NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8732064" data-attributes="member: 6877472">I don't blame the 3.0 design team for being wary and conservative about combat maneuvers.  This isn't a defense of the final product- having things virtually locked behind Feats, most maneuvers being very niche, and difficult to pull off isn't very fun.But I grok why a game designer might want to do this sort of thing.  When everyone is using non-magical weapons, a combat maneuver like Sunder or Disarm just requires you to have holdout weapons.When a game is built around an assumption that higher level characters require magic weapons, a combat maneuver like Disarm is huge and Sunder is just insane ("Yeah, ok, I'll destroy our loot, what a wonderful idea!").Restrictions like not being able to grapple big foes easily, or having difficulty tripping behirs might not be fun, but not having them will make some players violently reject the idea as breaking their verisimilitude- when 4e gave us powers that could just knock a guy prone no matter how big or strong he was, there was a very loud and angry group of D&D fans who were extremely unhappy with the idea, leading to complaints about "magic Fighters".Some people are not happy with the idea of high fantasy D&D, where legendary heroes can cleave the tops off of mountains.  Just as some people are not happy with the idea of low fantasy D&D, where a player character is just marginally better than a town guard and forced to fight ogres and dragons.Thus D&D has always had to walk a fine line, trying to have their cake and eat it too, with fantastic treasures and reality altering spells coexisting with heroes who can die to a single arrow at level 1.The Battlemaster can get away with not having to make skill checks or even have serious restrictions on their maneuvers because they are using a resource.  I feel very strongly that if the game had launched with all Fighters having maneuvers usable every turn without cost, many people would have torn their hair and gnashed their teeth.This was design they had rejected with 4e, and did not want.  And WotC, wanted to woo these people back into the fold, to regain whatever they felt they had lost to Paizo.This is the current paradigm, and it would take a lot of people voting with their wallets to change it.</blockquote>

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