Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Interesting Iron Heroes Comment

Monte Cook's Iron Heroes: I demoed this twice and while it's very cool for d20, it's still d20, and it still has the limitations from d20 that I don't like very much. For example, when playing the Berzerker, I wanted to pick up and throw the cowering cultist at the snake god, but I had to enter his square, grapple, and throw, and throwing would've had a 10' range increment and have only done 1d3+str bonus, with a -4 to hit for nonproficiency, and that would've taken a couple of rounds. So yeah, stunting, but not stunting-friendly enough for me. By the time the weekend had ended and I weakened enough to buy it despite these difficulties, it was sold out.

This item is from RPGnetter RobNJ, in a thread about GenCon purchases. His remark kinda takes the shine off any interest I had in Iron Heroes.

3 comments:

  1. Jeff,
    I want to ask you a question in regards to my legends of Steel game I'm working on. tell me what types of stunting things you would like to see in a game? what types of actions would you see characters in a 1980's Sword & sorcery genre doing and would the mechanics I use for my game fit in well with those "actions" or "stunts".
    Thanks jeff

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  2. Feng Shui is a great place to start for stunting. The basic premise there was that if one could hurt someone in a boring way, then hurting them in an interesting way should be mechanically identical. Take these two actions:

    "I walk over and hit him with my sword"

    "I leap of the bar, swing across the room via chandelier, and drive my sword his eyeball, splattering eyegoo across my face."

    Both accomplish the task of killing the poor bastard, while penalize the guy who is helping to entertain everyone?

    So rather than a list of maneuvers or anything like that, just instruct the players to try some cool stuff and explicitly instruct the DM to not be heavy-handed about adjudicating it.

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  3. I kind of agree with RobNJ's assessment. I bouthg Iron Heroes, and while it's pretty cool for d20, its ultimately still d20, and many of d20's problems are unresolved, because they are central to the system; no amount of tinkering is going to change the rapid linear across-the-board level progression, for example.

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