How to use a swordsage??? (ToB).

[Dr Pavo]

I just want to know how you use one, everybody talks about ToB and it's classes but i've never played one... actually no one i know have.. so im planing to give it a shot.. so anyone have any "guide" for me to know how to use one?. recomendations?
it will be lvl 6.. any help will be welcomed..

[Greenish]

Pick the maneuvers that you think look cool. Have fun.

The handbook is still under construction.

[bokodasu]

Don't forget to print out your maneuver cards to make keeping track of everything supersimple. But yeah, that's pretty much it.

[The-Mage-King]

Pick the maneuvers that you think look cool. Have fun.

Pretty much this. I suggest picking the ones that look like their names would be the most fun to yell at the table.

Like...

Spoiler

Show

FIVE SHADOW CREEPING ICE ENERVATION STRIKE!!

[true_shinken]

FIVE SHADOW CREEPING ICE ENERVATION STRIKE!!

That never gets old.

[kamikasei]

Remember that maneuver levels work like spell levels. At sixth level you have access to third-level maneuvers, not to sixth-level.

You can't ready more than one "copy" of a manuever. All your readied maneuvers have to be different from one another and once one is used it can't be used again until you refresh. (Unless you're multiclassing, in which case maneuvers coming from different classes are tracked separately.)

Swordsages get a lot of benefit from the Adaptive Style feat, which lets them refresh (and change) all their readied manuevers in the time it would normally take to refresh one.

[The-Mage-King]

That never gets old.

No, it doesn't.

[Runestar]

FIVE SHADOW CREEPING ICE ENERVATION STRIKE!!

Interesting how this maneuver can be abbreviated as FSCIES, and pronounced as ....

[Person_Man]

Pick the maneuvers that you think look cool. Have fun.

Pretty much this. Unlike most other 3.5 D&D classes, the Tome of Battle is very hard to "mess up." Although there are certain maneuvers and stances which are somewhat stronger or weaker, for the most part they're scaled well and give you a variety of useful abilities.

I would just warn you that Swordsages (like many melee classes) have MAD and feat tax issues.

Ideally they want high Str, Dex, Con, and Wis. You can get by with high Dex and reasonable Con if you take Weapon Finesse and avoid maneuvers with Saving Throws (require Wis). There's also a temptation for such builds to take Shadow Blade (Dex to damage), which is another feat tax which further limits your stances.

Or you can get by with high Wis and reasonable Con if you take Intuitive Strike (Book of Exalted Deeds). But in this case you can't reasonably use maneuvers which rely on opposed checks (Trip, Bull Rush, etc) which run off of Str or Dex (and usually size).

And anything that requires Combat Expertise by default requires Int 13 (which is itself a waste of a feat).

And most Swordsages will want to take Adaptive Style so that their refresh mechanic works efficiently.

Suffice to say, if you don't have reasonably good attributes, you're going to have some issues to work through. And in most cases, you will have fewer "open" feats to invest in then a standard melee build.