Complete Sublime (3.5e Sourcebook)/Introduction

Introduction
''My name is Asher, Ebon Phoenix Lord. I have trained with the finest minds that Reshar's experiment produced, but found it was not enough - for there was still much out there he did not discover. Where he wanders now is not my concern, but at the same time, his students, and I among them, have learned many things in our journeys. In some ways, he was a genius, but in others, he messed up. We are here to correct these deficiencies. Read this text, and learn from it, if you want to be prepared for what you will face.''

- Asher

''Don't let Mister Gloom-And-Doom over there scare ya! There's lots to learn that Reshar missed, sure, but it's gonna be fun! Think of it - guns! Every step of this book's gonna be awesome. Oh, my name is Avara, by the way.''

- Avara

''...sigh. Kids these days.''

- Arminius

So, what's this all about?
Martial maneuvers, and everything that came with them, was one of the most interesting products that came out of the entire 3.5E line. However, it received relatively little support from WotC, and with the change to 4E, the huge potential that it had was essentially strangled in its grave. To make matters worse, not all of the content in the Tome of Battle was everything it was cut out to be - some disciplines were totally better than others (compare Diamond Mind to Stone Dragon), while a lot of potential options (such as a discipline for ranged weapons) were completely overlooked and never expanded upon.

These make us unhappy, and in the true spirit of this wiki, we decided to do it ourselves. Complete Sublime is designed to do all the things that WotC did not do - give expansion options to martial adepts that allow them to have the flexibility and power to do things people want, and give balanced and useful options to everyone, but martial adepts first and foremost. Furthermore, we want to add more flavour to the stories around the Sublime Way to allow more stories to be told by those who practice it.

Finally, we acknowledge that other attempts to make DnD more balanced have existed, such as the E6 ruleset. Little integration between these attempts and Tome of Battle occur. Sections of this book attempt to rectify this.

Our chosen balance point
This sourcebook is balanced towards the rogue level of balance. This is for the following reasons: firstly, the Tome of Battle is a strong example of rogue-level play; secondly, due to public opinion; and lastly, game relation. As a result of these considerations, we have decided that this is the strongest choice of balance level for this sourcebook.

Firstly, the Tome of Battle being a rather nice example of rogue-level combat. Characters get cool powers, can beat things up well with big numbers or nice effects, but aren't omnipotent and can't destroy encounters in a single round, though you can usually destroy at least one creature in one round. This is something many agree on is a good level of play, both easy on the GM and the players, and likewise 'feels' right to a large number of people. Therefore, the rogue level of play seems to make sense for expansion content to the Tome of Battle, which is very much where we see this.

Secondly, Tome of Battle, similarly to psionics, tends to have a completely-undeserved reputation for being unbalanced or broken. While neither of these is true, for people who wish to get content approved by GMs, making it any more powerful (as wizard-level also has a reputation for being unbalanced or broken) would likely give more ammunition for erroneous opinions. Thus, we're gonna keep things reasonably sane.

Lastly, the rogue level of balance can be slotted into any game without ending up being a liability or an overpowering influence relatively easily, which is not as true of other balance levels. Since we want this content to be used by as many people as possible, this level of balance seemed very sensible.

Thus, we are going to stick to the rogue level of balance in this sourcebook.

Credit where credit is due
Aside from the credited contributors, we would like to thank TheDementedOne, for allowing us to use his Black Rain Discipline.