Post originally by Wombat at 2003-06-03 17:52:17
Converted from Phorums BB System

No, I know the bloody outcome of combat is not entirely random.

OTOH, if you put two matched opponents into combat against each other, which will win? Toss up, of course. But in this game, unlike others, there is no second chance -- dead is dead, and death is quite likely as soon as you are wounded, barring two people suddenly agreeing to back down.

I have run about 2 dozen combats using TRoS. I have seen the outcomes. I have not been tempted to run the game as a whole, mainly for the reasons that A) the book was presented to me (as it has been presented to many others) as a set of combat rules with other stuff involved and B) I am running another game quite happily. To this we could add that I cannot stand the base world presented in the book, but that is easy to work around.

I find that magic is incredibly overbalanced (it is easier to master magic than it is to master weaponry), but without the colour of Ars Magica. When magic is added into combat, people die even faster. The combat system also is pretty much horrible for trying to do anything other than matched-pairs combat.

When people talk about "gritty" campaigns, do they really mean PCs dying almost every session? I don't think so. Most people see "gritty" as something like Sharpe's Rifles -- there is a lot of dirt, a lot of moral ambiguity, and people die, but the heroes keep going. If Sharpe were a character in TRoS, he would have died by the second book in the series, unless blind luck aided him (e.g. an obliging gm who constantly fudged combat in his favour).

TRoS is not wildly random, but it is bloody and permanently bloody -- no resurrection, no easy healing, nothing like that. If you are injured, you are hors de combat for a long, long time. If you are dead, you are dead. Heroes will have to weigh each individual combat very heavily to see whether it is really worth it, yet the game is set up in such a way to appeal primarily to people who LIKE combat.

In the end, I find that for my purposes TRoS is best used as a set of one-on-one miniatures duelling rules, rather than as a RPG system.