Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

[Hytheter]

You see, Path of War (not sure about Tomb of Battle) had this mechanic where Maneuvers keyed of there own Leveling system similar to Caster Levels, except they had one major difference in the fact that you still got progress towards your Maneuvers even if you multiclassed into a Class that didn't get them at a rate of half progression. as an example if you were a Path of War Class 5 and Base Class 6, you'd have Maneuvers the same as an 8th level character. or to put it into 5e terms if you made a Wizard 10/Cleric 10 you'd have Spells Known as if you were 15th level in each class (Or access to 8th level spells in both classes). this to me would be a huge improvement as it would allow for more flexibility when trying to make concepts that don't have an easy subclass option.

I have mixed feelings about it, personally. On one hand it does make it easier to pick up tier appropriate abilities, but on the other it leads to weirdness where the specific order you level in becomes important. For example: all else being equal, a Level 9 Fighter who takes a level in an Initiating Class is somewhat better than someone who starts as a level 1 Initiator then takes 9 levels in fighter, and putting power discrepancy aside it's just kind of a bookkeeping headache.

That said, if it was easier to swap out old maneuvers for newer better ones that would be easily fixable, so maybe my real issue is that PoW limits you to swapping to maneuvers of the same level. Which is weird; the number of high level maneuvers you can have is already limited by their prerequisites.