Iron Lore: Malhavoc's Surprise?

[med stud]

When my father was a kid (10-11 years old) he and my uncle made bows from yew that could put arrows about half a foot into trees. So a ladder would be viable, maybe not in the time the ability takes. It's also a matter of the arrows holding for the weight of the climber; if you have handholds and keep close to the trunk I suppose you could make it, though. These abilities are over the top but OTOH there are people who can balance on seven chairs piled on each other and one guy from Texas (I saw it on some kind of documentary) that routinely hit baloons at 200 or 300 yards with a handgun. Human beings can be obscenely good at things if they give it enough dedication.

I think this looks interresting, not so much for the GnG-aspect as for the removal of the magical items, the tactical aspects and the revamp of the skill system.

The magical items lost all their value in my eyes when they are being talked about as plug-and-play units. It's not Narsil, the blade that once was broken, it's a keen longsword +3 that some hobo with wizard levels made in exchange for 32000 gold pieces. The other aspect is that my brain breaks down and cries when trying to make economics make any sense with the prices of magical items.

The tactical aspects are self explanatory.

But, my main problem with 3.X is the skill system. In 2e, for all that it didnt have, you could put a high intelligence on a fighter and have a scholar warrior. In 3e he lacks so many skills that he is essentially pointless outside of his field. A fighter almost cant be a political leader since he has a hell of a time getting enough Diplomacy, Sense Motive and Bluff for it along with necessary Knowledge skills. This means that a face is needed for the group, but the problem is that the face is often the only one capable of making good impressions; if the face is given opportunity to use his abilities to the max the rest of the group has nothing to do.

----

I dont know if this is going to be all it promises to be but I will buy it if I run a d20 campaign again.

On a side note, emulating the kind of stories where even the most skilled swordsman in the world has to be afraid of five soldiers with crossbows is not really d20 territory (IMO,Im not God who can tell people what to think ); the hit points make it so to a large degree. The best way of simulating that for me and my group was to take The Riddle of Steel, removing the SAs and tack on Willpower and virtues from Exalted. It made for a very strategical game where backstabs and ambushes are the key to survival and formal duels are very much a psychological game where you have to make an inferior foe accept a duel to not appear as a coward, and even then it was much Machiavellianism with poisonings and "accidents" happening to the superior fighter if he didnt keep his guard up. The channeling of virtues (from Exalted) made it so that some desperate fights were possible (like a PC hiding in a place with only one way out when five enemies are about to enter; channel Valor and surprise them and you could actually get away with it).
A d20 game on the other hand is better for the more heroic approach; the five crossbowmen in the ambush can really take down your HPs to a critical level but they wont (probably) instantly kill you.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Wow, I totally missed that. That sure makes it a lot easier to believe.

I had actually written a post "harping" on that this morning. I don't think it makes it more believable; rather, I think it's a back-door acknowledgement of how "wahoo" it is, especially since I expect that doing 9 points of damage will be a rather mundane task for the Archer.

It's akin to saying, "The Iron Lore monk can walk on water. However, this only works if he has perfected the technique of not breaking the surface tension of the water."

"Ah, that explains how he does it. Now it's a lot more believable."

 

[Cerbie]

Some thoughts...

I think I'll wait for IL for my campaign now. I got WoT d20, and have been using that for a base, and done well, I think. Converting magic has had some minor hitches, though. However, even when working well, there's been a major problem: portability.

I can make stunts (I was going to base it on playing cards), rework skills, and get a skill-based magic system going, and have it work as functional knowledge. I can get specializations in weapons working well (and will likely do a archer->gunslinger conversion--and someone else should have named the class ), and gotten inherit combat benefits into already-taken skills that would normally be bought for rounding out the character. Thus far, I haven't liked what many games have tried to do to implement it.

...but not only is it time-consuming, it is snowballs. I can't get it all working on my own in such a way that I could drop in a rust monster, or dragon, or random cool NPC badass. With IL claiming approximate compatibility to normal D&D (is this a reason for being OGL rather than d20?), and almost certain to actually have it, it will make DM prep far easier than what I have been working on. While I also tend not to favor games with metric tons of classes (IMO, over 5 --combining the WoT classes was dead simple), the multiclassing combinations from the released preview classes (Hunter and Archer) look good enough to let that slide.

Unless the Arcanist is total crap (and the way there have been pretty much 0 details about it so far, I doubt it is ), I will buy and use IL.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

... some alleged Twain quote...

This is a complete OT, nit-pick, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't Twain. I can't recall the name now, but I feel like it was a general in either the American Revolutionary or Civil War writing home to his father.

Yeah, which is why I only ascribed it as an "alleged" Twain quote. I'm aware that no one has proven he said it, despite that it is repeatedly said that he did.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I think Jackie Chan is an awesome example - I do hope that IL allows for this style of game. But also keep in mind that HL heroes will have some inhumanly high stats (I assume) that should allow them to do things no human would be capable of. A Thief with a 28+ Dex for example and the appropriate skills should be able to do things that no olympic athelete in the RL could even dream of attempting.

You know, I'm still wondering if that's the way things will work or not. I mean when WotC did the vow of poverty for a non-item using character they included a lot of suped ability scores, but noone has mentioned it in IL so while it's sort of intuitive for me that that would be a feature and I've been watching for it I'm developing some doubts.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Correct, and with respect to Dr. Strangemonkey, he doesn't get grim and gritty in the same sense that GnG afficiandos do. (There's another thread for that.)

I actually think "cinematic" is among the best descriptors for this style and is one of the primary things he's going for. Everything we have seen so far is certainly more cinematic than gritty.

Indiana Jones is not grim and gritty, nor Jackie Chan, 3M, James Bond, or Zorro.

They are not at all in the same genre as Conan and Fafhrd/GM.

But there is a difference between playing a game that allows us to do things we cannot do in the real world as a matter of skill and opportunity, vs a game that allows us to do things that are simply not possible within the laws of physics.

And it is understandable if the typical GnG player does not find Iron Lore a perfect match.

Wulf

Right I re-posted my response over in the other thread in question. Interesting and enlightening claims.

All I'd like to say is that I find it impossible to claim that Conan and Fafhrd/GM are not cinematic and thus in the same genre as the others. There's a huge body of criticism, formal and informal, that harps on the cinematic quality of those stories as essential to their nature. You could certainly say that those others belong in different sub-divisions of cinematic from Conan and Fafhrd/GM, but I don't think you can go so far as to deny that they don't share the action and material oriented qualities that all of them share as essential to their character.

And Zorro you just can't say that at all. Zorro as written and as played, at least for the most and best parts, is a very limited and realistic character in terms of what's possible for humans. Douglas Fairbanks introduced a lot of acrobatics to the character, but Doug was actually that good and none of them required the truly elaborate preparation that Jackie does. He didn't get shot that often, it's true, but I imagine that's true of most people who surprise small groups of Musket users at night with a melee weapon, speed, and a lot of capery. Aside from those muskets and the lack of magic he's very much in that category and a pretty clear candidate for profound influence on F/GM.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I had actually written a post "harping" on that this morning. I don't think it makes it more believable; rather, I think it's a back-door acknowledgement of how "wahoo" it is, especially since I expect that doing 9 points of damage will be a rather mundane task for the Archer.

It's akin to saying, "The Iron Lore monk can walk on water. However, this only works if he has perfected the technique of not breaking the surface tension of the water."

"Ah, that explains how he does it. Now it's a lot more believable."

Hmm, given that the real issue isn't the bow and the marksman so much as the ability of any old arrow to hold weight at that angle...

Would you also accept:

'The Iron Lore monk can walk on water because he has the right shoes and knows how to walk in them?'

No denying its a wonky ability just wondering how far the 'cool with physics' criteria goes.

 

[Felon]

If, as you say, it's simply something you know when you see then it would seem to me to both lack any claim to rigor and require subjective caveats, even to the level where typical probably requires qualification, or to not so much be an aesthetic with any sort of principles or structure as a refined set of rather arbitrary cultural expectations. In which case it would function as a clique dynamic along the lines of various punk subcultures united by markers and internal recognition that develop strange exclusionary identities for brief periods of time before being reintegrated into the general punk melange. Hmm, I may have to cross-post this into the other thread.

OK, so that all could have been stated more clearly with fewer words. Are you intentionally trying to drive home the previously-mentioned quote from Mark Twain? I beg you to spare any other threads.

Don't try to over-analyze common sense. it's evident in a matter of seconds whether or not something is so ridiculously beyond the realm of possibility that the immediate reaction is to snort in disdain. It's a gut reaction, though the term "common sense" allows for a certain margin of folks to lack that faculty.

No denying its a wonky ability just wondering how far the 'cool with physics' criteria goes.

It goes as far as your gut takes you.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

If, as you say, it's simply something you know when you see then it would seem to me to both lack any claim to rigor and require subjective caveats, even to the level where typical probably requires qualification, or to not so much be an aesthetic with any sort of principles or structure as a refined set of rather arbitrary cultural expectations. In which case it would function as a clique dynamic along the lines of various punk subcultures united by markers and internal recognition that develop strange exclusionary identities for brief periods of time before being reintegrated into the general punk melange.

If there's a point in there worth the trouble of rereading that 5 or 6 times, let me know.

Hmm, I may have to cross-post this into the other thread.

Don't look for me over there, cause it was posts like this that drove me out of there in the first place.

You'd be able to communicate twice as effectively if you used half as many words.

Then again, I'm just a jet-lagged technical writer criticized for brevity and clarity, so maybe it's me.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Hmm, given that the real issue isn't the bow and the marksman so much as the ability of any old arrow to hold weight at that angle...

That's part of the real issue.

Would you also accept:

'The Iron Lore monk can walk on water because he has the right shoes and knows how to walk in them?'

If he's clumsily trying to walk across water-- shuffling, really, at best-- wearing boat-like shoes on each foot, we can accept it, but it's not going to be particularly gripping action.

If it's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or Hero where the protagonists flit across the surface of the water, no.

Neither of these cases is likely to show up in Iron Lore, of course-- but nothing that a PC can do in 6 seconds is likely to be believable.