Review of Swashbuckler!
Swashbuckler! is a minimalist game wrapped around a nifty concept. While the concept (in this case, a fantastic dueling system) is very good, the book supplies more of a clever idea than a complete game.
First, the appearance: Swashbuckler! is a soft-cover book with forty-four pages of game text, two pages of cardboard charts, and two pages containing another chart, a character record sheet, and the chart that serves as the game's Big Idea. The cover shows color sketches of a bunch of (surprise!) swashbucklers with blades and pistols, shown in various poses over a brown field. It certainly leaves no doubt as to what the game is about. The rear page gives a quick blurb about fighting the good fight against the forces of evil and oppression, or some such thing.
The interior art is sparse, although the book is so short this doesn't become a strain on the eyes. All the pictures are black-and-white sketches of pirates (no gentleman soldiers, conquistadors, or highwaymen-just pirates). The art is good, and although it's nothing fantastic (the poses all seem a bit stiff to my admittedly untrained eye), they set the proper mood for a high-seas piratical campaign. I would have preferred to see a few more pictures showing other types of swashbucklers, though.
The text is clean and well-organized, divided into easily-digestible blocks, with short stories and explanations given in boxes or italics. The typographical errors are minimal and do not interfere much with the flow of the text. The only real blunder I could find was in the Combat Skills section, which incorrectly lists the cost of the Riposte skill. There's also the occasional quirk where the apostrophe comes out as an accented letter "i".
So, all in all, the book gets good scores for its appearance. It's nothing exceptional, and doesn't have the slick professional quality of one of the Big Name presses, but it looks pretty good and it's fairly easy to understand, which is more than I can say for many rule books. Now, onto the actual game.
We start with a personal introduction by the designer, in which he describes what he's trying to do with this game-a great courtesy to any reviewer, so kudos to him. The designer, Jim Dietz, asserts that the true element of a swashbuckling system should be the swashbucklers' individual combat styles, and then defines the basic system that was built around this notion: each swashbuckler develops his own style by selecting which of 25 basic maneuvers he knows.
We then get a thoroughly forgettable prologue, a short story that argues for a federal ban on fiction in game books, before moving on to the character creation chapter. Here, we're introduced to the four basic attributes: Bravery, Chivalry, Romance, and Physique. They're all fairly self-explanatory, with a bit of overlap among them, and they fit the genre nicely and are easy to employ. Characters distribute dice between their attributes: a d20 (the best) for one, a d10 for another, a d8 for still another, and a d6 for the last.
We then move onto skills, which are divided into non-combat and combat skills (or, more precisely, non-dueling and dueling skills). You get twenty points to spend on skills. For non-combat skills, each point allows you to roll 1d6 alongside your attribute when making skill checks. So, someone with Physique d10 and three points in Archery would roll 1d10 3d6 when shooting an arrow, attempting to beat a fixed difficulty number.
Non-combat skills include the usual stuff like Bluff and History, as well as non-dueling fighting skills like Archery and Firearms, and some genre skills like Impressive Entrance (depending on the attribute you use, you can rally armies, gain the ear of the court, make the ladies swoon, or terrify the enemy), and Valiant (basically, you can resist more damage whenever you're Fighting the Good Fight). The non-combat skills are well thought-out and work well for the game. I have no problems here.
Now, we get to the combat skills-this is the important part. Basically, you have a whole bunch of swashbuckling skills, like Parry, Slash, Feint, and Lunge. You start out knowing the simple stuff, like Dodge and Punch, but others you need to learn by spending points. By judiciously choosing starting skills, you can create a unique swashbuckler. Heavy bruiser types would know Shoulder Block and Hack, while defensive fencers would know Total Parry and Riposte, for example. Combat skills are divided into three levels, and you often need certain skills on the previous level before getting the more advanced skills. For example, the parry skills have three levels: Hasty Parry, Parry, and Total Parry. You need to know the first two before you get Total Parry.
This system is very impressive. It does a better job than pretty much anything I've ever encountered of giving each warrior a distinct feel and style, and it does so with a minimum of complicated rules.
Next, we get a little chart for character background. It's assumed that the swashbucklers will be playing in the real world, so we get a chart of who hates whom in that era, with all the European nations on a little chart. Presumably this would be quite handy, but I never got a chance to try it. Did you know Holland dislikes Austria?
Next, we get rules for firearms-basically, if you get hit by a pistol, you're probably dead, and if you get hit by a musket, you're definitely dead, unless you get medical attention real fast. However, firearms are dreadfully inaccurate, requiring some skill in Firearms to fire at all (appropriate for the genre, I suppose), and still missing most of the time. Oddly, the attribute used for Firearms seems to have changed from Physique to Bravery in this section.
Archery gets similar treatment, with arrows being a bit less instantly fatal than firearms, but still very dangerous. Whether using bows or firearms, the result is the same: lots and lots of people shooting all over the place, with the occasional very lucky shot dropping someone pretty much instantly. I've never been fond of that sort of low-accuracy, high-mortality combat, but it may work for some, or at least convince the players to make sure that they stick with swords.
Next, it's onto the Melee Combat section, which is the most important part of the game. This is where we get a description of how a battle goes. Basically, it's like this: first, the two swashbucklers involved in a duel simultaneously select which maneuver they're going to perform from the list of maneuvers they know. (I've found that writing your next maneuver down on a piece of paper, with everyone revealing their action at the same time, works quickly and well.)
Next, the two swashbucklers who are attacking one-another check the Big Chart (the game's only real chart), and cross-references their actions, which gives a modifier to the action. For example, a Slash is very effective against a Dodge, granting a 8 bonus, but it's very poor against a Parry, causing a -7 penalty.
Next, the two combatants roll 1d20, and the player (not the GM) modifies his roll. Whoever rolls higher succeeds on his action. If this action causes damage, the hurt character makes a Physique roll. If he rolls higher than the total amount of damage he's received, he can keep fighting. If he rolls lower, he drops.
Finally, and here comes the real thrust (ho ho) of the system: each maneuver only has a limited number of maneuvers that can be performed after it. For example, if you Thrust, you can next make a Hasty Parry or a Slash, while if you make a Riposte, you can then only make a Hasty Parry, Two-hand Hack, or Two-hand Slash. If you want to perform another maneuver, you need to spend a full round in the "Ready" position, which leaves you vulnerable. This produces a wonderful flow to the battles, as players try to guess which maneuvers their foes know, which ones they're likely to use next, and which of their available maneuvers will offer the greatest chance of success. It's truly a thinking man's combat system, with lots of scheming, baiting, and feinting in order to get the edge over the opponent. The combat system is masterfully done, wildly entertaining, and succeeds admirably at simulating the genre of swashbuckling movies.
The combat system provides advice for designing swashbucklers, how to run multi-person combats, and armor. It also provides lists of sample NPCs, from basic ruffians to the King's men, including the abilities they have and, more importantly, which maneuvers they can perform after they perform their maneuvers. Those little charts are a life-saver until you memorize which maneuvers follow which. We also get rules for experience (nothing special here: you get XPs for doing a good job, and skills and attributes cost different numbers of points), and reputation (which, interestingly, is tied to each attribute: you might have a reputation of 4 for Chivalry and 1 for Physique, for example).
Next, it's naval combat rules. They're not complex or realistic, but they're designed to hurry you up and get you into the interesting stuff: the boarding action, with the subsequent heroic sword-duels. This, the system does quite well. The basic idea is that for each PC in the party, there's one opponent of roughly equal skill that they'll have to fight. The crews' battles are described in more abstract or cinematic terms, based on the success or failure of the player characters.
The last bit of rules focuses on magic (don't let the players have it) and faith (if the players play really religious folks, they might get a miracle). Basically, we get two pages that tell us to wing it on the supernatural powers.
Finally, we get a sample adventure that, well, is absolutely not exceptional in any way.
So, there's the book. All in all, it's pretty good. The dueling system is fantastic. Furthermore, the idea behind the dueling system can be adapted to all sorts of things. First, the system uses a d20, which means that it can be adapted to WotC's d20 system. A couple extra rules can create all sorts of fantastic battles for D&D, and you really haven't had a lightsabre battle in d20 Star Wars until you've imported the Swashbuckler! system.
Even better, you can adapt the Swashbuckler! concept to entirely different genres. I've always wanted to run a spacefighter campaign in the vein of Battletech or Macross, but the dreary sameness of the different characters' abilities always bothered me. I just finished an adaptation of Swashbuckler! to a space combat system, that retains the uniqueness of the different characters in an entirely different setting.
Of course, the game isn't entirely perfect. The setting-a sort of bland, generic, morally black-and-white swashbuckling world-doesn't need to be there at all; it provides very little in the way of useful information, and the stories just serve to take up space. Most gamers, I assume, already know what swashbuckling is like, and don't need genre fiction (especially lousy genre fiction) to help them.
Instead, the game would be better served by a bit more detail in the rules. For example, the game never defines what different ranks in a skill mean. What's the difference between 1d6 in Sailing and 7d6 in Sailing? Further, some skills aren't too well-defined. For the life of me, I can't figure out what the Advance combat skill does or why anyone would learn it or use it.
All in all, there's just too much that the GM (that's me, unfortunately) has to figure out on the fly, because there's no information in the rule book. Apparently, you simply can't attempt a combat skill, such as Jab, that you don't have, although I don't think this is ever explicitly stated. There's no list of modifiers for different circumstantial conditions during combat, like higher ground or attacking from behind. While the willingness to ignore different weapon types for the sake of genre simulation is reasonable, there are no rules for handling truly different weapons, like vases, shovels, and ducks. While the game can't be called upon to cover every possible alternative combat style (hey, even I didn't see the duck coming), there's a fine swashbuckling tradition of beating people with wet towels or parrying with hats, and the game doesn't address any of that.
The lack of detail in the rules makes the game feel less like a complete system and more like a clever idea that someone wrapped a game system around. Now, granted, it's a fantastic idea, and it's obviously been playtested-the different fighting styles are well-balanced-but the lack of specific rules puts a distracting burden on the GM whenever someone wants to tackle someone, sneak up on them, fire a gun at melee range, or pull some other unusual stunt that the rules don't really touch upon. However, for what it is, it's fantastic, and for a GM willing to put in a bit of in-game effort into making up rules on the fly, and some out-of-game effort into coming up with an interesting setting for the game to replace the unremarkable default setting, Swashbuckler! can serve as a template for an excellent game.
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