D&D - Iron Heroes...between the poles

[HellHound]

Why does this keep coming up? How is a level 15 Berserker with no items any more powerful than a level 15 barbarian with all his gizmos? Does reading comprehension break down whenever the phrase "no magic items" comes up?

Probably because a lot of people are looking for a version of D&D that is lower powered in general. And Iron Heroes is not such a product - it is of roughly equal power to D&D.

This is not an issue of reading comprehension (which you manage to make into an insult to everyone who wants lower powered versions of the game), but to personal wants for the game itself.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

This bugs me.
They do not have magic 'in them.' They have nonmagical extraordinary abilities that rival the power of magic.

The difference is nontrivial.

Hmm, three points:

#1: Yep, the only distinction between a magical and non-magical phenomena is that you explain the one with magic and the other with something else, see St. Augustine.

#2: When people are talking about that difference within the game they are in fact talking about a very non-trivial if only cosmetically magical issue - the elimination of the magic item and wealth point-buy system from high level character creation and strategy.

#3: You're absolutely right.

All very much a tangent from the issues at hand, but, as they don't actually say, to turn a bug about is fair play.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Yes. I like Iron Heroes premise, I like the classes, but overall it looks like overpowered and longer to play. I won't do that, but I could be tempted to instead create new character classes for D&D based on Iron Heroes but toned down.

I'm certain I don't understand the specifics of your problem, I'd be interested to hear the specifics of your solution.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

I understand that the premise of IH is low/non-magic characters "just as powerful" as D&D characters ... but, I think with Turanil, and some others, that there's an element of lower-power in some of our concepts of low-magic.

I, for one, love the CONCEPTS behind Iron Heroes ... but I see some cool concepts that were immediately "turned up to 11".

One of the things I dislike about the high-magic nature of D&D is that, past about lvl 9 or so, it's very hard for me to run combats. There's just so much going on that needs to be tracked, status effects and the like, that even with software and spreadsheets, things REALLY start to slow down.

As a GM, I'm not horribly interested in trading one type of complexity and time-consumption for another. So that really, to me, begins to relegate IH to "ah, interesting" as opposed to a must-have item.

--fje

 

[nharwell]

Iron Heroes was never advertised as "lower-power" -- in fact, the premise for the game is that characters are equivalent to their D&D counterparts. So for those of you seeking a "lower-power" AND "lower-magic" game, might I suggest checking out True20 from Green Ronin. It lends itself to both types of game quite well.

 

[Aldarc]

Of course it would be rather easy to just lower the BAB of all classes by a notch and call that low-powered.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I, for one, love the CONCEPTS behind Iron Heroes ... but I see some cool concepts that were immediately "turned up to 11".

One of the things I dislike about the high-magic nature of D&D is that, past about lvl 9 or so, it's very hard for me to run combats. There's just so much going on that needs to be tracked, status effects and the like, that even with software and spreadsheets, things REALLY start to slow down.

As a GM, I'm not horribly interested in trading one type of complexity and time-consumption for another. So that really, to me, begins to relegate IH to "ah, interesting" as opposed to a must-have item.

--fje

Well, it'll be a while before I really get to test that, I think, but from what I've seen I'd say that there's a lot of trading but that in the final equation the complexity goes down.

Obviously, however, I couldn't say whether or not the complexity goes down enough to suit someone needs without some sort of baseline standard for what is a satisfactory level of complexity for high level combat.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Of course it would be rather easy to just lower the BAB of all classes by a notch and call that low-powered.

See that's my problem with a term like low powered. From what people have said I actually suspect that would aggravate the problem as it would certainly cause combat to take longer and become more complex as simple attacks became less effective.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Probably because a lot of people are looking for a version of D&D that is lower powered in general. And Iron Heroes is not such a product - it is of roughly equal power to D&D.

This is not an issue of reading comprehension (which you manage to make into an insult to everyone who wants lower powered versions of the game), but to personal wants for the game itself.

No, I don't mean to insult people who want a lower-powered game. I mean to insult people who read "a game without magic items that still allows the characters to face the same challenges" and somehow thought that the characters should be weaker. That's an error of expectation at best and a gross logical error at worst. If Characters + items = able to withstand a given encounter, and I take away the items but tell you the characters are still able to withstand that encounter, then I must have given the characters something to compensate. If someone can't solve that equation... well I'm glad I don't play the game with them, because the math involved must be excrutiating. And if it's the error of expectation problem, well that doesn't give people a license to come in here and bitch that their well-labeled root beer doesn't taste enough like cola.

And now that I've offended a few dozen more people... will someone define "low powered"? I'd really like to know what that means. What are we comparing against each other to determine what's "low"? Is vanilla D&D low powered at low levels? After all, a single lucky hit can kill most level 1 characters. That's actually sort of "realistic" (to use another silly, pointless word in the gaming milieu). Is it simply low powered if you're throwing lower numbered dice around? That seems to be the most common definition that I can see. The other common one seems to be some kind of vague "similarity to the real world" metric. Of course, no two people seem to share the same metric, so that seems like another meaningless term in these discussions. The other fallacy I see thrown around is that it's low powered if the characters aren't hitting things very hard, and high powered if the characters are hitting things very hard. How hard the things hit the characters doesn't seem to be an issue for those people. OK, so it's low powered if the GM gets to "win" and high powered if the players get to "win." No wonder power-creeping splatbooks sell so well, but all the GMs are in here bitching that there aren't enough "low powered" games.

 

[Piratecat]

Well, as a playtester there's no question in my mind that IH heroes are roughly equal in power to D&D heroes that are loaded with magic items. I found one of the most fun things about IH was that combat became a lot more interesting. Every hero had multiple valid choices that were tactically meaningful, and in our playtests the classes worked a lot closer together than most D&D groups I know; we worked more as a team, with each player looking out for the others and using their class abilities to contribute to the others' success. I thought that was a lot of fun.

Iron Heroes characters are designed to be used in a world rife with dragons and "traditional" D&D threats. If I were trying to base a campaign in a "low magic" world, I'd personally use Grim Tales.