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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ruleslawyer" data-source="post: 3291253" data-attributes="member: 1757">As an IH DM, I agree with this post. IH combat is quite complicated. My general solution to it has been to seriously turn down the level of mechanical discussion in combat. IOW, I now expect a player to say "I leap into the air, bound the ten feet to the ogre, and strike him with all my force on his head" rather than "I take a Jump stunt for +4 to attack and Power Attack for full". Of course, that requires that my players and I know the rules very well and back to front, which means a bit of work. However, IMHO, the rewards are worth it. Your players get more involved in the ebb and flow of combat, and combat is much more immersive in that players are constantly looking for ways to pull off interesting attacks and stunts. This is especially true in the PC vs. monster category: Since IH PCs have no conventional way to damage certain monsters, they have to resort to imaginative tactics to beat them. That said, Conan has two principal advantages over IH from your perspective: First off, combat *is* simpler (although not by much; Conan has combat maneuvers and armor piercing rules that, IMX, add almost much to the complexity as the IH challenges and stunts). Second, the power curve is flatter, meaning that combat (or the effects of it, anyway) is more "brutal," and the game stays simple as characters get to high levels. In general, the Conan classes are *definitely* easier to manage than the IH classes, since there are no token-based classes and far fewer class abilities overall.I wouldn't say that Conan's magic system is better than IH's... if you're running a no-PC-magic game. It's much easier to build a quick NPC spellcaster using the IH dreaded sorcerer than to work one up with Conan's scholar. As to "super-hero-y": I think that factor may be exaggerated a bit with IH. REH's Conan is quite "super-hero-y" enough to fit in an IH game. First off, the power curve in IH is not quite as high as it is in D&D. Second, the mainly "super-hero-y" things that IH-ers can do come in one of three forms: a) absorbing massive amounts of damage; b) dealing massive amounts of damage; or c) movement. Of those three, both (a) and (b) are abstract; the real balance implication at high levels of having high hp but dealing bucketloads of damage (IH) vs. having lower hp and dealing more moderate amounts of damage (Conan) is that the *monsters* (who have the same hp advancement in Conan as in IH) are more powerful in Conan. Movement is tricky; one way to deal with it would be to just ban the harrier class, which is the only class for which this really matters much. IH has really no implied setting, which may be an advantage for you, since the IH classes model pretty much any imaginable fighting style and archetype. Finesse- and ranged combatants are definitely better represented in IH than in Conan (which cleaves faithfully to REH's style in this regard), in addition to wuxia-type acrobatic fighters. (Incidentally, the arrow ladder is *one* *optional* class ability; it isn't even a feat or a hard-coded stunt. It's not necessarily the best illustration of how IH works.)</blockquote>

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