Quote Originally Posted by Xefas View Post
If he does, have him post them on the boards!
He's up to... three right now, though he hasn't actually finished any of them (as in, maneuvers for each level). Water, Wind, and Blood. The last is kind of campaign specific (character-specific even, since his blood has a bit of a violent reaction with certain other creatures he really wants to kill). I know he was considering a Light-based one, a Time-based one (which I had to veto in this circumstance), and a Luck-based one.

Well, I solved that problem by, uh, just letting them ready multiple copies of the same maneuver (except for the highest level they know). It's a rule in the Martial Adept. So, no reason to invent a bunch of identical maneuvers.

My advice is this. If there's an encounter where a martial characters wants to spam as many copies of the same maneuver as he can, over and over, without deviation of any kind, then either:

1) It's a problem with the maneuver. And you have to figure out what the problem is. Is the maneuver too good? Is it just the swiss-army-knife that works perfectly and amazingly in every situation? To the point where you don't even have to supplement it with Boosts, or defend yourself with Counters, or use the synergy of other Strikes? Then the problem is probably with the Discipline. Is it a decent maneuver, with its own situational uses, holes, and weaknesses, but it still manages to be the perfect option in every situation? Probably an issue with encounter design. Enemies should probably be challenging the character in more varied ways.
In this particular case its Burning Blade combined with a TWF/multiattack build. Because a full attack of +IL and a bit to damage on each attack is just much better than most of the one-hit Strikes in the system. This player has Burning Blade and Water Blade, which is basically Burning Blade but Water. He was going to go for a third copy when I finally realized the problem. I think honestly this comes down to the multiattack problem of martial characters in D&D - so much is weighted on being able to deliver your attack sequence because its multiplicative with any other buffs you can get, whereas everything else is additive.

Some other maneuvers with this problem I think: Avalanche of Blades, Raging Mongoose. Time Stands Still but thats a 9th, so even in your system you couldn't double up. If I could just have every one of my attacks be a Raging Mongoose strike buffed with Burning Blade that's going to be significantly better than a lot of my other options. Basically thats ~+80 damage plus 4*Weapon damage. So the other options either have to be utility, or they have to somehow address 'the world after hitpoints'.

2) The player is just really unimaginative, or isn't really into tactical combat. Nothing to do about that.

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Versatility should be a bonus. Players should want to be versatile. It shouldn't be something that has to be forced down their throat. If it is, something needs to be designed differently.
In some sense though, D&D doesn't really need help with the un-versatile martial character. A decently built Barbarian or even Fighter can put out enough damage to kill most things in the book in a single round if their attacks can get through whatever defenses the thing might have. A class that is 'Fighter, but does two times as much damage' actually makes the game focus even more on using magic to make sure those attacks can't connect. So I'm very cautious about maneuvers and so on that just increase damage output. For me at least, versatility is the very point of a more involved system.