The Gaming Den

Saw this quote in another thread:

ubernoob wrote:Here's the thing...
RoW fighter is the strongest noncaster class in all of the tomes and the WotC books. There's not a damn [non full caster] class stronger than it in head to head combat. At all. As such, a fighter can far more easily afford to use his 8 item budget on some flying wings or boots of teleportation than say, the barbarian that needs it for his magic axe to keep up with fighter damage.

Frankly, I'm not sure that even my incantagish would be stronger than an equal level Tome fighter. The class seriously kicks that much ass. Fuck, ranged combat? He already had PBS, uses his floating feat for Sniper, and just full attacks any enemy to death in two rounds (using blitz and power attack to further boost damage).

Seriously, there aren't a whole lot of enemies that a Tome fighter can't beat by just reaching for his spiked chain/throwing axes/greatbow/alchemist's fire. Tome fighter is the strongest fucking class in the entire tome.

I'm not too familiar with Tome material in play, but the Tome Fighter doesn't scream WIN EVERYTHING FOREVER to me at a glance.

Could anyone educate me about the proper care and feeding for one?

That's because it doesn't win everything. It just can win. Like a Rogue or a Wizard...

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:That's because it doesn't win everything. It just can win. Like a Rogue or a Wizard...

-Crissa

Upon rereading, the ability that stands out to me is Foil Action (AKA Cockblock), especially with extra Immediate Actions, since you can actually counter someone's ability to do anything with no roll needed, then fuck him in your next round.

Is it the feats? Tome feats are all autoupgrading and more powerful than entire feat chains in original D&D.

Yeah, Tome Fighter has cockblock and 17 feats, where each feat is worth more than most class abilities.

Especially because you can string feats together such that the first 12 feats you take all make one style of attacking better.

People hate on the RoW fighter because they have run some imaginary fight-club in their head and flip out when their favorite character doesn't auto-win.

The truth is that most characters can auto-win on another character in one or two turns. A rogue can cause enough burst damage to make your face explode in a single round, but no one cries foul. A decent wizard can kill you before his turn even begins, and that's deemed normal.

Against monsters, the RoW fighter does as well as a well-played Wizard or Cleric or Rogue. Nothing more. Even then, the Fighter needs to be well-played too.

I actually laughed a little at the post that says "he can kill me in two rounds!" Two rounds is an eternity in DnD.... an out of the box Wizard played by a noob can kill you with a save or die in one round with a high chance of success, and two rounds is just an absolute guarantee of success since you won't make a second save.

Monsters are built on a different metric, so they may make most saves when a character won't and saying "my character can't beat this one in a fight-club situation" is absurd.

+1.

Every time the RoW Fighter is mentioned, someone I know starts being snide about how the DM had better not use a wizard or Foil Action would auto-win.

A hijack, but is archery in the Tomes too good?

Perhaps I'm archer-biased, but when I think of Tome 'power builds' (most spell casters excluded) it's the kyūdō samurai, Mongolian knight, Zen archer monk, Diablo Dungeoncrasher, and the archer demon.

There are other options for fighting women, usually involving weapons like the dwarpike or kusarigama, but a bow or TWFing with thrown weapons really dominate in my mind.

If it were possible, I'd rather see warriors that had both ranged and melee capabilities, using the appropriate weapon for the situation. As it stands, archers try to learn how to use their bows in melee while melee weapon users focus on gaining ever longer reach.

Foil action is good, but I never thought it was *too* good. Hell, it only comes in at level 9, and even then it only has 30' range. If a wizard wants to do something he can just move 30' and do it. Or alternatively have mirror images or displacement or whatever to lower the chance of that touch attack even succeeding.

Tome Archers have this really big benefit, apart from being compatible with the features of high-damage classes.

The Point-Blank Shot feat synergizes with Sniper.

Point blank shot repeatedly brings up the first range increment?

Sniper increases range increments by 50%

The +3 to hit for PBS is within 30 feet?

Sniper makes any benefit for being with 30 feet apply out to 60 feet.

That said, there's some classes that're simple to optimize.

The Barbarian gets some sweet benefits from Great Fortitude. If you gave one Blitz, he would be a real berserker--dealing out lots of damage, but taking damage and provoking AoO's a ton, too. But -that- can be be mitigated by piling enough AC and DR increases (Adamantine Breastplate) on.

Tome Fighter gets the most Combat Feats. Combat Feats are awesome.

Put another way, scaling feats are always level appropriate. Other class features aren't. A Wizard's spells gained at level 1 aren't very useful at level 11, and a Barbarians +1 Rage Dice is superceded two levels later, but the feat a RoW Fighter gets at level 2 will be providing new awesome abilities all the time.

Most of the class abilities are also very generally useful. Combat sense is effectively a bonus to anything, granting you a reroll on attacks, saves, damage, skill checks or anything else you need to roll. Problem Solver is just more feats, and every class wants more 5' steps and reach. Every warrior in our group has looked at level 1 Fighter as a potential dip.

The problem we have found (as newer players) is the option space is just too large. By level 6 a Human Tome Fighter will have 7 feats, each providing 3 abilities, for 21 always active abilities to keep track of in addition to class features and magic items. Problem Solver requires you to know the entire feat list by heart to use effectively and adds more abilities. I know it states the class is for experienced players, but the class is so well written that a number of players have expressed an interest until they realised how complicated it is.

my first Tome character was a Blitzing Barbarian. I can say "lots of damage" if you can too, because that's what they dealt; their weapon + rage dice + blitz + str + combat school damage in their main hand; and weapon + 1/2 str + blitz + combat school in their off hand. I felt at the time that Rage Dice were a "main hand" deal anyway, and honestly... I didn't actually 'need' an other set of rage dice to swing around.

In any case, the character was lots, and lots of fun. The entire game was one of him deciding "kill this monster in 'now', or drag out the fight for more than 1 round". If he felt he could drop his target, he'd blitz and try to dump tons of damage onto the creature, hopefully killing it before it killed him. The side benefit of this was that he'd force his targets to decide to waste their AoOs on him, or wait and see if they could AoO an other party member.

It got to the point where healing him "in combat" was actually an effective choice for other PCs to make, since he was dropping equal CR creatures 1/round, but was usually in the 1-10 HP range; and more importantly, enemies would chase him first, or run in terror. It got to the point where Great Fortitude was his level 6 feat, simply for the bonus HP, and the boost to saves was handy too. I've personally felt that the RoW barb is best served by maxing their Con score, since their damage will always keep up to their enemies; while their saves and resilience to continue dealing buckets of damage are tied directly to their Con score. Also, a Barb's To-Hit is.... pretty much always going to be 'enough' to hurt their enemies.

((mind you, we play under the assumption that AoOs are used when an action triggers them, so, he'd take a lot of hits from stuff like... Ettins. ))

On PBS/Sniper synergy.... I think was intentional. Frank and K wanted to "deal" with the problem of archers needing tons of feats in a single action. If anything PBS, Sniper and the RoW version of TWF basically made Rangers viable, and have less limitations on how they act, or what they can do.

Overall though the fighter will tend to do less damage than an equally optimized Barbarian, especially in melee. The barbarian is the character who one-rounds everything it can get into melee range of, from Fire Giants to Cryo-Hydras, I've had a lot of experience putting the RoW barb through its paces from levels 3-14 in dozens of encounters. The class will just curb-stomp it's enemies, and that's often with very minimal optimization.

The fighter needs to have more work, and more tricks to be able to cope with the same things that the other classes can deal with. They need more "planning", but really, they're exactly as described in their write-up. They're a "martial equivalent" to the "wizard". Like the old adage goes, "if your DM ain't crying, your wizard ain't tryin'"; which goes equally for Fighters.

My experiences with Tome Fighter.
1) JE killed a game with it. Notably, he threw it at a newby DM (me) and I literally could not think of anything to ever challenge it without killing the entire (optimized, like shadowcraft mages and everything) party.
2) I was in a one shot with me playing an incantagish, my brother playing a min/maxed tome fighter, and the other players were an artificer (super duper buffed from custom crafted items), a gestalt cleric/bow PrC guy (he heard 'anything goes' and decided gestalt was fine), aaaand a warblade somebody threw together in ten minutes. Since I built my wizard with combat feats and had better numbers due to super buffs (seriously, giant size) my wizard was a *bit* better than the fighter. The fighter ended up using foil action and giving out rerolls on saves with a dip in master strategist a bunch. Everyone except for my incantagish and the fighter basically just sat back and watched us handle the battles because they couldn't contribute on anything close to the same scale.

So, my experiences with the class are a game being destroyed by it and it running head to head with a god damn incantatrix using combat feats.

Let me clarify, that's the strongest wizard build possible and he had all the benefits from combat feats on top of that. The fighter didn't deal as much damage, but he kept up. The artificer with ridiculous custom item buffs literally spent the battles casting mass snakes swiftness on a wand because giving us full attacks was better than him using his 100+ str score in a fight. The warblade obviously did nothing besides white raven tactics.

Any class that can keep up with an incantatrix using combat feats is bullshit.

Now, this is all just anecdotal evidence, so you're right to ignore it. What doesn't change, is this point:

Red_Rob wrote:Tome Fighter gets the most Combat Feats. Combat Feats are awesome.

Put another way, scaling feats are always level appropriate. Other class features aren't. A Wizard's spells gained at level 1 aren't very useful at level 11, and a Barbarians +1 Rage Dice is superceded two levels later, but the feat a RoW Fighter gets at level 2 will be providing new awesome abilities all the time.

Most of the class abilities are also very generally useful. Combat sense is effectively a bonus to anything, granting you a reroll on attacks, saves, damage, skill checks or anything else you need to roll. Problem Solver is just more feats, and every class wants more 5' steps and reach. Every warrior in our group has looked at level 1 Fighter as a potential dip.

The problem we have found (as newer players) is the option space is just too large. By level 6 a Human Tome Fighter will have 7 feats, each providing 3 abilities, for 21 always active abilities to keep track of in addition to class features and magic items. Problem Solver requires you to know the entire feat list by heart to use effectively and adds more abilities. I know it states the class is for experienced players, but the class is so well written that a number of players have expressed an interest until they realised how complicated it is.

In some games, it may be a fine class. In most, it's not appropriate for any of the above reasons.

K wrote:People hate on the RoW fighter because they have run some imaginary fight-club in their head and flip out when their favorite character doesn't auto-win.

Or maybe it's really strong.

Psychic Robot wrote:

K wrote:People hate on the RoW fighter because they have run some imaginary fight-club in their head and flip out when their favorite character doesn't auto-win.

Or maybe it's really strong.

Oh, it -is- strong. Quite probably strong enough to need a gentleman's agreement to not intentionally break the game.

But most people compare classes to other classes. I've seen people argue that the Tome Assassin would pwn a Druid, and that the Tome Fighter would embarrass any wizard, and the Thief-Acrobat is overpowered because that Shadow Tumble ability means it can do a teleport any time it wants, unlike a wizard. It takes some time to get them away from that thinking.

Let me guess, Uber: Two Weapon Fighting, Blitz, Sniper, Point Blank Shot, and a satchel of acid flasks.

When you push the envelope as far as you can, you end up with a total game breaking combat monster. You can also make a 'transmuter' like a spiked chain fighter with Combat School, Juggernaut, Hordebreaker, and skill like Hide and Move Silently. Or even an 'evoker' Elothar that wields a long sword and a short sword, and has ranks in Use Rope.

As you say, some kind of 'gentlewoman's agreement' is needed to make it work.

CatharzGodfoot wrote:Let me guess, Uber: Two Weapon Fighting, Blitz, Sniper, Point Blank Shot, and a satchel of acid flasks.

I don't remember flasks ever being used, but both games were high level (14+), so I'm sure all those feats were somewhere.

When you push the envelope as far as you can, you end up with a total game breaking combat monster. You can also make a 'transmuter' like a spiked chain fighter with Combat School, Juggernaut, Hordebreaker, and skill like Hide and Move Silently. Or even an 'evoker' Elothar that wields a long sword and a short sword, and has ranks in Use Rope.

As you say, some kind of 'gentlewoman's agreement' is needed to make it work.

And classes that require such agreements are bad.

Maxus wrote:

Psychic Robot wrote:

K wrote:People hate on the RoW fighter because they have run some imaginary fight-club in their head and flip out when their favorite character doesn't auto-win.

Or maybe it's really strong.

Oh, it -is- strong. Quite probably strong enough to need a gentleman's agreement to not intentionally break the game.

But most people compare classes to other classes. I've seen people argue that the Tome Assassin would pwn a Druid, and that the Tome Fighter would embarrass any wizard, and the Thief-Acrobat is overpowered because that Shadow Tumble ability means it can do a teleport any time it wants, unlike a wizard. It takes some time to get them away from that thinking.

Not strong, but balanced.

Being able to play the same game as the spellcasters is parity. DnD is a game designed for rocket-launcher tag, so the fact that a RoW Fighter gets to win sometimes means balance.

The hilarious thing is that Tome Fighters actually suck at most of the game and just draw even some of the time in combat. I suspect the vast majority of DnD players have never seen what a well-played spellcaster is capable of doing, otherwise they'd say that we didn't go far enough.

K, you are deluding yourself. Some of the biggest critics of Tome Fighter/Races of War in general are people who really actually know exactly what the worst of spellcasters can do is. We actually do know.

The problem is that you didn't go far enough in giving them interesting abilities, but you went way too far in breaking every RNG and numbers game there is.

The fact that you say "wins sometimes" about a class that has like eighteen different ways to go 100% against all the same game tests is a joke. Fighters automatically win any fight not against a cheesed out farther than most people know how to go caster. That's a problem. And they still can't contribute to anything besides killing things. That's also a problem. While it may be a problem intricately tied to the fighter, that doesn't mean the solution is to just break all the RNGs and go home.

I feel the Fighter is just boring. I mean, it's "a fighter", which describes... yeah, nothing. "Fighter" outside of D&D is a term that could mean martial artists (Monk), soldiers (Soldier), berserkers (Barbarian), town guards (NPC Warrior) and Your Mum. It's just a generic "Have a bunch of feats" class. I'm not sure it's that powerful (particularly if you don't keep adding feats that all stack together for the one shtick. Like the three archery feats *sigh* And instead get them to take feats that let them be decent at many things). But boring and generic, yes.

That said, it can be a pain for newer players to keep track of due to the feats: they're not listing a bunch of abilities that they independently use, they have a bunch of bonuses and a bunch of situational abilities and reactions and stuff.

Hell, your feat abilities progress like this, assuming non-human:
Level 1: 2 (1 feat, +0 BAB and +1 BAB)
Level 2: 4 (2 feats)
Level 3: 6 (3 feats)
Level 4: 8 (4 feats)
Level 5: 8 (nothing - up til now it's been like a Wizard's spells)
Level 6: 18 (6 feats, +0 BAB, +1 BAB and +6 BAB)
Level 7: still 18
Level 8: 21 (7 feats)
Level 9: 24 (8 feats)
Level 10: 27 (9 feats)
Level 11: 36 (still 9 feats, now the +11 BAB too)
Level 12: 44 (11 feats)
Level 13: 44
Level 14: 48 (12 feats)
Level 15: 52 (13 feats)
Level 16: 70 (14 feats, now the +16 BAB)
Level 17: zzz
Level 18: 80
Level 19: zzz
Level 20: 85

At what point there do you start to lose track of all these things? This is ignoring the wiggle feat, of course.

Anyway, I have a question about the Thief-Acrobat: what's its real shtick? What makes it really effective and cool in combat? I can see how it's a nice class for all the "Getting places, opening all the doors and not being killed by traps" aspects of the game, but given it's expected that at some point a tendriculos will want to eat you...

The fighter can handle several different archetypes. The dex-based high mobility guy (fencer, I guess), the walking door opener, the ranger, the exotic weapon master...

Now, Thief-Acrobat holds a place in my heart because it can actually handle thieving and acrobatics as a class feature. You can reliably use your skills. You can also flank with yourself. After a while, you can take 10 (or whatever) on Tumble and keep on moving and sneak attacking. Detect Magic as a class feature is...nifty, even though it isn't actually strong or anything.

Given Tome hiding rules and the lack of penalties, you can just stay hidden. All. The. Time. And keep nailing things for sneak attack.

ubernoob wrote:

CatharzGodfoot wrote:As you say, some kind of 'gentlewoman's agreement' is needed to make it work.

And classes that require such agreements are bad.

Yes, but most D&D classes do require such agreements to work. Any class that interacts with the stealth subsystem, for example, must be house-ruled. Any character with ranks in Diplomacy must also be house-ruled. These are really basic things that can break with almost any class in the game.

CatharzGodfoot wrote:

ubernoob wrote:

CatharzGodfoot wrote:As you say, some kind of 'gentlewoman's agreement' is needed to make it work.

And classes that require such agreements are bad.

Yes, but most D&D classes do require such agreements to work. Any class that interacts with the stealth subsystem, for example, must be house-ruled. Any character with ranks in Diplomacy must also be house-ruled. These are really basic things that can break with almost any class in the game.

And we can strive to design classes that *don't* have those problems. Like barbarian. And monk. I really love those classes. Every time I've let a player at my table use them, they've had a blast and I haven't had a headache.