OSSR: Tome of Battle
Chapter Three: Blade Magic
Our music today will be
Tiger Style by Wu Tang Clan. NSFW, obviously.
AncientH
For all the card-shuffling mechanics and feat nonsense which determine how the new subsystem interacts with the existing systems of D&D,
Tome of Battle was going to live and die on the
spells maneuvers, including whether or not they were any good and whether or not you got access to them. D&D3 had already successfully shown with the Sorcerer and the Psion that being able to access a specific subset of powers on demand rather than a more generic hodge-podge of powers they had to prepare in advance was a viable concept, so that part of the heavy lifting was already done.
They just had to be cool and useful. This might be chapter 3, but this is the hook.
Frank
Before we can get to the maneuvers, this book explains how they work some more with a 10 page chapter. Now you may be wondering how that is fucking
possible considering that the description of how you decide what maneuvers you have access to and when you can use them again was
two chapters ago. The answer to that is that there's a lot of prerequisites and ranting about the different schools of sword not-magic.
Every maneuver has prerequisites. You have to be high enough level to use it, which is referenced but not defined back in the character classes. Most higher level maneuvers have a prerequisite number of other maneuvers from the same school you have to have before you can take them. Note: after the first couple of levels a
majority of the maneuvers you know will be “up trades” where you exchange a maneuver of a lower level for one that's level appropriate to you now; and while it is
crucially important whether the maneuver being exchanged counts as one of your “X maneuvers of Y School” when upgrading, the book doesn't seem to bother explaining whether it does or not. A lot of words are expended on some very simple concepts, but actual questions you have when actually trying to make these characters are generally ignored. It's not “like” they never bothered trying to make these characters, it is
literally exactly that they never bothered trying to make these characters. Schools of maneuvers have an associated skill, which probably was supposed to be important at some point, but it really isn't.
The question on how uptrading works isn't a minor thing. Let's consider an example 6th level Warblade. They know
six maneuvers, and before turning sixth level, they have one first level, three second level, and two third level maneuvers. They can then trade one of the first or second level maneuvers for one third level maneuver if they want. They probably do want to do that. But there's the thing: there are
five martial schools that Warblades have access to, and if you wanted either of the White Raven maneuvers (which you do), you need to have the prerequisite of having one White Raven maneuver. So the question of whether you need to meet the prereqs during the trade rather than just before and after is a
really big deal.
Aside from the senselessly baroque means of determining whether you're allowed to take a particular maneuver, and the repeated attempts to get me to give a flying rat's ass whether a particular strike that does bonus damage is shadow style or tiger style, there's very little meat here.
AncientH
The "uptrading" thing is both an answer to the issue with Psions, Sorcerers, etc. where picking your powers at lower levels may not give you the abilities you need at a higher level; this was also something sort-of addressed in
Tome of Magic where your lower-level abilities were supposed to upgrade as you leveled up. All three are expressions of chasing the quadratic dragon, trying to keep the character's abilities viable as they increased in level.
The prerequisites are probably the most obvious difference between maneuvers and spells. You don't need X Illusion spells to take
shadow magic as a Sorcerer, for example, and this really feels like a bit of an artificial limitation to get players to devote most of their maneuvers to one discipline or another...which they could have done a lot more easily if they'd just had Martial Adepts which were the equivalent of specialist wizards, with forbidden schools and bonuses.
I feel at this point I should talk about different ways D&D3 tried to implement martial arts previously, like the styles in
Oriental Adventures, but I'll be honest they really don't have any comparison to this as far as I'm aware.
Frank
This books uses a lot of text to tell us that things that aren't spells are not affected by people's spell resistance. Also that they aren't affected by arcane spell failure and that the “casting” can't be interrupted. Things that you wouldn't think would have to be said at all, and indeed
don't.
Martial Powers, which despite the fact that that is 4th edition terminology is what this book explicitly calls them at some points, are conceptually equivalent to Wizard spells
only in the level and power structure. They are not actually
spells in any other sense. It's an action that has a level-based effect and its charge is expended when it is used, and that's about where the comparison to spells ends. There's no particular reason to think they'd be disruptible and
definitely no reason to have a separate heading to talk about each thing that actual magic spells do in D&D that these maneuvers don't do.
Basically it looks like the authors of the book got lost in the weeds of the
game balance justification for these things as being a source of real confusion for the process of using them. That sort of confusion is certainly possible, but really the very most any of this needed was a heading “Maneuvers aren't spells” that simply ran through a list of all the signature D&D spell properties that maneuvers didn't have.
AncientH
To be fair, they go through pretty much the exact same shit for psionic powers, incarnum soulmelds, and I think artificer...uh...<looks up> infusions, among various and sundry other options. Spells are the basis for so many effects in the game that players and designers both get fixated on them and how they work.
Sortof.
You still don't see a lot of discussion of cross-pollination. It's presumably kosher to combine any unarmed attack maneuver with a use of Stunning Fist, or for a Soulknife to use any maneuver that requires a sword with their mindblade, etc. It's a little more ambiguous about trying to do an unarmed attack with maneuver
and trying to deliver a touch spell. I also can't see anything where it says if you can initiate a maneuver while raging.
So kind of a "anything not forbidden is allowed?" Maybe?
Frank
The Book of Nine Swords uses 4th edition's timing system. Maneuvers generally speaking are Standard,
Minor Swift, or Interrupt actions. And people didn't especially notice because while this was all pretty much gibberish if you were reading this just after the Player's Handbook, D&D 3.5 had increasingly but gradually adopted an action system that was pretty much like this. Tome of Battle is pretty much the first book that is written from the ground up assumption that the action economy looks like this, and it works well.
I talk a lot of smack about 4th edition D&D, but the action economy is genuinely streamlined in a way that's mostly pretty OK. The only complaint I really have is that the limit on reactions to one per turn really limits design space since you can't have rider effects for bonus movement and shit. Also, there's a lot of weird incompatibilities between things that use Minor Actions that trod on each other's toes in dumb ways. In this instance, every reaction is a “counter” maneuver, and every swift action is a “boost” maneuver, and people being limited to one per round works well in this book.
What's interesting to me is that of the few genuinely good things you can say about 4th edition, many of them were locked in before people even
started to work on the draft that became the released version of 4e. Tome of Battle was based entirely on Orcus, and clearly uses the Move/Minor/Standard paradigm. But what's even more interesting is the fact that while this system worked pretty OK in 4e, it worked
considerably better in Tome of Battle. And that's precisely
because the whole
Minor Swift Action was an afterthought that didn't appear in the basic rules. It meant that the cost of using a Boost was
exactly and
exclusively that you used up a card in your hand, it didn't have an additional variable cost of freezing you out of using one of your other Swift Action options, because you
didn't fucking have any. On the flip side, in 4th edition they gave out various Minor Action options all over the place, so powers that used Swift Actions were sometimes freezing you out of doing important shit. But you know, sometimes they weren't.
The big issue is one of Boosts. A Boost takes a
Minor swift action, which in 3.5 you probably won't be using for anything else because the action type didn't exist when the core rules were written. A Boost that does
anything at all is simply a raw powerup for what you could be doing that turn. However, every turn you use a Boost (or a Counter for that matter) is a turn where you're likely to be using 2 maneuvers instead of 1. That means that for Sword Sages and Warblades, the
cost of Boosts and Counters is that it is less rounds of combat before you run out of cards in your hand and have to spend a round refilling your hard. Crusaders
never run out of cards, so the only cost to having Boosts and Counters in their deck is that if they draw too many of them they don't have a Strike to use. The Crusader thus just always wants to have enough Boosts and Counters in the mix that it's not possible for them to fail to draw a Strike. That's a somewhat interesting matter of deck management, and the authors of this book don't talk about it. At all.
AncientH
In general, martial maneuvers and stances that create supernatural effects are transparent to magic or psionics. However, martial maneuvers rarely interact with spells or powers.
You need a couple other books to actually parse this.
Expanded Psionic Handbook wrote:Combining Psionic And Magical Effects
The default rule for the interaction of psionics and magic is simple: Powers interact with spells and spells interact with powers in the same way a spell or normal spell-like ability interacts with another spell or spell-like ability. This is known as psionics-magic transparency.
Psionics-Magic Transparency
Though not explicitly called out in the spell descriptions or magic item descriptions, spells, spell-like abilities, and magic items that could potentially affect psionics do affect psionics.
When the rule about psionics-magic transparency is in effect, it has the following ramifications.
Spell resistance is effective against powers, using the same mechanics. Likewise, power resistance is effective against spells, using the same mechanics as spell resistance. If a creature has one kind of resistance, it is assumed to have the other. (The effects have similar ends despite having been brought about by different means.)
All spells that dispel magic have equal effect against powers of the same level using the same mechanics, and vice versa.
The spell detect magic detects powers, their number, and their strength and location within 3 rounds (though a Psicraft check is necessary to identify the discipline of the psionic aura).
Dead magic areas are also dead psionics areas.
Which is probably a point where it's nice to say that we don't have to deal with "psionic maneuvers" or "incarnum maneuvers" or any of that shit.
Frank
In general, you get new maneuvers and stances by going up in level and having your level-based numbers of maneuvers and stances go up. Also, starting at level 3 you can and therefore generally do trade one of your lower level maneuvers for a higher level maneuver every level (normally this will be one of your lowest level maneuvers being traded for one of your highest level options, save for a few outlier maneuvers that are wildly better or worse than other options).
There's also an incoherent rant about designing new maneuvers at a merely ruinous cost in time and XP that further requires a skill check that in turn requires you to cheat up some skill bonuses to have a reasonable chance of success. Which then goes back to the DM to make something up basically. There isn't actually any real
guidelines as to what a maneuver should be capable of at any particular level. If you make a 3rd level strike, what can it do? What
should it be able to do? The authors don't know and don't care, how could I possibly answer that question?
AncientH
Every one of the 9 disciplines has one key skill and 4-6 weapons, mostly non-exotic. If they ever expanded this thing, I'd fully expect to see some race-specific disciplines, just to make sure Elves get nice things. There doesn't seem to be a lot of consistency or synergy between a lot of the weapons chosen vs. the skills chosen. Like, Setting Sun and Shadow Hand both include "unarmed strike" because they're ninja/monk styles, but the key skills are Sense Motive and Hide respectively.
Mostly, these are suggestions instead of anything being hard-coded. Some maneuvers might use the key skill, some abilities reference the weapons, but otherwise they don't play a huge role. Noticeably absent are a lot of favorite exotic weapons and unusual weapons (shields, for example)
Chapter Four: Maneuvers and Stances
Frank
Because of the book's framing, there are
nine schools of stabbing people. This is too many to keep track of, and they aren't nearly different enough. Like, I
could design nine fantasy martial arts I suppose, but I'd want to make them a lot more different than these are. Like, I don't know what the conceptual difference is supposed to even
be between Devoted Spirit, Iron Heart, and Diamond Mind. Those sound exactly the same to me when you read their names out, and they pretty much sound exactly the same when you read their short, medium, and long descriptions too. And the abilities granted to any of them seem pretty much interchangeable. At 9th level, one of those gets Disrupting Blow, one gets Daunting Strike, and one gets Dazing Strike. Like fucking seriously, without looking at the page I have no fucking idea which one goes to which discipline and even if you swapped the effects of the different attacks I wouldn't spot it. One of those gives your opponent a potentially significant penalty for 10 rounds and one makes your opponent lose their action for one round, can you guess which is “Disrupting” and which is “Daunting?” Fuck.
These Swords look suspiciously similar.
The fact that there are nine of these fucking things also ill-serves the book in terms of how many maneuvers are actually written. A Warblade at 14th level has potentially three 7th level Maneuvers. None of the disciplines
have three 7th level Maneuvers. It's literally impossible to be a 14th level Warblade who does a single discipline. And 7th level maneuvers require that you have
three other Maneuvers in their discipline before you can select them. It's actually quite easy to imagine a 14th level Warblade who simply
can't select their 7th level maneuver trade-in because they already have both 7th level maneuvers from their favorite discipline and don't have the requisite three other maneuvers in
any of the other disciplines.
AncientH
It's worse than that because the disciplines also don't have any sort of balance as far as number of maneuvers per level. There are
two Devoted Spirit maneuvers at 2nd level - that's it. Desert Wind has four.
Why does Desert Wind have four? Because they're mostly about setting shit on fire, and those are easier powers to write.
A natural question you might ask is how maneuvers line up against spells of the same level. Well, when it comes to combat-oriented, damage-dealing spells...they do okay at low levels. A 3rd level Sor/Wiz spell is
fireball, which does 1d6/level (at 6th level, that's 6d6); the 3rd level Psi power
energy burst does 5d6 damage; the 3rd level Psychic Warrior power
Exhalation of the Black Dragon deals 3d6 damage to a close target; the 3rd level Desert Wind maneuver
Fan the Flames is a ranged touch attack deals 6d6 fire damage. I'll let Frank rant about this in more detail, but if you were below class level 6 I'd say your mystic martial artist would probably at least hold their own with a Psychic Warrior, Psion, or Sorcerer/Wizard.
Outside of that? Well, there's
no utilitarian spells, not unless you're using
Stone Dragon's Fury to turn big rocks into little rocks or
Leaping Dragon's Stance to help jump over a wall or something, which is more "getting creative with things" than anything else. It's kinda like how you can be an almighty sorcerer that knows how to cast a fireball but can't actually light a candle.
Frank
This is a White Raven.
Your music for this particular part of the rant will be
Eliza's Aria. Not because it's one of the greatest pieces of classical music of the 21st century, although it is. But because it's from an Australian Ballet about swans. In English a “black swan” is an idiom referring to an unprecedented or probably impossible event. But importantly there
actually are black swans. They just live in the Southern Hemisphere and they aren't weird or special, they are just
over there. If you go far enough away from England, black swans are just a normal thing that exists.
Which gets to the White Raven Style. It's a kind of stupid name. White ravens are simply an uncommon but not abnormal coloration of Ravens. White Raven was
by far the most popular power set in this book, because it has some very good
mechanical effects. Weirdly, in 4th edition they incorporated a bunch of references to White Ravens, possibly inaccurately thinking that people thought the
name White Raven was really cool. We did not. White Raven abilities were sought after because they manipulated the action economy and were very very powerful. White Raven Tactics literally trades a Swift Action for your ally getting an extra Move, Standard,
and Swift action. If they spend that Swift Action on White Raven Tacticsing right back things get super stupid.
AncientH
Some of the disciplines are specific to one martial class or another, which seems...counterintuitive to me. If you're going to make it so only Swordsages take Desert Wind, then why not just have a Swordsage list and be done with it? Does Desert Wind need to be a separate discipline? Fucked if I know.
In one of their occasional confusing choice of nomenclature, a number of the Devoted Spirit maneuvers are named "Aura of X" - these have nothing to do with the actual concept of auras, which is a
complete different game mechanic used by the Dragon Shaman and other classes, or any other use of the word "aura" on the part of any subsystem of D&D. In a better world, an aura would be a keyword which would interact with other keywords, so that you could do things with it. But here, it's just a generic title. Boo, hiss.
Frank
The biggest question when it comes to game balance is “are fifth level maneuvers the equal of fifth level spells?” And the answer is no. I mean, it's not even close. It's not
remotely close. A fifth level maneuver is like a single Stunning Fist attack from a 10th level Monk. It's basically just
whatever. If Dazing Strike was pretty much exactly what it is now except that it was a 2nd or even 1st level maneuver, I don't think anyone would notice or care.
This is why the balance argument for Tome of Battle is actually pretty easy. While the maneuvers are structured in levels similarly to how spells do, they
aren't as powerful as spells. Even the “broken” ones that manipulate the action economy aren't as stupid as what Conjurers, Necromancers, and Enchanters can get up to with minionmancy.
There is broadly no real idea of what a maneuver is supposed to be capable of at any particular level. In a general sense, 4th level maneuvers are mostly better than 2nd level maneuvers, that isn't always or exclusively the case. Basically this all works as a proof of concept more than an actual system.
Which of course is the major tragedy of all of this. This
did act as a proof of concept. Despite the half- or quarter-assed implementation, it's
very obvious that both the maneuvers and stances
and the weird card hands of maneuvers were totally viable. The experiment
works – at least as a proof of concept – and the people in charge of it canceled the project anyway.
AncientH
Some of these seem...weirdly unfinished. Case in point:
SHIELD COUNTER
Devoted Spirit (Counter)
Level: Crusader 7
Prerequisite: Two Devoted Spirit maneuvers
Initiation Action: 1 immediate action
Range: Melee attack
Target: One creature
As your opponent prepares to make his attack, you bash him with your shield and disrupt his attempt.
As an immediate action, you can attempt a shield bash against an opponent you threaten. This attack is made with a –2 penalty. If your shield attack hits, your target’s next attack automatically misses.
You can use this maneuver immediately after an opponent declares an attack, but you must do so before the attack’s result has been determined
Some notes:
1) Nowhere does it say that you have to have a shield as a prerequisite for this maneuver. It just assumes that if you want to do this maneuver, you have a shield at hand, and that the enemy is close enough to bash.
2) Shields are not weapons associated with the Devoted Spirit style.
3) Does this apply against casting spells? Backstab attempts? Can you use it as many times per round as you have maneuvers? How does this work with being flat-footed or surprised?
Some of these might have been answers buried in the previous ten pages of rules, but fucked if I'm going to dig through them. I'm still wondering why the Devoted Spirit has shield maneuvers. This isn't necessarily a bad maneuver, except that at 7th level it's just letting you hit somebody before they hit you - provided said person is within hitting range and you have a shield. Honestly, at 7th level I would expect you to be able to deflect
fireballs or something
Frank
The Maneuvers list is 48 pages long, and there's a lot of shenanigans in here. Probably the whole next post will just be us talking about it more.