Iron Heroes: Who needs magic anyway?

[Merc]

Review of Iron Heroes system

*cracks knuckles*

Okay, we haven't had a good system review in a while, and we've all been playing with a lot of systems in recent times. I think we're due a review.

I was thinking of doing one for 7th Sea, but given that I'm currently running an Iron Heroes game, that shall come first, despite having more time to experience 7th Sea. Perhaps Drac will want to do the 7th Sea one. ;p

Now, to start off with, for those who are gonna go "tl/dr", here's an incredibly basic summary:

Pros:
- The hero is you, not your trinkets.
- Good importing system to/from other d20 for the most part.
- Drawbacks for magic, while not horribly raping it (usually).
- Reserve Points.
- More feats.

Neutral:
- Humans only.
- Skill Groups.
- Feat trees.
- Tokens.
- Defense system changes.
- Dexterity is an easily-overpowered ability score.
- Skill tricks/challenges and stunts.

Cons:
- Unpolished.
- Has variant magic system that is unpolished.
- Few character options. 13 classes. 19 with 3 villain classes and 3 NPC classes.
- Low homebrew/support-base.

Scores:
* Balance - 7/10 It really needs more work on it that it won't get except from its own players. Still pretty fun though, and a nice variation on the D&D fantasy system.
* Classes - 8.5/10 While there are a few balance kinks (and really, what system doesn't), overall classes are great. Main gripe is that with the lack of support-base, there's really not a lot of options for multiclassing or variety.
* Combat - 9.5/10 While stunts and similar manuevers make rounds incredibly long, it's also a lot of fun. It could use some streamlining here and there, but overall, designers succeeded at their goal.
* Chargen - 8/10 About the same as D&D 3.5. Easier in the sense that there's less splatbooks (which sucks) and no need to hunt for all these magical trinkets to be awesome (which rocks).
* Game Master - 6/10 Requires a lot more homebrewing than D&D 3.5, and since not so many people play around with it, you're generally on your own.
* Overall Score: 8/10

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Arighty!

Having taken care of the lazy folk, here's the main review.

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: CharGen I - Abilities & Traits
Part 3: CharGen II - Levelling & Classes
Part 4: Chargen III - Skills & Feats
Part 5: CharGen IV - Equipment
Part 6: CharGen V - Tokens
Part 7: Combat I - General
Part 8: Combat II - Special Manuevers
Part 9: Combat III - Magic
Part 10: Other systems
Part 11: Homebrew Support/Rulings FAQ/etc
Part 12: Final Thoughts.

Part 1: Introduction
We'll start off with a pair of quotes.

"You are not your magic weapon and armor. You are not your spell buffs. You are not how much gold you have, or how many times you've been raised from the dead. When a Big Bad Demon snaps your sword in two, you do not cry because that was your holy avenger. You leap onto its back, climb up to its head, and punch it in the eye, then get a new damn sword off of the next humanoid you headbutt to death." ~ Mike Mearls, lead designer.

"It is not the sword, but the arm that wields it...   This exciting new game of heroic combat is for skilled heroes who have no need for magic swords or arcane trinkets." ~ Back cover of the player's handbook.

Basically, Iron Heroes is a game in the same vein as D&D. Like D&D, it is a fantasy roleplaying game, and even uses d20 system at its core. However, it does have one important difference. Magic is not -nearly- as prevalent, and the best way to go about doing things is not to rely on magic, because magic is hugely dangerous.

Everything that's been modified from D&D to make this system centers around this core concept: Magic bad, Do not trust it, If you want to hurt things bash it in with your own hands.

Generally, system does what it intended to do, even if it feels unpolished, especially in respects to magic.

See, it was still made to be more of D&D splatbook than as standalone product. In the very first page, the player's handbook basically states "A Variant Player's Handbook by Mike Mearls - Requires use of the D&D 3.5 books". Only you kinda don't really need them. System stands up mostly fine on it's own, but the fact that it was meant as a splatbook means for good and ill that it's easily attached to D&D games with a bit of tinkering. We'll go into that in more detail later.

Part 2: Chargen I - Ability Scores & Traits
Let's talk about character generation. If you're familiar with the general d20 system, which is what D&D 3.5e uses, you're going to be familiar with most of it. I'll comment briefly on the off-chance someone isn't familiar at all.

First, you have your six ability scores that drive most of your character's ability to do stuff: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma.

Generally, the idea is that these six ability scores should be in balance so that any combination can generate some form of relevant character. In general, as with most d20 games though, the result is actually fairly skewed. Charisma is about the same as in D&D, Wisdom is also easier to dump due to the lack of divine casting and much more limited uses of it, but there's another score of note in this game, and that's Dexterity. The game is -hugely- skewered towards it, especially at lower levels, though it becomes fairly more balanced later on.

It's kind of understandable how this popped up, to be honest. Here you have a system that encourages martial characters due to the low-magic environment. They'd be worried about Strength becoming overpowered. And strength is kinda important, to be sure, but they went to ridiculous lengths to downplay it. It's actually very, very, -very- easy to dump strength.

To explain that, we need to jump ahead briefly and talk about traits and feats. Now, feats are special abilities that classes get every couple of levels to make 'em more unique and possibly specialize around a certain type of play. Traits are much the same, essentially being buffed up feats that you only get two of at character creation. Essentially, in a world where the only characters are humans, they're essentially 'racial traits' for D&D terminology.

Now, on the side of traits, lets look at two things. First is traits that boost an ability score. Generally, a lot of the traits don't really have a downside to them. Given how ability scores fuel most of your character's actions though, ability traits tend to have some downside to them. As an example: Wise gives +2 WIS, but suffers -2 CHA.

Most of them are like that. +2 to X, -2 to Y. Then there's Strong: +2 STR, -2 INT and -2 X.

It hurts to be strong. Essentially the half-orc of traits, it has about the same connotations as the half-orc's did on gameplay.

Now, the second thing on traits. Let's look at Weapon Bond. For one trait it gives you: Proficiency with a weapon (if you did not have it), and the ability to use a score other than STR for both attack and damage with it.

Gentlemen, STR has, in one trait, been rendered almost entirely obsolete and balance has been skewered right off. Meanwhile, DEX users are singing like a church choir. All of a sudden, with one trait, dexterity is capable of handling almost everything combat related that comes up 90% of the time. Attack? Dex. Damage? Dex. Defense? Dex. Skills that modify combat actions? Dex. Reflex saves? Dex.

Ow, ow, ow, ow.

Balanced ability scores, indeed.

Generally, unless you're an archer, if you grab DEX as your main score, STR gets dumped. If you're a caster, getting INT or CHA as your main score...STR gets dumped. WIS and CHA are both good candidates for dump stats as well.

That said, one possibly nice thing about IH is that it encourages point-buy for scores, not rolling. While rolling is nice for the random generation of stats, it can result in a horribly skewered party. You can still roll for scores, but not something I'd recommend. Scores are easy to skewer in terms of importance. Why encourage players to skewer them even more based on their roll results? At least with point-buy, they start roughly on the same ground.

Part 3: Chargen II - Levelling & Classes
Levelling is pretty much the same as D&D. You gain a certain amount of experience, you level up. However, there are a few differences between the levelling processes.

First, there are no good/average/bad save bonuses. Your save bonus for every character is exactly +1/level.

Second, you get feats more often. In D&D, you would get them 1st level and then every 3rd level. Here, you get them 1st level and then every 2nd level. So instead of 7 feats by level 20, you'll have 11 feats in Iron Heroes.

Third, because of armor/defense mechanics in IH, you also get a base defense bonus, for which there are progressions. The weak one starts off at +0 and goes up to +15. The average one goes from +1 to +17. The good one goes to +20. We'll cover armor/defense mechanics in more detail in the combat section.

Fourth...hit points don't suck so much when the dice conspire against you. What do I mean? Well, generally, in d20 games, classes are expected to roll a dX dice based on how beefy the class is supposed to be. A caster would have a d6 for example, while the raging barbarian has a d12. And yet, the caster rolls a d6 when it's time to level, and the barbarian rolls a 1. Ouch. By the laws of average, the barbarian -should- theoretically manage to stay ahead of the caster as levels progress, but a string of bad dice rolls can lead to a beefy caster and a barbarian that doesn't even want to go near melee range.

Not so in Iron Heroes. Here, where the dice would be a dX, instead you would roll (X-4)+d4. Essentially, from the example above, the caster would roll 2+d4, while the barbarian rolls 8+d4. Now, consider that quickly. Outside of CON bonuses, there is -no way- for the caster to outdo the barbarian in health. Now, if you consider other classes, sure, some classes (such as the 6+d4 and 4+d4 classes) could catch up in health to the barbarian, but generally, it's not as likely that a string of bad rolls will cripple the barbarian. That's pretty awesome.

Fifth, base attack bonus also has three different progressions. One ends at +15, the other at +20, and the last at +25. Pretty standard.

Lastly, theres improvement of ability scores every 4 levels. Again, pretty standard.

Now as for classes, Iron Heroes first of all does not have any prestige classes. Whether this is by design or simply that books never came out for it is something we'll never know. As for base classes, there are 13 of them. Ten are in the player's handbook, so just with that book you have a lot of good options. There's 3 more classes in the player's companion, however. Mastering Iron Heroes also has 3 villain classes (not meant for PCs) and 3 NPC classes (for the none-heroes of the world). All in all, not a bad selection of classes, but you'll sadly not see more in the future.

I won't really go over classes much as I've not seen balance in play between them outside of level 1 so far, which isn't exactly the best measuring stick for any system. Overall, I am aware that there are some class balance issues here and there as some of the player base that does exist has gone to great lengths to make 'hacks' of the classes to better balance them. I'll admit that I have not really looked over those myself, as I did not want to complicate the character generation process too much for my players as we all started out with an unfamiliar system. I will look at them for ideas if balance starts becoming an issue.

I will say that out of those thirteen base classes, you have eleven classes that are martial combat oriented, and while some of them have some features that are similar, they generally stand unique from each other, so there's a good pool of options. For those that still like casters, there's two options for you, the arcanist who functions similar to a sorceror, and the spiritualist, who controls spirits to aid him. I'll cover magic in its own section.

Also, some of the class balance stuff makes me go "...saywhat? lol?"

Like, the Armiger, the master of defense...who has the weak base defense bonus progression.

And the Thief, the street rat that never gets an education...with INT bonus +0...gets 23 skills at max rank. It'd probably be less since he -also- has the ability to go above +2 above max rank, but still, wtf? That's a ridiculous amount of skills. It's not particularly unbalanced though, and I admittedly banned it from my game mostly because it didn't really fit with the starting setting, same with the Armiger. I may allow both of those classes to be available if one of my players happens to die since replacement would come from other areas. Not sure yet.

The arcanist also gets special mention before the magic section because it's quite easily the biggest show of how this game is an unpolished product.

Part 4: Chargen III - Skills and Feats

Ko, myself and a few others are fans of extra skill points for D&D to give some flavor/meaninful options besides the 'must-have' skills.

Skill system here is an interesting variation that ensures most classes have key skills while having points left to spare to flavor their characters. That's pretty nice.

First of all, one key difference is that there is no such thing as a class skill and a cross-class skill. Every skill costs 1 point per rank and you can get any skill you want without restriction.

Second, instead of class skills, what classes get are "Skill Groups". This is a set of skills that, when you put 1 point per rank of skill group, gives you 1 point per rank of EACH SKILL IN THAT GROUP.

Now, if you note the Thief mentioned in the last section, you can imagine how he gets so many skills. Besides getting 12+INT skills per level, he also has access to six skill groups. It's not broken, but it is kinda ridiculous.

Still, it does benefit other classes in meaningful ways, and are an interesting feature to play with that leads to more variation on how characters are designed skill-wise.

Feats are pretty much the same as in D&D, but are organized so that instead of various stand-alone feats that might have prerequesites of other feats, into feat mastery trees based on what they do, and classes have access to certain feat mastery trees earlier than other classes due to their class abilities.

They're kinda cool, but they might make people think they're playing with WoW talents and gripping about tabletop games not supposed to being MMOs.

Like I said, all it's done is organize feats with prerequesites and made it based on class level when you can access them, rather than by how broken you can get magical items and so forth to increase stats or skills so you can access them earlier. It's a bit more straightforward.

Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot of feat mastery trees per category. No classes show this more than the casters, whose primary feat category are the Lore feat trees...and not a -single- Lore feat tree is directed towards casting proficiency. Not a single one. Hell, they don't even really fit the classes thematically, even.

And as I'll keep mentioning through this review...there really won't be more new material added to this product.

Part 5: Chargen IV - Equipment

Weapons and general equipment are almost identical to their D&D counterparts, and you can easily import new items into Iron Heroes if it's non-magical. The only things you need to do is add one or more of the following tags to a weapon: Projectile, Power, and/or Finesse.

Projectile weapons are anything that can be shot, Power weapons are heavy things that hurt lots, Finesse are things that do a little damage but are expected to hit often. Generally, what the weapon is categorized as affects what feats your character can get to improve his use of that weapon.

Armor, on the other hand, is fairly different and you can't easily add in new items from other games. The reason for this is that armor, instead of providing defense bonus, instead provides damage reduction. How armor handles DR and the fact that it doesn't really add to defense is part of what makes me worry a bit over defense balance in IH. I'll explain it a bit more in the combat section.

Part 6: Chargen V - Tokens
I'd almost forgotten tokens and was about to go into combat. Whoops! Now, first, I need to explain tokens.

Tokens are a special mechanic new to Iron Heroes that allows certain classes to pull off certain manuevers, and generally come into play either really early on in a fight, or late in a long fight to finish it faster. They're tactical tools that you can gain either as part of a class ability (8 out of 13 classes get them) or from feats (quite a few feat mastery trees run off the use of the tokens).

Generally, how tokens work is that at the start of combat, you either have none and have to gather them, or start of with a small number based on your level. Once you've gathered some (and you can gather up to an amount based off your level), you can start spending them to increase your combat abilities in some manner, anything from an attack bonus, a damage bonus, inflicting penalties on the target, improving your own class abilities, etc.

Unfortunately, most of them are also fairly target specific. Given that, the game almost encourages the DM to not toss various human enemies at a player party, but rather to send a single uber-tough monster at them. Unless you have some form of health padding on characters, most human individuals aren't going to necessarily last long enough for classes to gather enough tokens to use them significantly in combat. This -may- be part of the intended design, however, with those tokens being something you're not supposed to really use often.

Part 7: Combat I - General mechanics
For the most part, combat mechanics are identical to D&D. You roll initiative, you have free/move/standard/full-round actions, and attack mechanics/damage mechanics are fairly identical. So are most of the special attacks such as bull rush, charging, tripping, etc (which are about the only reason to not dump strength). Some of those special attacks are actually much more viable in IH than in D&D, for example, sunder, as the lack of magical weapons and such means that it's a lot easier to break someone's weapon in two.

The main difference is in how defense works, and how health works.

Defense, as has been mentioned, has had two significant changes from D&D. First, armor does not provide a defense bonus, it provides a DR bonus. Second, classes follow a base defense bonus (BDB) progression as they level. Essentially, defense starts off about the same as in D&D, but keeps growing due to the BDB. By level 20, your defense can be up in the 30-40 range. This is mostly fine, but at low levels it's part of what makes Dexterity particularly valuable, as it's your primary source of defense. At higher levels, dexterity turns from a defense tool into an attack tool for various characters due to either skill tricks (covered in the next section in more detail) or class abilities, as it essentially turns an attack into an automatic hit.

This is due to how defense works. Defense follows the formula: Def = 10+Passive Defense Bonus (PDB)+Active Defense Bonus(ADB)

Passive Defense bonuses consist of shields (which unlike armor do provide defense bonus), size modifiers, and natural armor. All of these are pretty static, and you lose them only during touch attacks.

Active Defense Bonuses, on the other hand, consist of your dexterity bonus, class abilities, feats, and BDB. You lose these whenever a character initiates certain special manuevers, or when you are flatfooted. At level 20, this turns your mighty 30-40 defense into a pitiable 10 defense. Ow! Ow! Ow!

This is one of the things I am keeping an eye on. I have a good opportunity to experiment with balancing it, as one of my players is playing a character build dedicated around destorying ADB.

The next thing that's different from D&D is how health works. Now, you lose it pretty much the same way, however, there is the difference that D&D has clerics, paladins and other classes that can use magic to heal your wounds. Iron Heroes does not have that. Or rather, it does have some healing mechanics through magic, but given the attitude towards magic, who would trust a caster to try and heal their wounds? They can easily make things worse.

Instead, what Iron Heroes has is reserve points, which function as a 'second wind'. Characters have a pool ofpoints called reserve points which are equal to their maximum health. Whenever you are not engaged in streneous action such as combat, you can trade one reserve point for one point of health. Similarly, mechanics exist for trading reserve points to cure ability damage and the like. It's pretty neat as far as mechanics go.

Part 8: Combat II - Special Manuevers
Here's the fun part of Iron Heroes, but also what makes combat so freaking long. In addition to feats, IH characters have other options for attacking. These are called Combat Challenges, Skill Tricks, Skill Challenges, and Stunts.

Skill Tricks and Skill Challenges are manuevers centered around the use of skills to gain some tangiable benefit. You could reduce a target's ADB, you could gain a damage bonus, you could run through difficult terrain as if it was normal, etc. The main difference is that a skill trick is generally about improving how you do something, the challenge is about makign things harder for yourself to increase the reward.

Stunts are much the same, in that you use your skills to gain some sort of benefit for your character. They can do the same as skill tricks and challenges, or some new effects. There's also a small blurb on handling new stunts besides those sample stunts listed.

Combat Challenges are essentially feats that give you a small benefit for an unequal tradeoff. For example, all characters are able to trade -2 attack for a +1 damage bonus. This is weaker than the Power Attack feat, where you could trade -1 attack for +1 damage bonus, but it is available to all characters.

There is also one extra tool at the disposal of the GM, primarily, although players can also benefit from them. These are what are called condition zones. Essentially, things such as traps, environmental hazards and the like from D&D are rolled into these, but condition zones also handle a lot of other things in the game. Basically, whenever you have some variable action that's decided either by the actions of the players or other NPCs, it's a condition zone, and the game is pretty straightforward with creating these and balancing them for your players. They are admittedly more mentioned in the Mastering Iron Heroes book rather than the player's handbook, if that matters.

Part 9: Combat III - Magic
Magic is a mixed bag in Iron Heroes. First of all, there are no spells per day. Instead, characters have access to a mana pool that they can use to cast anywhere from one awesome spell to various weaker spells.

Magic is a lot more variable in what it can do. This is because while it has the same school of magics as D&D, there are no set effects for it, aka spells. Rather, there are just broad effects you can create with it. It's essentially a more freeform version of what you may be used to, which may be a good thing if you're imaginative. If not, well, it does outline a few things you can do with magic.

However, that's not what makes magic such a mixed bag. What does that is the fact that magic is incredibly dangerous in the world of Iron Heroes. Abusing your amount of magic (casting beyond your mana pool) is doable, but it can potentially KILL you by leaving you so drained of life, you simply cease to function. Not only that, but it requires intense concentration to cast, and even then you can suffer catastrophic effects. You attempted to bring a skeleton to unlife to serve you? Too bad, looks like it's obsessed with killing you. You attempted to create a wall? Too bad, you built it around your body, fusing those magical bricks to your body. Tried to conjure fire? Oh look who's a burning and screaming soon to be corpse!

I am assuming that you are supposed to be able to have been able to minimize such effects by use of Lore feats, but none are provided to aid a caster in the player's handbook or companion.

Spiritualists are a new caster class that was added in the companion. Supposedly, it's more balanced, but I haven't had a chance to play with it yet. If I ever do, I'll edit comments in about the class (assuming somebody else doesn't chime in). One thign to note is that it uses an entirely different magical system due to its use of spirits rather than schools of magic.

Part 10: Other systems

What do I mean by other systems? Really, it means how well does it plug-and-play with other systems, allowing you to import things from IH to other systems, or import things from other systems into IH.

Converting IH to D&D is pretty simple, and covered in the appendix of the player's handbook. It doesn't get more straightforward, though I'm not sure I'd recommend doing so. Rather, it's more interesting to import things rather than export, which the Mastering Iron Heroes book covers.

Monsters from D&D? Plop 'em right in, and you don't have to do a -thing- to balance them. You can do this with a lot of feats as well as magic items if you feel like popping a few of them in.

In the case of magic items imported, there is an addition of drawbacks, that make the use of such items a bit more tactical as a decision. Is it worth corrupting your soul to gain the nifty bonuses?

Classes from D&D? Sure. Just make sure to feed them their magical items which don't give -them- drawbacks, but do to the players if they attempt to use the item. Or just make the effect of the magical item something inherent to the character. For example, magic boots on an imported sorceror are not actually magic when the players loot him, rather the magic came from his tatoos. Stuff like that.

Part 11: Homebrew Support/Rulings FAQ/etc
The really sad thing about this system is that while it has potential, it is by far and long...essentially dead.

Not dead in the sense that you can't use it, but dead in the sense of D&D 3.5e. It's still useable, but you won't be seeing new products or further support for it. And this is doubly unfortunate for Iron Heroes, because whereas 3.5e has over 50 books worth of material, Iron Heroes has exactly FOUR books. A beastiary (monster manual), a player's handbook, a player's companion (splatbook), and Mastering Iron Heroes (dungeon master's manual).

That's not to say there's -no- support, however.

The Iron League: A fansite with some homebrew content you can use or mine for ideas. The masterwork system presented there is popular, although I reworked it for my own purposes.
Iron Heroes Board: It's kinda dead as a community, though some people do still check it now and then that you can ask for thoughts. There's also tons of threads with material you can use or just read and think about. The current owner of the license, Adam Windsor, occassionally pops in as well.
Iron Heroes Errata and FAQ: Most of this content has made it onto the books released through Fiery Dragon Productions. If you have the old book that says "Monte Cook presents: Iron Heroes", check it out. If you have the updated one...check it out anyhow. It might have some clarifications on material.
IH Spellcasting Wiki: Some homebrew material for improving the arcanist class or giving different spellcasting options.
IH House Rule Wiki: General homebrew material. One of the more looked at is Hong's self-titled "Great Iron Heroes Hack" which reworks a lot of the classes in great detail.
True As Steel: The game board for my current game. It's a work in progress as we play through this system, but it should eventually serve as a potential reference for people interested in trying the system.

[Anastasia]

Nice review. My thoughts on Iron Heroes is that it's an interesting idea, but it's very much a reactionary game system to 3.5. (As is 4e.) It's advertising point is essentially countering one of the common critiques levied against 3.5. Raging against the magic, yo. For me, that doesn't do it. D and D is about magic as well as beating the shit outta things. If I want to play a D and D styled game, I want magic to be involved. Now this doesn't excuse 3.5's balance issues with magic, but the point is that I don't want magic ripped out. It's part of the game, you know what I mean?

(P.S. : Mike Mearls can go suck a barrel of cocks.)

[Dracos]

There's some good concepts in there, buried under trash and a complete lack of polish.

Skill tricks.
Skill groups.
Stunts.
Challenges.
Movement away from Wealth Based Power. 
Some limitation/guidance on feats based on power level.
More skills in general.
Small randomization on hp.

Ko has his points,  but yeah.  I dunno if I'd play it with a different DM.  I joined merc's game to play with merc, not to play IH.  I'm also the referenced player taking complete advantage of that fact it's a ridiculous system by building a character that has a humble +18 tumble at level 2.  Not max twinked obviously or else it'd be 22 at level 2.


There's about a dozen tier 10 feat in the game, which is ironically taking skill trees even more ridiculous than where they were in 3.5 core fighter's (Which went all the way up to +18 for a couple of feats).  No one who isn't level 19 or 20 can use a tier 10 feat at all.  A good portion of classes can never use them (They're simply inaccessible).  Anyone who ever multiclasses cannot use them.  They're talked about everywhere as if they are relevant, but they are even less relevant than level 20 abilities for main classes are in 3rd ed.  In fact, everything 7 up might as well be not relevant.  Which is a pity as many of the <10 are reasonably interesting things that really aren't that crazy for mid to high level play.  It seems like such a waste.

Merc is also right that the system is dead, and while you could integrate IH chars with a D&D game, they're really strong and not meant to have magic at all.  So not much opportunity to use it.

Right now, it's really just a few propls for the playground though.  And if a system gives you that, then hey' it's good enough for a bit.

[Merc]

Yeah, I like magic as well, and I'd probably have gone wth just a low-magic campaign with D&D, but I had the books, and wanted to give it a shot without the bad memories from the last attempt at it. If I ever run another low-magic campaign, it'll probably be D&D 3.5e, though I'll import things I like from IH.