Question about D&D 3.5. I've heard that an unarmed Swordsage is better than the Monk...

Question about D&D 3.5. I've heard that an unarmed Swordsage is better than the Monk. But how do you actually go about making one? Is it really as easy as taking Improved Unarmed Strike at first level and just taking Swordsage levels?

There's a suggestion for a variant in the book that describes how you would do it.

Tome of Battle, page 20, under "adaptation". It is basically an Alternative Class Feature, where you trade the Swordsage's light armour proficiency for Improved Unarmed Strike and unarmed damage as per Monk.

Didn't really want to try and modify the class like that, but it seems harmless enough. Thanks.

It's a legit change cited in the same book as the class, so it's not even a real ACF per se, more like a subset of the class itself. You could say it's between an actual ACF and the choice you get with Rangers of which bonus feat you want with your Fighting Style.

that's weird the picture you posted won't load.

what's swordsage? sounds retarded

Read the Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords. It's one of the only decent supplements to come out for 3.5, giving the system actually good martial character options.

What is wrong with your post man? How'd you do that?

The name Swordsage is indeed retarded, as is the fluff in the entire book. However, the rules for it are clearly meant to replace Rogues and Monks, they just slapped on some bullshit fluff because they did not want to admit it was an experiment for the next edition of D&D.

His post looks normal to me, its probably an error on your side.

Weird. Well, I still don't know what the hell you guys are talking about, I can't read a chunk of that post. Is this some kind of homebrew book you guys are talking about? What experiment?

No, it is not a homebrew book. Tome of Battle: the Book of Nine Swords is an official supplement to D&D 3.5 published by Wizards of the Coast in August 2006.

Okay whatever man neat trick, ha ha, cool joke on the new guy.

Fuck off

whatever bit you're trying to do isn't landing

I don't understand.

Unarmed Swordsage is better than Monks purely because their options aren't limited to stand in one spot and Flurry

But what do I know the only time I ever played one was in a Gestalt campaign

It's novel. You'll have to give him that.

To be fair, so is the Arcane Swordsage and that is retarded broken.

You're getting trolled, bro. Some dude's decided to pretend that the Book of Nine Swords doesn't exist, comlete with saying any post mentioning it is nonsensical or broken. My guess is that he's a hardcore 3.5 fan who feels that the book is 2stronk because the classes in it are better than an unoptimized core fighter. He probably posts in /pfg/ about how the unchained monk is OP and the original version was perfectly good enough.

I have a friend that unironically believes ToB is overpowered. It hurts me every time we talk about it.

I have one, too. He gets this look on his face whenever I mention disciplines or maneuvers. He'll happily talk about "god-wizard" builds, but thinks that ToB is worse than psionics(which he also thinks is OP).

If anything, Tome of Battle is not powerful enough. My own group uses pdf related as our "fighter" class: it is a mix of Swordsage and Warblade, and has the strengths of both.

Looks cool user