Talk:Champion's Might (3.5e Martial Discipline)
Why an ancestral school and not a discipline
One of the things I like the most about Tome of Battle, aside offering options to martial classes, is the nature of disciplines. They're ancient, well developed, and unique, but specifically few. Alternatively, while I like what some homebrewers develop (expanding the notion of maneuvers with psionics, incarnum, etc.), the one thing I really can't stomach is that they completely break with the fluff of the story. I can accept some exceptions (mainly Falling Star and Black Rain as they cover for the things martial characters lack the most (effective ranged combat capabilities), but 51 new disciplines takes it way overboard.
When I thought how to expand the lore of the Sublime Way, I figured that the most elegant answer was to create something that allowed for new maneuvers, but that didn't quite reach the needed requirements to become a discipline; a "pseudo-discipline", if you may. Thinking of the best way to handle this, I stumbled upon the wealth of ways someone can learn martial arts, and how some existing arts have different, distinctive styles that teach a certain set of techniques, or have different requirements to progress, and figured I could work something similar to that.
By creating the concept of "ancestral schools", I hope to pave a way to create new disciplines while keeping the trappings of the original nine disciplines of the Sublime Way intact. It also helps producing them faster, as they require no specific choice of class skills, designing Tactical Feats or a choice of weapons. It does require the Ancestral School feat, which is somewhat easier because it follows a given structure.
Hopefully, this'll explain everything a bit further. T.G. Oskar (talk) 00:29, 15 July 2013 (UTC)