[FauxSR Review] Torchbearer

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Lago PARANOIA
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[FauxSR Review] Torchbearer

Post by Lago PARANOIA »

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This image gives grognards Catholic-guilt erections.

This advertising campaign of the game was comically pretentious about how much it emulated the aesthetics of Oldschool Roleplay, but you can't fault them for lack of effort. Except for the glossy foil Torchbearer title, the book looks and feels exactly like the 1E D&D PHB. The artwork is heavily inked proto-Bronze Age of Comics lineart that wouldn't feel out of place in one of the older manuals. It even has that coarse newsprint paper for pages and that weird waxy cardboard that becomes smoother over time and has those little crosshatches if you look at it hard enough. That said, it's nowhere near as much of an eyesore as the actual 1E D&D PHB. The book makes generous-yet-appropriate use of subsection headings, fonts, and typefaces and the book is very easy to read. The only real failings of the book's presentation are the occasional use of Comic Sans to denote an in-play example and the fact that it costs as of March 2014 35 fucking USD. 35 USD for a newsprint book that's all in black-and-white and literally 200 pages in length counting character sheets and publishing information is fucking highway robbery, even for an upmarket game from a small-potatoes press.

The Credits page doesn't reveal anything particularly illuminating. There are a ton of artists who worked on this book, but they mostly did B&W drawings and a couple of them did exactly one picture. I find the thanks to Greg Stafford (RuneQuest, Pendragon, and King of Dragon Pass) and for serving as a source of inspiration a bit amusing, because this game takes away practically nothing from RuneQuest in crunch or fluff... except for a couple of mind-melting game design decisions that add nothing to the game but hatred, rage, suffering, and woe. We'll get to that bullshit later.

Thor Olavsrud provided the bulk of the writing for this game, so let's talk about him for a bit. Thor does not fit the typical profile of a writer for traditional games. He works (present tense) in the computer industry as an IT specialist and has done his own tech startups. He's a columnist for CIO, known as that magazine you see all the time in the lobbies of office spaces of computer technology-ish companies yet can't remember the name of. So while his background is unusual, he's pretty much exactly the kind of guy you'd want for your flash-in-the-pan hipster TTRPG.

Luke Crane is the other big name for this book. It's hard to tell which portions of the game are distinctly his, but if I was going to guess he was the marketing guy for Torchbearer and helped adapt the game engine. He pops up more often in podcasts and YouTube videos and in fact was in charge of the Kickstarter campaign. The Thank You paragraph (in which he didn't exactly think anyone aside from the editor for production) is much smaller than Thor's and his Google Plus page talks more about hawking Torchbearer goods than promoting the game mechanics. Not to say that he's some kind of company man panhandling 'ideas guy' like Mike Motherfucking Mearls, far from it; he did write the Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard (of this game is a clear derivative) after all and the latter has won several gaming awards and even an article in Wired Magazine. But from what I can tell, Torchbearer is Olavsrud's baby and Crane is the godfather.

Torchbearer can't really be discussed without discussing its position towards OSR. The game specifically marketed itself as 1E D&D, but for REAL MEN. This infuriated the OSR crowd to no end and if you go on certain forums that will not be linked here you can find evidence of their ire. As I've said, this marketing gambit is pretentious in a way that would cause WoD to blush a little bit, but if you've got the moxie to make your posturing stick then go for it. Just be aware that for every successful mic drop of Sega shaming Nintendon't, you have five ads of 3DO falling flat on its face. Or worse, you end up with the Gnome and the Tiefling debacle.

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And that's why 3rd Edition fans are stupid doo-doo heads that should buy our games. Wait, where are you going?
“Groups can go in without a guide,” he says of his trip to Clarksville, “but you’re required to wear a helmet with a chin-strap, kneepads, and each person must bring three light sources, the primary one helmet-mounted. It features a number of tight squeezes that you have to worm your way through head first, an underground stream and other hazards.” 

Olavsrud says he was “consumed with the experience, but when I got home, it struck me that D&D, even with the AD&D Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide, doesn’t really reflect that experience.”
All of these are pretty good signs. They clearly put in the effort presentation-wise and the pedigrees of the game designers are modest but promising.

Introduction
You know what, the book can give a better (nominal) elevator pitch than I can.
This is a grim land. Summers are short. Winters are long. The towns are overcrowded. Food is expensive. Guilds control trade. Nobility control the taxes. Priests pray for our damned souls.

Out there, beyond those walls, are beasts, bogies, monsters. They inhabit the forests, live under the fields, dwell in the ruins of our burned-out fortresses. They kidnap the lone wanderer, harry our caravans, and when they are bold, they attack our towns.

This land is wild, untamable, and in it we struggle to survive. We who thought we could conquer it, subjugate it—we are guests here, our days numbered.

Our forebears succeeded in wedging a toehold—a small point of light in a vast, weird darkness. Their hubris led them to believe they had won, that victory was inevitable. But they were wrong. The forests fought back. The mountains rebelled. The seas heaved in protest. Things issued forth from crevices and caves; the foam and fire spat forth a writhing, crawling answer to our fathers’ “conquest.” We fought them. We banished them. We flung spell and prayer at them. But they came like a creeping tide, forcing us steadily back.

So now most of us crowd into our walled towns and make do with what’s been given to us. Some hardy folk brave the long nights and, far behind our defenses, work the soil at dawn. A few of us—those with nothing left—take up torch and sword and stride forth into the dark wilds.

For underneath the roots are the ruins of those who came before us. Layers of foolhardy civilizations crumbling atop one another like corpses. Each thought they could conquer this land. Each failed.

But in failure, they left us hope. They left us gold, artifacts, secrets, knowledge. Those brave or foolish enough to bring back these treasures are richly rewarded. Those successful enough can even can rise above their station.

Thus, we can become heroes.

...if we survive.
What Is this Game About?
Torchbearer is a riff on the early model of fantasy roleplaying games. In it, you take on the role of a fortune-seeking adventurer. To earn that fortune, you must explore forlorn ruins, brave terrible monsters, and retrieve forgotten treasures.

However, this game is not about being a hero. It is not about fighting for what you believe. This game is about exploration and survival.

You may become a hero. You might have to fight for your ideals. But to do either of those things, you must prove yourself in the wilds.

Because there are no jobs, no inheritance, no other opportunities for deadbeat adventurers like you. This life is your only hope to survive in this world.
What Kind of Game Is This?
Torchbearer is a roleplaying game. And it’s part of the brand of games Burning Wheel HQ has been producing for over ten years. It’s about making difficult choices, and it involves exploring the world and your character through the game rules and systems.

This is a hard game. It’s not a simple game. There are many moving parts and it’s not possible to experience the whole game in one or even two sessions. If you prefer lighter games, there are many other excellent choices available for you designed by our friends. If you’re ready to sink your teeth into a good game that will reward you for mastering the system over 10 or 20 sessions, this is the game for you.

In the spectrum of BWHQ books, Torchbearer is advanced Mouse Guard. While it’s not as complex as Burning Wheel or Burning Empires, it’s certainly more involved than Mouse Guard or even FreeMarket.
So, you get all that? Torchbearer is basically Steve the Crap Covered Farmer Becomes a Vanilla Action Hero from a Dying Civilization: The Game.

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This game has an RGB score of 191/255/73.

I have thoroughly whined about criticized these sorts of characters stinking up my speculative fiction game for well over a decade. But let it be known that while I hate what catering to this archetype has done to games like Shadowrun and 4E Dungeons and Dragons, I don't hate these characters or games that support these characters on principle. There's nothing inherently offensive about playing characters who would get their ass handed to them by a drunken washout from the City Guard; I just hate how they interact when mixed with more competent heroes. So Torchbearer is pretty much the kind of game you'd have to pitch at me if you want to get me interested in playing as a Peasant Hero.

The rest of the Introduction is pretty standard boilerplate you'd give to someone unfamiliar with TTRPGs -- though I have to question the wisdom of pitching a game that bills itself as difficult, requiring a dozen sessions to master (the game is thankfully exaggerating on this count), and a throwback to the Gygaxian era of roleplaying. However, then you get to this:

Description Forward!
As a player, you player describe your actions in response to the GM’s descriptions. Tell the GM what your character does, touches, manipulates, etc. Ask questions about the environment. But don’t tell the GM what skill or ability you use! Your description of your character’s actions should fit entirely within the context of what happens in the game world.

If you’re clever, you’ll frame those descriptions around your character’s strengths. Any other player who wishes to help should describe how their character supports the first character’s action.

Explain how you use your gear and surroundings to overcome the environment. Think creatively! Use the skills and abilities on your sheet as inspiration, but always talk in terms of action not using a skill.

“I scout ahead,” not “I want to use the scout skill..." (ED: this is written in that twee Comic Sans font)
I handle my alcohol about as well as an infant with no liver would so I will not be drinking while writing this. But if I was drinking, that would definitely be worth a sip. That is stupidity on the level of a foreign language teacher forcing a late student to say 'there are two guys fighting in the halls outside' in said foreign language before the teacher pretends to recognize the observation and renders aid outside. In case you're wondering, yes, Torchbearer does this sort of shit constantly. It's not ingrained into the rules or anything so you can just pretty much ignore it, but still, this is like your beloved great-uncle occasionally letting out a racial slur while taking you to see your favorite baseball team.

The resolution mechanic is pretty simple. Aside from the eye-rolling insistence on calling failed dice 'scoundrels', it works like any other dice pool system. You roll a variable number of d6s for a TN4 against a fixed difficulty. Some game effects will add or subtract dice or outright successes (yes, they're called successes and not 'heroes'), some will let your dice explode, and dice rolls can have margins of success or failure. Difficulties are rated from 1 to 10. What the game doesn't tell you at this point is that you're outright expected to fail a large number of rolls and have to take some kind of compromise to make up for the success gap. It's a pretty integral part of the game and the Burning Wheel system in general; in fact it is really the system's selling point over other rules-light games like FATE Core. So it's puzzling why they don't at least mention it here.

Next Time: Sketching out the portrait of a Torchbearer character.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Tue Apr 08, 2014 6:48 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Lago PARANOIA
Invincible Overlord
Posts: 10555
Joined: Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:00 am

Post by Lago PARANOIA »

An Adventurer's Essential Guide to Life on the Road
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WTF is this shit? Domesticity? Female protagonists in sensible clothing? SHADING? Dammit, Torchbearer, you're losing all of your OSR cred!!


These are the basic character creation rules of Torchbearer. At 44 pages of a 200 page book, the character creation rules are lean without being spartan. Except for a couple bits of fuckery, these are all right when judged by its internal paradigm. That is, a hipster recreation of OSR that cuts out all of the stupid bits but then selectively adds in the stupid bits when it feels that it's not cargo culting it up hard enough. The game is also coy about telling you exactly what certain things do, like not mentioning what kind of 'reward' you get for playing to a Belief until a later section, just that you get one. This is annoying but not deal-breaking. At first glance this section looks overly bloated, but because Torchbearer is all about nickle-and-diming your party to death you will need every advantage listed on your character sheet.

Speaking of which, the example character sheet in the back of the book is mainly for show. You will not be making photocopies of a page written in newsprint at the back of a book. So have fun printing out a bunch of character sheets from the website, you jackasses. That said, character sheets in this game are pretty sparse in this game and you can fit a character sheet on the back of an envelope. Or on an index card if you're using one just to track inventory. The character sheet is mainly useful for a quick reference guide.

Despite being a class-and-level game, a Torchbearer PC feels more like one from World of Darkness than D&D or your typical rules-light game. You have your basic stats and abilities like health and skills and whatnot, but what's arguably even more important are your various... aspects. Almost everything on your sheet is represented as a single-digit number. Having a starting score of 6 in something is practically munchkinny. A lot of the potential aspects are familiar to players of Other Games, others are not. Let's go down the big list of what makes up a Torchbearer character:

Class: Being OLD-SCHOOL OMG, Torchbearer uses class-as-race. Joy. So you have human clerics, magicians, and warriors along with dwarven adventurers, elven rangers, and halfling burglars. Magic is necessary but won't get you the spotlight, even at high level. And class features are somewhat pants. At any rate, you choose from one of six (or eight if you go to the website for the human thief or human paladin) and then you distribute 8 bonus points between Health and Will if you're a human and pick your weapon and armor if applicable. Everything else is fixed. If you're an elf, everything is fixed. There is no multiclassing and when you level up you choose from a small list of selectable features. In a surprising twist, all classes level up equally. Thank God for small favors.

Parents/Mentor: You need a mentor to train and you can use either to mooch off of in a pinch. Which is in fact necessary, especially for new groups starting out at low level. Mentors are especially important to wizards, whom represent the sole advantage human wizards have in the starting ruleset over elves. Yes, Torchbearer is one of THOSE games. Again, I'd take a drink but, you know.

Enemy: The game specifically keeps them at one level higher than you. They're represented as NPCs that function like any other NPCs except that they have automatic successes against you in argumentation conflicts and the GM is encouraged to use them to dick with you. Figurative dicks, thankfully, so stop that unsightly drooling rapenards.

Alignment: The game has Law, Chaos, and nothing. They do what they do in countless other games. If you're not a cleric, you can generally ignore it. If you are a cleric it can bite you in the ass at certain times, especially with preparing spells.

Belief: This is your abiding philosophy you use to motivate yourself. You act in accordance with your belief, you get a Fate Point. You act or are forced to act against a belief for a good reason, you get a Persona Point. You can't get both in the same session. PROTIP: Persona Points are more valuable than Fate Points. This isn't going to be the last time the game hands out perverse incentives like this. Speaking of which:

Persona/Fate Points: These are a combination of your XP and Edge Dice. Don't worry, spending them won't make you level up any slower. In fact, you have to spend your Persona and Fate Points to level up. Fate Points are what you use to make dice explode, Persona Points are what you use to add things to test. Both are post-hoc.

One good thing about Persona and Fate Points is that you don't need many of them to level up. You need 7 Fate and 6 Persona points earned to get to level 3 and it's eminently possible to average 2 points per session.

Goal: Goals are determined at the beginning of a particular adventure (short-term rather than long-term) and you get points for accomplishing them. The game is vague on what counts as an acceptable goal, claiming that a goal of 'become a king' is too broad and long-term and 'light a torch' is too narrow. You pick the right goal, you get a Persona point at the end of a session. Remember, Persona points determine how fast you level up your character and how often you get to drop a game-changing truthbomb on the game, so be sure to take those DM telepathy lessons.

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Hobbes was thereafter ejected from his Torchbearer group for being a cancer on the hobby and what's worse: a fucking munchkin.


Instinct: Instincts are quirks or habits like 'when camping, always prepare a meal' that give you a free throw of the dice at certain junctures when they're triggered. If the Instinct helps the group, you get rewarded. Because the game is really stingy with time, these are really important to get right.

Traits: These are aspects of your personality, like Quick-Witted and Fiery. To avoid the whole 'I am Batman' problem of traits, Torchbearer cuts you off at the knees by providing its own pregenerated list you must use. Oh, sure, spoil my fun. They're used in two broad ways.

The first is to add bonuses to rolls associated with a trait. A level 1 trait can add one d6 (+1D) to one roll per gaming session. Level 2 grants +1D to all rolls associated with the trait. Level 3 gives +1 to a tied or successful test associated with the trait. The second use of traits is for generating checks against you. You must have checks in order to do shit during the camping phase aside from assisting other people and to test for recovery before going to the town phase. Also, checks are used for Help Checks where you can log a test for advancement for the roll, where if a friend passes you get a pass and if your friend fails you get a fail. Fortunately, you can donate any amount of checks between party members. You earn one check by taking a -1D or two by giving an opponent +2D to a roll against you or resolving a tie in the opponent's favor. You only add one trait per roll in any case.

In a typical Gygaxian twist, traits are not freely selectable upon character creation. You get a free trait from your class. You also get another trait from your hometown (such as if you're from a Religious Bastion, you can choose Defender or Scarred), you can get another trait from depending on how you answer the nature quiz. You (not-so) thankfully can earn traits in play if you roleplay them hard enough dependent on a group vote. They're pretty damn important, especially once you get to level 2 of them, but not as important as:

Nature: This is the closest thing the game has to a God Stat. You preferentially use it for defaulting (since it's not halved), must use it when a skill is penalized to a base score of zero, and pretty much determines if you have an early retirement. It starts out at base rating of 3/3, can go higher depending on how you answer things in CharGen, and can be trained up as normal. You can single-tap it for an action inside your nature to replace the base skill or beginner's luck (no penalty if you win, tax penalty if you use it outside of your nature and win) or double-tap a skill that's within your nature (tax penalty if you lose the roll) to add a bonus of 1-7(!) to the base rating. If you get to something like 0/4 or 0/5, you replace one of your traits with something like Odd, Outcast, Faded, etc. on the stop and your max nature is reduced by one.

If your maximum Nature gets to 0 your character gets retired. If your maximum Nature gets to 7 your character gets retired -- of course, since you can take a permanent penalty to it at any time to increase your current Nature to your new maximum and it's really hard to raise your Nature, there's no reason why you should get too high. You can recover temporary Nature penalties by getting to the winter phase, delivering the prologue for your group, miss a gaming session, or make a lifestyle test upon leaving town.

You pretty much want to have your Nature as high as possible. The one exception is when you're trying to pick up skills; to pick up a skill from scratch, you have to use it a number of times equal to your nature rating. We'll discuss this stupidity more in-depth later. But generally, you want to start out with mediocre but not low Nature skill (3-4) and skill dance until you have the necessary skills.

But on the whole, yes, this means that the more your dwarf acts like a stereotypical fucking dwarf -- the kind of 'roleplaying' that gets mocked in any kind of amateur gaming comic -- the more they're rewarded. The less they act like a dwarf, the more they're punished in crunch situation. This, this friends is when I first thought 'Torchbearer has a pretty cool base engine, but I'd much rather see an adaptation or revision'.

Just so you know, here are the Nature Traits:
Dwarf: Delving, Crafting, and Avenging Grudges
Elf: Singing, Remembering, and Hiding
Halfling: Sneaking, Riddling, and Merrymaking
Human: Boasting, Demanding, and Running

Wises: Wises are narrow supplemental knowledge specialties and function kinda-sorta like them. But are more specialized. Quoting the book: "Wises may be invoked only when their subject is in play. They may not be used to invent information or bullshit the GM." You start out with one or two (dependent on class), can have up to four, and they're not attached to a particular score: so you can have things like Lying-wise or Elven Lore-wise. You can use one in conjunction with a Fate Point to reroll a die that hasn't been rerolled or exploded, spend a persona point to reroll all failed dice, or use it by itself to gain a +1D to a test for yourself or an ally you're not already assisting.

Beginner's Luck: If you don't have an appropriate skill, you're probably fucked. In these cases, you use Beginner's Luck. And these are the most complicated rolls in the game. Quoting the book: "Total up the dice for the ability (ED: Health or Will, depending on the skill), wises, help, supplies, and gear, divide that by half and round up. Then add traits, persona points, tapped Nature, the fresh condition, and any other special or magic bonus die." Unfortunately for your ass, if you want to learn a skill that you don't have, you need to use Beginner's Luck.

Resources: This is your cash, bitches, in dicepool form. You want this as high as possible, obviously. No using Nature with Resources, you cheesy turds. Yes, you can advance Resources like any other skill and it functions really fucking oddly when you do. More than the usual skill advancement stupidity.

Circles: This is your reputation, bitches, in dicepool form. You really want this as high as possible, especially if you plan on using it. Failing Circles rolls causes you to create enemies (who have a +3 autosuccesses on Disposition conflicts against you) that can only be turned on your side with a fuckton of dice. No using Nature with Circles, you ass-grabbing munchkins.

Skills: Okay, these are the meat and potatoes of your Torchbearer character. They're both narrow and pretty broad. For example, the Cartographer skill is specifically 'travel to a named location on your map if you have a light and map and get there without taking time or a test'. The Scout skill is 'A scout is adept at spotting and tracking monsters on the prowl, sneaking behind enemy lines, trailing targets, and finding hidden things. When out on patrol, scouts excel at moving undetected'. Oh hell yes.

Skills also generally need tools to use them. If you don't have the tools, you have to improvise them at a -1D penalty. Similarly, if you don't have the skill at all and want to fake it, unless explicitly contradicted by outside events you don't have the skills and you take the -1D penalty in addition.

Now, here's Torchbearer Major Derp Moment number 2, advancing skills. Let's just quote the game so you can just bask in the stupidity.
Abilities and skills improve during the course of play. On the character sheet, each skill and ability has a series of bubbles to the right of it. One row is listed P, the other is listed F. This stands for pass and fail, respectively.

An ability or skill advances when you pass a number of tests equal to its current rating and fail a number of tests equal to one less than its rating.
AAAARRRRGH. This is just so stupid. I'm not even going to waste your time outlining why this is stupid. Just read this thread starting from here. It's just like... why? Why would you shit on your game by doing this? This has to be the stupidest system of skill advancement seriously proposed in a game. Yes, even more stupid than FATAL. Does it make even a little bit of sense that you have to fail a Resources roll several times in order to advance it? Especially since the GM can introduce a condition that taxes said resource skill? As a small bit of mercy, you can expend treasure to insulate you from the tax and you can still advance it even after being taxed, but still. What a shitload of fuck.

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Yet in Torchbearer, Aeris would never level up her Armorer skill without wearing the hat on her face (Old Skill Level - 1) times in life-threatening situations.


Okay, if I ever play or run in a game, new house rule: we use FATE Core's pyramid system for skills. You pick your skills from CharGen as normal and then add enough points so that your skills form a 45-45-90 triangle. At the end of every adventure, you get one skill point to place wherever. You also get to advance one of Health, Will, or Nature every other occasion you advance a skill. I mean... Jesus.

Inventory: Torchbearer much hypes inventory, especially light sources. This is not idle hype. Inventory works on a slot + container system. You have six inventory locations with a limited number of slots: head (1), neck (1), hands (2 worn, 2 carried), torso (3), belt (weapon, pouch, waterskin), and feet (1). Items take a discrete number of slots and you can bundle some of them together in one slot. Backpacks have six slots for items, penalize your fighting tests, and take up two torso slots. Thankfully, the game doesn't make you devote space to stuff like shovels for digging and cooking pots and writing paper, Only the things that give you bonuses or prevent crippling penalties are tracked. It's fucking weird and metagamey that metagame forces prevent you from ditching your stupid cooking pots for an extra pair of boots, but whatever. You expend items for certain tests and can lose them due to 'twists' from dice contests, which are discussed later. If you want to carry more than this then you need to use the Laborer skill, which can cause bad conditions and twists if you fail tests.

The game has your typical long list of supplies. About as long as 3E D&D. For those of you in the audience who get stiffies discussing the merits of a warhammer versus a mace, Torchbearer tracks item differences.

Magic: Torchbearer uses a pseudo-Vancian system for spells. Every level you get one spell slot, spells take a number of slots equal to its level. You start out with one spell. This sounds pretty bad (and it is) but you level up pretty quickly in Torchbearer, remember. You get to memorize spells every time you have a camp phase, so by level 4 or 5

Prayer works pretty similarly for clerics, but with a TWEEST that makes it either difficult to get the prayers you want or easy. Roll your theologian skill versus 8 - Will (and not deducting your skill for injuried or sick) to get which prayers you want. If you fail, you get a condition and the prayers anyway or the GM chooses for you. Picking too many prayers that oppose your alignment has a high chance of backfiring.

Spells and Prayers in this game aren't that awesome... yet. There are some hints of the game going in the direction of sucking spellcaster cock (such as the Evocation of the Lords of Battle) and spells definitely have some irreplaceable effects, but the gold standard of determining whether you have an unbalanced game (whether you would rather have 2 casters or 3 noncasters of equal nominal level) isn't met in this game.


Anyway, that's most of what a Torchbearer character does, short of magic items. We'll get into the heart and soul of Torchbearer in the next post (Conflicts and Dispositions) and then dissect sketch out the structure of a typical adventure.

To break down the bad things so far in Torchbearer:
  • The skill advancement system is so fucking awful that unless you're okay with players repeatedly breaking the fourth wall in order to level-up their skills you need to ditch it.
  • The game telling you to describe all of your actions in-character. No, just no.
  • Some of the ramifications for what certain character aspects mean aren't apparent until later chapters.
  • The Nature system isn't large enough to cover certain roleplaying traits unless you're okay with every dwarf being like Gimli and every halfling being like Frodo. And because the Nature system hands out very huge bonuses it's not something you can just ignore.
  • The Traits are pretty wildly unbalanced in terms of roleplaying usefulness. Being able to see magical auras can open up a lot more roleplaying hooks than being Skinny or having Rough Hands. Seriously, those are actual traits.
  • The game strongly enforces racial segregation. I know some players are okay or even want this, but the vast majority of modern gamers think that if a player doesn't want to roleplay their dwarf like Gimli, they shouldn't be kicked in the balls for doing so.
  • The game claims that elves are EZ mode. This is an understandable sentiment, but it oversells its usefulness. The advancement traits are good, but by no means dominating -- of course, except for skills and traits, they can completely replace a wizard. At least in the basic level 1-5 rules. Remembering is a ridiculously easy-to-justify Nature trait and one that doesn't force you to roleplay like an obnoxious jackass like humans and dwarves. And of course they have the best starting skills and traits. This kind of elf-fapping is infuriating, but on the whole it's like printing a PHB LA+0 race that, say, gets a 5% experience point bonus.
Thankfully, this is as bad as the game gets. There's still some fuckery involved in future chapters but the worst was in the character creation portion.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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hogarth
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Post by hogarth »

You mentioned "taxes" several times. Is that a bit of Torchbearer game jargon that means a penalty or something?
Lago PARANOIA wrote: This has to be the stupidest system of skill advancement seriously proposed in a game. Yes, even more stupid than FATAL. Does it make even a little bit of sense that you have to fail a Resources roll several times in order to advance it?
The reasoning behind it is fairly obvious: requiring you to succeed at a skill X times before advancing is in order to slow advancement for someone who's a beginner, and requiring you to fail at a skill Y times is in order to slow advancement for someone who's an expert. It certainly seems like a clunky way of doing things, though.
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silva
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Post by silva »

hogarth wrote:The reasoning behind it is fairly obvious: requiring you to succeed at a skill X times before advancing is in order to slow advancement for someone who's a beginner, and requiring you to fail at a skill Y times is in order to slow advancement for someone who's an expert. It certainly seems like a clunky way of doing things, though.
There is another catch, I think: rewarding failures means incentive for players taking more risk, getting out of the safe zone and trying things even if the odds are against them.
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Post by Blicero »

It's weird. Anytime you read any sort of discussion online of a Burning Wheel-derived game, one of the first things that will always be said is "The advancement system in this game is ass. Don't use it."

But the people in charge keep making Burning Wheel-derived games that use Burning Wheel's advancement system. Why is this.
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Post by OgreBattle »

The Nature system seems like something where the player should get to write their own personality traits or choose from a good list.
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Post by Username17 »

The Nature system seems like something that simply shouldn't exist. In fact, I can't really see how most of the things on your character sheet wouldn't be better off not being there. Beliefs and Goals appear to exist only to fuck around with the advancement system, but the advancement system is very bad and should be excised from the game. Alignment is only there to give a handjob to people who haven't gotten an erection since 1978. Wises and Traits aren't seemingly conceptually different from Skills.

As described, this is basically "epicycles" of game design. Why do something elegant and functional when you can staple a new halfassed subsystem on sideways instead?

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Post by silva »

Yup, thats the problem I have with the Burning Wheel family of games. Too much fiddly subsystems with too much small variables to keep track of.

The advancement system is an example of this IMO. BRP/RuneQuest manages to have similar results without all the bookkeeping.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

silva wrote:BRP/RuneQuest manages to have similar results without all the bookkeeping.
:rofl:

silva, this kind of shit is why you're a laughingstock. BRP, the system where you have to keep track of every skill you use, doesn't have 'all the bookkeeping?' I don't know what you're smoking, but could you send a kilo my way?
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Post by Prak »

BRP may be slightly different, but I don't think it is.

In Runequest advancement happens at the end of every session. Everyone gets a number of advancement rolls, plus one if they have a high charisma (I never got that mechanic, but I exploited it every chance I got), and they either spend the rolls then and there, or they say "I'm banking a roll to up my Strength," and put a dot or a tally next to strength.

So while the "you have to have used it in game to advance" seems like it should increase bookkeeping, it really doesn't, because you just think back a few hours.
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Post by silva »

angelfromanotherpin wrote:
silva wrote:BRP/RuneQuest manages to have similar results without all the bookkeeping.
BRP, the system where you have to keep track of every skill you use, doesn't have 'all the bookkeeping?' I don't know what you're smoking, but could you send a kilo my way?
In Burning Wheel you must check a field separately each time you succeed and that you fail at a skill use, and you raise in that skill once 5 succeed checks or 4 failed checks are in place. Its the little Ps and Fs bubbles beside the skills here:
Image
While in BRP/RQ/Pendragon you must check a field just the first time you use a skill, or if you prefer, just ignore the checking and remember what relevant skills you used by the end of session. And the latest edition of RQ even cuts away the checking, like Prak said above: just use 3 advancements per session in whatever skills you want.
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Post by codeGlaze »

As for the title of the thread, I still think OSRR works rather well for doing OSR reviews.
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Post by fectin »

"divide by half"

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Post by Archmage »

codeGlaze wrote:As for the title of the thread, I still think OSRR works rather well for doing OSR reviews.
"FauxSSR" is excellent if you're pronouncing it the way I think you ought to be.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Thanks for the suggestion, Archmage.

Anyway, I'm going to try to get parts 3 and 4 (of 5; I might have a bullshit bonus section that implements some quick-fixes) ready by Thursday, maybeFriday at the latest. Unfortunately, I have a couple of papers that need to be turned in on Wednesday evening and a major test to study for.
hogarth wrote:You mentioned "taxes" several times. Is that a bit of Torchbearer game jargon that means a penalty or something?
Sorry about the confusion. Would you believe that Torchbearer doesn't have a glossary? I feel stupid to just now notice this, but it doesn't. Extremely poor form, Olavsrud and Crane.

Anyway, 'Taxes' are temporary accounting marks to an aspect's nominal rating that you take in order to use it. For example, if you want to use your Nature aspect to avoid some of the harsher Beginner's Luck penalties, you 'tax' it by -1. Things to note about taxes is that if you accumulate enough taxes to equal the original rating Bad Shit happens. Which usually at least means reducing the original score permanently by one point. The other thing to note is that until you have a permanent reduction taxes don't affect the original score. So if you have a Nature Rating of 5, until you get taxed 5 times you will roll five Nature dice. Various game effects allow you to recover taxes.

Yes, it's a really stupid and clunky mechanic, why do you ask?
FrankTrollman wrote:The Nature system seems like something that simply shouldn't exist. In fact, I can't really see how most of the things on your character sheet wouldn't be better off not being there. Beliefs and Goals appear to exist only to fuck around with the advancement system, but the advancement system is very bad and should be excised from the game. Alignment is only there to give a handjob to people who haven't gotten an erection since 1978. Wises and Traits aren't seemingly conceptually different from Skills.
Wises and Traits are supposed to give bonuses to skills instead of replacing them and also function as mini-Edge dice. That is, if your wise is 'Dwarf-Craft Wise' and one of your buddies is trying to decipher the runes on a door of Dwarf Make, they can get a +1 bonus to it. Traits, same deal, though they function more as direct bonuses to tests that you make.

One thing I left out - and hope to get to in the next part - is that assisting other players on their checks is a huge thing in Torchbearer. It's dangerous (because you're drawn into conflicts as well, which is one of the advantages of using Wises instead of direct assistance) but it's really the only way to reliably pass tests.

I'm with you on Nature, though. It's a completely unsalvageable game mechanic. I really don't know what the fuck the author was thinking with it. I guess in Olavsrud's mind OLDSCHOOL ROLEPLAYING FOR REAL MEN meant roleplaying your characters on the level of elementary-schoolers who just got back from the Clone Wars and they were looking to enforce that feeling.

What's worse is that I can't readily think of a way to fix it. A lot of the complaints I have about the game like consequences being too divergent in effect or elf fappery or skill training or the unnecessary split between fate and persona points could be fixed with a page of house rules, but Nature is simultaneously ingrained in the system deeply while not really having a positive function on its own than generating cynical bonuses. I just think that it flat-out needs to go.

Like leveling up your skills through use, it's cargo-cult roleplaying at its finest.
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Post by Mask_De_H »

Faux School System Review is also an option for the title.

E: this is what I get for not refreshing threads.
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Post by Cyberzombie »

FrankTrollman wrote:The Nature system seems like something that simply shouldn't exist.
I get the feeling Torchbearer was written for groups that don't roleplay much at all, so the Nature system is there just to hand out incentives for them to do something, even if they are playing a stereotype. And because this is some OSR high fatality game, you're not going to bother writing a big backstory for your character who may not live more than a few sessions anyway.
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Post by Username17 »

Cyberzombie wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:The Nature system seems like something that simply shouldn't exist.
I get the feeling Torchbearer was written for groups that don't roleplay much at all, so the Nature system is there just to hand out incentives for them to do something, even if they are playing a stereotype. And because this is some OSR high fatality game, you're not going to bother writing a big backstory for your character who may not live more than a few sessions anyway.
Even granting that, why not write up six natures and have people roll a die to see which one they get? If it's going to be stupid and inflexible, why can't it at least vary?

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Post by Cyberzombie »

FrankTrollman wrote: Even granting that, why not write up six natures and have people roll a die to see which one they get? If it's going to be stupid and inflexible, why can't it at least vary?
My guess is because it's written for OSR grognards who are among the most inflexible crowd there is. The moment you take Legolas' personality and attach it to Gimli, they'll all be crying out: "But that's not a dwarf!"

The target audience doesn't want innovation, in fact, they're sick of innovation. The more things are different from the game they played when they were younger, the more they'll hate it. They want nostalgia, and that means embracing those tired old stereotypes. It's supposed to feel like the D&D from the 70s and 80s, where dwarves were Gimli, elves were Legolas and halflings got to choose between Bilbo and Frodo.

Making a game for the "expendable heroes" OSR audience is all about playing it safe. The audience for those games can forgive terrible game design, but the moment something doesn't feel right, like an elf acting like Gimli, they're going to flip out.
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Post by Username17 »

I understand the logic of making every Dwarf play like Gimli and every Halfling play like Bilbo. That's stupid, but I understand. But why is every human character supposed to be played like Sir Robin from Monty Python and the Holy Grail? if you're only going to have one allowed human personality profile, why the fuck would you choose that one?

And beyond that, why is the "Nature" such a clusterfuck of unique game mechanics? Why can't it just be "Here are three bonus traits you get for being a Dwarf?"

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Post by Cyberzombie »

FrankTrollman wrote:I understand the logic of making every Dwarf play like Gimli and every Halfling play like Bilbo. That's stupid, but I understand. But why is every human character supposed to be played like Sir Robin from Monty Python and the Holy Grail? if you're only going to have one allowed human personality profile, why the fuck would you choose that one?
No idea on that one.
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Post by OgreBattle »

So what's the combat like in this game, is it minimal and quick?
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Post by hogarth »

FrankTrollman wrote:I understand the logic of making every Dwarf play like Gimli and every Halfling play like Bilbo. That's stupid, but I understand. But why is every human character supposed to be played like Sir Robin from Monty Python and the Holy Grail? if you're only going to have one allowed human personality profile, why the fuck would you choose that one?
Because Torchbearer is really a board game with just a thin veneer of RPG, so you're not supposed to care about making unique characters any more than you're supposed to make up a compelling back story for the Shoe in Monopoly or Professor Plum in Clue(do).
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Post by codeGlaze »

hogarth wrote:[...] you're not supposed to care about making unique characters any more than you're supposed to make up a compelling back story for the Shoe [...]
Well, shit, that explains a lot...
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Post by Harshax »

*necro-thread*

Was hoping to read more about this game here. I'm 25 pages into the PDF and what I've read is promising so far. While the Tolkien aspects of the original release are problematic for people who don't want to hue too closely to OE, there have been two releases that present several alternative race-classes that open up more unique character types. Yes race-class still appears to be a thing in these supplements. I do not own them.
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