This is, as the title states, a very short preliminary review of Martial Power II, which was just released by Wizards of the Coast, on February 16th, 2010.
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I picked it up today and it looks extremely interesting. Based upon my quick first glance through the tome, I think it is well worth it. I was wondering where they were going to go with the martial classes, and this books holds the answer to my question. It also holds more than I was expecting.
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Along with new builds, powers, feats, paragon paths, and epic destinies for the martial classes (Fighters, Rangers, Rogues, and Warlords), it also has new combat style rules, which provide benefits when you wield specific weapons or use specific weapons to attack. A combat style basically consists of two feats, the lesser one modifies at-will powers and gives a bonus to a specific skill check, while the greater one modifies encounter powers and provides some other benefits. Each greater style feat has the lesser style feat as a prerequisite. These lesser and greater style feats allow you to fine-tune your fighting style, allowing for more and more specialization (or min/maxing). In my mind, this is the type of thing that will bring 4e closer to the 3rd edition material (which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your perspective).
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The other cool new addition that I liked was a whole section on Martial Practices. These are basically a way of giving martial players a group of rituals to perform. Don’t run away at the mention of ritual, I know that some of you out there find them generally useless, but these martial practices are directly related to martial builds, and learning one of them provides a specific benefit. For example, you can learn to forge weapons or armor (including magical ones), fortify your mount (or tame a new one out of a previously wild beasty), and also do cool physical things better, like run long distances or get a short burst of uncanny strength.
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I don’t want to go on too long because this was supposed to be a short first-glance review, so here is my final statement: I thought that Martial Power II was going to be just the same old thing – a splatbook style group of new powers and feats that can be added to an existing PC. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there are rules additions that are worthwhile in this supplemental tome.
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Out of 159 pages, about 40-45 of them contain new and interesting material. At the standard $29.95 (USD) it’s worth the price if you play martial PCs a lot and don’t have a subscription to D&D Insider (with its awesomely powerful character builder).
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Until next time, I wish you good gaming!
~DM Samuel
Great review. I’m still trying to secure a copy of this book to do my own take on it, but I’m wondering if I should post a glance back at Martial Power 1 and assess it in the context of all the material that has been released since then.
Unrelated: I never understood why so many people argue that rituals are useless, considering the number of situations our group has resolved using them.
Arcane Marks help give a spellcaster a means of marking people when they could be impersonated by doppelgangers while Seek Rumor helps arcane characters with poor Streetwise scores.
I remember our level 7 artificer once used a string of rituals to prevent a level 12 werewolf from entering a room. And he didn’t even know it was a level 12 werewolf!
Thanks! I think that comparing the two Martial Powers will really show the weaknesses of the first one. I also think that looking at the splatbooks, in light of DDI, really shows the weaknesses of having a print run of any character enhancement type book. Most of the players that I know don’t bother to buy any books beyond the PHB – and they don’t need to, given that they have a nice fat DDI subscription waiting to help them design their character. It makes me wonder if WotC is eventually going to go DDI only, or maybe print-on-demand only?
I agree with you regarding rituals. I really like them, and I think they can add to the flavor of the campaign a great deal. I think a lot of people find them useless because they don’t role-play very much and so don’t need a lot of the rituals that are available to them. Some just simply forget to use them.
I am really lucky in that my group likes to role-play and they do it well, so I don’t feel like I’m forcing situations on them, they just naturally fall to the RPing when the combat is over and the game flows. And even with that, I find it hard to get non-ritual-liking players to warm to the idea of them. I am working on it though, and the next arc of my campaign will find them vital to the story-line… once my group gets a taste of them, maybe they will keep using them.
I don’t mind these power sourcebooks really, but I honestly think they could go with a better approach: perhaps something akin to the PHB where they charge customers less money per page for a bigger book encompassing the first generation of power sources. Then again, this won’t be as profitable as the new softcover format that debuted in Races: Dragonborn, which has a heavier dollar to page ratio.
With regards to rituals, I think two problems are at work: (1) The general rules detailed in p.296-300 of PHB1 are a headache to read, which is never good for trying to get older players into new subsystems. (2) It seems that even the so-called old-school players forget to exercise their creativity outside of combat, which might be why (a) players neglect the use of rituals and (b) players argue that 4e is a combat-heavy anti-roleplaying ruleset. Sad, though, because 80% of the utility of an arcane class is his ritual casting.
Oh, I don’t mind the books – I’m a completist, so I buy them and enjoy them! I think I am the epitome of WotC’s target customer in that regard… addicted heavy-user I think is the term :)
I agree RE the rituals and the preponderance of those “forgetting” about their utility – even the old-school people. I also think that there can be a lot of power in the Cleric’s ability to learn and perform rituals (as well as other divinely powered classes, though not as much). This is something that is also often ignored along with the arcane utility of rituals for the arcane classes.