OK, so I’m a big boy. I’ve been in this hobby for a long time. Things have changed over the years. New ideas come, old ideas go. Some good decisions are made, and a few bad ones. Moving on can be daunting, and there’s always going to be a learning curve.

But putting the weapons on page 218? What the hell was Wizards of the Coast thinking? Page 100 (or thereabouts) is where player character equipment belongs in a Players Handbook, damn it! </nerdrage>

I’ll surely have some more coherent observations to share after things have had a chance to settle in a bit more.

My weekly RPG group has recently reverted to a Forgotten Realms game, complete with the stereotypical traveling-circus nonsensical party composition (an Ogre, two Humans, a Gnome, and a Halfling), and I’ve taken it upon myself to give the fabled Tome of Battle, the Book of Weeaboo Fightan Magics a shot with a Silas Coldwater, Crusader of Tyr.

In broad terms, the Tome of Battle seeks to make melee combatants more interesting to use than simply Move Action, Attack with the occasional Full Attack, 5-foot-step. The kinds of tactical options available to the typical Fighter or Barbarian character have generally involved wading hip-deep into rules that involve attacks of opportunity, special modifiers, and contested die rolls (grapple, trip, bull rush, and sunder: I’m looking at you, here). Basically they bog things down and tend not to be terribly useful against Gargantuan critters with more than two legs. Tome of Battle introduces three new character classes — basically just Fighter variants — that take advantage of a new set of rules for Maneuvers and Stances.

Maneuvers operate a lot like spells in that they have minimum level requirements. In the case of my Crusader, I can make an extra-powerful “Mountain Hammer” attack every once in a while, or use Stone Bones to gain temporary damage reduction, or a number of other flashy tricks. Stances are special maneuvers that are pretty much always on. Silas generally operates in Iron Guard Glare stance, which grants an armor class bonus to all his allies (but not to himself) against any opponent that Silas threatens.

The Tome of Battle is considered one of the books that 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons will be drawing greatly from; it was an experiment in some new ways of handling tactical encounters that works pretty smoothly. It also shows a bit of how the Wizards of the Coast folks would like to handle character advancement going forward. They wanted to make it so that players would have interesting choices to make every time their characters become more accomplished. For a Fighter, character progression meant a small number of skill points, often used simply to reinforce aptitude in areas that character was already good at, the Fighter would get some more hit points, and his base attack bonus would go up. Yawn. Every second and every third level, the Fighter would get to select a new feat. This is the chief way in which a Fighter would differentiate himself, the primary mechanism by which he’d be cool.

For the Crusader, they mix this up a bit. To illustrate, I’ll describe the decisions I got to make on my way to 6th level.

1. 1st: Any character has a ton of choices at 1st level. What’s the basic character concept? What race, class, class abilities, skills, equipment, etc help demonstrate that concept? I went with a polearm-wielding Crusader with Combat Reflexes and a smattering of maneuvers like Vanguard Strike that help his buddies do their jobs better.
2. 2nd: Here a Fighter would get a bonus feat. A Crusader instead gets a second stance and a class ability that helps with saving throws. Silas picks Martial Spirit, which lets him heal allies a little when he hits an enemy in melee.
3. 3rd: Everybody gets a feat at this level, and a Crusader gets a new maneuver. 3rd level is when 2nd-level maneuvers are available, so I take Mountain Hammer, which lets me do an extra 2d6 damage, bypassing damage reduction and hardness.
4. 4th: Everybody gets a stat improvement, a Fighter would get a bonus feat, and a Crusader gets to upgrade one of his old maneuvers, swapping it out for a new one. 2nd level maneuvers are pretty cool, so I swap out a 1st level one that I really took as a placeholder, and grab another tasty 2nd level maneuver.
5. 5th: This is a dead level for Fighters, but when Clerics and Wizards get 3rd level magic. Similarly, Silas got a new maneuver at up to 3rd level. I get him White Raven Tactics, which allows an ally to go at exactly one initiative after him, even if that ally had already acted that turn. This lets the Fighter in the party get two full-round actions, sometimes before our opponents even get a chance to act. Neato.
6. 6th: Everybody gets another feat, Fighters get two, and a Crusader gets to trade out another Maneuver (throw away an old, stale one for a new, hot one). I could trade out Crusader’s Strike (which lets me heal 1d6+5 to an ally when striking a foe) for Revitalizing Strike (which lets me heal 3d6+6 — eventually 3d6+15 — when striking a foe), a clear upgrade for something that’s nice at low levels but utterly unimpressive at mid-level or high-level play. Or perhaps I’d be better served taking Defensive Rebuke, which forces any opponent Silas strikes to target him or provoke an attack of opportunity (handy with Combat Reflexes and a reach weapon). Decisions, decisions. There are several other options as well.

That doesn’t go into the various interesting class abilities. Basically I get to make real decisions in mid-combat without having to muck through a massive spell list. Nice. The other Tome of Battle classes, the Sword Sage and Warblade, have their own distinct flavors, differentiated by the palette of maneuvers available to them, their class abilities, and the means by which they get to refresh their maneuvers.

A lot of the descriptive text is the kind of poorly-conceived high fantasy oriental tripe that I expect from Dungeons & Dragons, the kind of stuff that leaves me incapable of running a serious game in Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms. That said, it’s an interesting addition to the way that D&D operates. Separate it a bit from the half-baked mysticism and I think they’re really on to something here. I can only hope that their approach to the 4th Edition Fighter is heavily inspired by the game mechanics, if not the fluff, of this book.

Looks like Wizards of the Coast have a hankering to squeeze out another set of core rulebooks. Sigh.

Only a handful of times since the advent of Dungeons & Dragons 3.0 have I had the occasion to drown a player character. I’ve been playing in or running D&D games nearly-continuously since the release of the d20 rule set, and it simply doesn’t come up that often. When it has, it has been frustrating, especially the v3.5 version.

Drowning should be a harrowing situation. The very air you need to survive is denied you as you struggle to surface, yet the rules as written make it a cakewalk in all but the most extraordinary circumstances.
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Every adventuring Wizard and Sorcerer worth his salt has a Fireball or Lightning Bolt and a couple Magic Missiles spell up his sleeve in case a fight breaks out, and spells like Bull’s Strength and Cure Serious Wounds have an obvious appeal when out dungeoncrawling or dragon-slaying. This post isn’t about those no-brainers, but rather the more subtle, multi-use spells you may have been forgetting.
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For years now, I’ve struggled with the existence of prestige classes in the d20 RPG system. I understand the desire to have them; they provide an underlying rule set to accompany a significant variation on the core character archetypes that are normal classes. They are “prestigious” in that there are necessary prerequisites to gaining entry into them. They are “classes” because progression in a PrC takes the place of the normal progression through a normal class.

Since the 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook was released in 2000, Wizards of the Coast has been on a fairly-steady schedule of monthly releases, putting out additional skills, feats, spells, classes, and prestige classes that can help mold their rule set to whatever setting you may wish to run it in. They’ve re-released the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk, as well as Eberron and a number of environment-type-based settings (Frostburn etc.).

All told, there are currently 652 prestige classes published by Wizards of the Coast for the d20 system. This doesn’t count the plethora of prestige classes present in OGL products like the Iron Kingdoms, Midnight, or Warcraft. Granted, many of these 652 PrCs are repeats (Archmage, Incantrix, and Wayfarer Guide are some that show up in two books), but this is a truly-obscene preponderance of customized character rules, and likely indicative of either a fundamental flaw in the system’s underlying mechanics or something far more insidious in their marketing department.

Ok, so Fighters in D&D have traditionally been pretty lousy at a wide variety of things, excelling only in pumelling, piercing, or hacking opponents into pulp. The d20 system did a lot to make the Fighter a more appealing character class, largely through the customization allowed by the class’s feat progression. This allows them to closely match the archery or two-weaponed fighting skills of a Ranger, the mounted combat skills of a Cavalier, the brutal attacking power of the Barbarian, or any suitable blend of the above. Alas, the d20 core rules don’t give them a viable means of beating the living snot out of their opponents with their bare hands.

For ease of reference, here are the d20 Modern unarmed combat feats, grouped by “feat tree.” They provide three separate ways that a Fighter could progress in unarmed combat prowess, and while they don’t make a Fighter the equal of a Monk for this purpose, it gives them some room to grow. Consider using them in your fantasy campaign.

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It looks like WotC has decided its website needs some more filler; they’ve taken it upon themselves to re-explain some character classes in a new series “Character Classes.” Unlike the mind-numbing depth and breadth of the Rules of the Game, These articles are brief and to the point, covering a handful of points about each class.

The Fighter article offers a rather narrow look at the Fighter-as-armored-lunk, treating ranged combat as an afterthought and largely ignoring the flexibility inherent in the Fighter class. The Rogue article does a better job of showing flexibility, but then with the high number of skill points and available class skills, the Rogue is more obviously versatile.

Overall, it reminds me that the articles I started out with a couple of years ago weren’t an entire waste of diskspace, including my looks at parties built around particular classes. I should probably go back through and make ones for the Iron Kingdoms classes of Arcane Mechanik, Bodger, and Gunmage.