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Some caveats. The game comes with a pre-packaged setting, mentioned above, Weyth. We didn't play in that. We played in the setting of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice setting. So I can't comment on the setting, really. I gave it short shift on my read. It seems to be competently done, though generic -- one of those "near earth" settings where the serial names on the countries have been filed off to protect the innocent, but its real clear who the Germans are, the Scots, the Russians, etc. Also, I no-one in the group had occasion to play a magician, so, again, while I read the rules and will comment on them briefly I have no experience with them.
Character Creation
TROS uses a system whereby characters priortorize six different categories -- Race and Sorcery (one's race determines if one can use magic), Social Class, Attributes, Skills, Profiencies and Vagaries (combat and knowledge of magic) and Gifts and Flaws. The higher you priortorize a particular category, clearly, the better you are at it. When buying attributes, you get a set number of points to spend on things, one attribute (out of ten) can be at a 7 (out of ten) and the rest can be no higher than 6. The average attribute score is 4.
I'll break it down, simple. By the rules, you can build a character very modestly superior to a normal person. If you make a fightin' type -- and, really, if you're playing TROS you're likely to want to do so -- you're liable to be in for a bit of a disappointment. Because pretty much every ability score is used in combat, fighting characters tend to distribute their numbers very evenly -- so nothing really stands out. A non-fighting character can specialize much, much more and stands out more vis-a-vis the fighting characters. Due to the lethality of the combat system, fighting doesn't actually seem to happen very much, but I'll get to that in a bit.
When you priortorize your skills, you set how well you know whatever skills you have. Each character picks two skill packages (or they can pick the same one twice if they want to be really good at it), each of which has about ten skills. The skills are pretty unremarkable, as a lot, the sort of thing one would expect by and large.
You also give yourself spiritual attributes, but they're sufficiently important to the game that they'll get a section all on their own.
Basics of the Mechanics
TROS is a dice pool game, using 10-sided dice rolling against "target numbers" -- each die you roll that meets or exceeds the target number is a success. Most of us are familiar, at least in passing, with this sort of system.
Skills are handled differently than combat. The dice pool for skills are equal to whatever attribute is relevant, at the time, for that skill. The target number, or TN, is set initially by what your priorities were during combat creation. Hard tasks get dice removed from your pool and if that leaves you with none, well, tough, you can't do it.
Skills can also be opposed by other skills or by raw attribute checks (in which case the TN is set by the GM -- or "Seneschal" in the TROS jargon). In resisted rolls, your opponent's successes are subtracted from your successes; if your successes are reduced to less than 1, you fail. Again, most of us will be familiar with this.
Combat (and spells, for that matter) are handled differently. For combat, you derive several abilities such as reflex, aim, knockout, etc. During character creation, you are given a certain number of points to increase your combat skills (called proficiencies to distinguish them from non-combat skills) that are added to your reflex in the case of melee proficiencies and aim in the case of ranged proficiencies. Spells are basically the same way -- you add a certain number of points to those derived characteristics for sorcery in a variety of areas to generate what sort of magic your character can do and how well.
Combat
Combat, particularly melee combat, is at the heart of TROS, so I'll talk a bit about it in particular. The designers of the game are clearly exceptionally, inordinately proud of their system, and actually seem to think it is realistic insofar as these things go. They even got the Association for Renaissance Martial Arts to put its stamp on the book.
Which is about right. It has about the same relationship to modeling a real fight as martial arts do to modeling a street brawl. There is a certain element of stylistic cleanliness that, for me, fails pretty specatcularly to capture the real crunch, blood and sweat of a fight. In my opinion, despite trying very hard to be realistic, it comes off as cinematic with everything neat and carefully discrete.
The mechanics of fighting are reasonably simple. First, if there is time, one chooses a stance -- aggressive or defensive. Second, characters decide, independently, whether their characters are going to attack or defend. If both characters defend, they circle and next round they declare, again independently, whether they're going to attack or defend. If both attack, they roll off on their Agility attribute to determine who goes first -- and the person who wins can't defend, and thus usually dies. (There are also fairly complex rules for "stealing" the initiative from someone in that situation if you loose the Reflex toss off.) If one person attacks and one defends, the attacker has the iniative.
Each turn of combat is divided into two phases. In the first phase, the person with the initiative publicly shows how many dice out of his combat pool he is going to attack with. Then the defender decides how many dice out of his combat pool he's going to defend with. Some things modify your combat pool, such as your stance initially, or wounds. The individual weapon determines one's attack target number or defensive target number. Then the attacker declares what part of the person's body he attacks -- in general terms, such as downward slash to the head, or diagonal slash to the shoulder, or thrust to the chest -- and whether the attack is a swing or thrust (each having a different set of places it is possible to attack). Then both sides roll a contest, the attackers dice against the defenders. If the defender wins, he blocks, parries or dodges the attack (depending on what, precisely, they did) and steals initiative. If its a tie, the defender defends but the attacker retains initiative. If the attacker wins, he hits, and does an amount of damage equal to strength plus weapon modifiers (unsurprisingly bigger weapons tend to do greater damage) plus the amount of successes they get in excess of the defender -- so the more successes you get the harder one hits. In such cases, the attacker also keeps initiative, allowing them to attack again. Then the attacker rolls a d6 to find out where PRECISELY in the general location the hit lands, and then damage is calculated to that area by subtracting the person's toughness (an ability you can get) and armor values for that location. Then you consult a chart to see what the precise effects of the wound are.
They brag a lot about how there game has no hit points. It doesn't. So each and every wound you recieve you note. This is cumbersome, but you rarely have to note many wounds -- TROS is not kind to combatants. Combats tend to end swiftly.
Part of each wound is a shock value, applied immediately, a pain value that is ongoing and a blood loss value. At the beginning of each turn, you make a roll against health, and if you fail, you loose a point of endurance. At 0 endurance you bleed out and die. This is rarely an issue, I should note. Most people die more directly before they bleed to death.
Then you basically do the same thing over for the second phase of the combat, using the remaining dice in your pool. The attacker attacks, and the defender defends. After the end of the second phase, its a new turn, combat pools "regenerate", are modified for wounds and such, and the person with the initiative attacks.
It's pretty slow, even in its most basic form. But everyone can do manuevers, which complicates combat even more.
The combat is actually quite deadly, too. To some people the lethality of the combat is good. For me, it is not. Because the characters are so mediocre to start, and combat is so deadly, every combat holds the very real possibility of death or dismemberment. The justification is that the lethality of the combat makes it all the more tense when combat does occur. This is true. On the other hand, it is so deadly that it is hard to maintain a reasonably stable in-character cast if anyone dares to play an aggressive character -- eventually they'll come into a attack-attack situation and loose the toss off and die. Its the way the rules are written. Maybe the rules would work if the starting characters weren't total wimps, but they effectively are very mediocre characters.
Reinforcing the "martial arts realism" is also that strength doesn't help to penetrate parries or blocks, which would be realistic -- its a pet peeve of mine, perhaps, but when the book goes to such lengths to promote itself as the most realistic fighting RPG ever I think its fair to demand a lot. The game is also wholly unprepared to handle dirty tricks, by and large -- which, again, given the purported realism of the game I would have liked to have seen. All in all, it promotes a very sterile view of realism in my view, with people performing classroom exercises against each other and lacking the visceral impact, the crunch of bone and tear of flesh, I would like to see in a "realistic" combat system. It is also slow, which in my mind makes it seem more abstract. You don't really get caught up in the drama of the fight because you're always busy counting numbers, reviewing tables and the like. The combat system is, to me, merely adequate.
Spiritual Attributes
After the combat, or perhaps before the combat, the part of TROS that gets the most buzz are spiritual attributes. I've got to say they look good on paper. For the uninitiated, spiritual attributes are ratings of largely psychological or unquantifiable elements that define a vivid character. They are conscience (one's attachment to morality), destiny (special things fate has in store for the character), drives (the person possesses a cause for which they would die), faith (believe in a religion), luck and passions (specifically love, hate and loyalty). They are numbered from 0 to 5. By and large, when a character risks something in the service of a spiritual attribute, they get to add their numerical rating in dice to the pool they're using for the duration the situation. If more than one spiritual attribute applies, you can add 'em all up -- it is technically possible to get huge dice pools this way. Additionally, doing risky things in the service of your spiritual attributes increases the value of the spiritual attribute. Lastly, to improve your character you "buy down" your spiritual attributes -- so they also serve as the experience point system.
It sounds really cool. You select certain elements (and you can change them pretty freely between game sessions, I should add -- you're not really stuck with anything for very long) and if you play them to the hilt you will succeed more often and get lots of experience. What's not to love!
Well . . . they're basically unplayable in my experience. The game I was in was quite small, only two players, but in roughly the half the sessions that were played neither character was able to activate a spiritual attribute because to do so would basically mean highjacking the scene and possibly the game from the GM. In short, in my experience, spiritual attributes encourage prima donna behavior, players selfishly trying to fulfill their character's spiritual attributes because if you don't . . . well, you can't succeed in very much and you don't improve in anything. So much of the game is functionally centered around spiritual attributes if you try to ignore them the game basically becomes unplayable. And since I do believe that system matters, this was a fairly bitter pill for me to swallow. (I also want to point out that my GM is very talented and very experienced. He was not the problem.) In my opinion, outside of solo role-play, a GM would not be able to design adventures for a group of players unless they had extremely similiar and compatible spiritual attributes (which in my experience is very, very rare, and basically impossible in groups bigger than about three players), and if a player tried to play the game as written they would either have to have a GM that was extremely permissive about the definition of spiritual attributes -- to the extent where any situation even tangentially or superficially related to a spiritual attribute would be enough to activate it, thus really diluting the impact of them in a role-playing sense, in my opinion -- or the player would basically have to be stealing the spotlight at every opportunity. While spiritual attributes look good on paper, in actual play I found myself being underwhelmed.
Setting and Sorcery
I can't really say too much about either. I gave fairly cursory reads to both sections because I knew that we wouldn't be using the setting and I didn't care about sorcery.
In any event, the setting appears competent. It's one of those earths given a paint job to cover the details with some magic thrown in. Its very standard looking, but probably quite good at what it does.
The magic is as involved and roughly as difficult as the combat, it seems. However, while the combat is reasonably generic and could be used for pretty much any High Middle Ages or early Renaissance sort of combat -- it'd be easy to enough to add firearms, too -- the magic is highly specific for the setting. You see, casting spells ages characters. When a person casts a spell, they basically divide their pool into dice for causing the effect and dice for holding back the aging. The effects of the magic can, even from the get go, be quite dramatically power if the player is basically willing to age their character at a hyper-accelerated rate. There is very little in the way of balance, furthermore, between magic and characters who specialize in skills or fighting. However, given the whole aging aspect of spellcasting, the magic system feels a lot less "portable" than the rest of the rules.
The Physical Properties of the Book, Editing, Art and Writing
The book itself is sturdy looking and I've had no problem with it. It looks like its well enough made to serve many years worth of hard use and hold up very well. The cover art is OK, though somewhat inscrutible. The book itself is all black and white, and the interior art ranges from the pretty okay to the really horrible. The book also could have stood to have an editor go over it again, there are several small grammatical problems, but nothing that interferes with comprehension.
The writing of the book is generally quite competent. However, often the game takes a condescending tone about how other games are designed and the players of other games -- obviously meaning D&D and similiar games. I found this to be pretty juvenile and quite jarring. Its good that they think their game is the neatest thing since sliced bread, but to put their arrogant and high-handed gamer snobbering into the game I felt to be pretty low-class.
Likewise, sometimes they work pretty hard to remind you how incredibly cool and realistic their combat system is compared to anyone else's. That sort of self-aggrandizement always aggravates me, and the book could do without it.
However, it is also very clear that this game is a labor of love. That Norwood really cares about the game, and gaming in general. He's passionate and that shows through and can be very inspiring. The game also "feels" real. It feels like it was made by real gamers who really play games, instead of being made by a bunch of guys in a studio who barely ever touch games anymore because they're burned out from working in the industry. Norwood and company are the real deal, and if for nothing else I give them a hearty salute.
Support and Such
Another place Driftwood really shines is the support they give. Their website is reasonably up to date, provides a lot of nifty things -- including teasers of the rules and such -- and when I needed to contact them about a rules question they were friendly and informative. Top marks, here.
Concluding
I really wanted to like this game more than I did. And I don't dislike it. Its a competently written role-playing game, and its obviously a passion to Norwood and company. It has a fair number of interesting innovations, such as the way initiative works that does manage to capture some of the feel of a flow of a fight, and spiritual attributes which I regard as an ambitious experiment that just barely failed. However, the centerpiece of the game is combat -- and starting characters aren't really up to the task of doing it, and tend to avoid it, so it dissatisfies that way; as well as the combat being slow to work through distracting from drama of the scenes save in a very technical sense ("will the blow kill my character?"). So given that I found spiritual attributes basically impossible to use and combat so risky to engage in that players either avoided it or have to make a lot of characters hoping for one that chances to survive until they become powerful, the game left a vaguely unsatified and disappointed feeling inside of me.
Clearly, however, other people manage to overcome what got in my way and have a lot of fun with the game. I wish I could have managed to do it, myself. I really wanted to like this game more than I did.
