Big Dummy's page

Although I rarely play Melee types very much, I will be very interested to see what you and HD come up with as House Rules for the Melee artists.

Another review came out on the codex... apparently from another one of the staff reviewers at RPGNow. Slightly annoying that he says I'm not trying to make combat realistic, since I was (everything in there is right out of HEMA and a few other historical martial arts systems) it's just that I was also trying not to make it complex, but, given what he meant, in an indirect way it's a compliment.

The two most important lines relative to this thread were:

"The Codex Martialis is a book that completely succeeds in its goals of making d20 combat into a more dynamic, tactical exercise."

and

"...if ordinary d20 combat is boring and no longer fun, this book is the answer."

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_reviews_info.php?products_id=58045&am p;reviews_id=19154

G.

Bagpuss wrote:

You later mention Power Attack and Combat Expertise. You are aware that they're both pretty much nerfed in PFRPG? As an aside, Mattastrophic and Jess Door make an extremely persuasive case that they should both be combat options open to all, rather than feats (much less nerfed feats).

I have, and I am oh so unhappy about it. I hope they either return the feats or just make them open options...

You should really try a Martial Pool man you'll like it... good alternative to the standard way of dealing with fighting defensively, full combat options, AoO, combat expertise, power attack and all that silly stuff without getting bogged down in tons of arithmetic.

I'm just sayin.

BD..

Exactly. All of those issues (great consise list, BTW) apply to Barbarian's, Rangers & Paladins (& Rogues!).

Hell, melee Clerics should be able to interrupt now and then, too.
The nerfing of both iterative attacks w/ movement, and the interrupt mechanism (which was linked with Casting Time in 2nd Ed.) affects ALL melee characters to the detriment of spellcasters.

Beyond specific Feats which could at least partially return the previous functionality (definitely justifiable, IMHO, since spellcasting lost NOTHING and gained TONS in 3/3.5), I think Initiative Actions (Ready, Delay) and Spellcast-Interruption could be looked at in themselves.

Myself, having started in 2nd edition, the 'casting time' mechanism made sense and even gave high lever casters SOME reason to cast lower level spells. It had a more interesting dynamic in that melee characters' init speed tends to stay the same, but casters' init tends to slow if they use their highest spells. And I like how init speed even applied to melee characters, giving the 'heavy 2h smashers' slower init than quick weapons. 2nd Ed. gave SOME advantage to casting a lower level spell vs. your highest one. 3.5's Quicken Spell is just a FREEBIE, nothing else... Yet 3.5's Melee types don't have their OWN Immediate/Swift Actions (I like the direction Paizo has gone with the Barbarian with this.)

I don't know if we'll go back to that system (Casting Time/Weapon Speed), but I think Ready & Delay need to become easier to use and less penalizing - Such as if you ready an action but your trigger doesn't occur, you can still take a standard action before the next turn's first initiative. This tactic is very limited anyways, since no matter what, it only works for one round, after that, you can't "interrupt" any more (possibly if your DEX/ init mod is higher you could...?) Characers shouldn't be screwed for TRYING to use it's one-round advantage, and be forced to lose their action because their exact trigger didn't occur.

Concentration seems very ripe for...

I agree with a lot of these issues people have raised about Fighters and Combat in 3.5. We came up with a house rule based on using a "roll many / keep one" dice system four years ago, which we have found really brings a lot of flexibility and dynamic qualities back to a fighter and to combat in general in our games. It was so successful that I made it the basis of a new martial-arts based combat supplement PDF I did which is doing pretty well now, but the basic mechanic which we call "Martial Pool" is Open Content so anybody can use it.

I've described it in detail in the thread linked below on EnWorld if anyone is interested, someone there saw this thread and recommended I post a comment here about it.

Link to thread

this is another related thread about using historical basis for ideas to make gaming (and combat) more interesting.

BD