OSSR: Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords
Wrapup
That's a wrap! A sword handle wrap. Get it?
AncientH
I guess we should start this off by acknowledging that whatever new and solid ideas that the writers of
Tome of Battle brought to the book, they also brought themselves. A lot of the things that are
good about the idea and execution of maneuvers is about how it differs from the rest of D&D, and a lot of the things that are
bad about the book are being just like other D&D books - especially the monstrous bloat of fluff on just about fucking everything, but especially egregious for the classes, magic items, and monsters.
...and none of that is very surprising. Late 3.5 D&D had arrived at that shovelware plateau where the books almost wrote themselves, and all you had to fill in was the requisite slots of feats, classes, magic items, etc. - and the info density had gotten so low that they were filling more pages with less ideas. So a fair chunk of the criticism of the book isn't really the new system it was presenting, but just the shitty paint-by-numbers way they approached it. This was a novel system, and honestly they could have done a lot more to embrace that instead of trying to present it as yet-another-player's-option book.
Even the missed opportunities are pretty par for the course. By the time TOB came out, there were multiple potential subsystems they could have tried to hook into it - psionics, incarnum, spellcasting, all the
Tome of Magic alternatives, warlocks - and that's not counting any of the
Races books, or setting material from Forgotten Realms or Eberron. And while there's a little of that in here scattered about, for the most part TOB barely touches on or interacts with any of it...which is a missed opportunity, but a pretty understandable one, because while this wasn't quite a lame duck product, it was released in 2006 and the next edition was out in 2008.
The thing is, D&D is one of those games without a single consistent setting or metaplot, so the release schedule is usually a bizarre and ill-managed. White Wolf might have shot its dick off with ending the World of Darkness, but there was at least
an ending, a sort of plan to wrap up the current slate of game lines and start on the
New World of Darkness. D&D 3.x never had anything like that, its final product rolled off the line with all the sense that it would keep on publishing forever...pretty much like AD&D did.
And what D&D needed was less a 4th edition than a 3.75 edition. Because a lot of the basic
ideas in a lot of their later products are sound, but poorly implemented. Those are kinks that could have been worked out by making them more part of the core gameplay - imagine a Fighter who was called a Fighter, but in addition to Bonus Feats also got to pick maneuvers like a Swordsage. Imagine if instead of straight Wizards and Sorcerers, you had Warlocks and Beguilers. I think there was a way forward where warriors were a lot less linear and wizards a lot less quadratic...but we never actually got there. Which is sad.
Frank
Tome of Battle exists as a proof of concept more than it does an actually functional game expansion. Fairly crucial questions as to how the ever living fuck any of this shit is supposed to work are left unanswered. People have been playing with this book for a dozen years, but
extremely important holes have to be filled in with mind caulk to make that happen. For fuck's sake, the most effective of these classes is the Crusader, and the Crusader reaches a “depends on the meaning of is” argument on the third turn of every battle starting at level 1!
Now the big question is whether the Tome of Battle is proof of concept that Orcus “could have worked” and the answer of course is that it does not. There are some pretty serious hurdles in the way of Tome of Battle working as it was written, and only some of that can be laid at the feet of Mike Mearls and Rich Baker being very bad at their jobs.
The elephant in the room of course is the question of “What happens when the combat music isn't playing?” Obviously that was a big problem for Orcus and it was still a big problem in Flywheel and it's historical reality that when 4th edition actually landed there wasn't any acceptable answers to that questions. But it's perhaps equally important that the stuff Tome of Battle took from Orcus was
incomplete, and that fleshing it out was going to take a lot more text. The model of needing special maneuvers to use two weapon fighting would require enough relevant maneuvers that a character could fill out their maneuver list and actually fight with two weapons. And what about archery? Or spear fighting? Or mounted combat? Or any other combat style that isn't running over and smacking your opponent with sword Final Fantasy style? When you think of the explosion of maneuvers that would have been necessary to cover a reasonable number of fighting styles in this system... well.... it's a lot.
This is another place where we look at 4th edition and see how it ended up failing in the particular way that it did. A 4th edition “build” takes up an
enormous amount of text space. Making enough “power cards” so that you can play a crossbow sniper or sneaky guy with a morningstar or small warrior with a long spear or
anything else not covered in the extremely narrow power selection in the 4e PHB fills up like 12 actual pages. Obviously, it would be trivial to create a higher information density than that, but realistically was Orcus ever going to be streamlined into something that could possibly fit a decent number of character concepts into a Player's Handbook? I'm not sure. But Tome of Battle
isn't proof of concept that they could do that, the information density in Tome of Battle floats on water.
AncientH
I don't know if there was a demand for this book. But the basic idea was definitely there that there were deficiencies in the game that the book was supposed to address. And they had been there for some time, because there had been several previous efforts to give Fighter-types
things that it was presumed they would want: combat tricks.
The thing is, D&D has always been resistant to let Fighters just throw some fire on their swords.
I had to re-write this paragraph several time, talking about the simulationist-vs-fantasy divide at the core of the game and how it's still reflected in games like Shadowrun, but let's focus on
Tome of Battle.
I fully believe that the people writing this were not trying to be
too revolutionary. That they were building a system they thought had the
minimum number of moving parts. Because they didn't want you to spend Psi points or expend your focus when using a maneuver; they didn't want that level of
choice. There are no X variables for damage in the maneuvers, everything is static, fixed.
This is the simple version. And in that it follows the basic philosophy of
Tome of Magic and Warlock and a lot of other ideas the presaged 4th edition and all that was wrong with it:
They were scared of their own creation.
D&D3 grew too big and complex too fast for the designers. They didn't want a GURPS-style build-your-own-class system, they wanted something that a couple of twelve-year-olds could pick up and play out of the box, with spell cards and maneuver cards sold separately. So
Tome of Battle is really a very very dry run for what they really wanted to design:
They don't want an RPG, they want a tabletop game.
Frank
It's kind of amazing how under
developed this book is. The fact that really basic questions about ability interaction and timing and basic character progression go unanswered is something that to a first approximation can be laid at the foot of the quality of technical writing (which is very low). But then you get to stuff like using two different game terms for the same concept while
simultaneously using the same word for different concepts and that really seems like a development issue.
And that's not even an exaggeration! A Swordsage has “readied” maneuvers, which refers to maneuvers
in her hand. A Crusader also has a hand and also has “readied” maneuvers, but
her readied maneuvers are
in her deck and the maneuvers
in her hand are called “granted” maneuvers. I can see various ways you could get there, like probably the Swashbuckler originally had some kind of deck and hand mechanics and they ended up shaving it down until they just had a hand and a used pile, but if that's what you're going to do you need to fucking adjust your nomenclature accordingly. It's totally unacceptable for different characters to use different words for their hand while also using the word other characters are using for their hand to mean something else entirely. That's just obviously unacceptable.
The Development lead on this project was Mike Mearls, and the amount of phoning it in done by the development team is very difficult to even wrap your mind around. If anyone was in any position of authority who actually knew or cared about Dungeons & Dragons and had paid any attention to this book, the entire Development team would have been fired on the spot. But of course what actually happened was that Jesse Decker, Stephen Schubert, Andy Collins, and of course Mike Mearls himself kept being allowed to develop 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons. With the predictable total failure of vision and nuts-and-bolts design and development that historically turned out to be.
AncientH
Is it wrong to be mad at people for being bad at jobs they love? Because people basically grew up with D&D3. It was the D&D for an entire generation. It wasn't their parent's D&D - AD&D 2nd edition was a dinosaur and you'd be hard-pressed not to know it - and it was a huge step forward in game design, warts and all.
But they kept shitting on it. And it's hard to say if they were even having fun while doing that.
Warhammer comes to mind as a comparable product: the product quality skyrocketed with the invention of word processing software, photoshop, and cheap Chinese printing. But the powers that be still manage to shit the bed in the quest for more money.
Frank
Tome of Battle was shovelware intended to make use of some design documents that had already been scrapped for a book whose only purpose was to fill a hole in the release schedule for an edition whose death warrant had already been signed. That it's full of word salad designed to meet page count criteria and procedurally generated content that uses text but doesn't increase play space is sadly to be expected. Wizards of the Coast had decided for various book distribution reasons that they wanted 150+ page hardcover books rather than the smaller softcover <100 page books like Sword and Fist. Getting all the real
content into a Sword and Fist size book would have been trivial, and you can really tell how
little effort was spent in pumping it all up to a 158 page hardcover shelfbreaker.
The true test of viability of this design direction would have been what it looked like once someone had attempted to use any kind of economy of language
at all. Like, obviously you don't need nearly
seven fucking pages to explain
one of these fucking classes. You just
obviously don't need that. But the very incompleteness of this book still weighs heavily on the project.
Let's be honest: a Martial Adept doesn't get
enough maneuvers to make interesting decisions most of the time. The action economy is such that they generally arrange to have one strike to use per turn for the combat and they don't have any “left over” for weird shit like disarming maneuvers or covering retreats. Having Martial Adepts who had some fucking variety in their actions (as is obviously the
intent of having Paladins shuffle their decks in the first place) would require larger hands attached to larger decks. But if Paladins and Fighters have bigger decks and hands, they also need bigger card collections, which in turn means more maneuvers to choose from. You can get a lot of redundancy out of there by getting rid of the stupid Nine Swords framing and just letting people pick level appropriate powers, but you're still going to need somewhere between double and triple the maneuvers the book actually contains. Something like 12 maneuvers per class per level – which works out to nearly four hundred of the fuckers just for those three classes.
Now you could cut these down enormously. If a maneuver was like
sixty words instead of over one hundred and fifty, you could still get it down to like thirty pages or less. For example, here is a maneuver that I literally picked at random (note that I'm here to discuss information density and not the fact that this maneuver is insultingly terribad for the level you get it):
SUPREME BLADE PARRY Iron Heart (Stance)
Level: Warblade 8 Prerequisite: Three Iron Heart maneuvers Initiation Action: 1 swift action Range: Personal Target: You Duration: Stance
You drop into a relaxed pose, allowing your defenses to fl ow naturally and easily. Your blade lashes out to absorb or deflect each attack you face, blunting the force of your enemies’ blows.
As a student of the Iron Heart discipline, you learn that a simple flick of the wrist or turn of the blade can transform a deadly strike into a wild miss. In battle, you enter a steady rhythm that makes you frustratingly difficult to fight. You disrupt each attack with a perfectly timed counter, leaving your foes’ strikes weak and ineffectual. While you are in this stance, you gain damage reduction 5/— against any opponent that does not catch you flat-footed. To gain this benefit, you must be proficient with the weapon you carry. You gain this benefit while unarmed only if you have the Improved Unarmed Strike feat.
That's 168 words to say this:
Supreme Blade Parry
Level 8 Fighter Stance
While in this stance, you have DR 5/- while you threaten at least one square.
And that's 22 words. I don't think you
necessarily have to cut things down that severely, although you possibly could. Two or three times that length is a completely reasonable target. And if that was your target, you could get a class worth of maneuvers into about 10 pages. Is that enough? It depends.
2 pages for the character class and 10 pages for their associated power cards is suspiciously similar to the 12 pages dedicated to a 4th edition class and powers. If your classes are as narrowly focused and defined as 4th edition classes you've just made the 4th edition PHB and failed at life. But if we're talking about 60 word powers instead of bloated multi-paragraph pieces of word salad that's 125 powers per class instead of 83 (the number of powers Rogues get in the 4e PHB, including the Paragon Paths), we have room for a PHB that delivers a decent number of playable characters.
Or at least, it
potentially could, provided that your maneuvers and powers are things of general utility and not “the basic 4th level sword strike, but usable when fighting with 2 daggers.” Even taking control over our destiny and trimming the fact and focusing maneuvers on things of general interest and giving players access to enough maneuvers that they have meaningful choices to makes during character generation and during play, we're still just factually running quite close to the edge of falling over into being 4e and essentially unplayable garbage.
The maneuvers concept is just really
greedy. It takes up a lot of page space for the amount of action it provides. Even if you consciously use economy of language and avoid getting lost in the weeds of shit no one cares about, it's still hard to get everything into a reasonable space. If you had 13 classes at 12 pages for their descriptions and power lists, you'd use up 156 pages just on that, which is half the player's handbook. That's doable, but only barely. The 3.5 Player's Handbook has a spell list that goes on for 108 pages and class descriptions that go on for 36 pages – for 144 pages in total. And most people would agree that 3.5's spell descriptions are tedious and over long.
AncientH
At the start of this, I was talking about design philosophy when creating player abilities - and my own personal thoughts are, you as a designer want to give players abilities that
expand their play options. Throwing some fire on your sword is a cool combat trick. It works in ChronoTrigger or Secret of Mana or Final Fantasy, where it only comes up in combat and in otherwise inaccessible.
But most of D&D isn't about combat. I think we've hammered that home about six times now, but it bears repeating the one final time. Do these abilities actually expand character options very much? They give you some combat tricks, but they all pretty much boil down to different ways to hit people with your sword. And it could have been more than that.
Frank
According to the people actually making 4th edition while they were at least pretending to think that was a good idea, the order of operations was this:
- Baker pitches Book of Nine Swords
- Baker decides to have Book of Nine Swords be a book of “powers for Fighters.”
- Mearls and Baker decide to use the Paladin, Swashbuckler, and Fighter from Orcus as idea mines for Book of Nine Swords.
- Mearls and Baker convince the rest of the Orcus design team to scrap the entirety of Orcus and start over from scratch with Flywheel.
- Mearls and Baker finish Book of Nine Swords.
So the fact that a lot of the book seems half-assed or even perhaps quarter-assed and left languishing in some design or development in-between state is understandable. The leads on the project had tabled and passed a vote of no confidence in the project four months before it went to print.
But it's interesting to me that all the weird framing about an ancient elf city called Whiteraven that no one gives a shit about came
first. The book was greenlit on the basis that Baker really wanted to write fanfiction about ancient Elvish swords. The shit no one cares about was the
first part, and the part everyone cares about was filled in madlibs style after the authors stopped liking the project and just wanted it to die.
The things that catch fire in people's minds aren't the weird bullshit
flavor text that got the book greenlit, it's the basic mechanical structures they took from Gutschera that they ended up being so offended by that they redlit the entire project.
Which is really where we were at. The people who made 4th edition were so badly out of sync with what the public wanted that everything they thought was good was so bad that people didn't even read it, and the stuff they thought was irredeemably awful was just good enough that people were curious and wanted to know more.
Which answers more than a few questions about how 4th edition got to be so very very bad. The people making it
really were exactly that clueless about what worked, what didn't work, and what people wanted to see in a new edition. The reason that 4e looks like it was designed by Russian agents trying to systematically destroy the value of the Dungeons & Dragons brand is because the people on the design committee were so bad at their job that that might as well have been the case.
AncientH
Yes, you could make a
Tome of Battle heartbreaker. But why the fuck would you want to?
If there was a set of RPG commandments, some of them should include:
1) Combat shouldn't be boring.
2) All characters should be able to contribute to the success of the group.
...and that's basically what TOB is meant to accomplish, even if the designers didn't apparently fucking understand that. And it failed. It failed to even understand what it was about. There's no bandaid to fix it. TOB would need to be gutted and rebuilt from the ground up to be both functional and accomplish a tenth of its intended ability. Why not just build your own system at that point?
TOB isn't heartbreaker material
because there is no heart to break. Nobody had any investment in this book, not even the people writing it.
Frank
After the shock of Fighters getting nice (or at least,
less bad) things wore off, a majority of people warmed to the idea that this is where Dungeons and Dragons was going. And most people assumed that it was going to be the foundation of 4th edition. That is historically
not what happened, but you can see how things might have been better if it had.
I do say “
might have” because of course the maneuver cards concept is only just barely possible to chop down into a sufficiently digestible format to allow for this concept to fit into a Player's Handbook to cover a decent number of character classes.
Consider a 4e power:
Distracting Wound Distracting Wound Master Infiltrator Attack 11 You strike from the shadows, delivering a wound that distracts your foe and makes him drop his guard. Encounter ✦ Martial,Weapon Standard Action Melee or Ranged weapon Requirement: You must be wielding a crossbow, a light blade, or a sling. Target: One creature you have combat advantage against Attack: Dexterity vs. AC Hit: 2[W] + Dexterity modifier damage, and the target grants combat advantage to you and all your allies until the end of your next turn.
That's 83 words, which is
half as much word text as a Tome of Battle word salad. And it could clearly be shrunk further. Just taking out the restrictions that keep it from being used by a decent array of characters would shrink it considerably.
This
could have been the way forward. But only if the people making it registered that its fundamental problems and limitations even existed. The chucklefucks making 4e would have made a terrible game whether they jettisoned Orcus or not.
AncientH
Restrictions is the key word here. A lot of the problem with this whole book is restrictions. You can't use this discipline with that weapon. You can't do this and that. You can't do this
or that. You can do this, but only for 1 round, and if somebody attacks you, and if Lucky the Leprechaun kissed your pot of gold within the last fortnight. This whole book is about telling you "Yes, you
can throw some fire on your sword," and then proceed to make the process as difficult and shitty as possible.
Because Fighters can't have nice things. And it took them 158+ pages to tell you that.