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If you like listy Gamism (and, boy, do I ever) then Iron Heroes is the bomb. If Arcana Unearthed was everything that D&D should have been, Iron Heroes is everything I wanted D&D to be.

With the exception of the really nonsensical and uninspired weapons and armor lists. Where is that cool double-bladed dagger that the masked executioner chick has? I want one! Also, why are the martial arts weapons still in the game? W/o Monks, there is no benefit to unarmed fighting, so you have a bunch of shitty weapons that just happened to be exotic. I can't believe that Mike Mearls doesn't get the currency of D&D weapons, so am I missing something here? Or was the equipment section a casualty of a fast development cycle? Or what?

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There are 8 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

You could ask the man himself over at

mearls, you know...

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I don't feel like I'm on close enough terms with the man to just say "how come your equipment list sucks horse balls?" out of the blue.

yrs--
--Ben

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Well, you could be more polite about it. :)

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But what fun would that be?

yrs--
--Ben

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IH is definitely the cool shit. I definitely think some things got rushed for this, especially since Mearls made the shift from Malhavoc to WOTC like a month or two before it released. On the other hand, Mastering Iron Heroes includes stuff that D&D has been crying for, for years, including simplified villain classes ("They need to be balanced against the party- not each other, so you need less details"), a whole chapter on alternate reward possibilities, "Wealth Feats" that are bought with gold and explain how the level 3 NPC Minister rules the city, etc.

My only "nitpick" that bugs me is that reach weapons lose the AoO of people trying to close on them...

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At one point I had worked out some kind of algorithm to generate double-ended weapons from the single versions of the same. I was young and naive back then, though, so I probably did not record it!

A quick flip through d20srd suggests that you simply add another head with equivalent damage and increase the proficiency category and "handedness", which is the light-1h-2h continuum. Weight doesn't appear to increase systematically.

So I guess a double-headed dagger is a d4/d4 1h martial weapon, and a triple dagger is two-handed and exotic, if we can apply the template twice.

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The basic problem was that I had about 10 weeks to do the entire game, from start to finish. There were areas where the game needs more work (magic stands out here) and equipment is one of them.

That's really the long and short of it.

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Yeah, that makes sense! That's a tight deadline for such a work.

Perhaps I will publish a more colorful weapons and armor list that folks can use with Iron Heroes. Is the whole damage reducing armor thing OGL?

yrs--
--Ben

P.S. I love the color of the book. Really not-entirely-european fantasy without being fetishistically "asian" or otherwise stupid.

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benlehman

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