Kmart Kommando
First Post
That list is longer than the actual number of readied maneuvers available, but less than the total known. So I guess they left off the other 4 shadowhand maneuvers.gribble said:
Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords: Proto-Review
- Thread starter JoeGKushner
- Start date
Some Customer Service Questions and Answers regarding the warblade:
Q. Is it possible to ready multiple copies of the same maneuver, like you can with spells? If I am playing a 1st-level warblade, for instance, and I am allowed to ready 3 maneuvers, can I ready 3 copies of a single maneuver, or do I have to ready 3 separate maneuvers?
A. No, you can only ready each individual maneuver once!
Originally Posted by Iry
Customer (Iry) 08/29/2006 12:02 AM
My group has a great deal of confusion as to what is possible during the recovery action of the Warblade, a base class in the new Tome of Battle book recently released.
Our current interpretation is as follows:
The Warblade can recover maneuvers with two methods. A) He can use a swift action to begin recovery, then make a melee attack. Or, he can B) Use a swift action to begin recovery, then use a standard action to do nothing in a round.
We assume that A allows us to use either a Standard Attack, a Full Attack, Fight Defensively, or a Charge Attack or otherwise allows us to make any of the basic attack actions that involve a 'melee attack' and do not include any kind of Maneuver or Stance. We also assume that so long as you make that melee attack, you can use a Move Action or a 5' step at any appropriate point during your turn depending on the type of action you took as normal.
We assume that B allows us to use a Standard Action to 'Do Nothing' except some minor thematics. However, we believe we can still use our Move Action to move, use any skill or feat that takes a Move Action or opt to take a 5' step so long as none of the above involves a maneuver.
Originally Posted by CustServ
Response (Brandon) 08/29/2006 10:07 AM
Hello Iry,
You are correct in each of your assumptions save for the charging after the swift action for recovery. You wouldn't be able to charge as you wouldn't be immediately following the swift action with an attack, but a move as you character charged toward the enemy in order to strike him. But so long as the first thing you do after making the swift action is attacking, then you are fine!
In short, you can move then follow with a swift action and finally an attack, or give up your move and turn that attack into a full attack, fight defensively, disarm, and most other attack moves.
Good Luck and Game On!
We would appreciate your feedback on the service we are providing you. Please click here to fill out a short questionnaire.
Q. Is it possible to ready multiple copies of the same maneuver, like you can with spells? If I am playing a 1st-level warblade, for instance, and I am allowed to ready 3 maneuvers, can I ready 3 copies of a single maneuver, or do I have to ready 3 separate maneuvers?
A. No, you can only ready each individual maneuver once!
Originally Posted by Iry
Customer (Iry) 08/29/2006 12:02 AM
My group has a great deal of confusion as to what is possible during the recovery action of the Warblade, a base class in the new Tome of Battle book recently released.
Our current interpretation is as follows:
The Warblade can recover maneuvers with two methods. A) He can use a swift action to begin recovery, then make a melee attack. Or, he can B) Use a swift action to begin recovery, then use a standard action to do nothing in a round.
We assume that A allows us to use either a Standard Attack, a Full Attack, Fight Defensively, or a Charge Attack or otherwise allows us to make any of the basic attack actions that involve a 'melee attack' and do not include any kind of Maneuver or Stance. We also assume that so long as you make that melee attack, you can use a Move Action or a 5' step at any appropriate point during your turn depending on the type of action you took as normal.
We assume that B allows us to use a Standard Action to 'Do Nothing' except some minor thematics. However, we believe we can still use our Move Action to move, use any skill or feat that takes a Move Action or opt to take a 5' step so long as none of the above involves a maneuver.
Originally Posted by CustServ
Response (Brandon) 08/29/2006 10:07 AM
Hello Iry,
You are correct in each of your assumptions save for the charging after the swift action for recovery. You wouldn't be able to charge as you wouldn't be immediately following the swift action with an attack, but a move as you character charged toward the enemy in order to strike him. But so long as the first thing you do after making the swift action is attacking, then you are fine!
In short, you can move then follow with a swift action and finally an attack, or give up your move and turn that attack into a full attack, fight defensively, disarm, and most other attack moves.
Good Luck and Game On!
We would appreciate your feedback on the service we are providing you. Please click here to fill out a short questionnaire.
SteveC
Doing the best imitation of myself
Now that I have the book and have actually sat down and given the book a good read-over, not to mention taking it for a test drive by making some characters, here's my $.02. For what it's worth, this is for someone who's initial reaction was "this is interesting, if overpowered." I specifically disallowed these classes from the Shackled City game I'm running, for example. Everything in this post is just my opinion, so, in the words of Conan O'Brien: be cool, my babies!
Now that I have some experience with it, I'd say the book fits with my style of play and will likely help me make D&D more the kind of game I want. What does that mean? I am not overly excited by the number of magic items that make their way into a typical powered D&D campaign at high level, and much prefer characters to be able to rely on their class abilities as opposed to their items.
For spell casting characters, this is not too much of a problem: a high level spell caster has many ways to be perfectly viable with minimal magical items. For non casters, however, this gets to be a problem, as a high level fighter needs to either be supremely cheesed out with feats and prestige classes, have a huge amount of magic, or both in order to be competative. I think this is a somewhat contraversial opinion on ENWorld, but I've never really understood why: the games designers have talked about the fact that there's still a lot of "suck at low levels, rule at high levels" in terms of spell casters.
To my mind, the Tome of Battle does a good job of bringing fighting characters up to the level of the spell casters at the higher levels in a relatively simple and straightforward manner.
That last part is the key. One of my players routinely posts to and reads from the optimization boards on the WotC boards, so I know fighter-type characters can be effective at high levels, believe me. When you see people talking about the ability for a high level character in Tome of Battle to do 100 damage with an attack, you see people breaking into two camps: those who say "OMG! That's crazy!" ... and those who say "meh, amateurs!"
So for me, if I were running a campaign where I was keeping a lid on the number of magic items in the game yet I still wanted to run it at the power level of a standard D&D game, Tome of Battle would be just the thing.
In a traditional campaign with normal items, I think these characters might be more prone to abuse. It is really hard to say, though, because the characters I've written up were really not that earth-shattering. Part of my realization of how this works was actually creating and leveling up some sample characters.
The warblade is really limited in what maneuvers he can select due to the prerequisites system, which is something you see in leveling up characters but you don't necessarily see when you try and quickly create something at an artificially high level. If you want to learn one particular maneuver, it's easy to do a build, but this is an extremely limited character, and also one that will not level up terribly well.
For this reason alone, I'd strongly suggest not jumping to any conclusions about the classes until you actually have the book and use it to make up some characters (unless, of course, you hate the very idea of fighting styles and maneuvers for your game).
Maneuvers are a genuinely new mechanic for D&D. You can't talk about them as being balanced with feats or spells, because they're really something new: they're half way between a feat and a spell, and the method used to limit how often they can be used is something that will take a while to get used to. A maneuver is more powerful than a feat, but it's also limited in how often it can be used (in our warblade example, every other round as a best-case scenario) so it's generally less powerful than a spell. Almost all of the maneuvers affect a single target and can't have the effects of other feats such as meta magic applied to them. There's no "quicken maneuver" ability out there (at least not yet...) They also are one round effects that typically use a standard action to use (for strikes anyway). That is a huge limitation, because you can't use them with any feat that talks about the attack action, nor do they stack with effects like haste. With all that put together, I'd have to say that a maneuver is the new guy in town, and we will have to see how it balances out over time.
So overall:
Personally, I think the mechanic for balancing powers by the encounter is the right direction to head D&D towards. Tome of Battle is just the beginning of any movement in that direction, and it's something I'd like to see more of.
The only thing I'm going to be super critical of is the book's organization. I'll join with many others who say that it is just way too hard to actually set up a character under the maneuver system. A master table including the all-important pre-reqs would be a godsend.
So there you go.
--Steve
Now that I have some experience with it, I'd say the book fits with my style of play and will likely help me make D&D more the kind of game I want. What does that mean? I am not overly excited by the number of magic items that make their way into a typical powered D&D campaign at high level, and much prefer characters to be able to rely on their class abilities as opposed to their items.
For spell casting characters, this is not too much of a problem: a high level spell caster has many ways to be perfectly viable with minimal magical items. For non casters, however, this gets to be a problem, as a high level fighter needs to either be supremely cheesed out with feats and prestige classes, have a huge amount of magic, or both in order to be competative. I think this is a somewhat contraversial opinion on ENWorld, but I've never really understood why: the games designers have talked about the fact that there's still a lot of "suck at low levels, rule at high levels" in terms of spell casters.
To my mind, the Tome of Battle does a good job of bringing fighting characters up to the level of the spell casters at the higher levels in a relatively simple and straightforward manner.
That last part is the key. One of my players routinely posts to and reads from the optimization boards on the WotC boards, so I know fighter-type characters can be effective at high levels, believe me. When you see people talking about the ability for a high level character in Tome of Battle to do 100 damage with an attack, you see people breaking into two camps: those who say "OMG! That's crazy!" ... and those who say "meh, amateurs!"
So for me, if I were running a campaign where I was keeping a lid on the number of magic items in the game yet I still wanted to run it at the power level of a standard D&D game, Tome of Battle would be just the thing.
In a traditional campaign with normal items, I think these characters might be more prone to abuse. It is really hard to say, though, because the characters I've written up were really not that earth-shattering. Part of my realization of how this works was actually creating and leveling up some sample characters.
The warblade is really limited in what maneuvers he can select due to the prerequisites system, which is something you see in leveling up characters but you don't necessarily see when you try and quickly create something at an artificially high level. If you want to learn one particular maneuver, it's easy to do a build, but this is an extremely limited character, and also one that will not level up terribly well.
For this reason alone, I'd strongly suggest not jumping to any conclusions about the classes until you actually have the book and use it to make up some characters (unless, of course, you hate the very idea of fighting styles and maneuvers for your game).
Maneuvers are a genuinely new mechanic for D&D. You can't talk about them as being balanced with feats or spells, because they're really something new: they're half way between a feat and a spell, and the method used to limit how often they can be used is something that will take a while to get used to. A maneuver is more powerful than a feat, but it's also limited in how often it can be used (in our warblade example, every other round as a best-case scenario) so it's generally less powerful than a spell. Almost all of the maneuvers affect a single target and can't have the effects of other feats such as meta magic applied to them. There's no "quicken maneuver" ability out there (at least not yet...) They also are one round effects that typically use a standard action to use (for strikes anyway). That is a huge limitation, because you can't use them with any feat that talks about the attack action, nor do they stack with effects like haste. With all that put together, I'd have to say that a maneuver is the new guy in town, and we will have to see how it balances out over time.
So overall:
Personally, I think the mechanic for balancing powers by the encounter is the right direction to head D&D towards. Tome of Battle is just the beginning of any movement in that direction, and it's something I'd like to see more of.
The only thing I'm going to be super critical of is the book's organization. I'll join with many others who say that it is just way too hard to actually set up a character under the maneuver system. A master table including the all-important pre-reqs would be a godsend.
So there you go.
--Steve
Plane Sailing
Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!
I've noticed people doing comparisons against fighters, barbarians and others, but I've not seen anyone make comparisons with Psychic Warriors, and there might be some mileage in that.
Not because of the psionic powers that the psywar gets, although they are pretty good they are not infinitely reusable during the day.
I was thinking of psionic feats - some of which you can use as long as you maintain your psionic focus, and others which require you to expend your psionic focus (e.g. psionic weapon, greater psionic weapon, deep impact). Regaining psionic focus is a full round action which provokes AoO, there is a feat which allows it as a move action. It does require a DC20 concentration check, so it is by no means a sure thing.
Psywars get 3/4 BAB, d8 hit dice, 2 skill points per level and a small number of powers that can be used a few times per day, some combat and some utility.
A casual glance at the two suggests to me that the warblade is substantially better off than the psywar in terms of damage causing ability, speed of recovery and risk of recovery of special abilities and so forth, but I wonder whether someone who actually has experience with ToB and XPH might be interested in doing a comparison?
Cheers
Not because of the psionic powers that the psywar gets, although they are pretty good they are not infinitely reusable during the day.
I was thinking of psionic feats - some of which you can use as long as you maintain your psionic focus, and others which require you to expend your psionic focus (e.g. psionic weapon, greater psionic weapon, deep impact). Regaining psionic focus is a full round action which provokes AoO, there is a feat which allows it as a move action. It does require a DC20 concentration check, so it is by no means a sure thing.
Psywars get 3/4 BAB, d8 hit dice, 2 skill points per level and a small number of powers that can be used a few times per day, some combat and some utility.
A casual glance at the two suggests to me that the warblade is substantially better off than the psywar in terms of damage causing ability, speed of recovery and risk of recovery of special abilities and so forth, but I wonder whether someone who actually has experience with ToB and XPH might be interested in doing a comparison?
Cheers
gribble said:Yay! My interpretation a couple of pages back (including that charge wasn't a legal option, as it wasn't *immediately* following the swift action with an attack) has been vindicated (or at least supported by another quasi-official source).
Can't you take a free action at any time during your turn? (Swift actions use the same limits as free actions, with the added limit of only one per turn.)
So, couldn't you declare a charge, perform the movement portion of the charge, then take the swift action to recover maneuvers, then make the attack at the end of the charge?
gribble
Explorer
boolean said:
Not by the RAW. There is no "start a charge" free action. A charge is an atomic full round action which consists of a move followed by an attack, and seeing as actions are atomic (you can't break them up by interspersing other actions between parts of an action) this isn't legal. Sensible? Not really, but it still can't be done.
Kmart Kommando
First Post
actually, free and swift actions can be taken at any point in your turn.
SRD:
You can charge someone and cast a quickened true strike during the charge, which is also a swift action.
SRD:
You can charge someone and cast a quickened true strike during the charge, which is also a swift action.
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