Anyone played this? How'd it hold up? Is it too miniature-gamey to be a good roleplaying game?

Anyone played this? How'd it hold up? Is it too miniature-gamey to be a good roleplaying game?

Played it, loved it, came back for more.

It's not very miniature-gamey unless you want it to be. It may well be my favourite RPG on the market at the moment, much of that has to do with the setting and those books are FULL off really interesting setting fluff.

Mechanics are good, very similar to the tabletop but with more stats and skills. It means there is a big difference between how an easy to hit hard to hurt knight in full plate with a tower shield and a light ninja-y assassin who is impossible to hit but dies to a stiff breeze if it in a way that D&D doesn't really do.

Characters are squishy but not DH squishy. Combat is fast, lethal, and something that can and should be avoided in many cases.

Character creation is fairly unique and really fun, where instead of picking 1 class you essentially pick 2 classes and get to combine them in fun and interesting ways, like taking the soldier and the officer to create a leader who's not afraid to lead from the front, or combining say the Man O War and mechanic to create the Man O War mechanic model from the tabletop.

tl;dr: 10/10 game, would recommend.

>Is it too miniature-gamey to be a good roleplaying game?

That depends entirely on you. I like it, especially the warjack aspect.

>Is it too miniature-gamey to be a good roleplaying game?

I just read the rules, never played it but to me it seemed that way.

Many rules are ported straigth from the tabletop without any explaination given on how exactly they work exactly. As an example I think I remember a ability that prevents the character with it and everyone directly next to him from being knocked down or moved. But why? How does the character accomplish that?

"Abstract" rules like that, that work in the Warmahordes rules can be immersion-breaking in an RPG.

Prettyfun/10.

Thinking on doing a conversion of the old witchfire business across, and them promptly never getting any mates together to play it. Warcasters being OP bullshit has me wary.
Setting is top tier though.

It's pretty decent, though I feel that a lot of it is hampered by wargame stuff.

Most of the support is for 'Stuff people use in the wargame', with non-wargame groups barely getting the time of day or a serious amount of fluff.

Warlocks are silly, silly powerful if you are playing Unleashed because they decided to just go 1:1 from the wargame rather than find a way for them to work without warbeasts (Or creating 'Laborjack' tier beasts) like how starting Warcasters don't get a warjack.

It also suffers from Def being a bit too easy to get too high for non-boosters to hit...but also that almost no one other than Warcasters/Locks get boosted attacks. A lot of the TT ways to bypass high defence really don't work in the RPG (You can't expect a guy to use his buddy as a grenade beacon and even if you do, all PCs in the RPG are multi-wound so it wil graze them at most)

Surely that is not unique to IKRPG but even if it is that's not a terribly compelling reason not to play.

I feel like the magic system could use some work, especially when it comes to spell descriptions. I'd like to have at least a short description on how a spell does what it does instead of just telling what the effects are mechanically.

>that's not a terribly compelling reason not to play.

It can be for some people, and it's one of the reasons that I didn't get into the IKRPG. I absolutely adore the setting and own quite a few of the books (both the new ones and old 3.5 ones) just because I enjoy reading about it, but I cannot stand the mechanics.

It's a pretty big problem with spells. As they are given zilch fluff on how an individual spell does what it does so many attack spells are '...ok, so this does stuff but it's name is completely not telling me how it's actually hurting the guy'

>'...ok, so this does stuff but it's name is completely not telling me how it's actually hurting the guy'
Do you not have an imagination? Can you not make it up yourself? Do you need someone to hold your hand through the entire roleplaying process?

No it's because you have spells like Eliminator.

Ok, so it does damage and lets you move per dude taken out...this is completely non-descriptive of what it's doing in-universe.

The game draws too heavily on the TT without actually explaining the world itself very well.

"You cast Eliminator, and power envelops your weapon. As your sword strikes down your opponent, the arcane energy then strengthens your muscles and you bound away to safety."

That easy.

If you like the TT, you'll think it's fun, but it is basically the TT with extra rules slapped on.

Character creation is quite nice though - it'd be a blast for a Necromunda-type campaign.

Eliminator is a ranged AOE spell.

Then have it blast dudes and the energy comes back and invigorates you. Whatever man. It's really easy to do this.

It is however a problem if a game gives you just rules and zero fluff. I mean, it has less fluff than D&D 4e did for any of it's powers.

And you expect first timers to an RPG to instantly get the idea of 'You need to fluff up how your spells work yourself'?

Every RPG is someone's first. They shouldn't have to work out how stuff works themself for it.

>And you expect first timers to an RPG to instantly get the idea of 'You need to fluff up how your spells work yourself'?
That's the general idea about role playing. You imagine how the situations work out and you act through them. You're not just rolling dice how the book tells you to, you're telling a story.

Role playing games shouldn't hold your hand and tell you exactly how to do things.

Not him, but speaking as a old-school 2e D&D player where you have to adjudicate nearly everything in the game; don't make excuses for the system and Privateer Press using the "not holding your hand" argument.
I like IKRPG. I like it a lot in fact, and my group plays in on a semi-weekly basis. But I'm still enough of an adult to realize and admit that it has flaws like anything ever made by human beings.

The reason the spells and abilities often have no real fluff is because they were copy pasted from the wargame with no real effort on the part of PP. They were on a timetable, they had already delayed release once, they had promised relatively-compatible with the wargame rules so they took a shortcut in production to actually deliver in the finished product. There's nothing wrong with admitting it at all.

I like it a lot, it's the primary RPG I play these days. I adore character creation and the setting, and I've managed to find a good balance in games I run of when to bust out minis and do previse combat and when to play it looser.

My biggest problem is my players. Almost everyone I've played with ho plays the table top is completely incapable of divorcing in-game knowledge with TT knowledge and gets super ducking anal about combat and team combos.

Also, Ios book when?

Adding more because why not.

I'm 50/50 on the spell description thing. Ever since they started Warmachine MkII the devs have made a point that two casters with the "same" spell don't necessarily have the same effect. For example Strakhov has been shown in fluff using Occultation to make himself easier to ignore and over look, while others might make them invisible, or chameleon-like. They should do a better job of explaining that in the IKRPG book though (I think there's a call out in one of them but I not remember which).

Hand down my biggest peeve now is WM/H players forgetting that MkIII doesn't mean the RPG changed. Spent my entire last session correcting people trying to use MkIII rules.

Well, if you had to make an RPG of any wargame, warmahordes is probably your best choice.

I preffered the Hordes version of the game, since you could play a Warlock and not be gimped straight from char creation.

Interesting setting.
Pretty fun system with some balance issues and cluck. Needs a bit of GM-wrangling to bring into line but was very enjoyable to play.
2nd ed draws heavily from the tabletop.

Supposedly, this issomewhat on purpose, as thry want you to come up with a bit of description for your spells, so that your Arcane shield, and some other dude's Arcane Shield can be two different spells visually and fluff wise, without needing two mechanically identical spells.

It's a fun game, doing some last minute prep for our weekly session coming this Sunday.

I've found you can't play this too well with Theatre of the Mind style battles - at least not in an easy manner. We use Roll20 for maps and that made a massive difference.

I can really feel it's wargame roots when I run this, I've never played the TT, but I do enjoy both the system and the setting.

Issues we've encountered;

>Life Spirals.
For some reason this seemed to annoy/cause headaches for some of the players.

>Combat modifiers.
When we first started out without using Roll20, a lot of the LoS caused problems, Roll20 has helped out with that quite a bit.

I'd recommend it as a fun system, and a great setting.

Why would anyone play Iron Kingdoms? It's one of the most poorly designed games ever published. It's fundamentally broken on a number of different levels.

If you want to play in the setting, I'd advise using GURPS to do it.

In what way is it broken?

I really enjoyed it, sadly my group roke up after two sessions.

There's a few balance issues but nothing that's impossible to work around.

(Armor being shit compared to defense stacking on a pirate is one of those things that does need fixing)

Oh and listing item weights but no rules for carry limits.

> Claims it's broken.
> Does not list a single thing wrong with it.

>tfw when my soldier-gunmage will never find a campaign to be in
Fuck you D&D

Armor is shit, much like in the tabletop Skew is the best thing, but because of various other penalties armor gives you can really only skew for Defense effectively.

A goblin pirate can have nearly untouchable def and can't be knocked down to counteract their def bonus.


The closest you can get on the armor side is a gatorman Stone Sorc/Warmage bumping your toughnes/natural armor through the roof.

wouldnt it be bitching if they made a "create your own character" miniature kit

though I think the last time someone did that, shit didnt go as planned (I think it was Malifaux?)

Its honestly far too much work to make, and usually has all the minis end up quite boring or samey. (the malifaux kits were iirc out scale and kept the fiddliness of their plastics.