Post originally by Ralph Mazza at 2004-01-26 11:56:41
Converted from Phorums BB System
1) Your comment on the the priorities regarding the knights is actually one that I have made myself. But what it comes down to is this. What is the game really about? The game is about choices and consequences. At the end of the day EVERY THING in TROS is about choices and consequences. SAs, Magic, combat...everything. This includes character generation.
So, while I agree with you that I find the idea of spending a high priority on Social Class to violate a degree of simulationist sensibility, that in effect what the system does is force the player to make a choice that has a consequence. The entire system works towards this..."what are you willing to do to demonstrate your Passion", "what are you willing to die/kill for", "what are you willing to Age for". The Character Generation asks "what are you willing to sacrifice to make a nobleman"
Its NOT a universal character generator in the sense that every member of society could be created using those rules. In Wyerth society to be sure, the nobles are healthier and better educated. Its a system aimed specifically at the players for a specific purpose. A purpose which it fulfills nicely.
2) Your comments on the combat system are pretty incomprehensible to me. You suggest what appealed to you was a quest for realism in combat, and yet you then indicate your disappointment that you can’t do a retreating fight up the stairs…a hollywood staple with little realistic connotation to it.
I think what you’re looking for is something that allows for one side to sieze and maintain the momentum in combat throwing attacks at an overmatched opponent who is forced to give way or be cut down. In practice this is VERY easy and common in TROS.
First you have to remember that the idea of a parry as defined as blocking an opponents weapon with your own is completely unrealistic. Fighting manuals refer to this type of maneuver as what “poor” fighters do. Therefor the visual you have of 1 side attack, attack, attacking while the other blocks, blocks, blocks…is not a realistic one. Both sides will be exchanging blows quite fluidly…even the over matched one.
Quality will tell, however, with the system. It is quite possible and desireable to attempt to sieze an advantage and continue to exploit it. In game terms this means being able to throw more dice at your opponent than he can throw against you. There are a variety of moves and dice allocation strategies in the combat that work to keep your opponent “dice starved” and thus unable to launch an effective offensive against you. There are also a variety of moves and strategies that allow him to turn the tables and sieze the offensive from you.
What you have to note is that being on the “offensive” does not mean you are the sole person attacking. If you are launching serious attacks against your opponent and the best he can do is respond with feeble attacks, then you are on the offensive as you envision.
The ability to “fall back” before a superior opponent (such as retreating up a stair if such a dramatic flair appeals to you) is handled superbly by the Full Evade. The Full Evade allows you to get a very powerful defence that if successful resets the combat back to initial engagement parameters (effectively eliminating the attackers built up advantage) in exchange for giving ground (if such ground is available to give).
So I don’t think your conclusions in this section are at all accurate.
3) As for monsters, I find your comments to be borderline ridiculous in all honesty. You wanted to explore combat that’s more realistic…and then your big beef is you can’t fight beholders… The assumption that in order to have a fantasy game you need to have monsters is so absurd that I can only conclude it comes from playing way too much D&D.
Here’s the thing about monsters in D&D. D&D needs them. The D&D combat system (in any edition) is fairly tactically stale. The primary source of maintaining interest for combat is varying the opponent. Only by varying the opponent do you have to vary your tactics. Only when the next enemy has different offensive and defensive capabilities than your last one is the combat interesting. What spells can you use to get an edge, how much damage can the thing dish out in a single blow to indicate whether your second line fighters can risk engaging it, does it have area effect or other special attacks, etc. These are the factors that must be understood and juggled and which make D&D combat interesting. D&D obtains the variety it needs to maintain this interest by varying the monsters. D&D CAN get this variety by using NPC characters as opponents, but character creation for high level characters in D&D is so complicated that its easier to mix and match a group of monsterous opponents than generate a group of character class opponents.
TROS doesn’t require monsters to get this level of interest in combat. Fighting a lightly armored guy with a cut and thrust sword and a shield is about as different tactically from fighting a heavily armored guy with a great sword as fighting different monster types is in D&D. Substitute a long spear for a sword and with that simple change you’ve altered the entire tenor of the combat all over again. Different moves, different tactics, different dice allocation strategies, all of the things that make combat tactically challenging can be had simply by using different stock human combatants. You don’t need magic, magic items, or monsters to achieve this.
This leaves us with using monsters because there is a particular desire to use the monster itself as a key part of the setting (as opposed to just a way to mix things up, which is the usual purpose for throwing new monsters at a party). For this TROS works quite well. The idea that you somehow need different charts and tables to reflect different monsters is somewhat silly. The tables have some flavor text to them, but that is just that…flavor. The actual mechanical effects of blood loss, shock, and pain apply whether you’re fighting a man or a beast.
One can easily model monsters simply by looking at the TROS maneuvers. Take a Blink Dog which can blink and teleport around. How easy is that to model simply by giving the dog the Duck and Weave maneuver at a better target number and the ability to make Terrain Rolls with free dice. Done and Done. Undead…easy, they don’t suffer blood loss or shock or pain. They ain’t going down then without being completely hacked to pieces…damn dangerous. You’d be hard put to come up with a monster type that you couldn’t model easily in TROS.
Would it take some forethought and effort…yes. BUT since you aren’t throwing monsters at the party from some wandering monster table but because they are an important feature of the setting and events of the game…it just falls into the category of standard GM prep. In D&D its expected that the DM learn the monsters capabilities and how they’ll work in a combat before using one (for good DMs) this is no different.
4) You ask “How do you write a successful adventure where your players have SAs that are totally contradictory? Example: If one player picks an SA that leads him to the south, and another player chooses an SA that leads him to the north, realistically, the two will part rather quickly to fulfill their dreams or destiny. You can imagine what trouble a party of five can cause to your adventure design schemes! To further complicate matters, the players can change their SAs at (nearly) any time. So, even if you design the adventure around the players’ SAs, they will change, and ruin it for you.”
This is an example of an extremely backward way to plan TROS adventures. The very notion of “your adventure design schemes” is a foreign concept to good TROS game design. How do you write a successful adventure? First you create your characters collectively in a group. This ensures that every player is fired up about every other player’s character in the session. You DO NOT allow your players to just show up with a completed character and say “lets play”. No. That’s a pretty poor way to plan any RPG session (an all too common one) but it absolutely won’t work in TROS.
You as GM come to the table with a situation in mind. A city, a manor, a small county or shire and an idea of what is going on there. Not a plot per se, just who the important NPCs in the area are, and what they’re up to. The players design characters that fit within this framework. They simply WON’T decide to have 1 go north and 1 go south, because they are working together to fill in a group of characters who have ties to the particularly slice of the world you’ve set the campaign in.
It really is that simple, and NO it doesn’t involve “off the cuff” play to any great extent. It does involve giving up the crutch of “If then” scenario design, but that’s not the same thing.
5) As far as the answer to the Riddle goes…it is very obvious. The entire game exudes the answer to the Riddle from virtually every page. Is it specifically spelled out for you? Can you turn to page 210 and read the answer key? No. Forgive me if I sound harsh here, but if you need the answer to the Riddle spelled out for you…you aren’t going to get it, even if it was.
What is worth dieing for, what is worth killing for, what is worth sacrificing for. Play the game, and as you answer these questions for your character, your character will be answering the Riddle for himself.
In conclusion. I really think your review represents only the most superficial of attempts to even understand the system and is thus fairly useless as a review. Your issues on combat and magic suggest that you have only a vague half formed notion of how the game actually plays. There is only so much you can glean from reading the mechanics. The mechanics are so far outside of the normal mode of IgoUgo attack and damage mechanics of most games (like d20) that they cannot be understood using the same logic as applied to other systems. You have to really experience the play of the combat system in order to appreciate the nuances. You’d be hard put to come up with a tactical situation that TroS doesn’t cover well. It just may not be where you’re looking for it.
Post originally by Ralph Mazza at 2004-01-26 12:57:26
Converted from Phorums BB System
Scuse Me?
Opinions should be based on facts.
In this case the facts cited by the reviewer were incorrect and showed a complete lack of understanding of basic game mechanics.
For instance. The review says
"While you are defending, you cannot attack, and vice-versa. This was another disappointment for me. You could never reenact a classic sword fight, ala Robin Hood, or Highlander. Why? Well, either you hit someone or you don’t. If you hit, you win the round, and can continue again next exchange. If you miss, your opponent will win the round, and you will automatically be sent on the defensive. What the combat really needed badly was a way to reflect someone forcing their opponent back as he parries his attacks. A sword fight up a staircase can never occur, in other words. Which is too bad, because this system raved about how realistic it was. I guess it never said it was playable."
This is factually incorrect.
1)There are ways to attack while defending.
2)the idea that if you fail on an attack you're sent on the defensive is misleading to the point of being factually wrong. Who is technically designated the "attacker" and who the "defender" for puposes of rolling the dice does not necessarily say anything about who is in control of the flow of the combat. Yes, I may "miss" an attack and be put on "defense" but I may still well be in control of the fight and overall be the aggressor with the advantage. A point which I made at some length above. That the reviewer does not know this suggests quite strongly he hasn't played enough to realize this is the case, as it is not immediately obvious from simply reading the mechanics.
3) A sword fight up the stairs can in fact occure very easily. While I've never actually used "up the stairs" I have seen numerous combats where an overmatched defender gave ground before an aggressive enemy while either waiting for help or waiting for an opportunity to Counter. This is handled beautifully with the Full Evasion manuever. Another area where the reviewer is simply flat out incorrect in his claim.
If he doesn't like the game, he doesn't like the game. But if he is going to put completely incorrect statements about the game into a review then I am going to A) call him out on them, and B) correct the misstatement so that others don't mistake them for being right.
There is a difference between having an opinion and simply being wrong.
Post originally by Seanchai at 2004-01-26 13:09:29
Converted from Phorums BB System
>>There is only so much you can glean from reading the mechanics. The mechanics are so far outside of the normal mode of IgoUgo attack and damage mechanics of most games (like d20) that they cannot be understood using the same logic as applied to other systems. You have to really experience the play of the combat system in order to appreciate the nuances.<<
Post originally by Ralph Mazza at 2004-01-26 13:28:06
Converted from Phorums BB System
Not sure what you mean by *those*, Seanchai.
My point is that there is a certain combat paradigm that started with D&D and has trickled through with variations through the majority of game designs. That being: Determine Initiative, Roll to hit, Roll for damage, continue to next combatant in initiative order (with variations being primarily on how initiative order is set, or adding a Roll for Defense, etc.)
TROS definitely breaks that mold. This *is* immediately obvious from reading the text. However, the various implications of that are not. The text will tell you to allocate dice from your combat pool to an exchange. It doesn't tell you the nuances of that choice or when allocating alot of dice in the first exchange is a good idea and when it isn't, etc.
There are alot of player controled tactics to the system and since the system isn't based on the normal IGO UGO system that most are familiar with, it does take some familiarity to adjust ones thinking.
It is clear that in this review, the reviewer had not done this, because most of his statements about how combat works are wrong. They are clearly statements about how he *thinks* they would work from having read them (and maybe played a couple quick engagements) but they are not true in actual play.
Post originally by Buzz at 2004-01-26 13:29:03
Converted from Phorums BB System
If we could leave aside the Forge-esque gushing and the D&D-bashing for just a moment...
Is it true that the combat system presented in the book isn't set up to handle more than two man-sized combatants? US$34.95 and 463 pages, and we can only do two man-sized combatants?
Forget whether you need monsters for good fantasy... what happens when my four exiled nobles meet up with a band of six bandits? Does everybody pair off and then the two remaining bandits wait in the wings?
This would seem like a ginormous deal-breaker to me.
Post originally by Buzz at 2004-01-26 13:32:40
Converted from Phorums BB System
Ralph Mazza wrote:
-------------------------------
<b>They are clearly statements about how he *thinks* they would work from having read them (and maybe played a couple quick engagements) but they are not true in actual play.</b>
I'm not sure I see how playing through some combats is not "actual play." The combat is the same, it's just happening outside the context of a campaign.
Post originally by baumi at 2004-01-26 13:40:20
Converted from Phorums BB System
Last game my two players (and one NPC played by a third player) fighted against 11 Bandits. This wasn't planned (they should have talked not fighted) but they had some good strategies and they survived it with only small wounds. Most of the Bandits died, a few were out of order and two or three fleed ...
All in all it was a big moment for everyone (because they survived because of tactis and not of luck) and it took no longer than most other RPG's out there. It is important to remember that if 11 fight against 2 that only four or five of the bandits can actually attack because of all the movement, tricks and moral issues (shooting into melee?).
Linear Mode
