The Age of Warriors (Project Revived!)

[Elves]

The thing is that it's throwing more damage on without cost.

Some degree of direct empowerment is implied -- you can eke good builds from the core martials with effort, but these ACFs were meant to make vanilla builds more viable. The assumption was DM approval required (eg, if someone's playing an optimized A-game paladin, they don't need it). Perhaps that's too wishy-washy for an optimization heavy game like 3.5. The intent could be changed so that it's about a higher roof, lower ceiling build that works well with no frills, similar to 4e essentials.

Either way, the intent -is- clearer if presented as a variant class rather than an ACF .

For paladin and ranger, replacing spells with mvs is obvious step. For fighter, there's nothing to change since the maneuvers fill the dead levels.

Rather than just bloat the output casually, I'd intensely prefer having them offload their existing damage mechanic into Maneuvers so they aren't gaining much simple damage and can't stack even more bonuses on top.

the relevant abillities are
- bbn rage
- monk flurry
- paladin smite
- rogue sneak attack
- ranger favored enemy

I don't think anything needs to be done for sneak attack (maybe slowing it slightly as Nigel suggests) or flurry. For the others, some maneuver interaction would be good.

For the sake of not mirroring a widely-known form of combat with Mental Grip's blatant Star Wars inspiration, I'd focus on rolling elements of the two into Infinite Shore as the Psionic Discipline.

Mental Grip I was originally eyeing to be the discipline for a Tome of Battle equivalent of the psychic warrior. Dropped that idea, so probably not including it. I also think it maybe goes too far away from karate and swordplay into just being magic.


Re combining the dreams and psionics disciplines: that's a pretty decent idea thematically, but I'm not sure if it works mechanically due to the power points gimmick being core to the psionic discipline whereas the dreams discipline is supposed to be core to the poet class, which is not psionic.

Warrior's Soul: Giving it a theme apart from just Incarnum overlap is very important

Here I have to disagree, its point is to be the "incarnum discipline" and that's a wide enough space in itself. Of course you're right that there should be some guiding principle to its maneuvers other than just "a bunch of random effects that you happen to be able to augment with essentia". The offensive soulmelds idea was one way of trying to get there, and doing more with the chakra slot/item slot theme would be appropriate.

Basically make it about using Incarnum to access the knowledge of warriors of prior ages, with the Sublime Way as the means to use that knowledge effectively.

And this seems thematically fitting.


Antimagic discipline: fueling the abilities with spell slots and giving virtual spell slots for knowing maneuvers seems overcomplicated. It also gives casters and theurges an advantage when the intent of the discipline should be to level the field between pure martials and everyone else, including theurges and partial casters. Basing anything on caster level has the same problem.

the overall nature of the effect is that you can make a go of countering any spell that passes within reach, so if you have a Reach weapon, you can counter anything that passes within 10 ft. of you

solid, although reach weapons and size enhancement are already very good strategies for melee.

As for adding magical capabilities to the discipline, I think that may be overconcepting it. If we were going to do the "arcane swordsage" thing, I think that would be its own whole thing. Most of the high level monsters in D&D are spellcasters, add that plus the caster-martial imbalance and antimagic is a useful enough space to furnish 25 maneuvers.

Brainstorming the basics:

- impose penalty on Concentration checks
- targeted dispel magic
- counterspell
- anti-divination
- see invisible
- see through illusions
- instagib summoned monsters
- when you harm summoned monsters, also harm summoner
- force polymorphed/shapechanged/wildshaped target back into true form
- cut through magical barriers (like walls of force)
- shatter mage armor effects
- gain SR
- caster loses spell slots on hit
- grab & tagalong with teleporting creature
- temporary mind blank
- disfigure hand or mouth, no verbal/somatic components
- spell reflection effect