OK, there is a meme that really needs to die: the idea that Mike Mearls has ever written anything good. People will concede that the last dozen rewrites of the 4e skill challenge system were wastes of time, each just as fundamentally flawed and ultimately worthless as the last. But then they'll say: "Sure, but Iron Heroes was good, right? I have high hopes that the next skill challenge rewrite Mearls does in 2 months will solve all the problems that the last dozen attempts did not." Now, leaving aside the battered wife behavior of someone who holds out that their abuser "still really loves them" after having their confidence taken advantage of a dozen times in a row, the fact remains that Iron Heroes was not in fact good. It was bad. It was very bad. It is difficult to even imagine writing a Role Playing Game that was as bad as Iron Heroes. Yes, the folks who made RaHoWa managed, but we're talking about a work made for a professional company with an editorial staff and actual artists. And by those standards, Iron Heroes sets the standard. For awfulness.

Where did Iron Heroes go wrong? Everywhere! Every. Single. Part of that game system was awful. The entirety of Iron Heroes is an unbalanced, incomprehensible, tedious, clunky, and directionless mess. But like a beautiful fractal made out of feces, every single portion of it, no matter how small, is exactly as wrong and wholly unsalvageable as the complete product.

The key to understanding Iron Heroes and its seemingly endless litany of faults is to grasp that it is supposed to be a d20 fantasy hack. Yes, d20 is already a fantasy game inherently, so you'd think that would be pretty hard to fuck up. Just figure out some niche of fantasy like a specific world or a subgenre other than the kitchen sink mega-magic fantasy that D&D runs by default, slap some conversion numbers on the deal, and put that baby out the door. People have done this again and again since the OGL came out, with ports from everything from novel series to video games, and almost all of them have been fairly playable. Because the d20 system is for all its faults, a totally playable system. And that's important while evaluating Iron Heroes, because for every subsystem in the game, from spellcasting to multiclassing, there is an already extant system in the d20 SRD that works at all. And that subsystem could have been used instead.

So let's talk about Iron Heroes' innovations and subsystems, starting from the very beginning:

[size=14]Traits[/size]
"Would you like to swing on a star? Or would you rather be a fish?"

Right at the start of chargen you get a series of bonus traits to pick out based on what makes your character unique and where they are from and such. This concept is nothing new, Ars Magica gave you merits and flaws to add differentiating traits between otherwise similar characters back when Reagan was President. Arduin let you roll on weird variation tables during the Carter Administration. So when I see a "traits" system come down the pipe, my reaction is an only-slightly-curious "So? What is your system supposed to do?" And that's a question that the Iron Heroes people never really came up with an answer to. They seriously don't seem to know. Some of these things make you massively better at doing the jobs of specific classes, others are minor disadvantages. Still others are basically story hooks. They all have the same cost!

This in turn leads to an obnoxious dynamic, in which there are "right" and "wrong" trait selections to make. That in turn makes it so that the same traits keep coming up over and over again on the same classes, which means that the traits aren't merely unbalanced, but they don't even do a good job of differentiating one character from another. Being physically large might as well be a class feature of the Berserker class.

But of course, it's worse even than merely having a strong association between specific "unique" traits and classes. Although of course it does do that. Because there are also trivial pieces of potential character background in that list, which you would have the option of taking instead of the ones that help you stab people in the face. The inevitable result of course is that it creates the expectation that you have to spend your traits on backstory if you want backstory. Meaning that players who do want to play an orphan from a fishing village who was raised by the local blacksmith or some shit get measurable penalties for doing so!

That's amazing. It's a trait system that is not only unbalanced, but actually leads to more soul crushing similarity between characters than not having a trait system at all. Hell, in original D&D you could simply decide what your Fighting Man's affinity for cabbages was and have that be that. In Iron Heroes, backstory is rationed and more creative backstories are punished. The worst possible outcome of a trait system.

[size=14]Skills[/size]
"Then we package your skills and apportion derivatives of them for the market..."

OK, I understand that skills in 3rd edition D&D have problems. Problems like how if you take your first level in Rogue and your second level in Fighter, you have more skill points than if you do it the other way around. Problems like how the entire system of "ranks" is really fiddly and can easily lead someone to have spent skill points on a level of skill that is not level appropriate and won't actually do anything for them (especially in the "opposed" skills like Sense Motive or Listen). But the thing is, it does work at all. So you could just leave it as-is and people would be vaguely OK with that, or you could attempt to address some of the wonky interactions.

Iron Heroes decided to address the wonky interactions by making them even wonkier. The main innovation is these things called "skill groups" - which are super skills that other skills collapse into if and only if you have the right classes on your sheet. So for example, if you have at least one level of Thief, then Forgery, Disable Device, Open Lock, and Sleight of Hand stop being four different skills and start being just one skill called Robbery. This increases the divergence between characters tremendously and it makes characters who multiclass get even wonkier than you used to think possible. The actual number of skills that exist to flush skill points into gets smaller as you take more different classes. Meaning that taking levels in a different order could literally cause you to have four times as many skill points. Not just for one level, but for all of them.

The other thing that they produce is a stunt system called, ironically enough, "skill challenges". What these are is that you declare that you want to perform a stunt, and the DM makes you roll one or more skills at a penalty that they pull right out of their ass, and then you get some benefit if you succeed that the DM pulls out of their ass. Much is made over this stunt system, because the author stresses that you should be doing badass Legolas shit with it. But it actually just runs on DM ass pulls, which means it isn't really a system at all. For all the hype, it's basically the same stunt system that exists in every game that does not have an explicit stunt system - you describe a cool stunt to the DM, and maybe he'll set a DC low enough that you can actually do it.

[size=14]Feat Masteries[/size]
"You probably must be kinda tallish to ride this ride."

Probably the core idea of Iron Heroes upon which everything rests is the idea of skill masteries. These are a separate tally that you get which rises in various categories as you go up in level, and is a requirement to get various feats. Feats no longer have prereqs (especially), they are just supposed to have mastery minimums. So what's that for? That's an incredibly good question, and Iron Heroes does not have a coherent answer for that. Certainly it isn't to make things require any less bookkeeping, because the Iron Heroes character sheets have an extra six spaces just to calculate and track your mastery levels (before we even get to the feats themselves). And that's actually required, because feat masteries don't even add linearly between classes.

The masteries also aren't to make sure you're getting level appropriate abilities, because your mastery levels in different categories are wildly divergent, meaning that for one character a feat may come online at level 4 while another character has to wait until level 10 for the same thing. They aren't there to reward specialists or generalists, because the way masteries add it is sometimes advantageous to multiclass and also sometimes not. And yes, that is often the case when mixing the same classes at different character levels.

But the biggest flaw of all isn't even the part where the game does not present a case for why you would want to include these things at all. The biggest flaw is that there are a lot of feats at a higher mastery level that completely supersede (and not stack with) lower mastery feats in the same category. It is not uncommon for one feat to reduce a penalty for something by 25% or 50% only to have a higher mastery feat reduce the same penalty by 100%. And no, the bigger one does not require or benefit from you getting the lesser bonus to same thing.

Really. There are any of a number of solutions to the problem that would have been workable. You could have feats that add up to a larger effect. You could have had the feats that supersede the smaller feats simply require the lesser feats as prereqs. Or you could have less total feats and have feats give out scaling benefits based on what your mastery levels were. Any of those would make sense, but instead they went with the one where wanting to play a character who fights in the dark from a low level makes you objectively worse than simply taking up blindfighting at high level with no build up at all. Once again, the system itself is fucking you over for having a backstory.

[size=14]Class Tokens[/size]
"My class gets 6 rods to the hogshead."

Pretty much every class has their very own resource management system in Iron Heroes. And most of them involve gaining and spending tokens. It's like someone had 9 different ideas for how they wanted to run the game and then just sort of left them all in a pile rather than actually develop any of them. Now you might be concerned that a system that causes you to gain and spend 13 tokens in a single turn is too fiddly. And of course it is, but that isn't the half of it.

The things a token buys you are nothing like balanced between classes. Some classes spend tokens to get small damage boosts, other classes spend tokens to get large damage boosts. Also, the amount of tokens you can hold at a time is wildly different between classes, as is the amount of tokens you can get at a time and what you get tokens for. And tokens aren't just gained on your turn, many tokens are picked up on the turns of other players for one thing or another. Meaning that not only does "I spend a token" mean pretty much nothing to anyone, but people have to be doing all this accounting continuously. And yes, if you multiclass, you have to keep track of the different resource management systems separately and simultaneously. The fact that tokens aren't individually of equal value is actually really important, because there totally are abilities that move tokens from one person's pool to someone else's pool (where they change into a different kind of token that is worth more or less).

And lest you think there was some kind of overall balance goal with making tokens that were hard to get be more valuable or something - forget it. Some classes have their token systems synergize with the things they are doing in their normal lives - like the Berserker who gets tokens for being in melee combat and spends them to be better at melee combat. While other characters have to contend with deeply unsynergistic setups, like the Archer who gets bonuses to his full attack actions against single targets by spending move actions. Still others have an even worse time of it, like the poor Armiger who only gets tokens when enemies attack him, and he is the lowest priority target on his entire team, since he is tougher and does less damage than a member of any other class.

[size=14]Magic[/size]
"Hahahahahahaha... oh... you were serious. That's so... sad."

The Magic System of Iron Heroes is a rabbit hole of bad decisions that never ever ends. It's "skill based" which in this case means that you grab effects off a list and add a bunch of modifiers together and generate a DC and then make a roll to see if you succeed. Your bonus on that roll is wildly variable at any given level because you have primary and secondary schticks, and your primary not only starts higher but also rises faster than your secondary. And failing causes you to suffer backlash based on how big the DC of the spell you were attempting to cast, so if you barely fail to cast a spell at high levels you fucking explode. All of this adds up to something really shitty, but it actually gets worse, because the DCs generated by the chart are completely insane.

You know Force Cage? The Seventh Level spell that is really good, because it traps people in a cage and doesn't allow a saving throw? You can cast that at first level. It's not even hard. Sure, it won't be made out of impenetrable mystic force, but it will be made out of totally solid and takes a fair amount of time to saw through wood. Because the DCs of creating objects are not based on how game affecting they are, but on the material in question and the projected weight and duration and phase of the moon (one of those is almost a lie). So merely trapping someone in a cage that it will take them longer than the battle to escape, with no saving throw, is a very low DC that a first level Arcanist can perform reliably. But making a permanent iron hammer, or something else equally trivial, is extremely dangerous.

====

Bottom line: it's not that Iron Heroes does not make bold mission statements, it's that every single part of it is crap and if you were going to try to fix it, you'd be better off going back to the d20 SRD and starting from scratch.

-Frank

Way too much effort spent thinking about a supplement released 5 years ago for a game system that is no longer supported by its original publisher.  Let it go.

That's way too much effort? I've seen longer.

I'm reading this, and all I can think is: all this is pure theoretical bullshit in a vacuum.

"Balance" is way overrated. I don't play a role playing game to have a character perfectly balanced compared to the guy next to me.

• For one thing, we're two completely different individuals with a different psychological makeup (including passive vs. active behavior in a role playing game session for instance, introverted vs. extraverted, analogic vs logic, or whatever other mental capabilities or approaches we have that may or may not relate to the game, its game play and game mechanics, and so on, so forth).
• Second, the importance of our classes relates to a particular game experience, and how it itself balanced by the types of challenges in play, the way the challenges themselves unfold, including dice rolls and results, and by the way the GM puts them into play.
• Third, it depends how the GM generally manages the game, whether miniatures are used or not, how the GM manages fiddly points of the rules, how he manages conflicts at the game table, how sensitive he is to psychological manipulation, and so on, so forth.

So, the rules balance is just one of the components of the overall game balance, to me. Absolute rules balance is thus a ridiculous game design goal in and of itself, and just satisfies gamers who either have a problem relating to any of their neighbors across a game table, or never play the game to begin with. In the former case, they need psychological help, and in the second, they need to shut the fuck up and run some games.

The thing is, yes, there are some wonky elements in Iron Heroes. And yes, some parts were simply not fixed before release which were addressed once Mike Mearls left for his WotC endeavors by Adam Windsor. My personal bottom line is that Iron Heroes is a fun game to play, and very inspiring for me.

I've played/ran many different games, and I could give you many examples of other RPGs which are "broken" by your reckoning but are actually a blast to play when you don't have a broom up your ass and freak out if you have one point less than your friend in your ability scores. Stormbringer 1e is one of the best game I've ever played, and man, by your own standards, it is so fucking broken it is impossible to even play! Well. IT IS playable, and IT IS awesome to me.

If there is one flaw to Iron Heroes, it is that it has too many rules. It makes a d20 game, particularly from a character components and tactical standpoint, with the feat masteries and the token pool mechanics, a lot more complicated than it really needs to be. That's what I would want to see worked out for my game table, personally.

So. I appreciate that you made it your mission to destroy any game you think is wrong at everything it does, but the fact is? It does a lot of things right for a lot of people. If you can't get that, then man, you need to reassess your notion of what objectivity is and isn't.

That is all.

But how does it play?

Way too much effort for an irrelevant critique.  Pretty much everyone has made up their minds about Iron Heroes already, so its irrelevant on that front.  And it's irrelevant as a critique of Mike Mearls because it's five years out of date.  People improve over time, so if you want to make the case that Mearls is a bad designer you need to show that what he is doing NOW is bad, what he did in the past doesn't matter.  They say it takes an average of 10 years to become good at something.  Since Mearls started publishing in 2000 (so sayeth wikipedia) then he was only 5 years into the learning process.  By the average time it takes to learn to do anything well (assuming you put in eight hours a day) Mearls would be just starting to realize his potential.  Maybe he still sucks.  But a separate case would have to be made.

I just love counter-arguments that are essentially "Your argument is stupid because I say it is." Then again, it's par for course.

Anyway, I agree that Iron Heroes isn't that great. The idea of action zones was the only item I considered salvageable enough to bolt onto other d20 games.

Quote from: DeadUematsuThat's way too much effort? I've seen longer.

Hell, I've written longer. My condemnations of some flawed systems are so in depth that they are in fact independently playable games that real people actually play.

Quote from: BenoistThe thing is, yes, there are some wonky elements in Iron Heroes. And yes, some parts were simply not fixed before release which were addressed once Mike Mearls left for his WotC endeavors by Adam Windsor.

No. They were not fixed. It's still crap. Hong did a major overhaul and Adam Windsor made a major overhaul, and the entire thing is still crap. What you really need to do is take a step back and differentiate a good mission statement from a good rule set. Yes, you want to have an inspiring mission statement for your games, because having one of those is a great send off to having good Role Playing sessions, regardless of ruleset. But that doesn't mean that the rules are good.

You can have good Role Playing sessions using any rule set or no rules at all. The rules are only good if they assist you in having good role playing sessions more than just playing abstract Magical Tea Party. Which means that yes, you need to compare and contrast the advantages and disadvantages of using any particular system against using freeware systems like Cops And Robbers and Münchhausen. If your system comes up short against those, it's a bad system. Period.

d20 hacks have an even harder time justifying their existence, because gamers pretty dependably know 3rd edition D&D rules, allowing you to scrape a game together quickly and effectively even though it is much more rules-heavy engine than Cops And Robbers. So whether your system is simpler or more complex than 3rd edition D&D, it still has to compete against the fact that people already read the 3rd edition Player's Handbook.

Iron Heroes is garbage. Not simply because it's an unbalanced, directionless, fiddly mess, but because the crap it brings to the table is in all cases a step backwards from playability from unmodified d20 rules. Take Feat Masteries. All those do is to make the bookkeeping more complex, to objectively hurt organic characters, and to create more "trap options". That's all it brings to the table over the standard feat prerequisite rules. It's all bad.

-Frank

Whatever, Frank.

Answer to the rest of my post.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415130You can have good Role Playing sessions using any rule set or no rules at all. The rules are only good if they assist you in having good role playing sessions more than just playing abstract Magical Tea Party.

And what types of rules create a "good role playing game session" will vary from user to user, because they search for different things in role playing games.

Also, role playing games are made of interactions between PEOPLE, people who THEN use rules and persona and a fantastic universe and social conventions to communicate a shared role playing experience. The rules are just a part of what leads to a good role playing game session.

Your WHOLE premise is that there are only rules, and only rules matter to decide whether a game is any good or not. And I'm telling you: this is bullshit. Pure, simple, straight, flat out wrong bullshit.

So your whole essay, to me, reads like wankery in theoretical la-la-land.

Thank you for writing that Frank.

I have a player that won't ever shut up about how cool it is. I tried reading it and it just seemed bad. I didn't think about it, but I just felt like I couldn't get behind it.

Next time he brings it up, I'm destroying it.

I salute crazy long rants about rpgs and for what it's worth, the short lived Iron Heroes campaign I played in some 5 or 6 years ago, was a pretty good example of a lotta the bad design Frank writes about.

Luckily, we could just leave it. Frank apparently couldn't.

Heaven forbid a bad thing is ever said about a RPG.

Quote from: DeadUematsu;415137Heaven forbid a bad thing is ever said about a RPG.

No shit. Everyone would be clapping if this was about Dogs in the Vineyard or 4e.

Quote from: Benoist;415133Your WHOLE premise is that there are only rules, and only rules matter to decide whether a game is any good or not. And I'm telling you: this is bullshit. Pure, simple, straight, flat out wrong bullshit.

Uh.. yes. The value of ruleset is 100% determined by what those rules actually are. I don't even know how much pot I would have to smoke before I thought that was worthy of serious discussion.

-Frank