My first BO9S adventure

[brehobit]

There is no official clarification on Adaptive Style as far as I'm aware. It can be interpreted either way, depending on how the DM looks at it and the rest of the rules related to it. Personally, for my games I go with the interpretation that readying maneuvers actually makes them ready for use, not just changing around the expended maneuvers for unexpended ones, which would be rather useless to most martial adepts.

There is no 'best' interpretation, it's purely up to the DM. It's also up to the DM to decide whether or not it provokes and attack of opportunity to use, since it doesn't say.

My interpretation makes the feat quite useful, but the alternative is to interprete it in such a way that it's a horrible, horrible waste of a feat that sucks worse than Toughness (except in rare cases at upper levels, and I mean very rare, since wasting a full round doing absolutely nothing useful is very bad in the fast-flying-exchange-of-spells-and-strikes-of-dooooooom! arena of high-level D&D combat).

And my actual-play experience is that it sucks to be a Swordsage who uses up his or her maneuvers in the first few rounds of combat, in lower and middle levels, and then spends the rest of the fight as a glorified Expert. And I'm talking about Swordsages I've played, ones I've played alongside, ones I've DMed for, and ones I've run as NPC foes, in different games. I haven't gotten to play or DM with/for any Swordsages at high levels yet.

Yeah,
I've always ruled that you still have the same number of feats ready, but you can move things around. IME it's still pretty handy when you have the wrong things for the fight from the start (swordsage with lots of fire abilities fighting a red dragon) or when you have 2 or 3 strikes/boosts that aren't all that useful. I do allow someone to use "strike X" and then use adaptive style to drop it from the "used" list and toss it on the "unused" list. At higher levels this is pretty handy.

Yes, a swordsage starts to hurt in a long battle, but I don't find high-level battles go that long to begin with (in terms of rounds, in terms of play time they go quite long). And in low level long fights, the swordsage just dominates the first few rounds, it seems only fair there be some down side.

Finally, if you do play that the spent round is a full recovery, every swordsage will take this. That's generally a good argument that the interpretation is a bit overpowered.

All that said, I do agree that both interpretations are reasonable from the text, and as a player I'd be fine with either.

 

[Scribble]

There is no official clarification on Adaptive Style as far as I'm aware. It can be interpreted either way, depending on how the DM looks at it and the rest of the rules related to it. Personally, for my games I go with the interpretation that readying maneuvers actually makes them ready for use, not just changing around the expended maneuvers for unexpended ones, which would be rather useless to most martial adepts.

My DM doesn't so much care, but I tend to only use it for these functions:

1. My guy is sort of a fire ninja. (Desert Sun and Shadow Hand...) Generally I stay loaded up with fire powers, but if I need to get all ninja, I use it to quickly switch out nto more shadow hand powers...

2. Combined with Vital Recovery. (I think thats the name) a feat that lets me regain 3 + level HP when I recover a maneuver once per encounter. Usually if I'm in over my head, and dropped, I'll hit Adaptive Style, recover some HP, and then when I can, shadow Jaunt my humbled booty out of there as soon as possible.

 

[Merlin the Tuna]

I always figured that you can choose any ability you like (feats, spells, class choices, whatever) but you can't USE it unless you meet the prereqs.

Gah. That'd make character builds ridiculous, and I'm even one of the folks that lays out where he's going impossibly far ahead. Beyond that, it'd make building PCs above 1st level that much more wonky -- they already get more flexibility with items (as their wealth is spent in one go rather than increasing in small increments over time) and now they'd be able to say "Oh yeah, I got Robilar's Gambit at 1st level, Improved Crit at 3rd, and Epic Combat Reflexes at 6th. I really came into my own last level. You just missed it."

And on the subject of Adaptive Style... it does refresh your maneuvers, and thus it is basically the Swordsage Tax. A lot of folks take it because the Swordsage's default recovery mechanism is awful, not because grabbing Adaptive Style makes them sexy shoeless gods of war. The out-of-book help support from WotC is at times erratic, but they've been very uniform in saying this.[sblock=Main 3.5 FAQ, Page 35]If a character uses the Adaptive Style feat (Tome of Battle, page 28) after he has expended some of his readied maneuvers, does he choose new readied maneuvers equal to the maximum number he can ready, or equal to the number he hasn’t yet expended?
Using the Adaptive Style feat completely resets the character’s readied maneuvers, making them all available for use. If you’re a crusader, you also reset your granted maneuvers.[/sblock][sblock=Customer Service]Q: The Adaptive Style feat in Tome of Battle allows you to change your readied maneuvers as a full round action rather than spending five minutes to do so. Does this...

A) Allow a martial adept to regain and change all of their maneuvers with a single full round action

or

B) Allow them to change the maneuver that is readied in their unexpended "slots".

A: Adaptive Style will actually let you perform option A) from your list. So as a full round action, you can choose a new set of readied maneuvers, and in doing so, reset all of your maneuvers. I hope that clears things up. Have fun and good gaming!

Link. Look under "Feats"; further links to multiple CustServ responses saying the same thing are included.[/sblock][sblock=Ask Wizards, 7/19/07]Q: Dear Sage
If a character uses the Adaptive Style feat (Tome of Battle p28) after he has expended some of his readied maneuvers, does he choose new readied maneuvers equal to the maximum number he can ready, or equal to the number he hasn’t yet expended?
--Matt

A: Using the Adaptive Style feat completely resets the character’s readied maneuvers, making them all available for use.

If you’re a crusader, you also reset your granted maneuvers.

Link.[/sblock]So yes, there are official answers on the subject, yes they're consistent, and from personal experience and a fair amount of board reading, it doesn't appear to be overpowered in practice.