Playing to Iron Heroes's Strengths.

[Pluto!]

A couple of my friends are asking me to run an Iron Heroes game. Sounded good; I remember reading it a couple years back, but I never used anything in my games for some reason.

Thumbing back through it, I see why: the system drips of all the worst trappings of early-2000s d20 design - fiddly tacked-on subsystems, dozens of +/- 1 modifiers to beancount, Monte Cook, bad tactical options presented as character-defining abilities, class features expressed as die roll modifiers.

I'm willing to run with it, make a game happen, let the players crawl around in holes and get strafed to death by dragons, but if I'm cramming on a new variant system, I'd at least like to play to its strengths.

The problem is that I'm not actually sure what they are.

As best as I can see, the payoff for using Iron Heroes is the gamist thrill of accumulating and spending dozens of tokens from classes and feats and other feats to your heart's content each combat. And beyond that, just kind of rolling with the normal d20 hack-and-slash.

What I'm thinking about doing with the system:

Lots of relatively low-level humanoid mooks. These will help the players get all the tokens they need to actually use their class abilities. I'll probably crib the 4e Minion rules to make fights against lots of creatures less painful.
Few supernatural monsters. Flying creatures without ranged attacks seem rough, but doable. Incorporeal enemies or flying strafers sound like auto-TPKs. Maybe I'll put some archers on Giant Wasps if I want **** to get real later on.
No other splatbooks. I don't think the IH material is robust enough to stand against other sources.
No casters. I'll need to double-check how healing is supposed to work in IH, but the caster class in the IH rulebook isn't much worse than a normal 3e caster as far as I can tell, while all the melee classes actually are worse than many of their 3e counterparts. I want to try to avoid games that are supposed to be about sweet low-magic axe-fighting heroes turning into "Merlin and the Cleanup Crew."
Generous application of "strikes" - IH talks up letting characters do sweet things, but kind of leaves it up to DM handwaving to determine how they work. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to implement a rule I've wanted to try in d20 for a while: Edit: This entry contained too much nonsense for this thread. I'll just say I'm planning to be a little more liberal with players who want to do sweet things with their otherwise boring standard action attacks.




Thoughts? Opinions? Miscellaneous Monte Cook smack talk? Other ways of making Iron Heroes more fun?

[Deadline]

We ran an entire Viking revenge campaign in this system, and I can share the things our group liked and disliked.

We had a party consisting of a Harrier, Berserker, Man-At-Arms/Myrmidon, and a Man-At-Arms/Thief

We quickly ran into the following problems:

Healing. While the reserve mechanic is better than what can be mundanely accomplished in D&D 3.5, you still wind up needing to take a day or two to heal up. This was only an issue when we ran into more than a few fights per day, or (more commonly) a single big fight.
Mid-High level Harrier = OP. By about 6th level or so, the Harrier became an unhittable speed demon. By about 10th, he was doing comparable damage to the Berserker.
Easily breakable mechanics. A Berserker with a large crit-range weapon, a Harrier, and the Gladiator feat line were all hilariously abusable. Luckily, the Berserker stuck with the Greataxe, and the Man-At-Arms/Thief didn't abuse the Gladiator feats too much.
Reliable damage from an enemy cuts any battle really short. If the enemy can use energy damage, or reliably does enough damage to punch through DR with a hefty remainder, the fights will be very short. Unfortunately, we ran into the latter often, because the DM had to use high levelled bad guys to even have a shot at hitting the Harrier. The rest of us were just meat.
Multiple small minions are not a danger to a Harrier or a Berserker. The Harrier is just unhittable, and the Berserker can shrug off small hits via DR and Berserk Toughness. We would wind up in fights against terrible odds and come out barely standing (we had a fight where we were raiding a Roman camp, and we were outflanked by two units of Roman infantry. The Berserker solo'd one unit (Vorpal Hurricane and Berserk Toughness), and the Man-At-Arms/Thief almost solo'd the other (auto crits with a scythe, and a solid AC). Meanwhile, the Harrier flitted from one area of the mass battle to the next, single handedly killing archers, small squads of soldiers, and high value commanders. He managed to come out of that battle with only a small handful of damage, while the rest of us were sitting in single digits (the Berserker sitting in single digits and an empty Reserve Pool thanks to Berserk Toughness).


So, things to avoid:

Be cautious about how much energy damage you use against the PCs, and how much you let them get their hands on (we did wonders with just some alchemist fire and acid).
You may want to flat out ban the Harrier, or find a way of counteracting its speed without utterly crushing the others.
You may also want to very carefully consider any Berserkers, as they can be broken very easily. Our Berserker was deliberately played at a low optimization point, and still wound up being a powerhouse.
It sounds like you aren't including the Player's Guide, and just using the main book. If so, you won't have to worry about the Gladiator feat chain, so that's a non-issue. Still, keep a wary eye on the feat chains, certain combos can really swing things.
You may want to flat out ban the Hunter, as in our test combats (we also tried the Archer, which worked fine), the Hunter was incredibly underpowered and boring compared to everything else.
The Armiger takes a while to get its schtick going, which means it may not get to use its token mechanic in small fights. Unless enemies are hammering like hell on the Armiger, expect him to see very few tokens. We had an NPC Armiger in our party who almost never got to use his abilities. You may want to see about changing how frequently they generate tokens if you have a player who wants to give it a try.
Combat Challenges were a little wonky mechanically. It wound up being basically always beneficial for the Harrier and the Berserker to simply Suicidal Strike for extra damage almost all the time. The Harrier still had crazy AC, and the Berserker wanted to get hit (it generates Fury tokens). The only time this wasn't the case was when we were up against bad guys who could reliably hit high AC and deal a large chunk of damage. This stopped the Harrier from doing it, but since the bad guys could still hit the Harrier (albeit only on a 15+ or so), it also meant that they were only missing the Berserker on a 1, so the Berserker kept doing it anyway.
Stunts and challenges got incredibly tiring to think up and describe when in a combat with tons of lesser enemies. And for the most part, the risk vs. reward against tougher enemies made them unappealing at best. It's a neat sounding idea, but it flopped pretty spectacularly in practice.


We never used the spell casters from the book. We wanted to play a party of "mundane" vikings, and it was indeed tough. The DM used a few D&D 3.5 sorcerers and spells, and it worked pretty well. Web was a challenging obstacle for a 10th level party to deal with. Especially since the best method of dealing with it was burning it, but that does fire damage to folks in it, and since fire damage is energy damage ...

At any rate, we managed to have a fun campaign with it.