SWORD & SHAFT
A serious disappointment for fighters everywhere.
INTRODUCTION
Let me offer a little background for those of you out there who aren't big fans of the fighter class. When 3e came out, fighters looked great. Getting one of these "feat" things every other level sounded like an outstanding benefit. But as time wore on, a lot of people began to realize that the small bonuses provided by feats such as Dodge, Weapon Focus, Toughness, and even the much-vaunted Weapon specialization were pretty much upstaged by the bonuses provided by abilities like barbarian rage or a 1st-level spell like Divine Favor. It started to become clear that the designers of 3e had cooked up an interesting little meta-rule that goes something like:
"A bonus that a character has all the time (such as those gained by feats like Dodge and Weapon Focus) should be inferior to a bonus that a character has only for limited number of times a day (such as those gained from a spell or barbarian rage)."
The flaw in that reasoning, of course, is that a character with the latter type of bonuses eventually can (and generally will) gain enough usages of them per day that the bonuses may as well be permanent. After all, you don't need bonuses all the time--just when they count! Considering that most parties only fight maybe a half-dozen battles before they stop to recharge, a fighter's only opportunity to shine is in those minor skirmishes where the other classes simply deign not to use their abilities.
Don't get me wrong. Could a player build a 12th-level fighter that was a lethal killing machine? Definitely.
But could a 12th-level cleric with the spells Divine Favor, Divine Power, and Righteous Might (all personal-only) cast upon himself kick that killing machine's ass up and down the street? His chances are pretty darn good, all other things being equal. Mind you, we're not even talking about letting the cleric use Harm or Heal.
All right, here's the big money question: is the fact that the cleric can only thrash the fighter once, twice, maybe three times a day, an adequate consolation to the fighters of the world? No. It's never desirable for one class to hedge another class out of its primary role, even for one round per day.
Now, if there were bigger and badder feats availabe to a fighter as he progressed in levels, then this wouldn't be a real issue. He'd still retain his rightful place as the main man in a battle even when other classes were starting to take their spells and other limited-usage abilities for granted. The problem here is, combat feats don't have much regard for character level. The party wizard does a little happy-dance every couple of levels as he gains the latest, greatest blasting spell, but there's not much in the way of "high-level" combat feats. The fighter gets Weapon Specialization at 4th level; now where's the progressively-nastier feat he gets at 8th or 10th level? How about at 15th or 16th? Whirlwind Attack was a good example of what should have been the key to building the ultimate combatant: put some highly potent feats out there that have a long list of prerequisite feats. The uber-feats would thus be at the end of a long chain that only a fighter could climb effectively.
The problem with that is, there's only so much space in the Player's Handbook, and it shouldn't have been used to list a slew of feats that will only be attainable by one out of eleven classes. No, what fighters truly needed was a sourcebook all their own dedicated to adding some links to their feat-chain. Or, barring major improvements in that department, then how about the clever application of prestige classes to provide fesh venues for carnage-dealing? Maybe some killer exotic weapons will give them an edge?
Enter Sword & Fist...
LOOKS LIKE YOU'VE GOT A MONK ON YOUR BACK
Before we go any farther, I'd like to make something clear. I realize that this is a book for monks as wells as fighters. I refer to this as "Mistake Number One". Fighters are a pretty popular class. If any book is going to sell, it's going to be their sourcebook, and they don't benefit from sharing it with another class. Unlike wizards & sorcerers or clerics & paladins or rangers & druids, fighters don't possess features that mesh well with other classes.
They're certainly not compatable with monks, that's for sure. The fact that monks are designed to rely on their own special attacks and defenses rather than conventional weapons or armor means they have almost as little in common with a fighter as a wizard does. Let's face it, the boys at WotC stuffed them into the fighter's book the same way left-wing congressmen take an anti-terrorism bill and tack on some funding for Robert Maplethorpe's next leather-biker-gives-significant-other-a-gerbil-enema opus. The monk is a cool class, but in Sword & Fist it's like a lamprey suckling on a shark's flank.
CHAPTER 1: FEATS
Making an assessment of this section of the book from the fighter's POV is no mean feat (pun intended). First, one has to write off the dozen or so monkish feats that are virtually unobtainable for fighters (remember that incompatability that I mentioned a minute ago?). Next, one must take into account all of the corrections made by the six(!) pages of errata that WotC eventually released. Then what you have left are a batch of feats that are largely unimpressive, uninspired, and in some cases just outright DUMB. Here are some prime examples:
UNIMPRESSIVE
Prone Attack
Benefit: Attack from a prone position without penalty.
Well, that'll increase my fighter's value to the party tenfold! Never mind what I've been saying, folks. Please disregard this review. Go to your local gaming shop and pony up $20 if you haven't already. How could I ever think Sword & Fist had unimpressive feats?
UNINSPIRED
Rapid Reload
Benefit: You can load a crossbow faster.
Of course, you still only get one shot a round, so a bow is still a far, far, far better weapon for a fighter (shouldn't this have been in the cleric book?).
JUST PLAIN DUMB (This one takes the cake, gang. Drumroll please...)
Dirty Fighting
Benefit: Give up all your iterative attacks in order to make one, single attack with a massive +1d4 damage bonus.
And no, this one didn't even get erraticized.
To be fair--and yes, that is something I'm striving for--I wouldn't label every feat in S&F as utterly worthless. You like Attacks of Opportunity? Boy howdy, have we got the book for you! While the author, Jason Carl, doesn't seem interested in increasing a fighter's basic damage output, he is quite infatuated with feats that grant AoO's under certain specific conditions. Close-Quarters Combat, Feign Weakness, Hold the Line, and Pin Shield all offer that benefit, and the Expert Tactician feat virtually does as well.
Essentially, it appears that Carl decided to give us feats that represent specific combat techniques rather than provide the pure utility of, say, Power Attack or Cleave. I appreciate his intentions, but that approach makes these feats underwhelming on the whole because they are all only meaningful in very specific battle conditions (e.g. a little trick you can do if your opponent's using a shield, a slight penalty you don't suffer if he's behind cover, etc), and for the most part are only useful against other humanoid opponents. They don't improve a fighter's overall combat capability in that A) none of them grant any major offensive bonuses, B) none of them improve his ability to soak up damage, and C) very few of them make him more formidable against powerful creatures such as dragons, demons, and the other gargantuan monsters that players will be pitted against more and more often as they climb the XP ladder (Close Quarters Combat is a noteworthy and welcome exception).
On a side-note: when fighter-fans started asking the boys at WotC why our sourcebook lacked high-end feats for the high-end fighter that we were expecting, one pundit offered the following terse reply that the public received: "If you just want to smash things with a big weapon, those feats are in the Player's Handbook." Ah, you can always trust the lads at Hasbro for their unwavering dedication to positive public relations.
All in all, I have to give this entire section a thumbs down. I look at Tordek and Regnar, the dwarf and human that grace the front cover of S&F, and think about how they're presented as illustrations of prototypical fighters both here and in the PHB. I seriously doubt the feats in this book did anything to enhance these archetypical characters.
CHAPTER 2: PRESTIGE CLASSES
Well, the ball got dropped in the feats section, so let's hope Carl can score a few points for the fighter team with his prestige classes. Of course, just like the feat section, we have to discard some of the prestige classes right off the bat, since they're clearly geared towards monks. We're only talking about 3 classes though (Drunken Master, Ninja, Red Avenger), which leaves a whopping 17 prestige classes. Of those 17, we have to eliminate all ot the classes that are too over-specialized to qualify as a good choice for a long-term player class. For most campaigns, that means:
Cavalier--Wow, how the mighty have fallen since their 1e days. Now he's nothing without his horse, which makes it pretty hard for him to pull his weight on a dungeon-crawl. Or on a high-seas adventure. Or a city-based adventure. Or....
Gladiator--A warrior whose abilities are largely dependent on having an audience around whenever he's fighting. Yeah, that's feasible. Good concept, poor execution.
Tribal Protector--A class much more fitting for the barbarian & ranger's book. It doesn't work for PC's because their abilities are restricted to fighting in a specific terrain against a specifc type of foe.
WarMaster--If they're not going to present rules for mass combat, then they've got no business creating classes that are only suited for mass combat. Common sense, really. But even when they do give us mass combat rules, do we still need characters that have towers, keeps, and castles listed as their special abilities? Karl Wagner's Kane was a "warmaster" if ever there was one, and that had nothing to do with his real estate portfolio.
The Ghostwalker--Despite the great appeal that it has to many players, I daresay that it is also too limited to be a viable PC class in a campaign--sorry, folks, a character whose specialty is getting beaten to within an inch of his life just to give some villain his come-uppance at a future point in time does have rather finite longevity in terms of playability. Once again someone has forgotten that not every prestige class has to be stretched-out for 10 levels.
That still leaves some 12 classes that could be considered at least moderately PC-friendly. Some are fine examples of the flexibility that 3 offers.
Duelist--Players have long desired a warrior class that focused on speed, agility, and weapon skill, instead of every effective fighter being a homogenous 18-Strength, plate-armor-clad lummox, and the duelist is a good idea for an alternative. "Good" but not "Perfect"; the duelist doesn't wear any armor at all, and that means that her AC will be unacceptably low. She should have been allowed some light armor, or offered better AC bonuses than "Canny Defense" is likely to provide ("Elaborate Parry" should have kicked in earlier than 7th-level).
Lasher-- Creating prestige classes that focus on exotic weapons is a smart move, and in a fighter sourcebook it would have been a major oversight not to nclude at least one. The lasher is a quality class; abilities that are both useful and colorful make for an intriguing character.
Master of Chains--makes use of one of my favorite exotic weapons, which just means I'm in for a bigger disappointment than usual. I don't mind the half-dozen prerequisite feats, but for that kind of entry fee there are too many weak and downright lame abilities sandwiched in there, like "Chain Fighting", "Chain Bind", & "Swinging Attack". Let's not even get into that 10th-level ability to animate chains. Ridiculous.
Fortunately, there are also a few warrior prestige classes that don't deviate from the tried-and-true path of wearing heavy-duty armor and swinging a heavy-duty weapon. Simple, straightforward, and possessing special abilities that aren't confined to a single battle scenario:
Master Samurai--A nice package that's puissant without being over-the-top...and I can actually imagine Samurai Jack having levels in this class. Cool.
Fist of Hextor--Your traditional massively-muscled brute, with solid abilities that allow a lawfully-alligned (and thus barbarian-ineligible) fighter to capitalize on the "limited-usage-means-big-bonuses" mentality I mentioned back in the prelude. Unfotunately, the initiation process pretty much restricts this career path to evil characters, making it another NPC-oriented class. Howabout a nice, big, friendly, chaotic good "Bicep of Kord" next time around?
Ravager--Another big meanie. Check this out: the only way to become a ravager is to track down a band of ravagers and fightl one of them to the death. Now, bearing this method of indoctrination in mind, how did the ranks of the ravagers ever grow beyond one lone, bloodthirsty marauder?
Order of the Bow Initiate--I don't get how the "Ranged Sneak Attack" is rationalized, but I can't knock this class for effectiveness. Not bad.
Weaponmaster--Ah, imagine that! A prestige class that is actually prestigious. Its prerequesites make it difficult for characters to qualify, but those who do qualify are rewarded with potent abilities. In other words, this is what a fighter prestige class should strive to be. Y'know, after reading through this class, I watched Ninja Scroll for about the 746th time, I noticed that the weaponmaster class fits Jubei perfectly. Kudos on this one.
This section is an improvement over Chapter 1, but with the exception of the weaponmaster, I don't see a prestige class for a character who isn't willing to train with an off-the-wall weapon or endenture himself to a higher power. While many of those outre classes sound like fun to play, S&F still didn't really offer any career options for that dwarf with the waraxe or the human with the bastard sword.
CHAPTER 3
The obligatory fluff section. Starts out by telling you stuff you never knew about...like how half-orcs make good melee guys cause they're big n' strong, elves' got good dexterity so that makes'em good arrow-shooters, humans are real, real flexible and real good at anything they wanna be good at, and other revelations of similar enormity. Then we get some more ugly white space filled with lots of pretty black typings about stuff like organizations of naughty fighters and organizations of nice fighters. Knightly orders, ruthless mercenaries, murderous bands of maurauders--you know, stuff that you've already thought of. Stuff everybody's already thought of.
CHAPTER 4: THE GAME WITHIN THE GAME
I took this chapter's title to mean that it would offer a thought-provoking discussing about applying game mechanics to the fighter (and monk) in order to maximize their potential. Rather, it starts out by offering an insulting, patronizing assessment of the obvious that wouldn't prove insightful to even the greenest of players. The chapter begins with the section "Be All You Can Be", which tells you what skills and ability scores are important to your character in case you're too much of a knucklehead to figure that out for yourself. This is followed up by a particularly offensive section called "Advancement: Wise Choices", which slaps your intelligence squarely across the face with the following advice:
If you want to take a prestige class, go ahead and start meeting the prerequisites, because you won't be able to meet the prerequisites, you can't take the prestige class. Some prestige classes have feats as prerequisites, so if you have all of the feats you need to meet the prerequisites for a prestige class except for one, you should consider taking that feat as your next feat choice, so that you can then qualify for that prestige class. Sometimes a feat will have other feats as a prerequisite. If you want to take a feat that is a prerequisite for a prestige class, but you don't have the feat that is a prerequisite for that feat, then you should first take the prerequisite feat, then you may take that feat that you need for the prestige class prerequisite.
(I'm only paraphrasing there; in the book, they actually go into detail and give you examples to facilitate your understanding of these extremely challenging concepts)
More gems of wisdom spill forth from the section "How to Fight Nearly Everything and Survive", which will enlighten you as to the best tactics for fighting different types of opponents. Apparently--at least according to this section--when you are faced with an opponent with a long reach, ranged weapons are useful (from a distance, mind you!). Who'd've thunk it? Not only that, but this section would further have us believe that ranged weapons can also be helpful against flying opponents as well! I knew my fighter was carrying around that darn bow on his back for some reason!
This portion wraps up with some excellent advice on how to deal with unbeatable foes: DON'T FIGHT THEM, STUPID! Then, to really drive home the point, there's this loooong scenario about hunting a green dragon in the forest and these 2 hill giants show up and the entire thought process you should go through about what you should do next. I wish I could muster up the energy to make fun of it, but it's just too painfully condescending to dwell on.
Let's move on to the remainging sections of this chapter, because they actually possess redeeming features.
"Tactics" offers advice on how to position your character on the battle map to maximum advantage. Topics covered include the Cleave feat, the benefits of reach, fighting around corners, and flanking. These are all issues that are introduced by D&D 3e, which at the time of S&F's publication was still fairly new. Even today many players would benefit from perusing this section.
"Doing the Math" provides data on how many times a character can hit against a certain armor class as well as how much damage he should expect to inflict per hit.
"Monstrous Fighters" has a lot of helpful info that is all too easy to overlook, such as a table for Weapon Damage by Size and a couple of nasty feats suited for monsters with fighter levels.
"Combat Examples" shows you how it all comes together with 2 battle scenarios, one involving mounted combat and the other a mano-a-mano melee.
CHAPTER 5: TOOLS OF THE TRADE
Should you elect to purchase Sword & Fist, make sure you buy an exacto knife as well. As soon as you get home, open the book to page 70 and begin removing pages until you've successfully excised the entire section on exotic weapons. Seriously, I'm not kidding. Slice that book up.
Those pages are just of no use to you, you see, because the table is riddled with totally unreliable numbers and the weapon descripitions are rife with inaccurate entries. No, my friend, a Fullblade does not inflict an absurd 1d12 points of damage. It actually does something like 2d8, but before you start licking your chops too much, don't bother allocating a feat for it; despite the weapon's description, a Medium-sized creature cannot wield it at all. And sorry to get your hopes up, I'm afraid a Bladed Gauntlet doesn't have a groovy 17-20 threat range after all; it's a blase' 19-20. Please, heed my warning and remove the offending pages lest they drive you mad as they have many a player before you.
The rest of the book is filled with maps of arenas and temples and, oh, all sorts of interesting places where a fighter and monk might go. Why are all these maps back here you might wonder? Well, because the back of all the other sourcebooks will be filled with lots of spiffy new spells. As we all know, monks and fighters don't have any spells--which is ultimately why they were crammed together into one sourcebook I suppose--so they have to put something here. They can't just NOT insert the extra pages and give you a cost break for the difference. They can't just spend those pages listing more feats in the place of spells. So, the clever dickens at WotC just decided to insert maps. When your buddies go whipping out some new spell from Defenders of the Faith or Tome and Blood, you just show them one of your neat maps! I personally recommend the Elven Canopy Tower. They'll be sooo jealous...
THE BOTTOM LINE
I sure hope they get it right the next time around. And god I hope there is a next time around for a fighter sourcebook (monks need not apply for entry!).
A serious disappointment for fighters everywhere.
INTRODUCTION
Let me offer a little background for those of you out there who aren't big fans of the fighter class. When 3e came out, fighters looked great. Getting one of these "feat" things every other level sounded like an outstanding benefit. But as time wore on, a lot of people began to realize that the small bonuses provided by feats such as Dodge, Weapon Focus, Toughness, and even the much-vaunted Weapon specialization were pretty much upstaged by the bonuses provided by abilities like barbarian rage or a 1st-level spell like Divine Favor. It started to become clear that the designers of 3e had cooked up an interesting little meta-rule that goes something like:
"A bonus that a character has all the time (such as those gained by feats like Dodge and Weapon Focus) should be inferior to a bonus that a character has only for limited number of times a day (such as those gained from a spell or barbarian rage)."
The flaw in that reasoning, of course, is that a character with the latter type of bonuses eventually can (and generally will) gain enough usages of them per day that the bonuses may as well be permanent. After all, you don't need bonuses all the time--just when they count! Considering that most parties only fight maybe a half-dozen battles before they stop to recharge, a fighter's only opportunity to shine is in those minor skirmishes where the other classes simply deign not to use their abilities.
Don't get me wrong. Could a player build a 12th-level fighter that was a lethal killing machine? Definitely.
But could a 12th-level cleric with the spells Divine Favor, Divine Power, and Righteous Might (all personal-only) cast upon himself kick that killing machine's ass up and down the street? His chances are pretty darn good, all other things being equal. Mind you, we're not even talking about letting the cleric use Harm or Heal.
All right, here's the big money question: is the fact that the cleric can only thrash the fighter once, twice, maybe three times a day, an adequate consolation to the fighters of the world? No. It's never desirable for one class to hedge another class out of its primary role, even for one round per day.
Now, if there were bigger and badder feats availabe to a fighter as he progressed in levels, then this wouldn't be a real issue. He'd still retain his rightful place as the main man in a battle even when other classes were starting to take their spells and other limited-usage abilities for granted. The problem here is, combat feats don't have much regard for character level. The party wizard does a little happy-dance every couple of levels as he gains the latest, greatest blasting spell, but there's not much in the way of "high-level" combat feats. The fighter gets Weapon Specialization at 4th level; now where's the progressively-nastier feat he gets at 8th or 10th level? How about at 15th or 16th? Whirlwind Attack was a good example of what should have been the key to building the ultimate combatant: put some highly potent feats out there that have a long list of prerequisite feats. The uber-feats would thus be at the end of a long chain that only a fighter could climb effectively.
The problem with that is, there's only so much space in the Player's Handbook, and it shouldn't have been used to list a slew of feats that will only be attainable by one out of eleven classes. No, what fighters truly needed was a sourcebook all their own dedicated to adding some links to their feat-chain. Or, barring major improvements in that department, then how about the clever application of prestige classes to provide fesh venues for carnage-dealing? Maybe some killer exotic weapons will give them an edge?
Enter Sword & Fist...
LOOKS LIKE YOU'VE GOT A MONK ON YOUR BACK
Before we go any farther, I'd like to make something clear. I realize that this is a book for monks as wells as fighters. I refer to this as "Mistake Number One". Fighters are a pretty popular class. If any book is going to sell, it's going to be their sourcebook, and they don't benefit from sharing it with another class. Unlike wizards & sorcerers or clerics & paladins or rangers & druids, fighters don't possess features that mesh well with other classes.
They're certainly not compatable with monks, that's for sure. The fact that monks are designed to rely on their own special attacks and defenses rather than conventional weapons or armor means they have almost as little in common with a fighter as a wizard does. Let's face it, the boys at WotC stuffed them into the fighter's book the same way left-wing congressmen take an anti-terrorism bill and tack on some funding for Robert Maplethorpe's next leather-biker-gives-significant-other-a-gerbil-enema opus. The monk is a cool class, but in Sword & Fist it's like a lamprey suckling on a shark's flank.
CHAPTER 1: FEATS
Making an assessment of this section of the book from the fighter's POV is no mean feat (pun intended). First, one has to write off the dozen or so monkish feats that are virtually unobtainable for fighters (remember that incompatability that I mentioned a minute ago?). Next, one must take into account all of the corrections made by the six(!) pages of errata that WotC eventually released. Then what you have left are a batch of feats that are largely unimpressive, uninspired, and in some cases just outright DUMB. Here are some prime examples:
UNIMPRESSIVE
Prone Attack
Benefit: Attack from a prone position without penalty.
Well, that'll increase my fighter's value to the party tenfold! Never mind what I've been saying, folks. Please disregard this review. Go to your local gaming shop and pony up $20 if you haven't already. How could I ever think Sword & Fist had unimpressive feats?
UNINSPIRED
Rapid Reload
Benefit: You can load a crossbow faster.
Of course, you still only get one shot a round, so a bow is still a far, far, far better weapon for a fighter (shouldn't this have been in the cleric book?).
JUST PLAIN DUMB (This one takes the cake, gang. Drumroll please...)
Dirty Fighting
Benefit: Give up all your iterative attacks in order to make one, single attack with a massive +1d4 damage bonus.
And no, this one didn't even get erraticized.
To be fair--and yes, that is something I'm striving for--I wouldn't label every feat in S&F as utterly worthless. You like Attacks of Opportunity? Boy howdy, have we got the book for you! While the author, Jason Carl, doesn't seem interested in increasing a fighter's basic damage output, he is quite infatuated with feats that grant AoO's under certain specific conditions. Close-Quarters Combat, Feign Weakness, Hold the Line, and Pin Shield all offer that benefit, and the Expert Tactician feat virtually does as well.
Essentially, it appears that Carl decided to give us feats that represent specific combat techniques rather than provide the pure utility of, say, Power Attack or Cleave. I appreciate his intentions, but that approach makes these feats underwhelming on the whole because they are all only meaningful in very specific battle conditions (e.g. a little trick you can do if your opponent's using a shield, a slight penalty you don't suffer if he's behind cover, etc), and for the most part are only useful against other humanoid opponents. They don't improve a fighter's overall combat capability in that A) none of them grant any major offensive bonuses, B) none of them improve his ability to soak up damage, and C) very few of them make him more formidable against powerful creatures such as dragons, demons, and the other gargantuan monsters that players will be pitted against more and more often as they climb the XP ladder (Close Quarters Combat is a noteworthy and welcome exception).
On a side-note: when fighter-fans started asking the boys at WotC why our sourcebook lacked high-end feats for the high-end fighter that we were expecting, one pundit offered the following terse reply that the public received: "If you just want to smash things with a big weapon, those feats are in the Player's Handbook." Ah, you can always trust the lads at Hasbro for their unwavering dedication to positive public relations.
All in all, I have to give this entire section a thumbs down. I look at Tordek and Regnar, the dwarf and human that grace the front cover of S&F, and think about how they're presented as illustrations of prototypical fighters both here and in the PHB. I seriously doubt the feats in this book did anything to enhance these archetypical characters.
CHAPTER 2: PRESTIGE CLASSES
Well, the ball got dropped in the feats section, so let's hope Carl can score a few points for the fighter team with his prestige classes. Of course, just like the feat section, we have to discard some of the prestige classes right off the bat, since they're clearly geared towards monks. We're only talking about 3 classes though (Drunken Master, Ninja, Red Avenger), which leaves a whopping 17 prestige classes. Of those 17, we have to eliminate all ot the classes that are too over-specialized to qualify as a good choice for a long-term player class. For most campaigns, that means:
Cavalier--Wow, how the mighty have fallen since their 1e days. Now he's nothing without his horse, which makes it pretty hard for him to pull his weight on a dungeon-crawl. Or on a high-seas adventure. Or a city-based adventure. Or....
Gladiator--A warrior whose abilities are largely dependent on having an audience around whenever he's fighting. Yeah, that's feasible. Good concept, poor execution.
Tribal Protector--A class much more fitting for the barbarian & ranger's book. It doesn't work for PC's because their abilities are restricted to fighting in a specific terrain against a specifc type of foe.
WarMaster--If they're not going to present rules for mass combat, then they've got no business creating classes that are only suited for mass combat. Common sense, really. But even when they do give us mass combat rules, do we still need characters that have towers, keeps, and castles listed as their special abilities? Karl Wagner's Kane was a "warmaster" if ever there was one, and that had nothing to do with his real estate portfolio.
The Ghostwalker--Despite the great appeal that it has to many players, I daresay that it is also too limited to be a viable PC class in a campaign--sorry, folks, a character whose specialty is getting beaten to within an inch of his life just to give some villain his come-uppance at a future point in time does have rather finite longevity in terms of playability. Once again someone has forgotten that not every prestige class has to be stretched-out for 10 levels.
That still leaves some 12 classes that could be considered at least moderately PC-friendly. Some are fine examples of the flexibility that 3 offers.
Duelist--Players have long desired a warrior class that focused on speed, agility, and weapon skill, instead of every effective fighter being a homogenous 18-Strength, plate-armor-clad lummox, and the duelist is a good idea for an alternative. "Good" but not "Perfect"; the duelist doesn't wear any armor at all, and that means that her AC will be unacceptably low. She should have been allowed some light armor, or offered better AC bonuses than "Canny Defense" is likely to provide ("Elaborate Parry" should have kicked in earlier than 7th-level).
Lasher-- Creating prestige classes that focus on exotic weapons is a smart move, and in a fighter sourcebook it would have been a major oversight not to nclude at least one. The lasher is a quality class; abilities that are both useful and colorful make for an intriguing character.
Master of Chains--makes use of one of my favorite exotic weapons, which just means I'm in for a bigger disappointment than usual. I don't mind the half-dozen prerequisite feats, but for that kind of entry fee there are too many weak and downright lame abilities sandwiched in there, like "Chain Fighting", "Chain Bind", & "Swinging Attack". Let's not even get into that 10th-level ability to animate chains. Ridiculous.
Fortunately, there are also a few warrior prestige classes that don't deviate from the tried-and-true path of wearing heavy-duty armor and swinging a heavy-duty weapon. Simple, straightforward, and possessing special abilities that aren't confined to a single battle scenario:
Master Samurai--A nice package that's puissant without being over-the-top...and I can actually imagine Samurai Jack having levels in this class. Cool.
Fist of Hextor--Your traditional massively-muscled brute, with solid abilities that allow a lawfully-alligned (and thus barbarian-ineligible) fighter to capitalize on the "limited-usage-means-big-bonuses" mentality I mentioned back in the prelude. Unfotunately, the initiation process pretty much restricts this career path to evil characters, making it another NPC-oriented class. Howabout a nice, big, friendly, chaotic good "Bicep of Kord" next time around?
Ravager--Another big meanie. Check this out: the only way to become a ravager is to track down a band of ravagers and fightl one of them to the death. Now, bearing this method of indoctrination in mind, how did the ranks of the ravagers ever grow beyond one lone, bloodthirsty marauder?
Order of the Bow Initiate--I don't get how the "Ranged Sneak Attack" is rationalized, but I can't knock this class for effectiveness. Not bad.
Weaponmaster--Ah, imagine that! A prestige class that is actually prestigious. Its prerequesites make it difficult for characters to qualify, but those who do qualify are rewarded with potent abilities. In other words, this is what a fighter prestige class should strive to be. Y'know, after reading through this class, I watched Ninja Scroll for about the 746th time, I noticed that the weaponmaster class fits Jubei perfectly. Kudos on this one.
This section is an improvement over Chapter 1, but with the exception of the weaponmaster, I don't see a prestige class for a character who isn't willing to train with an off-the-wall weapon or endenture himself to a higher power. While many of those outre classes sound like fun to play, S&F still didn't really offer any career options for that dwarf with the waraxe or the human with the bastard sword.
CHAPTER 3
The obligatory fluff section. Starts out by telling you stuff you never knew about...like how half-orcs make good melee guys cause they're big n' strong, elves' got good dexterity so that makes'em good arrow-shooters, humans are real, real flexible and real good at anything they wanna be good at, and other revelations of similar enormity. Then we get some more ugly white space filled with lots of pretty black typings about stuff like organizations of naughty fighters and organizations of nice fighters. Knightly orders, ruthless mercenaries, murderous bands of maurauders--you know, stuff that you've already thought of. Stuff everybody's already thought of.
CHAPTER 4: THE GAME WITHIN THE GAME
I took this chapter's title to mean that it would offer a thought-provoking discussing about applying game mechanics to the fighter (and monk) in order to maximize their potential. Rather, it starts out by offering an insulting, patronizing assessment of the obvious that wouldn't prove insightful to even the greenest of players. The chapter begins with the section "Be All You Can Be", which tells you what skills and ability scores are important to your character in case you're too much of a knucklehead to figure that out for yourself. This is followed up by a particularly offensive section called "Advancement: Wise Choices", which slaps your intelligence squarely across the face with the following advice:
If you want to take a prestige class, go ahead and start meeting the prerequisites, because you won't be able to meet the prerequisites, you can't take the prestige class. Some prestige classes have feats as prerequisites, so if you have all of the feats you need to meet the prerequisites for a prestige class except for one, you should consider taking that feat as your next feat choice, so that you can then qualify for that prestige class. Sometimes a feat will have other feats as a prerequisite. If you want to take a feat that is a prerequisite for a prestige class, but you don't have the feat that is a prerequisite for that feat, then you should first take the prerequisite feat, then you may take that feat that you need for the prestige class prerequisite.
(I'm only paraphrasing there; in the book, they actually go into detail and give you examples to facilitate your understanding of these extremely challenging concepts)
More gems of wisdom spill forth from the section "How to Fight Nearly Everything and Survive", which will enlighten you as to the best tactics for fighting different types of opponents. Apparently--at least according to this section--when you are faced with an opponent with a long reach, ranged weapons are useful (from a distance, mind you!). Who'd've thunk it? Not only that, but this section would further have us believe that ranged weapons can also be helpful against flying opponents as well! I knew my fighter was carrying around that darn bow on his back for some reason!
This portion wraps up with some excellent advice on how to deal with unbeatable foes: DON'T FIGHT THEM, STUPID! Then, to really drive home the point, there's this loooong scenario about hunting a green dragon in the forest and these 2 hill giants show up and the entire thought process you should go through about what you should do next. I wish I could muster up the energy to make fun of it, but it's just too painfully condescending to dwell on.
Let's move on to the remainging sections of this chapter, because they actually possess redeeming features.
"Tactics" offers advice on how to position your character on the battle map to maximum advantage. Topics covered include the Cleave feat, the benefits of reach, fighting around corners, and flanking. These are all issues that are introduced by D&D 3e, which at the time of S&F's publication was still fairly new. Even today many players would benefit from perusing this section.
"Doing the Math" provides data on how many times a character can hit against a certain armor class as well as how much damage he should expect to inflict per hit.
"Monstrous Fighters" has a lot of helpful info that is all too easy to overlook, such as a table for Weapon Damage by Size and a couple of nasty feats suited for monsters with fighter levels.
"Combat Examples" shows you how it all comes together with 2 battle scenarios, one involving mounted combat and the other a mano-a-mano melee.
CHAPTER 5: TOOLS OF THE TRADE
Should you elect to purchase Sword & Fist, make sure you buy an exacto knife as well. As soon as you get home, open the book to page 70 and begin removing pages until you've successfully excised the entire section on exotic weapons. Seriously, I'm not kidding. Slice that book up.
Those pages are just of no use to you, you see, because the table is riddled with totally unreliable numbers and the weapon descripitions are rife with inaccurate entries. No, my friend, a Fullblade does not inflict an absurd 1d12 points of damage. It actually does something like 2d8, but before you start licking your chops too much, don't bother allocating a feat for it; despite the weapon's description, a Medium-sized creature cannot wield it at all. And sorry to get your hopes up, I'm afraid a Bladed Gauntlet doesn't have a groovy 17-20 threat range after all; it's a blase' 19-20. Please, heed my warning and remove the offending pages lest they drive you mad as they have many a player before you.
The rest of the book is filled with maps of arenas and temples and, oh, all sorts of interesting places where a fighter and monk might go. Why are all these maps back here you might wonder? Well, because the back of all the other sourcebooks will be filled with lots of spiffy new spells. As we all know, monks and fighters don't have any spells--which is ultimately why they were crammed together into one sourcebook I suppose--so they have to put something here. They can't just NOT insert the extra pages and give you a cost break for the difference. They can't just spend those pages listing more feats in the place of spells. So, the clever dickens at WotC just decided to insert maps. When your buddies go whipping out some new spell from Defenders of the Faith or Tome and Blood, you just show them one of your neat maps! I personally recommend the Elven Canopy Tower. They'll be sooo jealous...
THE BOTTOM LINE
I sure hope they get it right the next time around. And god I hope there is a next time around for a fighter sourcebook (monks need not apply for entry!).
