Now that years have passed and we all calmed down, can we finally have a civil discussion of picrelated?

I loved the book and the flavour, but it was too little too late. The problems with martial and caster disparity were far too deeply ingrained in the system to ever be fixed with a single splatbook. To do that, you would need to rip the system's guts out and dig around and rearrange basically everything -- which is more or less what they did with 4e, but we all saw what happened there.

To this day, I still can't tell if people are just trolling or if they actually believe that caster supremacy is "how it should be."

I agree with you, it would have been nice to have more alternative interpretations and ways to implement the maneuvers into existing classes. As it stands, the ToB classes outright supplanted core martials and were better in every conceivable way.

Feats are a poor substitute for class features and they make a poor fix for a broken game

>can we finally have a civil discussion of picrelated?
>implying that's why you started this thread

WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEB SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIT

Just accept that martials are fodder and move on with your life

There is one thing I feel that ToB has that 4e doesn't

Reliable maneuver recovery. ToB maneuvers are around as powerful as 4e encounter powers, but you can regain your maneuvers as many times as you like throughout the fight using various means depending on your class

Recovering encounter powers in 4e is difficult, and is always limited in use itself

ToB/PoW were the only way to play Martials in 3.PF. Maneuver based martials alongside limited casters, tier 3/4, actually makes the game fun and playable.

Sure. I understand what the book did, I just don't like exactly how they did it.

It really did feel like the 3.weeb book of fightan magicians. Swordsages getting fireball explosions, crusaders getting source-less extra damage on attacks, warblades throwing their swords as a fucking line attack and returning to them? Cmon, man.

A lot more effort should have went into polish and keeping that kind of ...I don't know, gritty? feeling of being a martial. To be honest, I don't know how I would have done it myself, and tons of people do like it as is.

that first paragraph: 10/10, well said.

Fantasycraft has a good way of giving martials cool abilities, but its still a bit too meta for me. I'm working on my own system for autismofun and I intend to give martials more "realistic" ways of getting shit done. They definitely do need more options without having to spend a feat for each one, but those options should still not be basically magic, and I just can't accept meta shit like "cause an effect on an enemy with no explanation, 3 turn cooldown before you can do it again" or "can do this 5 times per scene" or some shit.

One of the things that rules-lite people like to hate D&D for is that you can't use your imagination much in fights without a mother-may-I DM relationship. Using a torch to light an enemy on fire? Using pitons or grappling hooks to climb on big enemies? Wrapping someone in your cloak to confuse, distract, or entangle them for a brief moment? Sparsely implemented at best, and even so, you have to take feats to do it.

I tend to like combat where you should inhibit or weaken your enemies in some way before directly attacking them, unless they're quite a bit weaker than you. D&D has a bunch of this, but most of it requires caster help, which is fine because the game is about teamwork. So I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing yet.

See, posts like this are what I mean Is he just trolling, trying to get a rise out of people? Or does he really believe it? It's impossible for me to tell anymore, because this board is just so fucking full of people with absolutely shit taste and bad opinions.

If someone says "caster supremacy is realistic" I can't tell if he means it or not. I know there's at least one person out there who really is a dumb enough motherfucker to believe it.

>I know there's at least one person out there who really is a dumb enough motherfucker to believe it.
One person wiggles his fingers, says some bullshit and reality rearranges itself. The other guy swings a piece of metal.

Clearly they are the same /s

I don't understand

It's 3.5, it's a silly, silly experience in which barbarians are pretty much able to one-shot any level-appropriate enemy from 1 to 20 with a big jumping, pouncing charge, in which it's totally viable to try and pick up a mountain to throw at someone if you're built for it, in which the best samurai use gnomish switchblades and laugh at their katana-wielding counterparts, in which a monk/kensai can totally avoid all damage from a fireball by staring at it really hard

Why the fuck are you looking for grit in 3.5?

And both of those effects can be equivalent in potency, because it's a fantasy world where that is just as believable as the alternative.

Yeah, exactly like this. That's an excellent demonstration of these people. I can't tell if they're trolling or not, and I'm exhausted. I can't bring myself to care anymore.

fpbp

my argument is complex, but I'll try to give it.

A prepared and well-enough-stocked caster is stronger than a martial, barring luck.
Casters are often not totally prepared or well-enough-stocked.
>Yes, yes, tons of spells per day and wands and shit for when not, but if you actually build and play said caster, you'll quickly realize how not true even THAT is
Its better to buff and set up the fighter than to try to blast/summon shit yourself, and two casters instead means your party is much more vulnerable to certain threats
>yeah but my casters can have so many different spells between themselves from a 1000 splats that a fighter would be a waste of a space
If you think there are threats that a full team of casters arent weak to, you have a lazy or incompetent DM
>your DM's just an asshole. The books say 4 equal-CR'd fights a day.
They also give you a table of how strong or weak fights should be, and the chances of each happening. The fights you expect are supposed to be the *average*, sometimes you get ambushed and surrounded by a 150 goblins instead of fighting a single behir, and sometimes you get ambushed and harried while you're trying to rest and rememorize spells, and sometimes you fight enemies that are more effective against casters than martials, etc etc etc

I'm not saying that the game is perfect the way it is: I think martials need more options and less rules against them, and casters need some reigning in, but many people have these unrealistic ideas about how casters perform in games where the DM actually plays the books suggest.

>Why the fuck are you looking for grit in 3.5?
because I like core. Splats ruined it, IMO.

I think maybe my best solution at this point is to just not play D&D anymore. My complaints about caster supremacy were largely addressed with 4e, but the rest of the community whined enough that we're right back to where we started in 5e.

hmm, my first greentex was me talking, not my opponent.

I've never seen a game that lets me do what 3.e does except maybe fantasycraft, which is clearly heavily based on 3.e

Swinging a hunk of sharpened metal cannot help you:
>turn lead into gold and the reverse
>reincarnate the dead
>create the undead
>communicate with other planes
>open up portals to other planes
>create your own planes
>teleport you or someone or something else somewhere else
>fly
>decrease or increase someones age
>grant immorality
>give sentience if not sapience to formerly inanimate objects
>divine the future
>divine the past
>speak to the dead
>speak to animals
>breathe water
>create elements ex nihilo
>make really cool crowd pleasing illusions to thrill and entertain the masses

I can do this all day, but I think you get the point. If a genie showed up in your room and offered you the chance to become either a level 20 fighter or a level 20 mage and you don't answer mage, you are actually, legally, cosmically, and ontologically retarded.

Swinging a bit of metal and waggling your fingers can have exactly the same, or completely different but equally powerful effects.

This is entirely consistent, believable and functional because it is happening in the context of a fantasy world.

How soon you forget your own world's mythologies.

>I've never seen a game that lets me do what 3.e does

What, precisely, does it let you do?

This is true enough, 3.5 offers a very wide range of character options that let you do really, really fun things

Pathfinder may have left it behind, but 3.5 will hold the iaijutsu katana chucker as a legal build forever

I'm surprised this doesn't mention Cuchulainn getting so angry he made a lake evaporate.

What about throwing water balloons full of acid? Wasn't there some build or another that let you do that with incredible power and accuracy?

That's a pathfinder thing, you can sort of do it in 3.5, but in Pathfinder it's more effective

3'5 instead contains the ability to throw anything you can lift over your head, and many, many ways to optimize carrying capacity, resulting in castles, mountains, and potentially the planet your character is on being used as thrown weapons

>Swinging a bit of metal cannot do anything listed in
>This is entirely consistent, believable and coherent martials in fantasy worlds never swing swords to accomplish anything on that list
FTFY

>muh mountain cuttin
>muh sooper strikes
Look at that list again, faggot, and see how much emphasis I put on combat utility and then rethink your retarded cap.

Different guy, but then maybe casters should be low power, high utility.

Mythological wizards, oddly enough, are not known for their destructive powers after all. Could you stomach giving up your fireballs?

thats a huge question
the biggest being that with a rules-heavy game, the DM and players can be on the same page and have a good understanding of what to expect
with rules-lite, the players are gonna be basic bitches, and the DM has to do A TOOOOON of extra work in the creativity and decision-making departments, on top of his already massive workload
I guess I could say, what doesn't it let me do?

>Could you stomach giving up your fireballs?
That nigger couldn't stomach giving up even a single thing. He's one of those faggots who refuses to play any edition but 3.5, I can tell immediately.

I didn't say that there wasn't any combat utility, dumbass. I left it out specifically to demonstrate that the martial can't compete with a caster because a martial is a one-trick pony.

Let's say for sake of argument that martials and casters are equivalent in terms of raw damage. They're not, but let's just run with that. Casters not only have all that damage potential, but they've got all manner of abilities outside of that. So casters, to use your terminology, are high power, high utility, whereas martials are just high power.

>Could you stomach giving up your fireballs?
No more than a martial would give up his sword, or his spear, or gun, or wuxia forms. That's the point. The magic lends itself to doing damage, but is not confined to that role.

As such, since even if martials were equivalent to casters with respects to combat damage, the martial inability to do anything useful outside of combat means that the caster is, without question, the greater of the two.

But there's no actual reason magic should have more powerful than refined martial skill.

It's an entirely invented fantasy concept that has no relation to the real world. You can do it however you like. As much as you insist there's only one way, it doesn't make you any less wrong.

I'm not that guy, but yes.
The proper way to balance casters, IMO, is to make them specialize.

There was a guy on giantitp who made a pdf that redoes the entire magic system, including spells and spellcasting classes. The main thing he did with wizards was make all the best spells be specialist-only, and the not-as-good spells are general. Each wizard has to be a specialist. Sorcerers can pick one specialist spell for every 3 spells they know. Everybody knows spells, there is no preparing, and it's a spell point system.

Fireballs are godawful, so sure. Take ALL the evocation spells, I'll only miss Contingency, and I can just craft those anyways.

>It's an entirely invented fantasy concept that has no relation to the real world.

Fucking this. The whole caster supremacy thing was wholesale a product of tabletop roleplaying games that began in the 1970s. For thousands and thousands of years before that, civilizations have stories and myths of the fantastical deeds of -- brace for it -- warriors.

That's interesting.

As a DM, I don't really prefer rules 'light' games, but I do prefer games that are not convoluted. I find a lot of games much easier to DM than 3.5 simply because they're easier to refluff, rebalance, and jig around with.

Limits are generally something I as DM/GM/whatever set. If players don't like them, they can take a hike - most people play the game to participate in a rip-roaring fantasy adventure, not play second-fiddle in one guy's powerwank.

3.5 and 4 were memes. 2nd edition was the best edition, and 5th is so-so. Just because there are other cheese mongering cluster faggots who cling to 3.5 like it's a fucking leaky tit doesn't mean that all of us do.

Keep trying brainlet.

ITT: assmad rollplay martials

This sounds so good. I wish 5e was like this. I think I need to play some non-D&D games for a while, I'm getting so sick of caster supremacy.

>The magic lends itself to doing damage

Why? It doesn't have to. It's not a real thing, after all.

That said, I don't believe wizards should give up damage. Martials should just be able to pull of greater and more impressive physical feats than they currently can, with more varying mechanical effects. There should be options for them leveraging their talents in interesting ways that make them valuable outside of combat too.

I mean, one of the biggest problems is hack DMs. I remember one guy reporting that, in a hall of mirrors fight, he asked to bounce an arrow off a mirror at a foe round a corner, and the DM made it some insanely high DC feat. Whereas the wizard got to do this for free when he asked to do the same thing with lightning (despite lightning not being, like, reflective or anything). Since most DMs won't allow martials to do anything cool unless it's explicitly stated in the rules they can do it, it needs to be in the rules.

>casters should be low power, high utility
This works in a low-fantasy setting, but we're not talking about that. OP brought up the weeabo book of fitan magic, so we're obviously talking high power settings.

This is the root of the double standard, kind of.

People keep trying to pair high fantasy magic with low fantasy martials and act as if the pairing makes perfect sense.

It works fine if you have high fantasy martials alongside high fantasy magic, or low fantasy magic alongside low fantasy martials, but the mismatch is what breaks things.

High fantasy martials alongside low fantasy magic would be just as bad.

>I find a lot of games much easier to DM than 3.5
No doubt. It's very difficult to DM well.

>Limits are generally something I as DM/GM/whatever set. If players don't like them, they can take a hike - most people play the game to participate in a rip-roaring fantasy adventure, not play second-fiddle in one guy's powerwank.
Well, see
for my thoughts on that.

I can't say I'm all the much on board for the "rip-roaring" part, though I think every good adventure has AT LEAST one good section with some thrilling action (rooftop chase, massive scary battle that looks like you won't survive, etc), preferably several, but where most of the adventure lets you go at a nice controlled pace.

I agree, and I think that's D&D's problem, as a whole. They try to make martials down-to-earth gritty low-fantasy warrior types, but then throw in casters who can do literally anything with a few magic words, and the devs are completely oblivious to the dissonance.

Maybe you should go back to *eddit if strangers' opinions bother you so much. I play RIFTS and I don't believe in enforcing balance. Player wants to use a tougher to play character? Let them. It's not league of legends, and "balance" is a videogaming term made for spoiled children. The team should balance itself, they don't need a system that sacrifices realism just to hold their hands and coddle them.

They weren't in 4e.

>Why? It doesn't have to. It's not a real thing, after all.
That's a retarded argument, and if you don't know it then you should feel bad about yourself. People try to weaponize everything, and if there were some way to do a chicken dance and make the universe spit out some useful reaction based off of that, you know motherfuckers would be finding ways to hammer dance fools into paste.

>I mean, one of the biggest problems is hack DMs
You're not wrong there. There's a way to design campaigns and encounters such that everyone gets a chance to be the hero. For the instance you mentioned, yeah, I would have made it a high DC check but I also would likely have fucked with the wizard for trying to bounce electricity off of a fucking mirror. Unless its some kind of magic mirror, that's just retarded. Some type of light-based spell though? That would have been fair game, but may have been a DC check depending on the nature of the spell.

And what if magic in that particular setting just doesn't have many effective or efficient ways to inflict harm?

The scope and limitations of magic is entirely up to the whim of the creator of the fiction.

>realism
There's that word again.

Thank you. Holy shit, the amount of stupid video game logic, reasoning, and mechanics that's made its way into tabletop games is retarded. If you want to play a tank, go download wow. It's okay for character classes to be unbalanced, because at the end of it some things are more powerful than others. They just fucking are. Learn to have fun and not get assmad just because someone does an end zone dance or whatever.

>because at the end of it some things are more powerful than others. They just fucking are.
So it's just like real life.

And what if licorice was a dormant form of Azathoth. Well, fuck, I don't know. We aren't talking about a series of what if's or what could be's. If you want a game or a system that solves "caster supremacy," then go make it. Fucking hell, you are insipid. It's not a vidya that refuses to be modded. It's an imagination game with pen and paper. Make it how you want it.

Fuck you and your shitty game design.

Tabletop games had the concept of balance well before vidya ever existed, and it's important for a fucking reason.

And before you pull some shit about balance being competitive only, fuck you. Balance is just as important in cooperative games, where letting everyone feel involved and participate in the game is something every system ever should aspire to achieve. That does not mean everyone has to be the same or do the same things, but the system should be designed so that one player won't get fucked over and have less fun because the system itself lied to them and told them that choice was equivalent to another.

>Balance is just as important in cooperative games, where letting everyone feel involved and participate in the game is something every system ever should aspire to achieve.
You know who has perfect and complete control over that, user? You do. Or the DM and the players, really. Tabletop games are there to provide the means to tell a cooperative story. If that story sucks, well, at the end of the day it's the fault of the people telling it. Maybe invest more in story, roleplay, and narrative rather than who gets how many d whatevers. You might have more fun that way.

That the GM can do it is not an excuse for shitty game design. A good, well designed system supports the GM and makes their job easier. A system that is properly balanced means the GM has less extra work to do, trying to balance a mechanically uneven party on the fly, and instead lets them focus on the actually fun parts of running the game.

You do know that the most overpowered things are in core, right?

>Lol system is bad? Just jury rig it
Fuck you

It did a lot to address the power gap between classes. I force my players to use it for martial character archetypes.

>waa, waa, this thing isn't perfectly tailored to my individual tastes so it's bad!
Yeah, we're done here.

...Saying that products should be well designed is whining now?

Most games aren't, but you can still aspire to it as a design goal. It's also not impossible to like games which fail at this. I love a lot of badly designed games, but I still acknowledge their flaws as bad design.

No, not really. People hear about them and assume a bunch of shit, but if you really know the books, it's not true. Or it is true, but it comes with a really heavy price.

Anytime somebody starts a post with "You do realize" I immediately pass over it. But you said "know" and not "realize" so you squeaked by.

everyone is worse
remove everyone

Which high price do you exactly pay for, say, Natural Spell

Frank Trollman is a nigger.

The problem with that line of thinking is that 4e is a trash game for trash players. Play a real edition of D&D (pre-3e).

Or you could just not play 3e.

No, they'll never be equivalent, you dumb motherfucker, because the wizard has mechanically-coded options that the fighter will never have. If you want those options, play a caster. If you don't, play a non-caster. Not hard to figure out.

All you're doing is stating the way things are. That has no relevance to questions of why they have to be that way.

Well, animals typically don't have good AC, for one, and the wild or beasthide or whatever enhancements cost a good bit of money, so you won't see them until like 10th or so.

Second, dungeons typically have a lot of stairs, ladders, 5ftx5ft tunnels or tighter, which your bear or whatever may have trouble with.

Also, I believe it takes an action to wildshape, though it does last a long time.

It's obviously a must-take feat, so it's really good, but not so good I have to ban it.

>Leadership
>Planar Binding abuse
>Wish loops
>Shapechange and to a lesser extent Polymorph
>CoDzilla

B-b-b-but mah Na-rew-toes!

>Leadership
More exp to share and a bunch of weaklings to worry about.
>Planar Binding abuse
Very expensive, takes a long time. Anything you summon can be banished with a single spell.
>Wish loops
Nope. Wish is heavily reliant on DM permission. Give a detailed argument if you want me to fight this one.
>Shapechange and to a lesser extent Polymorph
There you go. That's a tough one to argue against. Polymorph is pretty broken, but they face many of the same issues as the druid, to a lesser extent, and it can be dispelled as well.
>CoDzilla
Takes several rounds to get going and can be dispelled away. An elite-array cleric will be on par with an enlarged fighter, give or take, minus the bonus feats. A cleric statted to a fighter will be stronger, but relatively suck at cleric stuff. Not a big deal to me. DMM persist is where it becomes a problem.

>why they have to be that way
Because that's how Gary Gygax and Tom Moldvay and Dave Arneson did the game. If you don't want that shit (I don't), you can either

>not play D&D
>homebrew some shit

I am fully cognizant of the problems inherent to the D&D system, so I liberally apply house rules. Fighter wants to learn how to enchant his sword with flame? Yeah, that can be done. Rogue wants to learn how to create illusions? Sure, let's figure out how we can work this into your character's training. Warlock (lol warlocks) wants to learn magic missile? Yeah, your class is shitty anyway, so go for it.

>More exp to share and a bunch of weaklings to worry about.

nigga they have class levels.

>Anything you summon can be banished with a single spell.

implying that random monsters aside from liches or dragons can reliably beat the DC...

>Nope. Wish is heavily reliant on DM permission. Give a detailed argument if you want me to fight this one.

Wish has codified, RAW actions it allows that do not require DM permission. Wishing for infinite wishes still lets you cast infinite 8th-level spells.

You're right about Clerics, sort of, but the important thing is that an expert fighter's special gear can also "be dispelled away" and then they're some schmuck with at best 1d3+str fisting fists and a couple bonus attacks. At least a Cleric can cast spells after he's been disarmed.

Well, 4e managed it. But given how much people hated 4e, I can see the argument that those flaws are inherent to what a lot of people identify as D&D. Fixing them stops it being the same game.

Not how Leadership works, 10 minutes and for free isn't expensive, "I wish for a candle of invocation" and proceed to efreeti loop as long as you want, dispelling doesn't work reliably without a CL advantage, which enables you to do far worse things to a party than dispelling a single target.

>nigga they have class levels.
yeah, commer, expert, or warrior, up to like 6th, I think

>implying that random monsters aside from liches or dragons can reliably beat the DC...
it takes too long to cast to use it against random monsters, and if it tags along with the party, I think they have to share exp with it. You're correct though, aside from npc enemy casters.

>Wishing for infinite wishes still lets you cast infinite 8th-level spells.
It also says that wishing for too great an effect (like infinite wishes) comes with a disastrous result. Also, 5000exp cost.

> expert fighter's special gear can also "be dispelled away"
for a few rounds, I think? Even so, it's only the magic, not the gear itself. Unless you meant like rusting grasp in an indirect way, in which case there's an argument about getting into melee range, making your attack, his gear failing the saves, etc.

Leadership isn't restricted to NPC classes at all. One of the more broken uses of it is for spellcaster crafting bitches that never even touch combat.

>yeah, commer, expert, or warrior, up to like 6th, I think

I'm talking about the ones who matter. You get one cohort of your choice with legit class levels (who can even take Leadership). They're two levels below you. The rest of the group members get up to 6th level in any class, but you don't necessarily get to pick which one.

>It also says that wishing for too great an effect (like infinite wishes) comes with a disastrous result. Also, 5000exp cost.

This is why you wish for a ring of wishes, not Wish the spell. You only pay the cost once.

>for a few rounds, I think? Even so, it's only the magic, not the gear itself. Unless you meant like rusting grasp in an indirect way, in which case there's an argument about getting into melee range, making your attack, his gear failing the saves, etc.

Mordenkainen's Disjunction destroys the enchantments in your equipment forever. It's also the only spell capable of bypassing the shaped Antimagic Field on a prepared Cleric (20% chance of successfully dispelling the field at level 20).

>Not how Leadership works
prove it
>10 minutes and for free isn't expensive
planar ally is expensive, planar binding is dangerous and not guaranteed to work
>"I wish for a candle of invocation" and proceed to efreeti loop as long as you want
huge exp cost, and you have to be lawful evil, but it does technically work, I'll give you that

Planar Binding isn't there to mop up encounters for you, it's for expanding your repertoire through outsider SLAs. Or breaking the game by enabling wish spam, your choice.

There's no exp cost for getting a Candle. It's 8,400 gold per item, and since "Create Magic Item" is one of the RAW effects of a wish (that will always occur) you can just keep doing it.

how about that
3.0 explicity states they must be commoners, experts, or warriors, but I don't see anything about that in 3.5. They still cap out at 6th, however.

>spellcaster crafting bitches
Yeah, but they expend exp like anybody else. Once they drop a level, they have to earn it back the hard way.

>This is why you wish for a ring of wishes
the cost there being 21k exp, which is more than the cost of three wishes

>Mordenkainen's Disjunction
Is a 9th level spell, and it allows will saves for each item. Even so, the item isn't destroyed, it just loses its magic.

read the xp costs of the wish spell. You must pay TWICE the exp creation cost of the magic item PLUS 5000 exp

I was wrong here:
the ring would cost like 37k or something

>2017 A.D.
>Still has to explain why 3.5 is shit

A game doesn't have to work like that. When you play RIFTS or AD&D, you're agreeing to do something which is not fair, not easy, but good at replicating what you want out of a fantasy experience.

For me, that means that a juicer is not and should never be "balanced" with an archaeologist. The former is a chemically crafted combat machine designed to be so quick and powerful that it dies of exertion within ten years. The latter is just a scientist. Can the two find a reason to join together? Sure, but the reality of the setting cannot accommodate absolute equality between two inherently unequal people, just because the players choose to bring them together. That said, the players have a choice to balance themselves. Either they all play roughly equal classes, or they agree to, as a team, cover for their differences. The scientist gets to fly the sky king they found. The fighter gets to wear the magic armor. Etc. I prefer that a game present an interesting, realistic, and varied set of character options than baby me with millions of statistically equal, thoroughly playtested optimized-fun packages.

It's a different case if the game bills itself as balanced but isn't. Some players prefer a balanced system and that's fine - it should exist to fill that niche. I don't personally fit that description but I disagree with the labelling of my preference as a game player as "shit taste" or "bad design".

Class features make a poor substitute for good game design, and make a poor fix for a broken paradigm.

Spells and manuvers are literally just bettet feats given out for free to specific classes while requiring others to stick to the worse and less numerous lists. Getting rid of spellcasting as a class feature and making spells individual feats flattens the power curve.

It didn't fix the basic disparity, but it did do a bit to even out the power gap, and it made them more interesting to play, which is a serious improvement.

But you lose absolutely nothing by having the system be balanced at a default. You can always unbalance it later easily by adding or taking away stuff.

If the system has a warrior and alchemist class that are balanced with eachother, then it's trivial to make the warrior start two levels higher so he's the undisputed king of combat, while taking away abilities from the alchemist so he's just a skill monkey without any real combat options other than maybe tripping a trap to hit an enemy.

It's absolutely trivial to unbalance a game. It's a lot more difficult to make an unbalanced game balanced. Why should I do the hard part instead of the writer of the system?

But none of that is actually hurt by the system being balanced.

All those options could still exist in the same system, it's question of whether the system presents them as equal or not. If each one has a little number saying how powerful it is, letting people know explicitly how different elements of the system line up, then it's still a balanced system.

Although, it's also possibly to have characters of wildly different in universe power levels that are still equal in the hands of the players. It just tends to require metamechanics and other narrative design, like how Dresden Files handles the gap between mortals and supernaturals. It isn't perfect, but it has the right idea, matching supernatural potential against plot armour and influence.

>All it does is give martials more damage
Scaling fire resistance
Summoning
Scent
Shutting down charges
Disabling AoOs
Directly penalizing enemies for not attacking you

This is just level 1 maneuvers.

Tome of battle stuff does offer martial classes a fair amount of utility. It is enough to put them on par with the mid-tier classes like Bard, which I'd say is a rather good spot for them to be in.

The big issue is that people didn't like the way it was presented, and that it still didn't fix the balance gulf because full casters are literally gods thanks to how few restrictions they actually have.

Reframe all those maneuvers as 'skill feats' with less weird names and people would have far less of an issue with it.

Cohorts and companions that come from class features or feats aren't factored into ECL.