D&D 3E/3.5 Do you miss the martial adepts from "Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords"?

If we want to create a new class we need:

- Right balance of power, of course.

- Fun gameplay, interesting class features, not too complicate or fights will become slower.

- Own mark of identity. Playing a different class is like wearing a special cosplay/costume or special clothes of certain urban tribe. It should can be used to create a main character for a novel, without reference to gameplay. Martial adepts can't be only fighters with special maneuvers to be like in a wuxia movie. Why a crusader is a crusader and not only a paladin? If in a comic appeared two new characters...how would you notice who is the swordsage and who is the warblade, only because one fights with a shield and the other with a empty hand? But what if the swordsage is using a tower-shield what is a construct to walks alone?

* Sometimes I have imagine the reboot of the swashbuckler class like a martial adept.

Garthanos said:

Wow tell us how you really feel

To be honest on topic I didnt get to play the Tome of Battle characters. I have read it and was impressed both by the presented flavor and willingness to actually try and fix issues for martial style classes and the terminology well rocked. The battlemaster falls short sure and eldritch knight does even worse.

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Yes, the entire concept of martial maneuvers was brilliant and well executed in ToB. I especially liked that they were all in on explicitly supernatural maneuvers and had high level maneuvers like Perfect Strike that let martial characters actually perform on par with casters at those high levels.

I ran my group through the entire Pathfinder Rise of the Runelords adventure path and allowed both ToB and gestalt characters. It was a lot of fun. We then switched to 4e and I ran them through the entire Carrion Crown Pathfinder AP which I converted to 4e. That was a blast too. Now we are playing 5e.

While 5e doesn't have nearly the same power disparity between martial characters and casters as 3e did, I would still like to see more maneuver oriented classes in the vein of the Warblade or the Swordsage, especially some that could wield blatantly supernatural powers, and ideally classes whose abilities weren't so explicitly tied into the short rest mechanic.

Dragonblade said:

and ideally classes whose abilities weren't so explicitly tied into the short rest mechanic.

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@Zardnaar and I had some discussions of very interesting things for presenting various game world friendly methods which were more similar to 4e encounter powers. Like for instance tricks that could only be performed freely if the adversary had not seen you perform them recently (we had ideas that were multiple class flavor specific variations)

I have also been thinking of giving the Battlemaster virtual at-wills and advanced maneuvers ... Ability to use a attribute/skill check (investigation / insight / deception or intimidation) and a traded out attack from your attack action to allow another attack as though you had a superiority die. Advanced maneuvers use more than one superiority die

I've never actually played with Bo9S. I owned a copy, and I never banned it, but nobody in my games ever wanted to use it.

I do not like the initiator classes in Bo9S, and even less in PoW, but I really do like the initiator mechanics and wish they could be incorporated into the core combat mechanics for all classes, with a special emphasis on martials.

billd91 said:

Do I miss it? No. Didn't particularly like it.

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I too don't miss it. I disliked it enough to preemptively ban it from the table (which turned out to be unnecessary as nobody else that I knew liked it either). I'll take the maneuver system from Mearls's Book of Iron Might over TOB any day of the week despite the error in one of the sample maneuver builds.

Honestly the only reason I am still curious about playing 3e is because of the BO9S classes