D&D 3E/3.5 What do you ban? (3.5)

[Corwin of Amber]

You need to take your Hong Kong action flicks less seriously. That's a really gross generalization of Eastern MA that's either grand exaggeration or wholly incorrect, depending on the particular MA you're talking about. My friend took Kempo and showed me some of the kata he was learning, I thought it was kind of silly at first. Then he had me attack him different ways and showed me how they were used to defend and counter common attacks and ultimately were used to teach muscle memory and they made a lot more sense to me.

Just my 2cp, this is correct. Chi and body energy is just physiology. I study Goju Ryu and while we don't do Five Shadow Creeping Ice Enervation Strike, we learn to manipulate the body. For instance, there is a nerve plexus right above the sternum, hitting someone hard enough there will cause a spasm or shortness of breath and hitting someone in both carotid arteries will cause a slight dizziness/lightheadedness.

It's not magic, really.

 

[Celebrim]

Wow, you're seriously criticizing the practicality of eastern MA while talking about your familiarity with fencing? I did fencing for a year in college, nothing much, but learned the basics. I remember my first time practicing a match with someone. He lunged forward with his...Epee is much better at being practical, but you happened to mention foil.

Right. Epee. If you took even a little fencing, you'll know that the Epee scoring system is meant to simulate dualing with a smallsword, and that the foil is a practice weapon and its not meant to simulate any sort of actual combat.

My friend took Kempo and showed me some of the kata he was learning, I thought it was kind of silly at first. Then he had me attack him different ways and showed me how they were used to defend and counter common attacks and ultimately were used to teach muscle memory and they made a lot more sense to me.

I know what the theory is. Incidently, if your friend took Kempo, chances are its a 20th century martial art with heavy western influence. My point about 'muscle memory' is much the same as the point I think you were trying to make about fencing with a foil. Most martial art classes I've seen drill bad habits into the fighter by doing way to much kata and not enough free sparring. I mean, I can remember having these arguments in the 80's and 90's with people, and back then I could understand how people believed that the eastern arts were the way to go. But now we've got actual pankration competitions and I shouldn't have to have these arguments any more. The majority of eastern martial arts have been utterly flattened and completely discredited in the ring. The people that tried them got the snot beat out of them. A few - like Muay Thai - have endured to contribute their part to the best the world has to offer, but Muay Thai also had had the advantage of being refined by nearly a hundred years of real competive ring practice, and had a high emphasis on conditioning.

It's no more Eastern MA than Western. And there's nothing abnormal about meditating before going into combat.

This is simplification of the issue to the point of willful blindness. It would be one thing to postulate a 'combat focus' or some thing that could be held or lost (and even that has some magical thinking to it, see for example 'psionic focus). But this goes far further than that. This says that you can only use a technique that you've learned if you first mediatate on using it and practice it just before you do so. Now, I don't know about you, but I would think this a really wierd system for emulating say - boxing technique. You mean I can only throw upper cuts or only do quick jabs if 5 minutes before the fight I meditate on them? Gee, what do I take into this fight, my right hook or my counter-punching?

That's the problem here. Pretending that its anything less than that is just evading the problem.

The whole maneuvers system, again, is the fantasy aspect. Call it Vancian spellcasting if you want, it's a logical extension of real life for a fantasy game, to meditate to gain special combat techinques, just like a bard using music to produce supernatural effects.

Well, I agree with that. Yes, it is fantasy. Yes, it is just like a bard casting spells with music. It's a Sword-Wizard or a Steel-Mage casting spells with a blade. And that's ok. I think a campaign with nothing but Bo9S/eastern martial art classes might be quite fun. It would be like that seen in 'Wheel of Time' where one of the Forsaken says to Rand something like, "Do you remember when we took that game of swords and made a true Art of it?" But it would be a wholly different setting than what I was going for.

 

[Dandu]

Cerebrim, what do you think of

1. Qi Jiguang, a Ming general who wrote instructional manuals on armed and unarmed combat for soldiers which did not use spiritual elements or magical thinking, and

2. The retraining rules in the PHB2 which allow for a fighter to swap out his feats?

 

[Celebrim]

Cerebrim, what do you think of

1. Qi Jiguang, a Ming general who wrote instructional manuals on armed and unarmed combat for soldiers which did not use spiritual elements or magical thinking

That not everyone writing about the military arts in China was an idiot. Some of them in fact were quite ahead of their time, both compared to the East and West. It's instructive to for example read both Sun Tzu and Sun Tzu's commentators... who often don't have a clue what Sun Tzu is saying and whose expounding upon the works of the master often hinders clarity rather than aids it. In fact, in a few cases they expound precisely to obscure because what Sun Tzu is saying isn't 'politically correct' at the time they are writing. Clear insight and rationality would later get buried under a mountain of misinterpretation in the light of superstition, and then the schools founded based on the superstition and misinterpretation would become formalized and rigid and completely out of touch with reality.

It would be sort of like mistaking fencing with a foil for true combat experience. And in some cases you had techniques that had evolved specifically for dealing with a particular terrain - swampy bogs, ice covered scree, whatever - which were then exported to parts of china which had radically different terrain but which maintained the same formalism and eventually ritual.

It's from all that you get Chi and talk like that. There might be some actual value to the initial description, but the rather intelligent and learned guy who made the original description unfortunately described it in a magical way - not as leverage or such but as the flowing of natural energy up from the ground into your body. The students of that master would then focus on the explanation for the technique rather than the technique itself and would then produce an actually wrong technique based on magic. I once went into a dojo where the master was teaching the students that when their hand first made contact with the target that they needed to withdraw their hand as fast as possible from the target. This would do the most damage to the opponent because by removing your hand, you'd set up a magical resonance in the target that would disrupt the target's chi. If you pushed on the target with your hand, the chi would flow back into your body and you'd do little damage.

Now, anyone with even basic physics knows that the momentum imparted to a target is a function of the moment of inertia, and the longer this moment the more force is imparted. My grandpa taught me that when you aimed for a target, you aimed for the back of their body and you hit the back of their body. You didn't aim for the face, you aimed for the back of the skull. That's how you hit someone. That's how you work a bag. This supposed master was teaching the student how to spar without hurting their sparring partner, but he honestly didn't know that is what he was teaching them. He was teaching them to make shallow surface stinging hits that do almost no damage, but his student thought he was teaching them how to hit hard. He's was teaching his students how to get themselves killed by teaching them light sparring while teaching them that they were now lethal weapons.

But my point is that Qi Jiguang from what I read of his works was pretty much saying about the culture he lived in what I've been saying here. And he's in China. He sees it clearly... which proves he's smarter than I am because I see it clearly only because I have something to compare it to.

2. The retraining rules in the PHB2 which allow for a fighter to swap out his feats?

As you might expect, I don't use those rules either. Even sorcerer's can't retrain in my game, and that's far closer to core than PHB2. Those are gamist mechanics; they are meant to deal with the very gamist concern that what might be the most optimal spell at first level might be less useful later one. But there isn't alot of in game reasoning behind that, and no real attempt at it either. Some sort of in game reasoning might limit what you could retrain to the same school or to an improved version of an existing power (great cleave for cleave, major image for minor image). But those are rules that make no attempt to justify themselves except at the metagame rulesish level.

 

[Dandu]

It's fine that you don't use the PHB2 retraining rules and don't allow sorcerers to swap out spells, but by default both ToB classes and "regular" classes can permanently forget old abilities for new ones. Thus, I do not believe your complaint leveled at ToB classes with regard to learning new maneuvers in place of old ones is valid.

 

[Celebrim]

It's fine that you don't use the PHB2 retraining rules and don't allow sorcerers to swap out spells, but by default both ToB classes and "regular" classes can permanently forget old abilities for new ones. Thus, I do not believe your complaint leveled at ToB classes with regard to learning new maneuvers in place of old ones is valid.

Ok. I don't think that a barren naked appeal to authority like that is even remotely a logical point, but oh well. You can believe whatever you like; nonetheless, my rules - valid or invalid - and the reasoning behind them aren't going to change on account of that ... argument... such as it is. No one is asking you to play at my table.

But really, this a silly argument. The chapter of 'Book of Nine Swords' that introduces the mechanics we are talking about is called 'Blade Magic'. While not every 'Blade Magic' is explicitly supernatural, there is no attempt in the book to divorse and separate the merely superheroic from the supernatural. It's not even a big concern of the writers, and the chapter explicitly says, "The process of initiating a manuever is similar to casting a spell or preparing a psionic discipline" as well as comparing manuevers to spells in many other ways. I'm not the one forcing an interpretation on the text. Mine is the most natural interpretation not only of the fluff surrounding the manuevers, but in many cases of the actual mechanics themselves. With some straining, heaving, and deliberate looking away or winking, you can pretend that for a few schools this is a system of mundane combat, but that is the forced interpretation of the text.

Afterall, even someone learning the Iron Heart school is still called an adept.

Much as its 4e successor, ToB:Bo9S makes little attempt to even bother explaining the system as something existing in game world. Whenever some question about why the rules work as they do arises, the writer simply explains it openly in terms of game balance and interest. Simulationist concerns like, "How does real fencing work?" are pretty far from the minds of the writers. This is not an attempt at realism. This is an attempt to put fighters on the same level as spellcasters by making fighters effectively spellcasters, not in the sense of actually casting spells in game because again in game isn't a huge consideration of the writers but in the sense of having the same sorts of mechanical gamist resources and constraints, and is only one step short (and a pretty small one) from the 4e step of simply giving all classes a common mechanic.

And what's really silly about this is that at some level, I don't care about most of the things you are arguing about and many of the reasons why you seem to be arguing against me I actually agree with you on. Attacks like, "You just don't want fighters to get good stuff" are so incredibly misplaced. I'm honestly not sure that my fighter isn't as or more powerful than a Warblade. In some ways I find the manuevers too restrained. I assume that in my universe, magic is physics, so really nothing in game isn't magic and I have a feat designed for martial characters (since it scales with BAB) that for example lets a character channel power into any weapon he holds (or even his unarmed attack) and turn it magical weapon. I just don't like the manuever system's in game flavor, which is eastern, gamist, and unnecessarily blurs the divide between spellcasters and non-spellcasters. When I look to balance a feat, it typically isn't with availability per unit of time and with a few exceptions I tend to reject any feat that begins, "Once per day..." and pretty much all that say, "Once per encounter...". I also tend to see manuevers as something available to anyone, and the purpose of the feat is to make you better in them. For example, I loath feats that imply that there is something so obvious a 5 year old can do to another five year old, that you can't do with out the feat (like say, throw an enemy that you are grappled with). So, if the thing is mundane, I tend to assume that it must scale in kind and not depart from type - and if it does it probably isnt' mundane. Sometimes that rule is obvious (you create fire) sometimes its not so obvious (you deal constitution damage rather than hit point damage). That's why 'Ambush Feats' (being quite far from Bo9S) get rewritten - I don't like the realism of doing less abstract damage to do more concrete damage. Surely damage that does more concrete damage also must do more abstract damage if abstract damage has any in game meaning at all?

It isn't like I'm just picking on ToB:Bo9S for completely arbitrary reasons. The reasons I dislike it extend to a wide range of things, from retraining feats to well, I've just listed a bunch. So, yeah, I think I have coherent, thoughtful, valid reasons. You don't like them, then tough.

 

[Corwin of Amber]

But really, this a silly argument. The chapter of 'Book of Nine Swords' that introduces the mechanics we are talking about is called 'Blade Magic'. While not every 'Blade Magic' is explicitly supernatural, there is no attempt in the book to divorse and separate the merely superheroic from the supernatural. It's not even a big concern of the writers, and the chapter explicitly says, "The process of initiating a manuever is similar to casting a spell or preparing a psionic discipline" as well as comparing manuevers to spells in many other ways. I'm not the one forcing an interpretation on the text. Mine is the most natural interpretation not only of the fluff surrounding the manuevers, but in many cases of the actual mechanics themselves. With some straining, heaving, and deliberate looking away or winking, you can pretend that for a few schools this is a system of mundane combat, but that is the forced interpretation of the text.

The gall of the ToB:Bo9S publishers to implement similar mechanics to those already accepted in the game in an attempt to reach balance.

Afterall, even someone learning the Iron Heart school is still called an adept.

Adept

And what's really silly about this is that at some level, I don't care about most of the things you are arguing about and many of the reasons why you seem to be arguing against me I actually agree with you on. Attacks like, "You just don't want fighters to get good stuff" are so incredibly misplaced. I'm honestly not sure that my fighter isn't as or more powerful than a Warblade. In some ways I find the manuevers too restrained. I assume that in my universe, magic is physics, so really nothing in game isn't magic and I have a feat designed for martial characters (since it scales with BAB) that for example lets a character channel power into any weapon he holds (or even his unarmed attack) and turn it magical weapon.

You collection of house rules (which you keep posting and conveniently have one for every argument posed) basically undermines the entire system of mechanics for 3.5 to the point where you're playing a different game, save for a few names and terms. You're essentially arguing that because X happens in Risk you do Y in Monopoly. It might as well be a different game.

 

[Celebrim]

The gall of the ToB:Bo9S publishers to implement similar mechanics to those already accepted in the game in an attempt to reach balance.

a) Now you are reaching.
b) Do you think that the ToB was really "accepted in the game" much less a priori accepted in the game? With the possible exception of BoVD, did WotC release a more contriversial supplement than ToB?

Adept

Yes, I know. But you might want to also look up the eytomology of that world, because its very relevant in the context of a fantasy world. And that's to say nothing of its historical usage in D&D (as synnonym for a 2nd level cleric, as the title given to NPC spellcasters, etc.)

You collection of house rules (which you keep posting and conveniently have one for every argument posed) basically undermines the entire system of mechanics for 3.5 to the point where you're playing a different game...

Exactly what 'system of mechanics' have I undermined to the point that I'm playing a game that isn't recognizably a 3e D&D variant? I've rebalanced some base classes and some spells - it's not like I've tossed out or made unrecognizable feats, the skill system, BAB, AC, hit points, etc. My players with prior 3.5 experience occasionally stumble on something different than they are used to (like standing up doesn't provoke an AoO), but anyone who has played 3e can walk right into my table a immediately know what is going on and accurately report, for example, there initiative or will saving throw.

Hyperbole won't save you now.

 

[Corwin of Amber]

b) Do you think that the ToB was really "accepted in the game" much less a priori accepted in the game? With the possible exception of BoVD, did WotC release a more contriversial supplement than ToB?

You compared maneuvers to spells. I'm pretty sure spells are an accepted part of the game. Unless you have a house rule you would like to share with us that changes that.

Yes, I know. But you might want to also look up the eytomology of that world, because its very relevant in the context of a fantasy world. And that's to say nothing of its historical usage in D&D (as synnonym for a 2nd level cleric, as the title given to NPC spellcasters, etc.)

While simultaneously saying that ToB is not enough like contemporary martial arts you are referring me to archaic definitions in order to defend your point?

Exactly what 'system of mechanics' have I undermined to the point that I'm playing a game that isn't recognizably a 3e D&D variant? I've rebalanced some base classes and some spells - it's not like I've tossed out or made unrecognizable feats, the skill system, BAB, AC, hit points, etc. My players with prior 3.5 experience occasionally stumble on something different than they are used to (like standing up doesn't provoke an AoO), but anyone who has played 3e can walk right into my table a immediately know what is going on and accurately report, for example, there initiative or will saving throw.

If you haven't been paying attention to your own arguments for the last 15 pages, then I really don't know what else I can add.

Hyperbole won't save you now.

I suppose I could give smug arrogance a try, it seems to be keeping your ego intact.

 

[Borthos]

you mean this?

Online Etymology Dictionary

which pretty much says "one who is skilled" throughout the history of the word?