Celebrim
Legend
Yes, I know.
The warblade as written is both a magical class and a class with a strong eastern martial theme. Treating it as anything else requires significantly twisting and willful blindness, because that is the most natural interpretation. It's not just things like "Iron Heart Surge", which would have to be among the least of my complaints (you can take similar things as a combat feat in my own game, heck fighters can get SR in my game) since resisting magic is inherently a quality of being mundane - see for example Niven's 'The Magic Goes Away' or L. Spague De Camp's 'The Tritonian Ring'. It's the entire notion and descriptions of combat as being about stances and manuevers that is rooted in eastern rather than western martial arts.
And by the way, I actually have the Niven, the De Camp, and the Vance on my bookshelf at home. Don't tell me how you are an expert on Gygax's source material.
That is completely disingenious. D&D so heavily borrowed from the LotR that TSR was forced to defend against a lawsuit from the Tolkien estate, which they won - not by arguing that they hadn't blatantly ripped off Tolkien - but by arguing that their blatant rip off was fair usage under the doctrine permitting revolutionary transformative works. In other words, they got away with it only because the very idea of an RPG was original - not because halflings, ents, orcs, rangers, and the like weren't derived from Tolkien.
Also disingenious on several counts. First, he wasn't the only contributer and secondly his company was involved in a legal suit.
Which rather argues against what you say fantasy is about.
Excuse me, but there is nothing wrong with my vision. The problem with trying to balance against something like the 3.X wizard or cleric is that those classes are at high levels unbalanced, not merely in the sense that they are better than the fighter but in that they have too many narrative altering 'easy' buttons. The classes themselves contribute to narrative let downs, to narrative simplicity, and to the sort of stuff that in fantasy authors just don't normally get away with. I mean there is a reason that the protagonists tend to be sword swingers and not magicians with the power of plot. The problem isn't my lack of vision. The problem is that I'm not motivated by an envy based vision that says, "Well, if Clerics get all the good stuff then I demand it too." The real problem is that at some point you have classes that violate the fundamental rule of RPG's - "You can't be good at everything."
But for me, the power level of the Warblade isn't even the fundamental issue. The problem with the Warblade is that has no real place in my game. I understand what its trying to achieve, but I don't have much truck with how it achieves it. The fact of the matter is that most fantasy source material doesn't suggest 'Warblade'. Maybe if you were doing a 'Wheel of Time' type game I could see it, because WoT has both the eastern influences and the protagonists with only slightly less narrative authority than God thing going on.
So is D&D a focused game or not? If D&D is not a focused game, then you have no basis for saying D&D is this one thing. And if D&D can be described as a single thing, then it is a focused game and in fact does it very well. The fact is that D&D may or may not be medieval knights, may or may not have early modern armor and weapons, may or may not have a Greek style Pantheon, may or may not have pastiche of modern morality, and may or may not have squid headed alien invaders from the future. Personally, I consider that my dominent religion is much closer to Hinduism than Greek, and that only is reinforced by the wooly mammoths being used as beasts of burden on streets teaming with brightly colored silk wearers. If the game ever seems a European pastiche, it's simply because I know that better, but the assumptions of the game are such that really the game world can't and doesn't bear a direct resemblence to anything in the real world. The real world doesn't have nations ruled for centuries by vampires, immortal god kings, nations ruled by the ghosts of dead ancestors, nations ruled by talking swords where the mortal lord is merely the swords subject, nations ruled by alchemists drinking continually from potions of youth, nations ruled by a circle of dead wizards, and so forth. Nor were their in Europe heriditary Queendoms or nations that chose their next monarch from among the vagrant beggars. Certainly there was not on the Earth a many thousand year written history such that the inhabitants knew that they were simply in the world's fourth dark age awaiting the certainty of another truly globe spanning empire.
Pendragon may be best for King Arthur and his knights, but what I have is best for what I want. I don't drop Tome of Battle out of ignorance, stupidity, or a failure of self-reflection. If you think that the game is a "sea of hot turd" pockets without it, that's your problem and you should really really stop projecting your problems on to everyone else. I'm frankly tired of your shtick. Why does every single thread end up needing to become about how people who don't embrace ToB are having 'badwrongfun'?
