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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ycore Rixle" data-source="post: 3551129" data-attributes="member: 675">Heh, yep. I designed a lot of the feats for PHB II and a lot of the maneuvers for Bo9S. Happy to answer any questions about either. But yes, basically, a huge goal with both for me was to get fighters back on par with other classes when it came to high-level combat.The wire-fu flavor of Bo9S was an interesting choice made at a level above me. An interesting point, though, is that the warblade and crusader had a chance at somewhat mititgating that. The warblade was called something else throughout development. I don't know when it was changed; it was a surprise to me when I finally saw the hardcover. Its other title carried with it, by that name and a lot of cut flavor text, a very non-wire-fu flavor (think 300, honor, and glory). The crusader originally had with it a lot of flavor that was cut from the book either because the editors and developers thought it was no good or because they didn't want to open the politically charged can of worms that comes with modeling a character class on a defender of her religion's Holy Land. Anyway, my point is that the designers were trying to keep the book appealing to lots of people, and I was trying to include both wire-fu fighting and other types of mythology/history/movie-inspired fighting to go along with it. In fact, two of the three classes were drawn from Western, not Eastern, history.I think three things happened to allow the wire-fu stuff to dominate or at least stand out more than the rest. One is that the two Western classes themselves changed flavors, as I just mentioned. Two is that the maneuvers were changed for mechanics reasons in the development process so much that they lost some non-wire-fu-ness. Three is that classes are always defined more by their abilities than their flavor text, and the abilities here are the maneuvers. The maneuvers always had a flavor that was more wire-fu than anything Western. Speaking for myself, I probably could have done a better job of that in design.Well, that's about it for my two cents, but maybe I'll throw out one more example. In PHB II, one of my design goals was to keep it traditional D&D all the way. That's why Robilar's Gambit is named after Robilar instead of being called Temptation of the Emerald Dragon. In Bo9S, we were specifically setting out to make something different from traditional D&D combat, and in my part of the work, the names and flavor were designed to support that goal.EDIT: Just changed some pronouns and corresponding verb tenses to make it clear that I'm speaking only for myself, not Rich, Matt, Joe, Mike, WOTC, or anyone else.</blockquote>

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