TheRPGSite

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 (http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=50434). 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

I thought that Iron Heroes was full of interesting ideas. Not my cup of tea but some cool stuff and I know a lot of people like it.

Now I understand the desire to speak with passion about things that we find interesting. I did an entire video rant about the spiked chain. But this? This sounds like sour grapes. Frank already doesn't like me, so I have zero to lose here.

Quote from: Tetsubo;415143Frank already doesn't like me, so I have zero to lose here.

Wait, I don't? I don't really recall having any arguments with you at all.

-Frank

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.

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

Si senior!
But, if I may say, what perhaps you should consider is that besides your fundamental idea and opinion regarding rpgs, some discussions are about a tad more intricate things and sometimes since you do not want to get it you just threadcrap.

What Frank says is that in respect to d20 srd, Iron Heroes manages to be totally worse. He is not talking about rpgs in general. He is specifically making a comparison among d20 srd and Iron Heroes. Why the fuck won't you let him do it? It is a legitimate discussion he can have, no?

Benoist, even if many times people lose the forest for the trees, it is just not all the fucking time. Lets see if you can acknowledge you are being overzealous and let it be. :)

Besides, you should check other boards about rules minutia of the D20 rules over one class power and another. D20 is a gamist system and apparently it makes people care about whether specific rules balances fail. This is not necessarily bad. Yeah, it is a bad thing if a game makes it so that it becomes the players' purpose but trying to fix balance issues so people do not have to worry about it is not something evil -in this case there just exists a balance problem to begin with.

Cheers

Quote from: xech;415155What Frank says is that in respect to d20 srd, Iron Heroes manages to be totally worse. He is not talking about rpgs in general. He is specifically making a comparison among d20 srd and Iron Heroes. Why the fuck won't you let him do it? It is a legitimate discussion he can have, no?

While well intended (and laudably well written), I'm afraid you waste your breath on a lost cause. There's a reason why I don't react to certain of Frank's posts on this forum, but prefer to do so on his own.

Certain things have become absolutely worthless to discuss here. I mean, look at this trainwreck of a thread. It's the whole Paizo "playtest" melt down all over, where rule XZY is "in good order" because someone just feels it does, or did at one point in that session he can't quite recall those years ago, but hey everyone had fun and it sure worked for us!. ('Heaven forbit you insult our FUN!') That's not to say that something worthwhile (http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=7027) can be salvaged from a remooootely related angle on Frank's post, but the Badwrongfun rhetoric it sure ain't.

And when I can no longer tell the difference whether a game is discussed on paizo.com or over here, then it's perhaps really time to put the lights out. J_Arcane certainly's on the right about this.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415120OK, there is a meme that really needs to die: the idea that Mike Mearls has ever written anything good.

IMO, he's written plenty that is good.

Whether or not that includes Iron Heroes is another matter. I certainly wouldn't know from your post. Lots of naked condemnation, very little, you know, actual play.

I would agree the magic system is laughable based on my reading (though I could be wrong there too... but I have heard people who have tried to use it share the sentiment.) As for the rest, I'll call the jury out until I hear some (more?) people that say "yes, this is what happens."

Otherwise, it sounds like more theoretical ranting to the tune of "3e casues massive multiclassing" and "the 3e monk is overpowered."

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415139Uh.. 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.

QFT.

I get really, really tired of the whole "those game rules aren't bad because I played them and had fun" bullshit meme  - it seriously needs to die.  

Whether or not someone managed to have fun in spite of badly written rules is immaterial - if the rules are badly designed, then the game is badly designed, period.

Quote from: Benoist;415125I appreciate that you made it your mission to destroy any game you think is wrong at everything it does...

I thought his mission was to smear Mearls as much as humanly possible ("...there is a meme that really needs to die: the idea that Mike Mearls has ever written anything good.") I have seen Trollman finally participate in a thread where he wasn't busy trying to take apart Mearls or former industry comrades, but he still just basically is here bitch and kick over block towers...

Seanchai

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415139Uh.. 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

If I smoke pot, you're an idiot to believe the value of a game is only in its game system and some fabled rules balance that disintegrates as soon as the rubber hits the road in an actual game.

Quote from: Seanchai;415221I thought his mission was to smear Mearls as much as humanly possible

I think that's the whole point here, indeed.

Quote from: jgants;415179I get really, really tired of the whole "those game rules aren't bad because I played them and had fun" bullshit meme  - it seriously needs to die.

It won't die because it's the simple, plain truth that a role playing game, an ACTUAL game at the game table, is made of far more than people looking at each other's character wondering if they've been let down by the rules.

This:

Quote"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.

This here, is no "meme." This is the truth.
The "meme" as you say, is this strange belief that somehow an absolute balance of the rules makes for a balanced game.

Benoist, here's an idea: take your "play the game, not the rules" bullshit and stuff it right up your ass. For fuck's sake, every time you are playing the game you are either playing by the rules or you are breaking the rules. If you're breaking the rules and that's a good thing, the rules were bad. If you're playing by the rules and you should have been breaking them, then the rules are bad.

Rules can be bad. It's a real thing that really happens. Rules have measurable and predictable effects on the games that they are imposed upon. And those effects can be bad.

And if you die a little bit inside every time someone pulls back the curtain and discusses whether and how a specific rule is good or bad, maybe you shouldn't hang out on a message board whose nominal purpose is the discussion of role playing games and the things they are composed of. Because you know what? 100% of what makes one RPG different from another RPG is the rules. So if we don't talk about and rate the rules, we don't have a fuck of a lot to talk about.

-Frank

Quote from: xech;415155What Frank says is that in respect to d20 srd, Iron Heroes manages to be totally worse. He is not talking about rpgs in general. He is specifically making a comparison among d20 srd and Iron Heroes. Why the fuck won't you let him do it? It is a legitimate discussion he can have, no?

Absolutely. That's a worthwhile discussion. Just concluding, however, that the whole game "fails at everything" because well, this or that bit is not perfectly balanced, or "I don't like to have 9 different mechanics for token pools" is perfectly fine as an opinion, but not as some sort of fact that determines that anybody actually liking Iron Heroes must be out of his mind.

Fuck that noise.

Quote from: xech;415155Benoist, even if many times people lose the forest for the trees, it is just not all the fucking time. Lets see if you can acknowledge you are being overzealous and let it be. :)

Yes, I'm being overzealous, but not nearly as overzealous as Frank in his OP, I think. He's got a grudge against Mike Mearls, maybe because he's got a recognition that Frank doesn't enjoy, and thus wants revenge on this guy who's only quality for Frank is to put out X zillions words per week on a screen, but that's no excuse to walk all over a game that some people happen to like for widely different reasons, including myself.

That, and if there's really a meme that needs to die, that's this "rules balance über Alles" bullshit.

Quote from: xech;415155Besides, you should check other boards about rules minutia of the D20 rules over one class power and another. D20 is a gamist system and apparently it makes people care about whether specific rules balances fail. This is not necessarily bad. Yeah, it is a bad thing if a game makes it so that it becomes the players' purpose but trying to fix balance issues so people do not have to worry about it is not something evil -in this case there just exists a balance problem to begin with.

I've seen it, and that's what made me quit the d20 system in the first place, because this type of bullshit was all over the place. But you know what? In hindsight, I love d20 games, but I just don't care for this sort of nitpicky taking apart of rules as if that was the point of the game itself. It's NOT. Not to me. Not to many people who like to play games like I do, or in different ways than I do.

What I don't like is this constant diktat that somehow the rules and their balance must be the sole end of the game. Fuck that noise. Fuck it with a crowbar, beat the shit out of it, pour gazoline on it and set it on fire. This is really, really stupid bullshit I can't stand, because it pretends to be "objective" while in fact, it not only isn't, but it's completely misguided in treating the game system as an end, rather than means being part of many parts that make role playing games enjoyable to whole lot of people including me, myself, and I concur.

Wonder if Mike Mearls ever published anything before the d20 boom (ie. before 2000).

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415227Benoist, here's an idea: take your "play the game, not the rules" bullshit and stuff it right up your ass.

I love you too, Frank. :)

Quote from: 837204563;415127Way 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.

First, it is relevant.

Second, that "10 years to do stuff" meme is a load of bullshit that people really have to stop saying.  It can apply to completely technical activities, like playing tennis or guitar. It does NOT apply to creative activities like writing songs or books or RPGs.
If it did, Gygax's later games would have been unbelievably better than the game he wrote with essentially 0 years under his belt. And they really really weren't.

RPGPundit

Now, about the OP itself: I think Frank's analysis is probably right.  From a point of view of rules-design, Iron Heroes did seem to be crap.

Which is why I had confidence in Mearls at the time. IH was full of enthusiasm, didn't seem to give a shit about game balance, and followed NONE of the rules that people in the Forge wanted RPGs to look like.

So while you're right, Frank, that Mearls' design in IH was really pretty piss-poor from the point of view of things like balance and masterful "gamist" design, it was this very thing which led me (erroneously) to believe that Mearls would be a faithful guardian of the wacky wonderfulness of D&D.  I never saw the stab in the back that was 4e coming.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;415235Second, that "10 years to do stuff" meme is a load of bullshit that people really have to stop saying.  It can apply to completely technical activities, like playing tennis or guitar. It does NOT apply to creative activities like writing songs or books or RPGs.

For quite a large number of musicians, their best work was frequently done before they got their big break (ie. before they became famous).  The common pattern is their best written material frequently ends up on the first few albums.  After that well runs dry, they end up having to produce new crap on demand, which is frequently mediocre in comparison.

Not exactly easy to come up with good new material, when one is under pressure from record company bureaucrats, managers, fans, etc ... to produce a second encore in a very short period of time.  Their older material, may very well have been stuff they had written over a 10+ year time period previous to "becoming famous".

I haven't looked at Mearls' early d20 material from 2000-2003.  Wonder if it was any better (or worse) than his later stuff.

I love it how people now gang up to pretend Frank's OP is about IH's lack of balance and nothing else.

Indeed. It's a hatchet job on Mr. Mearls. Although i kinda agree about IH. I bought it because i heard such good things about it, read it and then thought what the fuck? I get tokens for being hit? Magic? Bwah! The magic section looked like it was from a Forge ashcan edition.

Quote from: Windjammer;415243I love it how people now gang up to pretend Frank's OP is about IH's lack of balance and nothing else.

What else is it about?

Quote from: ggroy;415241I haven't looked at Mearls' early d20 material from 2000-2003.  Wonder if it was any better (or worse) than his later stuff.

I'm not a Mike Mearls fan, but check out Portals & Planes (one of FFG's Legends & Lairs sourcebooks for 3E) that he wrote. I have found it to be a pretty solid reference work for planar adventuring.

Quote from: One Horse Town;415248read it and then thought what the fuck? I get tokens for being hit? Magic? Bwah! The magic section looked like it was from a Forge ashcan edition.

LOL I didn't care for the magic section personally. That's another thing I'd do in a second edition: just take magic out completely. It was added (and thus rushed) on the insistance of Monte Cook, who told Mike Mearls that the customers of the game would want some magic in there. I think he was wrong. Maybe keep it for monsters/NPCs, but for PCs, that kind of defied the point of the game in the first place.

As for the Armiger (with the token pool you gain from being hit), I love it, personally. To me, the tokens represent the abuse you're taking and then redirecting at your opponent. Ever fought a bully, being slapped/insulted over and over, turning red in your face, until you finally explode and punch him in the face, exploding his nose in the process? Well, I have. That's what I think of when I think of the Armiger. It's my favorite class of the game, I think.

I loved the artwork, and the concept of lots of fighter and rogue variations with little magic. But I never could get my friends to play, so I have no idea if it's fun at the table or not.

Quote from: Windjammer;415243I love it how people now gang up to pretend Frank's OP is about IH's lack of balance and nothing else.

Yeah, 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, when the few game balance problems I really dwelled on include such masterful pieces of writing as:

• Armigers basically can't use their abilities, because they require their enemies to behave irrationally to get tokens.
• Arcanists get the equivalent of powerful 7th level spells at first level.
• Arcanists of mid to high level who actually do attempt to cast the spells that are unlocked at higher level (which have no guaranty of being any better than the ones they could use at first level), they will die.

Those are pretty fucking serious balance problems, but they weren't the focus of my wrath. Hell, I could have brought up the fact that Iron Heroes went to print with single feat infinite damage loops that required you to take the feat, and then... um... use it. At all. Oh, and it went off automatically every time you hit with a melee attack. Is condemning that kind of bullshit suddenly an "obsession with game balance"? What the fucking hell?

Quote from: RPGPundit   Now, about the OP itself: I think Frank's analysis is probably right. From a point of view of rules-design, Iron Heroes did seem to be crap.

Which is why I had confidence in Mearls at the time. IH was full of enthusiasm, didn't seem to give a shit about game balance, and followed NONE of the rules that people in the Forge wanted RPGs to look like.

So while you're right, Frank, that Mearls' design in IH was really pretty piss-poor from the point of view of things like balance and masterful "gamist" design, it was this very thing which led me (erroneously) to believe that Mearls would be a faithful guardian of the wacky wonderfulness of D&D. I never saw the stab in the back that was 4e coming.

I saw Mearls' baleful influence on things as soon as he made the Knight for the PHB2. Iron Heroes was admitted to be unfinished. Reading through it, it's totally clear that no one has given a second glance to any of the subsystems. That nothing really holds together and there is no master plan. And his own excuse was that it wasn't finished. That yes, he had sent a product to print to sell to people for actual money that he knew wasn't actually ready.

But here's the thing: he had been given a job at WotC. People who pay actual money instead of peanuts and drycleaner coupons. So I could totally empathize with someone who simply walked from whatever bullshit no-money projects they were working on to go take a job with the five hundred pound gorilla. That makes perfect sense to me. I would respect the decision to finish the contracted projects you were working on first a bit more, but I've lived on the ramen diet enough to understand walking away. And I've been there from the other side, when someone just fucking leaves in he middle of a project and you either get someone new to hop in and do rewrites of a document he is just now seeing for the first time or you just go with whatever the fuck is there, and neither answer is good. So I get the publisher going to print with Iron Heroes even in the sorry state it was in.

But here's where he lost me: the Knight. His first big project for WotC. And... it sucks. Its abilities don't synergize, the code doesn't make any sense, and the central ability is a very under-explained MMO-style "hate grabbing" mechanic. It is, in short, unfinished.

And that's where he lost me. At the point where he said that he was dropping everything to go make real money doing real work for the 500 pound gorilla... and his stuff still looked like someone had scribbled some drunken ideas on a cocktail napkin and then tried to leave without paying the tab while other people were still puzzling over whether and how it worked.

So when people say "Sure, the Skill Challenge rewrites Mike Mearls has done were shitty and unfinished, but remember Iron Heroes?" I am left with my mouth hanging open like a cartoon dog. Yes I fucking remember Iron Heroes. It was shitty and unfinished, just like everything he has done since!

-Frank

Quote from: Seanchai;415221I thought his mission was to smear Mearls as much as humanly possible

Most people online are relatively harmless.

It may be a different story if there was a "John Hinckley" or "Mark David Chapman" type who really hated Mearls, who ends up stalking and shooting Mearls dead with a gun and subsequently fleeing the scene.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415255Is condemning that kind of bullshit suddenly an "obsession with game balance"? What the fucking hell?

Yes, it is. I'm guessing you've never played a Melnibonean Noble with a buddy playing a Nadsokor Beggar in a Stormbringer game?

If you can accuse Mike Mearls of something, in my opinion, it's to be an hypocrite in regards to rules balance, in the sense that he often gives the impression of endorsing the "rules balance über Alles" wholeheartedly, while his designs are not consistent with that "philosophy." That would be an accurate criticism.

Quote from: Benoist;415258Yes, it is.

Seriously? Condemning infinite damage loops that you trigger automatically every time you "declare a melee attack" is an "obsession with balance?" Really? That's your final answer?

QuoteI'm guessing you've never played a Melnibonean Noble with a buddy playing a Nadsokor Beggar in a Stormbringer game?

I have played RIFTS. Ars Magica too, which I think handles the Powerful Sorcerer/Lowly Goatherd party much better.

-Frank

I don't know enough about IH to have an opinion about it, but I do appreciate the self-important grandiosity of the OP.

The way Trollman sticks the boot into Mearls, you'd think he was publishing games rather than merely labouring to tear actual writers down by attacking their old projects.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415266Seriously? Condemning infinite damage loops that you trigger automatically every time you "declare a melee attack" is an "obsession with balance?" Really? That's your final answer?

That's not like you said "hey, this combo is really something that ought to be houseruled," no. You are saying that the game is broken, unplayable, and just can't do anything right across the board, carrying this logic through all sorts of details about its rules. You completely dismiss actual play, completely dismiss all other components of role playing games to purely concentrate on the rules and the rules only as the determining factor of whether a game can even possibilibly carry out a positive game play experience, no matter who the people are and how they're playing the game, as some sort of objective, true rule of game design, and that, my friend, definitely qualifies as an obsession for theoretical RULES (not game, rules) balance, yes.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415266I have played RIFTS. Ars Magica too, which I think handles the Powerful Sorcerer/Lowly Goatherd party much better.

-Frank

My point is that some people, many people as a matter of fact, do not need absolute rules balance to be a design goal of the game to have a great time with said game. Note that I am not saying that rules balance can't be a tool in the arsenal of a game designer, but this isn't an end in and of itself, no. Just a mean, an approach to game design. There are multiple ways to approach game design, and multiple individual gamers who each find different games entertaining in different ways at their game table.

Your take that rules balance is the be-all, end-all of game design is just pure bullshit. It may be what you personally want out of a game, and appreciate at your game table, but it is not an objective "has to be that way, or you're a deluded moron" fact. That's my point.

Quote from: Hairfoot;415272The way Trollman sticks the boot into Mearls, you'd think he was publishing games rather than merely labouring to tear actual writers down by attacking their old projects.

Two things.

1. That's the whole point of Frank's ethos in the last post (a propos Mearls' work on 3.5 PHB 2). Mearls is happy to produce unfinished stuff for people to put their own hard earned money to. Mearls got no problem to charge for that stuff. Frank does, both as regards his own work and that of others. Frank still designs stuff, and lets you have it for free. Shadowrun Horror (the boardgame), the Tomes for D&D 3e co-authored with K, the rewritten Matrix rules for Shadowrun 4.01, etc etc. It's all pristine stuff, and Frank doesn't charge you money for it. Does that make him any less of a designer? Not in my book. Especially not when he has been professionally producing stuff in the past for customers to pay for.

2. I think of the OP in this thread (and others Frank authored over the years) as akin to Borges' gem about Pierre Menard (http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/borges-quixote.html). Borges realized one day that 90% of all the great literary master pieces of the West came about a writer sitting in his closet one afternoon, getting ONE brilliant idea and then writing a 500 page novel about it. Borges says, 'fuck that, I'm just going to give you the one idea - and dress it up inside an imaginary book I never wrote... heck, make that: one idea dressed up as an imaginary review of an imaginary book I pretend someone else wrote'. Reading Frank's reviews, it seems to me just because his work there doesn't opt for the format "160 pages rehashed splat, that'll be 29.95 please" makes it any less insightful or useful. Especially not when compared to that trainwreck of IH, which is all about a guy going "hey, I have this one, maybe two cool ideas... how can I spam that into an unworkable 300 page manuscript that people pay money for?". Heck, there's more actual insight into d20 design buried under that OP here than in the entirety of that IH core book.

Quote from: Windjammer;4152791. That's the whole point of Frank's ethos in the last point. Mearls is happy to produce unfinished stuff for people to put their own hard earned money to. Mearls got no problem to charge for that stuff. Frank does, both as regards his own work and that of others. Frank still designs stuff, and lets you have it for free. Shadowrun Horror (the boardgame), the Tomes for D&D 3e co-authored with K, the rewritten Matrix rules for Shadowrun 4.01, etc etc. It's all pristine stuff, and Frank doesn't charge you money for it. Does that make him any less of a designer? Not in my book. Especially not when he has been professionally producing stuff in the past for customers to pay for.

THIS I agree you can honestly build a case for. That's what I was posting above: there is something to Mike Mearls being a hypocrite in regards to rules balance, in the sense that he often gives the impression of endorsing the "rules balance über Alles" wholeheartedly, while his designs are not consistent with that "philosophy."

"I made this awesome game all nifty, awesome and balanced, here it is, $39.99 please" when in fact, the game is not balanced like it was supposed to be. There's truth to that.

Quote from: Benoist;415273Your take that rules balance is the be-all, end-all of game design is just pure bullshit. It may be what you personally want out of a game, and appreciate at your game table, but it is not an objective "has to be that way, or you're a deluded moron" fact. That's my point.

So your point is:
(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_OEoNzDCQX5s/Sbl4iEQQeGI/AAAAAAAAAO8/Bzvouc3d2H0/s400/straw-man3.jpg)

Because the vast majority of the points in the original post were at best tangentially about balance, and were actually about the rules doing the things they were supposed to do.

Having a trait system that punishes players for having unique backstories or a character advancement system that punishes players who have high level character concepts that are similar to their low level character concepts is not a "balance" issue - it's a "your design is fucking terrible" issue. You can incentivize whatever you want, the fact that some choice or another is good or bad is not by itself a balance issue. It only becomes a balance issue if you tell players that they should select two different things which are wildly different in power.

The fact that a 3e D&D Cleric is a much better melee combatant than a 3e D&D Fighter is a balance issue because the game tells players that they are supposed to have a Fighter who goes into melee and a Cleric who helps out as a second banana in melee who also has various magic schticks that let him shine at other times. The fact that the Aristocrat class sucks is not a balance issue, because players who take the Aristocrat class know what they are getting into. The fact that Eagle Claw Attack is a worthless feat isn't a balance issue either, because it's not a standard option and no one has to take it.

The fact that Iron Heroes bones you for advancing your character within a consistent character concept is not a balance issue, because you could jolly well have advanced your character in a scattered fashion or carefully designed your "build" from the get-go. It's an issue where disincentivizing people to have fucking consistent character concepts is fucking insane. It's an issue where that design decision is inexcusable. Not because it's inherently unbalanced, but because what it encourages people to avoid is exactly what any sane person would want to encourage people to do.

So, since I am in fact not taking about "pure game balance" (whatever the hell that is), and never was, what the fuck is your point?

-Frank

I would think the way to address the OP's points would be to either point out where he is factually mistaken, or give voice to why the things he claims to be flaws turn out to actually make the play at the table better.
Rather than questioning his motives in writing the thing, or claiming that 'we once had fun playing with those rules', or saying he wrote his broken system 'enthusiastically' (though I'm a sucker for that myself). None of that addresses his actual argument.

I don't much care about 'balance' between PCs... and I agree with Benoist that the rules are the least concern in determining fun at the table... but for their small contribution they should at least be expected to contribute, rather than detract.

As it is it sounds from the descriptions here that the game has a lot of rules for things I wouldn't want rules for and would get in the way of my being able to play the character I'd want to play.

Quote from: Windjammer;415279Frank still designs stuff, and lets you have it for free. Shadowrun Horror (the boardgame), the Tomes for D&D 3e co-authored with K, the rewritten Matrix rules for Shadowrun 4.01, etc etc.

According to Google his most influential work is the publication of CGL's financial woes, but I'm not going to dispute your assessment of his other material.

Trollman's definitely entertaining.  As someone said upthread, if it were 4E he was hooking into, everyone would be applauding - me among them.

He may also be 100% correct about IH.  Perhaps it's because I don't have an opinion on it either way that the OP screams jealousy of Mearls over the steady hum of the critique.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415288Having a trait system that punishes players for having unique backstories or a character advancement system that punishes players who have high level character concepts that are similar to their low level character concepts is not a "balance" issue - it's a "your design is fucking terrible" issue.

Punishes? How? By having one trait more powerful than another? That's a balance issue. What if I don't care about having the +2 to something my neighbor's getting? What if -GASP!- my character concept matters, and the hell with it?

It is totally a case of balance über alles. If it's not balanced, then it's "terrible." Well no. Depends on the players and what they're searching for in the game.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415288You can incentivize whatever you want, the fact that some choice or another is good or bad is not by itself a balance issue. It only becomes a balance issue if you tell players that they should select two different things which are wildly different in power.

It also becomes a balance issue when you call it "terrible game design." Why? Because you assume that two different unbalanced choices demonstrate terrible game design. Why? Because you assume there is no choice. A player will obviously go for the mechanically more powerful choice. Well, NO. You are thus making it an issue, yourself.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415288The fact that Iron Heroes bones you for advancing your character within a consistent character concept is not a balance issue, because you could jolly well have advanced your character in a scattered fashion or carefully designed your "build" from the get-go. It's an issue where disincentivizing people to have fucking consistent character concepts is fucking insane. It's an issue where that design decision is inexcusable. Not because it's inherently unbalanced, but because what it encourages people to avoid is exactly what any sane person would want to encourage people to do.

I just don't understand your point here. At all. It's like you're talking about deprotagonizing sparrows or something.
Please write something I can understand.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415288So, since I am in fact not taking about "pure game balance" (whatever the hell that is), and never was, what the fuck is your point?

-Frank

From where I'm standing, you are totally talking about rules balance in a vacuum, except you tell me now that you aren't. So I guess my point from here is: make your fucking point clearer, Frank.

Benoist, are you seriously telling me that you "do not understand" that a game should incentivize behavior that is desirable on the part of the payers and not punish behavior that is desirable on the part of the players?

Are you also telling me that you do not think that a player deciding that they want to play a character who is good at fighting in the dark and then sticking to that as they rise in power is a desirable action on the part of a player?

Are you seriously saying that the kind of behavior that should be incentivized by the game is to abandon your character concept every single level and branch off into a wildly different fighting style like you were playing Ranma? Is that your final answer?

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415308Benoist, are you seriously telling me that you "do not understand" that a game should incentivize behavior that is desirable on the part of the players and not punish behavior that is desirable on the part of the players?

So what you're trying to tell me is that the whole point of Iron Heroes is to make one trick ponies with game mechanics? That's it? Well, not for everyone. That's just not true.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415308Are you also telling me that you do not think that a player deciding that they want to play a character who is good at fighting in the dark and then sticking to that as they rise in power is a desirable action on the part of a player?

Not necessarily, no. Having a character you like and feel comfortable playing is the desirable outcome, to me. To some people, that means having that guy that fights in the dark and thats-all-the-guy-does. To other people, it will mean having a more fleshed out character by selecting traits and feats that fits their idea of who their character is, on any number of standpoints between the personality of the character, his background, experiences, role in the group, whatever. One-trick-poneys are not the only possible desirable outcome of game design, no.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415308Are you seriously saying that the kind of behavior that should be incentivized by the game is to abandon your character concept every single level and branch off into a wildly different fighting style like you were playing Ranma? Is that your final answer?

-Frank

No. What I'm saying is that your idea of "sticking to your character concept" is one-dimensional, based on rules only, and assumes that automatically means creating one-trick poneys within the confines of the rules in a vacuum. That may be your take, but I don't have to accept it as mine.

Quote from: Benoist;415307Punishes? How? By having one trait more powerful than another? That's a balance issue. What if I don't care about having the +2 to something my neighbor's getting? What if -GASP!- my character concept matters, and the hell with it?

If you're playing solo, that's fine.  The instant another player sits at the table, you're playing a team-focused game.  You're expected to be a full and equal contributor to the team, and that means maximizing your performance because everyone else relies on you to do your part.  If you fuck up, it's not just you that suffers- everyone on the team suffers the consequences of your fuckup.  If someone else loses a PC because you fucked up, then they've got every right to call you on your bullshit because you Did It Wrong and thus can (and should) demand that you fix your man, get a better one or get the fuck out.  Who and what your dude was doesn't mean shit; all that matters is what your dude does during play, because success needs no justification and failure allows none.

I'm a bit in the middle on the whole game balance vs. individualism thing. Personally I see Franks point because as much as I love Palladium and Wujick, I've played a lot of Ninjas and Superspies and it had the same problem when you select powers.

For example, it might give you a choice between Wrist hardening (+5% escape joint locks) and Mind like the Moon (+2 Parry, +4 Dodge, +6 Initiative). A lot of times, Samurai type characters couldn't take sword drawing because they could instead take Mind like the Moon.

In my current game, my players always focus on concept because they are very artistic, but once it gets in the game, they get really salty when their concept doesn't statistically cut it, so I end up either artificially powering them up to equal or helping them rework their character some. I think being true to your idea is fine, but I think most people get sick of it when they realize they aren't doing enough damage.

Really?
I read that whole thread, and that's all there is to this?

A decent, if somewhat overzealous backstab rant/analysis about IH, some seriously overdone Mearls bashing, and Ben looking at it solely through the lens of balance, and some sniping?
 
You can look at any class (in a class based game) and as soon as you mention another class, it can be about balance.  It's too bad, but every class, race, power, etc, analysis can be seen through the balance lens.
And we do talk about the ogre of overdone balance a lot.

BTW, Frank, I like your commenht about the magic system , and your comment about the aristocrat was also very useful.

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;415312If you're playing solo, that's fine.  The instant another player sits at the table, you're playing a team-focused game.  You're expected to be a full and equal contributor to the team, and that means maximizing your performance because everyone else relies on you to do your part.  If you fuck up, it's not just you that suffers- everyone on the team suffers the consequences of your fuckup.  If someone else loses a PC because you fucked up, then they've got every right to call you on your bullshit because you Did It Wrong and thus can (and should) demand that you fix your man, get a better one or get the fuck out.  Who and what your dude was doesn't mean shit; all that matters is what your dude does during play, because success needs no justification and failure allows none.

Sounds like fucking World of Warcraft to me. I'm glad the guys I play RPGs with don't look at our games that way.

Quote from: Windjammer;4152792. I think of the OP in this thread (and others Frank authored over the years) as akin to Borges' gem about Pierre Menard (http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/borges-quixote.html). Borges realized one day that 90% of all the great literary master pieces of the West came about a writer sitting in his closet one afternoon, getting ONE brilliant idea and then writing a 500 page novel about it. Borges says, 'fuck that, I'm just going to give you the one idea - and dress it up inside an imaginary book I never wrote... heck, make that: one idea dressed up as an imaginary review of an imaginary book I pretend someone else wrote'. Reading Frank's reviews, it seems to me just because his work there doesn't opt for the format "160 pages rehashed splat, that'll be 29.95 please" makes it any less insightful or useful. Especially not when compared to that trainwreck of IH, which is all about a guy going "hey, I have this one, maybe two cool ideas... how can I spam that into an unworkable 300 page manuscript that people pay money for?". Heck, there's more actual insight into d20 design buried under that OP here than in the entirety of that IH core book.

It seems like many non-fiction books I come across, are written in this manner.  Some stuff would have been easier to get the point across as a magazine article (or blog post these days), instead of stretching it out over 200+ pages.

Here's where I agree with Frank: Iron Heroes as written is not coherent with itself. Its design is predicated on the notion that you'll have all sorts of neat mechanical gizmos to play with, but these gizmos are not all balanced with each other. Doesn't mean it's broken, unplayable, or that people can't have fun playing it. But if this isn't a problem with many players of the game, it is a problem with its own design intent.

This, is relevant to Mike Mearls' skills as a designer.

And that's where, I think, Frank does have a point.

Quote from: jeff37923;415251I'm not a Mike Mearls fan, but check out Portals & Planes (one of FFG's Legends & Lairs sourcebooks for 3E) that he wrote. I have found it to be a pretty solid reference work for planar adventuring.

Yes, that's true. Portals and Planes was quite good.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Hairfoot;415302Trollman's definitely entertaining.  As someone said upthread, if it were 4E he was hooking into, everyone would be applauding - me among them.

I was assuming it WAS 4e he was hooking into, just by proxy.

RPGPundit

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 (http://okayyourturn.yuku.com/topic/18105) 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 (http://www.therpgsite.com/showpost.php?p=415330&postcount=58).

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 (http://okayyourturn.yuku.com/topic/18105) 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 (http://www.therpgsite.com/showpost.php?p=415330&postcount=58).

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

There's nothing wrong with lack of game balance in and of itself, but it is often a symptom of a whole host of other problems:

Not being clear: if some things are more powerful than other things in your game it should be clear. If you're playing Call of Cthulhu and casting spells is suicidally dangerous and a bad idea and the game explains this to you clearly, then that's awesome. If you're playing a (hypothetical) game based on the Elric books and the book tells you that Melniborean sorcerers are awesome but the actual rules make them gimped since their heads explode 20% of the time they cast a spell, then the sorcerers being underpowered is a serious problem. Clerics being better at melee combat than fighters is an example of this.

Fucked up genre emulation: if the game rules make things that don't fit the genre that's being emulated more powerful than things that do fit the genre then there's a problem. If, say, Pendragon made armor be a hindrance in combat or if a Three Musketeers game made armor massively powerful then there'd be a serious problem.

Devs not understanding how their own system works: often things are underpowered because the way that the rules actually work is different than the way that the devs envisioned them working but they couldn't be arsed to test the game properly to make sure that the rules actually do what they're supposed to do.

All of these things (and more) can cause game balance problems. It's not that game balance is bad design, but bad design almost always causes bad game balance. The most important thing is for the lower levels to be CLEAR. If your character is a crippled beggar then you should suck at fighting, but if you take a fighting class and focus your character on being Fighty McFightsalot and then end up fighting like a crippled beggar since you ran headfirst into a newbie trap in the rules, (for example being high strength, high endurance, low agility in a White Wolf game) then that's bad.

tldr: Melnibonean sorcerers being more powerful than beggars is good, beggars being more powerful than Melnibonean sorcerers is bad.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415414If 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.

I was unaware that choosing things from a list was such a terrible design feature. How could Mearls possibly dare to allow players two choices from a list? The idiot!

Frank, you're totally wrong when you say players' expectations of backstory are entirely encapsulated within the choice of background traits they take or don't. This is just empirically false. I've played in multiple games of IH and never seen anyone do this, and I'd never even heard anyone who plays the game suggest it.

PCs don't suffer penalties for taking them, because many of the background traits are good mechanically. Background traits are also at most one of two trait selections you have, so even if you pick one that doesn't help your character concept very much mechanically, you're hardly at a significant disadvantage compared to other PCs.l

What background traits do is offer you the option of getting a mechanical bonus or ability from your background. If you don't want a special ability from it, then you simply don't take the background trait.

I think the Sky Captain's Handbook suckesd ass, too. Also, Iron Heroes is no texactly Palladiumbook-style full of good art and inspiring concepts. It supposedly a vehicle to better express existing concepts and longings WITH RULES.

Thus, Frank wins, everybody else loses, especially D&D.

I do stand by my eternal love for the "Warblade", whoever wrote that. I thought it was mearls. The Warblade is all that a fighter should have been in the first place. The Crusader OTOH was pre-shadowing everything bad about 4e and "powers".

QuoteI do stand by my eternal love for the "Warblade", whoever wrote that. I thought it was mearls.

Mike Mearls was a developer on Tome of Battle, but primary writing was actually done by Richard Baker, with additional writing by Mathew Sernett nd Frank Brunner. Mike Mearls was even the "lead" developer on Book of Nine Swords, whatever the fuck that means on a book with five developers and only 3 writers (who are also credited as "designers").

But while I don't agree with everything he has done (Magic of Faerun Creative Director credits, I'm looking at you), I won't stand in the way of your man-crush on Richard Baker.

-Frank

Quote from: Daztur;415471tldr: Melnibonean sorcerers being more powerful than beggars is good, beggars being more powerful than Melnibonean sorcerers is bad.

OK. I totally see your point there. :D

(Seriously though, I agree with your post. Bad rules balance will might be related to any number of aspects of game design, but in many cases, it'll be the symptom of problems with the game. So it's not that bad rules balance is bad in and of itself, that entirely depends on the particulars of the game and what it's set out to do, but it will often be the symptom of problems on a conceptual level with the larger design, particularly if the game claims to be balanced in the first place)

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415513Mike Mearls was a developer on Tome of Battle, but primary writing was actually done by Richard Baker, with additional writing by Mathew Sernett nd Frank Brunner. Mike Mearls was even the "lead" developer on Book of Nine Swords, whatever the fuck that means on a book with five developers and only 3 writers (who are also credited as "designers").

Wonder how exactly WotC distinguishes between "designers" and "developers".

Or are they just superfluous employee "title inflation" (ie. such as Wal-Mart referring to their rank and file employees as "associates").

The Tome-Fighter is also up my alley..with most stuff...

...but seriously, the Henchmen Tomefighter one of my players has would be overshadowing everybody if he wasn't 4 levels below and played by someone who sometimes forgets to use him.

But that is partly my fault...they snatched a pair of matching two-handed-fighting +3 Swords with that bleeding ability that lets the monster loose a CON point for each hit. Add Tome Two Handed Fighting Shennanigans (tm), Haste and is a true moulinette...

The Warblades's as well as the Tomefighter's abilities to boost saving throws are some of my most favorite. Also: Ways of being a true universalists with everything feat-based, instead of being idiotic feat-tree prisoners.

Quote from: ggroy;415529Wonder how exactly WotC distinguishes between "designers" and "developers".

Or are they just superfluous employee "title inflation" (ie. such as Wal-Mart referring to their rank and file employees as "associates").

My understanding is that the roles are a little akin to writers and editors. The designers come up with base ideas and raw mechanics, which are handed off to developers for refinement. The developers test this material, looking for balance across the game system. I think they may also be checking for consistency with story or background.

Quote from: ggroy;415529Wonder how exactly WotC distinguishes between "designers" and "developers".

Or are they just superfluous employee "title inflation" (ie. such as Wal-Mart referring to their rank and file employees as "associates").

That is an excellent question. The Tome of Battle doesn't even have "writers" on its credits sheet. It just has "Designers" who happen to also be marked as the "written by" on the book jacket. So apparently "Designer" means "Writer" - at least for that project. The Developer on a project is supposed to be the go-to guy who is keeping track of what all the different writers are doing and suggesting and being the last word on all the different questions that come up during production. How a project even could have 5 different last words is beyond me. My guess is that Tome of Battle was a hot potato that no one wanted to get stuck with, so they kept handing it back and forth to everyone in the office while the three writers plugged along virtually without direction.

Since it came out during the "throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks" phase, I think everyone interested in keeping their jobs tried their damndest to distribute blame as much as possible. Tome of Magic was the same basic deal - five developers, four designers (designers again being synonymous with "writers"). It's only after the fact, that Tome of Battle became popular and Tome of Magic (and comparable forays into out-there design like Magic of Incarnum) got resoundingly panned that people on the development team for Tome of Battle stepped up to take credit for it.

Interestingly, that system did eventually end. By the time 4e came out, they were back to distinguishing Designers and Writers again.

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415547My guess is that Tome of Battle was a hot potato that no one wanted to get stuck with, so they kept handing it back and forth to everyone in the office while the three writers plugged along virtually without direction.

My take is that since it was largely a proto-4e experiment, the staff wanted as many hands in as they could get to brainstorm and start with their feet wet for the real deal. Of course, in practice, position and employment turnover among the staff is pretty high, as always under wotc/hasbro.

The explanation for Tome of Magic is a lot simpler - it's just multiple discrete books sold under one cover.

Quote from: ggroy;415257Most people online are relatively harmless.

I agree. He's certainly not harming Mearls. To my mind, the most damning accusations are simple ones made by innocents. Frank's...zeal for Mearl's blood puts him in the kook category in my book. It's easy to brush off the things a kook tells you...

Seanchai

Quote from: Cole;415557My take is that since it was largely a proto-4e experiment, the staff wanted as many hands in as they could get to brainstorm and start with their feet wet for the real deal. Of course, in practice, position and employment turnover among the staff is pretty high, as always under wotc/hasbro.

The explanation for Tome of Magic is a lot simpler - it's just multiple discrete books sold under one cover.

I totally believe them when they say that Tome of Battle was braistorming and test ballooning for 4e D&D. It's just that I think it's rather obvious that Tome of Magic and Magic of Incarnum were also. If Magic of Incarnum had done well and Tome of Battle had bombed, 4e characters would have mana reserves or focus pools or something that they allocated to their various abilities. If the Truenamer had taken off from the Tome of Magic, spellcasters in 4e would have casting DCs to achieve various effects.

The used Tome of Battle as inspiration for 4e powers because it was popular. If it had flopped, it still would have been research, but they wouldn't have been talking about it during the pre-release for 4e because the take home message for the design and development teams would have simply been "don't do that" like it was for Incarnum.

-Frank

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;415491I was unaware that choosing things from a list was such a terrible design feature. How could Mearls possibly dare to allow players two choices from a list? The idiot!

I suppose Frank will respond if there's anything to the rest of your post, but this doesn't add anything to your argument. Of course lists are okay. All that Frank and I said was that if you're allowed to choose exactly X items from a list, you might as well be given X points to buy items from the list, all of which have a cost of 1 each.

So the question is: why is there this budget? Most of the time (as I said) it's because the design is supposed to balance the things on the list against each other, as well as limit access to the things on the list.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415566I totally believe them when they say that Tome of Battle was braistorming and test ballooning for 4e D&D. It's just that I think it's rather obvious that Tome of Magic and Magic of Incarnum were also.
[...]
They used Tome of Battle as inspiration for 4e powers because it was popular.

Well, I think to a certain extent most rules supplements that came out since 3.5, but not necessarily to a particularly large extent. I think there are two types of rule supplements that came out after the first round of 3.5 books. There's the "what's the next edition going to be like" books, and the "let's enjoy this edition while it lasts!" books. At the end of 2e you have "Combat and Tactics" and you have "Chronomancer." Even if Chronomancer has been a big seller, I don't see it having been a foundation for 3e. I don't know if C&T even sold that well. (by the time the books had the black cover designs, did ANYTHING sell well?)

I can't say with any genuine evidence which is which but if I'm making my best guess I'd say Tome of Magic was not created to be a major proving ground for 4e ideas - it's basically story based. You have the "key of solomon guy" and you have the "rule of names" guy. They are doing genre emulation from the fiction up, and no one is going to convince me there was ever a chance that was how it was approached. Magic of Incarnum is more suspect -it's about pretty much nothing (maybe somewhere along the lines they made everything blue because it reminded someone of the FF Blue Mage.)

I think Tome of Battle was a way to try out 4e elements more than test  market them. I am very confident that by the time ToB came out most of the eventual 4e designers had a pretty solid picture of about what they wanted 4e to be like, and were just concerned with the particulars of implementation.

I think this is relevant to a discussion of Iron Heroes - Mike Mearls sets out to make a game that's about gritty warriors, how does he go about it? It doesn't have much to do with realizing and has a lot to do with "well, guys fight, we need to have a lot of rules that make the game of fighting interesting rules wise. Not so much magic, we'll kind of nod to it. We make the FIGHTING RULES really FUN because it's about FIGHTING. We make it fun by having a lot of cool rules that involve (tokens, pools, etc etc)." This is the approach that made mearls a man the WOTC design brain trust wanted to bring in. Go back to iron might and substitute in (combat styles, IH stunt mechanics), go forward to ToB and subtitute in (Martial disciplines, recharges), go ahead to 4e and substitute etc etc.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;415568I suppose Frank will respond if there's anything to the rest of your post, but this doesn't add anything to your argument. Of course lists are okay. All that Frank and I said was that if you're allowed to choose exactly X items from a list, you might as well be given X points to buy items from the list, all of which have a cost of 1 each.

...And you are in Iron Heroes, Elliot. You're given two trait selections from a list. Each trait costs one of your selections. Seriously, RTFM.

QuoteSo the question is: why is there this budget? Most of the time (as I said) it's because the design is supposed to balance the things on the list against each other, as well as limit access to the things on the list.

What "budget" are you talking about? You pick two things off a list.

I don't have TFM to read. I was just reading Frank's critique of IH, thought it was interesting, would have happily read cogent counterarguments, but Benoist stumbled in and started arguing about balance for some reason.

You don't understand that if are you told to pick two things from a list, and no more than two things, than TWO is your budget?

Suppose the list of Traits is (1) Mustache (2) Major NPC Enemy (3) "Big" physique +2 HP/level and +2 damage when you hit. You get to pick one (i.e. your "budget" is 1 Trait), then what's the point if you can still have a mustache without choosing it as a Trait? Or conversely, suppose we try to make sense of this by saying you must choose the Mustache trait in order to have a mustache. Then nobody will have a mustache. No matter how you answer the question, you're worse off than free-forming it.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;415606Suppose the list of Traits is (1) Mustache (2) Major NPC Enemy (3) "Big" physique +2 HP/level and +2 damage when you hit. You get to pick one (i.e. your "budget" is 1 Trait), then what's the point if you can still have a mustache without choosing it as a Trait? Or conversely, suppose we try to make sense of this by saying you must choose the Mustache trait in order to have a mustache. Then nobody will have a mustache. No matter how you answer the question, you're worse off than free-forming it.

Burning wheel does exactly this (somewhat to irritation) and also calls them Traits? Anyone remember off the top of their head which came out first?

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;415587...And you are in Iron Heroes, Elliot. You're given two trait selections from a list. Each trait costs one of your selections. Seriously, RTFM.
What "budget" are you talking about? You pick two things off a list.

Is this some sort of joke? There is no difference at all between "pick two things off this list" and "you have two points to spend, things on this list cost 1 point each." For that matter, it's the same as if you had 20 points to spend and all selections cost between 7 and 10 points each. Seriously, this isn't even "these concepts are similar" but an actual "A == A" style definitional identity.

It's like you just stood up and shouted "That's not a dog, it's a domesticated canine! RTFM!" What are you actually trying to say or prove?

-Frank

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;415606I was just reading Frank's critique of IH, thought it was interesting, would have happily read cogent counterarguments, but Benoist stumbled in and started arguing about balance for some reason.

Well it was a cogent argument, since Frank later argued the virtues of rules balance in game design. My reason for doing so was that it simply was an opportunity to restate my position on this: that rules balance as some sort of holy virtue of game design is HIGHLY overrated, and absolute rules balance is pointless (and unreachable), since plenty of other factors participate to the actual balance of a game as it is being played.

Quote from: Cole;415614Burning wheel does exactly this (somewhat to irritation) and also calls them Traits? Anyone remember off the top of their head which came out first?

No, but BW is an avowed Forge game--at least I think it was by the time Revised was written. Whether or not the Forge was directly responsible for this, the point I want to make is that BW, like a lot of Forge games, takes a strong stance against in-character P.O.V. and in favor of active story-construction and thespianism. While I'm not entirely favorable to those approaches, I think they inform a rules set which is designed to guide you into creating your PC in roughly the way that a GM would create an NPC. In other words, for the purpose of "portraying" a character to the rest of the group. And IIRC BW does follow this up by having mechanical bite for all Traits--whether it be immediate mechanics or simply ways to gain Artha if the rest of the group likes how you embody the Trait.

Quote from: Benoist;415619Well it was a cogent argument, since Frank later argued the virtues of rules balance in game design. My reason for doing so was that it simply was an opportunity to restate my position on this: that rules balance as some sort of holy virtue of game design is HIGHLY overrated, and absolute rules balance is pointless (and unreachable), since plenty of other factors participate to the actual balance of a game as it is being played.

That would be cogent & relevant if Frank had actually claimed that as the basis of his critique. I don't think he did--it certainly wasn't what I got out of it on reading before I came to your replies. But maybe you can show me where he did.

Quote from: RPGPundit;415343Yes, that's true. Portals and Planes was quite good.

RPGPundit

By no cooincidence, that's the exact book I had in my head when I said I wouldn't agree he's done nothing good.

I don't like 4e (but blame heinosoo more) and was not wowed by Iron Heroes. But i's still pulling stuff from P&P years later.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;415627That would be cogent & relevant if Frank had actually claimed that as the basis of his critique. I don't think he did--it certainly wasn't what I got out of it on reading before I came to your replies. But maybe you can show me where he did.

Well that's what I got out of it, personally:

"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."

Later, if you look at the back-and-forth between Frank and me, you can see that Frank has a very different opinion about the balance of the rules as I do. He actually makes the point several times that this is the only way to measure a system's worth objectively. Right now, he's making the argument about lists and how a set number of choices equates point buy, which implies that all the options must be strictly balanced.

If you don't see how that is relevant to the greater picture of rules balance and its place in game design, that's great, you're free to dismiss it. But I do think it's totally relevant, personally.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;415626No, but BW is an avowed Forge game--at least I think it was by the time Revised was written. Whether or not the Forge was directly responsible for this, the point I want to make is that BW, like a lot of Forge games, takes a strong stance against in-character P.O.V. and in favor of active story-construction and thespianism. While I'm not entirely favorable to those approaches, I think they inform a rules set which is designed to guide you into creating your PC in roughly the way that a GM would create an NPC. In other words, for the purpose of "portraying" a character to the rest of the group. And IIRC BW does follow this up by having mechanical bite for all Traits--whether it be immediate mechanics or simply ways to gain Artha if the rest of the group likes how you embody the Trait.

Minor off-topic point I'm confused about, hopefully it won't be too thread-derailing, but how can you (the big "you", not the Eliot specifically "you") promote "thespianism" without also promoting "in-character POV"? Isn't "thespianism" acting, which seems to me like playing a character from that character's POV?

Benoist, you just quoted me saying that unbalance was one of the five bad things about Iron Heroes Why do you keep tilting at windmills to argue against the idea that balance or unbalance is all that matters? No one on this thread has made the argument you keep railing against. Kindly shut the fuck up. Seriously, you're acting like America (http://humoncomics.com/america-has-spoken).

-Frank

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;415626No, but BW is an avowed Forge game--at least I think it was by the time Revised was written. Whether or not the Forge was directly responsible for this, the point I want to make is that BW, like a lot of Forge games, takes a strong stance against in-character P.O.V. and in favor of active story-construction and thespianism. While I'm not entirely favorable to those approaches, I think they inform a rules set which is designed to guide you into creating your PC in roughly the way that a GM would create an NPC. In other words, for the purpose of "portraying" a character to the rest of the group. And IIRC BW does follow this up by having mechanical bite for all Traits--whether it be immediate mechanics or simply ways to gain Artha if the rest of the group likes how you embody the Trait.

True, but not, in my opinion, preventing it from being irritating :)

I'm just wondering if it were a plausible influence on IH's approach to traits. One of my annoyances with IH (and many games) is far less its pursuit of "balance," but the playability clusterfuck generated in clumsily pursuing it.

Compare Burning Wheel, where a "guerilla approach" to characterization goals by equating disparate categories of stuff - extremely mechanically powerful traits, penalties, "Every Bartender is a Good Listener!" chuckles - muddles and overcomplicates the process. You have to flip back and forth 6 times to figure out whether your required trait does something or nothing to develop a character, which Teaches a Valuable Lesson In An Intuitive Way About Play Goals etc  but is a giant pain in the ass that greatly outbalances the didactic benefits of refusing to denote which is which in clear fashion.

I.E. in both cases being so in love with game DESIGN as to impede playability. I like BW and don't dislike Iron Heroes but I think both games were damaged in a similar way by the writer having a hardon for the "making a game" process that outstrips their interest in the results.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415639Benoist, you just quoted me saying that unbalance was one of the five bad things about Iron Heroes Why do you keep tilting at windmills to argue against the idea that balance or unbalance is all that matters? No one on this thread has made the argument you keep railing against. Kindly shut the fuck up. Seriously, you're acting like America (http://humoncomics.com/america-has-spoken).

-Frank

Kindly direct this plea to shut the fuck up to Elliot, who keeps repeating my point wasn't relevant.

Quote from: Sigmund;415634Minor off-topic point I'm confused about, hopefully it won't be too thread-derailing, but how can you (the big "you", not the Eliot specifically "you") promote "thespianism" without also promoting "in-character POV"? Isn't "thespianism" acting, which seems to me like playing a character from that character's POV?

If thespanism is acting, this spins the question about a mile off the RPG planet into the frigid hell-world of peformance theory. This could be its own thread, but I would suspect it would be a contentions and ball-injurious one.

Quote from: Benoist;415619Well it was a cogent argument, since Frank later argued the virtues of rules balance in game design. My reason for doing so was that it simply was an opportunity to restate my position on this: that rules balance as some sort of holy virtue of game design is HIGHLY overrated, and absolute rules balance is pointless (and unreachable), since plenty of other factors participate to the actual balance of a game as it is being played.

Um, no.  Here's a brief recap of how this thread has progressed:

Frank said the design of IH was bad and gave many, many examples backing up his assertion.

Then you came in and said the rules don't matter because the game was based on cool ideas and you had fun with it despite the poorly-designed system.

Then Frank and I and others laughed at you for suggesting the rules of a RPG don't really matter (I'm still not sure exactly what you do value from your RPG books - do you just want a collection of cool ideas regardless of how well they are implemented?)

Your whole "balance" argument came after that, when you used it as a strawman to attack Frank, me, and anyone else who disagreed with you - basically saying all we cared about was "balance uber alles" despite none of us ever having said anything close to that.

Then when Frank and others kept pointing it out, you made a really bad argument about how we all must have been talking about "balance" because that is obviously the only point of wanting rules that are good.

When people started arguing with that point, pointing out that all games are based on a generic concept of balanced play, then pseudo came in and declared he wanted to be mayor of crazytown instead, insisting that choosing a discrete number of items off of a list is somehow not at all the same as purchasing options with costs from a pool of points, despite being exactly the same thing.

QuoteBut here's where he lost me: the Knight. His first big project for WotC. And... it sucks. Its abilities don't synergize, the code doesn't make any sense, and the central ability is a very under-explained MMO-style "hate grabbing" mechanic. It is, in short, unfinished.

Could you elaborate a bit on that. I enjoyed that class immensely. (Like all classes from PHB2.) For reference, here (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ex/20060501a&page=2) it is.

The code certainly makes sense to me. It even explains what it's all about beforehand. I would have explicitely included poison, but other than that, I see nothing wrong with it.

As for class abilities that do not synergize, which one are you talking about? Armor mastery (medium) probably wouldn't come into play that much, but then again, one might find a mithril armor early on. Not that many classes have good synergy in their abilities.

Finally, the challenge seems rather clear as well. "Take on someone your size!" What's not to get? It even ends when an ally interferes.

Quote from: Caesar Slaad;415629By no cooincidence, that's the exact book I had in my head when I said I wouldn't agree he's done nothing good.

I don't like 4e (but blame heinosoo more) and was not wowed by Iron Heroes. But i's still pulling stuff from P&P years later.

I love planar stuff (except for Planescape, oddly enough). I have all the Manuals of the Planes, as well as Beyond Countless Doorways. Is it worthwhile for me to get Portals & Planes?

Quote from: Cole;415648If thespanism is acting, this spins the question about a mile off the RPG planet into the frigid hell-world of peformance theory. This could be its own thread, but I would suspect it would be a contentions and ball-injurious one.

Well it sure seems to mean acting in the language I speak...

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Thespian

... although I suppose what could be the focus is not the acting part but the drama part, although I'd still contend that the acting part is not separable from the drama part while still being true to the word. In that case it would make loads more sense to just say "drama".

Quote from: jgants;415650Your whole "balance" argument came after that, when you used it as a strawman to attack Frank, me, and anyone else who disagreed with you - basically saying all we cared about was "balance uber alles" despite none of us ever having said anything close to that.

"I get really, really tired of the whole "those game rules aren't bad because I played them and had fun" bullshit meme - it seriously needs to die. (http://www.therpgsite.com/showpost.php?p=415179&postcount=21)"

Sounds awfully close to me. But whatever. You guys don't want me to talk about it?
I won't talk about it on this thread anymore. Have fun worshipping Za Rules.

Quote from: Sigmund;415661Well it sure seems to mean acting in the language I speak...

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Thespian

... although I suppose what could be the focus is not the acting part but the drama part, although I'd still contend that the acting part is not separable from the drama part while still being true to the word. In that case it would make loads more sense to just say "drama".

Actually, I do mean "acting", and while in English acting can be described as "playing a role", I don't consider "acting" and "role-playing" to be the same thing, even if they might overlap sometimes.

I agree that this would probably be best discussed in another thread.

Quote from: 1of3;415652Could you elaborate a bit on that. I enjoyed that class immensely. (Like all classes from PHB2.) For reference, here (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ex/20060501a&page=2) it is.

The code certainly makes sense to me. It even explains what it's all about beforehand. I would have explicitely included poison, but other than that, I see nothing wrong with it.

As for class abilities that do not synergize, which one are you talking about? Armor mastery (medium) probably wouldn't come into play that much, but then again, one might find a mithril armor early on. Not that many classes have good synergy in their abilities.

Finally, the challenge seems rather clear as well. "Take on someone your size!" What's not to get? It even ends when an ally interferes.

Where to start. Let's start at the code about attacking enemies. It's basically just a list of common ways to get sneak attack and an admonishment not to do them. Exactly the sort of thing that you might come up with if someone asked you to make a rule about "fighting honorably" in five minutes. But obviously it comes with problems. Problems that were not thought out at all.

For example: you're not allowed to attack people who are flat footed. On a first pass, that might seem fine, because it goes to some sort of hubris shit where the knight never attacks first because he's noble or likes to give his enemies a sporting chance or something. But did you know that you're flat footed "while balancing" (3.5 PHB, page 67). So the Knight can't attack an enemy who is standing in a grease effect, but if they fail their roll and fall down (giving the Knight an even larger bonus in most instances), they are under no such restriction? Obviously neither did the Knight's author. Or how about the fact that you are considered to be balancing when you are standing on a surface that is "difficult" and the Knight's own class features transform the ground next to them into "difficult terrain". Gosh, that sounds like an interaction that should probably have some fucking explanatory text, doesn't it?

But of course it doesn't, because the author plainly never did a keyword check to see if maybe "difficult" was a word used ambiguously in the core rules or if "flat footed" was a condition that was handed out in situations where being barred from attacking people who had it would be stupid. And he never did any of that due diligence research because it is exactly the kind of thing you'd come up with off the top of your head.

Or how about the fact that what the flanking bonus represents seriously isn't something that makes any sense at all to be giving up. Because it has 100% to do with your target having divided attention and 0% to do with you striking when their back is turned or in any way doing anything special. You don't need any combat training or even to be aware of the creature you are flanking with to get the bonus - the target does. If there is a guy who is invisible and your target sees invisible and you don't, you still get the flanking bonus. In character, you might not even know you got it.

And finally, this is Dungeons & Fucking Dragons. There are Trolls. Dealing lethal damage to trolls when they are helpless is how you defeat trolls. If you don't do that, they will regenerate and attack you again, because they are fucking trolls. You knock them out with swords, then you immerse them in water or set them on fire. That's how it works in D&D land. Every other creature with regeneration, and fair number of others like Vampires work like that too.

And that's it. That's the three bullet points in their code of stabbing people. And none of them were really thought out in terms of D&D's actual rules and actual setting. Strike one, strike two, strike three. For a table rule came up with on the fly it's OK, but given extensive thought and comparisons to the actual core rules, every part of it would have to be rewritten. And that's why it was horse shit, and I knew Mearls was up to no good. Because he passed off something that was "good enough" for an on-the-fly gaming session off as something that was ready for print in a core rulebook, even though it obviously was not.

-Frank

Quote from: Sigmund;415661Well it sure seems to mean acting in the language I speak...

I just mean to say that it is arguable whether or not acting intrinsically assumes identification of POV with a character

Quote from: Sigmund;415661... although I suppose what could be the focus is not the acting part but the drama part, although I'd still contend that the acting part is not separable from the drama part while still being true to the word. In that case it would make loads more sense to just say "drama".

I agree.

Quote from: Cole;415645True, but not, in my opinion, preventing it from being irritating :)

I'm just wondering if it were a plausible influence on IH's approach to traits. One of my annoyances with IH (and many games) is far less its pursuit of "balance," but the playability clusterfuck generated in clumsily pursuing it.

I understand what you're saying here, and I share your frustration with games that seem to offer mechanics as a solution, only to hand-wave away the problems they create.

As for publication dates:

BW Classic: 2002
IH1: 2005
BW Revised: 2005
IH2: 2007

(Sources: index.rpg.net, pen-paper.net, rpggeek.com, John Kim's encyclopedia of games.)

Not sure what exactly got changed from BW Classic to Revised, but I think that Traits were already in there. In short, it's conceivable that BW Classic somehow influenced IH, or that discussion around the development of BWR did.

Quote from: Cole;415672I just mean to say that it is arguable whether or not acting intrinsically assumes identification of POV with a character

I'm not sure I know of any other way of acting, at least in the sense that thespians do it.

I wouldn't mind at all continuing this discussion, but if we do it here, it's going to get tangled in Iron Heroes discussion. I'll try to introduce a new thread.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;415606I don't have TFM to read. I was just reading Frank's critique of IH, thought it was interesting, would have happily read cogent counterarguments, but Benoist stumbled in and started arguing about balance for some reason.

You don't understand that if are you told to pick two things from a list, and no more than two things, than TWO is your budget?

I think that's a misuse of the term "budget". The trait selections are non-fungible with other choices or decisions. While trait choices are a scarce resource, they don't impose an opportunity cost on other choices. Budgets are about the allocation of resources that possess those two characteristics, not just any choice whatsoever.

I think calling it a "budget" implies that trait selection does possess those characteristics, however tenuously, and I think implying this is meant to support Frank's position.

If all choices are "budgeted" in your opinion, then I still don't see how this supports Frank's position. The various choices are a set of mechanical tweaks, with various in-character colouring. They are meant to support or reinforce various kinds of abilities, and their value depends mainly on what kind of character build one wants. Changing the fluff is not problematic, since the fluff is secondary to the mechanical aspect.

QuoteSuppose the list of Traits is (1) Mustache (2) Major NPC Enemy (3) "Big" physique +2 HP/level and +2 damage when you hit. You get to pick one (i.e. your "budget" is 1 Trait), then what's the point if you can still have a mustache without choosing it as a Trait? Or conversely, suppose we try to make sense of this by saying you must choose the Mustache trait in order to have a mustache. Then nobody will have a mustache. No matter how you answer the question, you're worse off than free-forming it.

Your list is an inaccurate representation of what occurs in IH because it contains some things without mechanical backing and some things with. All trait choices in IH are mechanical tweaks that affect the character. It's a question of which mechanical tweaks you want. If you want something but don't care about receiving a specific mechanical benefit from it, nothing prevents you from simply declaring it with DM approval. For example, if you want to be tall but didn't take "Tall", then you can be tall, you simply haven't learnt to exploit it in combat like someone with the trait has.

Quote from: ColonelHardisson;415655I love planar stuff (except for Planescape, oddly enough). I have all the Manuals of the Planes, as well as Beyond Countless Doorways. Is it worthwhile for me to get Portals & Planes?

I don't know what exactly appeals to or is useful to you, but I certainly use all 3, plus Mongoose's Classic Play: Book of the Planes.

Beyond Countless Doorway is mostly travelogue style, going into great detail with many planes, but little toolkit (mainly the alternate worlds stuff). I love it especially for some planes, most of which I understand Wolfgang Bauer wrote (the Ten Hells, Ouno, Palpatur, the Lizard Kingdoms, and Dendri.)

Manual of the Planes is travelogue of more planes in less detail, cosmology, and a little toolkit, but still very useful (talking 3e here, but I got some good use out of the 1e one as well). I got tons of mileage out of the Plane of Shadow when the 3e MotP came out.

Portals & Planes is less a travelogue book, and more a toolkit books. There's a little section on player option style crunch, with a few prestige classes, spells, and items. But the bigger chapters are on Portals, Planes, and Inhabitants. The portals chapter is where the best stuff is because it has the richest ideas are, thought the other chapters are fully functional as well. The portals chapter includes planar pathways, interesting ideas for how to link worlds; one of these (the River of Worlds) has been a major basis point for my campaigning over the last 5 years. The chapter also talks about different portal types such as minglings and malignancies, which are loaded with campaign implications.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415671Where to start. Let's start at the code about attacking enemies. It's basically just a list of common ways to get sneak attack and an admonishment not to do them. Exactly the sort of thing that you might come up with if someone asked you to make a rule about "fighting honorably" in five minutes. But obviously it comes with problems. Problems that were not thought out at all.

For example: you're not allowed to attack people who are flat footed. On a first pass, that might seem fine, because it goes to some sort of hubris shit where the knight never attacks first because he's noble or likes to give his enemies a sporting chance or something. But did you know that you're flat footed "while balancing" (3.5 PHB, page 67). So the Knight can't attack an enemy who is standing in a grease effect, but if they fail their roll and fall down (giving the Knight an even larger bonus in most instances), they are under no such restriction? Obviously neither did the Knight's author. Or how about the fact that you are considered to be balancing when you are standing on a surface that is "difficult" and the Knight's own class features transform the ground next to them into "difficult terrain". Gosh, that sounds like an interaction that should probably have some fucking explanatory text, doesn't it?

But of course it doesn't, because the author plainly never did a keyword check to see if maybe "difficult" was a word used ambiguously in the core rules or if "flat footed" was a condition that was handed out in situations where being barred from attacking people who had it would be stupid. And he never did any of that due diligence research because it is exactly the kind of thing you'd come up with off the top of your head.

Or how about the fact that what the flanking bonus represents seriously isn't something that makes any sense at all to be giving up. Because it has 100% to do with your target having divided attention and 0% to do with you striking when their back is turned or in any way doing anything special. You don't need any combat training or even to be aware of the creature you are flanking with to get the bonus - the target does. If there is a guy who is invisible and your target sees invisible and you don't, you still get the flanking bonus. In character, you might not even know you got it.

And finally, this is Dungeons & Fucking Dragons. There are Trolls. Dealing lethal damage to trolls when they are helpless is how you defeat trolls. If you don't do that, they will regenerate and attack you again, because they are fucking trolls. You knock them out with swords, then you immerse them in water or set them on fire. That's how it works in D&D land. Every other creature with regeneration, and fair number of others like Vampires work like that too.

And that's it. That's the three bullet points in their code of stabbing people. And none of them were really thought out in terms of D&D's actual rules and actual setting. Strike one, strike two, strike three. For a table rule came up with on the fly it's OK, but given extensive thought and comparisons to the actual core rules, every part of it would have to be rewritten. And that's why it was horse shit, and I knew Mearls was up to no good. Because he passed off something that was "good enough" for an on-the-fly gaming session off as something that was ready for print in a core rulebook, even though it obviously was not.

-Frank

Aha. You see, I'm totally with you. Effects that you describe for the Armiger are bad design. This one seems to be a real problem from what I can tell and the people who do IH 2nd edition seem to be aware of that. (I have played IH one short session with premade characters.)

I also strongly dislike putting fluff traits and useful ones in the same category. It's just unnecessary to do so. Again, I can't really tell for myself whether this is the case in IH.

But with the knight you lost me. Obviously it is quite clear what the author was trying to say. (I never knew who it was, before you told me here.) That's good enough for me.

On the other hand, I have frankly no idead how Protection from Evil's second effect is supposed to work. Now, that's bad. Anyway I do not think making such a fuss about it, is necessary.

1of3 is a Forger/Ex-WW baitfish, Frank, just so that you know.

Quote from: Settembrini;4158661of3 is a Forger/Ex-WW baitfish, Frank, just so that you know.

And that's necessary to mention when he is extremely on topic?

QuoteBut with the knight you lost me. Obviously it is quite clear what the author was trying to say. (I never knew who it was, before you told me here.) That's good enough for me.

Knew what he meant? How? Are you fucking psychic? Can you guaranty that you can fix in exactly the same way as everyone else? For that mater, can you explain a mechanism by which you can attack someone without getting a bonus for flanking them?

Seriously, you could voluntarily not provide a flanking bonus for an ally. That shit is easy. If you simply decline to threaten your foe during your ally's turn, they don't get a flanking bonus. But you can't not get a flanking bonus based on your own volition, because again and still the flanking bonus has 100% to do with what someone else is doing and 0% to do with your own actions or opinions on the matter. You don't need to be aware of your enemy's additional enemy in order for the bonus to happen. It just happens. Your code of conduct could as easily be "other people don't wear blue" or something, it's completely out of your control. Both in terms of game mechanics and in terms of in-game fiction. There is absolutely no excuse possible for giving up your flanking bonus. You might as well be giving up your enemy suffering a penalty against you for being shaken or giving up a bonus for your enemy being stunned.

You can't just pass this off as "you know what he meant". Seriously, what the fuck did he mean? The most generous possible reading is that Mike Mearls didn't know what a flanking bonus was, but that still doesn't explain what the hell that code section is supposed to mean and do.

QuoteOn the other hand, I have frankly no idead how Protection from Evil's second effect is supposed to work.

Seriously? While you are under the effect of protection from evil, any [charm], [compulsion], or [possession] effects do affect you, and you can act normally. The durations on any effect you were already under continue to count down during your protection, and if they last longer than PoE then you go back under control when the protection ends. Furthermore, you are not an illegal target for those things, so people can layer those effects on you while the PoE continues - but of course those effects won't actually change how you act unless and until the PoE ends before they do.

What's not to understand? It fits very snugly into the rest of the game mechanics and assumed world of Dungeons & Dragons.

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415871Knew what he meant? How? Are you fucking psychic? Can you guaranty that you can fix in exactly the same way as everyone else? For that mater, can you explain a mechanism by which you can attack someone without getting a bonus for flanking them?

OH MY GOD. Does that mean actual people are running those games? UN-THINKABLE!

Yeah. My rants were completely off-topic. Right. :rolleyes:

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415871Knew what he meant? How? Are you fucking psychic? Can you guaranty that you can fix in exactly the same way as everyone else? For that mater, can you explain a mechanism by which you can attack someone without getting a bonus for flanking them?

The knight could probably try not to work to his full potential, effectively applying a penalty to himself, if you want to look at things that way.

QuoteSeriously? While you are under the effect of protection from evil, any [charm], [compulsion], or [possession] effects do affect you, and you can act normally. (...)

I realize that you know the regular problems of D&D less well than you might want to think. The problem - which is rather common-place - is the relative clause.

It's both arguable what exactly constitutes ongoing control and whether or not the clause applies to both enchantment and compulsion or only to compulsion effects. This problem even prompted WotC to give two different responses for 3rd edition and 3.5, respectively. If you like, you can look it up in the FAQs.

What the hell kind of inane gotcha is that supposed to be? We're talking about the 3.5 rules, not the history of D&D. Not the fact that custserv is a bunch of asshats who couldn't find their own butthole with both hands. Those are different issues. You said you didn't know how Protection From Evil's second paragraph worked in 3.5. That is dumb, because it is actually quite straightforward and uses keywords.

There is of course a separate issue, which is that if you were previously charmed, that allows people to make regular non-magical diplomacy attempts against you as if you were "Friendly". And that generates entirely non-magical and persistent effects from the diplomacy, which therefore has no keywords and is not shut off by Protection From Evil. But while that is intricate and potentially confusing, it is in no way unclear.

Quote from: 1of3The knight could probably try not to work to his full potential, effectively applying a penalty to himself, if you want to look at things that way.

Your apologetics have now officially driven you to stupidville.

The Knight does not know if he gets a flanking bonus or not. If he is flanking a Xorn, he gets no bonus. Should he have a penalty in that instance? If he is flanking an enemy with an Invisible Stalker that he can't see but the enemy is aware of, he gets a flanking bonus that in character he did not know was coming. Should he get the bonus in that instance?

Why or why not, considering that the actual knight class is written as if Flanking Bonuses were somehow option and required special action on the part of the character gaining them, neither of which is the case.

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415879What the hell kind of inane gotcha is that supposed to be? We're talking about the 3.5 rules, not the history of D&D.

I'm not sure what you are talking about. I'm talking about the fact no one I know had problems understanding the content of the knight's code while a dozen people I know have offered a dozen different interpretations for Protection from Evil that all have their point.

But anyway, now that I have managed to arrive in this scenic little village up the cost of yours, I guess I will enjoy it here a little more. Keep it on, will ya?

Quote from: DKChannelBoredom;415867And that's necessary to mention when he is extremely on topic?

Not to mention, isn't it time to Settembrini to have another girlish crying jag and run off, swearing he's never coming back?

Seanchai

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415879Your apologetics have now officially driven you to stupidville.

You oughta realize that you're talking to a 4rrry who played a knight for 1 session and thought it worked (http://translate.google.de/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2F1of3.blogspot.com%2F2008%2F02%2Fdungeons-dragons-4e.html), Frank. Remember, he asked 12 of his friends and none of them had a problem you outlined, ergo the problem doesn't exist. That's 4rry-land and Paizo.com all over again. Don't bother, he's an ass. And, oh, he's on record for saying (after 4E came out, of course), 'I never understood 3.5'.

Quote from: DKChannelBoredom;415867And that’s necessary to mention when he is extremely on topic?

Forgers are never on-topic, or, almost never. This time I was right again!

Also: Told all of you back in 2007, too.

If it wasn't true, it would be ridiculous.

Quote from: Windjammer;415925You oughta realize that you're talking to a 4rrry who played a knight for 1 session and thought it worked (http://translate.google.de/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2F1of3.blogspot.com%2F2008%2F02%2Fdungeons-dragons-4e.html), Frank. Remember, he asked 12 of his friends and none of them had a problem you outlined, ergo the problem doesn't exist. That's 4rry-land and Paizo.com all over again. Don't bother, he's an ass. And, oh, he's on record for saying (after 4E came out, of course), 'I never understood 3.5'.

(http://images.whatport80.com/images/9/9e/HA_HA_HA,_OH_WOW.jpg)

OK, point taken. Thank you. Pointing out that the Knight does not correctly interact with rule keywords or the game's assumed setting and does not have an adequate or plausible explanation for how or why their abilities or imitations work the way they do will not convince 1of3 of anything because he refuses to understand how "looking up save bonuses on the class table" works and thinks that spending skill points is a bewildering ordeal beyond mortal comprehension.

Since this guy thinks "Giraffes and Shit" is a good argument, there really is no convincing him of anything. Since I am apparently attempting to discuss fine points of rules interactivity with a Jugalo, I will now stop. Stupid argument once, shame on you; stupid argument twice, shame on me.

-Frank