User talk:MisterSinister/Martial Artist's Manual (3.5e Sourcebook)

Why exactly are you sticking with a singular style skill in this re-imagining? What good thing did that do that picking 2 / 4 / whatever and relying on the fluff of the discipline to keep it tied up neatly not do? What do style skills do in the first place anyway? Bloody alley seems like it could support some face climbing / gouging things pulled from climbing (better tied to climb/athletics than endurance), ravenous fiend seems like it could use some buoyancy stuff (better tied to swim/athletics than endurance), etc. It looks like having a singular style skill actually gets in the way of filling out your power lists (and may have uniqueness problems because of ToP skill consolidation), so what are you keeping it around for? - Tarkisflux ^Talk 18:25, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

No particular reason. Style skills are basically 'skills you want to have high for this style', mostly because the style techniques depend on them. So having more than one is totally OK. - MisterSinister (talk) 19:29, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

How do the techniques depend on them? And how many styles to you expect a PC to have? - Tarkisflux ^Talk 20:39, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

There would be techniques that scale by ranks in those skills, or rely on checks from those skills, for example. In terms of how many - there are four tiers, and for the revised classes I'm making, I'd expect something like 3 per tier. Meaning 3 mundane, 3 terrestrial, 3 celestial and 3 supernal. Given that mundane styles only go up to 5th level-appropriate abilities, terrestrial go to 10th level-appropriate and so on, this should be OK. - MisterSinister (talk) 20:52, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

So, to pull from actual 'martial arts' styles (and probably make myself look like an idiot in the process), a class might gain access to judo, kendo, and sumo for their maneuvers while a different class might get kendo, karate, and kyudo. That strongly suggests a couple of things for mechanics. Style skills need either overlap with other styles or complete uniqueness in order to prevent spending in too many different places. Partial overlap means that some maneuvers in a discipline fit better with other disciplines (and thus classes) than others, and works well enough to make classes unique even if the styles potentially blur a bit. It also suggests that style weapons need to either barely matter or also have overlap, because you're going to have a bunch of different styles to use them with but only X number of hands (unless you want golfbags and almost round-by-round in-fight swapping I guess).

In terms of style skills, I've decided to give two skills per style, which basically means I'm going down the 'overlap' route, seemingly. Style weapons will have overlaps (I think some are already visible). - MisterSinister (talk) 23:37, 21 December 2013 (UTC)