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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Michael Morris" data-source="post: 6011787" data-attributes="member: 87">A persistent problem of the d20 game is balancing martial against magic classes.  4e's solution was to make all characters spellcasters.  You can use all the wordplay you want, but when a fighter has a technique he can only use once a day - he's become a spellcaster.  And that isn't acceptable to me.I think that the five martial classes - barbarians, fighters, monks, rangers and rogues need a core mechanic that is fight oriented and flexible enough to allow all five of them to implement it in a manner that is flavored to them.My idea is combat meter.  Any time a fighting class lands a hit the meter rises by one.  The universal effect of the meter is that it drops the critical range of attacks. So a fighter using a longsword (19-20) who has landed three normal hits will have a crit range of 15-20 on the fourth attack, if that doesn't crit the next will have a range of 14-20. Once a crit lands the meter resets.Combat meter can also be spent to perform maneuvers. Each character will have a number of these flavored for alignment and class, and therein will be overlap - barbarians and fighters will share shunran maneuvers, while fighters share valran maneuvers with monks.  Characters pick up or improve (by lowering its cost) a maneuver each level.  These will be separate from feats.One last thing - if a character actually rolls natural 20 and crits while they have combat meter they deal 1d6 damage per point of meter in addition to the normal damage of the attack, then the meter is cleared. (returning to the previous example, if the fighter rolls a 20 to hit with 3 points on the meter, he'll deal +3d6 damage).  This damage rule also provides a rule of thumb as to how powerful the abilities should be at each cost.Thoughts?</blockquote>

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