Hey, all. I just flipped through Iron Heroes (Malhavoc) for the first time, and offhand, I'm already eager to try it out. I don't have the time or energy to offer a breakdown beyond the basics: no magic equipment, only one magic class; the book stresses non-magic classes and offers a huge variety of mechanics to make them shine more. Offers a combat system where characters get more badass as the combat progresses (via building up 'tokens' into various action pools through assorted and sundry methods ranging from 'you get X tokens at the start of every combat' to 'you get a token every time you get hit' to 'you get X tokens each time an ally is in imminent risk of death').
Because of the lack of healing magic and magic items, each class gets a defense bonus, higher HD, higher BAB (Cleric BAB is "low", and "high" BAB goes up to +25), etc.
Really, what I'd like to know is if anyone has tried Iron Heroes, or examined it and found any serious flaws therein. I'd like to try it, but I'm reluctant to try to get my group to accept such a relatively huge change in the class/feats/spells setup.
Any opinions?
Iron Heroes?
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Re: Iron Heroes?
The magic class is basically not for players, because it's pretty terrible. I believe the designer of Iron Heroes has expressed slight regret at the Arcanist being less well-designed than the martial classes the game is actually about.
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Username17
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Re: Iron Heroes?
OK, here's the obvious stuff: Magic in that system is completely unplayable. It's not like D&D where the magic is simply far more powerful than the non-magic, it literally cannot be played. A Magister gets up in the morning with a bonus to a die roll that if he rolls low enough on he explodes. As he goes up in level, his bonus rises, but get this - his DC goes up faster. An Arcanist is literally more likely to explode as he rises in level. At the high end, he won't be able to do anything level appropriate at all.
On the flip side of course, the spells include "Make your own Illusion" and even "Make your own Conjuration" - both of which are broken on first principles (there's no modifier for conjuring containers around enemies that happen to be ai tight, for example). So before the Arcanist breaks your game by failing to use his magic, he'll break the game by succeeding in using his magic.
So he's right out. Other than that, there are a bunch of feats in those chains that don't make any sense. Why would anyone take a feat that gave you a chance to negate crits when you can take a bonus feat off the top of the progression that negates criticals all the time? You can't even get the armor feats at a reasonable level unless you take the class that grants a bonus feat anywhere off the armor feat progression, so it's no skin off your ass either way.
Character generation and management is a chore. More even than in regular D&D. The system heavily favors multiclassing, which means that even mid-level characters are going to be throwing around like 3 or 4 separate piles of tokens - many of which don't really do anything. It's pretty frustrating to attempt to use when you have to keep track of aim tokens and rage tokens and armor tokens. More so, there's about fifty billion ways to fvck your character over forever because a lot of potential progressions aren't useful or don't stack or become obsolete at higher levels.
Combat itself is pretty much what you'd expect of a game with no healing - melee specialists blow, because they are only good for one combat while stealth characters are awesome.
-Username17
On the flip side of course, the spells include "Make your own Illusion" and even "Make your own Conjuration" - both of which are broken on first principles (there's no modifier for conjuring containers around enemies that happen to be ai tight, for example). So before the Arcanist breaks your game by failing to use his magic, he'll break the game by succeeding in using his magic.
So he's right out. Other than that, there are a bunch of feats in those chains that don't make any sense. Why would anyone take a feat that gave you a chance to negate crits when you can take a bonus feat off the top of the progression that negates criticals all the time? You can't even get the armor feats at a reasonable level unless you take the class that grants a bonus feat anywhere off the armor feat progression, so it's no skin off your ass either way.
Character generation and management is a chore. More even than in regular D&D. The system heavily favors multiclassing, which means that even mid-level characters are going to be throwing around like 3 or 4 separate piles of tokens - many of which don't really do anything. It's pretty frustrating to attempt to use when you have to keep track of aim tokens and rage tokens and armor tokens. More so, there's about fifty billion ways to fvck your character over forever because a lot of potential progressions aren't useful or don't stack or become obsolete at higher levels.
Combat itself is pretty much what you'd expect of a game with no healing - melee specialists blow, because they are only good for one combat while stealth characters are awesome.
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RandomCasualty
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Re: Iron Heroes?
When I read Iron heroes, I was excited at first, then quickly realized the writers weren't all that familiar with the system.
Some of the magic spells make this readily apparent.
As Frank stated, casters don't work at all. They are on a scaling system, which like psionic augmentation, totally hoses people trying to do things which are meant to scale (like direct damage) and makes non-scaling stuff (like buffs) range from useless to godlike, depending on your level. Take blurred immage for instance. It's your basic blur and displacement thing set for different spell levels. So it starts at 10% at level 1 (complete ass) and goes all the way to 95% at level 9 (basically complete invulnerability).
So the low level character can't do anything worth jack and the high level character can't even get touched by melee types at all.
On the other hand, direct damage blasting spells totally suck hard, worse than they do in normal D&D. It's like you're an evoker whose sole attack is a warlock eldritch blast, only instead of getting it for free, you have to pay out your ass in spell points and your blast may fail when you try to use it.
As far as meleers go, some of the stuff is just insane, for instance, the highest level of cleave lets you make an extra cleave attack whenever you deal 15 points or more with a single attack and you can "cleave" the same thing you attacked originally. Combined with power attack at high levels, that basically means you're going to get to keep attacking something until you miss (which given how defense works, probably won't be much at all at high levels).
Though I have to disagree with Frank about the multiclassing. There's actually not a heck of alot of good reasons to multiclass a meleer in Iron heroes. Most of your benefits rely on getting higher masteries, which don't synergize for multiclassing meleers, so you end up shooting yourself in the foot by multiclassing. IH seems very much like a single class game. As far as I can tell, there's very little incentive to multiclass, even saving throws are entirely based on hit dice.
The main problem with Iron heroes however, is that I'm not quite sure what it's supposed to do. It's a variant PHB, meaning you're supposed to be able to run it with the standard MM, only you can't. Most of the melee characters still can't defeat monsters of even CR, except for pure combat brutes. Throw in any kind of magical monster, like a pit fiend, or what not, and the Iron hero classes are pretty much helpless, since their entire benefits lie in getting in melee and chewing something up. Give them something they've got to fight at range and they're screwed, given that there's nothing decent for archers.
IH did some things right in my opinion, like standardizing character saves, and trying to cut down on magical bonuses. The skill system in IH for instance, actually works somewhat decently because you don't have crazy +10 bonuses and +15 bonuses from magic items in there to make or break it. Similarly, because you don't have widespread flight, skills for climbing, jumping and swimming are actually worth taking.
In fact if it were just a power down, it might be reasonably ok. However, instead of nerfing casters and keeping fighters sane, it nerfs casters and gives fighters all the super nuke attacks. This creates a glass cannon meleer effect. Worse still, if you play any other archetype other than a glass cannon meleer, the game just kicks you in the balls and makes you nearly useless. While I think there's an argument to be made for rewriting caster classes and spells entirely and rebalancing the game that way, Iron Heroes does it in the worst way possible, making it look like a fighter fanboy reaction to casters being so uber in D&D.
Some of the magic spells make this readily apparent.
As Frank stated, casters don't work at all. They are on a scaling system, which like psionic augmentation, totally hoses people trying to do things which are meant to scale (like direct damage) and makes non-scaling stuff (like buffs) range from useless to godlike, depending on your level. Take blurred immage for instance. It's your basic blur and displacement thing set for different spell levels. So it starts at 10% at level 1 (complete ass) and goes all the way to 95% at level 9 (basically complete invulnerability).
So the low level character can't do anything worth jack and the high level character can't even get touched by melee types at all.
On the other hand, direct damage blasting spells totally suck hard, worse than they do in normal D&D. It's like you're an evoker whose sole attack is a warlock eldritch blast, only instead of getting it for free, you have to pay out your ass in spell points and your blast may fail when you try to use it.
As far as meleers go, some of the stuff is just insane, for instance, the highest level of cleave lets you make an extra cleave attack whenever you deal 15 points or more with a single attack and you can "cleave" the same thing you attacked originally. Combined with power attack at high levels, that basically means you're going to get to keep attacking something until you miss (which given how defense works, probably won't be much at all at high levels).
Though I have to disagree with Frank about the multiclassing. There's actually not a heck of alot of good reasons to multiclass a meleer in Iron heroes. Most of your benefits rely on getting higher masteries, which don't synergize for multiclassing meleers, so you end up shooting yourself in the foot by multiclassing. IH seems very much like a single class game. As far as I can tell, there's very little incentive to multiclass, even saving throws are entirely based on hit dice.
The main problem with Iron heroes however, is that I'm not quite sure what it's supposed to do. It's a variant PHB, meaning you're supposed to be able to run it with the standard MM, only you can't. Most of the melee characters still can't defeat monsters of even CR, except for pure combat brutes. Throw in any kind of magical monster, like a pit fiend, or what not, and the Iron hero classes are pretty much helpless, since their entire benefits lie in getting in melee and chewing something up. Give them something they've got to fight at range and they're screwed, given that there's nothing decent for archers.
IH did some things right in my opinion, like standardizing character saves, and trying to cut down on magical bonuses. The skill system in IH for instance, actually works somewhat decently because you don't have crazy +10 bonuses and +15 bonuses from magic items in there to make or break it. Similarly, because you don't have widespread flight, skills for climbing, jumping and swimming are actually worth taking.
In fact if it were just a power down, it might be reasonably ok. However, instead of nerfing casters and keeping fighters sane, it nerfs casters and gives fighters all the super nuke attacks. This creates a glass cannon meleer effect. Worse still, if you play any other archetype other than a glass cannon meleer, the game just kicks you in the balls and makes you nearly useless. While I think there's an argument to be made for rewriting caster classes and spells entirely and rebalancing the game that way, Iron Heroes does it in the worst way possible, making it look like a fighter fanboy reaction to casters being so uber in D&D.
Re: Iron Heroes?
I've recently gotten the book, but I haven't absorbed most of it yet.
Combat itself is pretty much what you'd expect of a game with no healing - melee specialists blow, because they are only good for one combat while stealth characters are awesome.
There's a fixed amount of healing each day in your reserve points. So, you're good for two combats per day (at least) (since reserve hp=maxhp, iirc). Of course, I think they have to "heal" also.
Combat itself is pretty much what you'd expect of a game with no healing - melee specialists blow, because they are only good for one combat while stealth characters are awesome.
There's a fixed amount of healing each day in your reserve points. So, you're good for two combats per day (at least) (since reserve hp=maxhp, iirc). Of course, I think they have to "heal" also.
Re: Iron Heroes?
First of all, the magic system has been admitted by the creator as being less than polished because he literally ran off part way through (WotC hired him for bucko bucks it seems) so he never had time to really think about the magic system. Second, he intentionally made evocation stink so nobody would take it.
As for the system and it's 'lack' of healing, it's there with Reserve and the Heal skill. That's the only real resource (hit points), and the encounter system was intended to give ~4 encounters per day, and thus there's enough healing to cover that.
For the feat trees and some of redundant effects, that was semi-intentional by the writer. The fact you don't get access to the superior feats until higher level is supposed to give you a decision to make depending on your campaign's long-term goals. If you aren't realistically going to get above level X, then you take the lower-tier stuff to get some of the benefits. Some disagree with this philosophy, and house rule to allow the switching of feats for the higher tier stuff.
Multi-classing is actually a hard thing to balance. The fact your feat masteries don't stack makes a BIG difference, and it's only real benefit is giving you even more skills.
Melee specialists are fine in my game. Granted, the archer and executioner dominate the damage market, but the shield specialist armiger is holding his own as a tank (has Perform for the taunt option). In an older game, the beserker did have a bit of trouble with hit points if I threw more than 3 fights in a day, but he would seriously one-or-two-shot alot of stuff once he got to them.
My party is just now hitting level 9, and they're still going strong and handling all sorts of level appropriate monsters. Our archer and executioner turn stuff into puree. The thief is actually very much holding his own in combat thanks to stunts/challenges and sneak attack. The armiger is getting alot of focus fire against his enormous AC, and the arcanist would actually do pretty well if he would ever roll higher than a 7.
As for the system and it's 'lack' of healing, it's there with Reserve and the Heal skill. That's the only real resource (hit points), and the encounter system was intended to give ~4 encounters per day, and thus there's enough healing to cover that.
For the feat trees and some of redundant effects, that was semi-intentional by the writer. The fact you don't get access to the superior feats until higher level is supposed to give you a decision to make depending on your campaign's long-term goals. If you aren't realistically going to get above level X, then you take the lower-tier stuff to get some of the benefits. Some disagree with this philosophy, and house rule to allow the switching of feats for the higher tier stuff.
Multi-classing is actually a hard thing to balance. The fact your feat masteries don't stack makes a BIG difference, and it's only real benefit is giving you even more skills.
Melee specialists are fine in my game. Granted, the archer and executioner dominate the damage market, but the shield specialist armiger is holding his own as a tank (has Perform for the taunt option). In an older game, the beserker did have a bit of trouble with hit points if I threw more than 3 fights in a day, but he would seriously one-or-two-shot alot of stuff once he got to them.
My party is just now hitting level 9, and they're still going strong and handling all sorts of level appropriate monsters. Our archer and executioner turn stuff into puree. The thief is actually very much holding his own in combat thanks to stunts/challenges and sneak attack. The armiger is getting alot of focus fire against his enormous AC, and the arcanist would actually do pretty well if he would ever roll higher than a 7.
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Brobdingnagian
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Re: Iron Heroes?
While I don't agree with it on a mechanical or even conceptual level, seeing the party Arcanist explode because he saw a shiny and got distracted would be pretty funny.