Thymos wrote:Frank:
What designer left at Wizards is better than Mearls?
I mean, given the general attitude of forums it seems like there isn't anyone at wizards that is a good designer.
Rob Heinsoo. His work on Feng Shui and Shadowfist was very good. I
know that he can make a playable product that meets or exceeds expectations.
I mean let's face it: the best thing Bill Slavicsek ever made was the Pokemon Jr. Adventure Game ("Pokemon Emergency!"); James Wyatt is a litany of crazy like Magic of Feyrun; Stephen Schubert is only known for Fiendish Codex 2 and the Truenamer; and Andy Collins needs no introduction.
But the fact is that the chances of you having a
lot of talented people on staff when your product is 4th edition D&D is not terribly high. Seriously, that system blows, what did you expect from the people who
made that system? Frankly the only surprise on that list is Rob Heinsoo. He made good stuff once upon a time, so I don't know what happened.
while Iron Heroes is unfinished and could use some tweaking, I've had a lot of fun with it
Now, you
can have fun with a flawed product. Fuck, you don't need any product at all to have fun. I would sit down and play the Pokemon Junior Adventure Game
right now, because honestly the design flaws it has wouldn't bother me during an actual game of it because I would spend half the time saying "Mudkip!" rather than particularly trying to win.
But that doesn't mean that we should
praise the people who made those games that we had fun with
in spite of their flaws. You should offer praise to people who made those games you liked
because of their strengths. Iron Heroes does not
have any strengths. It's just a set of lofty design goals and some incompatible notes on potential subsystems that
might fit into a game that actually
met those design goals. But none of them
do.
Seriously, take it apart. After you "tweaked" it until you had something that met the design goals at the beginning, would you have
anything left of the subsystems that Mearls actually scribed before he abandoned the project? I submit that you would not. Let's go system by system:
Monsters: We know that the characters aren't compatible with the monsters in the D&D monster manual. They aren't even supposed to be. The numbers are all wrong and they don't have access to the kinds of supernatural asskicking required to fend off a CR 3 Shadow or even a CR 1 Lantern Archon. So that's a complete non-starter. But the monsters in the Iron Heroes book are no better. They aren't really matched to player strength in any meaningful fashion by level, so they are pretty much not usable. Which means that
after you remake the players into whatever you're going to make them into, you're going to have to reform the monsters
from scratch. Ouch. Remember that you're going to need to make a system for creating monsters that meet whatever the power benchmarks that you set are - not just write a bunch of monsters that happen to not break the game when introduced as antagonists in your personal game.
Masteries: Mike Mearls does not know what the word "otherwise" means. But even leaving that aside, the masteries don't work. The
biggest problem is that having a higher mastery does not by itself do anything - it's just a prerequisite for spending one of your finite feat slots on something that
does do something. Those feat slots in turn are of equal value but the things you purchase with them are specifically
not. It's a mess. It's a mess in which organic characters can specifically screw themselves later in order to get something decent now. And it's a mess where the mastery levels you gain now only mean anything in the context of the category you are actually spending a feat on, because your mastery level on every other category doesn't count. So if you wanted anything vaguely fair you'd want to rewrite the entire feats and masteries system into something that wasn't such a minefield of character obsolescence. Which would, by the way, be
completely different.
The Magic System: What the heck is this crap? Popping enemies into no-save iron cages at level 3? Having characters become more and more likely to explode when they try to cast a "level appropriate" spell effect as they gain levels? The inability to seriously threaten anything in the game at any level with magical fire? The
entire magic system needs to be rewritten. Ground up. Even the names should not be kept lest their cursory similarity cause people to accidentally carry over
any of the rules or subsystems from the original fiasco of a manuscript.
The Abilities: There is little in the way of class balance. Furthermore, the entire process of token accumulation basically completely falls apart when players multiclass. Often even if they stay in a single class. Really, people
want to play an Archer/Executioner/Weapon Master because that sounds like how you might go about making a crossbow sniper assassin. And the fundamental assumptions of how classes work are going to have to be replaced with ones that allow that to not be a logistical nightmare. And then all the classes are going to need to be rewritten to fit that.
What's
left? I mean, the traits are not very balanced, the combat maneuvers have the 3.5 problem where Grapple doesn't work - except that's suddenly important because players are supposed to be using basic combat maneuvers all the time. So there should be substantial rewrites in those sections as well.
Iron Heroes has the design goals of being a fast paced heroic adventure game in the vein of D&D except with a magic level more akin to that in Beastmaster, The Court Jester, or The Scorpion King. Those are great goals to have if you're writing a game, because a lot of people
want that. But like everything else Mike Mearls has ever written, it doesn't actually meet those specs. It's just a bunch of first ideas. The only merit it has is to light a fire under your ass to hopefully make you write a working system of your own. And maybe you'd call your new system a set of "Iron Heroes house rules."
-Username17
