The Gaming Den

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:

Traits
"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.

Skills
"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.

Feat Masteries
"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.

Class Tokens
"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.

Magic
"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.

-Username17

What do skill challenges even look like now anyway

Severian wrote:What do skill challenges even look like now anyway

The core is the same. The individual rolls are still called "success and failure" as is the overall challenge, creating pointless confusion when at any time they could have used distinct nomenclature like "hit and miss". And you still track successes and failures for the whole group, which means that you're still screwing over the party if you attempt to act and have even one less +1 on your skill than another player. The core is still rotten and the subsystem is still garbage. Also, the base DCs are set so low than you have virtually no chance of failure if you play them "right" and send in specialists to do their jobs and have everyone else hang back.

So you might well ask what the extra text spent on skill challenges that is now collectively longer than the Bible is about. And that's... a damn good question. As far as I can tell it is about spreading FUD. Basically, you have a whole lot of "options" as Mister Cavern that make things more complicated. You can, for example have the challenges change from one set of allowed skills to another after the PCs get a set number of hits. Which is um... exactly like running three simple challenges end to end. You can also set maximums on the number of hits you can add from a single skill, thereby forcing players to do something other than just let the Diplomancer talk the challenge to death. But none of these change the fact that the incentive arrows still go towards not participating in the challenge. And of course, all of those things are more work for Mister Cavern.

The most hilarious option on the list is the one where Mister Cavern mandates that players make specific tests regardless of their actions - which ironically encourages players to stay all the way at home rather than endanger the party's chances. But more importantly is basically a concession that the entire system is crap, since so far their best "fix" for the fact that the "right" choices are the opposite of what they promised was to take player choices away altogether.

Long story short: at this point there are so many variants that there is a lot of confusion as to what anything is supposed to do. But the core mechanic is still that the players attempt to the best of their ability to have a single character roll a d20 nine times in a row, which he succeeds on a 2+ or something retarded and then you win.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote: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.

Armor in Iron Heroes gives DR instead of an AC bonus, and there are basically no magic items, so everyone gets a class-based defense bonus dependent on their level. This bonus is considered an "active" bonus, and so you're denied it when you're flat footed. The easiest and most common benefit of using a stunt on an opponent is to ... surprise ... make them flat footed! Which makes Power Attack for arbitrarily high values incredibly effective. Now aren't you glad you have that 1d3/magic DR? (Oh yeah, armor-based DR is both tiny and variable, meaning the only time it's actually useful you're just mad at it because you have to roll a half-dozen DR checks).

I was under the impression people thought Iron heroes to be a noble failure at best and outright bad at worst.

Much like Skill Challenges, Iron Heroes was interesting in concept but failed in actual implementation.

Zinegata wrote:I was under the impression people thought Iron heroes to be a noble failure at best and outright bad at worst.

Much like Skill Challenges, Iron Heroes was interesting in concept but failed in actual implementation.

I've never actually looked at an IH rulebook, but when it came out a lot of people touted it as 'D&D with the classes actually balanced and interesting options for the warrior-types'.

Anyway, I found this review thoroughly entertaining. It'd been too long since Frank did a game review.

I'm guessing it was a Iron Heroes mention in "Skill Folding" that set Frank off on a rant.

EDIT: No, wait, there was that extended hoopla about a 2009 rpgnet and Mearls argument recently...

FrankTrollman wrote: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.

For the sake of completeness, I'd appreciate if you supplemented this discussion with what Mearls did in Book of Iron Might. To all appearances, that earlier work did contain a system of worked out stunts, heralded to be balanced - from the publisher's website:

Stunts: The innovative new stunt system allows DMs to incorporate exciting action into the game without unbalancing the rules.

I'd appreciate someone doing a run down on the suggested DC calculations for stunts Mearls suggests there.

...

And to raise a completely different, if roughly related point. The moment 4E was heralded as "the next big thing", I thought, taking a closer look at its alleged selling points, that it was simply the Malahavoc Edition of D&D (or, as someone put it so aptly on RPG.net, "Mike Mearls' Fantasy Heartbreaker"). There is not a single "innovation" in 4E that you couldn't trace back to something Mearls already tried for Malhavoc. Some cases in point:

1. Monster design. Look at the IH Bestiary. It's the Special gamey abilities aka "special effects on your battle mat grid" that drives the monster design and nothing else. None of the monsters is there to be rationalized against, or help rationalize, the implied setting of IH. Which is one of the big things Frank didn't mention in his OP - the implied setting of IH - because it's simply not there. And not for reasons of lack of space (aka Mearls going "sorry folks, ran out of pages to write on") but for the simple reason that setting does not matter in IH. Setting is the sum total of stage props that your IH characters need as they cut down legions of minions and smash them into buildings. You know, the only use special effects has for stage props is to blow them up.

2. Class powers. People reference Book of 9 Swords, but that came AFTER Mearls did shit like the armiger, whose AC increases (in IH: DR) when foes batter it by bludgeoning it. Again, it's "special effects on the battle mat grid" and it did not matter whether it made sense from an in-game POV (aka the POV of the characters and the setting they were in). Mind you, this is YEARS before Justin Alexander talked about dissociated mechanics in 4E. Prime exhibit 1 of that is Mearls' IH.

3. Ritual system. The idea for every class to have access to SPELLZ without having to go for (lengthy) class-dipping in spell caster levels by simply doling out some gp came right from the supplement Mystic Secrets Mearls did for Cook's Arcana Unearthed.

My conclusion:

None of these things made ANY impression on the 3.x or even 3PP crowd back then when they were released. No one in the community went "oooh! we totally need that in D&D!".

Then, a couple of years on, Mearls slaps the D&D brand onto these 'innovations' he did under the Malhavoc label... and all of a sudden everyone takes a 180° turn around. It's totally parallel how the D&D community went "4E DMG = best DMG EVAR!" despite its being a totally rip off of Dungeon Mastering for Dummies, a book no one remembers because it was done under Wiley Publishing.

Branding is everything, people don't give a shit about content, and that's what renders these discussions otiose.

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

This, otoh, is something I don't agree with.

Point the first: Mearls wrote a series of thouroughly enjoyable modules.

Such as:

1. Siege of Durgham's Folly
2. The Lost Vault of Tsathzar Rho
3. A couple of modules for Paizo's Dungeon mag. Sure, some were rather trite, but there were also really good ones there too.

Point the second: Mearls wrote good stuff ABOUT D&D

I also think that his two books for FFG on Dungeons and Monsters are very good. Not in terms of number crunching (which was never his forte) but in terms of design ideas. For instance, in the Monsters book there's a simple strategy line he suggests (I paraphrase):

'Create an encounter as follows. Have the main baddy have a special ability that his front line minions are immune to. E.g. a frost blast, with skellies in the front line. Or, have the back line baddy blast his foes with some sort of sonic damage, and shield him by a line of front line tanks who are deaf. And so on'

See that? That's four lines of text which sum up 95% of encounter design in the 4E MM 1 entries for 'sample encounters' (creatures 1 creates blast/burst damage of category Z --> couple creature 1 with creatures 2 which are immune to all damage type Z). I like that. It's short, explains the point up front, doesn't waste your time.

It's no secret that Mearls is not good on writing up rules or (let alone) whole rules systems, but that leaves plenty of space for him to shine with modules and general advice on how to run your games.

Windjammer wrote:For the sake of completeness, I'd appreciate if you supplemented this discussion with what Mearls did in Book of Iron Might. To all appearances, that earlier work did contain a system of worked out stunts, heralded to be balanced

That seems totally fair.


The Book of Iron Might is pretty short, and most of it is taken up with ranting about warforged (called "Iron Born" in that book). There are two different stunt systems in that book, and they aren't even next to one another. The first is a design-your-own special combat maneuver system, and the other is a make-up-shit to do with skill checks system.

The design-your-own combat maneuvers system is to put it bluntly: completely FUBAR. It's just a long list of potential effects you can add to attacks in exchange for crippling attack roll penalties (generally -20 or -30 to-hit) followed by a list of variously irrelevant "drawbacks" you can add to that which reduce the ridiculously large penalties by ridiculously large amounts. For example, you could have your "shoot someone in the eyes" attack that makes them blind for 1d4 minutes on a hit provoke an attack of opportunity (which isn't going to matter, because it is already a ranged attack). That reduces the to-hit penalty by fifteen.

The first thing that leaps out at you while reading this is that the author does not seem to understand that the entire Random Number Generator is only 20 numbers long. And thus if you add or subtract 10 or more points from the rolls, the entire game system rolls up into automatic failure or success. The second thing that leaps out at you knocking someone down is really not even in the same ballpark as taking all of their actions away or blinding them for the rest of combat. And the third thing that leaps out at you is that the various game balance warnings appear to have been written by a ferret. Seriously, it warns you that these things might make true strike into an unbalanced spell because you could use special maneuvers without buying the penalties off with trivial drawbacks; and it seriously warns you that the ability to add an at-will, no-save stun rider to your attacks might make the Stunning Fist feat feel less unique. Yeah... when I add the ability to turn normal bow attacks into no-save Tekken Juggles for free, my primary game concern is the uniqueness of the Stunning Fist Feat.


Anyway, on to phase two of the stunts: the stunts that are called "Stunts". These are... not very interesting honestly. The first half of the section is just a list of one or two things to do in combat with various skills with DCs in the 20-40 range. A typical one might be to spend a full round action studying something to make a DC 25 skill check to get a +1 Insight Bonus to attack rolls for the rest of combat against one target. That's not me making fun of it, that maneuver actually shows up more than once using different skills. A couple of the things are worth doing (a DC 25 Diplomancy check to end combat, for example), a number of them are straight up missing vital rules information (like an intimidate option that forgets to mention how long the shaken condition is supposed to last). The thing the author appears super pleased with is "conjoined tests" where you roll two skill tests and have to succeed at both in order to succeed at your action. I get the distinct impression that the author does not realize how much more difficult that makes things vs. having a slightly higher DC if there is any real chance of failure, or how completely no effect at all that has in the case that characters start getting bonuses in the high teens.

But what you're really here for is the make-your-own stunt section. The opening is not encouraging:

Book of Iron Might, Stunt DCs wrote:Stunt base DC + DM’s judgment factor

...great.


OK, so the core of the system isn't even a system, it's just "present a cool sounding idea to the DM, the DM makes up a DC, roll a die." That's just the regular rules. There follows some more bonus options to use with the athletics skills (Balance, Climb, Jump, and Tumble). Why are they not back with the bonus things to do with skills section that came before it? I don't know!

There follows a suggestion to ramp up the DC of something by +5 for every "benefit" the player gets. Benefits include "moving through an obstructed area" and "moving into a flanking position". Seriously, the actual example indicates that using a stunt to move past some enemies should be normal DC +5, while moving past some enemies and friends should be normal DC +10. That is seriously Mearls' actual example, I am not making that up.

Then it ties it back to the combat maneuvers section, and reminds you that you can add ten to your attack roll by attacking as a full round action. There is a thing on doing improvised stunt damage, which starts at 2d6 but doesn't really go anywhere from there - so first level characters are totally encouraged to kick shelves on each other and slam doors in each other's faces, but high level characters will ignore that shit.

And nothing would be complete without a way to make spellcasters better than you: spellcasters get to do absolutely anything you could do with a stunt using a caster level check plus their casting stat modifier. So they basically get all the athletics skills for free.

-Username17

Thanks a lot for the break down.

Windjammer wrote:'Create an encounter as follows. Have the main baddy have a special ability that his front line minions are immune to. E.g. a frost blast, with skellies in the front line. Or, have the back line baddy blast his foes with some sort of sonic damage, and shield him by a line of front line tanks who are deaf. And so on'

See that? That's four lines of text which sum up 95% of encounter design in the 4E MM 1 entries for 'sample encounters' (creatures 1 creates blast/burst damage of category Z --> couple creature 1 with creatures 2 which are immune to all damage type Z). I like that. It's short, explains the point up front, doesn't waste your time.

Here's the thing: I literally learned to read with the AD&D Monster Manual by Gary Gygax from 1977. That book suggests teaming up Frost Giants with Winter Wolves. I'm simply unimpressed with someone publishing that "insight" a mere 28 years after it came out in hard backed form.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:

Windjammer wrote:'Create an encounter as follows. Have the main baddy have a special ability that his front line minions are immune to. E.g. a frost blast, with skellies in the front line. Or, have the back line baddy blast his foes with some sort of sonic damage, and shield him by a line of front line tanks who are deaf. And so on'

See that? That's four lines of text which sum up 95% of encounter design in the 4E MM 1 entries for 'sample encounters' (creatures 1 creates blast/burst damage of category Z --> couple creature 1 with creatures 2 which are immune to all damage type Z). I like that. It's short, explains the point up front, doesn't waste your time.

Here's the thing: I literally learned to read with the AD&D Monster Manual by Gary Gygax from 1977. That book suggests teaming up Frost Giants with Winter Wolves. I'm simply unimpressed with someone publishing that "insight" a mere 28 years after it came out in hard backed form.

-Username17

Fuck that. I first got my rulebooks and two weeks later I was making encounters that used this (simple) level of tactics. And it only took that long because I preferred to read, and later play for the first thirteen days.

If someone new to the game, no matter how intelligent they are can work an idea out near instantly, that idea is neither informative nor insightful.

I tried using that simple tactic in Baldur's Gate. "Summon Fire Elementals so I can Fireball the enemies without hurting my summoned critter".

The fucker still went "I got attacked!" and turned on the party anyway.

Windjammer wrote:3. Ritual system. The idea for every class to have access to SPELLZ without having to go for (lengthy) class-dipping in spell caster levels by simply doling out some gp came right from the supplement Mystic Secrets Mearls did for Cook's Arcana Unearthed.

The ritual system in Unearthed Arcana predates that.

Roy wrote:If someone new to the game, no matter how intelligent they are can work an idea out near instantly, that idea is neither informative nor insightful.

The reason why I, who's at least somewhat intelligent, didn't and wouldn't hit on that simple idea all by myself or simply by perusing the MM 1 for AD&D, is that I first really got into D&D only late on in my RPG experience. I came to it from a completely different take on RPGs, owed to having played different RPGs like "The Dark Eye" (which was and remains the biggest RPG in German speaking countries) for years. In those games, you'd only combine creatures in an encounter if it made sense from a monster-ecology POV. The idea to look at which creature special abilities complement each other didn't even occur to me. That's something I only hit upon when I got into D&D, and even then it took a loooong time to re-adjust my mind to what drives that game.

If, as Frank and you suggest, you were introduced to RPGs directly via D&D, then I can agree that the idea comes to one naturally and is obvious. I'm not saying it's profound, I just found it helpful to have it pointed out to me by Mearls in that book.

hogarth wrote:

Windjammer wrote:3. Ritual system. The idea for every class to have access to SPELLZ without having to go for (lengthy) class-dipping in spell caster levels by simply doling out some gp came right from the supplement Mystic Secrets Mearls did for Cook's Arcana Unearthed.

The ritual system in Unearthed Arcana predates that.

Thanks, that's good to know. I only own Arcana Evolved, and so never owned the earlier ruleset (UA).

So I'd venture to guess that the rituals system in that case is an invention of Cook, and not Mearls - right?

hogarth wrote:

Windjammer wrote:3. Ritual system. The idea for every class to have access to SPELLZ without having to go for (lengthy) class-dipping in spell caster levels by simply doling out some gp came right from the supplement Mystic Secrets Mearls did for Cook's Arcana Unearthed.

The ritual system in Unearthed Arcana predates that.

Indeed, I'm going to call it as The Epic Level Handbook (by Andy Collins) having the Epic Casting system that was an inspiration for Unearthed Arcana (by Andy Collins) having the Ritual Casting system that was an inspiration for the 4e PHB (by Andy Collins) having its own, yet subtly virtually identical Ritual Casting system.

Not only are all three books written by the same man, but the casting systems really don't change much from one to the next. I'm willing to call it that the 4e Ritual Casting system is 100% Andy Collins, because he had been writing stuff exactly like that for six fucking years when the 4e PHB came out with his name on it.

Edit: Unearthed Arcana is not Arcana Unearthed. Different books.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:Edit: Unearthed Arcana is not Arcana Unearthed. Different books.

Ah, thanks, I had indeed misread that point as being about AU, not UA.

Windjammer wrote: In those games, you'd only combine creatures in an encounter if it made sense from a monster-ecology POV. The idea to look at which creature special abilities complement each other didn't even occur to me.

Something people tend to forget about D&D monsters is they're people, too.

...Hah. I like how that sounds. But, seriously. A lot of monsters have some kind of society going, they're as smart as (or smarter than) the PC races and they can do some shit. Even some of other monsters can understand Common and do some processing

It is not implausible that some different D&D monsters -do- band together for mutual benefit/survival/interest. And they aren't stupid. They have the brains to recognize their own talents and coordinate.

Y'know, this could do a pretty good gag comic. Life as a bunch of evil monsters who deal with the fact that the Paladins scream that they will strike down evil...then get mind-controlled by the Succubus. "Who trains these clowns? Really, I mean...Don't they -know- what we do? So why do they have such crappy willpower? Also, they call that a holy smite upon my evil self? Those just sting a little!"

Sort of like Goblins but without the wild swings in tone.

I think "Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic" had that kind of a premise, at least the society of "evil" monsters angle, the parts where baby Gelationus Cubes and baby Kobolds play together were adorable. And there was this one starring a minotaur* hired as security** in the Cave of Unspeakable Evil or somesuch, seen it a long time ago.

*Tactic of choice: grab the Fighter and bludgeon the rest of the party with him.
**No, wait, I just found it again. The name's Dungeons and Denizens and the minotaur is tech support apparently.

You know what I find annoying?

The recent trend in fantasy where it's apparently witty and edgy to go 'no, what if the forces of good and light were the monsters!' Not by actually constructing a setting where this is the case, but just by taking cliches and inverting them.

FrankTrollman wrote:The design-your-own combat maneuvers system is to put it bluntly: completely FUBAR. It's just a long list of potential effects you can add to attacks in exchange for crippling attack roll penalties (generally -20 or -30 to-hit) followed by a list of variously irrelevant "drawbacks" you can add to that which reduce the ridiculously large penalties by ridiculously large amounts. For example, you could have your "shoot someone in the eyes" attack that makes them blind for 1d4 minutes on a hit provoke an attack of opportunity (which isn't going to matter, because it is already a ranged attack). That reduces the to-hit penalty by fifteen.

Just a nit-pick.

Blinding Attack is not available as a ranged attack option under the system (ranged attacks have their own table), and ranged attacks can't benefit from Attack of Opportunity drawbacks (the rule for this is hidden in the text).

Maxus wrote:

Windjammer wrote: In those games, you'd only combine creatures in an encounter if it made sense from a monster-ecology POV. The idea to look at which creature special abilities complement each other didn't even occur to me.

Something people tend to forget about D&D monsters is they're people, too.

...Hah. I like how that sounds. But, seriously. A lot of monsters have some kind of society going, they're as smart as (or smarter than) the PC races and they can do some shit. Even some of other monsters can understand Common and do some processing

It is not implausible that some different D&D monsters -do- band together for mutual benefit/survival/interest. And they aren't stupid. They have the brains to recognize their own talents and coordinate.

Y'know, this could do a pretty good gag comic. Life as a bunch of evil monsters who deal with the fact that the Paladins scream that they will strike down evil...then get mind-controlled by the Succubus. "Who trains these clowns? Really, I mean...Don't they -know- what we do? So why do they have such crappy willpower? Also, they call that a holy smite upon my evil self? Those just sting a little!"

Sort of like Goblins but without the wild swings in tone.

This. The Frost Giant/Winter Wolf thing comes to mind. Not only do they work well together, but they live in the same areas. There is no conflict between fluff and crunch, they band together to hunt better than they could alone.

Just as humans on Earth invented team based tactics that complement each other and often involve non humans, so too do monsters. Not all the time, but often enough to be reminded that the enemy is intelligent as well.

Roog wrote:
Just a nit-pick.

Blinding Attack is not available as a ranged attack option under the system (ranged attacks have their own table), and ranged attacks can't benefit from Attack of Opportunity drawbacks (the rule for this is hidden in the text).

That's entirely possible. What was and was not possible as far as mix and matching those things is pretty delightfully unclear. The tables are flat wrong up one side and down the other (the table lists blinding attack as lasting only a d4 rounds), and the fucking example maneuver is performing a ranged blind maneuver by throwing something at an ogre's eyes. So I assumed it was supposed to be possible. It's so badly written that I can't even tell.

You are quite right about the attack of opportunity though. It turns out you do have to select other drawbacks. Foolishly, I had thought such information would be listed in the drawbacks themselves or in the description of the keywords or something. Silly me.

-Username17

So. How would you make a stunt system, then?