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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ainamacar" data-source="post: 6009248" data-attributes="member: 70709">Nonsense.  In any RPG one builds structure on top of universally shared mechanics (except perhaps in the Calvinball RPG <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />), and some classes (and/or sets of classes) utilize them to a greater or lesser degree.  For heaven sakes, we already have a class of mechanics everyone can use (weapon attacks) and we build classes (martial classes) which focus on them using the universal mechanics of weapon attacks.  If your argument were correct we couldn't even be having this conversation because the very notion of "martial classes" would itself not make sense!When I'm talking about ED as a "martial language" I am divorcing it from all trappings except these: it is a spendable resource represented by sets of dice which all players can use to increase damage you cause or reduce damage you take with respect to weapon attacks.  Those are the only qualities I think would be shared, and one could even get rid of one of the default uses and have it remain its universal character.  Everything else, including the manner of gaining, spending, and the effects of gaining and spending ED is up for grabs, mechanically.  Classes that focus on non-martial abilities would probably not have any additional connection.Unless the fighter has unique interactions with ED, just as it might have unique interactions with any other underlying mechanic.  In my initial and subsequent posts I have given numerous examples.  Even if these examples themselves are terrible mechanics, one thing they are not is the same.  People will still disagree about whether the degree of uniqueness is sufficient to make them compelling, or about the qualities of the mechanics themselves, and that's fine.  But your contention that letting every class use ED leaves fighters with nothing unique simply does not follow.  I could imagine a version with nothing unique, to be sure, by giving every class exactly the same mechanics, and then you'd be right.  I haven't, and you're not.Which contradicts anything I've proposed how?  An extreme example with minimal details:  Suppose ED are gained and spent by all classes like the playtest fighter, except every other class gets 1 ED and the fighter gets 10.  Further suppose that there exists at least 1 maneuver that requires spending 2 ED.  In that case ED is a shared mechanic as per my definition, and yet the fighter can do something no one else can do.  That is sufficient to show you are mistaken. Moreover, I can add new fighter-only capabilities by making new high-ED maneuvers, which is sufficient to give the fighter an arbitrary number of unique capabilities.  So not only are you mistaken in the simplest case, you are mistaken for any finite degree of uniqueness you might demand for the fighter to be "truly" unique.(You have a tendency of criticizing my examples without engaging what they are supposed to be examples of, so I want to be clear: that would be a terrible shared implementation of ED and I hate it.  Its only purpose is to explicitly demonstrate that shared ED mechanics can still lead to the fighter doing things no one else can do.)Unless EDs enable things the others, by themselves, cannot.  Which, if it is a shared mechanic, it does, just as in the cleric spell example from the last post.  Moreover, remember in your first post, where you wanted to do know what ED could add that sneak attack/ambush feats can't already do?  Now that I might be honing in on some of these things in other contexts (thanks largely to you making me think really hard), these extra capabilities are "gilding the lily"?  I'm all for making sure classes have an intelligible and well-defined scope, but I find this unsettling: if ED being less flexible/efficacious than these other mechanics would be bad (which I think we can both agree on), while exactly as flexible is extra work for no gain (as per our early posts), and more flexible/efficacious is "gilding the lily" there is literally no condition where you will admit that there might be some hope for this idea.  You only asserted the latter in the context of a Warlord, not as an absolute, so hopefully we can continue productively.I wrote "All with 5e mechanics that are, so far as I know, presently non-existent."  The mechanics do not determine the concepts, nor do the concepts determine the mechanics.  You cannot compare my example mechanics to mechanics that don't exist, you can only try to examine the correspondence with the concepts.I'm all for seeing if the mechanics are suited to the vision, but you're fixated on the wrong mechanic.  My word, it's a hypothetical, run with it.  So you know what, remove the skill check and make it a flat number, since the skill is clearly a stumbling block for you to talking about ED.  A level 5 Paladin with the Courage virtue can smite an enemy that used a fear effect or similar, getting 5d6 ED (or whatever) for that purpose.  This base paladin has no other guaranteed uses for ED except extra damage or reducing damage, although some may choose to improve it.  For the sake of argument the smite ability will specify that the ED apply only to offensive actions against the target being smote.  So: "I was trying to show how ED could tie into a class that is largely  weapon-based without making the whole class itself focused around ED.   Did I succeed, even partially, at that or not?"</blockquote>

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