The Age of the Warriors - a ToB expansion book idea

[dspeyer]

I wonder what would happen if you were taking on a cleric and he tried casting regenerate on you.

You could still voluntarily stand on one leg.

[Frog Dragon]

I just did Piercing Point and would be happy to have it included in this project. It will still probably change a bit though.

[Shyftir]

You're stepping on my toes... oh well it's kinda what I get for letting my Mystic Cobra lay lax while I have writer's block on it.

[Frog Dragon]

I did that before I found Mystic Cobra, but sorry
The fluff of mine could be altered to make it a sister school of the Mystic Cobra though.

[Shyftir]

Sister or rival... I don't think flavor is really much of aproblem as yours could easily fill the "warblade" spear school, and mine could become the "crusader" spear school. Mine already has connections to temples and the like, where your has apurely millitary origin. Only issue i see is that some of our maneuvers are VERY similar. We both have an instant set against a charge maneuver in our first level for instance. Of course yours has been done all the way up to 9 already. Mine's only reached 4 and some of its balance needs work.

[DracoDei]

Ok, how about this... parallel development, practitioners discovered eachother at some point and swapped notes. Merge them mechanically, but keep most of the fluff as you each already have it, with the link that I just described (which is the barest sketch of course).

The only problem might be the supernatural maneuvers not matching up well for the Warblade-esque side of things.

[JoshuaZ]

So, um bump? Do we have a to-do list somewhere for this project?

[pyrefiend]

Indeed! What exactly are we doing at this point?

[elliott20]

Oh sorry, I didn't put it all down.

- Create other schools such as the anti-temple of nine school, and maybe a couple of other ones for specific purposes (read: builds) using the current expansion material. (canonically, these are just schools that never came into prominence because of the niche they served)
- Finish the damn chart showing discipline relationships (I swear I'll get to that)
- Group disciplines into major niche areas (for school creation purposes AND for content referencing such as "disciplines suitable for comedic campaigns" and such)
- relate the PrCs and base classes to disciplines
- at some point, do a final cut off for disciplines, or else the task above will be never ending
- get started on the monsters using maneuvers guide
- organize the disciplines and maneuvers into a single word doc, create proper referencing in doc, then organizing the references into different types of organization (by level, by discipline, and by alphabetical order)
- oh yeah, and finish creating the content outline in the word document

I really need to just sit down and take a chunk of time to focus on this. Unfortunately most of my attention has been going to my job right now. My company is trying to select a proper Operation Support/Business Support system right now and so I got a lot of analysis stuff I need to complete.

But next week my wife will be taking my daughter on a trip for a number of days, so my nights should be freed up to catch up on these tasks, at least for a couple nights. I promise guys I'll get at least outlining stuff done.

Oh yeah, can the people who made the open excel spreadsheets PM me the links so I can add it all into my sig for faster references?

[JoshuaZ]

Oh sorry, I didn't put it all down.

- Create other schools such as the anti-temple of nine school, and maybe a couple of other ones for specific purposes (read: builds) using the current expansion material. (canonically, these are just schools that never came into prominence because of the niche they served)
- Finish the damn chart showing discipline relationships (I swear I'll get to that)
- Group disciplines into major niche areas (for school creation purposes AND for content referencing such as "disciplines suitable for comedic campaigns" and such)
- relate the PrCs and base classes to disciplines
- at some point, do a final cut off for disciplines, or else the task above will be never ending
- get started on the monsters using maneuvers guide
- organize the disciplines and maneuvers into a single word doc, create proper referencing in doc, then organizing the references into different types of organization (by level, by discipline, and by alphabetical order)
- oh yeah, and finish creating the content outline in the word document

I really need to just sit down and take a chunk of time to focus on this. Unfortunately most of my attention has been going to my job right now. My company is trying to select a proper Operation Support/Business Support system right now and so I got a lot of analysis stuff I need to complete.

But next week my wife will be taking my daughter on a trip for a number of days, so my nights should be freed up to catch up on these tasks, at least for a couple nights. I promise guys I'll get at least outlining stuff done.

Oh yeah, can the people who made the open excel spreadsheets PM me the links so I can add it all into my sig for faster references?

Ok. I can maybe help in more in a week or two. I'm a bit busy right now with actual school stuff. I'll also have at least two more PrCs to throw in (currently being EACHed) and might have one or two more after that. I think I can help out with the classifying disciplines into groups. It might also make sense if we are going to classify the disciplines to work out rough power levels (something like low power- equiv around Desert Wind, medium, Stone Dragon or Tiger Claw, high- White Raven) which might help give DMs some idea when swapping disciplines out from each other what to expect.

[elliott20]

Ok. I can maybe help in more in a week or two. I'm a bit busy right now with actual school stuff. I'll also have at least two more PrCs to throw in (currently being EACHed) and might have one or two more after that. I think I can help out with the classifying disciplines into groups. It might also make sense if we are going to classify the disciplines to work out rough power levels (something like low power- equiv around Desert Wind, medium, Stone Dragon or Tiger Claw, high- White Raven) which might help give DMs some idea when swapping disciplines out from each other what to expect.

well, I just added two of the spreadsheets into my sig, so I strongly encourage anyone who wants to make notes about a discipline to go there and do it directly.

You're right, I like that suggestion about power level stuff. For the purposes of simplicity, let's just do a simple low-mid-high schema or at least a "this is barometer we equate this discipline to" kind of thing. That way, the people using this will at least know what the intention was.

[Pechvarry]

Would this be a bad time to start critiquing the schools already included?

On the one hand, if you already have all the material and you'd have to recompile after author changes, then that's no problem.

On the other hand, if some regulars took some time off from normal hijinks for a while and put our focus on thread necromancy, maybe we can vastly improve a lot of these in a short period of time.

[DracoDei]

I for one, always love critique, no matter how old the material is. If thread necromancy starts to become a problem, put it in this thread I guess?

[elliott20]

I personally have no problem what so ever when it comes to critiquing existing material. Part of the effort of this project is to make sure that the material hangs well together, be it from a fluff stand point or a mechanical stand point. (Hence why we've institute TD1's rule for discipline training)

However, not being an expert in this kind of thing, I leave this up to the team members for now.

Like DracoDei said, if it DOES become a problem, we can always just direct all changes to that discipline here.

[dspeyer]

So far as I know, the disciplines are organized. I've been keeping the earlier post updated (see my sig). This hasn't solved the pairing problem.

I think the most useful thing to do now would be to make sense of the PrCs. That's the second spreadsheet elliott20 linked to. I would encourage everyone to skin the disciplines post first, so that filling in the "schools suggested" link becomes easier.

Once we have that, I think we'll be able to tackle the pairing problem.

Other things we need to do include addressing the duplicate disciplines, patching together coherent fluff, double-checking everything for completeness/balance/etc. and figuring out formatting.

[DragoonWraith]

I think that in terms of thread necromancy, the best thing to do would be to ask in the Site Issues forum about it. The moderators have explicitly stated that the necromancy rules in the Homebrew forums are laxer, but they have not (as far as I'm aware) delineated exactly what is and is not still bad, so the thing to do is to ask if it would be alright.

I'd be sort of surprised if it were not.

[JoshuaZ]

Yeah, I'm very tempted to threadomance the Broken Blade thread since that discipline could use some more fluffing of the maneuvers themselves.

Edit: Also another thought: Should we maybe mark the PrCs or disciplines that use material from other books? For example, the Occult Adversary uses pact magic, and the Huixxa Vo Nyarlathotep requires one to be a changeling or doppleganger, so part of what it relates to requires Eberron specific material. This might go under a general notes column if we want to add one in the table.

Edit: Also how specific to we want to be on the exclusion list? For example, I'm not sure it makes sense to list "Golden Saint" on the exclusion list for all the evil classes. If someone can't figure out the problem with that..

Edit: Should we make any more general rules for ok substitutions? For example, Mental Grip, Sleeping Goddess and Diamond Mind but be in general substitutable. Similarly, Infinite Torment and Ninefold Damnation might always be ok substitutes for Dread Crown, and the reverse. Note that Infinite Torment and Ninefold Damnation should not substitute for each other since one is abyssal and the other associated with the Nine Hells. This leads to the odd situation with A able to sub for B, B for C, but not necessarily A for C. Yay, non-transitivity.

[elliott20]

Yeah, I'm very tempted to threadomance the Broken Blade thread since that discipline could use some more fluffing of the maneuvers themselves.

Edit: Also another thought: Should we maybe mark the PrCs or disciplines that use material from other books? For example, the Occult Adversary uses pact magic, and the Huixxa Vo Nyarlathotep requires one to be a changeling or doppleganger, so part of what it relates to requires Eberron specific material. This might go under a general notes column if we want to add one in the table.

Edit: Also how specific to we want to be on the exclusion list? For example, I'm not sure it makes sense to list "Golden Saint" on the exclusion list for all the evil classes. If someone can't figure out the problem with that..

Edit: Should we make any more general rules for ok substitutions? For example, Mental Grip, Sleeping Goddess and Diamond Mind but be in general substitutable. Similarly, Infinite Torment and Ninefold Damnation might always be ok substitutes for Dread Crown, and the reverse. Note that Infinite Torment and Ninefold Damnation should not substitute for each other since one is abyssal and the other associated with the Nine Hells. This leads to the odd situation with A able to sub for B, B for C, but not necessarily A for C. Yay, non-transitivity.

Yikes, that is going to be quite a pickle.

I say go ahead and bump the Broken Blade if it needs work. Now is as good of a time as any to do this, and if they don't want that thread bumped, it's gonna just ended up re-posted anyway.

Good catch on the extra dependent mechanics. We should make sure there's a note attached to them so that people using it are instantly aware that it was designed with specific mechanics in mind.

Instead of doing an "exclusion" list, I think it might be more useful to simply do the reverse, an inclusion list. So, a PrC or Base class will just have a list of disciplines he CAN take.

And if there is a reason for a class to have some specific exclusions, we just put it in the discipline description itself in the way of say, alignment or something like a pre-req, I guess. I'm not sure, what do you guys think?

re: substitution
beyond TD1's rule on substitution, (drop one, replace it with another at DM discretion) we don't have any actual substitution policy as of yet. If we want to do "okay" substitutions off the cuff without any questions asked, then we need to keep this list in the discipline section as to what other discipline it can replace without any further questions. Non-transitive quality can make this a little confusing though... But I dont' see a major problem with this off the cuff.

[JoshuaZ]

re: substitution
beyond TD1's rule on substitution, (drop one, replace it with another at DM discretion) we don't have any actual substitution policy as of yet. If we want to do "okay" substitutions off the cuff without any questions asked, then we need to keep this list in the discipline section as to what other discipline it can replace without any further questions. Non-transitive quality can make this a little confusing though... But I dont' see a major problem with this off the cuff.

Ok. Do we want to then add a column to the Martial Disciplines list for can replace with no further questions the following? Then for the "Schools suggested" we could just only include the necessary suggestions that don't fit from the general rules.

[elliott20]

yep, I think that's how we should proceed. less work for us.

[JoshuaZ]

yep, I think that's how we should proceed. less work for us.

Hmm, minor issue. Some of the subs might still thematically make sense without removing the associated discipline. So for example, if I have a Hollowed Soul, which normally allows Dread Crown, I could reasonably still sub in Infinite Torment for one of the other disciplines that Hollowed Souls get, having then access to both. So we'll still need to list the thematically obvious cases but it will still cut down on work loads.

Edit: Also just noticed that Falling Wave has two duplicate lines in the discipline document. Not sure how to delete a line so someone else should probably fix that.

Edit: And we may want to include some variants and fixes on pre-existing disciplines also. For example, Demented One's fix for Iron Heart Surge.

[dspeyer]

I'd be against substitutions for new PrCs. Available disciplines are very much tied to the concept of the class. Some classes might have a "pick n of these disciplines to learn from, the choice cannot be changed" mechanic if we need it to avoid overpowering them (though prerequisites kind of do that for us).

We do need substitutes for the original base classes and maybe the original PrCs because they were made without knowledge of this. The disciplines already say which of the original bases they go with, so a substitute-one-for-one-at-first-martial-level sounds good.

[JoshuaZ]

I'd be against substitutions for new PrCs. Available disciplines are very much tied to the concept of the class. Some classes might have a "pick n of these disciplines to learn from, the choice cannot be changed" mechanic if we need it to avoid overpowering them (though prerequisites kind of do that for us).

That might work. The concern is that we have some PrCs and disciplines which while they fit well together thematically aren't options. In the vast majority of such cases it is because the disciplines and PrCs were brewed separately.

[dspeyer]

Edit: And we may want to include some variants and fixes on pre-existing disciplines also. For example, Demented One's fix for Iron Heart Surge.

I agree that we should have fixes for those, but I'm not convinced that Demented fixes are good ones. IHS is still vague about conditions (swallowed whole?) and you can still receive unlimited WRT in a round.

[JoshuaZ]

I agree that we should have fixes for those, but I'm not convinced that Demented fixes are good ones. IHS is still vague about conditions (swallowed whole?) and you can still receive unlimited WRT in a round.

Hmm, are there other fixes you prefer?

[imp_fireball]

That is, the way I see it, it almost feels like if we could fluff this all as saying the 9 original ToB disciplines are the ones that achieved major popularity because of Reshar's personal influence and his ability to push these out to the greater public, while the other extra disciplines are more like alternate schools that just never got the same recognition that Reshar's chosen schools got.

The book actually calls the nine the 'subtle way'. So really, their could be other 'ways' as well - its just that Reshar and that one school taught the subtle way. The fabled 'tenth discipline' is either bad writing/ret con, or simply the much less wondrous 'tenth in the subtle way that never got out'.

Also consider the setting. In the area where the school existed, there was probably not much serious by and large warrior colleges taught by high level dudes around. So really, the nine become this big product of myth and legend - and really, there's a lot of that in D&D, so it's to be expected.

I agree that we should have fixes for those, but I'm not convinced that Demented fixes are good ones. IHS is still vague about conditions (swallowed whole?) and you can still receive unlimited WRT in a round.

Also, it just powers up things that affect many creatures - the idea behind IHS is it's supposed to reflect that one guy who can overcome the party killing affect and save the day. Not to mention it buffs spells and nerfs psionics more than necessary.

Also the discrimination between spell likes and SU makes no sense, in my opinion.

[DracoDei]

Outlines of how to made two more non-humanoid ToB using creatures... didn't do stat-blocks etc, because the changes are so minor in scope (although major in impact) that it seemed a waste. If people are interested I will probably at least do up physical descriptions, and maybe even a lore table.

[elliott20]

heh, that's cute. I'm not sure if that really deserves a stat block either. But maybe we can include that as an example in the "monster initiators" section as to how to take existing monsters and give them martial maneuvers.

[Iferus]

The book actually calls the nine the 'subtle way'.

wasn't that the sublime way?

[DracoDei]

wasn't that the sublime way?

Yes, and I am sorry I didn't speak up on that subject myself.