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Also he is trying to give the flexibility out of combat. I would happily drop my dorm down some in order to ha e more things to do in social encounters. Which to me are arguably more important. Not only that making it so he only needs a few ranks in swim and climb and can help the party arent bad things this means he can spend thise valuable skill ranks else where and help his party out of combat. Hey look the wizard doesn't have to cast spider climb to get up anything they see they have to climb that means they benefit too. Why because they get to keep that spell slot for something else.
Ugh, please leave the fighter bashing to the other thousand threads.
And Ssalarn, my friend, on the off chance that some smart publisher picks this up, I recommend saying your adieu to this thread :-)
Fighter and wizard at late levels Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit: http://youtu.be/zFuMpYTyRjw
On the subject; I did feel that fighter is built for versatility but its low skill count and mundaneness hinders it from getting a lot of love, so I think courage as a subflavor will leave it room to gain more (Ex) abilities by virtue of being ridiculously brave. Honestly I have no idea why the class with bravery isn't outright immune to fear effects when another is.
Swallowed Pride, Malwing, and Divineshadow please try to keep the Discussion of the Fighter's balance out of this thread. This is not a place for balance discussion. It is for gauging interest and gathering ideas together for these "bravery" feats.
Please do not take this post as me being mean, its just that this really is not the forum section for this.
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Swallowed Pride, Malwing, and Divineshadow please try to keep the Discussion of the Fighter's balance out of this thread. This is not a place for balance discussion. It is for gauging interest and gathering ideas together for these "bravery" feats.
Please do not take this post as me being mean, its just that this really is not the forum section for this.
Sorry not what I was trying to do there. Was trying to explain the reason for the OP's idea. A and I think our OP has taken his leave lol.
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Ssalarn, I commend your ingenuity, and a lot of these ideas are both well-designed and flavorful! But unfortunately, it seems to me that this project's goals are at least partly self-defeating, and I wonder if you could offer your thoughts on this.
The primary goal of this supplement appears to be expanding the fighter's narrative power and options out of combat, and simultaneously addressing the weakness of the bravery class feature, by giving the class a range of feat options that extend bravery to other applications, functionally making the fighter more adroit both in and out of combat. The other major goal of the supplement is to do this without invalidating existing core materials -- i.e. without making abilities that are "strictly better" than existing abilities.
The core of your solution is frankly brilliant: in order to buff the fighter without also boosting other classes, create a bunch of feats that amplify an underwhelming, fighter-exclusive ability by tying it to other abilities. This mostly keeps the new feats from creeping into other classes while solving the first goal of shoring up bravery's deficiencies.
My concern, though, is that one of two things will result from this proposed supplement. (Note: I'm here assuming that one of the major premises of your project -- the claim that fighters lack narrative power relative to other classes -- is true. I agree with the claim, but I think it's important to make that underlying assumption explicit.)
1) In order to access these new abilities, the fighter must spend their primary class resource -- combat feats -- on bravery feats, making feat choice a tradeoff between additional combat effectiveness (or more traditional skill feats) and making bravery useful. This, in itself, isn't a bad thing! BUT if this tradeoff doesn't seem to be worthwhile, or if it's on an even footing with the fighter's existing options, the fighter isn't any less "behind the curve" overall in comparison with other classes.
2) The other possible outcome is that if Bravery feats do sufficiently expand the fighter's narrative power to bring them closer to par with other classes, they functionally become "must-pick" feats for any player who wants their fighter to be useful out of combat. Implicitly, this invalidates existing material -- because even without making a "strictly better" version of other feats, if bravery feats are significantly more attractive/viable than the others available to fighters, existing feats become relatively poor options. Moreover, this devalues fighter archetypes that replace bravery, because they get locked out of access to these options without a comparable replacement.
Ultimately, it seems like the only way to make the fighter better in comparison to other classes involves changing the fighter class in some way -- which means (yes, even in this case) either buffing the old class features/options, or introducing new ones which render the old obsolete. I don't think it's possible, by definition, to have it both ways.
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Ssalarn, I commend your ingenuity, and a lot of these ideas are both well-designed and flavorful! But unfortunately, it seems to me that this project's goals are at least partly self-defeating, and I wonder if you could offer your thoughts on this.
The primary goal of this supplement appears to be expanding the fighter's narrative power and options out of combat, and simultaneously addressing the weakness of the bravery class feature, by giving the class a range of feat options that extend bravery to other applications, functionally making the fighter more adroit both in and out of combat. The other major goal of the supplement is to do this without invalidating existing core materials -- i.e. without making abilities that are "strictly better" than existing abilities.
The core of your solution is frankly brilliant: in order to buff the fighter without also boosting other classes, create a bunch of feats that amplify an underwhelming, fighter-exclusive ability by tying it to other abilities. This mostly keeps the new feats from creeping into other classes while solving the first goal of shoring up bravery's deficiencies.
My concern, though, is that one of two things will result from this proposed supplement. (Note: I'm here assuming that one of the major premises of your project -- the claim that fighters lack narrative power relative to other classes -- is true. I agree with the claim, but I think it's important to make that underlying assumption explicit.)
1) In order to access these new abilities, the fighter must spend their primary class resource -- combat feats -- on bravery feats, making feat choice a tradeoff between additional combat effectiveness (or more traditional skill feats) and making bravery useful. This, in itself, isn't a bad thing! BUT if this tradeoff doesn't seem to be worthwhile, or if it's on an even footing with the fighter's existing options, the fighter isn't any less "behind the curve" overall in comparison with other classes.
2) The other possible outcome is...
Thanks for joining the thread! And apologies to everyone else who was conversing without me providing input, I had a very busy weekedn and didn't get very much time online.
Let me start by touching on your first point, that is, the comparative expenditure of resources. While I've been busily chugging away on refining and tuning these feats, my link from earlier will show that one of the first batches I did included feats that addressed each combat maneuver, allowign the Fighter some unique facility with that maneuver and the ability to add his Bravery bonus to it. As you're probably aware, Combat Maneuvers are very expensive (typically 3+ feats per maneuver to get full facility out of it), and oftentimes highly situational. So these Bravery-based maneuver feats are essentially a cheap buy in, providing you a small scaling bonus that eventually outstrips that given by the normal feat chains without giving you all of the extra attacks and special abilities involved. If you want to be really good at tripping, you could take both sets, but the real goal here is to lower the opportunity cost for you to "dip a toe" into a maneuver. Because of this set up, you're actually gaining more combat options and flexibility; if it turns out trying to be a trip master was a bad idea because the campaign was full of creatures that are either impossible or effectively impossible to trip, you're only trading out one feat. Even if you decide to stick with it, you've still only had to allocate a small portion of your resources, and while you won't get all the normal goodies as seen in the Imp. and Greater versions, you're still uniquely competent. So, scaling bonuses, lower opportunity cost without serious overlap of existing feats, greater total flexibility for the Fighter.
As to option 2-
Part of your concern is specifically why I tied the feats to Bravery. It's individually pretty terrible, so turning it into a pseudo-Qinggong archetype for the Fighter helps keep core competitive. When you look at some of the stuff that Bravery gets traded for you start seeing how even the Paizo team recognizes its weakness; almost universally when Bravery gets traded, it is traded for something substantially better, like the Roughrider's Steadfast Mount or the Lorewarden's trading Bravery +1 for the entry feat required for the bulk of maneuvers. The Bravery feats aren't going to completely invalidate the existing chains; some of them will be more focused or lack the the abilities that are key to their core counterparts, but they will expand the FIghter's total flexibility and make him more the warleader and master of all weapons that he is supposed to be. I think most people who decide to use the feats will probably find that they end up taking a specific selection of bravery feats that open up their swift action for use and either complement an intended path or give them that extra trick they can bust out every now and then.
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So there was a lot of fun ideas and good insight that came from this discussion, and I thought that I'd let everyone who participated know that it bore fruit.
Fruit for the fruit god!
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Fruit for the fruit god!
And lo, he tasted of it's sweet nectar and did find it pleasing. And then did he say unto those who followed the way of fruit "Go forth, and purchase yon belinked supplement, that your Fighters may be fruitful and multiply".
***Edit***
Just to be clear, these are Bravery feats, not Martial Fertility feats, though that would certainly impact the argument regarding narrative power betwixt martials and casters....