What are everyones thoughts on Iron Heroes?

[I'm A Banana]

At the very least, this is a must-have for me from a designer perspective. The biggest complication I can see so far is that "encounter" is kind of an artificial construct. It doesn't happen naturally in the story of a game. When does an encounter begin, when does it end? The lines are not rigid, and they are not for a reason, from what I can see -- mostly, that saying "ROUND ONE! FIGHT!" before every initiative roll seems quite metagame. And from a world-logic perspective building up these "danger points" in the form of tokens seems spurious...suddenly, now that I am facing evil, I can find this power I had, while before, I could not!

These are major issues, but are not hard to deal with, especially, if some thought is given to it. Still, I'd like to see how these powers are explained in the world, rather than in the game, and if it removes my suspension of disbelief too much to use them....

 

[Slobber Monster]

At the very least, this is a must-have for me from a designer perspective. The biggest complication I can see so far is that "encounter" is kind of an artificial construct. It doesn't happen naturally in the story of a game. When does an encounter begin, when does it end? The lines are not rigid, and they are not for a reason, from what I can see -- mostly, that saying "ROUND ONE! FIGHT!" before every initiative roll seems quite metagame. And from a world-logic perspective building up these "danger points" in the form of tokens seems spurious...suddenly, now that I am facing evil, I can find this power I had, while before, I could not!

These are major issues, but are not hard to deal with, especially, if some thought is given to it. Still, I'd like to see how these powers are explained in the world, rather than in the game, and if it removes my suspension of disbelief too much to use them....

I'm not sure I understand where you're coming from on this. From the designer diaries:

The only time tokens come into play (with a few notable exceptions) is during a fight.

You are either fighting someone, or you are not - right? I mean, this is something I feel pretty certain of at any given moment in the real world. Whether I'm in danger is uncertain at times, but once a fight starts you know it.

As for suddenly discovering powers ...what relevance does, for example, the abilitiy to use terrain for a defensive bonus have outside of a fight?

Now maybe the exceptions are problematic from a metagame perspective, so I guess we'll have to wait and see on that.

 

[Tolen Mar]

That's an aspect I'd like to hear more about, and surely it's not an NDA-breaker ... how did your group deal with the tokens, physically? Did the DM provide them, or are they more like dice, where the players kind of get attached to or bring their own tokens? Will a typical player need more than one color of token to represent different pools of abilities? Did any kind of "token etiquette" arrise in your games? Did players typically have some kind of container to keep their tokens in; did they have a little "token corral" to show which ones were being used/gathered at the moment?

I handled it with a sheet numbered down one side with multiple columns...most of the time I only tracked one type, but occasionally I had more. I laminated it, and used dry erase markers.

In AE I was using the tokens from my Risk box to represent daily spell slots. As I used them, I removed them from the pile.

There is more than one way to keep track of tokens, use the one you like. Maybe someone will catch on and release 'official' tokens, ala Magic The Gathering and other games...

 

[JohnSnow]

The biggest complication I can see so far is that "encounter" is kind of an artificial construct. It doesn't happen naturally in the story of a game. When does an encounter begin, when does it end? The lines are not rigid, and they are not for a reason, from what I can see -- mostly, that saying "ROUND ONE! FIGHT!" before every initiative roll seems quite metagame. And from a world-logic perspective building up these "danger points" in the form of tokens seems spurious...suddenly, now that I am facing evil, I can find this power I had, while before, I could not!

Encounter is not an "artificial concept." It is the moment at which the PCs "encounter" something with which they have to interact. In other words, they run into an enemy, in a location, and have to engage it. Assuming they choose to fight it, the use of tokens works as follows (using a party with characters where I MOSTLY understand from previews how their tokens work).

A Hunter, Executioner, Archer and Berzerker (all 5th level) are traveling through a forest. About half way through, they run into a party of 6 bandits (Men-at-arms) wearing studded leather and wielding longbows and shortswords. Everyone is aware, so there's no surprise. Combat begins...

The archer holds back, pulling his bow and taking aim at one of the bandits. The hunter pulls his weapons, immediately assessing the battlefield. The berzerker screams out a battlecry and charges headlong into the fray. The executioner hangs back, taking the measure of one of the bandits and searching for a weakness. The hunter notices a gap in the armor of the bandit nearest the executioner, which he calls out to his ally, who immediately shoves a dagger in the gap for full damage dropping his foe. The bandits hang back and pick their targets - three ganging up on the berzerker as the others spread out. The hunter notices some unstable ground nearby, and also takes the measure of the bandit leader. The bandits make their attacks, the archer deftly sidesteps, and the bandit leader stumbles over a root, his strike agains the hunter going wide. The executioner's foe is down, but two of those fighting the berzerker land their blows...opening red gashes across his chest and along one leg.

Second round: The berzerker unleashes the fury of his rage, smashing one foe with his greataxe and dropping him to the ground, then follows through, taking another in the leg as he turns with a menacing glint in his eye. The archer looses the arrow he nocked last round and it pierces his opponent in the eye and lays him low. Having taken the measure of his foe, the hunter slips a sword past his defenses, leaving a red gash across his chest. The executioner polishes off the hunter's foe with a well-placed sword in his back. The two bandits still standing think better of this ambush and split.

The token gathering moves are:
Tactical tokens (Hunter gets some per encounter - at 5th level, this character gets 3).
Hunter's Eye (Hunter gets 1 for a move action studying the battlefield).
Aiming (archer gets tokens for taking aim at foes - 4 in this case)
Damage (one way Berzerkers get fury tokens is by taking damage - not sure how much).
Studying (Executioners get tokens for studying their foes - again amount unclear).



The token spending moves are:
Tactical token conversion - Hunters can give tokens away to their allies - in this case the executioner, who I assume uses 2 to bypass his foe's armor with a lethal blow (probably also getting sneak attack damage).
Armor-piercing deadly shot by the archer (bypass DR 2 (2 tokens) add Dex bonus to dmg (2 tokens).)
Terrain Advantage - Hunter spends 1 token to gain a +1 to his defense from terrain-based cover (the rock).
Assess Opponent - Hunter spends 1 token to take the measure of his foe, getting +1 to AC and +1 to attacks (which he uses in round 2).
Fury - Berzerkers spend tokens to unleash their rage. I would imagine this is similar to barb rage with tokens replacing the times/day limitation. He should be able to spend some on a power attack and others to increase his intimidate check.
Armor-piercing deadly shot by the archer (bypass DR 2 (2 tokens) add Dex bonus to dmg (2 tokens).)

The executioner doesn't need to spend tokens to use his sneak attack ability.

Obviously, this is a really short combat, but I wanted to give people an idea of the "realism" side of token accumulation.

 

[Kaos]

Definately Excited

I was what you could call a 'Monte Cook anti-fan.' Literally; take the image of a hardcore fan, and reverse it so that she hates everything instead of loving it, and that's how I felt about Monte.

But now, he presents IH: and from everything I've heard about it, it's nothing short of what I would have liked to do to D&D, but didn't have the time, drive or support to do. Not that there was anything seriously *wrong* with D&D, just some areas that I thought could be better. I wanted something with less dependance on gear, a magic system with more similarity to my own occult dabblings, fighters who do more than just swing a weapon. Especially high-level fighters who could do even half as much cool **** as the high level spellcasters.

IH, from the previews, seems to offer all of that. And as long as it doesn't flop, that's enough for me to give up the hate. (And he's just presenting it, so imagine what it does for my opinion of the designer...)

I'm definately buying this.

 

[Kaos]

At the very least, this is a must-have for me from a designer perspective. The biggest complication I can see so far is that "encounter" is kind of an artificial construct. It doesn't happen naturally in the story of a game. When does an encounter begin, when does it end? The lines are not rigid, and they are not for a reason, from what I can see -- mostly, that saying "ROUND ONE! FIGHT!" before every initiative roll seems quite metagame. And from a world-logic perspective building up these "danger points" in the form of tokens seems spurious...suddenly, now that I am facing evil, I can find this power I had, while before, I could not!

An encounter starts when the adrenaline begins to pump.
An encounter ends when the arenaline is no longer coursing through your veins.
---

Ok, that's a very simplistic explanation from an in-character perspective but it *should* suffice for figuring out when you start collecting tokens and when they go away.

As for your other comment: I suspect most of the token-triggered abilities are only really appropriate when in combat (or combat-like situations) anyway. I mean, it's not like you're going to want to invoke your parry tokens for chopping firewood.

 

[ThirdWizard]

As for your other comment: I suspect most of the token-triggered abilities are only really appropriate when in combat (or combat-like situations) anyway. I mean, it's not like you're going to want to invoke your parry tokens for chopping firewood.

In Iron Heros, firewood chop you!

*cough* Bad me.

As for encounter referencing abilities, there's already one in the game: rage. The fatigue caused by raging goes away when the encounter is over. Not a biggie, but there is a precedence. Besides, its fairly easy to keep track of an encounter. First round of initiative: encounter starts; when you stop keeping track of initiative: encounter over (note I didn't say when you stop keeping track of rounds).

 

[Arbiter of Wyrms]

Onward again. Several people asked how the core characters and IH characters will mesh.

First up, you can use core classes and IH classes together (our group is doing so in our online campaign). The IH classes is balanced to the core classes as long as you take into account that the IH classes assume little to no magic items and that magic is more rare than the default core setting assumes. If you go this route, you are going to have a watch the balance of the IH characters because the default assumption is that IH characters have little access to magic. Therefore, if the IH character are kitted out in the same fashion as the core characters for magic items, the IH character will be better than the core characters.

I think I still don't understand.

If I let my players run a mixed group: a magister, a man-at-arms, an arcanist, a rogue, an akashic, and a druid, will the game break? Will I have to say "This magical item is for your PC. She isn't allowed to share it."? How will this work?

 

[Turjan]

I think I still don't understand.

If I let my players run a mixed group: a magister, a man-at-arms, an arcanist, a rogue, an akashic, and a druid, will the game break? Will I have to say "This magical item is for your PC. She isn't allowed to share it."? How will this work?

Most probably, IH characters will get hurting blisters if they touch magical items .

 

[Kaos]

I think I still don't understand.

If I let my players run a mixed group: a magister, a man-at-arms, an arcanist, a rogue, an akashic, and a druid, will the game break? Will I have to say "This magical item is for your PC. She isn't allowed to share it."? How will this work?

Basically, the IH characters will be overpowered if they are given access to the magic items. Until the book comes out, we can only speculate on how badly or what the best ways to deal with that are. AE characters, I couldn't say.