Fifteen books. The three core of course, a bunch of monster manuals, and then mostly campaign settings and lore books like the Manual of the Planes or the Book of Vile Darkness.

Out of all of them, my favorite is Lords of Darkness. Thin, softcover, but really well done.

I'm running Savage Tide. The players are about to parley with/raid the Lotus Dragons. I rebuilt Rowan Kellani as a kobold factotum, and I'm excited to use a class I seldom have.

>>96585511
I actually don't own any. I just have a shitton of PDFs.

So, last thread there was talk about PA/martials problems with lacking native damage from class or better Abilities. What if we were to combine them and build a Warrior/Fighter class around it. Similar to War Hulk really, but not as retarded.

Something like this:
[Brawn]
Warrior gets his level as bonus to Strength modifier for all purposes except Attack Bonuses or determining the DC of his abilities.
Whenever determining Carrying Capacity add double Warrior level to Strength.

As a result a PC at level 20 gets effectively +40 strength for most intents and purposes. Meaning your average character would have effectively 65-70 strength and have base damage of +27-30 out of the box. Plus all the other stuff high strength allows to do like carry bullshit amounts of stuff or breaking through walls like they aren't even there.

You still want special materials and magic weapons for dealing with high DR on some pre-epic monsters, or getting some more attack bonuses but damage is now dealt with and PA is no longer an absolute must have (even if damage wise it is still better if you really invest in it).

>>96586036
Here's the main issue I see: Setting aside the facts that PCs and NPCs typically have the same options and now an enemy martial is going to blow up a caster with a full attack action, you have a more fundamental problem. How does the game change if at level 10, fighter gets a class feature that says "any creature that the fighter attempts a melee full attack against dies"? No damage increase, no rolling for AC - if you can stand next to an enemy combatant for six seconds and you dedicate your turn to killing them, they are dead.

How many problems does this not solve in the average session? Hell, how many problems does it introduce when the best answers for getting your martials into position and protecting them from save-or-suck still requires magic? How many situations are there going to be where even if the fighter had a vorpal sword and a die that only came up 20, they'd still have nothing useful to do?

The weakness of hits-things-with-sticks man isn't hitting things with sticks. He's pretty good at that, though he could certainly be better and more build diversity opens up if he's given a stronger baseline. The weakness is that walking up to a guy and thumping him isn't the hard part, and anytime there's something going on that isn't that, the player controlling the stickman has nothing better to do than twiddle his thumbs. Agency, flexibility, and ways to be clever are what martials need more than anything else.

Sorcerer casting Expeditious Retreat on a Barbarian with the Run feat and Airwalk

350ft per round compared to 60ft with Fly

Am I onto something

>>96586174
The way I see it there are two big problems with martials, and especially with fighter obviously. It's lacking core features that don't actually keep up with what is needed (which the Brawn kinda covers a big part of, though it needs more) and the lack of ability to branch out properly.

Easiest way to deal with it is probably make the class a "wizard of martials" where they can basically build into anything similar to paladin, knight, ranger, barb and a few others.

So core features:
-Damage/Power/Lift -> Brawn
-Recovery -> probably eat more food for getting one more day of rest up to class level, so class 11 can cram 12 day of rest into one, if has enough food

Brawn also covers a lot of basic movement since it gives Climb, Swim and Jump at nice levels down the line even if you don't invest in them.

And then at each level you can choose a feature that imitates one of the other martial classes, though in most cases with removed damage part.

Fury/Rage -> get virtual size increases depending on level
Zeal -> Mettle, bonus to saves, aligned damage type in exchange for oaths
Guard -> Penalty to AC in exchange for your allies getting to use your own
Favored Foe/Terrain -> specialized skill bonuses, make em both competence so that they don't stack and actually just add class level to the rolls so that they matter.
Unarmed Combat/Armor Class -> dodge bonus gated by armor/load, but straight up +level, and monk unarmed strike
Limited Supernatural abilities - casting up to 3 level spells, weapon/armor enhancement (better kensai/soulknife), wildshape with very limited amount of forms, maneuvers and so on, can take only one, and maybe one other with a general feat.
Athletics/Acrobatics - ability to get swim, climb speed or bonuses to tumble, jump, slow fall and so on.

Most features that scale should do it with class level and occasionally BAB so that player is encouraged to stick with the class or at least other martials.

Another one is to go Cleric at level 1 with Travel Domain and then multiclass into Barbarian at level 2. This gives 50ft base speed and 250ft. running speed at level 2 on your Barbarian.

>>96586250
You can also get Quick trait for another 10 ft.

>>96586313
>Nazumi for another +10
Gotta go fast

3.5 is like that ex that you want to get together with again but you know it'd be a bad idea. So many rules I'd have to learn again and one misstep would leave me burnt out and alone again.

But it's so shiny and fun to flip through. So many half-assed ideas that could add up to something fun.

>>96586245
Congrats you've just made Fighter into every other dip class in the game but better. I don't know where you've seen Barbarians get virtual size increases, Paladins getting Mettle, the lack of the damage part of Favored Enemy gets compensated by Brawn, and you've just stolen the only real reason to get into Monk (bigger unarmed dice beyond those any other source can get). On top of that, you still have Full BaB, the second best HD in the game, and full competence with all types of armor and shields.

>>96586618
Seems to be more or less as intended. Why would I want to measure anything by monk of all things?
Though you are right, to make dips more painful proficiency probably should be spaced over the first 3-4 levels. And Improvised weapons proficiency at something like level 11.
Want paladin? Zeal, Guard, 1-3 levels of cleric or paladin casting spaced over 16 to 20 levels,and probably throw in some armor based DR bonus.
Monk? Zeal, Athletics, Unarmed Combat, etc.
And so on.
_________________________________

The idea for the class is to be solid enough to fight a level appropriate encounter by himself and have something like 50/50 chances of winning or dying. Which at level twenty without a lot of magic means having solid defenses and being absolutely lethal in case your opponent makes a mistake.

And at low levels advantages aren't that great. Level 6 character would have only +6 to damage and strength checks. So solid enough but nothing to write home about - you can actually do better with PA damage wise, though grappling would be easier with Brawn.

This way at least class would excel in its niche - direct face to face combat - and have enough space to take feats or abilities to not suck in social and exploration parts of the game. Comparison shouldn't be monk of all things - it should be dragon. And level appropriate dragon would be fucking brutal to fight.

>>96587031
>Comparison shouldn't be monk
Then just remove Monk from your game, because your Fighter is doing all the things is wants but better, especially if one starts a PrC or other dips from it.

>>96587081
It kinda already is removed. I didn't see monk outside of Tashalatora mixes for years at this point.

>>96585511
As a psionic fanboy i ownboth the 3e and 3.5 Psionic hanbooks IRL, sadly i have had a hard time getting my hands on the Complete Psionic or the Hyperconcius books.

>>96587031
if a single character class with no magic items can solo a encounter with 50/50 odds then something has gone horribly wrong (See High level caster), especialy when the game seems to expect you have some magic items (Weapon bonus to attack, Resistance bonus to saves etc).
the problem as i see it with the fighter is that it needs to be simple enough to function for monsters and the simple i hit things with a big stick style for new players, if you add to much the GM and new players can easily get lost in the sauce as it where.

i think my own "Fix" would be to add more Class Skills to the class instead of making an Instant Death Machine

>>96587110
Yes, that's the point. You're just removing it tombstone. We haven't even started talking about how the "barbarian" and "paladin" features are stuff that those two classes would kill to have.

>>96586245
try this martial:

https://www.finalfantasyd20.com/classes/core-classes/warrior/

>>96587154
I too am a psionics enjoyer. Tell me about your greatest psionic characters

>>96587154
>i think my own "Fix" would be to add more Class Skills to the class instead of making an Instant Death Machine
I tried that. It doesn't really work. Even if you give 8+Int skills and all the skills as class skills it's still not enough. Because good skills also need magic and item support to actually do stuff you want to do reliably. Yeah, you can do shit like talk to middling people without simultaneously picking your nose or cover some basic movement skills, but you still need Feat, Item and class dip investment to get solid skill bonus that allows you to excel in a niche. And fighter has basically none of that.

There is a reason most Rogues want UMD and the wands asap.

It could work in something like Conan d20, but
a) It has way lower HP
b) It's magic that doesn't rely on eating babies is way toned down

Shit like Jump makes skill ranks look like a joke.

>>96585511
>TQ
Rules Compendium, Magic Item Compendium, Spell Compendium, and my beloved Draconomicon.
As well as two books for a local third party setting.
Basically, a mixture of useful and cool.
Next I want to buy the DMG and PHB.
After that, not sure. Probably MoI, since Incarnum is super cool. Maybe the BoED since I'm using some spells from it and some party members are using feats from it too.

>>96587172
Well, it has Flexibility bullshit, and I really don't like it. It has the same problem as wizard looking at their spell list of ~20+ spells mid combat only worse.
It's also kinda fiddly in places and a good chunk of its abilities are already feats in 3.5, so just bolting some bonus feats would give a similar result. Similarly a lot of abilities give bonus damage, attacks and similar stuff, which I think is a big mistake - class should have solid damage output as a base and there should be no need for like 3-5 different abilities that make you hit a little harder. You already should be putting people into the ground.

>>96587177
My favorite character was probably a Elan shaper Psion i played in a PF game. I tried to play him as a bit of a excentric guy who wanted to experience everything to expand his mind, but ended up in the inquesitions grasp due to being wierd (i was searching for students by lighting my eyes on fire to sense their psionic potential). A funnily enough the astral construct was rareley used and instead i used Minor Creation a lot, fun story was how he became jealous of a bunch of fey’s perfect cooking so he learned the perfect cupcake recepie (Maxed ranks in Craft (Baking)) and offered them to any travelers the party ran into. The most used power other than minor creation was Share Pain (buff up the martials to make sure they don’t die), Time Hop (for funnies) and Telekenisis

>>96587223
Yeah, at some point you really do need to re-scale the skills so they do useful jobs at reasonable investments instead of having a pile of 5-10 rank breakpoints then really anemic linear scaling.

>>96587303
>It has the same problem as wizard looking at their spell list of ~20+ spells mid combat only worse.
>It's also kinda fiddly in places and a good chunk of its abilities are already feats in 3.5, so just bolting some bonus feats would give a similar result.
Similar reasoning is why I've thought about adjusting the existing bonus feats into distinct sets, so you decide from a whole bunch of things in downtime then only choose from like 2-5 that are thoroughly signaled to be used on different combat approaches.

>Similarly a lot of abilities give bonus damage, attacks and similar stuff, which I think is a big mistake - class should have solid damage output as a base and there should be no need for like 3-5 different abilities that make you hit a little harder. You already should be putting people into the ground.
It's really, REALLY hard to do this without tediously overhauling the existing feat options filled with so much of the same lest you blow out the floor.

>>96587580
>Yeah, at some point you really do need to re-scale the skills so they do useful jobs at reasonable investments instead of having a pile of 5-10 rank breakpoints then really anemic linear scaling.
True20 Revised probably had the right idea with challenges. Where a lot of stuff that 3.5 does through feats could be done by just taking a higher DC check. Shame it never got properly built up, but at least we got M&M out of it.

Problem with redefining skills is that you also need to nuke spells, items, alchemy and a lot of other stuff that right now could be piled up on top of each other. The core skill system is simple and serviceable, but you have so much bullshit piled up on top and so many ways to circumvent it that it gets flattened under them.

>>96587421
I might have to try a minor creation focused psionic character myself eventually. There are some rather useful, nonmagical, mundane vegetable materials in a typical fantasy setting that would be very handy to have on tap.

>>96588153
This could actually be seriously OP. With minor creation you can make 1 cubic feet/level of Sleepweed spores. A non magical plant in FR, the inhalation of which causes save vs. sleep for 1 MINUTE

hey guys, 5e enjoyer here does this edition have silvery barbs tee hee.

>>96586174
The problem with martials isn't that they aren't doing enough single target damage, it's that they can't do anything else.

>>96587730
SOME of this can be fixed with skill rank unlocks and better use of skill tricks for the matter, but yeah, the skills are kinda screwed by runaway bonus stacking in them since such bonuses are either not an issue or actually fix issues in the current paradigm.
>pointed look to Truenamer

>>96589384
There's a few ways to do decent multi-target damage and battlefield control that spell slot economy can justify bringing to a party despite how much they're overshadowed by the caster counterparts, but truly non-combat stuff IS in the shitter.