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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 1858454" data-attributes="member: 172">Did you happen to read the section at the beginning of the book about designing maneuvers? Some pretty extensive and matter-of-fact mathematical analysis went into desinging those maneuvers to keep them from being too powerful. That's pretty hard to ignore, IMO, unless you can make a case why his numbers don't pan out.To borrow a quip from the past, more ways to suck does not make for a more desirable character.You dismiss one of the fundamental tenets of game balance: players tend to not take substandard choices, even if it fits their concept. Making a character concept undesireable by making it substandard is not a tolerable venue for allowing the choice. You may as well not allow the choice at all.Of course I feel like I am just rephrasing what I have already said, but I don't know how else to get across what I really consider to be a pretty simple and apparent principle of game design.You are playing the wrong game then. Try Hero. D&D will never do this properly and remain D&D. (And IMO, games that do let you craft whatever you want come with the additional overhead of GM micromanagement and can never REALLY deal with all the potential abuses and balance issues, and requires the GM to herd players into ad hoc archetypes as the game won't do it for them.)What about them "dictates"? You aren't FORCED to take a prestige class, nor take it for more levels that satisfy your concept. You chose one only because it appeals to you.No (or light) backstory just makes it that much more portable and flexible. It seems to me you want to have your cake and eat it too (you want unfettered freedom of choice AND you want rigid faith to a rigid backstory). And from where I am standing, that makes it look very much like your arguments are being manufactured to justify your hate, instead of there being an authentic source to it, or that you are misidentifying the real source.Once again, yes there is: they give you neat moves with an axe. The background is obviously someone who has trained with an axe for some reason. I think most players and GM who can take it from there.Nobody in your campaign setting uses axes enough to develop special moves with it?Feat chains would be too costly. Unlike the must have fighter feats (weapon specialization, improved critical, etc.), different maneuvers cannot be performed in the same round, meaning they do not accumulate. If you spend lots of fighter feats picking up maneuvers, your character will be substandard compared to a single class fighter specializing in an axe, taking improved crit with an axe, etc.</blockquote>

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