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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dragonblade" data-source="post: 5776751" data-attributes="member: 2804">As a 4e fan, I have your analysis intriguing and insightful, Celebrim. I agree with you that the rules should be written in such a way that most classes can try most combat maneuvers. Otherwise, like you say, it effectively becomes a "spell" that only a few people can do.But I don't like the Pathfinder CMB mechanic, or too many fiddly rolls to achieve something. I have found that requiring umpteen skill checks or rolls to achieve some cool maneuver results in PCs who just stand there and swing away lest they fail their check and do nothing.I'd prefer some other mechanic where if you expend the right resources, you automatically succeed on certain things. Much like Mike Mearls token mechanic from Iron Heroes. So anyone can use an OA to stop an enemy from moving (even a wizard, for example), but for a fighter it only costs say one "grit" token, but for a paladin it might cost two, and for a wizard four or more. If you had no tokens remaining you could still try, but then you would roll and accept the risk of failure.How tokens are refreshed or generated in battle is another discussion altogether, especially if you have different types that some classes can generate more easily than others. But there are all sorts of ideas you could come up with, including different tokens for different power sources that can be expended to do different things. Casters could have arcane tokens that represent gathering in magical power. More powerful spell effects might require multiple tokens, but mage "at-wills" only use one. How fast and how many tokens a caster generates per round can be a function of level, feats, and player action or narrative.And layer on the token system such that you can totally ignore it and just default to making Pathfinder style CMB checks if you prefer melee characters that don't have an in-battle resource management mechanic. Or for those 1e fans, just ignore the maneuver subsystem altogether and just have fighters that swing away.And all of this can be grid agnostic for people like me who like narrative combat as much as grid based combat. Better yet have the grid pased maneuvers effectively segregated so you can layer on or remove grid based movement easily without having it built into the core game.</blockquote>

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