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

[Sindeloke]

I agree with all this, with the caveat that Tolkien and Conan likely represent low-magic and possibly even low-level worlds if you port them into D&D.

Yeah, that's true. What was that old blog post, "Gandalf is a 4th level druid"? Conan does a lot of dungeon delving, too, so less worries about rest balancing.

Unless we're talking the silmarillion of course, where running up and challenging a dark God to a duel is absolutely on the table for the party paladin

Eh, Fingolfin got in one hit and then got super, super dead. Beren and Luthien are the guys who actually scored a win, which goes to show that what you really need for the true Silmarillion experience is an extremely OP bard.

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.

That was a thing in ToB, yeah. Fighter/paladin/ranger gave you 1:2 uh... adept levels? Whatever they called the maneuver equivalent of caster levels. Can't recall if you got maneuvers too, or just the ability to pick better ones with your maneuver class levels. Edit: Shadowmonked, you didn't. Either way, I remember it caused a lot of debate over whether warblade was actually the first martial class that could truly stand on its own or if it benefited more from the same 2-level fighter dip that every other martial wanted than going the full 20.