Mechanical Notes on 3.5 Warlock, Dragonfire Adept, Factotum, Spellthief, Tome of Battle Initiators

Intro
Greetings, all!

I originally posted this as a reply to the Marshal Base Class thread, but I reposted this here for the sake of convenience.

Spell-like Abilities, Metamagic, Warlocks, and Dragonfire Adepts
By the rules as written, SLAs are effected by metamagic that specifically affects SLAs: Quicken SLA, Empower SLA, Maximize SLA, etc. These SLA metamagics require a specific caster level (not spell level) to use.

Warlock invocations and Dragonfire Adept invocations use a similar system: All invocations are SLAs that come in 4 grades (least, lesser, greater, and dark) and all have a spell-level equivalent (like level 1 for Eldritch Blast - see errata) but aren't spells.

Factotums
A Factotum's spells are prepared as spells with spell-based metamagic, but cast as SLAs.

Spellthieves
A Spellthief can steal spells and cast them as spells then later steal SLAs and cast them as SLAs. If a stolen ability was metamagicked, the Spellthief casts that ability with the same metamagics.

Tome of Battle's Martial Adepts AKA Initiators and Metamagic
Tome of Battle's base classes (martial adepts AKA initiators) have maneuvers and stances. These have levels (1-9) and require specific actions to initiate. Unlike spells, stances are usable at will and maneuvers can be recharged throughout the day, even mid-battle. Each maneuver's refresh mechanic depends on the class that readied this maneuver (Crusader, Swordsage, Warblade), and by RAW, only one class may know a maneuver at a time. (Thus, a Crusader/Warblade can only know Stone Bones as a Warblade maneuver or as a Crusader maneuver.) All maneuvers are (Ex) or (Su). Tome of Magic has various metamagic feats for supernatural abilities: Empower, Maximize, etc. but nothing for (Ex).

Tome of Magic has these feats because another base class (Tome of Magic's Shadowcaster) uses supernatural abilities.

 

Don't you mean use one maneuver at a time? since you have to choose what you know and what you have readied for Warmage/Swordsage or just know for Crusader

 

To my present understanding, I said what I meant and meant what I said regarding ToB. An initiator can only know each maneuver and stance a maximum of once, and each maneuver and stance can be attached only to one recharge mechanic (Warblade/Swordsage/Crusader) at a time.

 

@Endarire, besides those non implemented metamagic feats in ToEE, what's the difference between an Ex and Su Maneuver.

I am in the process of understanding the full mechanics of ToB and that's a detail I'd like to get explained to be sure I don't miss a detail.

Other questions:

Does it matter from which School you actually learn your maneuver?

Are you sure you can't learn a maneuver twice (once as a Crusader, once as a War Blade)? I mainly ask this from a technical point of view, because if you combine a wizard level and a sorc level you could learn burning hands twice. I don't say it would make sense, it's just what's doable.

 

What I read in the ToB is that if you have 2 classes like Crusader/Warmage. When you advance a level in one class you can learn any stance/maneuver available to that class even if you know it with another. When preparing stances/maneuvers you have to decide Which class you are using and can only use those. You can have ONE stance from that class(unless very high level) and use/Recover maneuvers by that class's rules i.e if using your Crusader class you would use only those stances and would have 2 random maneuvers that you know from that class at start of an encounter with only the Crusader maneuvers available

 

Probably the only difference is how it interacts with other effects. For example, Su abilities are disabled by antimagic fields, but Ex abilities are not. I'm not sure there are any interactions relevant to ToEE, though.

 

@Sagenlicht
An (Ex) maneuver is extraordinary (not magical). A (Su) maneuver is supernatural and, therefore, magical. A (Su) maneuver can be modified by supernatural metamagic feats.

By RAW, the school of maneuver/stance learning matters. From the maneuver cards, many maneuvers require knowledge of X other maneuvers of the same discipline. (I house ruled this to remove this requirement because schools of magic don't work that way, and enforcing maneuver # prerequisites just makes this more complex.)

By RAW, a stance is also a maneuver in terms of prerequisites. Thus, if a maneuver or stance requires 1 other maneuver of the same discipline, having a stance of that discipline counts.

Also by RAW, maneuvers and stances can self-qualify. Since you can swap 1 maneuver known per 2 base class levels (but not a stance by RAW -- ugh), you could learn a Tiger Claw maneuver, then another Tiger Claw stance requiring knowledge of 1 Tiger Claw maneuver, then swap out that first maneuver so the stance self-qualifies.

(I don't recommend enforcing maneuver count prerequisites. It makes this more complex.)

For multiclass martial adepts (Crusders, Swordsages, and Warblades), I was seemingly mistaken: From what I reread in the rules, I saw nothing against learning/readying a maneuver from more than one class/recovery method. (Each class has its own maneuver recovery method, plus another method for those who learned these maneuvers via feats or items that have no martial adept class levels.)

There are also maneuver-granting items like the Crown of White Ravens and Shadow Hands. There's no clear RAW answer as to whether these also grant stances, but I'd let them because there's no other RAW way to do it, and, well, WotC didn't fix anything of note with its Tome of Battle errata - which was just Complete Mage errata plus some content that wasn't in Tome of Battle.

 

Thanks for all your replies

 

You know, all the recent work on spells makes me think that the gameplay part of the engine should be converted to python as a whole as much as possible to lower the barrier of contribution.
But then again maybe that's best left for OpenTemple.

 

I'd like to help more, but yeah I am pretty much limited to python, which means I basically can't do much 'under the hood' work.