Iron Heroes...what's your opinion?

[ThirdWizard]

Having one so-so product in an otherwise great library of products doesn't a bad company make. I love Chaositech and the Temple of Mysteries module. I was disappointed with Iron Heroes. Life goes on.

You have made me more dissapointed with Iron Heroes than I was an hour ago, if that makes you feel any better.

 

[GlassJaw]

You have made me more dissapointed with Iron Heroes than I was an hour ago, if that makes you feel any better.

Victory!!

 

[Malachias Invictus]

It insults my intelligence quite frankly.

The roleplaying section *insults your intelligence*? If you recall, I asked for specifics. Specifically, how does it insult your intelligence.

Nope. Why no Mastery based on Improved Unarmed Strike? Is IUS what you meant by an unarmed combat ability?

Who said you could not use other Mastery feats with Improved Unarmed Strike? It sounds like you are upset that there is no Monk equivalent. That is a legitimate complaint, I suppose, but let's be clear on what we are complaining about.

They both replace the need for clerical healing and allow the characters to recover more quickly from a battle. The goals are quite the same actually.

Perhaps I am just ignorant as to the specific way VP/WP systems work. Please educate me on exactly how they fulfill this function, if you have the time. My impression was that such systems are quite a bit more deadly than a D&D-like hit point system, because of the effects of critical hits and the like.

If by strategic advantage you mean stand there and bite your shield so you can build up your Final Fantasy frenzy meter, then yes, it does reward the players.

Sometimes, doing something like stoking rage or aiming or taking the lay of the land is appropriate, and a better choice than hacking away. Why is it bad that such a choice is available? No one is forcing you to choose to do so, and there are a few classes that have no tokens at all.

Or certain publishers getting more of the benefit of the doubt sometimes?

That is simply nonsense. I spend a ton of money on gaming-related stuff, and I don't waste it on "benefit of the doubt". Iron Heroes was well worth every penny, and then some. I wish I got as much utility and pleasure out of all my gaming purchases.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Well I'm not sure if you've actually read any Conan stuff but I couldn't disagree more. If you took Conan and IH and printed out the mechanics only and removed all references to setting or publisher, Conan's ruleset immediately answers up the "why" and "how" the mechanics are what they are. If a set of mechanics can intuitively evoke the mood and feel of a genre or setting, it gets my praise. Conan does this. If you just had the mechanics from the Conan book and nothing else, you know what the style of play is.

I didn't get that feeling when reading IH.

Is it trying to be normal D&D? Is it a gritty setting like Conan? It is like Errol Flynn/Robin Hood?

I think this is the essence of the difference I was trying to get at, but first let me apologize.

At no point did I mean to imply that you were basing your opinion off a comparison that ignored what IH was in favor of what you wanted it to be. I respect your critical faculties. My only point was that I suspect you and I bring different knowledge sets to the game in terms of the RPGs we play and read. Certainly we have a lot in common but I would describe my knowledge of Grim Tales, for instance, as paltry in comparison to yours. And where you have made comparison, and I am in complete understanding that they are purely illustrative, to mechanics that originated in Star Wars D20, for instance, my immediate points of comparison actually tend to be non-D20 rules sets such as Feng Shui or Exalted.

As I said, over the course of the many conversations on this product I have come to respect your critical opinion and I think that though there are things I might disagree with you on on a very basic level as a fan of IH I'm very happy to have your critique around since I think it is a legitimate perspective.

Now:

My problem with Conan as a system is the very thing you bring up as a feature. Every new change it made to the system was in regard to a specific question. Each answer was tailored.

This is not my preferred style of game design. To me it feels too modular and grainy.

IH does a better job precisely because it is not question specific. The How and Why is only referenced to other parts of the system. It feels more like a complete text and it's easier to get a picture of how the different parts of the system relate to each other than it is something with an organization like Conan where instead of letting the play style demonstrate itself it tells you what it's doing.

For me it's the difference between a song that 'is' punk and a song that 'says' it's punk. There's nothing necessarilly wrong with the second style and there's no reason that saying your punk invalidates your being punk, but the first one I think is more likely to be interesting on its own and more likely to change the nature of being punk productively.

I read IH and I don't know what it wants to be, I know what it is.

Essentially, this is a difference in how much you value elegance, the techinal idea that you incorporate several functions into the same engine rather than creating specialized components, in design. If you don't like elegant design that's fine, it's not like it's a universally acknowledged necessary element, but it's sort of hard to deny that as a whole IH has a far more elegant design style than Conan.

And I like elegance.

It's also worth pointing out that I think the Conan OGL was trying to make the Conan stories a lot grittier than they actually are and that it sort of hurt them in trying to make a coherent game system out of it. But that's a pure tangent from what we're talking about here.

I'm sorry if I made this a lot more abstract than it is.

A simpler answer to your question of what IH wants to be is that it wants to be Heroic Fantasy which means it's going to end up on the boundaries of most current gaming aesthetics rather than solidly within most of the more current camps which combine Heroic Fantasty with other aesthetics.

Exalted, for instance, combines HF with Epics.

DnD combines HF with High fantasy.

Conan combines HF with Gritty fantasy.

This is in the nature of Heroic Fantasy as it is, on many levels, an inherently satirical form and thus incorporates a broad array of elements, most designers therefore look to another aesthetic to provide some limitation on the content available.

IH was able to avoid this directly by using the most Heroic Fantasy element of a High Fantasy game, the MM of DnD, to provide a cannonized standard of madness for the madness.

It's an interesting project since RPGs tend to view themselves as literary and IH/Heroic fantasy is always going to be sort of liminal to that. Some of Borges short stories would be the ones I would go to for the purest sense of that feeling, but equally I would add any reading of Leiber or Howard that was unaware of the direction those franchises would appear to take over the whole course of their work. The sort of thing that produces excited authors producing excited pastiches rather than the sort of thing that produces satisfied critics producing insightful elaborations. And, I would argue, the sort of thing that probably produced the works themselves.

On the other hand, it's also the sort of thing that produced He Man. So it's not like I don't appreciate someone calling out against the darkside.

 

[Lobo Lurker]

Wow, I'm obviously in the minority here but I finally got a chance to read it and I don't like it all. Seriously.

That's cool. You're entitled to your own opinion.

No unarmed combat abilities, an unnecessarily clunky reserve point system (why not just use VP/WP?), a token system that rewards players to spend actions to do nothing, a low-magic system in which armor grants DR but is overcome by magic weapons, a throwaway caster class and magic system, and quotes like:

"Players can get so caught up in the game's exciting combat and action that they forget to stress other key aspects of their characters, such as personality and background."

1) You can take Improved Unarmed Strike if you like. And no one is stopping you from coming up with your own Unarmed Combat Mastery tree.

While reading through the feats chapter, I constantly got the feeling that Mike was trying to provide a bunch of really useful examples of how to do your own feats. I anticipate further Mastery feats either online or in one of the other Iron Heroes releases (no proof of this though).

2) One of the stated design goals of Iron Heroes was to make the combat more tactical. Sometimes, doing nothing is better than doing something. The fact that Iron Heroes rewards players for doing nothing is great. The Player gets to make the choice of whether they'll press an attack, or pause to gather thier resources so that they can do something special (and oft-times it's worth it to gather tokens instead of just attacking).

3) Not all of use are, nor want to be "leet role players". Some of us like throwing the dice around so that we can hack and slash our way to victory and then on to the next fight.

4) Keep in mind that the book is also intended to be read and easily understood by RPG (or at lease, D20) virgins. The fact that is has a roleplaying chapter is commendable.

5) It is my understanding that the Vitality Point/Wound Point system was developed specifically for Star Wars D20. No one else was supposed to use it. But the people who made SpyCraft did and WotC granted them permission to continue to use it. I'm not a lawyer, but it may be possible that no other company CAN use that system.

EDIT: And then I remember that this system made it's way into Unearthed Arcana, possibly invalidating point #5...

I know that I personally have not seen any of the Conan rpgs that are out there. But it seems to me that Iron Heroes does a good job of delivering upon it's promise of a "low/rare" magic ruleset. The fact that it seems to be balanced with the rest of D20 (dnd) material is just an added bonus.

If you don't like it then cool, don't like it. But don't blast a product for doing what it sets out to do and for not being something that it doesn't claim to be.

Disclaimer: I have not read the rulebook in it's entirety.

 

[Nellisir]

I've only skimmed the book so far, but I'm lukewarm on it. It's certainly not the Second Coming of Dungeons & Dragons, but I probably won't sell it either. Traits are my favorite part of the book so far, and it's disappointing that they weren't opened up as OGC, but I've come to expect that from Malhavoc.

 

[Lobo Lurker]

On the other hand, it's also the sort of thing that produced He Man. So it's not like I don't appreciate someone calling out against the darkside.

HEY! I *liked* He-Man... Dad got me castle Grey-Skull and everything. I even liked Dolph Ludgren's movie. I'm not quite sure I like the new animated series, but I'd give it a shot if it ever showed at an hour when I had time to watch tv.

 

[ThirdWizard]

I even liked Dolph Ludgren's movie.

*stunned*

(even though I can quote from the movie...)

 

[Azurecrusader]

Thread jacking in process:

Actually, the new He-Man cartoon was quite good if you liked the old stuff. I'm sad that it got canned (or at least seems to have been canned, I'm not up on my He-Man lore).

Thread jacking done.

I'm sort of so-so on Iron Heroes. I think I *want* to like it too much and it's making me not like it so much if that makes any sense. I'm a little dissapointed in how poorly edited it is, certainly not what I expect from Monte and Mike.

There are great parts about it and parts that could stand some improvement. In my opinion that's pretty much just like every other game out there.

 

[Particle_Man]

From page 4: "It should be noted that this book is intened for those who have already played roleplaying games in the past. Beginners looking for a simplistic, tutorial-style game book should look elsewhere. This is an advanced rulebook."

That said, 7th Sea had both "beginners" and "advanced" roleplay advice, and the "don't ruin other peoples' fun just because you are trying to be 'in character': Pick a different 'character' to 'be in' instead " advice was in the "Advanced" section of the 7th Sea game, so maybe it officially counts as "advanced roleplaying advice".

Personally, I like Iron Heroes a lot, but am still absorbing it. I think I might simply try the magic system out at first and see what happens. Another option is simply to ban evocation, conjuration and transmutation and see what develops from that.

But the traits, skill challenges, combat challenges, multiple choice class abilities, multiple choice token use, feat mastery feats, and stunts are all cool to me. I like that there is the emphasis on combat. I also like that the "do nothing" options are there, because some players will "do nothing" in any case -- they might as well provide something useful to the party for doing what they will do anyhow, by gathering tokens.

I think the DR/magic was just short-hand for "some monsters go through your armor like tissue paper" since there are no magic weapons (or if there are, they are rare and cursed). Even the transmutation method doesn't make weapons magical. It just makes them better weapons.