Mounts are limited to one and of low HD/CR. so. Go ahead. Taking the time to kill it and raise it would be a waste.

While I am glad that (it seems) there isn't a combination of items, feats, and spells to get around such a limitation, it's only one strategy normally available to a Cleric that has been pushed off the table...

In reply to Seth 'Shard' Gray (msg # 34):

There is only one Cleric in the top tiers of the arena.  I don't think that's OP at all.

In reply to Kain (msg # 35):

Because it would replicate the already banned Leadership, just with a monetary cost instead of it costing a feat, and even worse corpses could be of any HD not just low levels as followers. But if going by judge things that aren't as overpowered and not overrepresented on the high tiers, since sorcerers, bards, shugenjas and favored souls aren't in the hight tiers, knowstones should be allowed too, wizards already can buy extra spells extra cheap (4,725 gp for a 9th level spell, that buys only a 2nd level knowstone, a 9th level knowstone costs 81,000 gp almost twenty times as much), and druids and clerics have free access to the whole spell compendium and every spell on the allowed books. Yet I'm sure that is not going to happen, they are dragon material which is preventively banned and at low levels they may be too much. A starting sorcerer who knows 20+ first level spells or 8 2nd level spells could potentially prove unbalanced.

Actually some spells from the allowed book list are banned. Which is good, or I could kill vast numbers of people by throwing them vast distances.

In reply to Kain (msg # 35):

http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Tier_System

Matches more or less every tier system I've ever come across...just because the top players aren't using clerics doesn't mean they're not OP.  Given the setting of the arena where their turn undead is either useless or extremely OP (if they take the feat[s] that let them convert turn to metamagic) Druids are probably slightly stronger in most peoples eyes.

As for the other Tier 1 classes: Artificer's strengths are lessened in the arena; Archivist are a bit obscure (probably); erudite(Spell to Power variant) is (or should be) banned; wizard are only slightly weaker (and only because they have to buy most of their spells instead of auto-knowing every spell that is in an allowed book and not explicitly banned [I kind of get it from a fluff standpoint, but mechanically, whoever decided to give Clerics and Druids that kind of spell access needs a slap up-side the head])

The fact that a Cleric/Druid/Wizard (possibly for a little gold in the Wizard's case) can research their opponent and tailor their spell list to counter them and have access to world shattering magic is what makes them OP (bad build decisions also barely hurt them, and as long as the decision was a feat, spell, or skill they can fix it just like everyone else [Psychic Reformation])

I am on my annual hunting trip with my father in law and brother in law in the Colorado mountains until Thursday night. Posting will be sporadic to say the least :).

Rufius and I will be setting up matches while Marcus is away, so if we miss something just bump the thread and we'll see it.

Sounds awesome!!  Have fun!

Ajah, you're teletyping (<tt>stuff</tt>) the wrong parts of your posts


What you did was teletype your exposition of your actions, and left the action/stat block normal. The purpose of teletyping is to format the text so that everything lines up.

What your post should look like (after posting it) is this:


I wouldn't mention it, but you've done it consistently (and teletyped one part without teletyping the other part) so I wondered if you had misunderstood.
This message was last edited by the player at 00:45, Tue 05 Nov 2013.

so that's how all of you lined it up I've been trying to figure that out and I finally gave up.

How do people feel about the Idiot Crusader?

For those of you who don't know how it works:

Crusaders (at level 1) only know 5 manuevers, and have access to 2 of them. At the end of turn, they get another one. If, at the end of turn, they have all their manuevers granted to them or expended, they recover all expended manuevers and restart the process of being granted them.

So the trick is to have the crusader be able to ready an equal or greater number of manuevers than they actually know. If a crusader can ready 5 manuvers, and only knows 5, then at the end of turn he can't be granted any manuevers and thus has all manuevers recovered and granted to him.

What this works out to being is that an Idiot Crusader can use every manuever he knows (albiet a small number of them) once per turn without using any actions to recover them (like a warblade or swordsage would have to). Additionally, 5 of the crusader's manuevers would be fairly low level, due to how achieving this works.

This can typically only be pulled off around the mid levels, level 10 or so.

I wanted to discuss peoples' thoughts on its power relative to the arena.

Actually you misread this.

Of his 5 maneuvers ready, a crusader is granted 2 maneuvers randomly. Then 1 per turn of those until they have all been granted, then he start again with two new ones.

No you don't have to recover maneuvers, but you won't always have the maneuver you need granted at the right time.

So i say, bof

The warblade way of granting and recuperating maneuvers is still better in my head.

I have a crusader, but I can't remember at anytime ever having all my maneuvers readied at the sametime so I'm ok with it. I usually use them almost every round, but that's because I don't use Warblade, Crusader or Shadowsage as my main classes ever.

In reply to Bollo the Twisted (msg # 45):

Even though the specific details of my post were incorrect, it's still possible for a Crusader to repeatedly use the same abilities each turn, due to how they are granted manuevers. It's just a matter of reducing options.

My question isn't about the feasibility, the arena makes doing so even easier actually, it's about whether or not people believe it to be over the top. Quite a few I've talked to (not here, just in general) don't care, and others believe it's the end of the world.

I'm just not interested in introducing a character and then having everyone rebel against it.
This message was last edited by the player at 03:55, Tue 05 Nov 2013.

Without Sage rulings, does the Idiot Crusader still work by RAW/RAI?

Does this make it not work:

?

From what little I've read, having access to low level maneuvers once a round at a high level doesn't seem overpowered, but if it becomes a problem, we'll fix it. Heck, Ruby Knight Vindicator got nerfed here to burning only one turn attempt a round for its abilities and it didn't even cause problems, I don't think. But it would have lol.

That quote actually solidifies that the Idiot Crusader works. The build I'm thinking of doesn't use the 'level of swordsage to deprive the crusader from learning manuevers' either, so that's not an issue.

Different builds have different qualities, there is an Idiot crusader with access to only high level abilities, but that uses some rules that are iffy even for me.

To be fair, the idiot crusader will have some high level manuevers to use, but it'll only have 2 ish, compared to the other 5 learned at early levels.

As it turns out, prestige classes that grant extra readied manuevers also grant the crusader extra manuevers granted. Page 96, though I found this out purely by accident :p

RAW, it works. RAI, who knows.
This message was last edited by the player at 18:32, Tue 05 Nov 2013.

Hi everyone - I'm back from my trip and will be updating when I can today.

Is this Idiot Crusader thing in a book somewhere or did someone just make it up?
This message was last edited by the GM at 17:01, Fri 08 Nov 2013.

Ok - I closed out all the finished matches (that have been posted in the Victory thread). Time to go to work :(.

Idiot Crusader is a min/max board brain child. It exploits prestige classes to give more maneuvers granted than known (I think) to constantly refresh all of a crusader's maneuvers each turn.

As with many min/max board creations, it has questionable RAI usage but seems theoretically sound based on the printed words.

In reply to Bogan Darkmane (msg # 52):

That is correct. If the crusader has 7 granted manuevers and 7 known manuevers, he refreshes all his manuevers at the end of each of his turns.

In reply to Cai Bladestorm (msg # 53):

I think the Idiot Crusader is only suppose to have like 1 or 2 levels in the actual Crusader class some swordsage levels so you can get into master of Nine PrC I think I'm not really positive. I've only heard off shoots of it, and you put your new maneuvers under swordsage and your new ability to ready additional maneuvers under Crusader until you are readying all your maneuvers every round. Which is very doable, by level 7 or 8 I think.

The version used in the forums works by taking a swordsage and warblade level to learn most of the manuevers available to the crusader, so that when they take a crusader level they don't have many remaining manuevers left to learn and are forced to learn only 2 or 3, thus triggering the automatic reset at early levels. They use Master of the Nine later on to learn high level manuevers.

I'm not going quite that far, my build achieves idiot crusader more around level 13, though I'm still fiddling with the details.

It seems like the byproduct of a miss-read to me.  The crusader has a number of readied maneuvers (which can be increased by some PrCs) and a lesser number of starting granted maneuvers (which, unless I'm mistaken, no PrC can increase).  Each turn, another readied maneuver is granted or if none are left to be granted, all are refreshed and the starting number are granted at random.  The maximum starting granted maneuvers is 4 (1 less than your starting known maneuvers) so even if you found a way to not learn any more maneuvers, you would still not have all 5 maneuvers available every turn (a random one would be unavailable turn 1, whichever you used on turn 1 would be unavailable turn 2, a random one turn 3, and so on).

Exploits like this in Psionics are a major reason Psionics gets so much hate from many GMs...we don't need the same happening to Bo9S...

In reply to Seth 'Shard' Gray (msg # 56):

Psoinics are horribly written, and writers said you can only have a move once even if you can take it in another class so it is an open exploit that the writers know about, but it is better than a crusader/warblade taking the same ability twice.