takasi
First Post
I just sent this request to my DM with the character examples above. What do you guys think? Am I interpreting the rules correctly? Does this look balanced? For anyone who's played Shackled City, does this look OK? For those of you familiar with the Warhammer world, what do you think of this character?
"Yesterday I posted on EN World asking about making a non-magical knight for Zach's Warhammer Shackled City campaign. They recommended that I ask if I could use material from the Iron Heroes d20 book. Iron Heroes was developed under Monte Cook's third party d20 team; he designed 3rd edition (check your PHB). This book was written by Mike Mearls, who is now the lead developer at D&D (he recently wrote the Book of Nine Swords).
Iron Heroes assumes that magic is dangerous and that heroes do not need it to survive. D&D assumes that players will have hundreds of thousands of gold in magic items; this is a very big factor in balancing characters.
The character I would like to play would not have access to ANY magic items. Not only that, but he would not benefit from any magic at all. Bless would not buff him and potions would not heal him. He could not turn invisible and he could not teleport. He cannot fly or walk on water. At the same time, he would be affected by magic from enemies. Fireball will hurt him and disintegrate will kill him.
In addition, since this is a very strange build I would take the elite array instead of doing point buy.
I would also only use the Iron Heroes book for building my character. All of the magic items I would receive from a treasure split would be destroyed, and any non-magical treasure would be sent back to my lord.
To compensate for these drawbacks, Iron Heroes has a few changes.
The first is saving throws. Instead of 1-6 for weak scores and 1-12 for strong scores characters get 1-20 for all scores. This is to compensate for saving throw bonuses from buffs (spells and magic items) to ability scores, saves and grant resistance/immunity to energy damage, poison, paralysis, etc.
The second change is expanded combat feats. Feats in Iron Heroes progress based on character class. For example, there are 10 levels of weapon focus. When you take the feat you get the benefit of the highest level for that feat for your class. Feats are placed into categories (weapon focus is called the "power" category) and each class has a list of progressions, similar to spells, for their feats. You don't have to pay anything extra for feats to scale; they scale automatically as you go up in level.
The third change is AC. You roll a d20 for and add a base defense bonus instead of AC. This is very cumbersome and would not work well IMO in our system. Instead I've taken this bonus and renamed the Base Defense Bonus to "Superior Armor Bonus" and taken 10 on all rolls to create a standard D&D AC.
The fourth change is healing and hit points. All hit dice are 1d4 with base modifiers. For example, the armiger base is 1d4+6. Instead of having a d10 with a range of 1-10, the range is 7-10, ensuring a higher number of hit points. For average hit points you would receive 8 (or 9) hit points instead of 5 (or 6) every level. For healing, Iron Heroes get a reserve of hit points equal to their normal maximum hit points. They can move their reserve hit points to their normal hit points at a rate of 1 per minute; from a gameplay perspective, the hero must rest in between battles. Reserve points are refreshed to full after a full night's rest.
The last update is the use of token systems. As certain events occur in combat tokens are accrued based on your class and abilities. For example, a third level armiger gets armor tokens every time he takes 10 points of damage. He can spend these tokens to activate certain actions, like drawing attacks meant for adjacent allies or forcing a will save on an opponent to impose morale penalties.
The class I'd like to try is the armiger; the flavor text describes it as a traditional knight in heavy armor. The class focuses heavily on building up AC, with high progressions in Armor feats, moderate progression in Defense feats and low progression in all other combat feats. It is the archetypical "tank" for the group. Here are some examples of what the character would look like at 1st, 5th, 10th, 15th and 20th."
"Yesterday I posted on EN World asking about making a non-magical knight for Zach's Warhammer Shackled City campaign. They recommended that I ask if I could use material from the Iron Heroes d20 book. Iron Heroes was developed under Monte Cook's third party d20 team; he designed 3rd edition (check your PHB). This book was written by Mike Mearls, who is now the lead developer at D&D (he recently wrote the Book of Nine Swords).
Iron Heroes assumes that magic is dangerous and that heroes do not need it to survive. D&D assumes that players will have hundreds of thousands of gold in magic items; this is a very big factor in balancing characters.
The character I would like to play would not have access to ANY magic items. Not only that, but he would not benefit from any magic at all. Bless would not buff him and potions would not heal him. He could not turn invisible and he could not teleport. He cannot fly or walk on water. At the same time, he would be affected by magic from enemies. Fireball will hurt him and disintegrate will kill him.
In addition, since this is a very strange build I would take the elite array instead of doing point buy.
I would also only use the Iron Heroes book for building my character. All of the magic items I would receive from a treasure split would be destroyed, and any non-magical treasure would be sent back to my lord.
To compensate for these drawbacks, Iron Heroes has a few changes.
The first is saving throws. Instead of 1-6 for weak scores and 1-12 for strong scores characters get 1-20 for all scores. This is to compensate for saving throw bonuses from buffs (spells and magic items) to ability scores, saves and grant resistance/immunity to energy damage, poison, paralysis, etc.
The second change is expanded combat feats. Feats in Iron Heroes progress based on character class. For example, there are 10 levels of weapon focus. When you take the feat you get the benefit of the highest level for that feat for your class. Feats are placed into categories (weapon focus is called the "power" category) and each class has a list of progressions, similar to spells, for their feats. You don't have to pay anything extra for feats to scale; they scale automatically as you go up in level.
The third change is AC. You roll a d20 for and add a base defense bonus instead of AC. This is very cumbersome and would not work well IMO in our system. Instead I've taken this bonus and renamed the Base Defense Bonus to "Superior Armor Bonus" and taken 10 on all rolls to create a standard D&D AC.
The fourth change is healing and hit points. All hit dice are 1d4 with base modifiers. For example, the armiger base is 1d4+6. Instead of having a d10 with a range of 1-10, the range is 7-10, ensuring a higher number of hit points. For average hit points you would receive 8 (or 9) hit points instead of 5 (or 6) every level. For healing, Iron Heroes get a reserve of hit points equal to their normal maximum hit points. They can move their reserve hit points to their normal hit points at a rate of 1 per minute; from a gameplay perspective, the hero must rest in between battles. Reserve points are refreshed to full after a full night's rest.
The last update is the use of token systems. As certain events occur in combat tokens are accrued based on your class and abilities. For example, a third level armiger gets armor tokens every time he takes 10 points of damage. He can spend these tokens to activate certain actions, like drawing attacks meant for adjacent allies or forcing a will save on an opponent to impose morale penalties.
The class I'd like to try is the armiger; the flavor text describes it as a traditional knight in heavy armor. The class focuses heavily on building up AC, with high progressions in Armor feats, moderate progression in Defense feats and low progression in all other combat feats. It is the archetypical "tank" for the group. Here are some examples of what the character would look like at 1st, 5th, 10th, 15th and 20th."
