The Gaming Den

Did anyone here have a look at this?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/20 ... aying-game

The (beta) ruleset can be downloaded here:

http://www.songofswords.net/rules


d10 dicepools and weapon TNs - what's the den's opinion about this?

Huh, another Riddle of Steel hack? Looks like they still haven't addressed any of the core issues, though. I'll give it a closer look.

On closer inspection, looks like a moderate improvement over vanilla RoS. More reasonable and flexible chargen, more restraint in weapon variance, uses the BotIT dicepool skills variant, etc etc.

Combat is still excruciatingly slow and over-detailed for my taste, but AFAICT that's always been a selling point for the target audience. The bigger deal(-breaker) is that it's still a dicepool system with varying TNs. They seem to vary less, which helps, but I don't know if it helps enough to make it not a shit-show.

edit: What's weird to me is that they seem to have some idea that varying TNs is bad. Here's some text from the skills section:

Target Number (TN)
The TN for skill tests is 7. It is always 7. No force can change it from 7 to anything else. Anything that suggests that it is possible to change the TN for skill tests to a number other than 7 is a lie. Ignore those anythings.

Sensible. And yet the combat TNs are still all over the place.

Also, they don't seem to understand either how words work or how their dice probabilities work. An Effortless skill task requires 1 hit on the dice, an Easy task requires 2, and a Routine task requires 3 (don't even get me started on the FAT3-style using words to stand in for numerical values). Each die averages .4 hits and the average Human stat is 4, so in order to on average perform a Routine task, a normal guy needs 4 in the skill, which is a significant investment (a low-medium starting PC probably only has 13-16 skill points). But then the examples of Routine difficulty include jumping into the saddle of a moving horse, so maybe it's just bad terminology?

Took a glance through, sure are a lot of weapons listed. I'd prefer a shorter list, like the free early version of Riddle of Steel had sabers, scimitars and dao just use the scimitar rules.

Is there no combat pool penalty for wearing armor? 'Cause being weighed down in metal is scientifically proven to fatigue a person quickly:

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/ ... 25025c8d27

Not for wearing armor specifically, but carrying weight has a pile of different penalties, page 256.

If they're going for ultimate realisms then they need to make weight on limbs contribute to encumbrance more than weight on the torso, and body armor contribute to fatigue instead of only the helmet doing so. The original RoS just simply had a flat Combat Pool penalty for certain pieces of armor, was simple to add up.

Sensible. And yet the combat TNs are still all over the place.

That's just how RoS did difference between weapons. If combat TN's were all the same how would you differentiate weapons from one another?

OgreBattle wrote:That's just how RoS did difference between weapons. If combat TN's were all the same how would you differentiate weapons from one another?

Pool mods.