Iron Lore - Tokens, what the heck are they?

[BryonD]

I haven't seen any marketing material about Iron Lore that said it's gonna be all gritty and stuff. The brochure emphasises lack of "safe" magic, "daring action and clever tactics", and "heroic combat."

Yep. I have not seen anything to imply that it will be at all gritty. The idea is that a 15th level IL char should be every bit as super survivable as a 15th level D&D character. That ain't grim nor gritty. Heck, to be that tough without gear is LESS grim if anything. Not that I have a problem with that.


On tokens, I'm a little leary of the physical mechanic of throwing tokens around. But I'm still very intrigued over all. The big picture sounds like a whole lot of fun and if tokens are part of that, then so be it.

 

[wilrich]

I've only read about halfway through this thread, so if my question has been answered already, I apologize, but I have a burning question. There seem to be a lot of people who have had some first hand knowledge of Iron Lore and hopefully, they can answer the following question (of course to the degree that they can do so without violating an NDA)

I am really excited about the general ideas and concepts behind Iron Lore, but, as someone mentioned above, I do have a concern about "too many cool options" from the DM's perspective. In my campaigns we don't tend to fight many monsters, but mostly evil NPCs with classes and levels. I am concerned that, for a DM, trying to run a fight between high level PCs and a dozen classed and (appropriately -- i.e. high) leveled foes using Iron Lore would be a tremendous bookkeeping headache and pain in the butt -- not to mention creating all those NPCs during prep. Granted, I concede that that same concern exists to a large degree under the D&D RAW (in fact ,I would argue that the lack of a firmly defined system to handle the capabilities of NPCs with classes and levels in a more streamlined fashion is the biggest weakness of D&D, but that is another topic that has been done to death). It appears to me that Iron Lore is likely to be at least as bad as the current rules when it comes to this issue, and that the problem could possibly be even worse. I understand that there will be less magic to address and deal with, but it still seems to me like it all might be a tremendous exercise in accounting causing lots and lots of headaches.

So, for those in the know, can you speak to this issue? Does Iron Lore provide a way to streamline the management and creation of all these details and resources from the DM's side, or (like the D&D RAW), just say "NPCs are detailed the same as PCs and you have to deal with all of the good and (in my opinion mostly) bad that goes with that? Is it as bad as the RAW as far as that goes? Better? Worse?

Thanks very much for any information!

 

[Andor]

In case it wasn't completely clear, my principal objection to tokens is that they needlessly complicate the game and will increasingly complicate the game as character level increases. And in particular, it bothers me that this complication is added to the game for the express reason of getting away from magical world altering effects but in fact what the system really seems to do is give magical world altering effects a mundane explanation. So, when I refer to the token system as a 'magic system', I mean that in a gamist since. Obviously, from a simulationist/narrativist perspective, what's going on isn't magical. But at some level its starts to 'feel' magical to me.

Fair enough, although I think it's difficult to judge how much they complicate the game without having seen them in action. I'd be worried about it too, if it looked like judgement calls had to be made with regard to token aquisition. However the examples we've seen indicate it's a very boolean operation. You did or did not spend an action to gain a point, you did nor did not take damage, etc. As long as the game effects required to gain a token are concrete I think there should be no slowdown.

Also it's worth noting that the stated goal is not to get away from magic from a gamist perspective, but to get away from reliance on it in game. Conan was not feared because he had a +5 brilliant energy caber. He was feared because he could probably win using a plastic spork.

That it and every other 25 sq ft. area of the universe contains something which provokes a DC 20+ balance check (the difficulty of running on a oiled balance beam) is somewhat amazing.

And that's the problem I have. I think that in a given environment, the assumption that there is a spot which is slightly more trippy than the rest of the floor is reasonable. But for the most part, this is not useful information, because the assumption that there is a spot on every floor as trippy as an ice rink is unreasonable to me. I already force players to make low DC balance checks on any reasonably trippy surface. You know its my campaign when you charge through the forest and I call for everyone to make DC 0 balance checks. It wouldn't be unreasonable for a player to try to place a trippy surface that forced someone who charged him to make a DC 5 balance check. But DC 20? DC 25? That's not taking advantage of the terrain. That's magic, or more to the point cinematic/dramatic movie magic.

*shrug* I don't think it's overly powerful for a 20th level ability. Is it actually going to happen all that often in most campaigns? Besides, you can always change the special effect to suit the circumstances of the fight. Dueling on the kings shiny ballroom floor? Obviously there shouldn't be a root for you to manuver him over, but you could kick something under his foot to trip him as he charged. Cinematic? Yes. It's a 20th level ability. Magic? Need not be. Besides, I told you how I've done this myself and I promise you I'm not 20th level.

But let's not get sidetracked. The principal objection I've had to this since the first is that adding all these tokens to the game is a complication I don't really need that doesn't solve the actual problems I have. It doesn't seem like its going to be able to help me run a high-level gritty campaign more easily. It doesn't seem like an extension of the D20 system. It seems like a completely new (and perhaps in the right genera interesting) system. The rest is just an excercise in exploring the ideas in the game out of my pure enjoyment of game mechanics as a thing in and of themselves.

Well, if you're looking to Iron Lore to help you run a gritty campaign then you're probably asking it to do something it wasn't written to do. It supposed to simulate Conan or Fafhrd and Grey Mouser. Fafhrd and Grey Mouser may have lived in a nasty, squalid untrusting world, but they were far from powerless. If I recall correctly just about the first thing they did after they met was to destroy an entire temple of evil priests by themselves. (Note to evil priests, do NOT kill the heros girlfriends and let the heros live.)

While gritty is really a concern of the world more than the system I don't think any level based system really does it well because eventually the heros will become powerfull enough in their own person to rise above the grit.

 

[Yair]

I don't mind the cinematic "spell" system, I like it. I think an Iron Lore combat scene could be very interesting, more so than in D&D.
What I'm worried about is the complexity of it all. Especially for high level NPCs, and for players that don't like paying attention to rules (I have some of those). It's a micromanagement nightmare.

It still looks like an interesting system, and I'd probably give it a spin.... too early to tell, but probably.

 

[monboesen]

A couple of points.

"Everyone is now a spellcaster". Well in pure technical terms yes. But there’s a heck of difference between forcing an enemy to make a difficult balance check and hmm.. lets say stop time itself, transform into a friggin 25 ft. tall demon or revive a hundreds of years old corpse. It’s not even comparable in any meaningful way.

"the tokens are an unnecessary complication that will slow the game down". Again that might be. But I'm pretty sure that spending a couple of tokens a round will not slow my players anymore down than remembering the spell effects and magic items on them in D&D.

Stat buffs, priest blessings, bards singing, polymorphs, magic enhancer spells, one shot magic items and so on bogs down my game more than anything else. And they are usually applied in each combat too.

In fact I'm pretty sure tokens will slow them down less once they get the hang of it. At least spending a token will likely most often only affect yourself.

And lastly anyone thinking IL would be a low powered gritty game has been fooling themselves. Its going to a high powered game where player accessed magic will be scarce and possibly dangerous to use.

 

[mearls]

On the NPCs and tokens issues:

Remember the NPC classes from the 1e days of Dragon magazine?

Yup, so do I. And they inspired an important part of the Iron Lore system, at least in the two follow up books. I can't say much more, since this stuff is still in development/playtest, but its something to think about. The issue of NPCs and tokens is an important one, and I addressed it in the design.

There are monsters that use tokens - but when they do use them out of the box, I tried to make them a measure that only gets spent if the DM wants to spend them.

 

[Yair]

About the Hunter class, I just wanted to add that "Hunter" is really a bad name for the class. "Tactician" would have been much better. The fluff is just all wrong (a strong independent warrior that ... leads his team-mates to victory ?!! Ehem).

 

[buzz]

I love this; it's like the days leading up to Eberron all over again.

"Check out that moehill."

"That's not a moehill, THAT'S A MOUNTAIN!"

"What? No it isn't."

"You're both wrong, it's a SPACE STATION!"

"What moehill are you guys talking about? I don't see nuthin'."



The Malhavoc (i.e., S&SS) booth is going to be my first stop at GenCon. I'm hoping IL doesn't sell out immeditaely like AU did.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

welcome to the land of the elision

About the Hunter class, I just wanted to add that "Hunter" is really a bad name for the class. "Tactician" would have been much better. The fluff is just all wrong (a strong independent warrior that ... leads his team-mates to victory ?!! Ehem).

While I may agree with you, I had the impression that the hunter was more a reference to someone who can read the landscape and who is good at both lore and tactics. That and the skill areas used. All of which are pretty huntable.


Something I'd like to point out: From my reading of this class it seemed as though the high level character would be easier to create, but...

...what we really need to see to determine that are the more basic structural details of the class like feat and skill acquisition rules, wealth by level, and BABs and Save Bonuses.

...and we need to contrast that against the assumed use of lack of use of magical items.

...and there is still a YMMV factor to it in that while character creation may be pretty constant for most people I don't know how much character creation maps to ease of character play.

All of that accounted for, from what I know, still leads me to favor the Hunter. If skill acquisition is primarilly by area, feat acquisition is limited by various ramps such as lore and tactics, wealth by level is less of a factor, and BABs and Save Bonuses don't need to be calculated through so many items then...

...all I need to do as DM is picking out those few skills that come from intelligence and don't fall into the areas, determine which feat paths I want the character to take and tick them off on the sheet, tick off his class abilities, determine if he's bothered to get a castle or not, and then just write down his BABs and Save Bonuses. Voila 15th level character.

So for a high level character a lot of my complexity vanished with skill ranks and magical items. Tokens would have to be mighty complicated to make up for that. Plus you get to use tokens, or more precisely your players do. Tokens are cool. Check out the intimidated look on the players' faces when you begin raking them in before the fight with the Big Bad.

The fact that there are actual bad a** NPC classes is intriguing in its own right.

I can't disagree, however, that it would be nice to see an example or transcript of play in which a DM runs an evil party against the PCs.

 

[tetsujin28]

Celebrim has established himself as this thread's token complainer.

*ouch*

I'm looking forward to using either gumdrops or marshmallow peeps for tokens.