Iron Lore: Malhavoc's Surprise?

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Good to have you here as well, Irda Ranger/Mac Callum.

In terms of the Horseman, I agree that you can really only go so far with animal companions that aren't mounts, but that's why I'd give beastmaster traits to the Horseman and just call it a horseman or huntsman. The mount aspects would be the core of the class and the beastmaster bits would be side benefits for when your mount isn't around.

I agree that beasts have never levelled up all together satisfactorilly in DnD, but I think Tokens might be a way around that. Instead of having a 20th level hound to go with your 20th level Horseman, you end up with a Freekin tough hound trained by a 20th level Huntsman to accompany you. For no tokens you can have the thing helping you out intelligently with aid another attacks or maybe taking out some mooks with its own powerful teeth and jaws. By investing tokens, on the other hand, you can have it hit with the power of your own training or surivive a hit with your own luck and durability.

Sides you had a character like this one around and then you could call it the Huntsman, put it far more definitively in the wilderness silo, and rename the Hunter the Cavalier and rearrange a few of its abilities, I'd recommend giving it some slightly less 'useful' skill groups, reducing the skill ranks per level to 4, and giving it more armor, so that it had a far more aristocratic and officer-like tone.

In other news, from what I've seen of the character builds so far I don't think anyone's in danger of having all the skills. My bet is that the Arcanist ends up with a LOT more skills than we are used to seeing in the Wizard, Sorceror, or Cleric and that the Thief might very well be a sort of hyper-skill using monkey, but that for the rest you're just finally ending up with characters who can actually play in anything that isn't a fight.

As it is in DnD I have to plan to make certain that we have at least one character who's competent at doing everything since everyone else is more or less incapable of doing everything from talking to people to swimming. It's a weird dynamic when taking on the undead is thrilling rather than terrifying and crossing a river is the reverse.

 

[Mac Callum]

It's a weird dynamic when taking on the undead is thrilling rather than terrifying and crossing a river is the reverse.

That's a frickin' awesome line. Almost sig-worthy. Also painfully true.

I thought "Huntsman" just got drunk and killed defenseless fuzzy things?

I suppose it could work, but I've never really like the Animal Companion schtick, even with Rangers or Totem Warriors. Might I suggest an ability though? You can use a Ride check to help your mount avoid damage. Maybe you could do a Handle Animal check to help a dog in the same way, as long he's within 10' of you? It's a thought. Personally, I don't plan on tinkering with the classes until I've played the game "as is" for a bit.

My bet is that the Arcanist ends up with a LOT more skills than we are used to seeing in the Wizard, Sorceror, or Cleric and that the Thief might very well be a sort of hyper-skill using monkey.

If we were putting down money, I'd actually take that bet. I don't think either of those classes is going to be a skill-monkey.

My picks:
Arcanist Skill Groups: Knowledge, "Alchemy, Healing, and Poisoncraft", "Concentration, Spellcraft, and UMD"
Thief Skill Groups: Perception, Stealth, "Thieve's Tools", "People Skills", and Athletic

Two side bets:
1. Perception isn't just Spot and Listen. It's Sense Motive too.
2. UMD may be necessary to use any magical item, or at least to use it without it consuming your soul or something.

Anyway, neither of those classes needs to know Survival, Perform, Handle Animal, Forgery (a useful one for both, but not core), Ride, Speak Language, etc. There are skills it would be useful to have, and you might purchase with your extra SP, but aren't essential to the concept.

I have two reasons for saying this.

1. The classes we've seen have a good selection of skills. Skill groups makes a Skill Monkey unnecesary.
2. Skills are useful in combat. Give a character too many skills, and he might shine "a bit too much" in combat compared to the others.

But that's just a guess. I sure as hell don't know anything you don't.

 

[woodelf]

Yes, A'Koss, that's probably the best design element I've read about so far.

This is probably the worst:

[paraphrase: it's all about fighting]

So what's the strategy here? Advertise how your game is shallow and that you aspire to provide us with the Jerry Bruckheimer version of an RPG? I won't say I hate every Bruckheimer movie I've ever seen, but I do want to see other movies when I go to the theatre.

Now combine it with it the following statement:

[paraphrase: classes strongly shape combat tactics]

So, all you ever do is scream "boo-yah!" and move from one explosive, action-packed scene to the next--with nary a moment to slow down, think, or savor anything--and your role in every fight is pretty clearly scripted. How does this not amount to tediousness?

I'm still interested in the book, but I can't say I think it's being presented in a good light by its author.

One: IME, Mearls is an excellent game designer, but sometimes a bit narrow-minded in exactly this way (focusing on a single playstyle). He is, in general, not a good persuader. His rules, luckily, do the work for him, because i don't think i'd ever have bought one of his books based on his trying to persuade me [that is to say, potential customers in general] to do so.

Two: Your description of the perceived tone of IL pretty much matches, IMHO, the tone that D&D3[.5]E conveys. On the one hand, that's to be expected: i hear a *lot* more complaints about D20 System stuff that isn't balanced for violent encounters than stuff that isn't balanced for, say, royal court encounters. On the other hand, people certainly play D&D3E games in other ways, so i don't see why the same can't be true of IL.

And, in this sense, it may actually be a good thing. One of the problems of D&D3E, where balance is concerned, is its reliance on a certain playstyle to maintain that balance. Switch to a heavily-political, almost-no-combat game, and any semblance of balance in D&D3E disappears. That's because some of the classes have exceptional non-combat abilities while othres have essentially none, and the system assumes a balance where a small bit of combat ability is equivalent to a large bit of social ability. If IL balances all the classes around just one area (physical/combat ability), and gives them all equal (if secondary) access to other types of ability, it may improve balance, regardless of playstyle. IOW, everybody gets an equal share of spotlight in combat. And now, everybody is equally well-equipped (which is to say, not very) in non-combat areas, too. If you're playing an IL game, and it moves into some palace intrigue, true, all of the characters will be a bit out of their depth. But it'll be all of them--there won't be one character who totally outshines all the rest, with tons to do while the rest are bored.

Not to mention, i've known quite a few RPers who run very RP-intensive games with little or no combat, and prefer a ruleset that only handles combat/physical things, because they feel that rules for social stuff just get in the way of RPing, and that the rules should only handle the parts that can't be acted out by the players.

 

[woodelf]

I can't say that I entirely get the urge to do this class equivilency exercises. I think that a paladin would probably be (pick class) plus (applicable traits) plus (roleplay). That could mean that he's a berserker who flies into a righteous fury, or an armiger who defends the weak, or a member of the clergy of the Lord of Swords sworn to use his for the cause of light, or...

In other words, paladin in roleplay. I wouldn't fixate on looking for an IL combination of classes to reconstitute the mechanical abilities of a DnD class. You'll probably be better served by doing a conversion of the paladin class to IL using the guidelines for that which are supposed to be there if you can't come up with any better mechanical skeleton to put the paladin-roleplay onto.

Especially given the number of popular fantasy archetypes that D&D3[.5]E can't do really at all, and the even larger number that can't be done without multiclassing. Arcana Unearthed/Evolved does a better job than D&D3E at representing typcial high-fantasy archetypes, and, so far, it looks like IL does a better job for less-wizardy fantasy (like Conan and Lanhkmar).

Also, frankly, i really don't care if there's a specific class that tries to represent paladin, barbarian, or several other of the D&D3E classes that shouldn't be classes, IMHO, because what defines them isn't their capabilities, its their attitude. ["berserker" would be ability-based, and that's really what the class should be--no need to tie berserking to background, and really no need to tie being from a primitive background to berserking.]

 

[Felon]

One, I have never been satisfied with the 2 SP / level that Fighters get. I have never been able to "round out" my characters the way I wanted to. Especiially with some skills being all but mandatory for some classes (Spellcraft?), I'd usually be left with one or two "optional" skills to fill out a PC if I was lucky. That was never enough for me.

Again, I think most people who are unsatisfied with skill point allotment are measuring it against a character with only 10 Int. You probably wouldn't be happy with your attack rolls with only a 10 STR or your HP with only a 10 Con. If players wan their fighters to be more skilled, bump INT.

Two, there are no skill-oriented classes in IL. No Rogue, Ranger, or Bard. No Akashic. The full complement of skills has to be covered by the PC's who are also fighter types. That means they need more than 2 SP/ level, or there will be huge gaps in what the party is capable of.

Actually, I suspect you'll find the Thief and likely the Arcanist are the skillmongers.

Three, not every group is going to have a representative of every class. That means you need more croos-training. Armigers need to be able to take Survival (without shafting the skills they need to be Armigers) in the event no one is a Hunter. To do that, you need extra SP/ level.

I don't follow the reasoning here. Every class needs extra SP so they can co-opt the roles of other classes?

I would say that if Mearls is setting up these skill groups for each class, he may as well go ahead give the classes max ranks in each group and then assign some discretionary SP on the side. It's safe to say that pretty much every Hunter is going to max out his Perception, Stealth and Wilderness Lore groups.

 

[Felon]

Especially given the number of popular fantasy archetypes that D&D3[.5]E can't do really at all, and the even larger number that can't be done without multiclassing.

That's what's really disappointing with the driection D&D is going. D&D continues to become morre and more inbred. Rather than designing a game that will appeal to newcomers who come in with visions of the LotR films or Conan comics in their head, they opt for this completely self-contained magic-intensive system that doesn't bear any resemblence to any kind of heroic fantasy that anyone might be familiar with. When you reach a point where Conan is flying around on winged boots or the Fellowship of the Ring can teleport to Sauron's tower the blink of an eye, and death is just an expensive pit-stop, maybe--just maybe--it's time to back up a step or two.

It's really amusing to me that we keep having these threads about "low-magic" systems, when the systems arren't actually low in magic, they're just not ridiculously inundated with it.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I don't follow the reasoning here. Every class needs extra SP so they can co-opt the roles of other classes?

I would say that if Mearls is setting up these skill groups for each class, he may as well go ahead give the classes max ranks in each group and then assign some discretionary SP on the side. It's safe to say that pretty much every Hunter is going to max out his Perception, Stealth and Wilderness Lore groups.

Actually, I think you'll find that MacCullum's resoning here is more or less a mirror of your own reasoning on the combat vs role-play oriented classes in Vanilla DnD.

Even though he applies it to maintaining balance in terms of class skill distribution overall, not so that you can take over the roles of other classes necessarilly so much as to prevent any one class becoming a necessary silo, I think it works just as well for your complaint that there aren't enough social classes.

Note that classes gain access to skill groups but essentially all other skills are class skills for Iron Lore characters. If MacCullum is right in his other argument that the Perception skill set contains Sense Motive, and I think it's a dang good argument, then I think even before you applly all the 'extra' skill points that skill groups give players you are actually going to see social skills distributed a lot more evenly throughout the classes as well as the characters.

And I like that, I think that given the distribution of skill sets we've seen so far the system already pretty much gives you full ranks in your essentials and then a few extra points to distribute as you see fit. The issue is that going with the 'full discretion' of skill points that you could put into skill sets you give the player many more options in terms of multi-classing or using his skill sets effectively toward something like a prestige class.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

If we were putting down money, I'd actually take that bet. I don't think either of those classes is going to be a skill-monkey.

My picks:
Arcanist Skill Groups: Knowledge, "Alchemy, Healing, and Poisoncraft", "Concentration, Spellcraft, and UMD"
Thief Skill Groups: Perception, Stealth, "Thieve's Tools", "People Skills", and Athletic

Two side bets:
1. Perception isn't just Spot and Listen. It's Sense Motive too.
2. UMD may be necessary to use any magical item, or at least to use it without it consuming your soul or something.

Anyway, neither of those classes needs to know Survival, Perform, Handle Animal, Forgery (a useful one for both, but not core), Ride, Speak Language, etc. There are skills it would be useful to have, and you might purchase with your extra SP, but aren't essential to the concept.

I have two reasons for saying this.

1. The classes we've seen have a good selection of skills. Skill groups makes a Skill Monkey unnecesary.
2. Skills are useful in combat. Give a character too many skills, and he might shine "a bit too much" in combat compared to the others.

But that's just a guess. I sure as hell don't know anything you don't.

I like your reasoning here, though I disagree. Post-Arcana Unearthed I think the real potential for skill monkeys isn't just breadth of skill it's also depth. Double attribute bonuses and extra skill focused feats, for instance, and easy access to take 10 rolls and limited abilities.

And that's what I think a thief will be, a character who focuses on stunts. The depth skill monkey where the Arcanist is the breadth one with a wealth of knowledge, craft, and mystical skills. Possibly also skill sets that differ based on specialization. Necromancers picking up heal and herbalism fer instance.

I like your ideas for the perception group and UMD.

Here's the structure I'd guess at:

Thief: Perception, Stealth, Athletics, Agility, Intrusion(open lock, disable d, and search), and Deception(bluff, disguise, forgery). That's six right there which puts the thief into the 8 skill ranks range for certain. And I ain't even put Urban or Social skill areas in there, which I only stepped back from doing cause that would put it at something like 10 skill areas.

Arcanist: I'd pretty much go with your reasoning cept I'd put craft and decipher script somewhere in there not to mention the variable skill set I mentioned earlier. All told that's way more of a skill monkey than the wizard and pretty much requires 6 skill ranks or more.

 

[A'koss]

I don't follow the reasoning here. Every class needs extra SP so they can co-opt the roles of other classes?

Remember that one of Mike's goals with Iron Lore was to create a game where you do not assume any one class will be in the party. I think with all the additional feats, traits, class abilities and combat options that skills will be at least somewhat less important in distinguishing between the classes. I suspect classes like the thief will have abilities that will allow them to get more mileage out of the skills they have.

That's what's really disappointing with the driection D&D is going. D&D continues to become morre and more inbred. Rather than designing a game that will appeal to newcomers who come in with visions of the LotR films or Conan comics in their head, they opt for this completely self-contained magic-intensive system that doesn't bear any resemblence to heroic fantasy that anyone might be familiar with.

Absolutely, I've beens saying the exact same thing for many a moon now... D&D is a great game that unfortunately isn't designed to run any of the styles of sword and sorcery fantasy I bought D&D for in the first place.

A'koss.

 

[Mac Callum]

I think most people who are unsatisfied with skill point allotment are measuring it against a character with only 10 Int.

Maybe for "most people" you'd be right, but not for me. I'm talking humans with a decent Int (for a Fighter). Not enough. I want my Knight to know his lineage back 12 generations and know how he's related to three different Kings (Knowledge (Royalty) 3 Ranks). I don't expect him to forge his own plate armor, but he should be able to fix a broken harness or a broken crossbow, shouldn't he? (Craft (Armorsmith & Weaponsmithing) 1 Rank each). He doesn't just ride his mount with skill, he trained the beast himself and is responsible for its care (Ride, Handle Animal, 6 ranks each).

In short, he's a professional.

My Samurai should have several Ranks in Perform (Haiku), and even more ranks in Knowledge (Royalty), plus some in Diplomacy. He isn't some uncouth yahoo from the countryside. Besides being a peerless horseman and dangerous fighter he is a respectable gentleman who knows the 4 ways of pouring tea.

I want my Rangers to sing ancient ballads in languages that haven't been spoken in a thousand years about people whom the oldest of the elves have almost forgotten. I want a Paladin who owns a vinyard and, when not adventuring, brews a mean bottle of sacramental wine. When adventuring he can speak with the Druid intelligently about the six best kinds of soil.

That's what I meant by rounding out. D&D doesn't let me do that.

I don't follow the reasoning here. Every class needs extra SP so they can co-opt the roles of other classes?

As others said, not to co-opt, but to cover for. Every class should be dispensible, so no one is forced into a role. That means more than one class has to have more than crappy access to Disable Device, Sneak, Diplomacy, etc.

I would say that if Mearls is setting up these skill groups for each class, he may as well go ahead give the classes max ranks in each group and then assign some discretionary SP on the side. It's safe to say that pretty much every Hunter is going to max out his Perception, Stealth and Wilderness Lore groups.

There's a good argument for that. Assume Max ranks in these skills, distribute the rest of your skills as you see fit.

That's what's really disappointing with the driection D&D is going. D&D continues to become morre and more inbred. Rather than designing a game that will appeal to newcomers who come in with visions of the LotR films or Conan comics in their head, they opt for this completely self-contained magic-intensive system that doesn't bear any resemblence to any kind of heroic fantasy that anyone might be familiar with.

Preach it.

I really hope Iron Lore allows me to do the kind of adventures I read about as a kid. I've been dying to do a campaign set in Midkemia, Ray Feist's world from the Riftwar series. That world's pretty magical, with dragons, immortal warriors, undead, spellcasters, etc., but D&D is so way beyond that I can't even bring the two within shouting distance of each other. For one thing, I think there's one magical sword in the whole series, and it's only magical because a quasi-God hid a spark of his essence it it. There sure aren't any humans running around making Flaming Longswords +2 at the drop of a hat. The one other magical item I can recall off the top of my head duplicated (in essence) an minor Weather effect which created fog over a square mile max; and using it almost killed the Magician.

For God's sake, I can't even run The Wizard of Earthsea with D&D, and a Wizard was the main frickin' character.

Anyway, my point is I TOTALLY agree with you here.

(I guess luckily for WoTC they have games like Neverwinter Nights to draw in new fans, and authors like Ray Salvatore faithfully cranking out their d20 Soaps)

I think a thief will be a character who focuses on stunts.

Hm, good bet. Giving them access to spells or a high BAB doesn't make sense, so in IL, what else is there? Maybe that's what their tokens do.

Arcanist will have breadth with a wealth of knowledge, craft, and mystical skills. Possibly also skill sets that differ based on specialization. Necromancers picking up heal and herbalism fer instance.

I can see that. I wonder what else being a specialist gets you. Given the limited nature of spellcasting, maybe only Necromancers can make undead? AU/AE has spoiled me into thinking that spellcasters are incredibly broad and flexible, but perhaps not this time.

Thief: Perception, Stealth, Athletics, Agility, Intrusion(open lock, disable d, and search), and Deception(bluff, disguise, forgery). That's six right there which puts the thief into the 8 skill ranks range for certain. And I ain't even put Urban or Social skill areas in there, which I only stepped back from doing cause that would put it at something like 10 skill areas.

I know, it almost seems too many. I left out some stuff I thought would be a good fit to include the "People Skills", because the character description said he has a silver tongue.

Wherever "Decipher Script" goes, I bet it's grouped with "Forgery."