>>98203207
Yep. Never got more use out of a single book ever.

>>98203207
I have more affinity for Incarnum myself, and its design choices do have rough spots (why oh why is there nothing FOR archers and all of two maneuvers for shields, and why is throwing almost solely on a PRC?), but it offering viable performance without the prior wonkiness with skill floors and pigeon-holding is a HUGE help for the broader system should the DM get over the thematic friction and needing to learn another subsystem.

I'd personally axe the Warblade and Weapons of Legacy for a chapter dedicated to "cross-compiling" between its Disciplines and "standard" feat-bundle mechanics like Martial Arts or Monk/Ranger styles, offering a removal from the subsystem to those who find it or the soft-replacement of core classes contentious and a more solid starting point to port in for those enthusiastic. Probably exemplify the latter with crossing over the [Psionic] feats in a Soulknife ACF stack, something that incredibly blatantly does not work for the book's "standard" theme but can be reasonably fitted to the mechanical framework.

>>98203207
Never read it myself but that was a book folks loved or outright hated

>>98203207
>"It fixes martials!"
>Look inside
>Half the maneuvers are extra damage on a standard action

It does very little to address the problems with martials. They could always deal damage, this just gives them a little extra mobility. Not bad, per se, but it doesn't really fix anything. Of the other maneuvers, you've got replacing saves with the same skill check three times (reactive, doesn't progress encounters of any stripe), the same teleport 3 times (requires line of effect, so it can't get you anywhere you couldn't go on your own), end an effect measured in rounds (note: 1 minute may equal 10 rounds, but that doesn't make a minute/level effect measured in rounds. Also, doesn't work on things that take your actions. Minimal utility, and still reactive), potentially giving someone an extra turn (completely busted, do not use or allow), and healing on hit (topping people off while still dealing damage. Only well designed maneuvers in the book).

And that's about it. Nothing that alters the dynamic of "Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit." Martials still just hit things with pointed metal while casters can do that if they want or ten thousand other things. I really feel like they weren't adventurous enough, particularly with the supernatural leaning disciplines.

>>98203641
If your standard is putting them on an even playing field with Tier 1 casters that won't happen. There is more to maneuvers than you're giving it credit for. Healing, damage reduction etc. The biggest change though is instead of just
>I full attack again lol
You get to do more interesting things. It turned martials into mid tier rather than bottom tier.

>>98203672
>You get to do more interesting things
This, I don't think martial players care that Wizards become Angel Summoner, they just want their BMX to get to do more cool shit than "I pop a wheelie".

What techniques would be in the Weaboo Book of Fightan Magics?
>1. *Teleports behind you*

>>98203641
>>98203720
The biggest thing is resistance to getting scrubbed, and mobility. There's no getting around it, a fighting character needs to be a wuxia fighter in D&D by high levels there's just too many flying/teleporting/climbing/etc enemies. You can get magic items for this but you really should not *have to* for basic competence. So moving fast, flying, swimming, holding breath indefinitely, super senses. The Aegis class in Pathfinder 1E does this better, since you can get all of this while also getting quality fighting powers.

>>98203207
Yeah, I actually really liked it. I do think the Crusader's random gimmick was kind of a pain in the ass though.

>>98203641
If people actually roleplayed there's nothing wrong with martials. The problem with martials v. casters is that everyone knows they're in a fake world and very few dms make things happen off screen. An adventuring party can take days to clear a dungeon at their leisure because they will never starve or grow annoyed at sleeping on rocks or deal with rivals coming in to plunder their goals. Casters never feel fear and make misplays because they're armored at best with some scraps of leather and a prayer of Mage Armor against a 12 foot minotaur charging them while the martial is plated from head to foot.

There's nothing to mechanically fix when it comes to martials because the problem is that 99% of ttrpg players are simply not good at roleplay or running campaigns that aren't glorified video games.

>>98203844
Roleplaying does not fix shit mechanics.

>>98203641
Literal power density of every fight/minute-or-so versus a two-digit number of times per day. The reason casters get a very long list of wonky paradigm-shifting stuff is because they're SUPPOSED to be tightly constrained in how many can be brought to bear under time pressure, which contains a lot of "necessities" so that where they depend on the Fighter and Rogue types to save on slots those rely on them to shift the paradigm so the adventure keeps moving at-pace despite ridiculous obstacles. This interdependency is why you bring a party.

Instead of comparing to the primary Vancian casters, compare them to prior at-will stuff like Binder, Incarnum, or Warlock. And remember to respond to Rope Trick in hostile territory with ambushes and stuff, some of your players may lose characters but that's kinda supposed to happen and a lot of shittiness in WotC D&D is losing the plot on it.

>>98203305
>or outright hated
In my experience this comes from casterfags, or people who think non-casters should be Batman, even though the rules in 3.5 don't really allow this.

Holy shit, thanks for the old school laugh. I haven't thought about the book of weaboo fightan magic in a long long time.

>>98203207
I think it's really cool as a sub-system and I like that they were at least clever enough to make it multiclass friendly instead of making it a wholly isolated system like something like Incarnum.

>>98203780
I'm playing a Cleric with a Crusader level and I'm surprised by how fun the gambling mechanic ended up being, at least wih the Extra Granted Maneuver feat.
I do wish there was a way to force some control, maybe something to do with the delayed damage pool, dunno.

>>98203641
>want to play a fighting character
>here are interesting, thematic and varied ways to kill stuff faster
What's the problem?

>>98203207
Considering that 5th made Psionics just another form of boring ass Arcane magic? Yes.

>>98204649
Maybe you'd want ways to move, defend, and disrupt the enemy or to participate in other types of challenges too.

>>98203763
ToB has maneuvers for Scent, blindsense, parrying touch spells and walking on air.

>>98203844
what is this mindless ragebait drivel

> roleplayed

any fool can tell you are a bottom-barrel roleplayer who thinks spreadsheet management and creativity are exactly the same

> fake world

the world is not fake

> off screen

things happen offscreen commonly in all games. the adventure hook for example

> starve

trail rations are in every edition. creating water is a 1st-level spell. if you're "camping out" in a dungeon you do track food it's just insanely rare that a physical structure someone had to build is so large it takes more than a few days to clear, unless it's one of those gimmick megadungeons, so it's not a problem. you would know if you played.

> grow annoyed

there are exhaustion rules for sleeping on rocks. who the fuck cares about being "annoyed" it's like two-three days max for legendary wealth and treasure are you so incompetent it takes your character years to clear a dungeon while simultaneously so lonely and unlikely you're DMing for yourself and no one can help you?

> rivals

rivals show up in some games sometimes but since most games have an actual storyline it's not reasonable that Gary Oak has come to the same hamlet and wants to kill you for some kobold shit every time

> fear

casters definitely feel fear. it's a status effect

> minotaur

plated head to toe does not help against a 12-foot minotaur. it will instantly kill both a man in steel armor and a man in leather scraps, because it is a 12-foot bull man. the fighter's only advantage is having a tool to take the coward's way out on hand. the caster feels less fear because the caster is much further away and the minotaur will usually pause to eat the fighter's body.

> nothing to fix

Except access to: mobility, utility tools for socializing, investigation, stealth, research surveillance and recon, long-distance travel, the ability to summon cool things that aren't sharpened bars of metal, infliction of status effects, control and creation of terrain and all elements...

>>98203844
I've come to learn that a lot of 3.5 DMs don't run the game as intended, and a lot of the class disparity comes from that. They don't actually use the "four encounters per day" system the classes are designed to run on, casters never feel the need to ration their spells, they just nuke everything. A few years ago I ran into a guy here who had a completely warped idea of what classes were good, because in his experience daily-use abilities were always available, because his DM never ran more than 1-2 encounters per day.

That being said, roleplaying is still not a solution, and none of the things you talked about have anything to do with roleplaying.

>>98204654
And ToB does that, what's the problem?

>>98204741
Exactly. That was my point as vague as that was I guess.
Giving murderman better cooler ways to murder shit is all well and fine, but ToB does go beyond just that.
Even something like being able to ignore hardness is already pretty big for crawling actual dungeons.

>>98204561
There was a lot of knee jerk reactions. A bunch of "ewww get that woobo shit from my pure "European" fantasy" too

>>98203207
>>98203207
It was fun but written by people with little grasp on basic cosmology and mechanics. No errata, probably intentionally because it was just pre-4e.
It was just another tool in the impressive 3e-type games toolbox. I think its fans are annoying.
Myself I would have preferred a collapsed feat system and a more freeform combat, ToB steered the game in the opposite direction.
PF2e did kinda the same, the result is now I play OSR.

>Even something like being able to ignore hardness is already pretty big for crawling actual dungeons.
Ignoring hardness with no limited daily use is incredibly stupid. It adds to the problem certain caster/craft abuse brings to the table.
ToB was designed by the type of people that had such a limited viewpoint on the game that later designed 4e. That's a massive problem.

lol martialcucks

>>98204792
>There was a lot of knee jerk reactions. A bunch of "ewww get that woobo shit from my pure "European" fantasy" too
The issue with the book is not the naming. You can rename shit no problem. It's stuff like (Ex) teleports and Heal. It was in a certain way used to gaslight people into 4e's Warlord idiocy.

>>98203844
Extended rope trick.

Roleplaying is not and never will be an acceptable method of balance, and neither are spell slots.

If you have to play badly on purpose for the game to work, the game is bad.

Fighters are just as resource dependent as wizards are.

>>98204656
>ToB has maneuvers for Scent, blindsense, parrying touch spells and walking on air.
Which were a great idea but (probably due to the limited space) needed to be thematically split. An actual good 4e that was a continuation of 3.5 would have done that, same thing with PF1e (they started to understand this only later in the edition when many people gave up with them).
Walking on air should be for Monks, blocking (and perhaps reflecting) a spell with your shield for Fighters, and so on.

What I REALLY appreciate of ToB is that they finally gave a proper use for Swift and Immediate actions to martials. I don't recall much use barring not-so-great "Charisma builds" (sic) for Zentharim Soldier Fighters with move and swift actions used to Goad and Fear.

>>98204716
If the party adventures without spell slots, the fighters don't shine. They just die.

If fighter was the only class in the game, it would still suck. In a game with all classes, fighters have no defense against a Balor Blasphemy. In a game with only fighters, they still don't.

Balance between classes is not irrelevant, but it's not the primary reason that fighters are such a liability that you'd be better off having one fewer people in the party so that treasure gets split fewer ways.

>>98204716
>I've come to learn that a lot of 3.5 DMs don't run the game as intended
It's just full of retards out there. It's enough to hear about how ho-my-gawd-OP Sleep is at low levels when Drow, Wood Elves, Skeletons, Zombies, Ghouls are a thing just CORE.

>>98204848
And being able to cast sleep is still infinitely better than never having that option at all.

>>98204804
As I said, I never got to read the book. All I know is how folks reacted to it and far to many didn't bitch on the mechanics but the concept or the fact it was "Weboo shit" seemed to be their big issue

>>98203207
Given that every table runs D&D differently according to group preference, how can any one interpretation be more "peak" than another?

>>98204852
>And being able to cast sleep is still infinitely better than never having that option at all.
Not relevant to the point.
>>98204864
>As I said, I never got to read the book.
No offense, but you sound not informed in general about ToB.

>>98204817
>Extended rope trick.
While a rework like the one in PF1e wasn't a bad idea, at the levels the casters start to be problematic, the type of dungeon dwellers you are facing have ways to counter even with simple Track + Dispel unless you are very careful. The further you go, more divinations, see invisibility, true seeing will be on the table.

I presume the anon above meant this for "roleplaying" even if he didn't convey it perfectly. Don't play monsters like retards.
Which is exceptionally difficult if the DM is a retard, which then will go online and will be told by other cretins that he's not the problem but the game is broken.

>>98204973
Completely relevant. Your assertion was false. The existence of those enemy types does not, in fact, mean that sleep isn't powerful. In reality, it remains one of the only first level spells worth learning.

>>98205015
So the only way to counter magic is with more magic? Thanks for making my point for me and agreeing the game is broken. Retard.

>>98203207
ToB was amazing. I wish I'd had more opportunity to use it. The saddest part about it being so late is there was so little support and crossover. I wanted some official Initiator/psionics prestige classes and feats for my Psychic warrior Swordsage.

>>98204804
>It's stuff like (Ex) teleports and Heal.
Literally inverting visibility by lighting is an (Ex) special ability, as are some Ethereal transitions, and you can just straight-up walk to visit your grandfather's soul in the afterlife if you know the right paths. Shut the fuck up about this fallacious "Guy At The Gym", the cosmology POINTEDLY does not demand (Su) or (Sp) to do Weird Shit and the core rulebook explanation is clear that (Ex) can in fact break physics as we know them. And the counters for teleportation and healing don't give a fuck if it's an (Ex) ability, so long as the DM makes the obvious connection and declares the Shadow Hand teleports to be quick trips through the Plane of Shadow Dimensional Anchor and friends still do their job.

This brainworm is why the Fighter and Rogue remain fucked, because it locks them out of anything that'd actually get anywhere with the qualitative disparity you RETARDS who cannot wrap their heads around attrition obsess over.

>>98204840
And if the party adventures with encounter rates even close to the explicit DM advice with nothing but daily-use classes, they'll be forced into absurdly nitpicky preparations with terrible risks of falling flat to keep up the pace. An 80% chance to end the encounter sounds incredible, until you have to use it three times in one leaving you with only one more for another three fights.

>>98205767
And the fighter doesn't have any ability to end encounters, at all.

>>98205066
>casters are so much better and awesome
>yeah there's only 3 spells worth learning
Why are most magic users powergaming fags?

>>98206230
What contradiction do you imagine exists between those two statements, both of which are correct?

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178 KB JPG

>>98205767
>>98204716
Most DMs only use 1-2 encounters per day because 4+ per day doesn't make sense most of the time. Narratively in most stories people just don't get attacked several times in one day. It only makes sense in a dungeon crawl or certain unusual situations. Strategically, if you have a guy whose awesome X times per day, if there is no great time restraint you'll be pressured by the casters to rest, and the party both IC and OOC would be stupid to refuse them. Thirdly, and for 3.X in particular, scrolls exist. Lastly, by the time the casters are out of spells the fighters are usually low on HP. In my experience the latter tends to happen *before* the former. In short the reason so few DMs run the game as intended, in 3.X or in 5E, is because the intention is retarded.

>>98204656
Which manuever is air walking?

I love the concept of moves, stances, counters, etc, but the implementation was shit
SHIT

if it had been made in 2000-2003 it might have been pretty good

>>98206200
HP damage that is their primary function does in fact tick encounters toward ending. And the optimization can blow that out to ending the whole thing opening round three times over.

>>98206261
It's not highlighting a "contradiction", it's highlighting that you're well down the sinkhole of retarded whiteroom optimizers that gets gutted to merely first-place some of the time the moment the DM introduces meaningful time pressure.

>>98206305
Yes, the "intended" pacing is quite contrived for the original framing device, and for some gods-forsaken reason WotC STILL has not drawn it down to normal play, but it remains that the issue stems in large part from DMs running the game wrong.

>>98203207
this book was ass, basically just proto-4e for martials, neither fixing the martial-caster discrepancy nor adding much of value to 3e's actual game mechanics. Everyone in this thread who pretends they were around for it and claims to love it is a faggot as usual

>>98206460
It really doesn't, that's just one small part of it. Even with the 'right' number of encounters.
1) HP still tends to run out as fast or faster than other resources.
2) Means of bypassing spell economy like scrolls exist.
3) Full casters have far more options for approaching noncombat situations and interacting with the world.
4) Martials have huge weaknesses [low saves, low touch AC, no mobility, full attack rules] that make fighting high level creatures without a Christmas tree of magic items nearly impossible.

D&D 3.X being one of the worst balanced games in tabletop history is just old hat. I've been having this exact same conversation on /tg/ since 2011. This idea that 'It works perfectly if you just enforce components, force players to have a bunch of encounters a day, give out just the right number of magic items, and let martials do things with Skills but not the casters it all evens out!' is horse shit. I'm amazed there's anyone still peddling it.

>>98204848
>there are things X doesn't work on
>therefore X isn't OP
No.

>>98206494
>pretends
I was playing with ToB before 4E was even announced. It was great. Its key advantage is making martial combat not boring as fuck and bringing you up to being able to deal with the various bullshit monsters that exist in the game, not casters.

>>98206603
>1) HP still tends to run out as fast or faster than other resources.
In the "typical" rocket-tag arrangement, yes, but if planning for it it's not hard to make the high-level utility spells the rate-limiter. Even prior to ToB, stuff like Combat Vigor got printed, and while somewhat more difficult and denigrated for dearth of proactive use AC inflation does exist.

>2) Means of bypassing spell economy like scrolls exist.
Which (mostly) have associated costs and their own rate-limits, functioning to amortize rather than being a true bypass.

>3) Full casters have far more options for approaching noncombat situations and interacting with the world.
Why is this some critical problem that absolutely must be solved or the system is dogshit? Why does EVERYBODY need big obvious Do Cool Shit buttons to bin "normal" world expectations with?

>4) Martials have huge weaknesses [low saves, low touch AC, no mobility, full attack rules] that make fighting high level creatures without a Christmas tree of magic items nearly impossible.
And the slot-sucking of dealing with them solely through spellcasting makes it a rather significant benefit to be delivering an Ubercharger. Such interdependency is an active design goal, hence shit like Trapfinding.

>This idea that 'It works perfectly if you just enforce components, force players to have a bunch of encounters a day, give out just the right number of magic items, and let martials do things with Skills but not the casters it all evens out!' is horse shit. I'm amazed there's anyone still peddling it.
I'm not saying it works PERFECTLY if you do ALL that, just that not following the intended pacing is a large part of the problem for exaggerating the power advantage of the pacing-governed spellcasters. How many times have you seen a debate get into the gritty details of problems-per-day by party composition instead of just whiteroom "class A can do W while class B can do that and also X, Y, and Z"?

>>98206867
>Why does EVERYBODY need big obvious Do Cool Shit buttons to bin "normal" world expectations with?
Because if a category of class doesn't have them they get left in the dust behind those that do the more fantastic the game gets. You know, like it's supposed to the further up you go in level.

>>98206811
>I was playing with ToB before 4E was even announced. It was great. Its key advantage is making martial combat not boring as fuck
It does not do this. It tries to patch martial combat by giving martials spells, which neither makes combat more fun and does not fix martial combat or any of the real issues with the combat, it just turns martials into budget casters.
>and bringing you up to being able to deal with the various bullshit monsters that exist in the game, not casters.
It also doesn't do this. ToB doesn't make martials any less dependent on magical gear to fight high level monsters that can turn intangible, fly, etc. Casters are still king in that regard.
People who unironically like ToB mistake doing more damage and casting not-spells for fixing the underlying issues with martial combat.

>>98206923
It does both of those.

>>98206913
Once again, I point to the usage limitations and overt design intent of interdependency. So long as there's an obvious area of comparative advantage, which the negligible-rate-restriction DPR provides to most martial classes when built right, there's a clear functional purpose. So long as your lot keep obsessing over the fact that spellcasters "can" get a very large collection of buttons without accepting that only getting to push them a two-digit number of times "pays" for it, no solution can exist, because that tradeoff is the fundamental logic of the paradigm.

>>98206923
>It tries to patch martial combat by giving martials spells, which neither makes combat more fun and does not fix martial combat or any of the real issues with the combat, it just turns martials into budget casters.
That's the best that can be hoped for in a single late-edition splatbook, anything else is just going to be forgotten by the vast majority like most of the UA variant rules or be drowned in the feat backlog, in either case failing to offer a more reliable par-performance floor.

>ToB doesn't make martials any less dependent on magical gear to fight high level monsters that can turn intangible, fly, etc.
No, ToB does actually have answers for mobility including verticality as well as DR, which are the most common causes of friction. And I think you can get a lot higher odds against incorporeal and invisible a few different ways. They may still be "incomplete" for those areas, but carve out a LOT of the "floor" to be a useful contributor.

>>98206973
Design intent means nothing when it doesn't match what they actually designed. The solution to 4 encounters to day making you use more spells than 1 or 2 encounters a day isn't bringing guys without spells, it's bringing more guys with spells that are also effective when they're not using spells.

>>98204848
>>98206794
People will say this about specific spells and then ignore how your starting longsword isn't going to even be capable of meaningfully damaging quite a few types of monsters.

>>98206988
>Design intent means nothing when it doesn't match what they actually designed.
When DMing in accordance with it brings campaign dynamics much closer, it does in fact matter. Sure, it could be matched better to begin with, but if an outright majority of the issues stem from abandoning the rails because the rules don't FORCE you on them then it's your fault for compulsively optimizing the fun out of it.

>The solution to 4 encounters to day making you use more spells than 1 or 2 encounters a day isn't bringing guys without spells, it's bringing more guys with spells that are also effective when they're not using spells.
Which tends to involve an assload of splatbook-diving for very nitpicky optimization compared to "bring a well-built Fighter, cast the 1-3 permissions he needs, deliver one to three round kill with extremely high confidence and rather low cost-variance". Especially with CLW wands in play gutting HP attrition.

>>98207016
WBL. You're not supposed to continue using the starting longsword for all that long. But if you want to, there's plenty of options to turn it into a sufficiently cool sword to keep up, MAYBE needing to trade up to Masterwork.

>>98206967
ToBfags have to just literally lie to make their favorite faggot book look better
>>98206973
>That's the best that can be hoped for
And here we get to the crux of the matter: it's a band-aid solution that ultimately removes what little identity martial classes have to make them bad casters, fails to achieve actual balance between martials and casters (which was its ONE job), and doesn't actually do anything to make combat less boring. It turns martial combat into MMO cooldown management, which is jumping through extra hoops to end at the same bland result.
>No, ToB does actually have answers for mobility including verticality as well as DR,
And none of it is as effective and versatile as simply casting Flight or bringing an appropriate magic item.
>And I think you can get a lot higher odds against incorporeal and invisible a few different ways.
Again, not as good as simply using the magical solutions to those problems. These are band-aids, they're not substitutes for magic gear and spellcasting but at best compensation if such things are for whatever reason missing from the party. ToB doesn't replace the progression of martials wanting/needing magic gear at all

>>98206460
No. If you can't end a fight before any of the enemies get a turn, you suck.

>>98206460
No such thing as time pressure. You can't make the players care, and it wouldn't matter if you could. If you adventure without spell slots, you die. And that's more true for the fighter than the casters.

>>98207109
ToB made martials more fun by an enormous margin, made combat less boring, and directly addressed many martial shortcomings. No amount of butthurt posts is going to budge my actual experience with the book.

>>98206867
Nope. A single full attack from a dragon will full to zero most level appropriate martials.

>>98206867
Why would you want to play a game where only some players get to do anything that matters, instead of everyone being able to? There is no upside, and no reason to design a game that way.

>>98206973
So why is it that only some classes depend on others, while the other classes don't them at all? Seems like this interdependency is just dependency. Why would ever bring a cleric and a fighter when I could just have two clerics instead?

>>98207047
Too bad the fighter gets zero class features that grant him the items he needs to be effective, huh? Casters can play with no items and just the spells they learn by levelling and don't depend on DM pity. Fighters cannot. Why?

>>98207109
If your class identity is "guy who swings sword (poorly) and can't do anything that actually matters and can be replaced by an animal companion or planar ally or summon monster", your class should not be in the game. it's a waste of pages.

>Everyone bitched about the caster v martial divide
>4e literally fixed that issue and was the most balanced version of D&D ever made
>Divided the fanbase and lead to the rise of pathfinder
I think there's just a large number of people who want the game to be unbalanced. Nobody actually wants the fighter to be on the same power level as the wizard.

>>98207109
>It turns martial combat into MMO cooldown management
>Again, not as good as simply using the magical solutions to those problems.
But usable much cheaper and more often. The fundamental paradigm-defining tradeoff behind why there's a line between casters and martials in the first place. Rather a lot of them do very silly things when available just whenever, especially at similar breadth to spellcasters. Again, so long as you insist that every one of the kinds of thing a Wizard can get up to have to be competed with, you're going to be impossible to satisfy because the Wizard only gets that by paying with time-pressure sensitivity (and a skill check gate, and GP costs to scribe, and spellbook vulnerability...) as revealed by complaining about the smallest possible taste of it.

Yes, the designers failed at balancing the tradeoff, but it remains a foundational assumption of the system. There HAS to be some disparity in power and/or versatility for the disparity in frequency of use to make any sense. This means the Fighter should be a peer to the Warlock, Dragonfire Adept, Totemist, and Binder, with the old web articles on Vestige design advice giving a very interesting piece: If you only get one or two, a top-level spell effect of a same-level Wizard is broadly appropriate on a five-round cooldown.

>>98203844
>If people actually roleplayed there's nothing wrong with martials.
No, the mechanical problems would still exist. Pretending that you can roleplay your way out of the fighter being a low-interactivity class is cope.

Also, I'm going to be very honest - your issue is "oh people play it like a video game" but I'm gonna be real with you. Playing shit MORE like a video game would actually lead to mecahnics being enforced on casters. Video games run on rules, pretty firm ones. A lot of what casters get away with has to do with GMs not being willing or able to actually enforce the rules of the game. I also want to make something clear - even when those rules are followed, fighter is still an incredibly low-interactivity class that is always worse than a caster.

>>98207509
I liked 4E when it got its footing with MM3 though.

>>98207109
See here's the problem.
Your idea of "martial class identity" is a very soft way of saying "NO FIGHTERS NEED TO SUCK, SUCKING IS PART OF WHAT MAKES FIGHTER A FIGHT."

>>98207509
4th edition commit a grievous sin by asking a simple question: what if D&D was actually fun?

>>98207578
I halved HP and doubled damage long before then.

>>98207587
It also committed the equally grievous sin of asking if certain mechanics were being kept around because they were actually good ideas or just out of cargo cult game design.

How many of you have actually played a long game with a ToB class in the party?

>>98207899
Many times back in the day. My longest 3.5 game was a player I played a Crusader. I loved that character. Recently I played in a Tomb of Abysthor game where I was going bard/warblade. I only got 1 level in warblade before the game died though so I was basically just playing a fighty bard.

>>98207940
A few ToB games and a lot of Pathfinder ones with Path of War.

>>98206312
It's a shadow hand stance - Balance on the sky

>>98208276
Sorry, forgot to paste

Shadow Hand (Stance)
Level: Swordsage 8
Prerequisite: Three Shadow Hand maneuvers
Initiation Action: 1 swift action
Range: Personal
Target: You
Duration: Stance
With arms spread wide, you step onto the air.

You gain the ability to use air walk (PH 196) on yourself only. You must keep at least one hand empty while using this stance. Moving upward requires you to spend 10 feet of movement for each 5 feet of elevation you gain.

You gain the benefit of air walk only while you maintain this stance. If for some reason your stance ends while you are in midair, you fall to the ground.

This stance is a supernatural ability.

>>98207899
Just once, I played a Swordsage and had a great time. No one else in the party used the book but there were a few antagonists that did throughout the game.
Diamond mind and Setting sun were my favourite disciplines but I quite liked Desert wind as well.

>>98207899
Every game I've ever gotten to use ToB fell apart because the DM was a flighty fuck who stopped running the game three sessions in.

>>98208289
>8th Level Manuever and you need a hand free

1-800-Come-On-Now. At least the Tome Monk from Dungeonomicon gets it at like Level 8-9.

>>98207143
Hello?

>>98207109
Oh no, not cooldowns! Like spell slots, barbarian rage, wild shape, and turn undead!

>>98209686
No you see only casters should have any sort of resource management or it’s literally a video game mmo.

>>98207899
I never played a ToB class but I did play a frank tome game that was fun.