First, let me tell you a little about myself, so you can know where I’m coming from. I’ve spent a good deal of my time playing the d20 system (and it’s predecessors), but found the system lacking in the realism department. I’m played plenty of other games such as GURPS and Hero, only to find them to be difficult to run, because they’re simply frameworks for systems, not systems themselves (there’s too much work needed on the GM’s part in my view). So here came The Riddle of Steel (TROS). TROS seemed to have plenty of realism, and yet, had plenty of background information for the GM (referred to as a seneschal in the book, but I’m lazy, so GM will be used here) to pick up and use immediately. So, I bought the book, play-tested it for a few months, and here’s what I think of the system.
The first thing about the book that turned me off a little was the artwork. The artwork was very inconsistent. Some pieces were great, and others were like a child’s drawing. The cover itself is nothing to brag about, and is very non-descriptive in regards to telling us anything about the game, so I should have expected this, but it was still a disappointment. I try not to judge games by their art or their covers, but game designers need to realize that the artwork you have in your book will either draw people into the game, and make their imaginations go wild, or it will turn them off from your book or do nothing for them. So the artwork for a game, in my opinion, is important in creating the feel for the setting and game. But, if the rest of the book was excellent, I could have forgiven that.
The dice mechanism in this game is something I liked. I will admit right away that I like the d10 die, and this game has you rolling a lot of them. This can be good or bad, depending. I, personally, liked the idea of rolling 12d10 in combat situations - it was excited. But, it did slow combat a tad, and for those people that don’t like rolling a lot of dice, this will be a drawback. But regardless, the system is fairly quick to learn. Basically, you are rolling a number of d10 equal to your attribute, trying to roll over a target number. Nothing original, but it was still fun.
Initially, I was really excited about the character creation system. It allowed for a lot of flexibility on the player’s part, yet kept them from creating unrealistic characters. It makes you make well-rounded characters, the hope of all games, yet gives you plenty of choices to make him your very own, without forcing you into ridgid classes. I liked that idea. But something occurred to me after making a couple of characters, and helping my players make theirs. One player of mine noticed a huge flaw, and after that, I couldn’t view it as a viable creation system anymore. Here’s why. As you create your character, you must assign priorities to various aspects of him or her, including race, attributes, social status, etc. using letters from A to F. This is fine and dandy, but what this means is that the knight, who must take at least a B in social class, will be less educated, have fewer attribute points, fewer advantages, and be worse in combat (combat skills are separate from other skills - I’m not sure why) than the slave! It’s true. If you make a slave, his attributes will be higher, he’ll have more skills at lower (better) levels, and can have a cool advantage or two to boot. For a system that brags how realistic it is, this seemed rather funny to me. And there’s not a thing a GM can do to fix this, except force everyone to be the same social class (noble), which isn’t good either.
The combat system was the meat of the book, and the reason why I looked into buying this game. To be fair, there is a lot that I like about it. It’s very detailed, which I love. It seemed to take into account a lot of detail normally ignored by other games, yet was smooth and fast. So how does it work? Well, first, the two opponents determine initiative by rolling a d6 die, and depending on which color you throw, that determines what action you are taking. If you choose a white die to toss, then you are defending this turn. If you throw a red one, you are attacking. The amount you rolled is irrelevant. Now, here’s a part that I had to question. If you both roll a white die, you just size each other up a bit. After *four* rounds of this, you are allowed to coax your opponent into attacking first by basically ridiculing him. First, I’m thinking - “shouldn’t this just be role-played out? I mean, why do I need to roll dice for four turns to see if the orc will attack or not?” Also, if both players roll a red die, they both attack, and it’s very deadly. But let’s assume that one attacks and one defends. Great. Now, as an attacker, I can attempt one of a variety of maneuvers to perform during that round, which I thought was very well done. The defender can choose a number of defensive maneuvers, to match, which was also well done. 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. Anyway, the other thing that turned me off about it was that combat was extremely deadly, meaning that basically, the first one to hit won the fight, in almost every case. This was what the designers intended, I’m sure, but in my opinion, I would have preferred a more heroic combat system. Something detailed and leaning toward realism, yet, playable and exciting, and allow you perform heroic feats. Everybody wants to be Aragorn, Legolas, the Highlander, etc. not some schmoe that gets his ass killed in the first fight by some lame bandit. But this is just a personal preference of mine. If bloody, gory, extremely gritty realistic combat is what you’re after, this is the system for you. Though it’s not perfect, and there’s plenty of room for improvement, it shows a lot of effort on the designers’ parts. I knew it was realistic when I bought it, I just was hoping it was a little more forgiving. Again, it was mostly the lack of a true sword fight that disappointed me. After a test session, and a few combats, the players avoided combat like the plague. I’ve read other reviews that mention similar lines. My group made snide remarks if they encountered a dog, or a child, or some similarly weak creature such as “Look out! It’s got teeth! Run!” or “That 2 year old could have a knife! Be careful!” Basically, if your group likes combat, they may not like this game, because they won’t want to do it here. Which is ironic, considering this is what the game is selling itself on. I think of the combat system in this game now as a Ferrari in a glass garage. It looks cool and moves fast, but isn’t that comfortable to sit in, and you never, ever want to drive it.
But that’s not my only beef with it, either. The game is primarily set up to have one on one, man vs. man type of fights. It is not meant for your party to fight a troll, a giant, a dragon, a beholder, or any other beast. Why? Well, for starters, the system assumes that you are fighting one man, and only man, and that this man is a humanoid the size of a human. There are no rules to fight halfings, for example. There are no rules for fighting a wild boar, a cougar, a small child, etc. (though some of these would be easy to figure out). If you plan on running an adventure that is more historical that heroic, this should work fine. If, though, you are planning on running a game with any fantasy elements, and I don’t even mean high fantasy, either, I would seriously consider skipping over this book and playing something else. Supposedly, the second book released by this company has more tables for fighting other types of beasts, which is good, but to me, this should have been given in the core book, and I refused to cash out any more dough to this company to find out.
Moving on, this game does have a very unique aspect to it that many of you will like. It’s called Spiritual Attributes. Basically, when your character is created, you must choose a number of SAs. These can be things such as Drive, Faith, Destiny, Passion, etc. They are very specific, such as a Passion for Jane, or Destiny to be king. Whenever that SA comes into play in the game, you may add those dice to any rolls you make. This is a really nice feature, because it means that what is important to you in life will aid you when it matters most. This is also the only way your character can advance, by following his goals and beliefs. This is a revolutionary concept in gaming. I can’t think of another game that has done this before. The problem with the SAs is that apparently, nobody knows how to use them exactly. Not even the game’s creator (I found two posts by him that completely contradict one another). I’ve read a number of posts in the forums on Driftwood’s site, and so far, I’ve come up with three different answers to a simple question (and I’m not sure any of them were correct): 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. The only way to run this game successfully, apparently, is to have some generally vague ideas for a story, and run it on the cuff, meaning, plan nothing. This was suggested a few times on Driftwood’s forums, making me think that those GMs came to the same conclusion I did. But to me, this is an awful lot to ask of a GM. This process could use some serious fine-tuning. I like the idea of the SAs, but a more proper use for them is required. Further, if the adventure did not include a character’s SAs at all, he got no experience points. While this makes sense logically, it is not very playable. Game designers take note of this review - realism *must* make way for playability.
Let’s move on to magic. Magic is important in any fantasy campaign, save for the most historical. The magic system in this game appeared to me to be an afterthought, one they threw in because they “needed it in a fantasy setting”. It’s really terrible. The sorcerers are so powerful in the game, they are akin to gods. Playing with a sorcerer is like playing Champions, only everyone makes a 50 pt normal, while the sorcerer makes a 250 pt superhero. Or, even better, everyone makes a 1st level fighter, except for Johnny who can make a 10th level wizard, in a D&D game. I'm not joking. The designers did this on purpose, but to me, I think that no matter how they thought it was a good idea, and possibly even realistic, they didn’t consider (or rather, they probably just ignored) the playability factor (again). Does anyone want to play Pippin the hobbit while I play Gandalf the wizard x10? I didn’t think so. But let’s by pass this for the moment. The magick system works basically like this. Sorcerers can make up their spells on the fly. They can do anything they wish to do (anything the player can imagine), as long as they have the proper vagaries (fields of magic). So, if someone put even a medium amount of points toward being a mage, they can destroy entire civilizations with a thought. And the funny thing is, that even the weakest mage can wreck havoc around him. Mages are apparently gods from the get go - there’s no learning curve here. I found this unrealistic and ironic, also. Every mage is a Beethoven, I suppose, being able to casts spells at age 4, and moving up from there. This is supposedly countered with the fact that whenever you cast a spell, your character can age a few months (maybe they really do start at age 4!). That’s not much of a deterrent in my mind. The "weak" spells can still summon incredible power, and the age factor can be countered with dice. One solution is to have them age years, instead of months. This may deter sorcerers from casting spells willy-nilly. The other problem is that it's a little difficult to have an evil mage at the heart of your adventure, because any mage will annihilate the party without trying.
Now, if you can accept all this, here’s another kick in the pants: Mages must explain any spell they cast using science. Yes, that’s correct. Science apparently is the answer to mystic sorcerers. That explains so much, huh? To give you an example, suppose I want to heal a broken leg. In order to do so, I’d have to have vagaries such as vision, sculpture, and growth, and also conquer to block the pain, perhaps. So I’d state to the GM my plan to heal the leg using those vagaries, in a scientific manner. It doesn’t make much sense to me, but maybe it does to you. To me, there just seems to be a lack of mystery to it all. In my mind, I prefer magic to be mysterious, rarely understood, and maybe unpredictable. Not a scientific process of A + B + C = D.
Lastly, we come to the setting. Weryth could have the making of an excellent setting, but because the book was so big, they left out a bunch of needed descriptions. Most of the regions and their inhabitants are not explained in any great detail, meaning you pretty much have to make it up for yourself, which makes me wonder why they bothered at all. A few of the 40 nations’ inhabitants have a picture to help show you what they may be like, but most do not. It perhaps would have been better to release only 5 or 10 regions to choose from, and then give the same amount of text for those regions (and more pictures!), or made the weryth book a separate book to do it justice. Even the d20 system had a better description of their “races” and they did it in fewer pages. The amount of pages in the region section weighs in at 45, and not much is said for all that space.
As a last tidbit, the name of the game, The Riddle of Steel, is never fully explained either. Apparently, its part of the religion (more of a belief, actually) of Weryth, but what exactly it is was never given to us. It is only described as the belief that some people are able to master the sword, and never die. But there could have been much more detail in that. The name made me wonder what it was about. I got excited to find out. I read high and low for the mysterious answer. I felt like Ralphie from A Christmas Story who finds out his secret decoded message is to drink his Ovaltine. Don’t you think that if the name of the game is Killer Tomatoes, that I’d have a page or two talking about killer tomatoes? Well, in TROS, you get a short paragraph telling about the belief, but never going into great detail. It’s very disappointing as well. Ok, this is just nitpicking, so forgive this last paragraph. ;-)
So basically, I came down hard on this book, and no longer play the game, because of what I’ve mentioned above. But I feel I’m made some fairly valid points, even if you disagree with them. Remember, a good game or a bad game is only a matter of opinion. In my opinion, as a game designer myself, and an avid role-player for 27 years, this game is not worth buying for any reason, unless a very detailed and deadly combat system is paramount for your group, and you can work around the issues I mentioned above, AND magic is not paramount to your group for any reason. Sorry this took so long, hopefully, my future reviews will be shorter! ;-) Thank you for taking the time to read it, and happy gaming!
Review Summary