Talk:Scaling Maneuvers (3.5e Variant Rule)

Ratings
Ironically, I have to agree with both Surgo and Ghoshwheel. It changes the balance of ToB, and that's the point. There should be no reason to have the same maneuver at higher levels with the only difference being a couple d6 of damage. --Havvy 00:51, 25 August 2012 (UTC)


 * It was fine as it was. This hasn't fixed anything, and what it's done is decrease the incentive to keep taking levels in the martial adept class. Why do you need higher level maneuvers if they're not any better than the ones you already have? Go crusader 1/warblade 1/sublime knight 1/paladin of the sublime way 1/drifter 1, then spend the rest of your progression taking whatever PrCs you can. The new maneuvers known can go to whichever class you want, because all that matters is your IL. You'll have oodles of ways to deal damage from your 1st level maneuvers, and because sublime PrCs add their full level to your IL (every IL), you'll only be 3 IL behind your level. And this is using almost nothing but 1st level maneuvers. Also, this is a very heavy-handed change, because there are some maneuvers which deal less than standard at-level damage due to also carrying a status effect -- this does not account for that. --DanielDraco 18:34, 25 August 2012 (UTC)


 * If I was a DM, I would talk to anybody who decided on that, since that is pure cheese. Spamming for the first level of classes should always be looked at suspiciously. As for maneuvers that deal less than standard at-level damage, a DM can make the nuanced decision to have the damage lowered by that amount or to raise the level the maneuver is at. And finally, if your only incentive for taking levels in a martial adept class is purely for a higher damage output, then the incentives for the class are too small. --Havvy 05:19, 26 August 2012 (UTC)


 * A reliance on DM fiat for balance is a strong indicator of a very weak system that has very poor innate balance. One should make systems that are in and of themselves balanced, rather than forcing the DM to scrutinize every player's class choices if they were choices that were allowed by the DM. --Ghostwheel 05:34, 26 August 2012 (UTC)


 * This is not a problem with this variant rule anyway...it's a problem with shitty maneuvers. There's plenty of reason to pick some of the higher-level maneuvers, as some of them have pretty good status effects or other riders like "deal 4x damage". Admittedly some maneuvers are total shit, but the lesson here is to write better maneuvers. Surgo 06:27, 26 August 2012 (UTC)


 * While I agree that maneuvers should be reworked for the most part (in my opinion, a given maneuver should do around 2d6 per level of the maneuver if all it does is purely add to damage, see how I would scale them here), this does more to hurt the system than to add to it. It would be better to redo most of the maneuvers to the above damage, though that would take a lot of work. This variant just breaks the system wide open by making lower-level maneuvers for the most part just as good as high-level ones, instead of redoing the higher-level ones to keep pace with the damage that an equivalent-level player should be doing. --Ghostwheel 06:55, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Standardization
I would suggest that, instead of giving the open option between 1d6/IL and 1d6/CR, you make one of them the default rule, and put the other in a sidebar as a variant. As is, a DM might simply say that CSu is being used, and then only later does a player discover, while building their character, that he neglected to make this necessary choice and must now be bothered. And we all know how aggravating it is for the DM when players have to constantly needle them with character creation questions -- so let's minimize it where possible. --DanielDraco 09:28, 24 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Initiator level still scales with half of your other levels, right? Then I vote for IL, because 1d6/CR is laughably easy to abuse with multiclassing. --Foxwarrior 17:27, 24 August 2012 (UTC)