User talk:Luigifan18/Somewhere Over The Rainbow (3.5e Maneuver)

Ratings

	Spanambula opposes this article and rated it 0 of 4.
	Congratulations, you took a 6th level maneuver, raised it by 2 levels, made it less effective, and then added an extra 10 billion words just for funsies or your idea of realism. Good job. Here is your "YOU TRIED" award typed in comic sans. I'm going to go find a cure spell to heal the 6d6 ocular migraine damage I took trying to read this.

	Leziad opposes this article and rated it 0 of 4.
	This does not deserve a lengthy oppose. Let keep it brief. It long, unusable and has tons of obnoxious references peppered into it. Nope.

Ganteka Future opposes this article and rated it 0 of 4.

This took me, at a reasonable pace of reading out loud, 24 minutes to complete. This included the stat block (but not the author box). Eiji's suggested rewrite took less than a minute to read. The problem with this is... hmmm... it's long. It's like, really long. It's unusably, confusingly, obtusely long. This makes combat unfun for everyone else while trying to take a half-hour to read this (in the middle of a combat), and may even be used more than once, because it's a maneuver, and that could happen, and trying to find all of the clauses and call back references to earlier material in it, for any given case... I lost my train of thought there. It's bad long bad. Just sandbox this, man. Stop trying to make throwing someone unfun. Edit: Out of curiosity, I placed the text of this maneuver into the formatting for Tome of Battle as close as I could. It took a full four pages with a little bit onto a fifth. The single page I referenced had over five maneuvers on it.

	Eiji-kun opposes this article and rated it 0 of 4.
	You know. I was going to do this funny joke illustrating how long and rambling this was, with a thousand subdivisions, explaining in detail how I go to oppose by moving my hand by using electrochemical signals by using ATP by explaining chemistry by explaining atomic physics by explaining string theory by explaining... But I can't. 24 minutes. 24 MINUTES!!! Oh Luigi, why? Why?!

	DanielDraco opposes this article and rated it 0 of 4.
	You've built a skyscraper when a shed would have worked. The many special conditional modifiers, the graduated consequences, and the enormous list of special cases make this far too complicated for the small effect that it ultimately produces.

Ow

Oh my am I going to summarize the hell out of this. Give me.... a couple months. @_@ -- Eiji-kun (talk) 06:05, 27 September 2015 (UTC)

I cut the fat. There was a lot of fat.

This maneuver functions like mighty throw gain a +8 bonus on the ability check, you deal 6d6 damage, and you can throw them up to 10 ft per initiator level in any direction, even arcing the creature through the air. The target takes falling damage for the distance traveled, becomes prone on landing. It does not provoke attacks of opportunity for this movement.

You can aim the target towards another creature by making a ranged touch attack. Struck targets must make a Reflex save or be subject to this maneuver, traveling along the same arc. Flying creatures take a −2 penalty to their saving throw for each step below average maneuverability, and a +2 bonus for each step above average maneuverability.

The save DC is either Strength or Dexterity based, depending on what you used for your initial trip attempt.

There were more things in there, but the rest of the stuff didn't need to be. I assure you. No need for 1001 situations, not if it kills the flow of battle. -- Eiji-kun (talk) 06:15, 27 September 2015 (UTC)

Holy hell, yeah. This is one maneuver, man. It shouldn't be three times the height of my laptop's screen. These corner cases are the reason that DMs exist. Handle the implications for the target when colliding with something while still in midair. Assign damage to the creature or object impacted, with no contingency as to whether it's midair or grounded. If you really must, offer a stabilizing save to creatures "capable of flight, hovering, or any similar abilities". (Weasel words like "similar" are the idiomatic way to catch edge cases like these.) And stop using so many fiddly little modifiers and graduated effects based on the degree of failure of success. This is entirely overcomplicated for a maneuver that is essentially Mighty Throw plus arcing. --DanielDraco (talk) 22:45, 27 September 2015 (UTC)

I very deliberately organized the maneuver to keep the corner cases out of the way. You don't even need to bother with collision or interruption mechanics unless something actually happens to interrupt the arc of effect, and then you can just look up the specific interruption. I think it's fine as is. --Luigifan18 (talk) 16:01, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

The idea behind the Fortitude saves is that the bigger you are, the harder you are to knock over by something getting hurled at you, especially if that something is smaller than you are. It also represents that being thrown at something smaller than you are isn't likely to interrupt your momentum too much. --Luigifan18 (talk) 16:07, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

While I think you failed in your goal of "keeping them out of the way", may I suggest another perspective. Any person looking for homebrew to add to their game needs to understand what the homebrew is, and that means reading it. All of it. After all, you wouldn't want to pick a class and halfway through your game realize that something was seriously messed up.

Prospective homebrew seekers will take one look at this, and never use this. It's longer than some licensing agreements, documents designed to be long and obtuse to confuse the reader.

Btw, the thing you defined about size mattering doesn't need explanation text, it is built into creatures with stability. This is one of those moves stability applies to. If you want size to factor in, you just say they said their size modifier to the roll, easily done in one sentence like... well, just like I did now. -- Eiji-kun (talk) 16:14, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

"Any person looking for homebrew to add to their game needs to understand what the homebrew is, and that means reading it. All of it." This bears repeating, and is pretty much exactly what I was getting ready to say until I read on and saw Eiji saying it first. It applies not only to DMs, but to players who are looking for maneuvers to learn. This maneuver is simply too long for anyone to bother with.

And that's really shocking when you consider that it is essentially a very simple effect. Your maneuver does nothing that Mighty Throw doesn't do -- it's just in a different shape -- but it manages to be many times its length. I think you should take that as a sign that maybe something's gone wrong. --DanielDraco (talk) 01:03, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Mighty Throw can't slam people into walls for... some reason. In fact, almost none of the Setting Sun maneuvers in the Book of Nine Swords can. WTF? --Luigifan18 (talk) 02:12, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Fair point. It requires about two sentences. --DanielDraco (talk) 11:20, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Actually, colliding with different things would have similar, but different results. For instance, the maneuver treats collisions with grounded creatures differently from collisions with aerial creatures because, while it can knock both over, the consequences of that are different. An aerial creature can be knocked out of the sky and fall to the ground; a grounded creature is already on the ground, so being knocked prone is the most that can happen to it in that regard.

Grounded obstacles are objects that are firmly attached to the ground or just resting comfortably on it, like pillars, crates, and buildings. Aerial obstacles are objects that are suspended in midair through either mechanical or magical means (dangling from a rope, floating disk, levitate, etc.). Many of these means have an upper limit to how much weight they can support, and if someone lands on top of an object held in midair like that, that adds to the weight that has to be supported. If it's too much weight, the object is going to fall. But for both grounded and aerial objects, there are three main possibilities; colliding with the side of the object, smacking the underside of the object, or falling on top of it. Obviously, you can only collide with the underside of something on the way up, and you can only land on top of it on the way down. And not all objects on the ground even have undersides, and the undersides they do have would just be outcroppings from the main body of the object (such as a balcony on a building, or a branch on a tree). (As for "wall" and "ceiling", those refer to colliding with the boundaries of an enclosed space, e.g. you're inside a building, cavern, etc., so you can't actually be thrown over or past it. Sufficiently wide and tall objects, like castles, are hard to distinguish from, well, objects; they're more like features of the terrain. Being thrown up onto the ramparts of a castle has a similar result to climbing the castle's walls yourself, except more painful.)

Logically, you could catch yourself on a wall if you were tossed past it, but only if you're really good at climbing. I made the minimum requirement 18 ranks because that's how many a 15th-level character can have.

Truth be told, this could have been a lot more complicated, but I held myself back a lot so that the maneuver would only be as complex as I felt it absolutely had to be. Originally, the maneuver was going to have four separate arcs, each with different ratios of distance to initiator level for the X and Y axes. I cut all this in favor of a simple "up to 10 feet vertically per initiator level, aim for any square within 10 feet per initiator level" formula to avoid having to go through the trouble of calculating those different trajectories. Likewise, I was originally going to have a clause for colliding with or landing on top of something tall and narrow, like a pillar or a tree, potentially knocking it over if it had a weak foundation, but scrapped the idea because I couldn't figure out a good way to implement it. Basically, I said "Screw it. If the pillar's hp drops to 0, that knocks it over; otherwise, it's fine." Likewise, if you collide with something dangling in midair from the side, you should cause it to start swinging back and forth (though something held in midair by magic, such as telekinesis, probably wouldn't exhibit such behavior); I left that out because the maneuver was already long enough.

Finally, the "complicated mathematical formula" bit... as I mentioned, there are three main parts of an object that a creature could be thrown into — underside, vertical-facing side, and topside. And I think a skilled mathematician would be able to figure out, based on the speed and trajectory of a hurled creature, which part of an object it would strike. After all, in real life, if you threw someone at a large crate several times in the exact same way, they would hit the exact same part of the crate every single time (barring something modifying their flight path, like, say, wind conditions), but if you changed the angle or the power, they'd hit a different part of the crate. However, I'm no mathematician, and even if I was, I wouldn't want to force people to conduct some sort of calculus mid-game just to figure out if someone collides with something from below or from the side! So I just made it a matter of probability. Seriously, simulating the physics of collision trajectory for a game of D&D would be too much work. --Luigifan18 (talk) 15:28, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

(RESET INDENT) Since it's been very telling, can we get another live reading of this one? Place your bets. I say 15 minutes. -- Eiji-kun (talk) 07:20, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

(EDIT: Oh crap... I... I thought I overshot with 15 minutes. I was joking. ....he's STILL TALKING!) -- Eiji-kun (talk) 07:44, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Well...lttp as usual, but I think if it were 20ft per initiator level to make it blatantly better than Mighty Throw, and (bear with me, I'm not kidding) was given a table of contents with sublinks to each talking point, it would be pretty good but as it stands, there's LOADS to thumb through. But yeah, double that distance and delicately organize the fluff, and you've more or less got a winner. Also, separate the short list of things that will come up often(hitting ceilings and grounded creatures and wot) from the laundry list of jazz you're almost never gonna see(narrowly passing by a wall and hitting flying objects) to make it easier on the reader. All that, and we're golden. Solid 4/4. But as it stands? I'm sad to say it doesn't breach 2/4. But all that writing? Like, damn man. A for effort at very least. But better luck next time. -SecondDeath777 00:23 4 September 2017