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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9166419" data-attributes="member: 4937">In the core rules sure, but if you are removing PrCs as I suggest then there are plenty of silo'd martial class abilities that can become part of feat trees, and there are plenty of things out there that were published as more powerful feat concepts for martials - including in Iron Heroes that you cite - that can be adapted to standard feat trees with only slight modifications.I'm familiar with it.  Iron Heroes basically builds an entire feat tree into each feat using the Mastery levels you mention.  This complexity isn't really necessary if we are trying to give all the good stuff to Fighter class and be fully compatible with standard base classes.  For compatibility with the base classes, it makes more sense to just have each thing be its own feat.  However, the feats are really the smallest part of what makes Iron Hero classes powerful.  Most of the power is really built into the class abilities and many of them rely heavily on the introduction of new types of meta-currencies that can be earned and spent in a variety of ways.  I am not a huge fan of meta currencies as they tend to by their nature be only lightly associated with game state.  Overall, I consider Iron Heroes to be simply not aggressive enough in its approach and to be too fixated on its need to have a wide variety of classes to do what I want to accomplish - consider my statement above about how one of the key weaknesses of martials compared to spellcasters is that they are one trick ponies in the light of the martial design for Iron Heroes.   I also think that Mearls really fails to understand the problem, in that almost all of his innovations are simply to make the martial more likely to hit, or to have more attacks, or to do more damage, or to "win more" in melee combat with another martial.  One of the problems you get into when talking about this is that almost everyone has a different sense of what the problem is based on different ideas of what is "cooler".  Some people literally just mean that they want the cinematic action that a fighter engages in to be cooler to imagine, and so want more concrete choices that directly translate to game state.   Others just want the numbers to be bigger.  And so forth.</blockquote>

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