PDA

View Full Version : Crusader Bookkeeping



Swiftblu
2007-12-31, 12:26 PM
I was lucky enough to get Tome of Battle for Christmas, and after blazing through the fluff as fast as I could, I saw the Crusader class. The way they get their maneuvers (they prepare some of them from the ones they know, start each encounter with a fraction of their prepared maneuvers, and a random prepared maneuvers is given to them each round) seems like it would create a bookkeeping nightmare, with rolling for which maneuver they get and keeping track of prepared/unprepared/usable maneuvers.

Has anyone had any experience with this? Is it less of a problem than I'm thinking, or is there a solution for it?

Talya
2007-12-31, 12:27 PM
I was lucky enough to get Tome of Battle for Christmas, and after blazing through the fluff as fast as I could, I saw the Crusader class. The way they get their maneuvers (they prepare some of them from the ones they know, start each encounter with a fraction of their prepared maneuvers, and a random prepared maneuvers is given to them each round) seems like it would create a bookkeeping nightmare.

Has anyone had any experience with this? Is it less of a problem than I'm thinking, or is there a solution for it?

Put their maneuvers on cards.

Kurobara
2007-12-31, 12:31 PM
The best way to deal with it as far as I can see: maneuver cards (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/we/20061225a). Useful for any martial adept, but indispensible for Crusaders. Keep your readies maneuvers as a "deck", then shuffle and deal out however many granted maneuvers you get. Deal one more each round. Then when you run out of cards to deal, pick them up and repeat.

Hunter Noventa
2007-12-31, 12:33 PM
What she said. Put them on cards, keep the readied ones face down, take the granted ones into your hand a la poker, and put the used ones in a face up pile.

When i played a crusader I also made use of my laptop and a simple text file to track a lot of things rather than constantly erasing and writing on my character sheet.

The section for keeping track of manuvers looked something like-


Ancient Mountain Hammer RGx
Rallying Strike RG
Foehammer R
Divine Surge


R for ready, G for granted, and x for expended.

ZeroNumerous
2007-12-31, 12:34 PM
I just number my readied maneuvers(1-X) then roll a dX. Where X is the maximum number of readied maneuvers.

Roll for granted maneuvers.

Swiftblu
2007-12-31, 12:34 PM
I think the cards bit was suggested in the book somewhere... I'll have to try it out. My group has been using graph paper stapled to the back of our character sheets so far.

Come to think of it, I could probably write a Python script to take care of most of this for me.

Keld Denar
2007-12-31, 12:46 PM
The cards are a suggestion from the book. It is really a very good suggestion. Use a couple of the suggestions above.

It kind of gives the crusader a Magic:The Gathering kind of feel, which depending on the individual, can be kind of fun. Unfortunately you can't muligan your hand if you don't like it, and your party might groan and slap their foreheads if you try to Tinker a Darksteel Colossus into a game.