Ironcarnum

[Confused_Jackal_Mage]

What's so full of fail about it?

6: Erase your very identity from other's minds.
...
8: Hear people walking from far away.

Right. Moving on.

Also the focus pool mechanic is about the lamest thing I have ever seen. A 9th level Arcanist is seriously supposed to move tokens around and give himself a twentyfour percent miss chance from quasi-incorporeality. This is simultaneously amazingly unimpressive and horrendously annoying in practice. Seriously, 24% - what the fucking hell?

-Username17

This post happened quite a while ago, but I've been away from gaming for about equally as long, or else I'd have seen it.

I'm the author of Ironcarnum. It was fun to work on, but I'd make quite a bit of changes if I were to do it again. However, I'm still interested in it, and since Frank put forth enough effort to at least completely diss it, I figure I can put forth enough effort to see what can be made better about it.

A few things of explanation, first. Obviously, this was designed for Iron Heroes. IH doesn't have the powerful magic that D&D does. Its fighters are more powerful, but they're still nowhere near the power level that the GD tends to like. That's what I like, though, so I designed roughly to that standard. With fresh eyes I see I still didn't hit that in some areas, but shrug. Second, it wasn't nearly as much effort as Frank seemed to think I spent on it. ^_^ It was a fun project that I blew a few hours on, nothing more.

I... really wasn't sure what the hell I was smoking when I wrote the +2% miss chance Focus Option. Spending a single token is *supposed* be worth half a poor feat (since you can get 2 tokens from a feat), but still, that's just *horrible*. Make it 10%, past self, and we can *start* talking.

The battlespell system, which forces you to spend a feat to get the equivalent of a shortsword, though, I stand behind. When everyone around you is armed with swords, electricity damage is worth its weight in gold (more than silver, at least, since it can bust through more DRs). It's roughly the equivalent of Exotic Weapon. Is EWP sucky? Yeah. But I don't care, I'm not redesigning IH, I'm just putting my mark on its magic.

You're 9th level, you're fighting a Dire Rhino. It has 229 hit points. I literally don't give a fuck if you can shoot a d10 fire bolt at your enemies.

Not my problem. That d10 fire bolt is treated exactly like every other weapon. Particularly, it's treated identically to a d10 bow. Think the entire combat system sucks? That's fine, but my addition to it doesn't suck *more*. I'm not some wanker who thinks that magic attacks are uber-precious and must be carefully rationed out. I just made them act like weapons, so that I don't *need* to worry about balancing them. The rest of the system can do what it wants, and my stuff works just fine at whatever balance level you are happy with.

The other feats are fair game. Though, judging Ghoststep by its short descriptions isn't exactly fair. ^_^ I had the hardest time coming up with things that were even *remotely* useful for Ghoststep without breaking things. IHers can't see through invisibility, after all, which is why the Mastery 1 ability is so nerfed.

Anyway, interested in any opinions. I didn't go into Ironcarnum trying to revolutionize Iron Heroes. At the core, I just wanted fireballs that took attack actions. I came up with a few other things that I found interesting, and that was that.

[koz]

[quote="Confused_Jackal_Mage]Not my problem. That d10 fire bolt is treated exactly like every other weapon. Particularly, it's treated identically to a d10 bow. Think the entire combat system sucks? That's fine, but my addition to it doesn't suck *more*. I'm not some wanker who thinks that magic attacks are uber-precious and must be carefully rationed out. I just made them act like weapons, so that I don't *need* to worry about balancing them. The rest of the system can do what it wants, and my stuff works just fine at whatever balance level you are happy with.
[/quote]

No, this is patently false. That 1d10 also has Str (from compositing), enhancement (from making it magical), other bonus damage (from whatever), multiple shots (BAB, Rapid Shot) etc. Your argument is wrong on first principles.

As an aside, shouldn't this be in IMHO?

[ubernoob]

I take it you want to improve your system? I suggest you make your system halfway complete first because I can't make heads or tails of the wiki you've linked. What specific mechanics do you want to improve, because the whole system looks retarded (in the sense that it adds a subsystem headache without a good reason) from my quick perusal.

Why in good god do we need another minigame?

[Username17]

Remember that these arcanists aren't just operating in a vacuum, they are standing next to people with bows who have actual levels of archer. They are standing next to swordsmen who have actual levels of executioner. And so on and so forth.

People don't shoot 1d8 arrows at things. A 9th level Archer shoots 5 times a round and does large bonus damage on every attack. A d10 is just five points, it's laughable, and I actually laugh at it. Even in Iron Heroes where battles take longer and we're supposed to take swords seriously.

-Username17

[Prak]

yeah, this is the problem that's immediately obvious to me.

You can make magic attacks that act as weapons, but unless the person shooting his electrified load off can do so as well as an archer can fire a bow and with enhancements and ABILITY bonus, and so on and so forth, magic dude's gonna look a bit small in the pants next to the elf with six feet of recurved wood.

[koz]

What's more concerning is this statement, which quite frankly belongs in the mind of some kind of Kevin Siembieda clone:

I'm not some wanker who thinks that magic attacks are uber-precious and must be carefully rationed out. I just made them act like weapons, so that I don't *need* to worry about balancing them.

Seriously 'I'm gonna half-assedly make them imitate weapons, so I won't have to care about balancing them'? Let's see just how many mistakes there are here:

1) Weapons are not balanced
2) They don't actually imitate weapons
3) Not needing to worry about balance in general is fail

Oh dear.

[virgil]

Doesn't a battlespell get bonus damage based on the casting stat? I'm not seeing how an archer who took the Battlespell feat and using it instead of a bow is any worse off.

But that's for some other class taking the magic feats, rather than the arcanist class itself; which I'm not sure of, since it doesn't look finished yet.

[Confused_Jackal_Mage]

[quote="Confused_Jackal_Mage]Not my problem. That d10 fire bolt is treated exactly like every other weapon. Particularly, it's treated identically to a d10 bow. Think the entire combat system sucks? That's fine, but my addition to it doesn't suck *more*. I'm not some wanker who thinks that magic attacks are uber-precious and must be carefully rationed out. I just made them act like weapons, so that I don't *need* to worry about balancing them. The rest of the system can do what it wants, and my stuff works just fine at whatever balance level you are happy with.

No, this is patently false. That 1d10 also has Str (from compositing), enhancement (from making it magical), other bonus damage (from whatever), multiple shots (BAB, Rapid Shot) etc. Your argument is wrong on first principles.[/quote]
This would be why you read at least a little bit before dismissing something offhand. In Ironcarnum, the 1d10 also has some mental stat, enhancement (from making the talisman magical), other bonus damage (from the same sources of whatever), multiple shots (BAB, Rapid Shot, etc). In Ironcarnum, a damaging spell is a weapon. I'm not pulling these words out of my ass here, I mean it literally. It's an Exotic weapon that can do energy damage, and uses a mental stat rather than Str. That's it.

I'm going to go ahead and ignore several other of the posts here, as they also explicitly assume that shooting off a firebolt in Ironcarnum takes a standard action and doesn't benefit from BAB or feats. Now that you guys know a bit more, we can talk like I'm not a moron. ^_^

As an aside, shouldn't this be in IMHO?

Possibly. I figured the homebrew forum was better suited, but I may be wrong on the details of your forum organization. If so, I apologize.

1) Weapons are not balanced
2) They don't actually imitate weapons
3) Not needing to worry about balance in general is fail

1) That may be. I don't care, because I'm working within the assumptions of Iron Heroes.
2) You are correct, they don't imitate weapons. They *are* weapons. Read better.
3) Incorrect. This is a separation of concerns. I make the assumption that IH is balanced appropriately in one regard, and extend it. This way I only need to worry about new balance issues that I introduce, rather than caring about the whole thing at once, and potentially having to rewrite large parts of the core system. The initial assumption may be incorrect, but I play IH, so I'm running with it.

I take it you want to improve your system? I suggest you make your system halfway complete first because I can't make heads or tails of the wiki you've linked. What specific mechanics do you want to improve, because the whole system looks retarded (in the sense that it adds a subsystem headache without a good reason) from my quick perusal.

Why in good god do we need another minigame?

It's, um. Minigame? Huh?

Battlespells are weapons. Some of you guys are hung up on them, because you've quickly skimmed and made some very incorrect assumptions (though honestly, I don't blame you, given the standard hardon for magical damage).

The rest of the stuff is... feats? How are feats a minigame? You get some combat abilities, some skill bonuses, etc. You're still an IHer doing IH-ey things. I really haven't made up any special new mechanics. I can see that I was clearly on the crack pipe at the time of writing a few of these, and a GD opinion on things would give me a nice perspective on what I need to change. Frex, Frank has already pointed out (about 2 years ago...) the astonishing uselessness of the Focus Option on Ghoststep 5. That's cool. Without an indepth review I probably would have just passed it over. Fresh critical eyes are awesome.

[Username17]

Incorrect. This is a separation of concerns. I make the assumption that IH is balanced appropriately in one regard, and extend it. This way I only need to worry about new balance issues that I introduce, rather than caring about the whole thing at once, and potentially having to rewrite large parts of the core system.

No. You are wrong.

Things don't have transitive properties like that. When people bust out their talismans and shoot electric bolts out of them they are engaging in what is for Iron Heroes, a new direction. People going in that direction have to be as effective as people going in the directions that are already available.

You need to balance the results, not the inputs.

-Username17

[Confused_Jackal_Mage]

While true, I'm curious about how this actually applies here. Vague aphorisms are useful during the design phase, but I'm past that now.

Now that you know that firing off a lightning bolt *is* equivalent to firing an arrow, in that it uses the exact same mechanics, benefits from the exact same feats, and generally has the exact same numbers, is there anything in particular about battlespells that is unbalanced? I intended it to be *almost* a purely cosmetic change. The tiny non-cosmetic changes I made are, I believe, balanced (within IH), though I'd be interested in opinions to the contrary.


To be honest, the battlespell section was by far the most trivial part of the rules. I just took the existing weapon rules and very slightly increased your options in *creating* a weapon. The hard part was explaining it all in a coherent way, because I found that people often had a hard time discarding the idea that spells are intrinsically different from swords. (You see that in this very thread, where assumptions are made based on how d&d magic works which turn out to be completely incorrect.)

It's the rest of the spells that I'm concerned about, and you've already helped me somewhat with them.

[Judging__Eagle]

Seeing as how Battlespells = New weapons that look funky wasn't clearly stated at first. I don't see why you're so surprised. Heck, you did state it, and I didn't notice it when I first read the OP a couple days ago.

This is a place where we write up 3.5E 'weapons' that include swords that swing for mirror-damage, axes that swing for hatred damage, or ghoul-skin pimp-slapping gloves to give to giant sentient construct pimps, and talk about how the only real class in D&D is ''magic, weapon and armour using humanoid adventurer.''

We really don't give a shit about keeping mundane gear/abilities for warriors and magic/abilties for wizards.

We tend to be fine giving people 'whatever' so long as it brings the laggards up to speed with the MVPs of the party. If 'whatever' is a sword that deals 1d6 Slashing & Electricity damage per 2 levels and lets the user cast Lighting Bolt every round, Chain Lighting every 5 rounds, and Dimension Door (self only, must have LOS to target square) at-will, then so be it.

The separation between magic/mundane with regarding warriors or wizards is a false one, and we know it. The only separation between characters is really in results and flavour.

The problem most people here had was that the way you were describing things, the results weren't good enough for the game that it was designed for.

Telling people to play Padded Sumo is stupid, since most people don't want to grind each and every lame fight. Which stirred up the hornet's nest.

[Confused_Jackal_Mage]

That's fair. I'll take a crack at tightening the text in that section further, so it's smack-you-in-the-face obvious what I'm aiming for. It sort of feels that way to me now, but then, I already know what I mean. ^_^

I think I'll take a good look through what I already have outside of battlespells and kill anything that jumps out at me as horrible now (like that +2% miss chance focus option), then ask for another review. You guys have already helped me some, so thanks!