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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8506748" data-attributes="member: 87792">At this point I'm going to say that the Book Of Nine Swords/Tome of Battle (its full name is "The Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords" and it's called by both halves by different people) is a special case that 3.5 DMs should know about.Fundamentally fighters in D&D 3.5 are for many people both boring and unrealistic. In combat (despite being "fighters" and it being where they should excel) thanks to the feats system 90% of the fighter decisions for what to do in combat are made in character creation and they just spend their time spamming whatever their feat-chosen best attack is. Something that can be done on autopilot - and having your fighters be these untiring automata who spam their best attack rather than outthink their foes and exploit their weaknesses in a more organic way is both unrealistic and, to many people, boring.The Book of Nine Swords contains three classes:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The Warblade - which is a replacement for the fighter or, arguably, the barbarian and in general fits Athas very well.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The Swordsage - which is a replacement for the Monk and fits Athas pretty well right down to having Desert Wind techniques available</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The Crusader - which is a replacement for the Paladin. The healing school (there are nine "swords" or schools) is a bad fit for Athas and the entire class isn't great for Athas.</li> </ul>If your player turned up their noses at the idea of playing a fighter or a monk and instead wanted a class that is both better balanced (<a href="http://minmaxforum.com/index.php?topic=658.0" target="_blank">the Bo9S classes are all tier 3 which is about where the game should be; the fighter and monk get failing grades at tier 5</a>) and a lot more interesting to play while actually fitting the lore I do not blame them in the slightest. There is no challenge allowing Warblades or Swordsages in the lore (Crusaders are another matter) - and by offering "lore based alternatives" when they weren't actually trying to break the lore you weren't dealing at all with why they wanted to use the Bo9S (which is that the mechanics for martial characters in 3.X generally suck).</blockquote>

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