Heroes Of Battle SUCKS!!! (IMHO)

[swordsmasher]

A 4 out of 10 is crap?

I haven't read the book thus far, but if you think it's so bad that you need to call your thread "Heroes of Battle SUCKS!!!", why would you give it 4/10 stars?

I am a DM. I have been a DM for over 13 years, and I have never ever been a player. So I tend to rate products from a purely DM point of view. I don't care if the pc's get use from stuff, because I have about 8 million NPC's that could potentially take a good PRC, or who will use feats that player's never will.

 

[Felon]

It does not discuss the strategy, the flavor of war (war is hell, hero at the gate, last stand, rail campaign, or any other flavor), or hints for running the suggested mass battles ('do not run several thousand combatants, run 30-80 folks fighting each other instead'.

Actually, HoB recommend keeping it down to 8 enemies or fewer at a time. Yep, 8 per battlefield. Again, this is another area where the "battlefield as dungeon" concept doesn't work out so splendidly.

I found the book also glosses over spells like fireball and entangle will make fighting hordes of opponents pretty pointless. And treat a battlefield like a dungeon all you want, but sooner or later you're going to realize, it ain't a war without hordes.

 

[Felon]

If you were looking for Mass Combat rules - this was not and was never purported to be the intent of the book.

We've heard that said a few times lately. I think that line is starting to be used to straw-man crticism of the book. There are valid crticisms that go way beyond the lack of mass-combat rules.

So, to say the book had no crunch is, in a nutshell, an opinion that is demonstrably unfounded.

It's not devoid of crunch, there's just far less than there should be. This book is more about adapting the genrre to play like standard D&D, rather than being about providing the toolset (the crunch) to adapt standard D&D to the genre. See my previous post.

To say that it features a great deal of advice would be accurate. But don't fault WotC on throttling back the pure crunch. If there is anything that WotC has been told lately on their own forums as well as on ENWorld, it is that there is way too much crunch going on in their past books.

If they're listening, I'm glad, but it is incorrect to imply that a bunch of malcontents complaining on messageboards represents a substantive mass of unsatisfied consumers. It's not a great basis for a focus group. There's always malcontents complaining on messageboards, and they'll always outnumber the folks raving about the status quo. Now we have folks complaining that there's not enough crunch, so if they're listening then now let them listen to this.

 

[S'mon]

And honestly, I still have yet to find a better Mass Combat syste than what was printed in the Sacred "D&D Rules Cyclopedia".

Word.

I was thinking though that HoB's system of awarding points for PC task achievements could easily be integrated with the RC War Machine rules, where "heroic task" gives a flat +20 bonus to the PC's side - ie they could potentially work very well together?

 

[Shemeska]

Hey Shemmie. It also has a writeup for the Baatezu Brigade. All told, there's about three pages dedicated to them total. It breaks down the armies by commanders, special groups and rank and file, with tactics for all.

I do recall somewhere in the book talking about the Blood War forces (maybe not named as such) waging war on the Eternal Battlefields of Acheron, which struck me as a bit odd.

*ponders* How does it compare to Hellbound?

I didn't have any preconceptions nor expectations on this book before it came out, so it's really up to folks' reviews or suggestions whether I even glance at it, let alone buy it. I'm curious if it's worth my $30.

 

[RithTheAwakener]

It truly suggests to keep combats down to 8 people?
i think mass combat will be much simpler to do, say 100vs100 battles with a level 20 wizard on ones side. a meteor swarm here chain lightning there, and the other armys dead.

im terribly disapointed in these reviews. here i was hoping it would have an awesome mass combat system (in the current campaign im playing in, im an epic character raising an orcish horde, which i will then combine with another PCs undead army *maaaaassive combat*)

le sigh

 

[Felon]

It truly suggests to keep combats down to 8 people?

The theory that's advanced is basically that if you can kill eight of anything, then adding more than eight does not make the encounter significantly tougher. If you can kill eight, you can kill twenty-eight without much more trouble. The recommended approach is to wait a few rounds and throw another handful of opponents at the party.

And in fact, that is their best (and only) suggestion that addresses my concern with fireballs and entangles ruining any kind of tactical element to combat. Of course, that's more symptomatic of D&D in general these days. It's not about tactics, it's about resource management.

The book is not terrible. It is not as useless as Deities & Demigods. It offers some good advice, but mostly it's common-sense stuff. There are some good rules on the in-game effect of battle fortifications.

The smattering of feats and PrC's just seem like a limp attempt at adding just enough hint of crunch to get a few sales from the crowd who are avid for it. Of the handful of feats, I would say some of the aren't especially genre-oriented (I mean, Block Arrows would work in just about any book). I'd have liked to have seen some stats for weapons and armor that are especially useful on the battlefield, and maybe not so useful in the dungeon (pikes spring to mind). And again, I'm really annoyed they borrowed so much from the Minis Handbook without including the base classes that actually more sense in a war campaign than some of the PHB's base classes.

 

[S'mon]

The theory that's advanced is basically that if you can kill eight of anything, then adding more than eight does not make the encounter significantly tougher. If you can kill eight, you can kill twenty-eight without much more trouble. The recommended approach is to wait a few rounds and throw another handful of opponents at the party.

That's not necessarily unrealistic, either - a drawn-out battle is likely to end up looking something like the later part of the Battle of Camlann in the film Excalibur, with weary warriors roaming a body-littered battlefield looking for something to kill. OTOH if my PC is a Ftr-20 I'm naturally going to want to use him to lead a charge to break the enemy formation early on, so a book called 'Heroes of Battle' ought to be able to address that kind of thing too, with high-level champions vs hordes of mooks. Likewise the best use for a Wiz-20 is going to be standoff artillery and battlefield-shaping, which can kill hundreds of enemy troops, not engaging directly with enemy champions.

 

[Li Shenron]

5: Okay (You'll use at least 50% of it in your campaign, even if the players never do.)

Seriously speaking, I have serious doubts that books other than PHB, DMG and MM are used over 50% of their contents. And that is particularly true for "player's crunch"... I don't know how many characters you people play in a year, but we simply have not enough characters to use more than 5% of the prestige classes, feats, spells etc in the books we have.

Anyway, you shouldn't IMHO be so enraged by a book which you just flipped at the FLGS. While you may be completely right about its value, it doesn't seem like you really know a book if you've only seen it like that...

I recently became interested in this book, after it was cleared out what it was about (although now with this thread I'm not sure anymore that it has succeeded in that), but I still haven't read the answers to what I wanted to know about it.

Definitely I prefer that there is the least player crunch as possible. There are hundreds of combat-based prestige classes, battle mages, combat feats and mass offensive spells that can be already used to make military characters. Furthermore, I wonder why would one make a military character if D&D is not about war AND even this book isn't! Why would you make an army commander if the whole game still doesn't cover battles?

What I'd like from this book is serious explanations about how the DM can let the characters affect a large-scale battle with their abilities. If in our campaign there is a large battle scene of people against a small army of undead or monsters, who can I make the characters (which are built around the idea of one-on-one combat mostly) be protagonists or at least have a role in that battle? I don't know how to do that, and I'd be glad if this or another book could help me, but I still haven't figured out if Heroes of Battle does it or not.

 

[James Heard]

I actually think it's very well executed with fairly concise, if not precise, information on how to handle war as stage rather than war as a wargame in the context of a roleplaying game. If you want common sense applications of the implications of magically aided warfare, you've got it already. This isn't really a crunch book. This is a setting book detailing a very specific flavor of other settings in a very specific way. In that it's awesome. I think the criticism of the lack of, and nature, of the crunch in the book is therefore unjustified because that's not really the intent of the writing in the first place. I agree that they seem to be afterthoughts, mostly because I think the book could have performed excellently without any new additions beside the siege weapons entirely.

Actually though, if there were anything in the book I was sort of expecting and missed, I'd have to say that it was monsters. I think there was probably ample justification for tossing in a few more "military" monsters. All in all I think the book is several times more successful in its execution than large portions of the "Races of" books at least, if not the brilliant gem that "Sharn: CoT" was.