I really like the idea of the Fighting Styles presented in the book and was wondering if anyone could give us some ideas of how they work in actual play. Do PCs use them? How succesful are they? Are they too succesful? etc.
Thanks
Fighting Styles in Play
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malladin_ben
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Well, we've been playing with them in our games for a good while now. Not just for Etherscope, either. You can find otehr PDFs with fighting techniques in them in earlier Malladin's Gate Products.
I think we didn't get the balance right in earlier versions of the rule (when first introduced in Unearthed Adventurers), but these in Etherscope are much toned-down from those early ones.
What we find in play, whatever game we use them in, is that they enable a combat character to multiclass around a bit and become very flavoured to their concept without drastically affecting their feat progression if they take too many steps outside of Fighter. You still don't come close to a fighter, and if you've been spending points on developing these skills cross-class in some of your classes , you'll not be as effective skills-wise as, say, a rogue. You also find that while a FT using character may come close to a figher in terms of feats, they invariably have less hp and base attack. The FTs are also quite restrictive, so you end up slowing down your atacking force as you try and get yourself into position for those big manoeuvre combos, which almost always fail, even with a maxed out skill in the technique.
Having played a fighter/wizard character in an Eberron campaign that used an FT I found I was on a combat par with the party's druid (who was admittedly about as combat oriented as a druid can get), but not a patch on the party's fighter. I'm sure we would have had some objections from other players if the character had been too powerful. He was pretty lethal on occasion (doing 5d6+24 damage, but that was with a +2 flaming rapier), but this happened maybeonce per combat, and probably cost me a couple of AoOs against me to pull it off, most of the time I did a fairly normal (for a 11th level character) 3d6+6 (a fighter could do similar with the a flaming greatsword and hit more often).
Does that help? I too would be interested to see anyone else's thoughts on them...
I think we didn't get the balance right in earlier versions of the rule (when first introduced in Unearthed Adventurers), but these in Etherscope are much toned-down from those early ones.
What we find in play, whatever game we use them in, is that they enable a combat character to multiclass around a bit and become very flavoured to their concept without drastically affecting their feat progression if they take too many steps outside of Fighter. You still don't come close to a fighter, and if you've been spending points on developing these skills cross-class in some of your classes , you'll not be as effective skills-wise as, say, a rogue. You also find that while a FT using character may come close to a figher in terms of feats, they invariably have less hp and base attack. The FTs are also quite restrictive, so you end up slowing down your atacking force as you try and get yourself into position for those big manoeuvre combos, which almost always fail, even with a maxed out skill in the technique.
Having played a fighter/wizard character in an Eberron campaign that used an FT I found I was on a combat par with the party's druid (who was admittedly about as combat oriented as a druid can get), but not a patch on the party's fighter. I'm sure we would have had some objections from other players if the character had been too powerful. He was pretty lethal on occasion (doing 5d6+24 damage, but that was with a +2 flaming rapier), but this happened maybeonce per combat, and probably cost me a couple of AoOs against me to pull it off, most of the time I did a fairly normal (for a 11th level character) 3d6+6 (a fighter could do similar with the a flaming greatsword and hit more often).
Does that help? I too would be interested to see anyone else's thoughts on them...
Yeah, thanks ben that does help. I have been thinking about adapting them for use with a d20 Modern driven fantasy game (we are playing Eberron and I don't want our next game to be to comperable so no straight Etherscope). What are the other products that feature fighting styles and which do you think is the best outside of Etherscope?
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malladin_ben
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Modern Heroes: Martial Avengers is a D20 Modern product which has a number of modern-style FTs in it, which are in exactly the same format as Etherscope. If you're into fantasy-based D20 Modern, check out DarkLore, whih is preciesely that, with a load of extra flavour thrown in. That two has FTs in it. Whilst these are in a different (more powerful) form than Etherscope and MA you can probably just tone them down a bit by dropping the highest DC manoeuvre, making the first feat on the stance list a required feat instead, and changing the ranks that the character gets their feats at more spread out intervals (similar tothose in Escope). I think you might be able to get away with more feats in a fantasy game than a modern one, as there's many more available and less bonus feats available to the characters (even in DarkLore, which is D20 Modern based). Old style (too powerful) FTs can be found in Martial Avengers, which might be worth a look for a fantasy game just because there's so many of them and they're all the fantasy archetypes. That said, I think you'd need to convert them in a similar manner to as I suggested for DarkLore, but these have no requirement feats, so you'll need to make the first two feats requirements.
Cheerio,
Ben
Cheerio,
Ben