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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eldritch_Lord" data-source="post: 5863904" data-attributes="member: 52073">For those arguing about hard caps vs. cumulative penalties, I would point out that the latter case does not imply that you're either using it at full strength or have no chance for it to work.To use a 3e example, let's say you're a rogue with a Kick Ogre Ass maneuver that takes a -4 cumulative penalty each time you use it after the first, and you're facing four ogres, so it's worthwhile to use over your normal attack.  Your first time has a 60% chance or so to work, so it's plenty worthwhile to risk it.  The second time has a 40% chance to work, still kind of worth it but very chancy.  The third time has a 20% chance to work, so you don't bother, right?  Nope--you can have the druid entangle an ogre (-4 Dex, so -2 AC) and then flank with the fighter (+2 attack) to cancel out that penalty and stay at that 40% success rate.  You finish off the last ogre (also entangled and flanked) with your Kick Ogre Ass maneuver by feinting at him to drop his AC further.Which is to say, you can't just look at numbers in a vacuum.  Situational modifiers, buffs, etc. can all play a role, and in fact that would encourage tactical thinking and give players control over their characters' actions.  One of the reasons 4e tightened the math up was to make maneuvering and tactics more important; the reasoning went that if you're struggling for every +1, higher ground and flanking and such become more desirable.  The issue with that approach, though, is that they didn't look at it from the other angle--the reason few 3e fighters bother with high ground and flanking while their 2e and 4e counterparts want them is that (A) their primary tactics are already sufficiently focused to not need the minor bonuses from positioning and (B) any secondary tactics have penalties too large to be offset by the minor bonuses from positioning.If you build in the assumption from the start that you want people to use combat maneuvers (but not too often) and want them to be unreliable (but not too prone to failure), you can avoid the problem of getting only 1 or 2 uses out of a particular maneuver and also avoid the problem of spamming.  That the 3e devs failed to do this is an issue with their specific implementation, not the concept in general.</blockquote>

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