Iron Lore: Malhavoc's Surprise?

[Mac Callum]

But at 20th level, those 'replacments' for magic items and other standards, is going to continue to rise no? Replacements to overcome damage reduction and other core elements, such as teleportation, dimension door, bulls strength and other buff spells, will have to be built into it, or it won't be compatible with either Arcana Evolved or D&D as both have lots of magic built into 'em, even if you just use the spellcasters and toss the magic items.

Replacements for DR-piercing and direct-boost-granting items, yes; but I'm not sure why you need to compensate for the loss of Teleport or Dimension Door. Usually, those don't effect the CR system much, just your ability to get in and out of situations that or too hairy to approach or retreat from normally.

A good example if the Archer's BAB progression with the Bow. You'll notice that it neatly dovetails with a Fighter's BAB progression + a magical bow appropriate for that level. That's a direct Attack boost. The token abilities also nicely match some of the damage boosting capabilities of magical weapons at higher level. I imagine that general Feats available to everyone will handle the DR-piercing bit (or a general mechanic that pierces DR as you advance in total character levels).

I don't see any need to replace Teleport. In fact, I regularly nix Teleport, or 'shaft' it in some way to make it less common. I need to because in hong's parlance a world with free and safe Teleport is just a little to wahoo for me to wrap my brain around. I'll be happy to see it gone. Same goes high level divination too.

If IL seems incompatible with Arcana Evolved or D&D, I think it's really the implied settings which are not compatible. Eberron and the Diamond Throne just don't work without access to high level magic. Eberron could not be staffed solely with NPC's with class levels from IL, so yeah, in that sense they're incompatible.

But in a general CR-sense? They seem to be so far. (Notwithstanding specific examples, such as Elmer Fudd, which will probably have to wait until we have the whole ruleset).

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

A good example if the Archer's BAB progression with the Bow. You'll notice that it neatly dovetails with a Fighter's BAB progression + a magical bow appropriate for that level.

Golly, if that doesn't lend credence to my prior churlish post.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Golly, if that doesn't lend credence to my prior churlish post.

If you're ok with being a churl, I'm okay with you being a churl. Or at least posting like one.

I meant no offense by it, simply to illuminate what Mac Callum might be responding to. We're a friendly board and I appreciate it that people are watching out for each other's style. In a prior thread I used the term prejuidice in what I felt was a perfectly innocuous sense, was called on it, and was only too happy to respond and adapt to the criticisms. Many of the posters I most respect most have gone through similar processes in any number of threads. I'm certainly happy to elucidate further on the subject of snark, but really it's only the smallest of sins and a not illegitimate style of posting. My only point was to illuminate a potential point of irritation so that it might be smoothed over, not to defame anyone's sense of sophisitication in argumentation and style. I might do that under other circumstances, but it's really not apropos to anything at hand including the current posters.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Golly, if that doesn't lend credence to my prior churlish post.

And to respond to the argument:

I honestly don't think it does. You might be able to clarify but as far as I can tell magic is the ultimate point of calling a spade a spade. You can't claim magic is in a game unless someone puts it there. Mike hasn't said that the Archer's abilities are magic related so unless you are saying that they are in your homebrew I don't see where your argument comes from.

Certainly if you don't have a magic bow then you aren't reliant on magic items, but if you also don't have any other way to associate the term magic with your character then it doesn't make any sense to say that the characters are less reliant on magic items but still reliant on magic?

Are you suggesting that its necessary in heroic fantasty for heros to be screwed if they don't have magic items? 'Cause I'd need to see a more involved argument on the nature of the genre to buy that.

 

[Mac Callum]

Golly, if that doesn't lend credence to my prior churlish post.

What do you want, Wulf? Mike's already admitted that IL characters should be about par with PHB characters of the same level. For that to work you have to make up for the item & spell granted boosts somehow.

AFAIC, the only reason that these adjustments have been made are so that I, as a DM, do not have to re-figure every CR in all of the Monster Supplements I own. AFAIC, that's a huge favor. This is a Good Thing. Grim Tales is terribly interesting and thought provoking, but the CR / EL tables are a lot of work. I can't do it on the fly, and it would be nice to just run an adventure out of Dungeon or what-have-you without having to recompute every encounter. There is absolutely no reason why an IL-only campaign can't be as gritty as you want. Just disallow Arcanists, get rid of all the monsters, and make all of the NPC enemies humans with class levels on par with the PC's. That way all of the Defenses Bonuses and Advanced BAB progressions just come out in the wash and you're left with a always-life-threatening slug-fest.

I wanted to move on, but it was posts like this, which harp on how IL keeps disappointing you, that made me make the original 'churlish' comment. It disappoints you. Fine. We know. Can we move on now?

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

The heroes in Leiber and Howard's stories were not superheroes. They relied heavily on stealth and picking foes off quickly one at a time. This is because plowing into multiple opponents was a good way to get killed, particularly if they were armed with weapons that can strike at a distance. And on the occassions where they encountered monsters, they were fighting an uphill battle. Pitted against other men they were hell-on-wheels, but going toe-to-toe against something bigger, stronger, and more savage than themselves was a very bleak option.

Then again, maybe Howard and Leiber's heroes were just very low level.

There's no doubt about any of that, except that there are more than a few occasions where the two heroes plow into multiple opponents it is one of the staples of the genre, but I don't see where you're getting that IL is somehow a violation of that ethos.

If anything the introduction of archers with the abilities listed finally makes it possible for people to fear ranged attacks without irony.

I take a lot of hope from the most recent design diary. A dragon fight is described in which the characters have to use the terrain, tactics, and heroic daring to take it down, all without dipping into flavor text, and the dragon uses the same to fight against them.

If anything what IL is doing is not making it possible to play DnD with heroic fantasy characters so much as to make DnD a heroic fantasy world. One in which effort dedicated to the individual task recieves a concrete reward.

An archer who isn't stealthy and doesn't set up her position so that she has time to aim the shot is completely screwed in a way that I have yet to see paralleled in other GnG games. A Conan or BCCS archer doesn't have to do anything other than surprise the opponent and doesn't have any options for stealth beyond that. True of heroic mortal exalted as well. The token system makes an ambush on the part of an archer a multi-round process involving a lot of tactical sophistication and culminating in a shot that should prove to be satisfyingly deadly no matter what level of play you're working with.

I can accept that IL characters are heroic, and at high levels Heroic, but super-heroic I just don't see.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

For that to work you have to make up for the item & spell granted boosts somehow.

To be honest, I think that this is a mistake from both sides.

If the goal is to allow you to play DnD with Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser then it's not that you are making up for the lack of magical items with other magical abilities its that you are levelling out the system as a whole.

What we have is a historical cognitive dissonance here. We are so used to the standards of DnD from years of playing it that we have gone from thiking of 'in DnD if you lack magical items you are screwed when facing a dragon' as a complaint to thinking of it as an aesthetic necessity.

Watched Dragon Slayer the other night. Now you can fight me on this, but I think of that as a pretty perfect example of a GnG movie, at the very least its the best heroic fantasy take on magic in film and the best dragon slayer movie of all time.

And it struck me how much magic items just don't enter it. There's one magic item and two masterwork items in the whole movie. The magic item is a literal magic item. It's not some sort of thrice blessed sword it's a rock that lets you do magic. The masterwork item is hard to get on the one hand as its made of dragon scales and the other is simply hard to make.

The other thing that struck me is that the dragon wasn't a threat because it was a magical beast. The dragon was a threat because it was a magic beast with the tactical advantages of fortifications, mobility, reach, strength, armor, napalm, and intelligence. People go out to get a wizard to fight it, but noone thinks they can't hurt it through mundane means. Just that doing so will be pretty nastilly difficult, and the only way even the wizard can see to defeat it is through suicide bombing. Even the magic is tactical.

But the point is that noone in the movie thinks we're screwed we have to go home. The whole point of the movie is that everyone has to think we're screwed, we have to figure out a way to get unscrewed.

It's also worth noting how much preparation figures into the story as an element of each attempt against the dragon.

The thing I'm looking forward to most about IL is how much it rewards preparation. Cause what it's essentially down is replaced magic items with tactical sense. The two classes we've seen require preparation and the class we've seen that explicitly doesn't, the Berzerker, still requires you to really consider and evaluate the advantage of every blow struck against you. It's the first class where I can actually picture the eye of the hero, the whole heroic cinema trope of the hero getting into the fight and then evaluating each opponent as he prepares not only to make the next move but to recieve it, making sense.

 

[Felon]

I imagine that this description could be perfectly adjudicated in IL. Plowing headlong into a crowd of Armigers / Beserkers backed up with Archers would be suicide if they were a high enough level.

That sort of example is based on an assumption that you're assigning no-name rank-and-file schlubs with character classes, which pretty much runs counter to d20 design philosophy. When I say Howard and Leiber's heroes didn't plow casually into hordes of opponents, I didn't mean hordes of equally heroic opponents. Didn't think I needed to clarify that, but there you have it.

By way of example, in "God in the Bowl", Conan has a run-in with a bunch of palace guards. These guys are just schmucks, but they do hold him at bay quite successfully. Conan is particularly wary of the young pup leveling the crossbow at his chest, not so much because of the young pup being some badass archer but rather because of the crossbow's ability to puncture any number of internal organs.

 

[buzz]

By way of example, in "God in the Bowl", Conan has a run-in with a bunch of palace guards. These guys are just schmucks, but they do hold him at bay quite successfully. Conan is particularly wary of the young pup leveling the crossbow at his chest, not so much because of the young pup being some badass archer but rather because of the crossbow's ability to puncture any number of internal organs.

You can do this in D&D as-is, if the schmuck guards know how to Aid Another and have readied actions. It's maybe not going to be as lethal as GURPS, but them's the breaks. "God in the Bowl" is a pretty early story, too, isn't it? What equivalent level might Conan be in that encounter? Low enough to be wary of a squad of armed guards, maybe?

Things always get sticky when you try and match examples from an author-controls-all medium to RPGs, especially RPGs as gamist as D&D and most d20 RPGs.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Things always get sticky when you try and match examples from an author-controls-all medium to RPGs, especially RPGs as gamist as D&D and most d20 RPGs.

Then perbhaps should comparissiosn should be left out entirely? No more X will let you emulate Y because we don't want to get sticky or anything now no?