Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 2725050" data-attributes="member: 8461">Power Gamer's 3.5 Warrior Strategy GuideThe Power Gamer’s 3.5 Warrior Strategy Guide is a book on how to make the strongest kind of combat character for your 3.5 Fantasy d20 game. As a note, this review was conducted based on the print version of the book, so PDF-specific information (such as if there’s a printer-friendly version or not) is not given. There is no interior artwork, save for the black-and-white diagrams given in the last chapter. The pages themselves are splotches with gray, as though they had been bled on, which gives a very nice but subtle effect.This book contains absolutely no new rules whatsoever. There are no new races, classes, skills, feats, items, etc. The totality of this book is devoted to using the materials in the Player’s Handbook to make a character that can effectively kill opponents in combat. Because of that, this book doesn’t focus on in-game rationale for why a character would choose what he does; the focus here is on telling the player how he can make the strongest kind of character.The book has an introduction, followed by seven chapters, closely paralleling the PHB. The introduction notes how this book will always be useful to you, because it only utilizes material from the PHB, and thus can’t be excluded by a DM. It also lays down the format for how the book treats building warriors. Because there are different types of combat, the book talks about building different warrior archetypes. These archetypes are archer, cavalry, guerrilla, light infantry, heavy infantry, and skirmisher. These are the kinds of characters the book teaches you how to build.Chapter One covers ability scores. It talks about which ability scores are best in general for a combat character, and what works best for each kind of archetype, using the elite array of ability scores (15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8).Chapter Two covers races, noting how the various races’ special abilities are either helpful or detrimental to a combat character, and breaks down how the races’ ability adjustments are good or bad for each archetype. Sidebars cover most of the subraces from the Monster Manual also. Finally, a section at the end talks about the advantages and disadvantages of monstrous PCs.Chapter Three covers classes. Instead of covering all eleven classes in the PHB, it only covers the five most martial classes: the fighter, barbarian, monk, paladin, and ranger. Each class is covered for what archetypes it best lends itself to, as well as how to best use its special abilities. The fighter is given a helpful chart (the first of the many charts in the book) showing the benefits of taking the fighter-only feats at higher levels (Weapon Focus, Greater Weapon Focus, Weapon Specialization, and Greater Weapon Specialization). A sidebar is provided for this and all the other tables in the book showing how they did the math, just in case you want to check it yourself, or work out some number-crunching of your own. Finally, a considerable section is given to multiclassing, and working out the best multiclass combos for your archetype.Chapter Four covers skills. The skills warriors should take are broken down into three broad categories: combat mobility, combat staging, and combat tactics. Various skills are discussed for each, breaking down why such skills are a good or bad choice, and how many ranks are optimal. Sidebars provide great insight on which skills should be avoided, since magic items can make them altogether useless. Finally, there’s a recap on how many ranks warriors should use for the various skills; maxing them out is not always the best decision.Chapter Five covers feats. Feats here are dealt with in trees; a feat tree being one feat that is needed to access the later feats, such as how you need Power Attack to take Cleave, Great Cleave, etc. After a short list of feats that should be avoided (which has some surprising choices, such as Improved Initiative). After this comes the breakdown of the various feat trees. This involves a lot of tables to back up the mechanics of exactly how much these feats will do for you at various levels, showing you how much more likely you are to hit and cause damage against various armor classes. Finally, it talks about what feat trees are good for what archetypes.Chapter Six covers equipment. Virtually all of this is dedicated to weapons. Each weapon is listed, along with their damage and critical information, their cost, their average damage inflicted (both not taking critical hits into account, and taking them into account, followed by miscellaneous information, and a table breaking down their damage potential at base attack bonus +1 through +20, versus armor class 10 through 20. Needless to say, the information here is absolutely invaluable. A short section (less than a page) then covers armor, before then giving you a page-long table of the various armors, cross-indexing their armor bonus against possible Dexterity bonuses (ranging from -1 to +6), also taking into account each of the different types of shields. It even lists the costs for each such combination. Great stuff here.Chapter Seven covers combat. This diverse chapter is probably the greatest one in the entire book (and that’s saying something). It first discusses qualifying the battlefield, qualifying your opponents, and then establishing an action plan. The first part involves figuring out the logistics of where you’re fighting, what to take into account, and how to make it work for you. The second part breaks down enemies into various categories (critters, fiends, terrors, toughs, etc.) and what you should and shouldn’t do against them. Finally, the last part discusses your action plans; that is, what you can actually do in combat. It covers basics like attacks of opportunity and movement, and then breaks down the special attack actions, such as charging, bull rushing, and more.It’s worth noting that, although the above paragraphs may make the book sound like a dry, boring breakdown of information, this book is anything but. The narrative style comes off as rather like a drill instructor (some of the bad feats are under the heading “Miscellaneous Suckness,”) and the entire book is quite amusing in that regard. Make no mistake, this book is as fun to read as it is useful. While many players and DM’s may encourage good role-playing, no one can really deny that combat is at the heart of the game, and this book will make sure that it’s a game that you win.</blockquote>

Verification