Any 'Iron Heroes'-style rules for 5e?

[Talyn]

I was going through my old D&D books from when I was in college, and found my old copy of Mike Mearle's Iron Heroes - an alternate player's handbook for 3.5 with a focus on all-martial characters in a gritty, Conan-esque low-magic setting.

I was thinking that it would translate well into 5e - especially once you stripped out Mike Mearle's super-fiddly 'tiered feats' system. Has anyone seen (or created) something similar for 5e?

[CheddarChampion]

You could just run a game for Barbarians/Fighters/Rogues (and maybe Monks) and ban their magical subclasses. Easy.

Oh, and ban any races/subraces that gain magical powers.

[Dienekes]

So the thing that made Iron Heroes great was of course 1) that it focused on martials. But 2) that each of the martials played radically different.

From the Armiger whose powers were based on getting hit, to the Harrier who powered up by moving a lot each round.

The issue is, 5e doesn't really do that. The martials pretty much all get powers based off short/long rest, pretty much exclusively focus on basic attacks done repeatedly. Mechanical complexity was purposely pushed exclusively onto the magic system. Getting a resource pool that grows and shrinks based off your actions in combat isn't really done.

Now, I will admit I did try to implement a bit of the mentality of Iron Heroes here (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?610037-Differentiating-Martials-(PEACH)). Where I reworked each of the martial classes in order to make them play wildly different from each other. And you might be interested in how I worked the Paladin, where they essentially got their powers based on actually following the tenets of their oath in combat.

Though I will say it's almost a year old and I think in desperate need of some revisions. The Monk especially has a good kernel of an idea in there, but having played it now I think it's too complicated for too little benefit. And in general I would restructure powers along the 5/11/17 level split instead of how I did it there.

But you might find it interesting to look at.

[Pex]

For a no-magic game there is a 5E adaptation of Middle Earth. It has its own classes and feats and no spellcasting. You don't need to play Middle Earth to use it, just ignore all the flavor text and do what you want. It has wilderness travel rules that arbitrarily applies bonuses and penalties on an adventure based on dice rolls PCs can influence. I'm not a fan of that because it imposes roleplaying on players, telling them what their characters must feel and do taking away player choice. A bad roll can make the actual adventure a death spiral.

It does not use the token system of Iron Heroes. It's still 5E. Personally I'm not a fan of the token system either. By the time you accumulate enough tokens to do that one cool move the combat is over or the conditions to allow the move are no longer there.

[Talyn]

You could just run a game for Barbarians/Fighters/Rogues (and maybe Monks) and ban their magical subclasses. Easy.

Oh, and ban any races/subraces that gain magical powers.

I'll be honest with you, I strongly considered just telling my players to all play either Rogues or Battlemaster Fighters and just pick different maneuvers for their Battlemasters - it's a very doable and not even particularly underpowered setup, but I was looking for something with a little more 'meat' to it.

[Talyn]

It does not use the token system of Iron Heroes... Personally I'm not a fan of the token system either. By the time you accumulate enough tokens to do that one cool move the combat is over or the conditions to allow the move are no longer there.

I was thinking about, instead of a stacking token system, each class would have something that would give them 'Opportunity' (or whatever, I'm not married to that name). Like Advantage, Opportunity would be a binary 'have it/don't have it' system. If you HAVE Opportunity, it gives you some small bonus based on your class. So you can keep it, take the advantage, and make your base attacks. Or, you can expend the opportunity to use one of your class features and do something cool, but then you have to wait for the circumstances of battle to give you Opportunity again.