Quote from: RPGPundit;415344I was assuming it WAS 4e he was hooking into, just by proxy.

That would make sense.  I walked away from 4E in disgust, so I simply assumed he's talking about the last version of IH I saw, which was 3E.

It doesn't alter the basis of my comments, since I don't know or care about IH in any edition.

Iron Heroes 2nd edition is definitely going to be OGL. It'll have nothing to do with 4e.

The year that came out at GenCon I had Iron Heroes in one hand, and WOTC's Unearthed Arcana in the other, and had a decision to make being on a budget and all.

I ended up taking home Unearthed Arcana. I liked the character background options, The optional spellpoint magic system, The character class variants, recharge magic, Honor, and Reputation systems much better then a bunch of additional fighter variant builds.

I think I would have liked the Archer class though. D&D has never had a build for Archery specialists except with Iron Heroes.

I wouldn't categorize Iron Heroes as bad. There was already a bunch of variants out that were just better.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415255Yeah, that's a weird one. Almost the entire post is about how things are clunky and punish players for being creative or playing in character. And Benoist goes on about the evils of game balance

Afraid I'm too isolated from modern D&D to get a whole lot out of this thread, but I did read a fair bit into your analysis in the OP. It looks to me like Benoist's missing the fact that if you see a system that involves paying points from a pool, in order to build your character, 99% of the time it's because the system is trying to balance things. So his ire should be directed at IH first of all, and not at you for saying that IH doesn't do what it's supposed to do, which has worse consequences for the game as whole than if IH didn't try in the first place.

I chalk it up to a kneejerk reaction against the word "balance" among OSR-adherents.

P.S. Has Frank ever analyzed Fantasy Craft? Not that I think it's bad (in fact, although I think it's too much of whatever it is for me to actually use it, I think it's probably pretty good). But I'd like to read his take on it.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;415372It looks to me like Benoist's missing the fact that if you see a system that involves paying points from a pool, in order to build your character, 99% of the time it's because the system is trying to balance things. So his ire should be directed at IH first of all, and not at you for saying that IH doesn't do what it's supposed to do, which has worse consequences for the game as whole than if IH try in the first place.

Which of course, is covered when formulating the part where I agree with Frank.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;415372I chalk it up to a kneejerk reaction against the word "balance" among OSR-adherents.

Way to lump me into some imaginary category too, Elliot. Thanks a lot.

Quote from: Benoist;415362Iron Heroes 2nd edition is definitely going to be OGL. It'll have nothing to do with 4e.

That's understandable, but given the nature of IH I could see it being a potentially fantastic 4e variant, along the lines of how Gamma World is a 4e genre expansion.

Quote from: ColonelHardisson;415382That's understandable, but given the nature of IH I could see it being a potentially fantastic 4e variant, along the lines of how Gamma World is a 4e genre expansion.

As a genre expansion? I could see it. It could be simplified, with new token mechanics, specific powers triggered by tokens instead of per encounter/day, etc. Could be interesting.

Quote from: Benoist;415377Which of course, is covered when formulating the part where I agree with Frank.

Yeah, I hadn't gotten to that part at the time I posted. Maybe if you'd thought a little bit before posting your counter-rants, you'd have reached the same point somewhere in the first page or so.

QuoteWay to lump me into some imaginary category too, Elliot. Thanks a lot.

Don't be silly.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;415391Yeah, I hadn't gotten to that part at the time I posted. Maybe if you'd thought a little bit before posting your counter-rants, you'd have reached the same point somewhere in the first page or so.

My rants against "balance über Alles" and my agreement with an incoherence of the game's design are neither opposites, nor contradictory. So thanks for the suggestion, but my thought process is fine, thank you very much.

Protip Elliot: You're not "paying points from a pool" when you're constructing heroes in IH.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;415408Protip Elliot: You're not "paying points from a pool" when you're constructing heroes in IH.

If you're taking limited selections from a list, yes you are. The costs may be "1 trait point" but it's still points from a pool in every way that matters.

Quote from: RPGPunditI was assuming it WAS 4e he was hooking into, just by proxy.

Precisely. If you criticize 4e, its partisans get their back up about how it could get fixed any time because the great fucking Mearls made Iron Heroes. This post is a direct response to that. To say that Iron Heroes was in fact always bad and that Mike Mearls is never going to finish his fixes for 4e.

Of course, as soon as you denigrate Iron Heroes, the goal posts magically shift and you get insulted for not reviewing the great Mearls' recent creations - but that's the nature of 4rries. They can't stick to consistent benchmarks because their game has already failed by any possible consistent benchmarks you could have had.

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415414Precisely. If you criticize 4e, its partisans get their back up about how it could get fixed any time because the great fucking Mearls made Iron Heroes.

Now I've seen that point made several times by fans, and indeed, I completely agree this is backwards logic.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415414... their game has already failed...

awesome
carry on

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415414their game has already failed by any possible consistent benchmarks you could have had

Failed... at what, exactly?

Quote from: Benoist;415417Failed... at what, exactly?

Failed at reviving the D&D game. Things were flagging a bit there at the end of 3.5 printing, with people being not-that-excited about stuff like Elder Evils, and possibly looking for a new game to play. A new edition got people excited about D&D again and could have gotten people back in the seats. It measurably didn't do that, and instead WotC's own numbers say that just one quarter of the people were playing their game 2 years after 4e launch as were playing it a year before. Halving the fanbase and then halving it again in 2 years of 4e is not reinvigorating the game.

Failed at delivering numbers that "just worked". A huge selling point of 4e D&D was that all the numbers "just worked". They stressed this over and over. If the numbers were so fucking good, why did they have to errata them three times? Clearly the numbers they claimed to be so proud of were nothing like functional, and the entire foray into really well done math was a failure.

Failed at saving us from the Christmas Tree Effect. Yes, they promised us that we wouldn't be grubbing for item slots or whining about items we needed in 4th edition. Seriously. They promised that. Failure.

Failed at delivering us a unified non-combat resolution protocol. On launch for 4e, they said that we could (and would want to) us Skill Challenges for everything. Heck, they didn't even have rules for training a horse or forging a sword. They just said you would "make it a skill challenge" and sat down smugly as if that solved everything. Except... it didn't solve anything. On launch, their skill challenge rules were unusable, and their hastily created errata to them just inverted success chances to make them pointless rubber stamps. They have fiddled with them more often than once every two months since launch in June of '08, and at this point no one knows how the fuck they are even supposed to work. But the hilarious thing is that they still haven't addressed the core issues of them being too much work for Mr. Cavern, of them being senselessly confusing for the Players, and most importantly of all: of them actually penalizing team work despite being supposedly group affairs. Instead of delivering a snappy new mechanic that we'd all gleefully adopt, they delivered a painfully arcane snipe hunt that is almost universally reviled. The only people who defend it now are people blinded by the shell game of constantly shifted goal posts who claim that you could salvage something by sifting through that turd that was vaguely playable by dint of having stacked on so many optional rules that it didn't even resemble a skill challenge described in the book.

That is what 4e failed at. 4e failed at being good at the things that its designers said it was for. And that is why the vast majority of the fans left. And that is why there is serious danger of Pathfinder beating D&D despite the fact that Pathfinder is just some house rules for D&D written by some guys who are bad at math and got fired from WotC for incompetence.

-Frank