[Iron Heroes] Magic oddities.

MacMathan · Aug 7, 2005

I guess my problem with it is the opposite, I wish the other schools were more toned down to that level than they are.

I also find magical healing to be too easy, fast and reliable for a game that was not supposed to really have it.

Kaos · Aug 7, 2005

med stud said:
I too think that Mearls are discouraging blasting mages. Looking at the genre there are few instances of mages throwing around fire balls but there are lots of references to the summoning of demons and contact with higher powers.

He's pretty much stated that already on the IH boards; evokers are weak on purpose. I still think he overshot the mark a bit on that category, though.
He's also said that he's not particularly happy about the magic in general, though.

*Elric - Haven't read so much Elric (three books) but I have never seen a mage throw fireballs. It's mostly about summonings of creatures.

In Moorcock's Swords trilogy, there's summoning magic, mind-affecting magic and the elder races had the ability to see and travel into the 5 adjoining dimensions (until the conjunction stripped that away.)

OTOH, go to Sword of Truth and you get deadly blasters. Not many of them, but that's more to do with the lack of mages in general.

Then there's Last of the Renshai - only four mages, and they had ideological issues with big magic in general (brings chaos into the world, thus bringing Ragnarok that much closer,) but they could do the big blasts if they really wanted to.

And that book comes damn close to being IH as it is. The main characters are easily mapped to a Weaponmaster, an Archer, and a man-at-arms (and one who's arguably a man-at-arms/weaponmaster dualclass.) Course, the nature of the mages themselves makes it fairly easy to excise the Arcanist class entirely for a game set in that world.

Agamon · Aug 8, 2005

There's a lot of discussion on this here. Mearls has said he doesn't like the magic mechanic, and didn't have the time to figure out how to impliment it the way he wanted to. He says he would like to set up a blog to impliment people's ideas on how to fix or replace the system, the kernals of which are in that thread.

Kaos · Aug 8, 2005

Agamon said:
There's a lot of discussion on this here. Mearls has said he doesn't like the magic mechanic, and didn't have the time to figure out how to impliment it the way he wanted to. He says he would like to set up a blog to impliment people's ideas on how to fix or replace the system, the kernals of which are in that thread.

Actually, it was a wiki. I'm "ProphetofKaos" there

I'm not particularly fond of the token-system suggestions, but I can understand the appeal (attractive new mechanic, get around the 'daily limit' issue.)

Agamon · Aug 8, 2005

Kaos said:
Actually, it was a wiki. I'm "ProphetofKaos" there
I'm not particularly fond of the token-system suggestions, but I can understand the appeal (attractive new mechanic, get around the 'daily limit' issue.)

Right, wiki, blog makes no sense.

I'm not sure what I like yet, I need to think more about it, and maybe see what other ideas come and how these ideas flesh out. I doubt my IH campaign will start until winter, so I'm in no rush.

Kaos · Aug 8, 2005

Agamon said:
Right, wiki, blog makes no sense.

I'm not sure what I like yet, I need to think more about it, and maybe see what other ideas come and how these ideas flesh out. I doubt my IH campaign will start until winter, so I'm in no rush.

And unless you've got someone chomping at the bit to play an arcanist, it's not essential.

Felon · Aug 8, 2005

But if you do, it's a problem. For me, it's strike one against using IH.

"Didn't have time" to figure out how to implement magic? Unacceptable. Heck, leave it out of the PHB if you can't make it work.

TroyXavier · Aug 8, 2005

I had the same thought. I don't really need another system so anything that wants my money better be firing on all cylinders.

Kaos · Aug 8, 2005

Felon said:
But if you do, it's a problem. For me, it's strike one against using IH.

"Didn't have time" to figure out how to implement magic? Unacceptable. Heck, leave it out of the PHB if you can't make it work.

Oh, it works. Just not as well as some of us would have liked it to; bit too much gap between the practical capabilities of some variants. Some things seemed to have been balanced according to mana requirements, others to dificulty class, and when both got tied together it created cases where a reasonable cost for the effect made the difficulty too high or too low (or vice versa.)

Call it a case of the 3.0 Ranger. I just find that the core of it is intriguing enough that I'm compelled to 'improve' it. And I have to give credit to the author for being candid about the issue, instead of ducking it.

Felon · Aug 8, 2005

Kaos said:
Call it a case of the 3.0 Ranger. I just find that the core of it is intriguing enough that I'm compelled to 'improve' it.

I guess I just wanted something that was good enough that it would work well out of the box. All things considered, it looks Iron Heroes characters would not be doomed be doomed outright if they were to face a mage who can nuke as well as a D&D wizard (indeed, they'd probably do better against a straight-up damage-dealing evoker than many other types of casters). So, why deal the evokers a weak hand?

And I have to give credit to the author for being candid about the issue, instead of ducking it.

That seems a little too generous IMO; you get credit for fixing the flaws before they go to press. not for leaving them as-is and then being candid about it after the fact. I just hope Iron Heroes will see a revision somewhere down the line, and that possibility won't get nixed by Mearls' job at WotC.