrying+long range spells, wind wall, ray deflection and/or spell turning, and any SoD, all of which are mid-level caster tricks; if those are epic fighter feats, what is he supposed to do when casters hit 8th and 9th level spells?

Yitzi
2012-12-20, 06:32 PM
That is your opinion; I do not share it. For the default style of kick-in-the-door goblin exterminator, "I attack again" is exactly what he wants to do every single time; that's the whole reason you play such a character in the first place.

To me, though, it seems that a fighter should (just from a fluff perspective) be a more versatile combatant with more options (even if not of the wizard-ish variety), with the barbarian (or a barbarian-like fighter variant) being the "kick in the door and just keep attacking" sort.

willpell
2012-12-20, 07:53 PM
The first two maneuvers are like TWF but work on a standard action, Moment of Perfect Mind gives him one Will save every few rounds at +11 that doesn't autofail on a natural 1, and Punishing Stance gives him +1d6 damage instead of +2 at the cost of slightly lower AC. On top of that, if he decides to go for a better weapon than the two-bladed sword, he can retrain the Exotic Weapon Proficiency and Weapon Focus to apply to whatever new weapon he chooses. I'd say the warblade version comes out ahead.

Being better is not the point. And trading "2 damage" for "1d6 damage and lower AC" is not a trade I'd make; I would reliably roll only 1s and 2s and thus be worse off. If it was trading 2 damage for 2d3, then I'd do it, because the odds of turning out worse would be tolerably low, and the chance of a big payoff, though significantly lower, would still make the game more interesting. But that "1" is the kiss of death. A 16% chance of getting metaphorically punched in the doubly-metaphorical berries is not worth any amount of potential upside.


The "typical adventurer" being a sociopath with no skills is one of the fighter's major problems, which the warblade averts with its Int focus and better skill selection.

But it's completely in flavor for the Fighter. And raising the Warblade's skills to x4 is not much of a fix for the kind of warrior-philosopher he wants to be. Though personally I am increasingly inclined toward raising every single class-skills multiplier by 2 in my games, just because I like being able to get things like Perform and Sense Motive and Survival strictly for flavor reasons.


To me, though, it seems that a fighter should (just from a fluff perspective) be a more versatile combatant with more options (even if not of the wizard-ish variety), with the barbarian (or a barbarian-like fighter variant) being the "kick in the door and just keep attacking" sort.

Barbarian has a very specific fluff due to his skills selection; he is a wilderness survivalist as well as a warrior. Fighters are more urban, more dependent on civilization (if not to participate, then to predate). They are *both* "kick in the door and keep attacking" sorts, and they both need to be able to take any action the situation demands, without having to refer to a list and see which of their options are still exhausted until they go out of their way to recover them.

enderlord99
2012-12-20, 08:03 PM
hmm... NO.
The maneuvers system is morphed Vancian spellcasting with no material/vocal components and held weapon(s) as focus.

Wrong flavor.

...How can a mechanic, isolated from anything else, have the "wrong flavor?" It doesn't have any flavor! Sure it's similar mechanically to spells, but that isn't flavor. The flavor is... uhh... whatever you want it to be, honestly.

PairO'Dice Lost
2012-12-20, 08:23 PM
Being better is not the point.

Oh? Being better is not the purpose of a fighter fix?


And trading "2 damage" for "1d6 damage and lower AC" is not a trade I'd make; I would reliably roll only 1s and 2s and thus be worse off. If it was trading 2 damage for 2d3, then I'd do it, because the odds of turning out worse would be tolerably low, and the chance of a big payoff, though significantly lower, would still make the game more interesting. But that "1" is the kiss of death. A 16% chance of getting metaphorically punched in the doubly-metaphorical berries is not worth any amount of potential upside.

First of all, I don't see how you think you can roll less than a 2 on 2d3; turning out worse doesn't have "tolerably low" odds, it's physically impossible. Second, though I realize that you think statistics is a lie, the average damage for 1d6 is 3.5, which is certainly an improvement, particularly when you consider that the +1d6 is 1/6 of a warblade's 1st-level class features while the +2 is all of a fighter's 4th-level class feature.


But it's completely in flavor for the Fighter. And raising the Warblade's skills to x4 is not much of a fix for the kind of warrior-philosopher he wants to be. Though personally I am increasingly inclined toward raising every single class-skills multiplier by 2 in my games, just because I like being able to get things like Perform and Sense Motive and Survival strictly for flavor reasons.

It's completely in-flavor that the fighter is useless outside of combat, but again, that is one of the parts of the fighter that most needs fixing. 4+Int skill points from a good list which includes Diplomacy, Knowledge, and Tumble is better than 2+Int skill points from a bad list.


Barbarian has a very specific fluff due to his skills selection; he is a wilderness survivalist as well as a warrior. Fighters are more urban, more dependent on civilization (if not to participate, then to predate). They are *both* "kick in the door and keep attacking" sorts, and they both need to be able to take any action the situation demands, without having to refer to a list and see which of their options are still exhausted until they go out of their way to recover them.

1) Given your earlier comment about the adventuring day, it seems that you think the warblade has some sort of daily limit to his maneuvers, but that isn't the case; as mentioned before, every single expended warblade maneuver is no more than 1 round away from being usable again.

2) It's all very well and good to say the fighter can take any action the situation demands, but fighters can't actually always do that. If the situation demands for a character to hold off an army attacking him, for example, the fighter might possibly have Whirlwind Attack, if he sunk 5 feats into it and has good Dex and Int, while the warblade can easily pick up Mithral Tornado with a single maneuver slot--or the superior Adamantine Tornado, also with a single slot. Much better for one of the warblade's nine known tricks to be Mithral Tornado, usable every other round, than for the fighter to have Whirlwind Attack as his one known trick available every round.

Yitzi
2012-12-20, 09:53 PM
Barbarian has a very specific fluff due to his skills selection; he is a wilderness survivalist as well as a warrior.

True. That's why I said "or a barbarian-like fighter variant", i.e. something that gives up the feats for a barbarian's rage and tanking ability. (Perhaps give up the feats for a d12 hit die and rage, associated powers, and DR as a barbarian); he doesn't get the barbarian's noncombat abilities, but also gets access to heavy armor and tower shields which the barbarian doesn't.)


and they both need to be able to take any action the situation demands, without having to refer to a list and see which of their options are still exhausted until they go out of their way to recover them.

There I'd agree. However, even if the fighter doesn't have an exhaustible list, at least some of his abilities should give new options beyond "just keep attacking in melee". Playing a fighter should have a tactical element, though not as much bookkeeping as a wizard or cleric.

willpell
2012-12-20, 11:23 PM
...How can a mechanic, isolated from anything else, have the "wrong flavor?" It doesn't have any flavor! Sure it's similar mechanically to spells, but that isn't flavor. The flavor is... uhh... whatever you want it to be, honestly.

No, the flavor is whatever explanation best corresponds to the mechanics. If you have a magic blast spell that deals double damage to wood objects and causes other wood objects touching those directly targeted to also take the damage, and continue taking damage and spreading the effect for several rounds, this is obviously a fire spell. If you try to claim it's sonic instead, and BS a justification for why wooden objects are "catching sound" instead of catching fire, you are being a munchkin and trying to cheat the system by getting a harder-to-resist damage type onto a power that was designed solely and specifically to be fire-flavored.

You could make an argument for something fairly close to this effect to be something other than fire - if damage spreads from creature to creature then it's probably a disease, or maybe some sort of poison that turns the victim's bodily fluids to acid or something - but in every case there are specific mechanics tied to the flavor, such as a disease being curable by paladins, and you cannot just ignore those mechanics in the name of "refluffing"; if you want the refluff then you have to do the extra work of adjusting *everything* to match the new reality you are simulating, or else your rules no longer simulate anything and are just arbitrary restrictions on player choice.

Making the game reflect reality enough to provide a degree of versimilitude, thus enhancing the enjoyability of this activity we perform only for recreational purposes, is a requirement which every DM must fulfill to the best of their ability. Sometimes full simulationism is too tall an order, and you have to accept that some corners must be cut for practical reasons (such as ruling that all creatures occupy square spaces and take their actions sequentially in six-second blocks). But there's a fine line between making concessions to practical difficulty, and just being lazy (or pretending to be lazy while having an even more ignoble motive, such as a munchkin's desire to "win" at the expense of his so-called friends).

So no, the flavor and mechanics are NOT separable, not unless they're both very poorly created. Quality in such creations is virtually synonymous with the extent to which they perfectly reflect one another.


Oh? Being better is not the purpose of a fighter fix?

No, it's not. It is the purpose of creating a prestige class or something that you would take instead of taking fighter levels. The tier system is not supposed to exist; in theory, choosing between fighter or wizard is supposed to be a matter of personal preference. The purpose of a fighter "fix" is not to be better than a fighter, it is to *be a fighter* more effectively. And thus any fix which contradicts the "fighter feel" to even the relatively slight effect that the warblade does is not an improvement, it is an alternative.


First of all, I don't see how you think you can roll less than a 2 on 2d3

I didn't say you could. The tolerable worseness was replacing "2 damage" with "2 damage and a penalty to AC".


Second, though I realize that you think statistics is a lie, the average damage for 1d6 is 3.5, which is certainly an improvement, particularly when you consider that the +1d6 is 1/6 of a warblade's 1st-level class features while the +2 is all of a fighter's 4th-level class feature.

It doesn't matter how many class features the warblade is getting instead, if he is worse at doing the only thing I care about. (Which is true for the sake of this example, though not necessarily for actual play; again, the half-black-dragon fighter is not a PC, he is an obstacle for the PCs, and thus being effective at his narrative role is important, while having the option to go off the plot rails is not. He doesn't need versatility, he needs reliable results.)


It's completely in-flavor that the fighter is useless outside of combat, but again, that is one of the parts of the fighter that most needs fixing.

That's not a "fix", that's missing the point. If you don't want to play a fighter then don't play a fighter. Play a warblade instead, I'm fine with that - but the warblade is NOT Fighter 2.0 any more than the Swashbuckler or Sohei or Factotum, he is a completely different type of warrior who uses quasimystical "blade meditations" to do things that a fighter cannot do, at the expense of not being as good at plain old fighting as an actual fighter. He is better in certain contexts, and a fairly good number of them; he is not a replacement.


1) Given your earlier comment about the adventuring day, it seems that you think the warblade has some sort of daily limit to his maneuvers, but that isn't the case; as mentioned before, every single expended warblade maneuver is no more than 1 round away from being usable again.

That 1 round could be the difference between life and death. If nobody is in range of a melee attack, the warblade who needs his maneuvers back has to stand there and do absolutely nothing in order to recover his magic. A fighter could instead pick up and throw a rock, or scream out a warning, or dance the funky chicken in an attempt to make the opponent stop and ask what the dickens he's doing; all of those might be more useful contributions than the warblade's "flourish" to recover his manuevers, but more to the point, they are his choice, not a mandatory part of the system. Which is most of my point - magicians have to jump through the hoops that the system requires of them in order to get their magic back. A fighter is just a guy with a sword and he can do any dang thing he wants, which is part of the point of playing a fighter; he has the basic rules and is designed to do well within those rules, not to staple on new rules to compensate for his original inadequacies. He has a good Hit Die, a good BAB, and Weapon Proficiencies, and that is all he needs. The Warblade has those things plus more stuff.

Grod_The_Giant
2012-12-20, 11:44 PM
That 1 round could be the difference between life and death. If nobody is in range of a melee attack, the warblade who needs his maneuvers back has to stand there and do absolutely nothing in order to recover his magic. A fighter could instead pick up and throw a rock, or scream out a warning, or dance the funky chicken in an attempt to make the opponent stop and ask what the dickens he's doing; all of those might be more useful contributions than the warblade's "flourish" to recover his manuevers, but more to the point, they are his choice, not a mandatory part of the system. Which is most of my point - magicians have to jump through the hoops that the system requires of them in order to get their magic back. A fighter is just a guy with a sword and he can do any dang thing he wants, which is part of the point of playing a fighter; he has the basic rules and is designed to do well within those rules, not to staple on new rules to compensate for his original inadequacies. He has a good Hit Die, a good BAB, and Weapon Proficiencies, and that is all he needs. The Warblade has those things plus more stuff.
Err... point of fact, a Warblade:
a) recovers his maneuvers by attacking; ie, the same thing that a normal fighter does every turn. It's an obnoxiously good mechanic, but there you go.
b)can do everything a fighter can. he's got the same BAB, a bigger hit die, still has plenty of bonus feats, even qualifies for fighter-only bonus feats.

If I may ask... do you see the fighter as an NPC-only class or something? Because that's the impression I'm getting from your arguments here.

Lord_Gareth
2012-12-20, 11:54 PM
Err... point of fact, a Warblade:
a) recovers his maneuvers by attacking; ie, the same thing that a normal fighter does every turn. It's an obnoxiously good mechanic, but there you go.
b)can do everything a fighter can. he's got the same BAB, a bigger hit die, still has plenty of bonus feats, even qualifies for fighter-only bonus feats.

If I may ask... do you see the fighter as an NPC-only class or something? Because that's the impression I'm getting from your arguments here.

I'm getting the impression that he thinks that a Warblade is somehow impaired in the CHARGE AN FULL ATTACK environment, which is patently untrue, but I'm afraid I'm going to bow out of this thread; I find myself incapable of saying anything aside from this post that would be a positive contribution instead of volcano-like nerd rage.

PairO'Dice Lost
2012-12-21, 12:16 AM
No, it's not. It is the purpose of creating a prestige class or something that you would take instead of taking fighter levels. The tier system is not supposed to exist; in theory, choosing between fighter or wizard is supposed to be a matter of personal preference. The purpose of a fighter "fix" is not to be better than a fighter, it is to *be a fighter* more effectively. And thus any fix which contradicts the "fighter feel" to even the relatively slight effect that the warblade does is not an improvement, it is an alternative.

The warblade doesn't contradict the fighter feel in the slightest. You can't both claim in one paragraph that all the fighter does is attack, attack, attack, with no tactics or fancy capabilities, and then claim that the fighter is better because he can do "any dang thing he wants." If the fighter is all attacks, all the time, then you have no grounds to complain about the warblade not making any "useful contributions" in some rounds, since a fighter who can do nothing but roll attack rolls isn't making many useful contributions either; if the fighter is all about improvising and tactics, then you have no grounds to complain about maneuvers, since they provide rules for exactly the fancy tactics the fighter can supposedly perform.


It doesn't matter how many class features the warblade is getting instead, if he is worse at doing the only thing I care about. (Which is true for the sake of this example, though not necessarily for actual play; again, the half-black-dragon fighter is not a PC, he is an obstacle for the PCs, and thus being effective at his narrative role is important, while having the option to go off the plot rails is not. He doesn't need versatility, he needs reliable results.)

The warblade has BAB and saves equal to the fighter's, better HD, proficiencies, and skills than the fighter has, and more selectable abilities than the fighter does, each of which is superior to a feat obtained at comparable levels. Heck, the only thing the fighter has that vaguely resembles a class feature, fighter-only feats, the warblade can pick up as well. How can the warblade possibly be worse at the fighter's job than the fighter?

As for PC vs. NPC effectiveness, "versatility" doesn't solely mean ability to affect the world, it also means adaptability and ability to handle challenges. An NPC facing 4-to-1 odds who can move up to the best position to attack two PCs is superior to one who can't move and attack twice in the same round; an NPC who has a 70% chance to pass the save against the PC casters' sleep or color spray is superior to one who only has a 20% chance. Wizards don't suddenly suck as NPCs because they have a narrative role to fulfill, and neither do warblades.


That's not a "fix", that's missing the point. If you don't want to play a fighter then don't play a fighter. Play a warblade instead, I'm fine with that - but the warblade is NOT Fighter 2.0 any more than the Swashbuckler or Sohei or Factotum, he is a completely different type of warrior who uses quasimystical "blade meditations" to do things that a fighter cannot do, at the expense of not being as good at plain old fighting as an actual fighter. He is better in certain contexts, and a fairly good number of them; he is not a replacement.

The difference being, of course, that the sohei and factotum do different things than the fighter does, whereas the warblade does exactly the same thing the fighter does but better.


That 1 round could be the difference between life and death. If nobody is in range of a melee attack, the warblade who needs his maneuvers back has to stand there and do absolutely nothing in order to recover his magic. A fighter could instead pick up and throw a rock, or scream out a warning, or dance the funky chicken in an attempt to make the opponent stop and ask what the dickens he's doing; all of those might be more useful contributions than the warblade's "flourish" to recover his manuevers, but more to the point, they are his choice, not a mandatory part of the system.

As Grod pointed out, throwing a rock is an attack and dancing is a flourish, both of which would recover a warblade's maneuvers. In fact, since the fighter is apparently all about attack, attack, attack, the warblade can't be worse than a fighter in that instance since the fighter would just be attacking in that round anyway.

vasharanpaladin
2012-12-21, 12:46 AM
Err... point of fact, a Warblade:
a) recovers his maneuvers by attacking; ie, the same thing that a normal fighter does every turn. It's an obnoxiously good mechanic, but there you go.
b)can do everything a fighter can. he's got the same BAB, a bigger hit die, still has plenty of bonus feats, even qualifies for fighter-only bonus feats.

If I may ask... do you see the fighter as an NPC-only class or something? Because that's the impression I'm getting from your arguments here.

It's true, it does, and it is. Simple fact of the matter is... fighters have been useless since wizards came out.

Yitzi
2012-12-21, 12:46 AM
That's not a "fix", that's missing the point.

On the one hand, you are absolutely correct: The fighter class is about fighting, and so all its benefits should give boosts to fighting.
On the other hand, there is something to be said for letting each character have options in various areas, both from a gameplay perspective (so he's not sitting out half the time) and a simulationist perspective (the second son of a nobleman might have become a fighter...but it's quite reasonable that he'd still have picked up some diplomatic skills as well, even if they have nothing to do with his class.) IMO, the best way to deal with that is to provide background-based boosts independent of class. (This also lets you separate the barbarian's wilderness capabilities from the berserker style of fighting, making for more character building options.)

Arcanist
2012-12-21, 12:56 AM
the second son of a nobleman might have become a fighter...but it's quite reasonable that he'd still have picked up some diplomatic skills as well, even if they have nothing to do with his class.

And it never dawned on you that you could take cross-class skills? :smallconfused: AHAHAHAHA! A Fighter would actually be better taking cross-class in Diplomacy or Use Magic Device then he would in his own skills...

But eh... I never really viewed the Warblade as actually being the Fighter 2.0 because to compare the Warblade to the Fighter would be... Really stupid actually. It's like comparing Hercule to Goku or a Nuclear Weapon in kill potential to a Rubber Band :smallconfused:

Lord_Gareth
2012-12-21, 12:58 AM
And it never dawned on you that you could take cross-class skills? :smallconfused: AHAHAHAHA! A Fighter would actually be better taking cross-class in Diplomacy or Use Magic Device then he would in his own skills...

While the white text is true, those 2+int skill points really bite cross-classing in the ass. Frankly, I'm a fan of the Legend approach to skills, where there are no "class skills" at all.

Grod_The_Giant
2012-12-21, 01:10 AM
While the white text is true, those 2+int skill points really bite cross-classing in the ass. Frankly, I'm a fan of the Legend approach to skills, where there are no "class skills" at all.

Yeah, same here. Make UMD a class feature, make sure everyone gets at least 4 skill points/level, and things start looking up for poor maligned classes like the Fighter.

Lord_Gareth
2012-12-21, 01:13 AM
Yeah, same here. Make UMD a class feature, make sure everyone gets at least 4 skill points/level, and things start looking up for poor maligned classes like the Fighter.

Honestly, what fighter could use is 6 skill points and a broader base of skills. I mean, Fighter has SO MANY archetypes it's supposed to cover - warrior-kings, urban thugs, soldiers, samurai, pirates, archers, etc. With such varied backgrounds, it really could use some skill support to flesh out those concepts.

Of course, that's what the ToB classes got (Warblades can take the skills they need to be leaders of men, warrior-poets, or grunt soldiers) but some people here seem to be under the impression that ToB is BadWrongFun, so if you're going to fix Fighter skills I'd suggest "Give them more," as an option, and you don't even need to worry about stepping on Ranger/Bard since both have lots of other features that make them distinct.

Arcanist
2012-12-21, 01:35 AM
Honestly, what fighter could use is 6 skill points and a broader base of skills. I mean, Fighter has SO MANY archetypes it's supposed to cover - warrior-kings, urban thugs, soldiers, samurai, pirates, archers, etc. With such varied backgrounds, it really could use some skill support to flesh out those concepts.

This is actually reason 1, why my quick Fighter fix is to just give them the Rogue Skill list and 8 points :smalltongue: DEFINITELY makes the Fighter much more effective in terms of versatility :smallsigh:

Grod_The_Giant
2012-12-21, 01:40 AM
Honestly, what fighter could use is 6 skill points and a broader base of skills. I mean, Fighter has SO MANY archetypes it's supposed to cover - warrior-kings, urban thugs, soldiers, samurai, pirates, archers, etc. With such varied backgrounds, it really could use some skill support to flesh out those concepts.

Oh yeah, those are definitely things I've done for my fighter fixes.

willpell
2012-12-21, 02:55 AM
If I may ask... do you see the fighter as an NPC-only class or something? Because that's the impression I'm getting from your arguments here.

I did float the idea of having Fighter replace Warrior earlier in the thread, but it's not really that...of course, I may have a different definition of NPC class than you. In my game Commoners only exist until I get a replacement I call the Citizen fully homebrewed, and Experts and Warriors have already been dropped, while Aristocrat and Adept are considered legitimate choices for characters - the Aristocrat gets more starting gold, which is only an advantage at level 1 but it's something at least, and the Adept has a unique spell list which combines aspects of cleric and sorcerer in a way which is interesting, even if incredibly weak.

So to me, NPC classes aren't "weak" so much as "boring"; I want them to construct a character who is competent to get through his life, but not too inclined to want to go adventuring. Someone who "optimizes" Profession so he can put food on the table, and figures Toughness is a good feat because he wants to not die and certainly isn't going to charge headfirst into battle so that his "better" Power Attack and Improved Initiative will work....he's worried about a heavy object falling on his head or a goblin sniper shooting crossbow bolts at random humans from the nearby hill, so Toughness helps him survive this unfortunate fluke for long enough to run to the town Adept or Gleaner (a homebrew NPC mini-druid-farmer thing that I also use in my game, came from this very site before the articles were removed) and get healed before going back to his life.

By this definition, Fighter is still not an NPC class, but it's kind of a gateway drug. It's intentionally slightly boring, with only a few choices to make, but still requires you to shop the feat list...Barbarian is easier but not everyone is going to be into the fluff of that one, and some players do like making choices. So if you want to customize your character but only a little, Fighter is your training wheels, and when you want something that involves shopping a much longer list much more often, you play a Sorcerer or a Psion or, yes, a Warblade. And when you want something still more difficult, you play a Wizard, and something still more difficult than that, you play a Cleric, because each one has a still longer list and refers to it still more often. All of which is great if you take your game seriously and want something that fully engages the puzzle solving aspects of the game, but sometimes you just want to eat pizza and bash orcs with your buddies. For that, Fighter is an "optimal" class, and Warblade is overcomplected and undesireable.


The warblade doesn't contradict the fighter feel in the slightest. You can't both claim in one paragraph that all the fighter does is attack, attack, attack, with no tactics or fancy capabilities, and then claim that the fighter is better because he can do "any dang thing he wants."

First of all, I think you know me better by now than to think there's anything I "can't" do if I set my mind to it. :smalltongue: And second, yes I did in fact make that exact claim, and I stand by it. There is freedom in simplicitly; options lead to option paralysis. In his restricted choices (which are not *quite* as lacking as "just attack" thank you; he gets to choose where to stand, he has the option of tripping, and he can always try an untrained Diplomacy check or a quest to recruit NPC help or the activation of a random magic item pulled out of a bag of holding...they may not be good options, but they're options, and they present a cognitive load all by themselves even if all you do is reject them as dumb ideas), the Fighter is set free, for he knows exactly what to do and doesn't have to spend a lot of time thinking about it.
It's a matter of efficiency; having a default option which you are maximized toward means that you always know where to start, and don't have to make any choices until later, when you know your Plan A won't cut the mustard. The Warblade on the other hand doesn't have Plan A, he has three separate plans and he has to figure out which of them is best for the situation. Which is not where you want to be if gaming is your downtime and you like to turn off your brain (cookie to those who get the reference).


If the fighter is all attacks, all the time, then you have no grounds to complain about the warblade not making any "useful contributions" in some rounds, since a fighter who can do nothing but roll attack rolls isn't making many useful contributions either

The fighter does more damage with his attacks and has a better to-hit, as long as he has his Focused and Specialized weapon. So yes, he's better than the Warblade in that sense. Though the Warblade's better D12 is also a very relevant advantage, and a Warblade without maneuvers would almost be a playable alternative to the Fighter. With maneuvers, though, he's in a completely different league, if not a different sport. Why do golf players not use a hockey stick and a softball instead of the club and ball they're used to, so it'll be easier to hit with their swing? Because that's not the game they want to play. If you want to play a Fighter, the warblade's superior options place him in a completely different category from what you're doing.


if the fighter is all about improvising and tactics, then you have no grounds to complain about maneuvers, since they provide rules for exactly the fancy tactics the fighter can supposedly perform.

But they provide rules dictating that those tactics can only work in particular ways, which you have to read out of a book to find out exactly what they are, and can only do them that way. Without those rules, you have to make the tactics up, and can do it in whatever way you think is best at the time, and then next time it's a completely different situation and you do it all over again a different way. Rules are a restriction; they tell you "this is the way it works and you may not do it otherwise". Sometimes you want to be restricted, as I alluded to before, but other times you want freedom to do whatever you want. Improvisation has advantages that memorization and list-selection do not.


Heck, the only thing the fighter has that vaguely resembles a class feature, fighter-only feats, the warblade can pick up as well. How can the warblade possibly be worse at the fighter's job than the fighter?

Having to wait two more levels to get those feats, obviously.


An NPC facing 4-to-1 odds who can move up to the best position to attack two PCs is superior to one who can't move and attack twice in the same round; an NPC who has a 70% chance to pass the save against the PC casters' sleep or color spray is superior to one who only has a 20% chance. Wizards don't suddenly suck as NPCs because they have a narrative role to fulfill, and neither do warblades.

Again, you are presuming that being better is always an advantage. Why not let Arnold Schwartzenneger join your kid's Little League team then? Clearly he's a better player than your kid can possibly hope to be.


The difference being, of course, that the sohei and factotum do different things than the fighter does, whereas the warblade does exactly the same thing the fighter does but better.

Nope, not exactly. Though I'll admit that it's closer than I originally thought; Tiger Fang sounded like it was going to be almost fake Druid, with quasi-shapeshifting powers, but instead it's only vaguely animal-inspired and fits with the general martial arts subtext of TOB. Still, I had to learn that fact because it wasn't obvious, and I still think the maneuvers could have better names and better organization to make it easier to comprehend what was being offered. For that matter, if they wanted Warblade to be Fighter 2.0, they could have just said "Variant Fighter Class: Warblade" and made it a literal replacement; clearly they agreed with me that it was something slightly different and should be cordoned off by itself.

willpell
2012-12-21, 05:13 AM
IMO, the best way to deal with that is to provide background-based boosts independent of class. (This also lets you separate the barbarian's wilderness capabilities from the berserker style of fighting, making for more character building options.)

A decent idea, and something I believe Pathfinder attempted, though not very well from what little I saw. I've been trying to think up a satisfactory rule of my own along these lines, but am not great at it, but the other day I did hit the point of officially having had enough of the "twice as much for half as much" nature of cross-class skills, although it wasn't a Fighter that put me there, it was a Swashbuckler who I conceptualized as having Perform: Dance. There's just no way fancy footwork isn't in-character for a Swashbuckler. (And of course if your group uses BOEF there's another Perform skill they need in-class, but we won't get into that....)


Honestly, what fighter could use is 6 skill points and a broader base of skills. I mean, Fighter has SO MANY archetypes it's supposed to cover - warrior-kings, urban thugs, soldiers, samurai, pirates, archers, etc. With such varied backgrounds, it really could use some skill support to flesh out those concepts.

Most of those classes don't really call for any skills, and the ones that do generally have variant classes associated - Unearthed Arcana for instance offers the Thug, which is pretty on-the-nose although could perhaps stand to be a bit better at being a Fighter-Rogue hybrid. Generally I think Wotco wanted you to use multiclassing or gestalting for such characters, but the mechanics of both are icky to me; I prefer unique classes, though not too many of them - more or less all the ones published by Wotco are cool by me, but I tend to frown on homebrew or third party as being overspecialized and unnecessary. But there is a samurai class, a swashbuckler class which at least tries to be a pirate, and Ranger or Scout as one variety of archer, the one most in need of skills (Survival and Knowledge Nature; the stand-on-the-castle-wall type of archer doesn't really need anything except maybe Hide for ducking behind the crenellations and sniping, and the ordinary cover rules might be sufficient there). The only archetype you see where I feel like there's a great need for skills is the warrior-king, who I'd probably build as an Aristocrat first for skills and money, then dip both Fighter and Marshal and eventually go into some prestige class (gestalting the weak martial classes with Binder and then going Scion of Dantalion would be fun, probably not ideal but all I can think of offhand, not being aware of too many PRCs).

PairO'Dice Lost
2012-12-21, 05:49 AM
*snip stuff about "lack of rules means fewer restrictions"*

It's a matter of efficiency; having a default option which you are maximized toward means that you always know where to start, and don't have to make any choices until later, when you know your Plan A won't cut the mustard. The Warblade on the other hand doesn't have Plan A, he has three separate plans and he has to figure out which of them is best for the situation. Which is not where you want to be if gaming is your downtime and you like to turn off your brain (cookie to those who get the reference).
[...]
But they provide rules dictating that those tactics can only work in particular ways, which you have to read out of a book to find out exactly what they are, and can only do them that way. Without those rules, you have to make the tactics up, and can do it in whatever way you think is best at the time, and then next time it's a completely different situation and you do it all over again a different way. Rules are a restriction; they tell you "this is the way it works and you may not do it otherwise". Sometimes you want to be restricted, as I alluded to before, but other times you want freedom to do whatever you want. Improvisation has advantages that memorization and list-selection do not.

Let me try to express this visually.

Here is the set of every single possible option the fighter has:

[-----------------]

Here is the set of every single possible option the warblade has:

[-----------------] [-----------------]

The warblade has all of the fighter's options and more. You feel that more options are somehow constraining because you have to plan more, but that's not really the case. If the fighter's Plan A is here:

[-----------------]
-----^

then the warblade can have his Plan A here:

[-----------------] [-----------------]
-----^

or here:

[-----------------] [-----------------]
---------------^

or here:

[-----------------] [-----------------]
---------------------------^

or anywhere else in either set, whether he plans painstakingly for the scenario, comes up with common tactics ahead of time, or just chooses things at random. The warblade has more and better options for Plan A than the fighter does.

Plan A = "hit stuff, repeat until it dies"? Fighter can do it, warblade has more and better options.

Plan A = "improvise a crazy plan"? Fighter can do it, warblade has more and better options.

Plan A = "careful tactics and planning"? Fighter can do it, warblade has more and better options.

Plan A = "do something beyond the skill of a normal mortal"? Warblade can do it, fighter can't.

Unless your DM lets you do things like change the game rules to suit yourself, just magically accomplish things without skill checks, or the like, there will always be plans that require rules from here:

------------------- [-----------------]

that cannot be carried out if you only have access to rules in here:

[-----------------]

No matter how far out of the box you think or how much you try to cajole your DM, there's nothing you can do as a fighter that you can't do as a warblade, but there are plenty of things you can do as a warblade that you can't do as a fighter. Why you would wax eloquent about improvising in one paragraph, and then turn down the class with more options in another paragraph because you want to turn your brain off for gaming, I haven't the faintest idea.


The fighter does more damage with his attacks and has a better to-hit, as long as he has his Focused and Specialized weapon. So yes, he's better than the Warblade in that sense.

If your fighter has nothing better to take than the WF/WS tree, your warblade can get them too, and being +1 attack or +2 damage behind the fighter for a level or two is meaningless when the warblade can attack touch AC, add +Xd6 damage where X is at least 4 or 5, get two extra attacks in a round for free, etc.


Why do golf players not use a hockey stick and a softball instead of the club and ball they're used to, so it'll be easier to hit with their swing? Because that's not the game they want to play. If you want to play a Fighter, the warblade's superior options place him in a completely different category from what you're doing.

Playing a warblade instead of a fighter is not like using a hockey stick for golf, it's like going to a golf game with a full golf bag. If you want to play the entire round with just a driver, a putter, a wood, and a wedge, there's absolutely nothing preventing you from doing that...but if a circumstance comes up where a 9 iron is the best club for the situation, you have that in your bag, ready to rise to the occasion.


Again, you are presuming that being better is always an advantage. Why not let Arnold Schwartzenneger join your kid's Little League team then? Clearly he's a better player than your kid can possibly hope to be.

You're thinking of the wizard in the party. :smallwink:

What you're suggesting is closer to having your kid go to bat at his or her Little League game with one hand tied behind their back for no particular reason, because removing the options that extra hand provides you is actually more freeing.


Nope, not exactly. Though I'll admit that it's closer than I originally thought; Tiger Fang sounded like it was going to be almost fake Druid, with quasi-shapeshifting powers, but instead it's only vaguely animal-inspired and fits with the general martial arts subtext of TOB. Still, I had to learn that fact because it wasn't obvious, and I still think the maneuvers could have better names and better organization to make it easier to comprehend what was being offered.

The different disciplines, their themes, their favored weapons, and everything else are explained in several different locations in the book, and everything is grouped very obviously by discipline in the class and maneuver entries. I think the organization is fine.


For that matter, if they wanted Warblade to be Fighter 2.0, they could have just said "Variant Fighter Class: Warblade" and made it a literal replacement; clearly they agreed with me that it was something slightly different and should be cordoned off by itself.

No, clearly they realized that people wouldn't buy something that purported to replace the fighter, paladin, and monk after they'd already done that with the 3.5 update. They could have written up a bunch of ACFs and bonus feats and said "Here, use these, stop using the weak old feats and classes," but (A) as we saw from the backlash around MIC, some people view making weak things worthwhile as overpowering them and (B) writing up a new system lets you avoid some expectations that they were trying to break anyway.

willpell
2012-12-21, 10:38 AM
The warblade has all of the fighter's options and more.

False. A character with even one warblade level (unless gestalt, natch) does not have the option to take Weapon Spec at 4th level. What he gets two levels from now (or one if he's multiclass) doesn't matter; it's whether he has it right now. There isn't a warblade maneuver that gives a flat +2 to damage for every single attack you make all day (unless someone Sunders or Disarms your favorite weapon, and if it's magic it'll be tough to Sunder and Disarm has to beat your own attack roll, which is +1 thanks to WF). I don't know what the +1d6 damage maneuver is, but even if you could prepare five hundred copies of it, that would still mean your five hundred and first attack of the day didn't get it unless you took a turn to reload. More realistically, if a warblade has a single copy of that maneuver, uses it every second turn, and gets statistically average rolls, then he's adding 7 damage every 4 rolls, and the Fighter gets 8 in the same time. It doesn't matter how many options the Warblade gets if the most important one, the one he will solve nearly all his problems with for the early levels, is even slightly diminished in effectiveness. The fighter will still be better at what fighters do; the warblade might be the better adventurer overall, but he's not able to take the fighter's place in every context.


Plan A = "hit stuff, repeat until it dies"? Fighter can do it, warblade has more and better options.

Not that I've seen, at least not at level 1.


Plan A = "improvise a crazy plan"? Fighter can do it, warblade has more and better options.

Really that one works equally well no matter what class you are, which is why it's my favorite. Rules are a poor substitute for creativity.


Plan A = "careful tactics and planning"? Fighter can do it, warblade has more and better options.

That one I'll grant you, and it's very fitting to warblade flavor. But that just means fighter is better for the ordinary grunts that outnumber warblades 30 to 1 in a typical camp world, existing for no other narrative purpose than so the warblade can feel special like the ponce he is.


Plan A = "do something beyond the skill of a normal mortal"? Warblade can do it, fighter can't.

Actually pretty much all D&D heroes are far beyond the skill of a normal mortal from level 3 or so on (fighters maybe take until 4). Mostly because the very D&D rules are written poorly for simulating human frailty. IRL a bash on the back of the head can kill you, and people have even died from a firm finger poke to the chest; in D&D you can get clobbered down to 1 HP without so much as breathing heavily, or take an infinite amount of nonlethal damage and not even be sore the next morning.


Unless your DM lets you do things like change the game rules to suit yourself

Which the best GMs, and any GM I will ever willingly play with, will do from time to time, at least if you have a really good idea. I mean it's not like 3.5 is a perfect set of rules that deserves to be enshrined as the ultimate accomplishment of gaming technology.


No matter how far out of the box you think or how much you try to cajole your DM, there's nothing you can do as a fighter that you can't do as a warblade

Except take Weapon Spec at level 4.


but there are plenty of things you can do as a warblade that you can't do as a fighter.

Which may or may not be inherently better. If more options were always preferable, nobody would eat at Mcdonalds twice; there are fifty thousand different restaurants out there but some people would rather stick with what they know and love than be baffled by unfamiliar choices. (I'm not necessarily one of those people, but they exist, and they deserve classes built for their benefit.)


Why you would wax eloquent about improvising in one paragraph, and then turn down the class with more options in another paragraph because you want to turn your brain off for gaming, I haven't the faintest idea.

Is there something wrong with having a diversity of opinion, or changeable moods?



Playing a warblade instead of a fighter is not like using a hockey stick for golf, it's like going to a golf game with a full golf bag.

Except that you unavoidably drop every club after swinging it once, and once your clubs are all on the ground, you can't pick them back up until you kick the ball once. If I'm in the mood to kick a ball, I'll just play one of the two sports known as football, and I expect that a guy who plays football all day every day is going to will kick the ball slightly farther and harder than the guy who carries football shoes, golf shoes, ice skates and ballerina slippers around in a bag, and can only wear each one for one step at a time before going barefoot for a round.


but if a circumstance comes up where a 9 iron is the best club for the situation, you have that in your bag, ready to rise to the occasion.


Regardless of what you play, your GM shouldn't give you any occasions which you aren't capable of rising to. If he does, you halt the game and discuss your concerns with him, and he should be amenable to either giving you bennies or lowering the bar, because his job is to entertain you. (It's a bit different in a party, which is D&D's default, but even so, the GM should make an effort to ensure everyone has their chance to shine, even if some require a lot more polishing than others.


What you're suggesting is closer to having your kid go to bat at his or her Little League game with one hand tied behind their back for no particular reason, because removing the options that extra hand provides you is actually more freeing.

Well it sure as heck makes a bold statement as to how good you think your kid is, and sending that message might be the point of doing it. But actually no, it's not like that, because the kid in the analogy is the fighter, and Ahnold is the warblade. Tying the kid's hand would be building a fighter with 3 strength who refuses to wear armor and spends his feat on Power Attack while fighting with light weapons.


The different disciplines, their themes, their favored weapons, and everything else are explained in several different locations in the book, and everything is grouped very obviously by discipline in the class and maneuver entries. I think the organization is fine.

Well I very much disagree. I think it was a mistake sorting the maneuvers by discipline, so that a level 1 Warblade with three different maneuvers from different dispclines and a stance from a fourth keeps having to flip pages to find the full text on each one (the mini-reference list is better than nothing, but it's not complete, and even it doesn't segregate the three classes), and can't even look in the beginning of that section for his beginner-level maneuver because they're alphabetical instead of sorted by rank. I also don't like that they put the Martial Study feat in the feats section where you can't see what it can get you, or that the maneuvers aren't listed under the class that can get them - the whole thing is designed like an encyclopedia, instead of as a guidebook to make playing the class easy and enjoyable. It might be a reasonable design decision, but it's not the one I'd make - I probably wouldn't even have had all three in the same book, but produced a separate (and cheaper) guidebook for each, even if it meant duplicating some text. Each one would be a step-by-step guide to playing a character throughout their entire career, and wouldn't give you advice at level 1 that doesn't become relevant until level 11.


but (A) as we saw from the backlash around MIC, some people view making weak things worthwhile as overpowering them

I am one of those people. I don't mind making the fighter a little stronger (just as I'm happy to weaken the high-level wizard while making him suck a bit less at level 1), but I certainly don't approve of obsoleting him.


and (B) writing up a new system lets you avoid some expectations that they were trying to break anyway.

Really don't know what you're trying to say here.

Yitzi
2012-12-21, 10:56 AM
And it never dawned on you that you could take cross-class skills? :smallconfused: AHAHAHAHA! A Fighter would actually be better taking cross-class in Diplomacy or Use Magic Device then he would in his own skills...

Cross-class skills are half strength, though, which means he'll still be fairly weak at those things. (Also, Intimidate would probably be more useful to a fighter than Diplomacy once the cross-class nature of Diplomacy is factored in.)

Grod_The_Giant
2012-12-21, 11:44 AM
So we like the barbarian as a fighter, but the flavor doesn't work? Why not try something like this?

Hit Die: d10.
Class Skills: The fighter’s class skills are Balance, Bluff, Climb, Craft, Diplomacy, Gather Information, Handle Animal, Intimidate, Jump, Knowledge (Architecture and Engineering), Knowledge (History), Knowledge (Nobility and Royalty), Listen, Profession, Ride, Search, Sense Motive, Spot, Swim, Tumble, and Use Rope.
Skill Points at 1st Level: (6 + Int modifier) ×4.
Skill Points at Each Additional Level: 6 + Int modifier.

{table=head]Level|BAB|Fort|Ref|Will|Special
1st|+1|+2|+0|+0|Focus 1/day, Bonus Feat
2nd|+2|+3|+0|+0|Uncanny dodge, Bonus Feat
3rd|+3|+3|+1|+1|
4th|+4|+4|+1|+1|Focus 2/day, Bonus Feat
5th|+5|+4|+1|+1|Improved uncanny dodge
6th|+6/+1|+5|+2|+2|Bonus Feat
7th|+7/+2|+5|+2|+2|Damage reduction 1/—
8th|+8/+3|+6|+2|+2|Focus 3/day, Bonus Feat
9th|+9/+4|+6|+3|+3|
10th|+10/+5|+7|+3|+3|Damage reduction 2/—, Bonus Feat
11th|+11/+6/+1|+7|+3|+3|Greater Focus
12th|+12/+7/+2|+8|+4|+4|Focus 4/day, Bonus Feat
13th|+13/+8/+3|+8|+4|+4|Damage reduction 3/—
14th|+14/+9/+4|+9|+4|+4|Bonus Feat
15th|+15/+10/+5|+9|+5|+5|
16th|+16/+11/+6/+1|+10|+5|+5|Damage reduction 4/—, Focus 5/day, Bonus Feat
17th|+17/+12/+7/+2|+10|+5|+5|Tireless Focus
18th|+18/+13/+8/+3|+11|+6|+6|Bonus Feat
19th|+19/+14/+9/+4|+11|+6|+6|Damage reduction 5/—
20th|+20/+15/+10/+5|+12|+6|+6|Mighty Focus, Focus 6/day, Bonus feat [/table]

Proficiencies: all simple and martial weapons, all armor and shields.
Bonus Feats: as the Fighter
Focus: As the Whirling Frenzy rage variant
(Improved) Uncanny Dodge: Standard
Damage Reduction: As barbarian, but only while in armor

Roderick_BR
2012-12-21, 12:56 PM
Yeah, no. Warblade has very different flavor from fighter; he's like the elite special forces commando to fighter's Marine grunt (which doesn't say that the grunt is weaker necessarily, only more of a general grounpounder without the highly specialized skills of the Tom Clancy hero, probably more useful in a straight up firefight and definitely so in a nonstop running battle, but less able to tackle rare and unusual high-stakes missions). Grabbing quotes from the Warblade fluff, a fighter is not a "sword prince"; ask some poor French peasant forced to slog through Napoleon's campaign whether he agrees with "Battle is beautiful". I like warblade flavor for a lot of purposes, but the warblade can't shine unless he has the fighter as background (Warrior doesn't cut it - in fact, given that fighter is so much weaker than warblade, it should probably replace Warrior as the default "no-class class" for NPC combatants).

A warblade gets three maneuvers at first level, and can't do one of them twice in a row (I'm pretty sure I saw a rule saying you can't ready one maneuver three times; they have to all be different). He has to overthink his battles a little, and there are some character concepts for which that's just the wrong flavor. Take for instance the half-black-dragon Fighter 4 in the Monster Manual; what maneuvers would you give him, to make up for the fact that you've disqualified him for his Weapon Specialization feat as well as taking away his 1st and 2nd level bonus feats? Maybe you could make him better for typical adventuring purposes, but he's not built for those purposes (and given that a typical adventurer is a sociopathic hobo with no skills to actually pay the bills and stay alive when there isn't a dungeon for him to loot, that's probably just as well for the half-dragon in question). He's there to be fought, and that means he needs to be good at fighting, no matter how often he has to fight in a given day. He does not need fancy tricks aimed at "covering himself in glory"; he just needs the ability to kill things quickly and efficiently, and for all its lack of versatility, few people complain that the fighter is not good at dealing damage (compared to anything that isn't Tier 1-2 at any rate).
I think this makes the fact that the fighter is far too weak even more obvious. Magic users canuse magic at 1st level. Skill-monkeys has several different abilities. What meleers get? A big buffed up hit die, a better to-hit rate, and better starting armor. Nothing special, unique. They are just pumped up commoners. Warblades makes the character have had a special training, just like wizards had special training, instead of just finding a book and started flinging magic missiles, or clerics that have special training to cast their given spells instead of just "ok, I'm a cleric, hey Perlor, give me magic abilities, thanks".
It bumps meleers from the party's jock to a specialized combatant.

PairO'Dice Lost
2012-12-21, 01:04 PM
Spoilering my post since the replies are getting long:

False. A character with even one warblade level (unless gestalt, natch) does not have the option to take Weapon Spec at 4th level. What he gets two levels from now (or one if he's multiclass) doesn't matter; it's whether he has it right now. There isn't a warblade maneuver that gives a flat +2 to damage for every single attack you make all day (unless someone Sunders or Disarms your favorite weapon, and if it's magic it'll be tough to Sunder and Disarm has to beat your own attack roll, which is +1 thanks to WF). I don't know what the +1d6 damage maneuver is, but even if you could prepare five hundred copies of it, that would still mean your five hundred and first attack of the day didn't get it unless you took a turn to reload. More realistically, if a warblade has a single copy of that maneuver, uses it every second turn, and gets statistically average rolls, then he's adding 7 damage every 4 rolls, and the Fighter gets 8 in the same time. It doesn't matter how many options the Warblade gets if the most important one, the one he will solve nearly all his problems with for the early levels, is even slightly diminished in effectiveness. The fighter will still be better at what fighters do; the warblade might be the better adventurer overall, but he's not able to take the fighter's place in every context.

The +1d6 maneuver is a stance, i.e. it's "on" constantly, and it's available from level 1. That's +3.5 damage, every single turn, forever, for 3 levels before the fighter gets his constant +2 to damage.


Really that one works equally well no matter what class you are,

Exactly. If something works well as both a warblade and as a fighter, but the warblade version gives you more options, be a warblade.


That one I'll grant you, and it's very fitting to warblade flavor. But that just means fighter is better for the ordinary grunts that outnumber warblades 30 to 1 in a typical camp world, existing for no other narrative purpose than so the warblade can feel special like the ponce he is.

By that reasoning, fighters must exist to make wizards feel special as well. Fighters are certainly well-suited for the mindless ranks of faceless mooks, mechanically speaking, but by their flavor they're supposed to be just as badass and awesome as the warblade.


Actually pretty much all D&D heroes are far beyond the skill of a normal mortal from level 3 or so on (fighters maybe take until 4). Mostly because the very D&D rules are written poorly for simulating human frailty. IRL a bash on the back of the head can kill you, and people have even died from a firm finger poke to the chest; in D&D you can get clobbered down to 1 HP without so much as breathing heavily, or take an infinite amount of nonlethal damage and not even be sore the next morning.

1) The rules aren't supposed to simulate human frailty past the low levels, they're supposed to simulate a human who can take on a twenty-foot-tall adamantine-clad fire-breathing lizard and survive.

2) I'm not talking RL mortal, I'm talking D&D mortal. If everyone can safely jump headfirst off cliffs by level 15 or guzzle gallons of poison, then that's not a "fighter" ability, that's an "any character with high Con, HP, and Fort" ability, which, I repeat, the warblade gets as well. The warblade can go even beyond that superhuman height, which is necessary to overcome the fighter's shortcomings.


Which the best GMs, and any GM I will ever willingly play with, will do from time to time, at least if you have a really good idea. I mean it's not like 3.5 is a perfect set of rules that deserves to be enshrined as the ultimate accomplishment of gaming technology.

I have never met a DM that will let you arbitrarily violate the game's laws of physics to accomplish a plan. Have them rule favorably for you? Sure. Fudge a couple of rolls for you? It's something I disagree with, but sure. Let your fighter just act twice per round, or kill an ogre with a coin hurled at their face? No chance at all, but something the warblade can do (Time Stands Still and Strike of Perfect Clarity) because he's Just That Badass.


Which may or may not be inherently better. If more options were always preferable, nobody would eat at Mcdonalds twice; there are fifty thousand different restaurants out there but some people would rather stick with what they know and love than be baffled by unfamiliar choices. (I'm not necessarily one of those people, but they exist, and they deserve classes built for their benefit.)

Again with the comparisons assuming that the warblade can't do what the fighter does. If the fighter and the warblade want to eat McDonald's every day for lunch, they can do that. If the warblade ever decides he wants something else, he can do Panda Express or Chipotle for dinner, while the fighter is stuck with McDonald's whether he likes it or not.


Is there something wrong with having a diversity of opinion, or changeable moods?

Only in that you argued for two diametrically opposed positions within the same post.


Except that you unavoidably drop every club after swinging it once, and once your clubs are all on the ground, you can't pick them back up until you kick the ball once.

:smallsigh: To once more extend the metaphor, if you use your 9 iron, you need to use something else (say a 7 wood) for the next stroke, but then you can use the 9 iron again. You don't need to go through all your maneuvers, you don't have a daily limit. If you're unclear on the maneuver refresh rules and can't find them in the book, they're free online right here (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ex/20060802a&page=2).


Tying the kid's hand would be building a fighter with 3 strength who refuses to wear armor and spends his feat on Power Attack while fighting with light weapons.

...or like building a warblade without maneuvers, for instance.


*snip stuff about organization*

We've already discussed your issues with reference book layouts in another thread, no need to cover it again here.


I am one of those people. I don't mind making the fighter a little stronger (just as I'm happy to weaken the high-level wizard while making him suck a bit less at level 1), but I certainly don't approve of obsoleting him.

Within the 3e framework, there is no way that WotC could have fixed the fighter to the satisfaction of any customers. Scrapping him and starting anew was really the only way to do it.


Really don't know what you're trying to say here.

I'm saying that when people hear "fighter" they have certain associations with the name, such as "one-trick pony," "bound by the laws of physics," "boring skill-less muscle-brained jock," and others. If WotC were to make ToB as a fighter fix that was added on to the fighter, any maneuvers that seemingly broadened the fighter's repertoire, broke the laws of physics, or gave him utility would be rejected (and obviously some still do reject that sort of thing for fighters); by coming out with a new class, no one had those preconceived expectations and so WotC could get away with a lot more.

Djinn_in_Tonic
2012-12-21, 01:35 PM
First, to the OP: This fix helps the Fighter a tiny bit, but the issue is that Feats are STILL no substitute for actual class features. It'll increase the power of the Fighter a bit, but he's always been decently strong in terms of raw physical damage. His issue are his lack of options and his inability to APPLY that damage reliably against a number of foes: a problem that this fix doesn't really help resolve.

To willpell


False. A character with even one warblade level (unless gestalt, natch) does not have the option to take Weapon Spec at 4th level. What he gets two levels from now (or one if he's multiclass) doesn't matter; it's whether he has it right now. There isn't a warblade maneuver that gives a flat +2 to damage for every single attack you make all day (unless someone Sunders or Disarms your favorite weapon, and if it's magic it'll be tough to Sunder and Disarm has to beat your own attack roll, which is +1 thanks to WF). I don't know what the +1d6 damage maneuver is, but even if you could prepare five hundred copies of it, that would still mean your five hundred and first attack of the day didn't get it unless you took a turn to reload. More realistically, if a warblade has a single copy of that maneuver, uses it every second turn, and gets statistically average rolls, then he's adding 7 damage every 4 rolls, and the Fighter gets 8 in the same time.
Actually, with Punishing Stance I get +1d6 damage to all attacks all day, in exchange for -2 AC. But let's assume that's not enough for you. We're level 4, so I have 2nd level maneuvers: that gives me access to Mountain Hammer, which overcomes DR and Hardness, and adds +2d6 damage to my attack. That's +7 damage on average every other round (assuming constant refreshing), or +3.5 damage per round, which beats out the Fighter's average of +2 damage per round from Weapon Specialization. Of course, that assumes I don't maximize my damage output by using OTHER damaging maneuvers before taking a single swift action to refresh them.

Further, that's using a single choice: I'm not being complicated here. My character sheet could simply say "Mountain Hammer every other round" under attacks, and I'm suddenly out-damaging the Fighter.


It doesn't matter how many options the Warblade gets if the most important one, the one he will solve nearly all his problems with for the early levels, is even slightly diminished in effectiveness. The fighter will still be better at what fighters do; the warblade might be the better adventurer overall, but he's not able to take the fighter's place in every context.
Since options are directly relevant to combat capability (hence why Wizards, with their options, are better than Sorcerers, who have more raw blasting potential), Warblades WILL be better. That 1-2 points of damage doesn't make up for the ability to overcome hardness, impede movement, avoid attacks with counters, allow an ally an additional turn, reposition yourself or your allies on the battlefield without spending a move action, and so forth. In fact, your damage remains competitive if not above all but the most heavily optimized fighters, because you rely on a single likely-to-hit attack for most maneuvers: fighters tend to miss past their second iterative attack.




Not that I've seen, at least not at level 1.
At level 1 the Fighter gets d10 HD, 2 skill points, +2 Fort, +1 BaB, and a feat.

The Warblade gets d12 HD, 4 skill points, +2 Fort, +1 BaB, 3 maneuvers, and a stance. Those maneuvers more than make up for any feat you can select at level one.


Really that one works equally well no matter what class you are, which is why it's my favorite. Rules are a poor substitute for creativity.
Correct. But saying "DMs will reward creativity" can apply equally to both classes, so it's not really something up for discussion here. The issue we're talking about is rules-based: the Warblade is better than the Fighter in every rules-related sense, and thus will still perform better when creativity is allowed. Both allow for equal creativity, but the Warblade has more tools to use creatively, while still having all the Fighter's options.


Except take Weapon Spec at level 4.
Correct. He cannot take a bad feat at level 4, although I have already shown you that he doesn't need it to surpass the Fighter in terms of damage. With both striving to deal as much damage as possible, Mountain Hammer outdamages Weapon Specialization by 1.5 damage per round, almost the full value of Weapon Specialization.


Which may or may not be inherently better. If more options were always preferable, nobody would eat at Mcdonalds twice; there are fifty thousand different restaurants out there but some people would rather stick with what they know and love than be baffled by unfamiliar choices. (I'm not necessarily one of those people, but they exist, and they deserve classes built for their benefit.)
They do deserve classes, but the Warblade isn't really an unfamiliar class. You can pick maneuvers at random and still be good: no real effort is necessary to make a good Warblade. You have to actually work fairly hard to make a BAD Warblade. And, if you never even TOUCH any of your maneuvers, you still compare to a fighter (although you perform SLIGHTLY below his level, since he has a feat or two on you). I haven't met a single player who deems the Warblade to complicated once the mechanics have been explained: even one happy to spam the same three maneuvers forever can have a blast with the Warblade.


Is there something wrong with having a diversity of opinion, or changeable moods?
No, which is why the Warblade is great. Smash face? Check. Smash face with style and maneuvers? Check. Skills? Check. You can have your cake AND eat it, to. Ignore the parts you don't want. Use only Mountain Hammer and its upgrades. Take a single stance you like and pretend it's a feat. Pretend maneuvers are 1/encounter Feat abilities that you can get back. Do whatever. It'll turn out okay in the end.


Except that you unavoidably drop every club after swinging it once, and once your clubs are all on the ground, you can't pick them back up until you kick the ball once. If I'm in the mood to kick a ball, I'll just play one of the two sports known as football, and I expect that a guy who plays football all day every day is going to will kick the ball slightly farther and harder than the guy who carries football shoes, golf shoes, ice skates and ballerina slippers around in a bag, and can only wear each one for one step at a time before going barefoot for a round.
This metaphor is a bit silly. Look at it this way: I have option A-Beat Face with Stick. However, I also have a number of options A-1 to A-9, which are DIFFERENT ways to Beat Face with Stick. Now, the Fighter has those options as well (trip, disarm, and so forth). As a Warblade, however, I have a reserve of options the Fighter can never get: A-10 to A-???. These options are ALSO Beat Face with Stick options. They all achieve the same end goal, and if I have to resort to option A again because I'm out of other ways to achieve that goal, well...like the Fighter, options A-1 to A-9 are still always usable. I just have more tricks up my sleeve if I care to use them.


Regardless of what you play, your GM shouldn't give you any occasions which you aren't capable of rising to. If he does, you halt the game and discuss your concerns with him, and he should be amenable to either giving you bennies or lowering the bar, because his job is to entertain you. (It's a bit different in a party, which is D&D's default, but even so, the GM should make an effort to ensure everyone has their chance to shine, even if some require a lot more polishing than others.
So a Fighter should only have combat situations thrown at him? Seems like a boring game.


Well it sure as heck makes a bold statement as to how good you think your kid is, and sending that message might be the point of doing it. But actually no, it's not like that, because the kid in the analogy is the fighter, and Ahnold is the warblade. Tying the kid's hand would be building a fighter with 3 strength who refuses to wear armor and spends his feat on Power Attack while fighting with light weapons.
That's not an apt analogy. A Little League has a set of rules governing who enters it. The Fighter and the Warblade are meant to compete in the same arena of the D&D party. Since we're using poor metaphors, it's more like having a choice for your Major League team: a guy who is a good pitcher, or a guy who is a equally good pitcher, but also a good hitter, good baseman, good catcher, and good outfielder. The first guy might be decent, but the second is clearly a superior player with a better understanding of the game at all levels, and is just as competent in the role you want him in. He knows all the tricks, even if he chooses not to employ them.


Well I very much disagree. I think it was a mistake sorting the maneuvers by discipline, so that a level 1 Warblade with three different maneuvers from different dispclines and a stance from a fourth keeps having to flip pages to find the full text on each one (the mini-reference list is better than nothing, but it's not complete, and even it doesn't segregate the three classes), and can't even look in the beginning of that section for his beginner-level maneuver because they're alphabetical instead of sorted by rank. I also don't like that they put the Martial Study feat in the feats section where you can't see what it can get you, or that the maneuvers aren't listed under the class that can get them - the whole thing is designed like an encyclopedia, instead of as a guidebook to make playing the class easy and enjoyable. It might be a reasonable design decision, but it's not the one I'd make - I probably wouldn't even have had all three in the same book, but produced a separate (and cheaper) guidebook for each, even if it meant duplicating some text. Each one would be a step-by-step guide to playing a character throughout their entire career, and wouldn't give you advice at level 1 that doesn't become relevant until level 11.
This is solvable through the Maneuver Cards freely available on the Wizards website. Also, the design is actually pretty straightforward once you get used to it. I don't think this is a good reason to complain about the class and the mechanics themselves.


I am one of those people. I don't mind making the fighter a little stronger (just as I'm happy to weaken the high-level wizard while making him suck a bit less at level 1), but I certainly don't approve of obsoleting him.

He IS obsolete though. He has always suffered from a lack of options, because Beat Face with Stick over and over again is simply insufficient when presented with anything outside of a challenge that stands toe-to-toe with him and dukes it out. Years of 3e experience from thousands of players has come to this conclusion. There isn't a way to fix the Fighter effectively without redesigning him from basically the ground up: most Fighter revisions either entirely reimagine feats or give the Fighter a whole host of new abilities. The Warblade is, effectively, a Fighter with a whole host of new abilities.

Hanuman
2012-12-21, 08:40 PM
That is your opinion; I do not share it. For the default style of kick-in-the-door goblin exterminator, "I attack again" is exactly what he wants to do every single time; that's the whole reason you play such a character in the first place.
I'm not saying such options shouldn't exist, I'm saying that it's a pretty low bar for entry-players to experience after coming out of, well, anything DiabloII or later, which includes pretty much everyone who's tried RPGs or TACTICs in the last 15 years.

Nothing wrong with playing tier5 classes either, I just wouldn't want to play a 3 hour encounter with one nor would I want them in my campaign without massively compensating them.

willpell
2012-12-22, 01:00 AM
The +1d6 maneuver is a stance, i.e. it's "on" constantly, and it's available from level 1. That's +3.5 damage, every single turn, forever, for 3 levels before the fighter gets his constant +2 to damage.

Assuming you mean Punishing Stance, it gives you -2 AC. Probably a good trade, but not automatically better, and particularly not something I would stick on a villain the players want to beat up. How much damage such an NPC dishes out is FAR less relevant than how much he can absorb; he's an obstacle, the players only need to deal with him once, so his survivability is crucial.


Only in that you argued for two diametrically opposed positions within the same post.

"The true test of a first-class intellect is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in mind and still function." --Niels Bohr


:smallsigh: To once more extend the metaphor, if you use your 9 iron, you need to use something else (say a 7 wood) for the next stroke, but then you can use the 9 iron again.

No, if you use one maneuver and then you use another maneuver, they are both exhausted until you spend a round not using a maneuver at all (which in this analogy means kicking the golf ball because you're not allowed to use a club, as the clubs are the maneuvers).


Within the 3e framework, there is no way that WotC could have fixed the fighter to the satisfaction of any customers. Scrapping him and starting anew was really the only way to do it.

Then they should have done that, instead of creating the Warblade.


I'm saying that when people hear "fighter" they have certain associations with the name, such as "one-trick pony," "bound by the laws of physics," "boring skill-less muscle-brained jock," and others.

Any person who has learned that association from the PHB and cannot unlearn it when they read a book that presents the New and Improved Fighter is to be deeply pitied for their ossified and intolerant mindset. Where's your sense of wonder, your joie de vivre? Hear the word "fighter" and imagine the possibilities, ignoring any rules which contradict them. Dare to dream and reach for a star! If your game doesn't inspire you and fill you with joy, just play a different one, or figure out how to change the one you love to be more lovable.


If WotC were to make ToB as a fighter fix that was added on to the fighter, any maneuvers that seemingly broadened the fighter's repertoire, broke the laws of physics, or gave him utility would be rejected (and obviously some still do reject that sort of thing for fighters); by coming out with a new class, no one had those preconceived expectations and so WotC could get away with a lot more.

Hm. So you're saying the reason they nailed on the ridiculous fluff of warblades and blade magic and the nine swords was to hoodwink the buying populace into thinking that a fix was an innovation. That...actually makes a lot of sense, now that I think about it.


I think this makes the fact that the fighter is far too weak even more obvious. Magic users canuse magic at 1st level. Skill-monkeys has several different abilities. What meleers get? A big buffed up hit die, a better to-hit rate, and better starting armor. Nothing special, unique.

Actually a big buffed-up hit die, a better to-hit rate, and the best starting armor ARE special and unique things, at least as much as the skillmonkey's abilities are (with spellcasters you do have a point, but their very uniqueness is what I want to avoid with martial characters unless they're conceptualized as using Blade Magic, Incarnum, or some other subsystem). The whole point of the fighter is that he excels; he has the best physical chassis in the game except maybe for the barbarian (depending on whether you weight heavy armor more or less heavily than a d12 hit die and eventual damage reduction), and the only way anyone else can be better in a fight than him is to cheat, such as by praying to Erythnul for combat buffs, or polymorphing your spindly wizard butt into an ogre.


Warblades makes the character have had a special training, just like wizards

Which is exactly why they are 100% different from fighters in flavor and can never replace fighters, any more than Cillian Murphy can replace Sylvester Stallone in the role of Rambo, no matter how many martial arts you teach him. Being a guy who's Just That Tough is completely different from being a "blade magician" who learns mystical secrets, even if they're subtle ones that mostly just involve swordfighting better because you take a moment before the battle to focus your ki. Fighters don't need no steenkin' ki focus, and that's the whole point of being one.


or clerics that have special training to cast their given spells instead of just "ok, I'm a cleric, hey Perlor, give me magic abilities, thanks"

Actually that's pretty much exactly how I play it.... You don't need special training to be a cleric, you just need to be willing to volunteer to be your deity's b**** and have his eyes on you 24/7 for the rest of your life, either to boss you around or to punish you for defying him. Makes them a heck of a lot less of a T1 class, I tell you that much. (As a corollary, I also regard being a cleric of a "cosmic force" to be much the same as being a cleric of a deity, except with less personality; the force might not talk to you, but it still places harsh expectations upon you and will punish disobedience. You can literally be a Cleric of Butt-Kicking, and Butt-Kicking Itself will ensure you never have the option of not kicking butt, even when you're stuck in the desert dying of thirst and kicking the butts of the nomads who know the location of the oasis guarantees that they won't save your life.)


But let's assume that's not enough for you. We're level 4, so I have 2nd level maneuvers: that gives me access to Mountain Hammer, which overcomes DR and Hardness, and adds +2d6 damage to my attack. That's +7 damage on average every other round (assuming constant refreshing), or +3.5 damage per round, which beats out the Fighter's average of +2 damage per round from Weapon Specialization.

Okay, I guess for people who don't absolutely know in their very bones that Murphy's Law is gunning for them, replacing a guaranteed 2 damage per round with a miminum of 2 damage every second round and the potential for 12 seems like a pretty fair trade. But because every maneuver higher than 1st level requires previous maneuvers in its discipline/school/whatever-the-word-is, you can't get Mountain Hammer unless you pick a previous (I'm guessing) Stone Dragon maneuver. And that is what kills it for me, because no matter how useful the stone dragon maneuvers (and there are only like two at first level to choose from), if they feel wrong, I won't pick them. Sometimes I don't want a character to have an ability that he shouldn't have; if I'm building Captain America, I won't accept that Charging Minotaur Strike is on his list of options, because you never see Cap lower his head and charge like a bull skull-first into his opponents. (Well okay I haven't read every Cap comic so maybe he's done that once or twice, but it really doesn't feel like the kind of thing he should do).

This is my point about magic subsystems - they are their own little reality, they follow their own rules, and they staple a set of expectations onto the character which I might not want them to have. If one tiny thing about the character sounds a sour note, it completely kills it for me. As long as the problems are system deficiencies ("my fighter is supposed to know how to break-dance, but Perform isn't on his skill list"), they can be fixed by DM fiat ("okay, spend a feat on Martial Study: Funky Chicken Tactics and you can get Perform: Break Dance as a class skill; I'll let you take a Flaw to pay for the extra Feat, even though I generally don't allow Flaws). But if the sour note comes from my own character, then I have to rebuild the character to not contain it, and if the rules prohibit doing so and I can't get a GM to overrule them, then the character is just ruined and rendered worthless to me, because the moment he becomes something he's not supposed to be, he isn't him anymore, he's just a pile of words on a sheet that mean nothing.

It is the pure essence of the character that makes it leap off the sheet and come alive, and sometimes the pure essence is that he doesn't need a bunch of (insert slur)y maneuvers to dance around the battlefield shouting (insert slur that already ends with y) slogans and gobbledygook to make his mojo work, because he's a simple guy at heart with a simple plan that simply works. And either the GM is willing to cooperate with that playstyle or he isn't, determining whether I can play that character or not. If the GM isn't going to bend the rules of reality a little in my favor so I can get to play who I'm playing, it's like I'm Superman and I put on my glasses and walk into the Daily Planet as Clark Kent, and not one person is fooled for a moment because the GM refuses to accept that "pair of glasses = completely effective disguise" is simply a necessary concession to Superman's narrative reality. You have to be willing to work with the character, or he's a detective on a forensics show where all the crimes mysteriously fail to leave any evidence, and he has nothing whatsoever to do.


Of course, that assumes I don't maximize my damage output by using OTHER damaging maneuvers before taking a single swift action to refresh them.

Standard, not swift. Big difference.


Since options are directly relevant to combat capability (hence why Wizards, with their options, are better than Sorcerers, who have more raw blasting potential), Warblades WILL be better.

I am not arguing that Warblades are not better. I am arguing that they are not exactly the same. The Fighter doesn't want options. Any character that wants options should be built as a warblade instead, but characters that want the options not to exist (as opposed to having them but Holding the Idiot Ball and refusing to use them for no visible reason) need to be Fighters instead, so that they can be forced to use the only option they have at times when that option is what the story is about them doing, because nobody will ever do it if it isn't the only choice they have. Literature is filled with these; being forced to accept a lack of options is hugely critical to drama, which is exactly the reason that most people say it's hard to write good stories where the protagonist can do anything.


No, which is why the Warblade is great. Smash face? Check. Smash face with style and maneuvers? Check. Skills? Check. You can have your cake AND eat it, to. Ignore the parts you don't want.

Not how it works. You can refuse to go into the room in your house that has a rabid wolverine living in it, but you still have a rabid wolverine living in your house, and thus you are strictly inferior to another person whose otherwise-identical house has an empty room in it which they also don't ever go into.


So a Fighter should only have combat situations thrown at him? Seems like a boring game.

If you find it so then you stop playing the fighter and take up a different character for a more engaging game for a while.


That's not an apt analogy. A Little League has a set of rules governing who enters it. The Fighter and the Warblade are meant to compete in the same arena of the D&D party.

Well that would be the problem. If they are intended to be interchangeable, making the Warblade better was unacceptible. Really, what is needed is for the tier system to be formalized and incorporated into the game rules, with something like higher XP awards or more favorable dice fudging if you're playing a lower tier.


Since we're using poor metaphors, it's more like having a choice for your Major League team: a guy who is a good pitcher, or a guy who is a equally good pitcher, but also a good hitter, good baseman, good catcher, and good outfielder. The first guy might be decent, but the second is clearly a superior player with a better understanding of the game at all levels, and is just as competent in the role you want him in. He knows all the tricks, even if he chooses not to employ them.

It's not be possible to not be affected by the knowledge you possess. Because the multi-disciplinarian player is capable of more roles in the game, he simply is not going to think about the role of pitcher the same way that a strict pitcher does, and his choices and attitudes and split-second reactions are all going to be off in a thousand subtle ways. This is why it is very important to be aware not only of what skills you possess, but also which ones are conspicuously and palpably absent. Both occupy space within the conceptual reality of you, and empty space is sometimes critical to your functionality (try building a light bulb whose interior is filled with cotton sometime and see whether it's a good thing; I mean, you never know when you might need the option to use cotton, so shouldn't you stuff some into every cubic inch of space in your house just in case?).

Hanuman
2012-12-22, 05:20 AM
Well that would be the problem. If they are intended to be interchangeable, making the Warblade better was unacceptible. Really, what is needed is for the tier system to be formalized and incorporated into the game rules, with something like higher XP awards or more favorable dice fudging if you're playing a lower tier.
Accepting the tier system means accepting the way to fix it, and that's by moving a character to a different tier.

WB does this, and no it's not a fighter because WB is tier 3 and fighters are tier 5.
Fighters are so often fixed because they aren't good at fighting, they are adequate at best and have little to nothing to offer otherwise as a class.

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-22, 10:33 AM
Fixing any of the mundane Core classes is an exercise in futility unless you're willing to reexamine and fix the entire 3.5 system largely from the ground up...or at least find someone else who has. :smallwink:

The problem with D&D isn't the Fighter or the Monk and so on, the problem is the Wizard and the Cleric, etc. Well, that's not true, the Fighter and the Monk do have legitimate problems, but they're problems that are fairly easily fixed by just adding proper class features and, in the Fighter's case, making feats better when Fighters take them.

For example:

WEAPON FOCUS [FIGHTER BONUS FEAT]
Prerequisite: Base Attack +1
Benefit: Choose a type of weapon You gain a +1 competence bonus to attack rolls with the weapon of your choice, with an additional +1 for every eight points of Base Attack you have above +1.
Special: A Fighter may select Weapon Focus as a Fighter Bonus Feat. Once per encounter, if the fighter is wielding a weapon from the chosen type, he may reroll any attack roll and take the higher of the two rolls. He also gains additional attack re-rolls for every eight points of Base Attack he has above +1.

The key here is twofold:
1) The feats must be better and must scale (interestingly enough, making them scale often goes a long way towards making them better). As it stands, most feats right now are Tier 6, because their benefits are pathetic and they almost never get better over time. They are a waste of a slot.
2) The feats must be better when Fighter has them. There's nothing wrong with a class that is almost entirely oriented around the Feat system as long as it gets more bang for its buck from that feat system. Otherwise, Barbarian or frickin' Paladin are always going to be better choices.

The example above is a good way to do this: Everybody gets a scaling attack bonus, which benefits everybody and, therefore, benefits Fighters. But only Fighters get the attack reroll, and they only get it for begin a certain minimum level of Fighter.

Now, this brings us to our second problem that must be addressed in every Fighter fix: The Warblade. A Warblade over 20 levels of given race X gains 11 feats; a Fighter over 20 levels of given race X gains 18 feats, but Warblades have that annoying thing which I will hate forever:


Weapon Aptitude (Ex): Your training with a wide range of weaponry and tactics gives you great skill with particular weapons. You qualify for feats that usually require a minimum number of fighter levels (such as Weapon Specialiation) as if you had a fighter level equal to your warblade level -2.

Warblade really is intended as the Fighter fix, but it does so by utterly replacing the Fighter, the Fighting-Man, the guy who's been with us since 1st edition. For some of us, our nostalgia just can't take it.

This means that all that work you've just put in to fixing feats so that Fighter gets the most bang out of them has just been an exercise in futility. Sure, Fighter gets more, but the Warblade still gets to complete one, maybe two chains of feats and get his kewl trick, and gets those damn maneuvers. So, the second step to fixing the Fighter class? Oddly enough, I here echo the standard suggestion:

Give it some actual class features! Give it a niche of its own, let it do something that even the Warblade can't do. I advice taking Dungeon Crasher and running away with it.

Here's my take (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=210972). Basically I took every single alternate class feature for the Fighter - from the Dead Levels article, from PHBII, from Pathfinder, and, of course, from Dungeonscape - and gave it to the Fighter. The Fighter also needs better skill selection, including, at the very least, Listen and Spot (there is no reason for these two skills to not be class skills for EVERY class).

The third thing a Fighter fix must accomplish is to remember that the Fighter fights. That should be all the Fighter is good at. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a class that can do little else but fight, as long as it can straight up mop the floor with anything that's stupid enough to step into weapons range unless those other things are bringing some underhanded tricks to the field that the Fighter can't overcome. You're not trying to create a Tier 3, 2, or 1 character; forget about that right now.

And the final thing that a Fighter fix must do?

Fix the spellcasters.

Yup, we're back to here. The problem with 3.5 D&D isn't the Fighter or the Monk by themselves; the problem is that the Fighter and the Monk are bad and the spellcasters are broken. There is no valid reason for Tiers 1 and 2 to exist, and as long as they do exist, they utterly invalidate everything below them. The same can't be said of, for example, Tier 3. For all the kewl combat abilities of the Warblade, it still generally needs to function as part of a team in order to get **** done and appreciates help from a Bard or a Rogue. The same cannot be said of the Sorcerer, let alone the Wizard and forget the Druid, especially once you reach high-level play.

My signature contains my own thoughts on how to fix everything; so far playtesting is going very well.

Anyway, I've ranted and railed enough now. Enjoy my thoughts. Or don't.

willpell
2012-12-22, 10:52 AM
Accepting the tier system means accepting the way to fix it, and that's by moving a character to a different tier.

Accepting the tier system means not thinking it necessarily needs to be fixed, I would think. Though my mind is not made up on this yet.


WB does this, and no it's not a fighter because WB is tier 3 and fighters are tier 5.
Fighters are so often fixed because they aren't good at fighting, they are adequate at best and have little to nothing to offer otherwise as a class.


Fixing any of the mundane Core classes is an exercise in futility unless you're willing to reexamine and fix the entire 3.5 system largely from the ground up...or at least find someone else who has. :smallwink:

That's pretty much exactly what I'm doing, constantly, at the slow pace I can stand to deal with it. Not only are mundane classes terrible because of deficiencies in the rules' ability to simulate the complexities of reality (and thus the details of reality that mundane characters excel at exploiting, while magic characters bypass them), but those same deficiencies, as well as excessive brevity in spell writing, are part and parcel of what makes casters so overpowered.

The example of this I always uphold is Pass Without Trace, a spell that single-handedly flips off one of the defining class features of the Ranger class, and takes interactivity out of the game by simply prohibiting any possibility that you can detect the caster's trail, instead of just invoking a new roll where you try to conceal yout trail better than the ranger can discover it. It's very distasteful to me, and I think it powers a lot of the nerd-rage on these forums, the exploitation that is possible when you read rules literally and use "but it doesn't say I can't" as a justification. I come to the D&D rules in the first place because I want complexity, of a level I didn't find in White Wolf, so that I can get nitty-gritty details that add realism to my setting. But what I find is a lot of people using "the book says X" as an excuse to stop thinking and silence all argument with their claims, and that makes me very sad.

Sorry, that got off on a bit of a tangent....


The problem with D&D isn't the Fighter or the Monk and so on, the problem is the Wizard and the Cleric, etc.

I would like to agree with you on that, but the community typically states that the balance point is closer to the casters' end because of monster abilities (which are often based off spells, only even better becuase they don't require components in SLA or SU form). And this strikes me as being likely to have at least some truth to it. The idea of Challenge ratings is a good one, but I don't think they're at all properly arbitrated, and most monsters are just plain tougher than they should be IMO, which the community tends to interrpret as proof that a character has to be absurdly godlike in power in order to not die horribly. It's rather a precarious situation, what!

[QUOTE=Rogue Shadows;14417254]in the Fighter's case, making feats better when Fighters take them.

Whoa, I really don't like that idea. The fighter gets more feats, and should perhaps get still more than that, but I don't think he should get anything from a feat that another character wouldn't get from taking the same feat, or it's not really the same feat anymore. I'm not even sure I like that Weapon Spec exists, because it says you can't possibly learn how to be particularly deadly with a greataxe or a dagger or whatever through any other method of learning than to enroll in Bash University or its slightly less tongue-in-cheek equivalent. Of course, we're getting into the area where I start wondering why exactly I should be restricted to classes at all, instead of just spending XP to purchase abilities one at a time like in White Wolf games. I like the idea of the classes as constructs which identify your social strata and expertise, like a Job in Final Fantasy, but I'm less fond of mechanics that make you feel trapped in that role - there's a fine line between deliniation and proscripton.

Argh, I've been typing since 1 AM and I want to play some Diablo before I go to bed for the day, I'll read/reply to the rest of your message later, RogueShadows. But thanks for your advice and the friendly tone in which it's delivered. Glad to know this thread doesn't consist entirely of people trying to prove me wrong.

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-22, 11:18 AM
Argh, I've been typing since 1 AM and I want to play some Diablo before I go to bed for the day, I'll read/reply to the rest of your message later, RogueShadows. But thanks for your advice and the friendly tone in which it's delivered. Glad to know this thread doesn't consist entirely of people trying to prove me wrong.

One thing I've learned about internet forums is that none of them are nearly as friendly as they wish they were. Stricter rules just leads to more veiling, not less antagonism.


Accepting the tier system means not thinking it necessarily needs to be fixed, I would think. Though my mind is not made up on this yet.

As a general rule, I think that every class should shoot to be mid-to-low Tier 3 or high Tier 4, with the "high tier 4" characters defined as "able to do one thing better than anyone else (and that one thing can be reasonably expected to come up fairly often, such as combat), but not much use outside of that one thing."


Sorry, that got off on a bit of a tangent...

That's what internet forums are for. That and snarking.

Things that Make Rogue Shadows sad: Threads that are closed due to "going off topic."

Anyway, I completely agree on liking 3.5 becasue it allows for a lot of nitty-gritty detail. One of my favorite aspects about it over its predecessor or successor is how much non-combat stuff it supports. Skills like Profession, or Perform for anyone who isn't a Bard, or what have you. It's entirely possible to build a character who sucks at dungeon-delving but nevertheless has amazing skills and abilities that can be measured and represented in-game, rather than by pure fluff.

Every character I've ever built has at least a few skill points spent like that...Craft (basketweaving), Profession (vintner), Perform (stand-up)...


and most monsters are just plain tougher than they should be IMO

This is actually interesting, because (in general, there are some exceptions), I actually find the opposite to be true.

For example, I've never hesitated at throwing an essentially limitless number of 1st-level goblin warriors at a given adventuring party of Levels 1-3, because they could take them on without breaking a sweat. By level 4 I'm comfortable using several ogres per battle. By level 7, the first juvenile and young adult dragons start to show up.

And we're not talking about an optimized party here, either: we're talking an Oriental Adventures 3.0 campaign with a Samurai, a Shugenja (fire), a Shaman, a Monk, and a Sorcerer (restricted to OA spell list).

On the other hand, these guys at level 10 got their asses handed to them by two Will-o'-Wisps.

My conclusion? D&D is a fickle, fickle game.


the fighter gets more feats, and should perhaps get still more than that, but I don't think he should get anything from a feat that another character wouldn't get from taking the same feat, or it's not really the same feat anymore.

The problem here is that more feats, by itself, isn't really enough, if anyone can take the feats and get the same benefit. Sure, the Fighter has more feats and so can complete multiple feat chains and so have all sorts of kewl combat options, but really, completing one feat chain is usually sufficient. Further, if feats are improved (and they must be) but everyone gets the same benefits from them, then it hasn't closed the gap between the Fighter and everyone else at all: sure, Weapon Focus now scales based on BAB, but that helps the Barbarian and the Paladin and the frickin' Warblade (God I hate the class) as much as the Fighter, which defeats the purpose of fixing the feat system to help the Fighter.

Now, on the other hand, as long as you make sure that the Fighter has some actual class features alongside the crazy Feat progression (which you should never touch, it's the Fighter's "thing"), you can probably get away with it. I recommend doing what I did and just piling on all the ACF's you can. Especially Dungeon Crasher.

Amechra
2012-12-22, 12:42 PM
One of my favorite little things (which is one of the feats that I'm throwing into a big collection at some point...) to give the fighter is for them to get a class feature that, X times per encounter, allows them to use feats that take a standard action to use that incorporate an attack in some way...

As an attack action.

Bam, it's something unique that they get, it helps them out with action economy (a lot of feats suck because action economy, not other reasons.)

Heck, you could include some of their ACFs in there; PHB II introduced 3 ACFs for the fighter which boiled down to:

1. Make a single attack instead of a full-attack action, get a scaling dodge bonus to AC for the round.
2. Make a single attack instead of a full-attack action, get to make an immediate action attack this round.
3. Make a single attack instead of a full-attack action, double damage on all attacks this round.

Now, if you could use those as a standard action a few times per encounter, that would give you some nice, meaningful tactical decisions.

Really, there are feats that give Fighters neat things to do in combat... they just need some action economy fixin' to get everything to play nicely.

PairO'Dice Lost
2012-12-22, 02:52 PM
Spoilering a long response to willpell, Rogue Shadows, and Amechra.

"The true test of a first-class intellect is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in mind and still function." --Niels Bohr

"There is one thing even more vital to science than intelligent methods; and that is, the sincere desire to find out the truth, whatever it may be. " --Charles Sandera Pierce.

And your quote actually comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald, by the way.


No, if you use one maneuver and then you use another maneuver, they are both exhausted until you spend a round not using a maneuver at all (which in this analogy means kicking the golf ball because you're not allowed to use a club, as the clubs are the maneuvers).

When you say you have to kick the golf ball, that implies that you're doing something useless for a round, which isn't the case; you can make a normal attack. The warblade has the fighter's basic set of four clubs (attacks and combat maneuvers), and then a bunch of extra clubs (maneuvers); he can still use the basic clubs as much as he wants, so every few rounds he has to stop being better than the fighter and spend a round being just as good as the fighter.


Then they should have done that, instead of creating the Warblade.

Creating the warblade was scrapping the fighter and starting from the ground up, that's the whole point.


Any person who has learned that association from the PHB and cannot unlearn it when they read a book that presents the New and Improved Fighter is to be deeply pitied for their ossified and intolerant mindset. Where's your sense of wonder, your joie de vivre? Hear the word "fighter" and imagine the possibilities, ignoring any rules which contradict them. Dare to dream and reach for a star! If your game doesn't inspire you and fill you with joy, just play a different one, or figure out how to change the one you love to be more lovable.

You can talk about imagining the possibilities all you want, but take a look around this and other forums; invariably, when someone posts a fighter fix that lets him break the laws of physics, use some sort of resource system, makes him a commander or diplomatic type, or similar, people complain that it's too anime, or too complicated, or "not a fighter anymore." Even you mentioned that the warblade was using some mystical mumbo jumbo and you didn't want to deal with the maneuver system because it was too much to keep track of.

As long as people will complain that the fighter must be mundane in theme, limited in capability, and constrained in focus, the fighter will not be fixed.


Hm. So you're saying the reason they nailed on the ridiculous fluff of warblades and blade magic and the nine swords was to hoodwink the buying populace into thinking that a fix was an innovation. That...actually makes a lot of sense, now that I think about it.

Precisely. There's literally nothing about the warblade that can't be explained by exactly the same mundane means as the fighter's feats; he can fight with two weapons, he can hit people really hard, he can attack precisely, and basically do what high-level feats should have done, but because he was using the same system as the slightly-magical crusader and the more magical swordsage and they couldn't say "This guy's not magical because he's the fighter replacement, the other ones are magical because they're replacing magical classes," they called it blade magic, noted in the beginning that they were inspired by anime, etc.


But because every maneuver higher than 1st level requires previous maneuvers in its discipline/school/whatever-the-word-is, you can't get Mountain Hammer unless you pick a previous (I'm guessing) Stone Dragon maneuver.

This is where it helps to actually read the book. Stone Dragon, as the discipline all three classes share, has fewer prerequisites for its maneuvers. Mountain Hammer has none, despite being a 2nd level maneuver, and the 9th level maneuver doesn't have any either.


But if the sour note comes from my own character, then I have to rebuild the character to not contain it, and if the rules prohibit doing so and I can't get a GM to overrule them, then the character is just ruined and rendered worthless to me, because the moment he becomes something he's not supposed to be, he isn't him anymore, he's just a pile of words on a sheet that mean nothing.

So your DM is wiling to go way out of his way to houserule in an extra skill for your fighter (even involving feats and flaws and stuff when he could have just said "You want Perform? That won't break anything. Ta-da, you have Perform."), but won't do the same for any other class? You do realize that if your DM has to be "willing to cooperate with that playstyle" and "bend the rules of reality a little in my favor so I can get to play who I'm playing" for a fighter then all of the touted benefits of a fighter (improvisation and so forth) are dependent on DM, rather than class?


Standard, not swift. Big difference.

Technically, it's a swift action, followed by an attack or a standard action to do nothing, so it could be swift+full attack if you want.


Well, that's not true, the Fighter and the Monk do have legitimate problems, but they're problems that are fairly easily fixed by just adding proper class features and, in the Fighter's case, making feats better when Fighters take them.

For example:

WEAPON FOCUS [FIGHTER BONUS FEAT]
Prerequisite: Base Attack +1
Benefit: Choose a type of weapon You gain a +1 competence bonus to attack rolls with the weapon of your choice, with an additional +1 for every eight points of Base Attack you have above +1.
Special: A Fighter may select Weapon Focus as a Fighter Bonus Feat. Once per encounter, if the fighter is wielding a weapon from the chosen type, he may reroll any attack roll and take the higher of the two rolls. He also gains additional attack re-rolls for every eight points of Base Attack he has above +1.

I would argue that the very fact that you focused on Weapon Focus for your example shows that the problem cannot be fixed very easily. To make WF better, you decided to make it eventually grant +3 instead of +1 and to give fighters 3 rerolls per encounter.

Numbers don't matter in a fighter fix next to options. You could give the fighter +(2*level) to all rolls, and while that would make him boring to play because he would basically kill anything he touched by high levels, that wouldn't really fix anything because it wouldn't help him get to the point when he can touch enemies at that level and it doesn't give him anything to do besides the same ol' same ol'.

The rerolls are good, but limited; a bad round of rolls could use all of them up for the encounter. You could let him reroll one attack roll per round at level 6 or so to help with the less-accurate iterative attacks and that wouldn't be going too far.

Think big! Think crazy! You can always rein in too-powerful abilities later if necessary.


But thanks for your advice and the friendly tone in which it's delivered. Glad to know this thread doesn't consist entirely of people trying to prove me wrong.

If I'm coming off as unfriendly, I apologize; I'm more exasperated than anything. The ToB vs. fighter discussion comes up a lot, and repeating the same points over and over tends to make one sound more abrupt than one actually means to be.


One of my favorite little things (which is one of the feats that I'm throwing into a big collection at some point...) to give the fighter is for them to get a class feature that, X times per encounter, allows them to use feats that take a standard action to use that incorporate an attack in some way...

As an attack action.

Bam, it's something unique that they get, it helps them out with action economy (a lot of feats suck because action economy, not other reasons.)

Heck, you could include some of their ACFs in there; PHB II introduced 3 ACFs for the fighter which boiled down to:

1. Make a single attack instead of a full-attack action, get a scaling dodge bonus to AC for the round.
2. Make a single attack instead of a full-attack action, get to make an immediate action attack this round.
3. Make a single attack instead of a full-attack action, double damage on all attacks this round.

Now, if you could use those as a standard action a few times per encounter, that would give you some nice, meaningful tactical decisions.

Really, there are feats that give Fighters neat things to do in combat... they just need some action economy fixin' to get everything to play nicely.

Once again, you need to stop thinking small. Forget per-encounter, just give the fighter something like the following:

Awesome Combos (Ex): At level 7, the fighter may use any ability that usually requires him to make a single attack as part of a standard or full-round action as an attack action instead.

Nice and simple. If a 20th level fighter wants to make three attacks that deal double damage and one Counterattack so he can hit someone with double damage as an immediate action, go for it. If he wants to use his four attacks to do Elusive Attack, Counterattack, a Dungeon Crasher bull rush, and Improved Trip (with an Overpowering Attack on the follow-up), go for it.

The vast majority of suggested fighter abilities are overly weak or restricted because people are used to seeing the fighter as being weak and limited. Even little things like giving fighters everything in a list instead of making them pick, or removing use restrictions on things, go a long way. To look at Rogue Shadows's link--and RS, I'm not picking on you, I know you were just trying to consolidate a bunch of abilities instead of rebuilding things from scratch--a few things jump out:


Bravery (Ex): Starting at 2nd level, a fighter gains a +1 bonus on Will saves against fear effects. This bonus increases by +1 for every four fighter levels the fighter possesses.

At 20th level, the fighter gets +6 on Will saves against fear? Whoopty-do. Just give him fear immunity at 6th level; the paladin has had it for three levels now, it won't break anything.


Physical Prowess (Ex): Starting at 3rd level, a fighter gets a bonus to some aspect of his ability checks that makes him a better warrior. The fighter gains an additional bonus at 5th level and every two fighter levels thereafter (7th, 9th, 11th, 13th, 15th, 17th, and 19th). The bonus must be drawn from the following list.

Applied Force (Ex): A fighter can administer force to the weakest points of inanimate objects effectively, giving the character a +1 bonus on Strength checks to break or burst items.

Combat Bearing (Ex): A fighter can steady himself to fight in precarious situations, giving the character a +1 bonus on Dexterity checks to avoid falling when damaged while balancing or moving quickly across difficult surfaces.

Stamina Reserve (Ex): A fighter can push his body more than normal, giving the character a +1 bonus on Constitution checks to continue running and to avoid nonlethal damage from a forced march.

So the fighter gets up to +7 in a very limited category. Whoopty-do. Just let the fighter add half his level to all checks based on Str, Dex, or Con. Yes, that means he can Climb, Jump, and Swim really well in addition to being able to break things. I think we'll survive.


Tough Defense (Ex): Beginning at 8th level, the fighter is able to use sheer physical toughness and pigheadedness to overcome many challenges. A number of times per day equal to half his or her fighter level, the fighter can choose to make a Fortitude save in the place of a Reflex save.

Beginning at 12th level, the fighter gains the additional ability to make Fortitude saves in the place of Will saves. Either usage of Tough Defense is still drawn from the same limit of one-half the fighter’s total level.

The usage of Tough Defense works with the fighter abilities Grit and Greater Grit, as applicable.

Steadfast Determination lets you use Con instead of Wis on Will saves and not fail Fort saves on a natural 1, all day every day. Up to 10 times per day at level 20 is a bit underwhelming; you could honestly make that ability usable once per round and it would be fine.


And so on and so forth. Think big, people. The fighter is highly unlikely to break the game if you give him a few cool toys.

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-22, 03:20 PM
The rerolls are good, but limited; a bad round of rolls could use all of them up for the encounter. You could let him reroll one attack roll per round at level 6 or so to help with the less-accurate iterative attacks and that wouldn't be going too far.

That's amazingly too good.

And your objection doesn't change the fundamental point: 3.X fighters are based on feats, so the only way to fix them is to fix the feats and make the feats go further for fighters; or else scrap the fighter entirely, which is viable, I guess, but it hits the nostalgia kind of hard.


At 20th level, the fighter gets +6 on Will saves against fear? Whoopty-do. Just give him fear immunity at 6th level; the paladin has had it for three levels now, it won't break anything.

When creating or modifying classes, I generally try not to step too hard on the toes of other classes. The Fighter can be good at resisting fear, but not as good as the Paladin. Similarly, the Paladin, Ranger, and Barbarian can all be good in outright, straight combat, but should never be as good as a Fighter (but they make up for this with class features that make them more useful in other areas or against specific foes).

Please remember as well that the fighter fix I posted is meant to be played alongside numerous other revisions to the entire system, including, for example, entirely eliminating 8th and 9th level spells; making sure that EVERYTHING gets a save (except magic missile), a cross-examination and refinement of every single one of the remaining 400+ spells to bring them into balance, and other changes.

As I said in the opening, there is no viable way to fix the Fighter without first dealing with the most fundamental problem of 3.X: the high-tier Spellcasters. In the original post on Tiers, the OP suggests that classes of given Tier X play along fairly well as long as everything else is within three tiers of it (inclusive). If Tier-3 becomes the highest Tier, then everything down to Tier-5 becomes suddenly viable in any given game. Now, the goal should still be to uplift things from Tier 5 and Tier 4 into Tier 3, but that returns us to: the Fighter I built is a solid Tier-4, which is exactly what I was going for. A Fighter isn't trying to be useful in a variety of situations; a Fighter is trying to fight, and that's it. You want versatility, play a bard or a rogue.


So the fighter gets up to +7 in a very limited category. Whoopty-do. Just let the fighter add half his level to all checks based on Str, Dex, or Con. Yes, that means he can Climb, Jump, and Swim really well in addition to being able to break things. I think we'll survive.

As mentioned in the thread itself, those abilities come from the "Dead Levels" article. They aren't meant to have game impact; they're there to prevent the "special" column from being empty.

Remember that the "Dead Levels" pair of articles are specifically talking about filling in dead levels without changing the balance of power amongst classes. They're neat, and flavorful, but they're basically intended to be Tongue of the Sun and Moon.

Further, note that there is only one point - 19th level - where Physical Prowess is the only thing gained. At every other level, the Fighter gains things like Dungeon Crasher, Elusive Attack, Counterattack, and so on.


Steadfast Determination lets you use Con instead of Wis on Will saves and not fail Fort saves on a natural 1, all day every day.

I'd argue that's not nearly as good. After all, a 10th-level Fighter has a base Will save of +3, but a base Fortitude save of +7 - which translates to being 20% more likely to make any given save. I would call that significant.

A natural 1 on a Fortitude save only happens 5% of the time. I would call that insignificant.


Up to 10 times per day at level 20 is a bit underwhelming; you could honestly make that ability usable once per round and it would be fine.

What the Hell kind of games are you playing that you need it more than 10 times per day at 20th level? Again, at will once per round is amazingly too good; if it's usable that often then what's the sense in limiting it at all? At that point it makes significantly more sense to just say "for all saves the Fighter uses his Fortitude save instead of his Reflex or Will saves," but that's way too good.

Might as well give Archer-type rangers unlimited +5 Slaying ammunition while we're at it.

There's thinking big, and then there's building Hulking Hurler: the Base Class. Your suggestions lean towards the latter.

nonsi
2012-12-22, 03:32 PM
As long as people will complain that the fighter must be mundane in theme, limited in capability, and constrained in focus, the fighter will not be fixed.


I don't remember "limited in capability and constrained in focus" ever being stated as design requirements or even desired characteristics.
Mundane in theme, however, definitely a must.

Djinn_in_Tonic
2012-12-22, 03:46 PM
That's amazingly too good.

What, giving the Fighter at least one assured hit per round? Hell, I'd argue that allowing the Fighter to ALWAYS roll two d20s on attack rolls and choose the higher wouldn't overpower him past about level 10 or so. Wizards and their ilk can do far, FAR worse than a system ensuring a Fighter doesn't miss his first two attacks each round.


And your objection doesn't change the fundamental point: 3.X fighters are based on feats, so the only way to fix them is to fix the feats and make the feats go further for fighters; or else scrap the fighter entirely, which is viable, I guess, but it hits the nostalgia kind of hard.

If that's your point then yes, Fighters are fundamentally broken. Feats can either be buffed across the board (helping other classes almost equally), or given Fighter-specific clauses, which is A: poor design, B: another sub-system for the Fighter tacked onto something other than the class itself, and C: a lot of effort for relatively little reward, unless you tack actual abilities to the feats...which is basically making them Stances or Maneuvers. Easier to change the Fighter than change all the feats.

I don't see a problem with hitting the nostalgia though. Sometimes nostalgia is just that: looking at something that wasn't actually that good and remembering it fondly. Play it if you want, but changing it around is, in effective, changing what you're remembering. Why not just use something superior, if you're going to alter it anyway?


When creating or modifying classes, I generally try not to step too hard on the toes of other classes. The Fighter can be good at resisting fear, but not as good as the Paladin. Similarly, the Paladin, Ranger, and Barbarian can all be good in outright, straight combat, but should never be as good as a Fighter (but they make up for this with class features that make them more useful in other areas or against specific foes).

And it's a good philosophy to have. But Fear Immunity isn't really THAT important to the concept of the Paladin: it fits the Fighter conceptually as well, and prevents the Fighter having to remember that he even has the bonus. Simplicity is good whenever possible--Fear Immunity would, in my mind, be a much better replacement than a +X bonus that players have to remember. You could also make it more unique, and give the Fighter a "Roll Twice, pick better" reaction to Fear, for a different feeling form of a similar power.


Please remember as well that the fighter fix I posted is meant to be played alongside numerous other revisions to the entire system, including, for example, entirely eliminating 8th and 9th level spells; making sure that EVERYTHING gets a save (except magic missile), a cross-examination and refinement of every single one of the remaining 400+ spells to bring them into balance, and other changes.

Then it's not that apt for this conversation, which (given the opening post) seems to be assuming a Core environment. I also find it odd that you'd revise magic completely, but not do the same for martial classes. Still, that's neither here nor there: it's not my revision. :smalltongue:


As I said in the opening, there is no viable way to fix the Fighter without first dealing with the most fundamental problem of 3.X: the high-tier Spellcasters.

I'd disagree, but that's another whole thread of discussion right there. I'd be interested in talking about it though.


In the original post on Tiers, the OP suggests that classes of given Tier X play along fairly well as long as everything else is within three tiers of it (inclusive). If Tier-3 becomes the highest Tier, then everything down to Tier-5 becomes suddenly viable in any given game. Now, the goal should still be to uplift things from Tier 5 and Tier 4 into Tier 3, but that returns us to: the Fighter I built is a solid Tier-4, which is exactly what I was going for. A Fighter isn't trying to be useful in a variety of situations; a Fighter is trying to fight, and that's it. You want versatility, play a bard or a rogue.

By contrast, if Tier 4 and 5 are gone, and Tier 2 is your balancing point, Tier 2 and 3 become nicely playable. It's fairly easy to tone down Tier 1 classes to Tier 2, and Tier 4 can usually be bumped up to Tier 3 with a few buffs. Thus, Tier 2-3 seems to be where you want the mid-ground, not the highest level of power.

Also remember...the Tiers measure power somewhat (except for Tier 2, which is just an odd tier), but they REALLY measure versatility. That's why Tier 4-6 are generally regarded as mediocre to bad. They lack in options, and thus in generally utility. The idea that a Fighter can only contribute in combat is a rather outdated one, and is better suited to Dungeon Crawls and War Games than a modern RPG. If you enjoy those sorts of games, that's fine, but I think D&D should be designed with more than that in mind.


As mentioned in the thread itself, those abilities come from the "Dead Levels" article. They aren't meant to have game impact; they're there to prevent the "special" column from being empty.

A poor design decision, ultimately. You could give MEANINGFUL abilities in those same levels, or at least small but flavorful ones. Another +1 to something is boring for everyone.



Remember that the "Dead Levels" pair of articles are specifically talking about filling in dead levels without changing the balance of power amongst classes.

Correct. And you can fill them with more interesting things while still not changing the balance of power much at all.



A natural 1 on a Fortitude save only happens 5% of the time. I would call that insignificant.

5% is not an insignificant statistic assuming the average lifespan of a PC and the number of Fortitude saves rolled. Plus it's a good example of a dead-level filler that's more interesting and fun that +1 to saves against fear: Sure, you might never use it and might never need it...but when you DO? MAN are you glad you have it. It feels GREAT, and doesn't have much of a game impact until it pops out to save the day once in a blue moon.


What the Hell kind of games are you playing that you need it more than 10 times per day at 20th level? Again, at will once per round is amazingly too good. At that point it makes significantly more sense to just say "for all saves the Fighter uses his Fortitude save instead of his Reflex or Will saves," but that's way too good.

Which would be boring, and probably to good, yes. That said, once you get above 5/day, it may as well just be at will: that sort of number tracking is probably unnecessary. I'm not sure what I'd recommend here, but I don't like either your ability, nor the one suggested by Po'D (although I do like the Con on Will saves and not failing Fort saves).


There's thinking big, and then there's building Hulking Hurler: the Base Class. Your suggestions lean towards the latter.

None of Po'D's suggestions are Hulking Hurler big, nor anywhere close. I would argue that, although his save suggestion was a bit boring (if I'm interpreting it correctly as "always uses Fortitude in place of Will"), he hasn't come CLOSE to making the Fighter overpowered.

What he's suggested makes it a really, REALLY strong melee fighter, but that's what it SHOULD be. Maybe he's made it a bit to strong...I'd have to crunch numbers and test it myself to see. Regardless, it's still not enough to fix the Fighter, because the Fighter's issue has never been numbers. It's always been options, and the lack of effective ones against the majority of opponents D&D can throw at you.

PairO'Dice Lost
2012-12-22, 04:15 PM
That's amazingly too good.

Not in the slightest. Rerolls are worth roughly +3-+4 on a d20. Factotums can add that or more to their attacks at 1st level with Int to attack, shiba protectors add that or more to attack and damage with every attack at around 6th level, warblades can reroll one attack every other round at +2 at 7th level. The fighter getting Nice Things as his one class feature at that level is not a problem.


And your objection doesn't change the fundamental point: 3.X fighters are based on feats, so the only way to fix them is to fix the feats and make the feats go further for fighters; or else scrap the fighter entirely, which is viable, I guess, but it hits the nostalgia kind of hard.

Fighters are based on feats currently, and fixing the feats is certainly a good thing, but they also need exclusive class features and they need those fighter-only feat benefits to be strong ones.


When creating or modifying classes, I generally try not to step too hard on the toes of other classes. The Fighter can be good at resisting fear, but not as good as the Paladin. Similarly, the Paladin, Ranger, and Barbarian can all be good in outright, straight combat, but should never be as good as a Fighter (but they make up for this with class features that make them more useful in other areas or against specific foes).

Please remember as well that the fighter fix I posted is meant to be played alongside numerous other revisions to the entire system, including, for example, entirely eliminating 8th and 9th level spells; making sure that EVERYTHING gets a save (except magic missile), a cross-examination and refinement of every single one of the remaining 400+ spells to bring them into balance, and other changes.

The fighter isn't as good at resisting fear as the paladin if he gets immunity 3-4 levels later, and giving a measly +6 by 20th level is less powerful than one day-long 5th level spell from the party casters or making Will a good save, even with the changes you're making. Giving the fighter a limited, situational bonus like that is precisely the problem I mentioned earlier of being too cautious when boosting the fighter.


As mentioned in the thread itself, those abilities come from the "Dead Levels" article. They aren't meant to have game impact; they're there to prevent the "special" column from being empty.

Remember that the "Dead Levels" pair of articles are specifically talking about filling in dead levels without changing the balance of power amongst classes. They're neat, and flavorful, but they're basically intended to be Tongue of the Sun and Moon.

Which is great for an article on flavor-only abilities, but if you want to actually fix the fighter you need something with more oomph.


I'd argue that's not nearly as good. After all, a 10th-level Fighter has a base Will save of +3, but a base Fortitude save of +7 - which translates to being 20% more likely to make any given save. I would call that significant.

A natural 1 on a Fortitude save only happens 5% of the time. I would call that insignificant.

1) The point of the comparison was to show that Steadfast Determination is unlimited-use, not that it's better than the suggest class feature--although it happens to indeed be better, since the difference between a Wis mod of +1 or +2 and a Con mod of +4 to +6 at 10th level thanks to Con as a secondary stat and an amulet of health is also a 20% difference or more.

2) Not failing saves on natural 1s is good for things like massive damage saves, poisons, and other things that are dangerous because of volume of rolls rather than high save DCs, but again the point was that there's an additional benefit on top of the unlimited-use bonus.


What the Hell kind of games are you playing that you need it more than 10 times per day at 20th level? Again, at will once per round is amazingly too good; if it's usable that often then what's the sense in limiting it at all? At that point it makes significantly more sense to just say "for all saves the Fighter uses his Fortitude save instead of his Reflex or Will saves," but that's way too good.

Are you saying that by 20th level your characters don't make 10 or more Ref or Will saves in a single day? If you're going by the established guidelines of roughly 4 encounters of roughly 3-5 rounds per day with roughly 1-4 enemies in each based on relative encounter difficulty, needing to make one save every three rounds will use up all 10; if you're doing something more realistic involving a few larger set-piece battles with a long-lived "boss" enemy or lots of weaker ones, you'll need to make more than 10 saves as well.

The purpose of making it usable once per round is that it's good against single enemies or single spells but not as much against lots of enemies or multiattackers, so it's more a "screw you" to casters and debuffers without being a "screw you" to other martial characters.


Might as well give Archer-type rangers unlimited +5 Slaying ammunition while we're at it.

There's thinking big, and then there's building Hulking Hurler: the Base Class. Your suggestions lean towards the latter.

I fail to see how a noticeable bonus to one save per round is going to break anything, particularly considering that that one save per round could be a SoL like said slaying arrows or hold monster or whatever.

A fighter can expect to have around a +25 Fort save by 20th level (+12 base, +8 Con, +5 resistance), while the save DCs he needs to worry about are around DC 27 (10 base + 10 half level + 7ish key stat for monsters, 10 base + 9 spell level + 8ish key stat for casters). That's a pretty darn good success rate. However, the fighter's Ref save of +17 (standard fighter, +6 base, +6 Dex tops, +5 resistance) or +20 (your fix, +9 base) and Will save of +14 at best (+6 base, +3 Wis maybe, +5 resistance) have a much lower success rate; a Will-targeting effect has a 60% success rate, as opposed to the 5% success rate of a Fort-targeting effect.

If a single failed save can take the fighter out of the combat--even nerfed SoDs can have a big effect, and the difference between full damage and half damage on a blasting spell could do it too--then giving him the tools to resist those saves is a good thing.


I don't remember "limited in capability and constrained in focus" ever being stated as design requirements or even desired characteristics.
Mundane in theme, however, definitely a must.

That's precisely the point: they're not requirements or at all desired, but many people assume those anyway.

As I said before, if you try to make a fighter fix that gives him a broad range of abilities or makes him anything more than "the guy who full attacks every round" people start to complain. Even the exceptionally thematically-mundane warblade is accused of being "too anime" and overpowered, when his most powerful and flashy maneuvers are literally nothing more than "full attack twice," "deal lots of damage and Con damage," "deal lots and lots of damage," "deal lots of damage and possibly insta-kill someone," and "charge and stun someone," all of which are just improved versions of things that a low-level fighter could do with Stunning Fist, a poisoned blade, and lucky damage rolls.


EDIT: Djinn, don't swordsage me here, we're talking about the warblade. :smallwink:


Which would be boring, and probably to good, yes. That said, once you get above 5/day, it may as well just be at will: that sort of number tracking is probably unnecessary. I'm not sure what I'd recommend here, but I don't like either your ability, nor the one suggested by Po'D (although I do like the Con on Will saves and not failing Fort saves).
[...]
None of Po'D's suggestions are Hulking Hurler big, nor anywhere close. I would argue that, although his save suggestion was a bit boring (if I'm interpreting it correctly as "always uses Fortitude in place of Will"), he hasn't come CLOSE to making the Fighter overpowered.

I wasn't trying to make a new and interesting ability at all--I've been hammering the "options, not numbers" point as much as you have--I was trying to take the existing "sub Fort for other saves" mechanic and make it worthwhile. I addressed the per-round and power level points above.

Djinn_in_Tonic
2012-12-22, 04:29 PM
EDIT: Djinn, don't swordsage me here, we're talking about the warblade. :smallwink:

This made me smile more than it had any right to. :smallbiggrin:



I wasn't trying to make a new and interesting ability at all--I've been hammering the "options, not numbers" point as much as you have--I was trying to take the existing "sub Fort for other saves" mechanic and make it worthwhile. I addressed the per-round and power level points above.

I know. My comment was more directed at the fact that the ability, while good, was still not enough to being the fighter up to par and also uninteresting: reinforcing the concept, basically, that better numbers alone won't cut it, which is something we both heartily agree on.

Amechra
2012-12-22, 06:20 PM
Eh, true about the combos thing; I just put that limit on it because I couldn't think of the wording that you used, and the way I was going to type it would have allowed them to use maneuvers as attack actions, so...

Considering that, in the fix I made a while back (which is kinda crappy but eh) basically kept fighting even when dead/dominated/whatevs at higher levels...

The "fix" was tier 4, but I wasn't trying for Tier 3 anyway.

One of my early 'brews was basically "the Fighter, if he could use metamagic feats on his attacks." It was surprisingly viable as a concept (might have to redo that one.)

Another 'brew got mobility through eventually just getting all the movement types; flight was only in a straight line, though, since it was supposed to be a better form of "jumping."

Also, they could shake off petrification and the like.

Just throwing those out as ideas to pillage.

vasharanpaladin
2012-12-22, 06:48 PM
I don't remember "limited in capability and constrained in focus" ever being stated as design requirements or even desired characteristics.
Mundane in theme, however, definitely a must.

As long as you remember that this is a fantasy game and thus "mundane" does not equate to "must be constrained in all ways by laws of nature and physics." :smallannoyed:

As I see it, if deliberately bending the laws of reality over your knee is "magic," then a "mundane" PC is one who does it incidentally. If you don't get magic, you get stunting, that's how it should go. :smallamused:

Yitzi
2012-12-22, 07:21 PM
A decent idea, and something I believe Pathfinder attempted, though not very well from what little I saw. I've been trying to think up a satisfactory rule of my own along these lines, but am not great at it

Create "backgrounds" in addition to classes; each background gives a few related skills, a few points per level to spend on those skills, and possibly a few extra boosts (such as Fast Movement). Each background can only go with certain classes (and class feature options); once you take a non-allowed class or feature you stop getting background bonuses (but keep what you already have.)


although it wasn't a Fighter that put me there, it was a Swashbuckler who I conceptualized as having Perform: Dance. There's just no way fancy footwork isn't in-character for a Swashbuckler.

That's just a poor envisioning of the class; it should probably be more similar to Duelist.

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-23, 01:54 AM
What, giving the Fighter at least one assured hit per round?

A Fighter shouldn't get one guaranteed hit per round for the same reason that there should be no spell with "Save: No; SR: No." Everything should have a chance of failure beyond the critical fail, at least in theory.

Although, having said that, while the armor class of monsters does rise as CR goes up, it does not increase nearly as much as the Fighter's ability to add on bonuses to attack rolls. Or in other words, as level increases, the Fighter (and indeed other full-BAB classes) are pretty much garunteed one hit per round anyway.

Consider the AC of a Balor, for example - 35. A 20th level Fighter can be reasonably expected to have a 26 Strength at least (15 + 5 [from leveling] + 6 [magic item]), and a +5 weapon. Their first attack in a round, therefore, is at a +33. They hit on anything other than a 2 or 1: Apart from on a critical fail, they're all but guaranteed to hit anyway.

Keep in mind that a 26 Strength for a 20th-level Fighter would be pretty weak, too, given that they could have, for example, gotten their wizard friend to use some wishes on them, and it doesn't take any other possible buffs into account either.

The problem with the Fighter has never been its ability to hit things; it does that just fine already.


A: poor design, B: another sub-system for the Fighter tacked onto something other than the class itself, and C: a lot of effort for relatively little reward, unless you tack actual abilities to the feats...which is basically making them Stances or Maneuvers.

A: I don't see why.
B: A sub-system? It's the feat system, it just gives more bang to a Fighter.
C: Trust me, from experience, the reward is definitely worth the effort. Although thanks to the Internet it's really just trolling around looking for other people's effort and then applying it to your own game.


I don't see a problem with hitting the nostalgia though. Sometimes nostalgia is just that: looking at something that wasn't actually that good and remembering it fondly. Play it if you want, but changing it around is, in effective, changing what you're remembering. Why not just use something superior, if you're going to alter it anyway?

Curiously, fixing the Fighter is actually based around looking at something that wasn't actually that good and remembering it fondly while acknowleding that it was wasn't that good and resolving to fix it.

Not sure what you'd call that, but "nostalgia" seems right.

As for why we keep plugging away at the Fighter rather than just switching to Warblade, it's because I'd rather keep playing the thing that has the je ne sais quoi that the Warblade lacks. It's...a hollow, empty thing. The fact that it has a class feature that makes it directly ape the Fighter doesn't help.


Then it's not that apt for this conversation, which (given the opening post) seems to be assuming a Core environment. I also find it odd that you'd revise magic completely, but not do the same for martial classes. Still, that's neither here nor there: it's not my revision.

Please note that even assuming a core environment, the Fighter I posted is better than the Core Fighter for having exactly the same feat progression, plus better saves, more skill points and a better skill selection, and actual class features alongside the feats. So it still works as a valid example of a fix.

Also please note that I did refine every core class, feat, and spell. The casters were powered down, yes, but the martial classes like rangr and paladin were powered up.


Also remember...the Tiers measure power somewhat (except for Tier 2, which is just an odd tier), but they REALLY measure versatility

It would be good to remember, too, that the reason why Tier-1s are Tier-1 is because they can do literally everything; and the Tier-2s are Tier-2 because they can do nearly everything. They're not just versatile; they render everything below them actually unnecessary. Why have a Fighter when you can polymorph or summon in a creature or have an animal companion? Why have a rogue when you have find traps and knock? Why have a Ranger when you have the Divination school?

Tier-2 is not a design goal; Tier-2 is something to be avoided, not as fervantly as Tier-1, but fervantly nonetheless.


5% is not an insignificant statistic assuming the average lifespan of a PC and the number of Fortitude saves rolled. Plus it's a good example of a dead-level filler that's more interesting and fun that +1 to saves against fear: Sure, you might never use it and might never need it...but when you DO? MAN are you glad you have it. It feels GREAT, and doesn't have much of a game impact until it pops out to save the day once in a blue moon.

Bear in mind that "treats a 1 on a d20 roll normally and not as an automatic failure" is in D&D something restricted to gods. Unless you're comfortable awarding high-level Fighters an ability comperable to that of a Divine Rank of 1 being, I don't see how you could be okay with this.*

Further, for every time that that "treats a 1 on a Fort save normally" pops up feels great and saves the day, it will several times come up on a Fortitude save that the failure of which essentially does not matter for.

And finally, while 5% is not insignificant over the average lifespan of a PC, remember that critical failures of all kinds occur far for often for the DM, by virtue of making far more dice rolls. I've always considered this to be much more of a balancing factor: for every time the player fails spectacularly, the DM fails more.


The fighter isn't as good at resisting fear as the paladin if he gets immunity 3-4 levels later,

I'd disagree: immunity is immunity, and who cares when the Fighter and the Paladin got it if both have it by the time save VS fear starts becoming relevant anyway.


Which is great for an article on flavor-only abilities, but if you want to actually fix the fighter you need something with more oomph.

Now, I'm only guessing, but it's entirely possible here that this is why I ensured that "physical prowess" was never the only thing gained at a given level, except 19, which is really just the waiting room for level 20 anyway.


Are you saying that by 20th level your characters don't make 10 or more Ref or Will saves in a single day?

I'm saying that by 20th level my characters don't make 10 or more Ref or Will saves in a single day that actually require a replacement with a Fortitude save, yes.


If a single failed save can take the fighter out of the combat--even nerfed SoDs can have a big effect, and the difference between full damage and half damage on a blasting spell could do it too--then giving him the tools to resist those saves is a good thing.

This, to my eye, argues only that spells are overpowered, not that fighters are underpowered.

---------------------------------------------------
*To be frank, actually, I'm not at all opposed to all 20th-level characters automatically gaining Divine Rank 0, but even then that's still 1 DR shy of "treat a 1 on a d20 roll normally." By the time you hit levels 16-20, you're probably bumping shoulders with gods anyway, and can pretty much duplicate everything found in the Illiad and Odyssey anyway.

willpell
2012-12-23, 02:03 AM
Okay, Rogue Shadows, I read your example feat - personally I consider it way overcomplected, but there's a lot of that going around. It reminds me of the Devotion feats, which I just studied in depth for the first time yesterday; they all have a ton of moving parts, and IMO this is too much for something you get as many of as feats - cleric domains, on which the Devotion feats are based, are a much better example because you only ever have two of them on a cleric, and so they very much define that cleric's identity. (It probably goes without saying that I have yet to dare trying to read the Tactical feats.) Ardent mantles, Illumian power words, the Warlock Power Sources that PersonMan homebrewed a while back...these are good examples of the kind of "high gear" character widgets that every character ought to get a very small number of. Feats, rather, seem like "low gear" wigdgets that you just plug in and forget about; they shouldn't require constant recalculation, you shouldn't ever be at risk of forgetting they exist or failing to apply their abilities, they ought to be written right into the formula of the most basic abilities of your character. "Attack bonus = BAB + STRMOD + Weapon Focus". Bam, that's perfection. I could see raising Weapon Focus to a lot more than +1 (I'd have to play out some test battles between Fighters and non-Fighters before I was sure how much I considered fair), but I definitely don't want it to be super-complicated.



2) The feats must be better when Fighter has them. There's nothing wrong with a class that is almost entirely oriented around the Feat system as long as it gets more bang for its buck from that feat system. Otherwise, Barbarian or frickin' Paladin are always going to be better choices.

No, because Barbarian or frickin' Paladin do not get as many feats! They in fact hardly get any - 8 if human, 7 otherwise, plus maybe Flaws. A Fighter 20 gets more than double that, which in and of itself ought to be enough to make it a very healthy alternative, if everything else were lined up right.


The Fighter also needs better skill selection, including, at the very least, Listen and Spot (there is no reason for these two skills to not be class skills for EVERY class).

On the contrary, I usually forget those skills even exist, both as player and as DM; they're more of a nuisance than a need. The encounter begins whenever the DM says it does; if he wants you surprised, you will be. I only ever spend points on Spot or Listen if it's for flavor reasons, and usually when I take Listen ranks I'm thinking more "keep your ears open for rumors while mingling at the Duchess's party, see if you can learn some hint of what Lord Thistlebottom is plotting" than "notice the goblin placing a bomb mystic elemental boomingflasher crystal in your saddlebags". Likewise I easily forget the distinction between Spot and Search, and tend to think of them as two different skills for doing the same thing, where wizards are good at one and clerics are good at the other but the difference is mostly flavor.


One thing I've learned about internet forums is that none of them are nearly as friendly as they wish they were. Stricter rules just leads to more veiling, not less antagonism.

I would really like to sig this, as it perfectly mirrors my opinion of this particular forum.


Things that Make Rogue Shadows sad: Threads that are closed due to "going off topic."

With you 100%. I've found enough people that feel this way that I sometimes think we really need to create our own forum. "Giant Just Outside of the Playground", or something...do all our conversating there, still on the same topics but a more relaxed attitude, and link to it in our signatures here so that people who like our homebrew will know where we hang out.


It's entirely possible to build a character who sucks at dungeon-delving but nevertheless has amazing skills and abilities that can be measured and represented in-game, rather than by pure fluff.

What it needs is better rules for arbitrating the rewards to be earned thereby. If you don't go out and kill stuff, the rules don't give any guideline as to how much XP you should earn; the GM just has to make up a number off the top of his head. Interestingly, lots of skills govern production of gold, so if you ruled there was no such thing as a dungeon and never let anybody get into a fight, nobody would ever earn XP, but they could easily grind Profession or Craft and get rich gradually, making tons of gear that would come in handy if they ever did dungeon-delve, while if dungeon-delving is an option, those mountains of gold with dragons sleeping atop them completely wreck the economy and make any other livelihood pointless. Which leads to the other thing I think the game could use - better rules for simulating economies of time and scale, so that there's a realistic idea of how much money should flow in and out of one person's pockets over the course of time.

The affiliation rules both touch on this issue and utterly fail to address it; sure there are ways to determine how much capital your business generates in a month, and how likely your private army is to be able to torch that business - but it doesn't say how many affiliations exist within how many square miles of land, and how many simultaneous violence and espionage checks are getting made nation-wide per month, and so it falls far short of actually being able to determine events on a nationwide scale. You have to do all the work of setting that stuff up yourself, and it's going to be absurdly complicated, and frankly I have too little realistic understanding of social dynamics to be much good at it. But what little canonical info is available is about half-lame by my standards (the Sun Fane vs. the Troglodytes vs. the Shadow Caravan, bletch), so I don't have the option of just running with the printed material, nor do I have the tools I need to homebrew my own 100%. Sux.


Every character I've ever built has at least a few skill points spent like that...Craft (basketweaving), Profession (vintner), Perform (stand-up)...

Same here, but unfortunately it often leads to a critical shortage of skill points for things that have actual mechanical effect. A merchant/sorceress of mine makes a great example: she shorted her Profession: Merchant check so she could afford a cross-class Forgery rank, just because she's an Illumian and it seems like the ability to detect forgeries is something they should always have. Another example is a Goblin Thug who I decided to put into the Restenford Sewer Workers guild, which meant he needed ranks in Bluff, Disguise, Hide, Listen, Sense Motive and Spot. The Thug is a sort of hybrid of Fighter and Rogue, but of those six rogue skills, Bluff is the only one the Thug gains. So I had to retrain one of his feats into Open-Minded in order to afford just two of those skills, reducing his penalty for joining the Affiliation to a mere -8. Sigh....

Djinn_in_Tonic
2012-12-23, 02:11 AM
A Fighter shouldn't get one garunteed hit per round for the same reason that there should be no spell with "Save: No; SR: No." Everything should have a chance of failure beyond the critical fail, at least in theory.

There is a chance on rolling two d20s. It's just very small.

[/quote]Although, having said that, while the armor class of monsters does rise as CR goes up, it does not increase nearly as much as the Fighter's ability to add on bonuses to attack rolls. Or in other words, as level increases, the Fighter (and indeed other full-BAB classes) are pretty much garunteed one hit per round anyway.[/quote]

True. This effectively negates the previous point...now we're just talking about upping his average damage per round.


The problem with the Fighter has never been its ability to hit things; it does that just fine already.


Indeed. I wasn't suggesting that as a fix...just suggesting that it wouldn't be overpowered, which someone earlier claimed it would be.


A: I don't see why.

It's poor design because it's basically doubling or more the text of dozens of feats just to serve the Fighter. It means that non-Fighters will have to pour through those options and end up feeling upset they can't use those, and thus it will make feats in general seem...less inviting. It's just awkward.


B: A sub-system? It's the feat system, it just gives more bang to a Fighter.

Adding a "Fighter-Only" clause to every feat is, in effect, adding a sub-system to feats specifically for the Fighter. Urgh. Sloppy, imho. Your mileage may vary.


C: Trust me, from experience, the reward is definitely worth the effort.

And I feel the effort would be better spent working on something that fits more gracefully into the game and the class system.


Curiously, fixing the Fighter is actually based around looking at something that wasn't actually that good and remembering it fondly while acknowleding that it was wasn't that good and resolving to fix it.

Not sure what you'd call that, but "nostalgia" seems right.

I concede the point. Although I fail to see why the Warblade doesn't also fit this, as it still smacks face, still has Fighter feats, and so forth. But then again that is the crux of this discussion.


As for why we keep plugging away at the Fighter rather than just switching to Warblade, it's because I'd rather keep playing the thing that has the je ne sais quoi that the Warblade lacks. It's...a hollow, empty thing. The fact that it has a class feature that makes it directly ape the Fighter doesn't help.

How is it hollower and/or emptier than a class that is literally a blank slate? *is puzzled*


Tier-2 is not a design goal; Tier-2 is something to be avoided, not as fervantly as Tier-1, but fervantly nonetheless.

I'd disagree. Tier 1 and 2 have their place, but it's all dependent on where your balance point is. Usually I feel the balance is Tier 3...but that doesn't mean that Tier 4-6 is acceptable either.


Bear in mind that "treats a 1 on a d20 roll normally and not as an automatic failure" is in D&D something restricted to gods. Unless you're comfortable awarding high-level Fighters an ability comperable to that of a Divine Rank of 1 being, I don't see how you could be okay with this.

I'd be perfectly fine with it. It's something that can be given by the feat PairO'Dice mentioned, after all. It's also a relatively minor ability in the long run, so...yeah. I have no issue with handing it out to PCs, especially since the Divine rules are...silly.


Further, for every time that that "treats a 1 on a Fort save normally" pops up feels great and saves the day, it will several times come up on a Fortitude save that the failure of which essentially does not matter for.

And that's fine. It still prevented SOMETHING, however minor, and that's fine. Again, it's supposed to be a MINOR ability, not something huge. This sort of functionality works for me.


And finally, while 5% is not insignificant over the average lifespan of a PC, remember that critical failures of all kinds occur far for often for the DM, by virtue of making far more dice rolls. I've always considered this to be much more of a balancing factor: for every time the player fails spectacularly, the DM fails more.

...this matters to this argument how? Not all NPCs will be Fighters, after all. Those that aren't won't have that ability, and those that are have the same odds of preventing auto-fails as the PCs.

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-23, 02:36 AM
I could see raising Weapon Focus to a lot more than +1 (I'd have to play out some test battles between Fighters and non-Fighters before I was sure how much I considered fair), but I definitely don't want it to be super-complicated.

I'd like to take this time to reiterate something I said in my previous post: Nothing with a full BAB is going to have a problem landing at least one attack per round anyway, barring a natural 1, which is the entire point of a natural 1 anyway.

Believe it or not, the problem with Weapon Focus isn't that the bonus is so small, as much as no matter how large the bonus, there's no real reason to take it anyway if all it's going to offer is a bonus to attack.


No, because Barbarian or frickin' Paladin do not get as many feats! They in fact hardly get any - 8 if human, 7 otherwise, plus maybe Flaws. A Fighter 20 gets more than double that, which in and of itself ought to be enough to make it a very healthy alternative, if everything else were lined up right.

This doesn't matter as much as it should. Also, consider that most class abilities could basically be considered feats with a prerequisite of the class and level they're gained at, such as...

Sneak Attack
You can sneak attack
Prerequisite: Rogue 1
Benefit: You can sneak attack for +1d6 damage, plus an additional +1d6 at 3rd level and every 2 Rogue levels thereafter.
Normal: You can attack, and be sneaky about it, but you can't sneak attack.
Special: Rogue is my favorite class.

The trade-off is that Feats can be selected whereas class features are by and large set; to balance this trade-off, however, feats are in general weaker than class features. This is fair...

...however, when you get a class like Fighter, which is built around Feats as their class feature, what you end up with is a class built around having a wide selection of class features, but none of which are as good as the pre-set class features of other classes - and worse, the other classes can take the Fighter's class features alongside their own!

Put another way, grab the Fighter class table and replace every "Bonus Feat" line with a bonus feat of your choice; so, for example, Weapon Focus at level 1, Power Attack at level 2, and so on. Having completed the class, look it over and compare it to, say, the Ranger. See the problem? And now remember that the Ranger can take some of those class features himself!

While it's neat that two different Fighters can end up with very different feat selections, all this means is that we get basically a chassis that can create a multitude of versatile but weak sub-classes.


On the contrary, I usually forget those skills even exist, both as player and as DM; they're more of a nuisance than a need. The encounter begins whenever the DM says it does; if he wants you surprised, you will be.

See, I don't do that, and a good DM doesn't either.


I would really like to sig this, as it perfectly mirrors my opinion of this particular forum.

Go right ahead.


Interestingly, lots of skills govern production of gold, so if you ruled there was no such thing as a dungeon and never let anybody get into a fight, nobody would ever earn XP, but they could easily grind Profession or Craft and get rich gradually

Which, in fact, entirely matches up to the XP system and, well, life in general: you only grow (gain XP) when challenged, and there's only so much challenge you can get when your daily life consists of tending the bar of the Sleeping Dragon Inn, as opposed to, say, using a bar to bludgeon in the skull of a sleeping dragon.

(which probably won't work, hence you'll be in battle, hence, XP).

Simply put, adventurers take more risks and so get more reward, and challenge themselves more and so get more XP. A character who does everyday stuff, even extraordinarily, shouldn't get comperable XP to a character who does extraordinary stuff, even if it's everyday for them.

I subscribe to the theory that every human who has ever historically lived can be accurately represented as a level 5 character max, and usually only around level 2 or 3 at most. Napoleon, Alexander, Einstein, Sargon of Akkad (the first emperor, of anything, ever - more people need to know his name), Muhammed Ali...and experience gained from just going through everyday life is usually enough to get you there.

Once you hit level 6, you enter the real superhuman territory. Doing ordinary stuff shouldn't be enough to hit level 6, let alone level 20.

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-23, 02:52 AM
Indeed. I wasn't suggesting that as a fix...just suggesting that it wouldn't be overpowered, which someone earlier claimed it would be.

Here's the problem: a +33 to attack pretty much guarantees a hit as-is, so all a re-roll is going to be is going to either cancel a critical fail - which I do not feel are enough of a problem as to require a re-roll mechanic per round, as they only come up 5% of the time, and if you can cancel them, then what's the point of having them? Critical hits feel great but critical fails build tension and can be dramatically fun in their own right - or to try and fish for a critical hit, which can already be pumped to come up often enough with things like keen and Improved Critical* that giving a free re-roll per round essentially doubles the chances of getting a critical hit, which robs the critical hit of its gravitas.

------------------------
*Bad feat, I know, but it's a valid example

Djinn_in_Tonic
2012-12-23, 03:00 AM
Here's the problem: a +33 to attack pretty much guarantees a hit as-is, so all a re-roll is going to be is going to either cancel a critical fail - which I do not feel are enough of a problem as to require a re-roll mechanic per round, as they only come up 5% of the time, and if you can cancel them, then what's the point of having them? Critical hits feel great but critical fails build tension and can be dramatically fun in their own right - or to try and fish for a critical hit, which can already be pumped to come up often enough with things like keen and Improved Critical* that giving a free re-roll per round essentially doubles the chances of getting a critical hit, which robs the critical hit of its gravitas.

------------------------
*Bad feat, I know, but it's a valid example

Correct. It's not a GOOD thing to give Fighters. My only point was that it wasn't overpowered. That was, in fact, the entirety of my point. Hence why I stated such in my last post.

willpell
2012-12-23, 03:05 AM
"There is one thing even more vital to science than intelligent methods; and that is, the sincere desire to find out the truth, whatever it may be. " --Charles Sandera Pierce.

Never heard of him. I've seen my quote attributed to Niels Bohr, who I admire and respect; if it's actually from Fitzgerald, who is nothing but a vaguely familiar name to me (as opposed to this Mr. Pierce who isn't even that), well, whatever, but I might not have fallen so in love with the quote years ago if it had been attributed to someone I didn't know.


When you say you have to kick the golf ball, that implies that you're doing something useless for a round, which isn't the case; you can make a normal attack.

Which is no better than the attack of a fallen paladin or a barbarian. While the fighter still has his Weapon Specialization and numerous other feats.


Creating the warblade was scrapping the fighter and starting from the ground up, that's the whole point.

Except that they didn't scrap the fighter. They didn't publish a new PHB with the Warblade instead; they didn't announce official errata which said all Fighters in published books were now Warblades instead. They didn't make learning this new maneuvers nonsense mandatory as a way of playing the game (until 4E); they left it as an optional subsystem which is therefore easily ignored, not considered a cornerstone of the setting. Same problem that Psionics and Incarnum have, they're not fully integrated and not everyone who plays D&D 3E is familiar with them, so they can't really be said to have "replaced" anything.


You can talk about imagining the possibilities all you want, but take a look around this and other forums; invariably, when someone posts a fighter fix that lets him break the laws of physics, use some sort of resource system, makes him a commander or diplomatic type, or similar, people complain that it's too anime, or too complicated, or "not a fighter anymore."

Sad but true. I even do it myself; most homebrew instantly turns me off by seeming excessive and gratuitous. Honestly wish I knew why I'm on both sides of this particular fence.


Precisely. There's literally nothing about the warblade that can't be explained by exactly the same mundane means as the fighter's feats

There's at least one thing, and that's just at 1st level: the Wolf Fang stance that gives you Scent. No amount of mundane training will give you a dog's ability to recognize people individually by scent, even if they shower daily and don't wear perfume, and follow their scent trail for miles over bare rock just by putting your nose to the ground. That one maneuver at least makes the Warblade quasi-mystical, and there's probably a few others where the blade magic flavor is more than skin deep. Plus the use of terms like "initiator level" strongly discourages you from feeling like this isn't an arcane magical system. You "use" a fighter feat; you "initiate" a maneuver, and that alone is enough to make it feel foreign and spooky in a way that contradicts Fighter flavor.


they called it blade magic, noted in the beginning that they were inspired by anime, etc.

I think it was more wuxia than anime, which is probably just as well.


So your DM is wiling to go way out of his way to houserule in an extra skill for your fighter (even involving feats and flaws and stuff when he could have just said "You want Perform? That won't break anything. Ta-da, you have Perform."), but won't do the same for any other class?

I am my DM, and my reluctance to just throw the rules out the window whenever they inconvenience my build is an attempt at preserving versimilitude and avoiding that semblance of gratuitous excess I mentioned before. I follow the rules as closely as my short attention span will permit me to, up until the moment when I conclusively decide that they MUST be changed. A few of the rulings I have actually made to date:

* The Improved Shield Bash feat allows you to gain the +1 AC of a Buckler even while fighting with that arm, despite the fact that the Buckler doesn't actually bash.

* Body Adjustment is a Level 2, not Level 3, power on the Life Mantle list, so that an Ardent who already has Touch of Life needn't pay 5 pp to gain 1d12 HP when he's already able to heal a guaranteed 10 for the same price (nevermind that the latter works on others). Instead he now pays 3 PP for either 1d12 or a flat 6, assuming he knows both powers, and he has a better choice for the 2nd level than the rather forgettable From the Brink, while 3rd still offers him (I think) Body Purification. Psychic Warriors can already get Body Adjustment for 3 PP, while only Psions have to pay 5 for it; since Ardents have a d8 and are thus closer to PsyWars's d10 than Psions' d4, it seemed like they deserve this generosity.

* A Divine Mind need not match the alignment of his deity, as his powers are psionic and come from his own idea of the deity, not the real deity which he would get spells from if he were a cleric.

* The Divine Mind's Wild Talent is replaced with Hidden Talent, a feat that is not otherwise available, and thus the Divine Mind has one known power and two PP to manifest it with starting at 1st level. He remains devoid of other powers and gains no additonal PP (except from his key ability) until 5th level, as is true for the printed version.

* The Divine Mind's Psychic Aura initially takes 1 minute, not 1 hour, to switch; it still can't effectively be done during a fight, but there's no sense in ruling that all his buddies have to just stand around doing nothing for half the day while he twiddles through the dial. I may eventually go all the way to the Marshal and Dragon Shaman aura systems for the DivMind, but he gets a lot more auras to choose from as well as both d10 HD and mild casting ability, so I didn't want to be too generous all at once to even one of the worst classes as-written.

* Because my game does not use psionics/magic transparency, I ruled that Psionic Major Creation can create Cold Iron, unlike the Major Creation spell, as the prohibition is due to Cold Iron's status as an anti-magical metal. I'm figuring that there's some inherently anti-psionic substance which the spell can create and the power can't, but haven't figured out what it should be as yet.

* The Diadem of Purelight soulmeld creates a light so mystically benevolent that it does not trigger the light sensitivities of orcs, drow, and similar subterraneans creatures (who are as likely to be player characters as enemies in my game). The same is true of the sun in the Neutral Good outer plane of Eden (known in the canon as Elysia); a Drow can enjoy a walk on the sun in that plane without any negative effects, though of course only a few would want to, even given the option.

* I ruled that you can't sleep in a Rope Trick because you have to actually keep holding onto the rope after climbing up into the extradimensional space, which doesn't offer anything you can use as ground. I found this flavorful, being inspired by an 80s movie poster for Jack in the Beanstalk or something (Kurt Russel was in it I think; it was by the artist who did the Indy Jones and Star Wars posters, that's the only thing I remember for sure), which shows people climbing a rope miles in the sky; I figured it would make the spell more cool while also making it no longer an enabler for the 15-minute adventuring day (other such spells still exist for the moment, but at least they're above 2nd level).

* Item Familiars are available, but not to spellcasters of any variety, including psions and the like; I will decide on a case-by-case basis exactly who can have them, but in general the only caster-type who qualifies is the Truenamer, and high-tier non-casters like Warblade are probably also prohibited from using this absurdly powerful subsystem. Even on Fighters I don't use it very often, but it is an option for making characters both more powerful and more interesting if they seem to badly need the help; it is emphatically not a way of making Tier 1 classes even more dominant. This is justified in-flavor as a spellcaster having too much mystical "radiation" for the spirit of the item to be capable of awakening, but that's an admitted kludge; it's really just a mechanical choice.

* I've changed the listed alignments of a few of the classic Ten Dragons, as well as including a few extras to create a balanced set that fits with my gameworld's themes; as a result, Dragon Shamans and the like who are tied to a traditional dragon may have different alignment options. Green and Black dragons, for instance, are now both Neutral Evil, so Shamans of either can be any Evil alignment but not Lawful or Chaotic Neutral. This is because I never felt there was anything terribly Lawful about Green dragons, while Blacks do seem adequately Chaotic but not quite as much so as Reds and Whites, and I wanted no more than two dragons per alignment. I consider black dragons to be representative of spite, and spite is a Neutral Evil motivation more than Chaotic, as it involves holding a grudge and plotting vengeance. So you can now be a tyrannical LE BDS who obeys the letter of the law while perverting its spirit, but not a whimsical roguish CN who taps into the spirit of acid-breathing swamp dragons while composing bawdy poetry, and occasionally commiting petty theft to ensure he doesn't drift into Good.

* And of course there's my homebrew Celebrant cleric, listed in my signature, the only outright made-up class I currently allow in my game.

As you can see, I deal in nuance and do not rush into anything. The issue with the dancer-fighter was enough to convince me that I wanted to change something about the skill system, but I haven't yet decided what.


You do realize that if your DM has to be "willing to cooperate with that playstyle" and "bend the rules of reality a little in my favor so I can get to play who I'm playing" for a fighter then all of the touted benefits of a fighter (improvisation and so forth) are dependent on DM, rather than class?

Everything is dependent on DM; the DM runs the universe. And a class is more an identity than a set of rules; the rules are only there to help define the identity, and in some cases they do a poor job of it and should be changed.


Numbers don't matter in a fighter fix next to options.

If you want options, play a rogue. Fighters are about doing one thing and doing it well (in theory). They're supposed to be totally committed to their combat skills; options are contrary to their essence. Possessing more than a handful of interests outside fighting proves that the fighter hasn't been concentrating on fighting as hard as he should, and at that point I wouldn't let him take any more fighter levels.


If I'm coming off as unfriendly, I apologize; I'm more exasperated than anything. The ToB vs. fighter discussion comes up a lot, and repeating the same points over and over tends to make one sound more abrupt than one actually means to be.

Believe me, I get that. :smallsmile:


At 20th level, the fighter gets +6 on Will saves against fear? Whoopty-do. Just give him fear immunity at 6th level; the paladin has had it for three levels now, it won't break anything.

The paladin's fear immunity is mystical, a reward from the Force of Good Itself for being its unflinching champion and toeing the line of the Code of Conduct. Fighters dhouldn't be able to get complete immunity, because their lives are always in danger and they should value the edge that fear gives them in destroying the source of that fear. If anything I'd give a high-level fighter the ability to turn the -2 penalty of Shaken into a +2 bonus, which increases to +4 if he becomes Panicked, though he still has to run if able, he just fights instead of cowering if cornered. All this seems much more in-flavor. I'd probably make it a fighter feat rather than a class feature, so that anyone can get it but only fighters are likely to.

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-23, 03:06 AM
Correct. It's not a GOOD thing to give Fighters. My only point was that it wasn't overpowered. That was, in fact, the entirety of my point. Hence why I stated such in my last post.

I'd say anything that doubles your chances of rolling a natural 20 is, if not overpowered, then at the very least Hella good, especially once you get to the point that vorpal weapons become available.


Honestly wish I knew why I'm on both sides of this particular fence.

Because most people never fall evenly onto one side or another of a given issue.

PairO'Dice Lost
2012-12-23, 03:29 AM
Which is no better than the attack of a fallen paladin or a barbarian. While the fighter still has his Weapon Specialization and numerous other feats.

1) For the bazillionth time, the warblade can also have that and other fighter feats.

2) Serious question: Do you seriously consider the Weapon Focus/Weapon Specialization line to be some uber-awesome thing that puts the fighter head and shoulders above other martial classes, or are you just using one of the few fighter-only feats as an example? Because WS is really nothing to write home about--a waste of a feat, really--and the fighter getting +8 damage on a full attack pales in comparison to the extra damage of even the blandest maneuvers.


There's at least one thing, and that's just at 1st level: the Wolf Fang stance that gives you Scent. No amount of mundane training will give you a dog's ability to recognize people individually by scent, even if they shower daily and don't wear perfume, and follow their scent trail for miles over bare rock just by putting your nose to the ground. That one maneuver at least makes the Warblade quasi-mystical, and there's probably a few others where the blade magic flavor is more than skin deep.

Outside of D&D, warriors with excellent senses (of smell and otherwise) gained in a purely nonmagical way through training are practically a genre staple. Within D&D, you can acquire Scent nonmagically from several different sources, including the Fist of the Forest and Bloodhound PrCs; ToB just lets you get it sooner and easier, the same way Mithral Tornado drops the prerequisites for Whirlwind Attack to sensible levels (i.e. there are none outside of prior maneuvers).


Plus the use of terms like "initiator level" strongly discourages you from feeling like this isn't an arcane magical system. You "use" a fighter feat; you "initiate" a maneuver, and that alone is enough to make it feel foreign and spooky in a way that contradicts Fighter flavor.

Uncanny Dodge is based on "rogue level," Weapon Spec is based on "fighter level," Flurry of Blows is based on "monk level." It's called "initiator level" because multiple classes use maneuvers, not because it's inherently magical at all. And if using a thesaurus to spice things up makes maneuvers feel spooky, I don't know what to tell you.


I am my DM, and my reluctance to just throw the rules out the window whenever they inconvenience my build is an attempt at preserving versimilitude and avoiding that semblance of gratuitous excess I mentioned before. I follow the rules as closely as my short attention span will permit me to, up until the moment when I conclusively decide that they MUST be changed.

I repeat: you're willing to overrule and change things if you don't like the mechanics your fighter uses, but not willing to do the same for a warblade? If the very existence of Charging Minotaur offends you, just don't use it; with all the hyperbole about your fighter being "ruined and rendered worthless" to you if the slightest thing is out of place, I don't see why you wouldn't be willing to ignore a rule that doesn't even affect your character at all.


Everything is dependent on DM; the DM runs the universe. And a class is more an identity than a set of rules; the rules are only there to help define the identity, and in some cases they do a poor job of it and should be changed.

No, everything is not dependent on the DM unless you as DM choose to meddle. If the rules say you can do something, you can do it. If the rules say you can't do something, you can't do it. The DM can step in to change things at any time, but there's a big difference between "The rules let me accomplish X" and "I can accomplish X because the DM lets me." Classes with actual options can do things to affect the world without invoking DM pity even once; the fighter, not so much.


If you want options, play a rogue. Fighters are about doing one thing and doing it well (in theory). They're supposed to be totally committed to their combat skills; options are contrary to their essence. Possessing more than a handful of interests outside fighting proves that the fighter hasn't been concentrating on fighting as hard as he should, and at that point I wouldn't let him take any more fighter levels.

Actually, I'd say "being outdone in his own (and only) area of competence" proves that the fighter hasn't been concentrating on fighting as hard as he should; the barbarian, ranger, warblade, and a few others show that you can be competent at fighting and noncombat stuff with the same character.


The paladin's fear immunity is mystical, a reward from the Force of Good Itself for being its unflinching champion and toeing the line of the Code of Conduct. Fighters dhouldn't be able to get complete immunity, because their lives are always in danger and they should value the edge that fear gives them in destroying the source of that fear. If anything I'd give a high-level fighter the ability to turn the -2 penalty of Shaken into a +2 bonus, which increases to +4 if he becomes Panicked, though he still has to run if able, he just fights instead of cowering if cornered. All this seems much more in-flavor. I'd probably make it a fighter feat rather than a class feature, so that anyone can get it but only fighters are likely to.

The paladin's feat immunity is magical, but fear immunity in general doesn't have to be. There are plenty of justifications for being immune to fear nonmagically, within D&D and elsewhere.

"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain."


I'd say anything that doubles your chances of rolling a natural 20 is, if not overpowered, then at the very least Hella good, especially once you get to the point that vorpal weapons become available.

Increasing your chance to activate a somewhat underwhelming weapon quality by 4% isn't what I'd call "hella good"--really, it's usually more productive to reroll later iteratives to give them a better chance of hitting than to focus on your best iterative.

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-23, 03:47 AM
"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain."

Perhaps referencing a book wherein humans have been genetically bred and guided over 10,000 years by the mystical Bene Gesserit is not the best example of a normal human being able to be immune to fear, espcially since we can't know if the humans of the Padishah Empire are in any way human as we would use the term

Having said that, remember that that is a litany made to guard against fear that one is facing, or knowing that one is likely about to go into a situation where fear might become a problem. That sounds like someone who definitely thinks that might become afraid and so is using mind techniques to guard against it: they're activating their bonus to Saves VS Fear, not immunity to fear.

Nitpicky, I know, but a valid point nonetheless.


Increasing your chance to activate a somewhat underwhelming weapon quality by 4% isn't what I'd call "hella good"--really, it's usually more productive to reroll later iteratives to give them a better chance of hitting than to focus on your best iterative.

I'm still not comfortable introducing something that can be done at will per round regardless. Fighters can have nice things, just not this nice thing.


Outside of D&D, warriors with excellent senses (of smell and otherwise) gained in a purely nonmagical way through training are practically a genre staple. Within D&D, you can acquire Scent nonmagically from several different sources, including the Fist of the Forest and Bloodhound PrCs; ToB just lets you get it sooner and easier, the same way Mithral Tornado drops the prerequisites for Whirlwind Attack to sensible levels (i.e. there are none outside of prior maneuvers).

...oddly I'm actually going to chime in in support of you here: there's also just being a Gnome or a Half-Orc, which lets you take the Scent feat if your DM allows it.

(at least that was the case in 3.0, can't remember if that holds true in 3.5).

Anyway, otherwise I'm going to sum up the problem that all of us Fighter nostalgics have with the ToB maneuvers: They're Vancian. (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VancianMagic)


1. Effects are packaged into distinct powers; each power has one fixed purpose. A power that throws a ball of fire at an enemy just throws balls of fire, and generally cannot be "turned down" to light a cigarette, for instance.
2. Powers represent a kind of "bomb" which must be prepared in advance of actual use, and each prepared power can be used only once before needing to be prepared again.
3. Users have a finite capacity of prepared powers which is the de facto measure of their skill and/or power as users. A user using powers for combat is thus something like a living gun: he must be "loaded" with powers beforehand and can run out of "ammunition".

Warblade maneuvers conform to all three rules as listed above. So do Wizards. Their timetable is a little different, but note that the "prepared in advance" clause doesn't care if the preparing needs to happen per day or per round, only that it needs to be prepared at all (as opposed to, say, a spell-like ability, which does not need to be prepared). See the problem?

It's a Vancian system applied to Fighters. It's taking the spellcasting system and changing some names and effect types around and re-brandishing them as maneuvers, but at the end of the day, they're Vancian casting, and for 30+ years, Vancian systems have been the domain of magic-users, so giving the martial classes a Vancian system is basically like saying "Sure, the Fighter can have nice things, as long as the Fighter doesn't mind being a spellcaster in everything but name," which begs the question: why play a toned down Wizard when you can just play the Wizard? Even though he's not, by the strictest definition, a spellcaster, he is still using a system that is irrevocably associated with spellcasting in the mind of us Fighter nostalgics

It's like when Joe Store Owner has been fighting off random thugs and robbers in his bad neighborhood for 30 years and then one day finds his store has a bunch of Triads in it who are saying "Hey, you don't have to fight off random thugs and robbers anymore! But bad things happen to good people sometimes, so maybe you should float some cash our way every month, for protection."

willpell
2012-12-23, 03:55 AM
Correct. And you can fill them with more interesting things while still not changing the balance of power much at all.

The problem is that you then have to remember those things, even though they're largely irrelevant. This is the one thing I don't like about the Barbarian, my go-to "simple" class; he has a lot of abilities that he doesn't really need, like trap sense and improved uncanny doge (normal uncanny dodge is kind of a big deal, but improved only matters if you fight rogues). I'd rather that he had enough Damage Reduction to actually matter, for instance. Likewise the Rogue has a lot of little abilities that I don't care about, and would prefer had been made feats so that you'd only have to know about them if you chose to go out of your way to get them. The Fighter's lack of such "class features" is a plus in my book; it means "Thog elegant in Thog's simplicity" (which is ironic given that Thog is mostly a barbarian).


As long as you remember that this is a fantasy game and thus "mundane" does not equate to "must be constrained in all ways by laws of nature and physics." :smallannoyed:

As I see it, if deliberately bending the laws of reality over your knee is "magic," then a "mundane" PC is one who does it incidentally. If you don't get magic, you get stunting, that's how it should go. :smallamused:

I do think that fighters should be constrained in all ways by those laws, apart from any magic items or permanencied spells or the like they have access to, unless they have gods they can pray to directly for power or totemic spirits that will fudge the rules of physics for them. "Stunting" is generally a good way to break my suspension of disbelief. What I want instead is someone who does things that anyone can do, but somehow they always turn out perfectly in his case. An action hero never stumbles over a sidewalk crack while running after the perp, never has his gun go off in the holster when he hits the pavement, never dies of a subdural hemorrhage after being whacked with a big stick on the back of the head. He doesn't do anything that you couldn't do - but everything he does works better than it would have if you tried it, because he's Just That Good. There's nothing supernatural about it, just good luck and guts and highly-trained professional competence, but all of these hold out reliably in his case, and he never seems to suffer the frailties that beset lesser men, doing better at all the same tasks for no terribly obvious reason.



Believe it or not, the problem with Weapon Focus isn't that the bonus is so small, as much as no matter how large the bonus, there's no real reason to take it anyway if all it's going to offer is a bonus to attack.

I firmly disagree. Perhaps at level 20 you'll never need it (but by then it'll be the prerequisite for a lot of things you do need), but at level 1 it makes a huge difference. STRMOD +4, BAB +1, and you can't even afford a masterwork tool; if your opponents have +4 hide armor and a +2 heavy shield, you will notice every single +1 on your attack roll. And at slightly higher levels, a bigger-than-necessary attack bonus will let you use Combat Expertise, Power Attack, or various maneuvers and situations that impose little -2 penalties in exchange for some effect. Personally, I dread the moment when you are absolutely sure you can't miss except on a 1; it takes all the fun and suspense out of the game. But improving your odds from 15% to 20% is a big deal indeed, which is why I am in no great hurry to reach the higher levels, apart from the fact that they have all the cool stuff like dragons and beholders and so forth.


Also, consider that most class abilities could basically be considered feats with a prerequisite of the class and level they're gained at

That's something that I've often considered, and I think it might have been preferable, but I've never gotten a good handle on exactly how to balance everything. I do think the current feat supply is insufficient, which is why I eventually approved Flaws and just plain gave my players one extra "weak" feat for flavor reasons, but I haven't become comfortable with an across-the-board change yet.


See, I don't do that, and a good DM doesn't either.

That I forget I freely admit as a failing of mine, but that it's not super-relevant is more of a game theory thing with me. I don't believe the game needs to be "fair" or precisely realistic, unless you're running it as Sim City to amuse yourself; usually it exists for the benefit of the players, to tell a story revolving around their exploits. So it's totally reasonable to say "The goblins sneak up on you and catch you flat-footed" or even "the goblins put sleeping potion in your waterskins and you wake up strapped to an altar in a bloodstained temple", as long as you're going somewhere good with the story and will give the players a chance to do something fun (and it helps to have earned their trust; I don't recommend this scenario for first-timers who have no assurance that you're not just a sadist who wants to grief them).


Go right ahead.

Thankee kindly. At the rate I'm working through this thread, I should get it added no later than February....


Which, in fact, entirely matches up to the XP system and, well, life in general: you only grow (gain XP) when challenged, and there's only so much challenge you can get when your daily life consists of tending the bar of the Sleeping Dragon Inn, as opposed to, say, using a bar to bludgeon in the skull of a sleeping dragon.

This is true, but I think it should be reasonably possible to succeed in life while avoiding trouble; you just won't be quite as successful as the no-guts-no-glory heroes, but you also won't be as likely to end up dead someday. Of course, given my background in more story-driven games and my desire to avoid the "killer DM" stereotype which flourishes in D&D, I maybe keep the stakes a little lower than some would prefer, but that's more or less what I'm comfortable with. I need someone's permission if I'm going to get a little rough with them, and am very worried about the possibility I'll accidentally go too far.


I subscribe to the theory that every human who has ever historically lived can be accurately represented as a level 5 character max, and usually only around level 2 or 3 at most.

Once you hit level 6, you enter the real superhuman territory. Doing ordinary stuff shouldn't be enough to hit level 6, let alone level 20.

Don't agree with this at all. All the fun class features seem to be at level 20 - Binders get their fourth Vestige to mix and match, Truenamers get Say My Name And I Am There, Incarnates turn into outsiders of their element - that's the awesome stuff, and I don't want to restrict it to only the super-duper-uber-special. A Level that's one-fourth of that should be ordinary; it should be like the mayor of your home city, certainly not Einstein. At a guess I would divide the real-world population into percentages and give each class level 1% more of the population than the one below it. So 1% of the population are level 20, and 20% are level 1 (except that adds up to 220% so I probably have to use like thirds of a percent or something). The level 20s of the D&D world are the equivalent of our own political figures, most famous celebrities, and household-name scientists...and there are hundreds of them, because the world is big. So a D&D world has something like four billion level 1 characters, and only a million or so level 5s, and a few thousand level 10s, and hundreds of 15s, and dozens of 20s. (Though I'm likely to err in favor of the higher numbers just for the sake of making things more interesting.)

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-23, 04:15 AM
I firmly disagree. Perhaps at level 20 you'll never need it (but by then it'll be the prerequisite for a lot of things you do need), but at level 1 it makes a huge difference.

But therein lies the problem of Weapon Focus: At level 1, sure, it's great to have that extra 5% chance to hit something, but you're now stuck with it until level 20. Even if you make it scale immensely - say, +1 every 3 levels - it's still by level 10, let along level 20.

The trick isn't balancing things at any given level, the trick is balancing things at all 20 levels.


I do think the current feat supply is insufficient, which is why I eventually approved Flaws and just plain gave my players one extra "weak" feat for flavor reasons, but I haven't become comfortable with an across-the-board change yet.

Again, feats are, in general, weak, especially in Core, where around half of all the feats printed are either useless or nearly useless even by level 5, let alone level 20. They were intentionally designed to be weak because a) they're more versatile than class features and so have to be worse by trade off, but also b) WotC vastly overestimated the power of the Fighter class to gain free feat selection.

Giving away free feats isn't going to fix anything unless you're giving away stupid amounts of them. It makes more sense to fix the feats than to just pile them on.


So it's totally reasonable to say

Gonna have to stop you there. While I'm perfectly okay with arbitrarily having things happen in the game 'cause you're DM - such as, for example, while the characters were busy (dying) in the Tomb of Horrors, their favorite inn was burned down by goblins - anything that the players themselves could potentially get involved in or could resist, they should get a fair chance to do so.

For example, I am apparently one of the few members on this board that thinks it's okay to have a thief steal the wizard's spellbook. Having said that, I would never have such a thief automatically succeed: he'd have to make his Hide and Move Silently checks, his saves against any traps, etc. Similarly, if I'm running a character who's maximized her Listen skill so that it's crazy good for the level (say, I dunno, +25 by level 5) and we've set up camp for the night and I roll a natural 20 on my Listen check while taking first watch and we're nevertheless "surprised" by goblins who are quite obviously the stock goblins from the Monster Manual, I am going to call shenanigans. Ditto any other conceivable time where I've built a character that should by all rights succeed on Given Task X and fails only because the DM says so.

The DM and the players are telling a story, and the DM only has control over everything in the game world except anything written on the player characters' sheets. Unless it's an intelligent item or something, but you get the point. The DM should never just flat-out ignore the abilities of the player characters, at least not without giving them an honest chance to fail (or succeed) first.


So a D&D world has something like four billion level 1 characters, and only a million or so level 5s, and a few thousand level 10s, and hundreds of 15s, and dozens of 20s. (Though I'm likely to err in favor of the higher numbers just for the sake of making things more interesting.)

I feel someone needs to calibrate their expectations. (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/587/roleplaying-games/dd-calibrating-your-expectations-2)


There’s a common fallacy when it comes to D&D, and it goes something like: Einstein was a 20th level physicist. So, in D&D, Einstein – that little old man – has something like a bajillion hit points and you’d need to stab him dozens of times if you wanted to kill him. That’s ridiculous!

The problem with this argument is that Einstein wasn’t a 20th level physicist. A 20th level physicist is one step removed from being the God of Physicists. Einstein was probably something more like a 4th or 5th level expert.

This can be a little bit difficult for some people to accept, so let’s run the math. At 5th level an exceptional specialist like Einstein will have:

+8 skill ranks
+4 ability score bonus
+3 Skill Focus

In the case of our 5th level Einstein, that gives him a +15 bonus to Knowledge (physics) checks. He can casually answer physics-related questions (by taking 10) with a DC of 25. Such questions, according to the PHB description of the Knowledge skill, are among the hardest physics questions known to man. He’ll know the answers to the very hardest questions (DC 30) about 75% of the time.

And when he’s doing research he’ll be able to add the benefits of being able to reference scientific journals (+2 circumstance bonus), gain insight from fellow colleagues (+2 bonus from aid another), use top-of-the-line equipment (+2 circumstance bonus), and similar resources to gain understanding of a problem so intractable that no one has ever understood it before (DC 40+).

(This 5th level Einstein can also be modeled with as few as 5 hit points – 1 per hit die. Even if he rolled an average number of hit points on each hit die (3 each), as an old man his average Constitution of 10 will have dropped two points. With the resulting Constitution penalty, he still only has 10 hit points. This is the other reason why the hit point argument holds no water.)

You’ll see this same fallacy trotted out whenever someone insists that the local blacksmith “must” be at least 10th level in order to be competent in their profession. In reality, the typical village blacksmith is probably only a 1st level character. At 1st level the average blacksmith’s Craft (blacksmithing) skill looks like this:

+4 skill ranks
+1 Intelligence bonus
+3 Skill Focus
+2 from an assistant or apprentice helping them

That’s a +10 bonus on their checks. This bonus allows them to take 10 and craft masterwork-quality items. By 3rd level an experienced blacksmith can do that without the help of an assistant.

Even less capable 1st level blacksmiths (without an assistant or the Skill Focus feat) still have a +5 bonus to their skill. This lets them take 10 and craft high-quality items (the only things they can’t handle are exotic weapons and complex items).

And what does an exceptional 5th level blacksmith look like?

+8 skill ranks
+4 Intelligence bonus
+3 Skill Focus
+2 masterwork tools
+2 from an assistant or apprentice helping them

That’s a +19 bonus to the check. When taking 10 he can essentially triple the speed with which he can make common items like iron pots and horseshoes. He can easily create work far surpassing masterwork quality and can every so often (when he rolls a natural 20) create a work of essentially legendary quality (DC 39).

What does all this mean?

It means that the most extraordinary blacksmiths in the real world top out at 5th level. Amakuni, the legendary Japanese swordsmith who created the folded-steel technique? 5th level.

Arachne, the legendary weaver who challenged Athena herself to a duel (and lost)? She might be 10th level.

Does this mean you should never throw a 10th level blacksmith into your campaign? Nope. D&D is all about mythic fantasy, after all. But when you do decide to throw a 10th level blacksmith into the mix, consider the fact that this guy will be amazing. He will be producing things that no blacksmith in the real world has ever dreamed of making. And a 20th level blacksmith is one step removed from Hephaestus himself.

(Coincidentally: Why do dwarves have such a reputation for mastery of the forge? They have a +2 racial bonus to Craft checks. That means that, unlike human blacksmiths, the average dwarf doesn’t need to be 3rd level in order to single-handedly create masterwork items – they can do it at 1st level. Basically, due to their natural aptitude, dwarves are master craftsmen before they ever leave their apprenticeships.)

My general rule is this:
1-5: Ultimately human (or like human, anyway). Local legends. Batman.
6-10: Superhuman, but not terrifically powerful. Regional legends. Cyborg.
11-15: Very powerful and awe-inspiring. Known far and wide. Wonder Woman.
16-20: One step shy of outright divinity. Known throughout the whole world. Superman.
21+: Gods. Darkseid.

willpell
2012-12-23, 04:23 AM
1) For the bazillionth time, the warblade can also have that and other fighter feats.

Two levels later, and without a bunch of extra feat slots to take them with.


2) Serious question: Do you seriously consider the Weapon Focus/Weapon Specialization line to be some uber-awesome thing that puts the fighter head and shoulders above other martial classes

Yep. A normal person with Strength 11 swings a battleaxe and does 1-8 damage. A fighter with a Strength of 11 (nevermind that most have more) swings a battleaxe and does 3-10 damage. In two swings, the statistical average damage of the former is 9, which won't even drop a Fighter 1 unless he has a constitution penalty, while the fighter's average with Weapon spec is 13, and even the Barbarian 1 with a +2 CONMOD is going to be at death's door after that one. More Hit Dice means the ability to take a few more of those blows, but they are always going to be felt. And yes the Warblade has those 1d6 extra damage tricks, but I for one will take a guaranteed 2 over the roll, nevermind a guaranteed 4 since the roll is only every second turn. I think bad luck stings far worse than good luck, um, sings. Guaranteed minimum values are worth a lot more to me than extra dice that are likely to disappoint me right when it will hurt the most.


Uncanny Dodge is based on "rogue level," Weapon Spec is based on "fighter level," Flurry of Blows is based on "monk level." It's called "initiator level" because multiple classes use maneuvers, not because it's inherently magical at all. And if using a thesaurus to spice things up makes maneuvers feel spooky, I don't know what to tell you.

I'm just saying it feels more arcane and strange than it should if Warblade is meant to be mundane. I'll get a direct quote from TOB:

"You initiate a maneuver by taking the specified initiation action".

Vs.

"You use a feat to attack".

There's also the Martial Lore skill, which mirrors Spellcraft and Psicraft...if you don't have ranks in Martial Lore, you have no idea what just happpened after a warblade performs a swift action to recover all the maneuvers he's initiated. And then there's the names of the maneuvers - what the holy flying hell is a "Sapphire Nightmare Blade"? Does it turn your sword blue? Does it let you invade your opponent's mind and show him his worst fears? No, it's just a strike for extra damage which requires precise timing. So the maneuver should have been called "Precise Timing".

The very names of the martial disciplines are off-putting to anyone who wants to build a "normal" character. Instead of Tiger Claw, it could have been "Adrenaline". Instead of White Raven, it could have been "Teamwork". Giving the maneuvers dandified names to make them seem cool also means that they feel out of place on a "blue collar" character.


No, everything is not dependent on the DM unless you as DM choose to meddle. If the rules say you can do something, you can do it. If the rules say you can't do something, you can't do it. The DM can step in to change things at any time, but there's a big difference between "The rules let me accomplish X" and "I can accomplish X because the DM lets me." Classes with actual options can do things to affect the world without invoking DM pity even once; the fighter, not so much.

On the contrary, the DM needs to allow them to apply the rules at any time. If the Rogue wants to Sneak Attack, he has to hope the DM doesn't rule that the mists of the city air aren't thick enough to grant concealment to the enemy. If he thinks he has a 100% chance to hit, he'd better hope the DM doesn't decide that a -2 circumstance penalty to his roll is appropriate. Everything is DM fiat; the rules are never anything more than a guideline to help minimize the work the DM has to put into figuring things out.


The paladin's feat immunity is magical, but fear immunity in general doesn't have to be. There are plenty of justifications for being immune to fear nonmagically, within D&D and elsewhere.

"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain."

Saying all that does not guarantee that you can stop your heart from hammering and your hands from trembling. Fear is a biological mechanism in the brain; the mind's ability to overrule it through conscious choice and concentration is very limited, because ultimately the body will not allow the mind to get it killed over a point of pride without fighting for control of itself. If you have an itch, you have the option to not scratch it, but you don't have the option to not feel it and be potentially distracted by the sensation. Magical immunity, to fear or itches or anything else, is a Very Big Deal. It means essentially that you are more than human - or, as Redcloak points out to Miko, less than natural. A big bonus to your Will save to resist fear is very in-flavor for a character who spends a lot of time training and practicing and doing exercises to gain mind-body control, but a 100% guarantee that you will NEVER be victimized by such a thing is very different, and totally out of flavor for the fighter.

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-23, 04:29 AM
Two levels later, and without a bunch of extra feat slots to take them with.

This really -

- really -

- and remember that I hate the Warblade with the burning fury of a thousand suns when I'm saying this -

- does not matter. At all. In any way.

willpell
2012-12-23, 04:39 AM
Oh, and to add this bit which I almost missed as I was hitting "post":


Increasing your chance to activate a somewhat underwhelming weapon quality by 4% isn't what I'd call "hella good"--really, it's usually more productive to reroll later iteratives to give them a better chance of hitting than to focus on your best iterative.

Actually crits are most of the chance your iteratives will have to hit anyway, so if you're going to crit-fish you might as well save it for the later attacks, unless you think the first attack will drop your target, in which case you wouldn't want to waste a crit on that anyway. This business of having zero chance to miss the first attack but rapidly decreasing odds of success on other attacks, even after you give up your move action for the round to get them, is kind of an inherent problem with the iterative attacks rules anyway, one of several things I don't think D&D does all that well but haven't yet figured out how to fix to my satisfaction.


The trick isn't balancing things at any given level, the trick is balancing things at all 20 levels.

And, admittedly, I don't even really try. I have only a vague idea of just how overpowered wizards get at double-digit levels, as my highest-level one to date has been 8 and will shortly level to 9. My highest-level character period is an Incarnate 11, and I still haven't seen how he compares to the dragon hatchlings I made up for the same ECL. Bottom line is, I'm putting the higher levels off so I don't get bored with them too soon, so my focus is mostly on making level 1-3 characters work smoothly, as they're the majority of my populace.


For example, I am apparently one of the few members on this board that thinks it's okay to have a thief steal the wizard's spellbook. Having said that, I would never have such a thief automatically succeed: he'd have to make his Hide and Move Silently checks, his saves against any traps, etc.

But for the most part there isn't a fixed DC for those tasks, and I'm seldom going to feel patient enough to go flipping through books looking for DCs and modifiers so I can get the "right" value, when there's no such list which is 100% comprehensive anyway. So at the end of the day it's still all just made up; consistency is a nice idea in theory but I don't think it's really possible, and certainly I'm not up to the effort of it.

I do agree with the general theory of what you're saying here, but ultimately I think if you trust the GM then you're good and if you don't then you're screwed, and you might as well not sweat the details in between. Of course, one might say I don't exactly have a Rogue mindset. :smallbiggrin:


The DM should never just flat-out ignore the abilities of the player characters, at least not without giving them an honest chance to fail (or succeed) first.

Again, in theory I agree, but what exactly is the "honest chance" for every situation that will ever come up? In most cases I don't know, and I'm going to have to take my best guess as to whether the player is likely to succeed or likely to fail, and probably don't have time to write up a comprehensive multi-stage contingency plan depending on which rolls he makes, so sometimes I railroad a bit for the sake of the game not grinding to a halt. I try to at least make sure it's worth the trip.


Create "backgrounds" in addition to classes

Interesting thought. I'm told Pathfinder does this. I'm not certain whether I like the idea, but am inclined toward thinking it would be good, but only if I personally approved the background lists, something I haven't been up to doing yet.


That's just a poor envisioning of the class; it should probably be more similar to Duelist.

I'd been meaning to compare the two....

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-23, 04:50 AM
But for the most part there isn't a fixed DC for those tasks,

No, there's rolls that are opposed by the players. Move Silently is opposed by Listen, for example; Hide by Spot. Sleeping potions are resisted by Fortitude saves.


and I'm seldom going to feel patient enough to go flipping through books looking for DCs and modifiers so I can get the "right" value, when there's no such list which is 100% comprehensive anyway. So at the end of the day it's still all just made up; consistency is a nice idea in theory but I don't think it's really possible, and certainly I'm not up to the effort of it.

It's still nice to give your characters' hard-earned and carefully-invested skill points a chance to matter. If I had a maxed-out Listen and was snuck up on without even getting a Listen check, I'd be annoyed. If I was a Barbarian with a +12 bonus to Fortitude by level 7 but got knocked out by sleeping poison in my waterskin without ever getting chance to resist it, I'd be seriously pissed.

Part of being a DM is accepting that your best-laid plans can be turned aside by the players.


Actually crits are most of the chance your iteratives will have to hit anyway,

Actually, no. Using the Balor (AC 35) and +33 BAB Fighter example from earlier, the Fighter's four attacks are at +33/+28/+23/+18.

The first attack hits on a 3 or above on the d20 roll (85%), the second on a 8 or above (60%), the third on a 13 or above (35%), and the forth on a 18 or above (15%). So in fact, the Fighter had good odds of getting at least two hits in, and possibly even three - I'll take a 35% chance to hit. That forth attack probably won't hit, but man, it feels GREAT when, once in a blue moon, it does.

Remember, as well, that this would be considered a fairly weak fighter for being 20th level.

willpell
2012-12-23, 04:56 AM
It's still nice to give your characters' hard-earned and carefully-invested skill points a chance to matter. If I had a maxed-out Listen and was snuck up on without even getting a Listen check, I'd be annoyed. If I was a Barbarian with a +12 bonus to Fortitude by level 7 but got knocked out by sleeping poison in my waterskin without ever getting chance to resist it, I'd be seriously pissed.

Ideally, the GM should take those things into account, but it can be in a general way. Perhaps the potion is exceptionally high-potency, or perhaps the Listen check fails because the reeds were rustling in the wind...there's a thousand possible modifiers the GM could come up with if you force him to, but then you're just making him jump through hoops and wearing his nerves thin. If you're not sure whether he's treating you fairly, you can ask something like "you did take my dwarven +4 vs. poison into account, right?" If he says "yeah I did" or "it wouldn't have mattered", you just accept that and move on. Sometimes even the world's top poker player gets dealt A, 2, 3, 4, 6; it doesn't necessarily mean anyone cheated.

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-23, 05:00 AM
Perhaps the potion is exceptionally high-potency,

I should still get my save, damnit, especially seeing as it's possible to both critically succeed and critically fail a save.

So no matter how high-potency the potion (DC 40?), I always have a 5% chance of resisting it, and I would be pissed if an attempt to get that Natural 20 was denied me.


or perhaps the Listen check fails because the reeds were rustling in the wind

That gives me a -2 circumstance penalty to my Listen check, it does not make my Listen fail without me even getting an attempt.

I could be asleep on the other side of a stone wall with the reeds rustling in the wind and I still get to make a Listen check, albeit at something like a -20 penalty. But for all I know the goblin has only rolled a 9 on his Move Silently check and I might roll a natural 20 to go along with my +14 Listen - so I hear him, damnit, because I spent the skill points so that I could hear everything.


but then you're just making him jump through hoops and wearing his nerves thin.

"Wearing nerves thin" is here apparently not defined as "screwing the players out of their character builds."

willpell
2012-12-23, 10:48 AM
I should still get my save, damnit, especially seeing as it's possible to both critically succeed and critically fail a save.

So no matter how high-potency the potion (DC 40?), I always have a 5% chance of resisting it, and I would be pissed if an attempt to get that Natural 20 was denied me.

The result of such reliability in the rules is a world in which every plan that anyone makes has a 5% chance of failing at each critical step. Which would mean that ultimately there would be little reason to even try and plan any course of action, as things would reliably go wrong at the worst possible moments. (Sort of the way I think Real Life works, but I understand that I have a skewed perspective on such matters. And definitely not High Fantasy in any case; such worlds have prophecies to fulfill, prophecies which do not have a 5% chance to not actually turn out that way after all, regardless of anything anyone does.)


"Wearing nerves thin" is here apparently not defined as "screwing the players out of their character builds."

Not at all. If it's a defining aspect of a character's concept that he can hear a pin drop on the other side of a wildebeest stampede three miles away inside a stone crypt which is inside another stone crypt with a lake of rubber in between, then I'll know that and I won't try to rule that the character didn't hear something. But if the character has a +3 on Listen checks and my goblin has a +12 on Move Silently, I have a reasonable expectation that the goblin will remain unheard, and the player getting a lucky roll derailing my plot means that I wasted my time coming up with a plot, and now have no idea what happens next. So at the very least, it means I have to stop the game until I figure out what to do instead, and more likely it ticks me off.

Zireael
2012-12-23, 11:17 AM
The ToB classes may have a bunch of fancy fluff, but that's mostly to conceal the fact that crusader, swordsage, and warblade were basically intended to be Paladin 2.0, Monk 2.0, and Fighter 2.0

Yeah, this is mostly true. So, the question is, why do we try fixing the fighter if we have the warblade available for free from WotC site?

Speaking of fighter fixes, the idea of scaling feats was not bad. If we grabbed Weapon Aptitude from warblade...

Yitzi
2012-12-23, 11:27 AM
This, to my eye, argues only that spells are overpowered, not that fighters are underpowered.

That said, one would expect a trained fighter to be expert at resisting any spells that would likely be used in combat, including domination and burst spells.


Interesting thought. I'm told Pathfinder does this.

Apparently it does. It has a lot more options than what I was envisioning, and gives fewer bonuses, but it is a similar idea.

Zale
2012-12-23, 12:42 PM
It's fun watching people argue in circles about things.

I think Fighters should be awesome.

By level 20, they should be superhuman. They should be able to leap across a gorge, strange a dragon, beat a giant at arm wrestling..

But, by level 20, they are barely even competent enough to kill things.

It's sad.

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-23, 02:20 PM
It's fun watching people argue in circles about things.

I think Fighters should be awesome.

By level 20, they should be superhuman. They should be able to leap across a gorge, strange a dragon, beat a giant at arm wrestling..

I don't think anyone here disagrees with that. As I said earlier, I'm not entirely opposed to giving every character who reached level 20 a Divine Rank of 0 to represent that anyone advancing that far is just one step shy of godhood.

The disagreement is over how to go about achieving such things.


And definitely not High Fantasy in any case; such worlds have prophecies to fulfill, prophecies which do not have a 5% chance to not actually turn out that way after all, regardless of anything anyone does.)

You'll note I hope that in fantasy literature, half the time the only reason a prophecy exists is so that it can be subverted or stopped, right?

I'm a particular fan of Eberron's Draconic Prophecy, which invariably takes the form of "If X, then Y" statements with various groups trying to either cause or prevent X. The key being that Y is only guaranteed if X happens, and X is preventable (or even not going to occur at all without effort).


I have a reasonable expectation that the goblin will remain unheard, and the player getting a lucky roll derailing my plot means that I wasted my time coming up with a plot, and now have no idea what happens next

If you're not prepared to deal with that, then you have no right DMing.


Yeah, this is mostly true. So, the question is, why do we try fixing the fighter if we have the warblade available for free from WotC site?

I've outlined this twice now. There are three major reasons:

1) The Warblade may be a Fighter fix, but it did not actually replace the Fighter. ToB wasn't lauded as a fix for anything, just an add-on. No one expected Shadowcasters to replace Illusionists: the Fighter should still be a viable class option in its own right. This is compounded that the Warblade, surprisingly, does not invalidate the Fighter, because Fighter is still a better class to dip into for one or two levels if all you're seeking are some feats to hit a prestige class requirement or something. The Warblade is meant to play in an environment wherein the Fighter is still available, so it isn't good that the Warblade is outright better than the Fighter as a distinct class option (anymore than it's fair that the Cleric is expected to play fair alongside the Healer, or the Beguiler alongside the CW Samurai).

2) That nostalgia thing. The Fighting-Man has been around since 1st edition, and not everyone is comfortable with just outright replacing his actual successor, the Fighter, with a Wuxia knockoff.

3) That Vancian thing. As I said, for 30+ years the Vancian spellcasting system has been the domain of spellcasters, and so it is intractably associated with spellcasters in our heads. By giving the maneuver-classes a Vancian system, if ToB really was intended as a "fix," it "fixed" things by saying "sure, the Fighter can have nice things, as long as he doesn't mind being a Wizard in disguise." Unsurprisingly, a number of people do mind.

Amnoriath
2012-12-23, 03:21 PM
Two levels later, and without a bunch of extra feat slots to take them with.



Yep. A normal person with Strength 11 swings a battleaxe and does 1-8 damage. A fighter with a Strength of 11 (nevermind that most have more) swings a battleaxe and does 3-10 damage. In two swings, the statistical average damage of the former is 9, which won't even drop a Fighter 1 unless he has a constitution penalty, while the fighter's average with Weapon spec is 13, and even the Barbarian 1 with a +2 CONMOD is going to be at death's door after that one. More Hit Dice means the ability to take a few more of those blows, but they are always going to be felt. And yes the Warblade has those 1d6 extra damage tricks, but I for one will take a guaranteed 2 over the roll, nevermind a guaranteed 4 since the roll is only every second turn. I think bad luck stings far worse than good luck, um, sings. Guaranteed minimum values are worth a lot more to me than extra dice that are likely to disappoint me right when it will hurt the most.



I'm just saying it feels more arcane and strange than it should if Warblade is meant to be mundane. I'll get a direct quote from TOB:

"You initiate a maneuver by taking the specified initiation action".

Vs.

"You use a feat to attack".

There's also the Martial Lore skill, which mirrors Spellcraft and Psicraft...if you don't have ranks in Martial Lore, you have no idea what just happpened after a warblade performs a swift action to recover all the maneuvers he's initiated. And then there's the names of the maneuvers - what the holy flying hell is a "Sapphire Nightmare Blade"? Does it turn your sword blue? Does it let you invade your opponent's mind and show him his worst fears? No, it's just a strike for extra damage which requires precise timing. So the maneuver should have been called "Precise Timing".

The very names of the martial disciplines are off-putting to anyone who wants to build a "normal" character. Instead of Tiger Claw, it could have been "Adrenaline". Instead of White Raven, it could have been "Teamwork". Giving the maneuvers dandified names to make them seem cool also means that they feel out of place on a "blue collar" character.



On the contrary, the DM needs to allow them to apply the rules at any time. If the Rogue wants to Sneak Attack, he has to hope the DM doesn't rule that the mists of the city air aren't thick enough to grant concealment to the enemy. If he thinks he has a 100% chance to hit, he'd better hope the DM doesn't decide that a -2 circumstance penalty to his roll is appropriate. Everything is DM fiat; the rules are never anything more than a guideline to help minimize the work the DM has to put into figuring things out.



Saying all that does not guarantee that you can stop your heart from hammering and your hands from trembling. Fear is a biological mechanism in the brain; the mind's ability to overrule it through conscious choice and concentration is very limited, because ultimately the body will not allow the mind to get it killed over a point of pride without fighting for control of itself. If you have an itch, you have the option to not scratch it, but you don't have the option to not feel it and be potentially distracted by the sensation. Magical immunity, to fear or itches or anything else, is a Very Big Deal. It means essentially that you are more than human - or, as Redcloak points out to Miko, less than natural. A big bonus to your Will save to resist fear is very in-flavor for a character who spends a lot of time training and practicing and doing exercises to gain mind-body control, but a 100% guarantee that you will NEVER be victimized by such a thing is very different, and totally out of flavor for the fighter.

1. A warblade by then has intelligence to reflex saves, 5 maneuvers known, and uncanny dodge. Feats can only go so far and often do not give the tools to be the best at something. Lets give a core example you have a fighter and a barbarian at level 1 the barbarian has a feature which gives +2, +3 damage, +2 health, and +2 to will save. They both choose Power Attack but the fighter chooses weapons focus as well. Obviously the Barbarian deals more damage and at this level having more than one hard battle is just sadistic but lets move things along to level 3. The fighter could make room for combat expertise and improved trip. The barbarian can only choose combat expertise if he wants to trip. Yes, here a fighter has an advantage in completing a feat chain faster but once we get to 6, the Fighter may have only chosen weapons specialization however the Barbarian now with tripping is actually better at it because he is stronger and still deals more damage. As they progress the Barbarian can actually gain more for free than what the Fighter can only do more quickly.
2. I just gave an example on how small those two can be. Knowledge Devotion gives bigger bonuses than both of the chains combined and two levels before Weapons Specialization. It isn't that these don't do anything, but it just goes to show how a fighter is always left trying to get another ability often through multiple feats while the martial adepts can just select a maneuver.
3. This is why people are so fustrated with you here. If you want a different name than make one up. If you don't like the flavor of a couple disciplines don't use them. If you don't like the Warblade for this than offer your own suggestions. You have this archetype of Joe the Hero who wades into battle with experience and brawn to save the day but can't do so because the special superhumans steal the spotlight. However, the minute some one mentions a better way to make Joe the Hero you get angry. Did not Joe the Hero perform some miraculous stunt that maybe couldn't be done the second afterwards? I know ToB came off anime when some one was just looking for LOTR but please put some ideas on the table rather than on one hand lamenting the fighters lack of capability while praising it for almost the same reason.

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-23, 03:24 PM
3. This is why people are so fustrated with you here. If you want a different name than make one up. If you don't like the flavor of a couple disciplines don't use them. If you don't like the Warblade for this than offer your own suggestions. You have this archetype of Joe the Hero who wades into battle with experience and brawn to save the day but can't do so because the special superhumans steal the spotlight. However, the minute some one mentions a better way to make Joe the Hero you get angry. Did not Joe the Hero perform some miraculous stunt that maybe couldn't be done the second afterwards?

For the record, I'm fine with Joe the Hero being miraculous, I just don't want him to have to use maneuvers to be miraculous.

Amnoriath
2012-12-23, 03:35 PM
For the record, I'm fine with Joe the Hero being miraculous, I just don't want him to have to use maneuvers to be miraculous.

Yeah, but you have been putting ideas on the table and have been consistent in your argument. I would like to see something different too it is just that it is very hard to accurately make what the fighter was all suppose to encompass while being reasonably good at them.

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-23, 03:44 PM
Yeah, but you have been putting ideas on the table and have been consistent in your argument. I would like to see something different too it is just that it is very hard to accurately make what the fighter was all suppose to encompass while being reasonably good at them.

That's because fixing the Fighter means fixing the feats, and that is, I acknowledge, no small task.

Or, it means removing the feat dependency from the Fighter, but then what you end up with isn't, really, the Fighter, or at least it doesn't feel that way anymore.

There are no easy fixes, that's for sure. There is nothing that will fix the Fighter with just a few lines.

Well, unless you're willing to use martial adepts, in which case I suppose the single line "Fighters gain and use maneuvers and stances like Warblades but don't get a bonus feat at 1st level" will fix it, technically...but as stated, I hate ToB.

Djinn_in_Tonic
2012-12-23, 04:14 PM
...but as stated, I hate ToB.

Have you ever played a Martial Initiator? When I first saw the book, my first thought was "Interesting enough to buy, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with this level of casting in my martial classes."

Then I actually played one of the classes. The combat flow was amazing, the abilities were fun, they felt martial (save for the obviously magical ones), and the entire class functioned as a relatively seamless whole. I was sold. I found I could reflavor all the maneuvers to fit my needs perfectly, and that the system did in fact deliver on its promise to increase the versatility of combat classes.

So have you, in fact, ever played a Warblade? I'm curious.

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-23, 04:26 PM
So have you, in fact, ever played a Warblade? I'm curious.

No, but I have played a Crusader for a few sessions (level 7). While the Crusader does things a little differently from the Warblade, though, I'm pretty sure the differences aren't so great that I can't count the experience playing as one towards analyzing the other two.

Don't get me wrong: I acknowledge that the three classes are basically very well constructed and absolutely do what they set out to do. I just don't like the way they do it.

Djinn_in_Tonic
2012-12-23, 04:28 PM
No, but I have played a Crusader for a few sessions (level 7). While the Crusader does things a little differently from the Warblade, though, I'm pretty sure the differences aren't so great that I can't count the experience playing as one towards analyzing the other two.

There's some pretty serious differences, actually. The Crusader feels more random, more Vancian, and it feels like you have less control. The mechanics are also about a thousand times clunkier. Personally, I can't stand the Crusader's method of maneuver use and recovery.

I'd recommend trying a Warblade, but that's just a personal recommendation, as I feel the differences between the two are fairly significant.

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-23, 04:34 PM
I'd recommend trying a Warblade, but that's just a personal recommendation, as I feel the differences between the two are fairly significant.

At the end of the day, though, I'm still left with a distinctly Vancian system of basically being a living six-shooter with trick bullets, which is the whole problem with the system (I'd actually argue that the Crusader is the LEAST Vancian of the three, thanks to the randomness...the Wizard never randomizes his spells).

No, I'm going to keep plugging away at the fighter. Or actually I'm not because I already did as part of a much larger rebuild and I am quite satisfied with my results, since I long ago gave up trying to "fix" the Fighter without also fixing everything else at the same time.

Still, every now and then I'll sit down and try and fix the fighter for default 3.X. Just 'cause.

Morph Bark
2012-12-23, 04:51 PM
To anyone who may be interested, I'm currently going over a lot of Fighter Fixes in the Homebrew Tier Compendium (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=14419783#post14419783), trying to see how they compare.

willpell
2012-12-24, 09:52 AM
Y'know now that I think about it, it kind of sucks that Diamond Mind and Stone Dragon maneuvers can be taken by both Swordsages and Warblades, but the Swordsage has a harder time recovering the maneuver even though it's exactly the same.

Grod_The_Giant
2012-12-24, 10:03 AM
The Swordsage does have a pretty unfortunate recovery mechanic. I usually let them recover [Wis Modifier] maneuvers for their action.

Lord_Gareth
2012-12-24, 11:01 AM
The Swordsage does have a pretty unfortunate recovery mechanic. I usually let them recover [Wis Modifier] maneuvers for their action.

I just don't fight the system and take Adaptive Style. Why NOT?

Grod_The_Giant
2012-12-24, 11:59 AM
Oh, right, you can do that, can't you? D'oh!

Just to Browse
2012-12-24, 01:42 PM
I am entirely lost as to what this thread is about now...

Grod_The_Giant
2012-12-24, 10:46 PM
Tome of Battle argument #25413462347.2

willpell
2012-12-25, 01:38 AM
I am annoyed by the discovery that both Iron Heart and Stone Dragon use Balance as their key skill. A character who takes Martial Study for both ought to gain two skills, just as he would for any other two disciplines. I'm thinking Stone Dragon could become Survival, since it seems to involve calling upon "earth power" and thus could benefit from closeness to nature. Thoughts?

Dienekes
2012-12-25, 02:23 AM
I am annoyed by the discovery that both Iron Heart and Stone Dragon use Balance as their key skill. A character who takes Martial Study for both ought to gain two skills, just as he would for any other two disciplines. I'm thinking Stone Dragon could become Survival, since it seems to involve calling upon "earth power" and thus could benefit from closeness to nature. Thoughts?

Ehh, Stone Dragon was always more about having a firm battle stance and being unmovable rather than any actual earth powers. Balance seems to work best for it.

Iron Heart is however just being a superb swordsman, and since I don't believe the skill actually has any other use within the discipline I'd maybe suggest making it Martial Lore. That represents the training necessary with the class, and compliments that it is the more intelligence focused Warblade classes signature discipline.

LordErebus12
2012-12-25, 02:47 AM
Iron Heart is however just being a superb swordsman, and since I don't believe the skill actually has any other use within the discipline I'd maybe suggest making it Martial Lore. That represents the training necessary with the class, and compliments that it is the more intelligence focused Warblade classes signature discipline.

i must agree with Martial Lore

willpell
2012-12-25, 02:53 AM
But what good would it do to gain Martial Lore, a skill which only ever applies to Tome of Battle characters? If you're not fighting other swordsages and warblades, it's 100% useless, isn't it? (And the DM has to actually call for the rolls instead of just telling you what you see, which I never do because I'm lazy and would rather exposit regardless, though that is admittedly me playing the game "wrong" for personal reasons.) Survival on the other hand would help you find food in the wilderness or avoid getting lost; the most appropriate place for it to be a key skill would be in Tiger Claw, but that already has Jump, which seems appropriate there and would be completely wrong for Stone Dragon.

Oh, and I got distracted earlier plus had a forum timeout which stopped me from posting for several hours, but I meant to say:


This really -

- really -

- and remember that I hate the Warblade with the burning fury of a thousand suns when I'm saying this -

- does not matter. At all. In any way.

It sure as heck does if your game doesn't go above level 5. The Warblade will never get Weapon Spec in that case. And ditto for Greater Weapon Focus at 8 and Greater Weapon Spec at 12; the Warblade waits 2 more levels, and the game could easily end before they arrive.

LordErebus12
2012-12-25, 03:17 AM
I am entirely lost as to what this thread is about now...

yup. Anyways ive always wanted the fighter to be more of a utilitarian being, able of bringing true fleibilty in "being what we need at this very moment, to save our teammate's asses, and for Glory... *draws blade, raises it high*

perhaps we could create three unique ability trees gained at 1st level, each containing three bonus tricks not typically found in standard fighters as they progress, some new abilities (one to extend reach, one to grant better defense, one for accelerated movement, one for mental clarity, one for extra actions, one for blocking allies from damage and effects, one for deflecting damage, one for physical strength, one for flexibility, one for tactical knowledge and bonuses, one for luck, and so on...)

5th level: I Got A Plan!
ability that allows a fighter to "fake any one combat or teamwork feat" for a round + 1/2 fighter level. so many 10 rounds a day.

10th level: I Wont Be Caught Off Guard, Now.
you may fake that same type of combat or teamwork feat for the entire day, but the catch is that feat can only be used this way again for 1d4+1 days. Take a feat to test it out for a while, see if it works nicely. Frees up your I Got A Plan ability for other feats.

15th level: I Got It, Smalls.:smallbiggrin:
allows you to gain any one feat forever, until he decides to change it with one hour of practice. more permanent, useful, at will.

20th level: I have this Dream... Retirement.:smalltongue:
ability is all about proficiency with all armor and weapons, no matter the type, and allowing you to retrain any proficiency feats you have taken over your lifetime. Gain a free business through some random means, enjoy the high life of retirement.

LordErebus12
2012-12-25, 03:22 AM
The designers clearly thought feats were the primary mode for the fighters to shine, so lets expand upon that principal. I hope we can improve upon what ive put forth.

LordErebus12
2012-12-25, 03:25 AM
It sure as heck does if your game doesn't go above level 5. The Warblade will never get Weapon Spec in that case. And ditto for Greater Weapon Focus at 8 and Greater Weapon Spec at 12; the Warblade waits 2 more levels, and the game could easily end before they arrive.

perhaps the fighter should simply gain these feats as class features, stop all this nonsense about it only can be taken by fighters, its meant for them, at the wrong penalty of simply not having them automatically. let them simply gain them, perhaps rethinking whether or not other nonfighters can take them at equal levels, as they are now class features.

Dienekes
2012-12-25, 12:26 PM
But what good would it do to gain Martial Lore, a skill which only ever applies to Tome of Battle characters? If you're not fighting other swordsages and warblades, it's 100% useless, isn't it? (And the DM has to actually call for the rolls instead of just telling you what you see, which I never do because I'm lazy and would rather exposit regardless, though that is admittedly me playing the game "wrong" for personal reasons.) Survival on the other hand would help you find food in the wilderness or avoid getting lost; the most appropriate place for it to be a key skill would be in Tiger Claw, but that already has Jump, which seems appropriate there and would be completely wrong for Stone Dragon.

I'll be honest, I have only ever seen Balance being used when someone casts Grease. That's really it. Also if you're picking Martial Study then the GM is allowing ToB so it may see some actual use.

boomwolf
2012-12-25, 03:01 PM
Ok. lets get one thing straight.

Yes, the fighter is weak and mechanically failing.
Yes the warblade is better then him for any build you want.

NO, the warblade is NOT a "fixed fighter", he is something VERY different, plays differently, feels differently and works differently.
I enjoy fighters, despite their flaws, I do NOT enjoy initiators. why? donno, that's just me. they feel too caster to me, and if that's the case I'll just play myself a gish.

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-25, 11:59 PM
It sure as heck does if your game doesn't go above level 5. The Warblade will never get Weapon Spec in that case. And ditto for Greater Weapon Focus at 8 and Greater Weapon Spec at 12; the Warblade waits 2 more levels, and the game could easily end before they arrive.

Even a non-optimized Fighter will probably not take Weapon Focus or Weapon Specialization anyway, except to qualify for a prestige class that requires one or the other, so the point is largely moot

Besides which, when creating a class, you shouldn't be thinking "this is good for level 5 and below," you should be thinking "this is good for level 20 and below." You're building a 20-level base class, so you should balance it across 20 levels and take everything into account for all 20 levels, because what about all those campaigns which DO go to level 6 and beyond?

willpell
2012-12-26, 12:36 AM
I'll be honest, I have only ever seen Balance being used when someone casts Grease. That's really it.

That may be true in actual play among optimizers, but from my perspective I see Balance mentioned a LOT in the books. I consider it to border on a "must-take just in case" skill, though not as much so as something like Survival or Sense Motive. I would take Balance before Listen, Spot, Jump or Climb for the most part.


NO, the warblade is NOT a "fixed fighter", he is something VERY different, plays differently, feels differently and works differently.

Thank you.


Even a non-optimized Fighter will probably not take Weapon Focus or Weapon Specialization anyway, except to qualify for a prestige class that requires one or the other, so the point is largely moot

I can't imagine why not. Doing damage is what fighters do, so Weapon Spec is probably the first feat I'd ever take. Though I do think it probably wouldn't break anything to give fighters the Warblade thing about retraining with a weapon, just so as to avoid Roy's "I have a club instead of a sword" problem. Perhaps allow the feat to be taken multiple times - once automatically applying to all weapons, once retrainable to one weapon over another, and the final time not at all, so that if you really want to build a character who's totally in love with his hammer and will simply not do as well if forced to use a mace instead, you can, but such a character goes well out of his way to acheive such a narrow focus, and most fighters never go that far.


Besides which, when creating a class, you shouldn't be thinking "this is good for level 5 and below," you should be thinking "this is good for level 20 and below." You're building a 20-level base class, so you should balance it across 20 levels and take everything into account for all 20 levels, because what about all those campaigns which DO go to level 6 and beyond?

Why, exactly, do you assume that the class must be designed so? Prestige classes are not designed for ECL 4 or less characters (on average, a few can be qualified for as low as ECL 3 without tricks, and others take much longer), because they are not meant to be entry-level classes; they explicitly exist as something you have to work up to. So why not have classes which explicitly exist only as things to work up with? Classes that you not only don't want to go 1-20 in, but physically can't, because they're designed solely as a starting point? Think of them as "101 classes" (pardon the pun).

Just to Browse
2012-12-26, 12:42 AM
Weapon Spec gives you +2 damage, which is just sad for a feat. If the fighter is supposed to do damage, there is a host of other feats far far superior which also come with the benefit of being occasionally interesting.

willpell
2012-12-26, 01:01 AM
Weapon Spec gives you +2 damage, which is just sad for a feat. If the fighter is supposed to do damage, there is a host of other feats far far superior which also come with the benefit of being occasionally interesting.

Name another feat which gives a flat +2 or more damage at all times under all circumstances. "Interesting" is all well and good, but there's something to be said for "reliable"; I would happily choose Weapon Spec over Punishing Stance for every single NPC and a fair number of PCs, for whom accepting an AC penalty and/or the possibility of rolling 1 would not be worth the possibility of a high roll.

Dienekes
2012-12-26, 07:05 AM
Name another feat which gives a flat +2 or more damage at all times under all circumstances. "Interesting" is all well and good, but there's something to be said for "reliable"; I would happily choose Weapon Spec over Punishing Stance for every single NPC and a fair number of PCs, for whom accepting an AC penalty and/or the possibility of rolling 1 would not be worth the possibility of a high roll.

Punishing Stance gets tossed around a lot, but it's really not that great anywhere past early levels where 3.5 damage an attack is a reasonable chunk of an opponents hp. What's good about Punishing Stance is that it can be taken at level 1, making it useful for those 4 early levels when hp is low enough that 1d6 can mean the difference between killing an opponent in 1 hit or 2.

By level 4, +2 or +3.5 may matter, but isn't very likely to. By level 10 it doesn't, by 15 it isn't even noticeable. That +2 to damage may be reliable, but that doesn't make it good. By those levels tricks are available to on a charge deal hundreds of damage. Or feats that allow more attacks. Or allow mobility so you can more reliably full-attack. Compared to those options the total damage a character can reliably deal is actually less if they go the Weapon Specialization route. +2 damage just doesn't matter past a certain point in the game, and during most of that time Weapon Specialization is not available, Punishing Stance is.

willpell
2012-12-26, 09:52 AM
By those levels tricks are available to on a charge deal hundreds of damage.

If your GM will stand for such "tricks"....


Or feats that allow more attacks.

Which are *very* good with either WeaponSpec or PunishingStance, but I'd prefer the reliability of the former over the statistical probability that the latter will average more. That's just me, I realize this.


Or allow mobility so you can more reliably full-attack.

That, admittedly, is a very big deal. And Steel Wind is a *very* good maneuver, I'll admit that much. I've studied the Warblade 1 fully now, and my only remaining complaint about him is that he doesn't have a lot of variety - there are only like 6-8 maneuvers available, so you won't make very many Warblades before you've seen them all a dozen times. Why they gave THREE of the four Tiger Claw maneuvers-and-stances the fourth one as a prerequisite, I don't know...it seriously hurts the class's flexibility. (I could see it for Scent, the one that I previously called out as seeming too supernatural for the Warblade, but on Sudden Leap and Blood in the Water it seems thoroughly unnecessary.)

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-26, 10:07 AM
Why, exactly, do you assume that the class must be designed so? Prestige classes are not designed for ECL 4 or less characters

I am very obviously not talking about prestige classes. Stop being pedantic.


So why not have classes which explicitly exist only as things to work up with? Classes that you not only don't want to go 1-20 in, but physically can't, because they're designed solely as a starting point? Think of them as "101 classes" (pardon the pun).

That's not how base classes work. You're playing the wrong game if you want them to, but it should be telling that Wizards of the Coast never published a base class that had fewer than 20 levels for D&D (heck, even the NPC base classes have 20 levels) - and further that this topic of discussion should be moot because we're not talking about random class X, we're talking about the Fighter.

Dienekes
2012-12-26, 12:20 PM
If your GM will stand for such "tricks"....

Yes if you're GM stops you from taking good tricks then eventually WS becomes a viable choice. That's hardly a valid measure of somethings usefulness. Take 2 feats, Power Attack and Leap Attack. On a charge you can take a -2 to attack (so essentially no penalty or bonus to attack) to deal an additional 8 damage. That's the equivalent of 4 attacks with your WS. That's also one of the lowest optimization levels ever. If they're comfortable taking a -2 to their average attack roll they'll deal 16 bonus damage.

Hell in Core only there's still Spirited Charge + Power Attack, mind you, it's a bit more restricted in it's use but still so much better than WS it's embarrassing.


That, admittedly, is a very big deal. And Steel Wind is a *very* good maneuver, I'll admit that much. I've studied the Warblade 1 fully now, and my only remaining complaint about him is that he doesn't have a lot of variety - there are only like 6-8 maneuvers available, so you won't make very many Warblades before you've seen them all a dozen times. Why they gave THREE of the four Tiger Claw maneuvers-and-stances the fourth one as a prerequisite, I don't know...it seriously hurts the class's flexibility. (I could see it for Scent, the one that I previously called out as seeming too supernatural for the Warblade, but on Sudden Leap and Blood in the Water it seems thoroughly unnecessary.)

Yeah, there are less maneuvers at level 1. I don't really see it as so much a problem since he still has to pick a feat and whatnot. But of course, there's a reason why new ToB maneuvers and schools are one of the more common homebrewed materials out there.

Starbuck_II
2012-12-26, 03:35 PM
Why, exactly, do you assume that the class must be designed so? Prestige classes are not designed for ECL 4 or less characters (on average, a few can be qualified for as low as ECL 3 without tricks, and others take much longer),

Strange, Complete Mage has a Prc for ECL 4 called Master Specialist for wizards.
Then there is Church Inquisitor in Complete Divine (admittedly you need high Int/human for skill prereqs).
The list goes on.

This is natural prereqs no cheese/tricks.

Just to Browse
2012-12-26, 04:11 PM
Name another feat which gives a flat +2 or more damage at all times under all circumstances. "Interesting" is all well and good, but there's something to be said for "reliable"; I would happily choose Weapon Spec over Punishing Stance for every single NPC and a fair number of PCs, for whom accepting an AC penalty and/or the possibility of rolling 1 would not be worth the possibility of a high roll.

... but that's not even reliable. +2 damage is moderately noticeable at levels 1-3, maybe still at 4-5, and then it doesn't matter at all. Power Attack is more flexible, similar in approach, and also succeeds at its intended purpose. Mounted Combat gives better damage output because high-ground gets you +1 to hit, and also gives access to the great world of riding. Combat Reflexes does even better. Stand Still is also better. Karmic Strike is definitely better.

Weapon Spec is a feat that matters a little bit if you rush it, and then stops mattering for the rest of the game. It isn't "reliable" in the slightest, because picking it just increases the chances that your character will be sad and weak once they hit the 5-digit XP mark.

Amnoriath
2012-12-26, 05:20 PM
If your GM will stand for such "tricks"....


There aren't any tricks about it, Power Attack and Leap Attack yield 1 attack to 6 damage trade. The Heedless Charge option of Shock trooper transfers power attack penalities to AC. Battle Jump doubles damage when falling ten feet above an opponent and allows a charge to trigger that same way. Spirit Lion totem Barbarian gives pounce. The valorous enchantment(+1) adds another multipler and two more from a lance and spirited charge. At this point for every single penalty of AC taken you gain 24 points of damage not including weapon and strength damage.

Djinn_in_Tonic
2012-12-26, 06:06 PM
On the topic of Weapon Specialization: the feat has reverse scaling in terms of statistical utility, and is thus bad.

Compare to Weapon Focus. The d20 roll used to hit never changes, and so a +1 to hit always increases your chance to hit by 5%, regardless of level. It's not a particularly GOOD feat, but it keeps it's power well.

Weapon Damage, however, doesn't have a binary result (hit/miss). The value of X damage depends on how large a percentage of your opponent's health X is. Bonus damage is effectively wasted on overkill: dealing five 24 damage attacks to a monster with 100 hp drops it to 0 just as fast as five 20 damage attacks.

Further, since player damage scale, damage boosters scale according to the percentage it increases your damage. A 50% damage boost keeps constant: you will kill everything 50% faster. Flat damage bonuses, however, become statistically less and less valuable as your total damage increases: at 4 damage, a +2 bonus increases your damage by 50%. At 10 base damage it increases your damage by 20%. At 40 base damage it increases your damage by 5%. Thus, Weapon Specialization becomes less and less useful as you gain levels, making it an extremely poor feat choice. It's actually only useful at all if that +2 average damage reduces the number of attacks that a monster needs to be slain by 1, and even then it will only save you a single attack per fight.

willpell
2012-12-26, 11:23 PM
Strange, Complete Mage has a Prc for ECL 4 called Master Specialist for wizards.
Then there is Church Inquisitor in Complete Divine (admittedly you need high Int/human for skill prereqs).
The list goes on.

This is natural prereqs no cheese/tricks.

Church Inquisitor I was familiar with, along with possibly the easiest PRC of all time, Warchief. I haven't gone into Complete Mage. But these are a tiny minority of PRCs; almost all of them require ECL 5 to qualify (and thus ECL 6 after you take the first level) or higher.


... but that's not even reliable. +2 damage is moderately noticeable at levels 1-3, maybe still at 4-5, and then it doesn't matter at all. Power Attack is more flexible, similar in approach, and also succeeds at its intended purpose.

Power Attack requires taking penalties on your to-hit, which prevents it from being safe against high-AC foes. Not much of a disadvantage, but one I tend to fixate on because I'm very susceptible to being screwed by the dice.


Mounted Combat gives better damage output because high-ground gets you +1 to hit

Source?


Combat Reflexes does even better.

Combat Reflexes does *nothing* unless your opponent takes actions which provoke AoOs.


Stand Still is also better.

Stand Still involves you not dealing damage at all. (Though it is definitely a great feat for anyone whose job is to act as a roadblock; there are nowhere near enough widgets in the game which allow a tank to actually prevent foes from just walking around them.)


Karmic Strike is definitely better.

Dunno that one. Book?


Weapon Spec is a feat that matters a little bit if you rush it, and then stops mattering for the rest of the game. It isn't "reliable" in the slightest, because picking it just increases the chances that your character will be sad and weak once they hit the 5-digit XP mark.

An eventuality that concerns me not in the slightest; I'm not at all worried about my character becoming "weak", and most of my games don't go on that long anyway. The game gets increasingly degenerate and hard to manage at higher levels, so making low-level play more interesting is a far more significant concern.


There aren't any tricks about it, Power Attack and Leap Attack yield 1 attack to 6 damage trade.

That's a trick.


Battle Jump doubles damage when falling ten feet above an opponent and allows a charge to trigger that same way.

That's a trick.


Spirit Lion totem Barbarian gives pounce.

Has nothing to do with Weapon Spec, other than serving as a great enabler for it if you multiclass properly.


The valorous enchantment(+1) adds another multipler and two more from a lance and spirited charge. At this point for every single penalty of AC taken you gain 24 points of damage not including weapon and strength damage.

All of which is dependent on your DM allowing this combo, or "trick" as I call it. There's no guarantee you'll be permitted to distort the game rules to this degree; it might be RAW, but that doesn't guarantee it flies at the table, any more than drown-healing. Personally I might allow half of these items to work together before I'd start ruling "okay, that doesn't interact with that because obviously lolno".


On the topic of Weapon Specialization: the feat has reverse scaling in terms of statistical utility, and is thus bad.

My opinion of statistics is well-documented.


Weapon Damage, however, doesn't have a binary result (hit/miss). The value of X damage depends on how large a percentage of your opponent's health X is. Bonus damage is effectively wasted on overkill: dealing five 24 damage attacks to a monster with 100 hp drops it to 0 just as fast as five 20 damage attacks.

But dealing four 25 damage attacks instead of five 21s is good, so I'm not sure what your point is.


Further, since player damage scale

Not very much it doesn't. Five +1s in 20 levels, if you put them all in Strength, plus whatever equipment or inherent bonuses the DM allows. Mostly damage stays within a few points for your entire career.


Thus, Weapon Specialization becomes less and less useful as you gain levels, making it an extremely poor feat choice.

You can always retrain it if it loses value, assuming the GM doesn't say no (which, if you're obviously not contributing, would be poor form on his part). But I think making it useful at the early levels is the important part, not only because I prefer low-level games in the first place, but simply because it doesn't matter what happens at level 6 if you die during level 5, or just can't ever earn XP during it.

Djinn_in_Tonic
2012-12-26, 11:38 PM
My opinion of statistics is well-documented.

But in a game where a good portion is mathematics, statistical analysis is about the best we can do.


But dealing four 25 damage attacks instead of five 21s is good, so I'm not sure what your point is.

My point is that, as your attack damage goes up, the chance of the +2 extra points being the difference in attacks to kill a monster decreases drastically. In effect, the +2 is only really useful if the estimated average damage of your attacks without it reduces the monster to a value of 2 x (Total Number of Attacks) or lower. Any higher than that and you'd need another attack ANYWAY. Even then, it does only save you one additional action.


Not very much it doesn't. Five +1s in 20 levels, if you put them all in Strength, plus whatever equipment or inherent bonuses the DM allows. Mostly damage stays within a few points for your entire career.

And a +5 Magic weapon. With possible weapon-increasing attacks. And feats, some of which can add damage. And magical weapon abilities.

Let's assume a Strength of 18 at level 1, and a Greatsword. Damage at level 4 is 2d6 + 8 with Weapon Specialization.

At level 20, with +4 points of Strength and a +6 item of Strength, my Strength is 28, or a +9. Base damage with Weapon Specialization is +13, and it's a +5 weapon, so it's +18. My to-hit is through the roof, so I can afford to power attack a bit: let's say a modest -4, which puts me at +8 extra damage, for +26 damage. Let's say I have a Flaming weapon, just for fun. That's an average of +3.5 damage, so we'll say +3. So that's 2d6+8 vs. 2d6+29, or 15 average vs. 36 average. My damage has doubled, to Weapon Specialization is effectively worth 50% less than it was at level 4.

That's relatively low-optimization, mind, and a Fighter with just that will likely under-perform compared to most of the rest of the party. A more heavily optimized Fighter sees an even GREATER reduction in Weapon Specialization's utility.


But I think making it useful at the early levels is the important part, not only because I prefer low-level games in the first place, but simply because it doesn't matter what happens at level 6 if you die during level 5, or just can't ever earn XP during it.

The problem is that, since retraining is NOT part of the core rules, this is poor design. Actually, even if retraining WAS part of the core rules it would be poor design.

D&D is not a PvP game where you can kill of an opponent early in the game. It's not Defense of the Ancients or League of Legends, where powerful early-game characters who have an incredibly ability to win early and mid game are balanced by their weak end-game. The reason it's not those games
is because D&D doesn't have an end: you just keep playing until you decide to stop. There isn't a winner. You're stuck with your character until he/she dies or the campaign ends.

So making choices that SEEM good (and even might be decent) at level X isn't a good idea if those choices are relatively worthless at level X + Y. Likewise, abilities that have to be retrained because they're great early but weak later are basically abilities that say "You have to take me, but you'll just end up getting rid of me eventually."

Poor design, in a nutshell.

Just to Browse
2012-12-27, 01:01 AM
I'll just bold response topics:

Power Attack: I assume from this comment that you're playing very low level. Starting at level 3-4, attack bonuses almost entirely eclipse AC.

High Ground: Being on higher ground gets you +1 to hit. When you are on something higher above someone else, you have high ground.

Combat Reflexes, Stand Still: Yes, and despite the fact that combat reflexes requires people to provoke AoOs and that stand still doesn't deal damage, they both outshine Weapon Specialization because they scale. Both of those are melee disruptor feats because they disincentive or entirely stop enemies that want to get around you, which not only supports the melee archetype and probably increases your per-round damage (Combat Reflexes is extra attacks, which in themselves will do more than 2 damage, and Stand Still keeps enemies in range for full attacks).

Karmic Strike: PHBII.

Staying at low levels: I think this is kind of the crux of the argument. When someone makes an argument about a feat being bad, they mean that it's a bad choice as a feat for a standard D&D character anywhere between levels 1 and 20. You can't just limit the argument to levels 1-4 because you play there.

So the feat is OK but not great at low levels. If you aren't leaving low levels, go ahead and take it and have a blast. But you can't impose a personal preference into a generic discussion, so you shouldn't bring the level 1-4 mindset to a 1-20 discussion.

Not Liking Statistics: If your argument against math is that you don't like and thus it should be ignored, then I honestly don't know what to tell you...

Amnoriath
2012-12-27, 01:03 AM
That's a trick.



That's a trick.



All of which is dependent on your DM allowing this combo, or "trick" as I call it. There's no guarantee you'll be permitted to distort the game rules to this degree; it might be RAW, but that doesn't guarantee it flies at the table, any more than drown-healing. Personally I might allow half of these items to work together before I'd start ruling "okay, that doesn't interact with that because obviously lolno".



If those are tricks than any feat, skill bonus, attribute and even your weapon specializations are "tricks". Also they are perfectly legal, look them up, the multiplication of Leap Attack only applies to Power Attack damage while the other multipliers are for the entirety which stack according to rules which increases the multiplier by one of the existing for every 100% increase in normal damage. So don't make this about distorting the rules just because you can't argue the effectiveness of something you know can't compare to what others can do.

Dienekes
2012-12-27, 01:56 AM
Willpell, I'm gonna ask an honest question, and I know it'll come off bad but I am not trying to be mean. How many times have you ever actually played above level 8 or so? Because a lot of what you post seems to me to imply you either never have or have no idea at all how to build a character above that level.

willpell
2012-12-27, 02:25 AM
But in a game where a good portion is mathematics, statistical analysis is about the best we can do.

I think a good portion of the game is inspiration, and mathematics are a stopgap solution for when it fails.


In effect, the +2 is only really useful if the estimated average damage of your attacks without it reduces the monster to a value of 2 x (Total Number of Attacks) or lower. Any higher than that and you'd need another attack ANYWAY.

In my game I tend to be more realistic than the default about whether a creature will fight to the death; if your opponent has 10 hit points, then whether you dish out 5 or 9 doesn't make a difference to how long it takes you to drop them, but it makes a fairly significant difference in how likely they are to cut and run when they realize what a wallop they just took.


And feats, some of which can add damage.

Gee, imagine that. Wonder who would ever want such a thing.... :smallannoyed:


High Ground: Being on higher ground gets you +1 to hit. When you are on something higher above someone else, you have high ground.

I have *never* seen this rule *anywhere*. Not that I'm an expert or anything, but please cite a source.


Staying at low levels: I think this is kind of the crux of the argument. When someone makes an argument about a feat being bad, they mean that it's a bad choice as a feat for a standard D&D character anywhere between levels 1 and 20. You can't just limit the argument to levels 1-4 because you play there.

It's inaccurate for them to describe it as "a bad feat" if it is in fact a good feat within a narrow context, because you might be in that context, and hearing that the feat is "bad" will talk you out of taking it, even though in your situation it would have been the right choice. The optimization community is irresponsible IMO, because they dismiss things as useless rather than specify that they're only useful in certain situations. You should always be given the option to take whatever suits your fancy, and then be given *constructive* advice about how to make the most of it, rather than dismissively told that you chose poorly. They're *your* choices; they help define who you are, and they are never "wrong".


So the feat is OK but not great at low levels. If you aren't leaving low levels, go ahead and take it and have a blast. But you can't impose a personal preference into a generic discussion, so you shouldn't bring the level 1-4 mindset to a 1-20 discussion.

Yeah, good luck with that. My perspective is attached; it goes where I go.


Not Liking Statistics: If your argument against math is that you don't like and thus it should be ignored, then I honestly don't know what to tell you...

Statistics is not proven math AFAIC. It is speculative, little more than guesswork, suggested by circumstantial evidence which is treated as if it was conclusive by those with a vested interested in having it be taken seriously. I regard it as a deception, meant to lull people into a false sense of security by convincing them that random effects are predictable, when in fact any correspondence between the prediction and the actual outcome is pure coincidence. Even if the prediction comes true a hundred thousand times, counting on it to also come true the hundred-thousand-and-first is "just asking for it" IMO. So I treat all statistical results as a "maybe" to "probably", never as anything so seductive as a guarantee. I hedge all my bets, and I assume things WILL go wrong at the worst possible moment, so as to be either pleasantly surprised or bitterly vindicated, and never crushed utterly by the dashing of a vain hope.


If those are tricks than any feat, skill bonus, attribute and even your weapon specializations are "tricks"

No, any one widget in isolation is not a "trick"; exploiting an interaction between widgets that are not designed to coordinate is a "trick". If Leap Attack specifically mentions Power Attack, then presumably they were designed to work together, and I'd sign off on them. But if you bring things in from multiple books and assume without evidence that they are compatible (*particularly* when the books in question are niche works such as campaign settings, or class-specific sourcebooks where you generalize the effect to other classes), then you're getting wickety IMO, and I feel increasingly justified in putting a Rule 0 kibosh on such attempts at distorting the reality of my game. Anything that says your human-with-a-pointy-stick can deal hundreds of damage on a charge is clearly and obviously wrong, regardless of what the rules say; hundreds of damage are just not within the realm of human possibility, even a dragon probably can't dish out that much, and I'm not going to permit some exploit that makes a guy on horseback deadlier than a dragon.


Willpell, I"m gonna ask an honest question, and I know it'll come off bad but I am not trying to be mean. How many times have you ever actually played above level 8 or so? Because a lot of what you post seems to me to imply you either never have or have no idea at all how to build a character above that level.

Never or almost never, I'll agree. IMO the game grows increasingly degenerate at higher levels, so I'm in no great hurry to master those aspects of the system. Eventually I'll get that far, and start figuring out how to set things more in order at those levels to correspond with the game's reality-basis, where 80% or more of the populace is level 1 and their ability checks are the measure of what's humanly possible for anyone but the greatest of prodigies. I don't quite buy the "level 6 characters are practically godlike" argument, but neither do I buy the "gods are just level 30ish characters" end of the spectrum; exactly what I *do* want to see is still being negotiated, but it will involve evaluating monsters at appropriate CRs, seeing how they correspond to their mythologic basis (if any) and factors of ecosystem and society and such, and generally just sifting through insane amounts of data to see where it looks wrong to me, changing it when I'm confident I can safely do so. Maintaining an ironclad understanding of the low-level reality-basis of the game is crucial to making that possible someday.

TuggyNE
2012-12-27, 02:51 AM
OT on statistics:

Statistics is not proven math AFAIC. It is speculative, little more than guesswork, suggested by circumstantial evidence which is treated as if it was conclusive by those with a vested interested in having it be taken seriously. I regard it as a deception, meant to lull people into a false sense of security by convincing them that random effects are predictable, when in fact any correspondence between the prediction and the actual outcome is pure coincidence. Even if the prediction comes true a hundred thousand times, counting on it to also come true the hundred-thousand-and-first is "just asking for it" IMO. So I treat all statistical results as a "maybe" to "probably", never as anything so seductive as a guarantee. I hedge all my bets, and I assume things WILL go wrong at the worst possible moment, so as to be either pleasantly surprised or bitterly vindicated, and never crushed utterly by the dashing of a vain hope.

Intriguingly, since what you are describing is either a) not statistics or b) only discernible by accurate statistics or c) both, I don't think anyone will disagree that it is a deception. Actual statistics does not present conclusive and absolute predictions; all predictions are marked with confidence margins, expected error, or the like. And, in particular, predicting that a specific event will happen one way or another guaranteed and for sure is the sort of pseudo-science that statisticians frown on pretty hard.

Statistics is, in fact, nothing more or less than the quantification of the informal "maybe" and "probably".

Dienekes
2012-12-27, 02:51 AM
No, any one widget in isolation is not a "trick"; exploiting an interaction between widgets that are not designed to coordinate is a "trick". If Leap Attack specifically mentions Power Attack, then presumably they were designed to work together, and I'd sign off on them. But if you bring things in from multiple books and assume without evidence that they are compatible (*particularly* when the books in question are niche works such as campaign settings, or class-specific sourcebooks where you generalize the effect to other classes), then you're getting wickety IMO, and I feel increasingly justified in putting a Rule 0 kibosh on such attempts at distorting the reality of my game. Anything that says your human-with-a-pointy-stick can deal hundreds of damage on a charge is clearly and obviously wrong, regardless of what the rules say; hundreds of damage are just not within the realm of human possibility, even a dragon probably can't dish out that much, and I'm not going to permit some exploit that makes a guy on horseback deadlier than a dragon.

Yeah Leap Attack is specifically designed to work with Power Attack, and it's design as well as most the rest of the damage feats are really easy connect the dots realizations that are about the only thing that make damage useful come high levels. You're last line there, is quite honestly the entire mentality that fighters can't have nice things that many posters find so infuriating as it gets in the way of designing a balanced game where each class functions as it's supposed to in high levels.

Also I find your statement that high damage is obviously wrong very odd. Where do you draw the line on what a human is or isn't supposed to do at any given level? It's relatively easy to make a character who with high enough level can survive a fall from almost any height. Is that obviously wrong as well because that's how the game is designed. Also it's possible for characters to go swimming in lava. Hell, at a much earlier level its nearly impossible to be shanked to death by a knife.

The point is, high levels are outside human possibility. They always have been, and it's ridiculous to try and shut down the potential to escape human possibility in certain aspects when the entire game is designed to do so anyway.


Never or almost never, I'll agree. IMO the game grows increasingly degenerate at higher levels, so I'm in no great hurry to master those aspects of the system. Eventually I'll get that far, and start figuring out how to set things more in order at those levels to correspond with the game's reality-basis, where 80% or more of the populace is level 1 and their ability checks are the measure of what's humanly possible for anyone but the greatest of prodigies. I don't quite buy the "level 6 characters are practically godlike" argument, but neither do I buy the "gods are just level 30ish characters" end of the spectrum; exactly what I *do* want to see is still being negotiated, but it will involve evaluating monsters at appropriate CRs, seeing how they correspond to their mythologic basis (if any) and factors of ecosystem and society and such, and generally just sifting through insane amounts of data to see where it looks wrong to me, changing it when I'm confident I can safely do so. Maintaining an ironclad understanding of the low-level reality-basis of the game is crucial to making that possible someday.

I don't think anyone says level 6 characters are godlike, just that they represent roughly what is considered peak human conditions, give or take a few levels here or there. It's not an exact science in any case. But what can be agreed on is eventually beyond that level the game does not model real life well. Hell before high levels it's not exactly a great model of real life either.

What you want to see is not D&D 3.5, it never was D&D 3.5. So arguing how these feats will and should interact in your imaginary perfect system brings absolutely nothing to the table when everyone else is discussing D&D 3.5.

willpell
2012-12-27, 02:59 AM
Statistics is, in fact, nothing more or less than the quantification of the informal "maybe" and "probably".

True, and I'm glad you pointed that out, but I go further with the idea. To me, those terms are misleading, because the truth is binary - there's a 100% chance will occur unless it doesn't, and a 0% chance that it will occur unless it does, and identifying any percentage in between is rather pointless unless it's with the intention of rounding to one of those extremes. If you think your girlfriend wants chocolate for valentine's day, whether the chance of her liking it is 60% or 90%, you'll probably buy it (you might be willing to pay a little more for a higher percentage or procrastinate a bit for a lower, but ultimately it makes little difference). So I say it's better to just leave the statistics out of it and just make the decision through your own free will, based on what you think is going to happen, which you make as much based on what your prediction says about your outlook on life, as any ability to comprehend the unknowable future.


You're last line there, is quite honestly the entire mentality that fighters can't have nice things that many posters find so infuriating as it gets in the way of designing a balanced game where each class functions as it's supposed to in high levels.

I would say that *no* class should be able to just instantly neutralize a dragon; I won't hesitate to nerf wizards as soon as I manage to figure out exactly what they're capable of per RAW.


Where do you draw the line on what a human is or isn't supposed to do at any given level?

Some reasonable extrapolation from actual human ability, with the addition of a few fantastic elements.


It's relatively easy to make a character who with high enough level can survive a fall from almost any height.

Proof that the falling rules are glitched and need adjustment.


Is that obviously wrong as well because that's how the game is designed. Also it's possible for characters to go swimming in lava. Hell, at a much earlier level its nearly impossible to be shanked to death by a knife.

All of these, yes, obviously wrong.


The point is, high levels are outside human possibility. They always have been, and it's ridiculous to try and shut down the potential to escape human possibility in certain aspects when the entire game is designed to do so anyway.

I'd say the point of the game is to escape humanity's current situation, not its quintessential nature. What human beings are is a tool-using species who works to overcome its limitations, and that becomes moot if we don't have those limitations anymore.

Djinn_in_Tonic
2012-12-27, 03:11 AM
I think a good portion of the game is inspiration, and mathematics are a stopgap solution for when it fails.

This is true in many systems, but not in D&D. Yes, inspiration is a large part of gameplay, but, ultimate, the majority of campaigns (and system balance) comes down to the mathematics of the game to resolve things like combat. System balance cannot be judged in a vacuum of "inspiration," because mechanics and inspiration do not directly interact. However, we can judge mechanics off other mechanics within the mechanical framework of a game. That's how we determine mechanical balance (or an extremely large part thereof).

There is a conceptual balance element, certainly, but Weapon Specialization (our argument here) has nothing but mechanical, numerical implementation, and should therefore be judged with that in mind.


In my game I tend to be more realistic than the default about whether a creature will fight to the death; if your opponent has 10 hit points, then whether you dish out 5 or 9 doesn't make a difference to how long it takes you to drop them, but it makes a fairly significant difference in how likely they are to cut and run when they realize what a wallop they just took.

Correct. However this is not a default assumption, and it does indeed change the grounds of the discussion. That said, it STILL doesn't make Weapon Specialization a good feat outside of an exceedingly small level range where it is relevant but not good.


Gee, imagine that. Wonder who would ever want such a thing.... :smallannoyed:

A lot of people. I was, however, primarily referring to scaling damage feats: Power Attack, Leap Attack, Shock Trooper, among others. These scale throughout all levels, and thus are desired damage boosters.

Now, I'll throw an addendum on my "Weapon Specialization is bad" comment. It's not a great feat, but it's not worthless. It sees some utility if you fight with two identical weapons, as you add another +2 into the mix. And, yes, more damage isn't usually a bad thing. It's just bad in the sense that it scales non-competitively, and so many other Fighter feats out there are just that much better.


I have *never* seen this rule *anywhere*. Not that I'm an expert or anything, but please cite a source.

Hypertext SRD: Favorable Condition Combat Modifiers (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/combat/combatModifiers.htm): First table, fifth from the top.


It's inaccurate for them to describe it as "a bad feat" if it is in fact a good feat within a narrow context, because you might be in that context, and hearing that the feat is "bad" will talk you out of taking it, even though in your situation it would have been the right choice. The optimization community is irresponsible IMO, because they dismiss things as useless rather than specify that they're only useful in certain situations. You should always be given the option to take whatever suits your fancy, and then be given *constructive* advice about how to make the most of it, rather than dismissively told that you chose poorly. They're *your* choices; they help define who you are, and they are never "wrong".

It's not a *wrong* feat, or a *wrong* choice. That doesn't mean it isn't a bad choice though. It's an optimization community: Weapon Specialization is mechanically inferior. Therefore, by the standards of reasonable optimization, Weapon Specialization is a sub-par feat. Picking it is bad optimization, but it isn't bad game-play, and it doesn't make you wrong unless your goal is to make the best Fighter you can.

No one is saying you CAN'T take Weapon Specialization or hell, even GREATER Weapon Specialization. We're just saying they're never optimal feats, even within their most powerful range of functionality (about levels 4-8). They're acceptable feats within about the 4-8 range, but still not GOOD feats. Average, perhaps, or a bit below. And there's not much more advice that CAN be given about Weapon Specialization because it's so straightforward. There's no more use you can get out of it. But if people ask for recommendations, the first one is "pick a better feat." We're not MAKING them do that. Just pointing out a place where a build could be improved, or could gain additional combat options.

Further, unless a player specifically specifies that the campaign is going to end at level X, most people will assume that player is looking at the long term. Weapon Specialization decreases in usefulness as a character levels, meaning that for any game that we think might progress beyond the 4-8 range we will not recommend it, as other feats will either retain their value or become STRONGER, while Weapon Specialization will drop off.


Statistics is not proven math AFAIC. It is speculative, little more than guesswork, suggested by circumstantial evidence which is treated as if it was conclusive by those with a vested interested in having it be taken seriously. I regard it as a deception, meant to lull people into a false sense of security by convincing them that random effects are predictable, when in fact any correspondence between the prediction and the actual outcome is pure coincidence. Even if the prediction comes true a hundred thousand times, counting on it to also come true the hundred-thousand-and-first is "just asking for it" IMO. So I treat all statistical results as a "maybe" to "probably", never as anything so seductive as a guarantee. I hedge all my bets, and I assume things WILL go wrong at the worst possible moment, so as to be either pleasantly surprised or bitterly vindicated, and never crushed utterly by the dashing of a vain hope.

This is why there's a confidence interval in statistics, as well as statistical outliers. They account, as best probability can, for unlikely results.

Statistics, due to the nature of probability, cannot guarantee anything. But they can predict, with quite accurate results, the results of a given event. A SINGLE event gets difficult to predict, yes, but a given SET of events becomes easier and easier to predict.

Statistically, for example, if you rolled 3d6 and added them together, did that 100,000 times, and averaged them, your average would be 10.5. There's probably a 99% chance that your average would be between 10.2 and 10.8. While you COULD roll all 6s, the odds are so small that, while the odds aren't TECHNICALLY any less than a given number, you'd be unlikely to see that in billions and billions of years. You'd also find that your rolls of 18 appeared about 1 out of every 216 rolls, although that number, due to its lower rate of occurrence, might not match perfectly. You'd almost certainly get close to those odds though...and the more sets of 100,000 rolls you performed, the closer you'd get to having 18s once out of every 216 rolls.

Random? Somewhat. Predictable? Definitely. There's a reason that statisticians are in high demand, and it's NOT because they're just randomly guessing. We can, in fact, use mathematical averages and statistics to balance D&D mechanics. That's what D&D mechanics are BASED on. That's how difficulty DCs are set, and saves determined.

Saying we should ignore that is like saying that we could basically decide our balance by assuming that everyone will rolls 1s when things matter, or always roll 20s. Statistics say otherwise.


Anything that says your human-with-a-pointy-stick can deal hundreds of damage on a charge is clearly and obviously wrong, regardless of what the rules say; hundreds of damage are just not within the realm of human possibility, even a dragon probably can't dish out that much, and I'm not going to permit some exploit that makes a guy on horseback deadlier than a dragon.

But, quite frankly, that's what the RAI (rules as intended) intend. Feats are MADE to interact with each other in cases like this. There are rules for it (the "two doublings equals a tripling" rule, for example). D&D is a game about mechanical interactions: that's why it has so many moving parts. Sure, some of it is unintentional and yes, some of it is out of line, but you can't put that as an argument that it's a trick. There were a number of "tricks" that the system wasn't supposed to allow: turning Locate City into a bomb, for example. Stacking "+damage on a charge" feats to...well...deal more damage on a charge isn't a trick. That's a feature: all the feats were designed to work with Power Attack and/or Charging, so combining them just makes you good at Power Attack and/or Charging. Splatbooks WERE made to function in the same game, after all. A class-specific sourcebook that gives feats that can be taken by other classes expects that those feats will indeed be taken by other classes!

D&D is ALL ABOUT mechanical interactions. It's both a blessing and a curse, but you can't say it's not intentional. Things like Pun-puns manipulation of the Sharruk (or however you spell it) and the Locate City bomb, now, are definitely exploiting poorly written rules, because those things were NOT designed to be able to interact with the rules people manage to get them interacting with. Using three Charge modifiers on a Charge Attack, however, is using things in the way they were meant to be used. I can't call that tricky.

willpell
2012-12-27, 04:54 AM
I'm forced to argue against you sort of defending my point of view - greater weapon spec requires Fighter level twelve, so if it's only "useful" up to level 8 according to you, then oops.

TuggyNE
2012-12-27, 06:33 AM
I'm forced to argue against you sort of defending my point of view - greater weapon spec requires Fighter level twelve, so if it's only "useful" up to level 8 according to you, then oops.

You are enlightened. :smallwink: :smallbiggrin:

TheFallenOne
2012-12-27, 09:29 AM
Statistics is not proven math AFAIC.

As Far As I Calumniate?

willpell
2012-12-27, 10:20 AM
As Far As I Calumniate?

No idea what this means.

Djinn_in_Tonic
2012-12-27, 10:32 AM
I'm forced to argue against you sort of defending my point of view - greater weapon spec requires Fighter level twelve, so if it's only "useful" up to level 8 according to you, then oops.

Problematic, isn't it? Especially since it's "usefulness" is still not that useful.

Basically, Greater Weapon Specialization is just Weapon Specialization again: it still adds +2 damage, exactly the same as its predecessor. Thus, it's good at the same levels mathematically, even if it has higher prerequisites.

Sure, it increases your damage again...but at the cost of another feat, so we can't use it to argue that Weapon Specialization is at all better.

Starbuck_II
2012-12-27, 05:42 PM
High Ground: Being on higher ground gets you +1 to hit. When you are on something higher above someone else, you have high ground.


I know it says ground, but shouldn't Leap Attack get the bonus because you jumped are higher than them?
Or does really require you to be standing/sitting on something higher?

TuggyNE
2012-12-27, 07:34 PM
I know it says ground, but shouldn't Leap Attack get the bonus because you jumped are higher than them?
Or does really require you to be standing/sitting on something higher?

Pretty sure if you're in the air you're not colloquially "on" anything. (Battle Jump would get the bonus though.)

Lans
2012-12-28, 02:07 PM
No one is saying you CAN'T take Weapon Specialization or hell, even GREATER Weapon Specialization. We're just saying they're never optimal feats, even within their most powerful range of functionality (about levels 4-8). They're acceptable feats within about the 4-8 range, but still not GOOD feats. Average, perhaps, or a bit below. And there's not much more advice that CAN be given about Weapon Specialization because it's so straightforward. There's no more use you can get out of it. But if people ask for recommendations, the first one is "pick a better feat." We're not MAKING them do that. Just pointing out a place where a build could be improved, or could gain additional combat options.

Further, unless a player specifically specifies that the campaign is going to end at level X, most people will assume that player is looking at the long term. Weapon Specialization decreases in usefulness as a character levels, meaning that for any game that we think might progress beyond the 4-8 range we will not recommend it, as other feats will either retain their value or become STRONGER, while Weapon Specialization will drop off
.

There are 2 instances when weapon specialization is decent.
One is when your using a damage+x=DC effect, and the other is when you have a lot of attacks.

Boomerang daze and standstill are examples of the first, and volley archers are the example of the other. Even then there are better feats that one would take first, but weapon specialization goes on the list to be taken for these characters. Except maybe the guy using standstill, charging bonuses last for a round.

Which gets to why the warblade doesn't replace the fighter any more than it replaces the barbarian- it can't do what a fighter can do at all levels. Mostly when it comes to ranged combat, as I'm willing to give being able to do maneuvers like the one that adds 2d6 damage are close enough to specialization to be doing what a fighter does in melee.

Granted a fighter can throw more feats into attack spam, but they don't seem to beat out the warblades damage. Say they both take PA and Shape soulmeld for lucky dice , fighter has 2 feats- weapon focus, and improved bull rush. The fighter is getting a bit higher damage over all. Unless the warblade uses its rage ability, I mean punishing stance

A fighter can get Boomerang Daze at level 4, a warblade would have to wait til 6, and wouldn't be able to have rapid shot at level 6 with out having to be a race with a bonus feat, flaws, etc. While the same fighter would have improved rapidshot, or weapon specialization, or knowledge devotion

Edit- Which is why i feel that any fixes to lower tier classes should leave the class able to do what it could before

willpell
2012-12-29, 04:21 AM
I didn't even notice that this thread had updated until I found this quote in Complete Divine, concerning the Divine feats, and just went "O_o" at the message it sends.


In keeping with the idea of expanding the options of all classes, the feats in this category share characteristics that make them unavailable to single-class fighters.

Did...the person who wrote this think ALL feats were fighter bonus feats, or something? I'm absolutely baffled by the perspective that would have been necessary to write this sentence. And come to think of it, there are several feats in books I've processed to date (Draconomicon and Complete Adventurer are the main ones I think) which read like they should have been FBFs, and have FBFs as prerequisites, but they aren't FBFs themselves. The more I think about it, I wonder if the whole of Wotco just accepted as true that the Fighter was unbelievably amazing and never bothered to mention some houserule that actually never made it into the books.


Edit- Which is why i feel that any fixes to lower tier classes should leave the class able to do what it could before

This.



It's an optimization community: Weapon Specialization is mechanically inferior.

I still don't agree. Weapon Specialization would only be a bad feat if there were a feat which could give you +3 damage to a chosen weapon, or +2 damage to three chosen weapons, +2 damage to a chosen weapon without having to be a Fighter 4. If the comparison is not exact apples-to-apples, then saying that a watermelon is better than an apple is an exagerration, even though the watermelon is obviously much larger. You might not want size, you might not want an inedible rind and seeds you have to spit out, you might want something you can bake into a pie which is quintessentially American....well, you get what I'm saying. As long as you claim that Weapon Spec is bad for reasons that don't directly relate to its effectiveness, I will continue to insist that you're missing the point. Having to use special maneuvers to set up greater damage, and rely on the DM not to veto such an exploit, makes it not worthwhile IMO; a flat "+2 damage all the time" is a very nice bennie to have and it's almost impossible for anything to go wrong with it, so by my definition it's strong.


But if people ask for recommendations, the first one is "pick a better feat." We're not MAKING them do that. Just pointing out a place where a build could be improved, or could gain additional combat options.

True, saying "do this" doesn't force obedience, unless you hold some sort of authority. But it still qualifies as giving advice which in some cases you shouldn't. if someone wants to be really good with an axe, Weapon Specialization (Axe) is their optimal feat. Telling them how to do +367 damage with a magic lance while jumping off the back of a wyvern isn't helpful, because they don't want to fight with a lance and they're not always on the back of a wyvern. Punishing Stance gives you much more damage than WS, but at the cost of an AC penalty. Leap Attack only works when you can charge, which isn't always. And Shock Trooper, whatever exactly it does, is at least overcomplected, and not in-concept for a character that's designed to be straightforward, like Thog. The bottom line is, being more powerful is only the point if someone specifically says it is. When someone frames a question, you should not automatically insert your own parameters for how to answer that question (though note that this is my theoretical "should", I'm keenly aware that it can be hard to take your brain out of a particular mindset, which is exactly why I try to discourage people from getting into such mindsets in the first place.)

And now I'm going into rant mode a bit so I'll spoiler this for the benefit of those who don't want to hear my usual brand of lunacy.


Statistically, for example, if you rolled 3d6 and added them together, did that 100,000 times, and averaged them, your average would be 10.5.

And actually, it might be some other number, so when you say "Statistically, X will happen", what you actually mean is "I think X will happen and claim that satistics proves I can't possibly be wrong". When, in actuality, you might. It's "unlikely", but that doesn't actually matter; probability is an optical illusion, because in actuality the shape of future events is fixed, and humanity has no ability to predict them accurately because it is incapable of observing the determined future. So it invented the concept of free will to console itself that it had some control over its destiny, and then invented everything from astrology to statistics to attempt to prove that that control was greater than it might initially appear. It's nothing but mental gymnastics to try and convince people that something is true when this fact isn't obvious, and thus I unrelentingly disdain it, and will always advise anyone not to believe it. It's a confidence game that our entire society conspires in, and I detest it; I want to see people accept the nihilistic truth, that we are rocks in flight whose path is predetermined by ballistics, all busily trying to sell each other quack cures for nonexistent diseases. It disgusts me, and I will always strive to oppose it, even though I know this is futile, because I feel that it is better to lose for the right reasons than win for the wrong ones.


Random? Somewhat. Predictable? Definitely. There's a reason that statisticians are in high demand, and it's NOT because they're just randomly guessing. We can, in fact, use mathematical averages and statistics to balance D&D mechanics. That's what D&D mechanics are BASED on. That's how difficulty DCs are set, and saves determined.

Okay, say for instance that a goblin has exactly 5 HP at all times, and a fighter deals 1d4+1 damage at all times. Statistically, the fighter has a 25% chance to drop the goblin in one hit, and a 75% chance to drop the goblin in one hit if he uses his 1/day "deal double damage" ability. So, stastitically, there is a 1/2 chance that the ability in question will do what it exists to do. So why let the dice decide?

Urg, I'm not explaining myself very well. If the DCs are calculated on the basis of statistical assumptions, why not recalculate them to use the statistical average as a fixed value, and eliminate the possibility of the dice screwing you? Rather than things being random, I'd rather see them be psychotically more detailed, so that every factor is taken into consideration to determine how much it actually DOES affect your ability to succeed, rather than how much it MIGHT.

There should be surprise and unpredictability in games, but it shouldn't be this...niggling and pointless. I dunno, I'm not quite making sense even to myself, but there's something here so I'm gonna keep groping around and try to find it....later.


Saying we should ignore that is like saying that we could basically decide our balance by assuming that everyone will rolls 1s when things matter, or always roll 20s.

I pretty much feel that we always do roll 1s when it matters, and that statistics is there to try and trick us into hoping otherwise, so that we'll be crushed by disappointment over and over again. Perhaps this is confirmation bias, but I don't believe so. I think my luck has been measurably worse throughout my life than statistics says it should be, and that the inability to prove this just indicates that the mysterious forces responsible are good at their jobs.


Sure, some of it is unintentional and yes, some of it is out of line, but you can't put that as an argument that it's a trick.

That's pretty much exactly what I *do* definie as a "trick". The rules are written for brevity, and they have unforseen consequences. The moment those consequences were discovered, the rules should have been rewritten, but they weren't because they'd been printed in physical form and sold for money, and it would cost money to buy the books back, rewrite the text, and send them out again in corrected form. Which is why I consider books to be a bad format for this sort of thing. I'm increasingly in awe of the concept of wikis because how much better a format for information access they are than any book ever printed; the only reason d20srd.org doesn't become the ultimate ever-evolving rules resource that D&D needs is that it's legally prohibited from deviating from the original text, which makes me very sad.


There were a number of "tricks" that the system wasn't supposed to allow: turning Locate City into a bomb, for example.

Yep, that and polymorphing into a genie to grant your own wishes are probably my top two "I don't care what the rules say, the answer is no" scenarios.


Stacking "+damage on a charge" feats to...well...deal more damage on a charge isn't a trick.

It has to do with whether you should be able to stack that many of them. Every one should work in isolation, but the ability to combine them should be more limited than it is.


A class-specific sourcebook that gives feats that can be taken by other classes expects that those feats will indeed be taken by other classes!

I think you give the writers of those sourcebooks too much credit - see the beginning of this post.


D&D is ALL ABOUT mechanical interactions.

I'd say D&D is all about raiding dungeons and slaying dragons. If the mechanics EVER get in the way of that, the mechanics are the part that fails. As long as no game other than D&D can have mind flayers, beholders and slaads (which the SRD's Product Identity section guarantees is true), then all other factors should bend to get out of the way of making sure that any game you want to put mind flayers, beholders and slaads into is the game you're trying to play. It doesn't mean you have to accept every other dumb thing that the writers ever failed to exclude.

Hanuman
2012-12-29, 11:17 AM
No idea what this means.
I'm so meta even this acronym...

Rogue Shadows
2012-12-29, 12:26 PM
I'm so meta even this acronym...

Yay XKCD!


So why let the dice decide?

Because the element of chance makes it fun. Also while overall things are statistically likely to happen one way or another, in any one given instance it's much more random.

Basically - Roll a d20. The chances of it coming up as a 20 are 5%. Roll a d20 again. The chances of that second roll being a 20 are still 5% for that single roll.

But! The chances of rolling two twenties in a row is .25% (5% of 5%).

That is where statistical averages come in. We're not telling you whether or not Weapon Specialization is useful against this one goblin, we're telling you how useful it will be, from a statistical standpoint, every time your character uses it over the course of his or her career (which is presumed to be from levels 1-20, inclusive), which is eminently predictable.

willpell
2012-12-29, 07:47 PM
Because the element of chance makes it fun.

I agree...so why attempt to remove the element of chance by predicting statistical outcomes? Just let the dice remain random, and use fixed results wherever you want predictability.

TuggyNE
2012-12-29, 08:21 PM
I agree...so why attempt to remove the element of chance by predicting statistical outcomes? Just let the dice remain random, and use fixed results wherever you want predictability.

... the what now? Dice are, indeed, random*, but the amount of randomness can be measured and adjusted. There's no need to take a black-and-white "either it's random or it's not" stance: randomness is not a binary value, and statistical analysis of dice results does not automatically set it to 0.

In particular, probability cannot and will not and does not predict your next roll. 3d6 has certain identifiable characteristics, and 2d10 others, and 1d20 others yet, but "will definitely roll a 3 next turn" is not one of them. Instead, you can determine that rolling 18 on 3d6 is a lot less likely than a 20 on 1d20 (and therefore using 3d6 for attack rolls needs a different arrangement for critical hits). Or, to take another example, 10d2 has a much smaller range of possible values than 1d20, despite having the same maximum, and it also has a tighter range of likely values (being far more likely to center around 15 than a d20 will).


*Except for relatively minor inaccuracies that show up only with statistical analysis of large numbers of rolls, due to flaws in die manufacture or rolling technique.