Review of The Riddle of Steel

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THE RIDDLE OF STEEL

When I saw The Riddle of Steel (TROS), I thought it had enormous potential as an RPG. After a few months of playing the game, I came to the conclusion that it doesn’t live up to its potential, or it’s hype.

The Good

TROS has a few good points about it, but most of them have a number of bad points to counter the good, so let’s take a look at them.

The initial stories at the front of each chapter are fairly decent, and do some good to help bring color to the setting. They are interesting, and each one is written in a different fashion, ensuring that they do not become old hat as you read the book. A tactic that was taken from other story telling books, and though those books do a much better job of it, such chapter headings really provoke an interest in the game world, and a desire to play.

The game has a unique aspect to it, that none have done before. A game mechanism called Spiritual Attributes, which enhance role-playing. Basically, the player chooses a number of SAs for his character, which are anything from his belief system, his passions, his destiny, or etc. These traits help the character in time of need in the form of additional dice in combat, and also are the sole reason for character advancement. While an interesting concept, this mechanism wasn’t described very well in the book. It took me a long time to understand exactly how to use them. And certain things still remain a question. For example, if one has a passion for the princess, who has been kidnapped, when does the character get to add these extra dice? Since the focus of his quest is his passion, does he get them for every obstacle he may encounter, or only when the evil villain has a knife to her throat? Questions like this and more remain unanswered. The SAs could use an entire chapter about how to GM with them, yet none exists. This unique gaming tool has one other interesting flaw to it that requires group participation to work. See, the GM creates the adventure using the character’s SAs. Well, what if in a party of 4 players, their SAs are all contradictory? One decides to go to the sea to fulfill his destiny, one goes to the mountains to find his brother, and one seeks revenge in a city to the west, etc. It seems to me that unless the players and the GM work together to create their SAs as a group, sheer pandemonium can arise. This could be rather annoying, but with my group, it wasn’t an issue. I can see it being a problem with certain groups, however. Also, there was a question brought up in my group that made sense to me. Shouldn’t the preservation of life be an SA? I mean, your character should get extra dice to save his own life, not just to serve his king, or avenge his father’s death. In times of such peril, we often find such strength. You can get extra dice to save the king, or protect your faith, but to save your own skin, you get zip? Regardless of all this, the SAs remain a unique gaming experience, and I loved the concept. I only wish they were implemented better, and their uses described more.

The dice mechanism is a good one. Heavily borrowed from White Wolf, TROS uses the d10 system and target numbers. This can lead to a lot of dice rolling, but I personally liked it. My only real complaint about the system was the inconsistencies with it. Despite that the system uses only d10s, the target numbers are achieved differently for different tasks. For example, attributes are increased, skills are decreased, and combat uses its own system entirely. It reminds me a little of first edition AD&D where sometimes you rolled d20, sometimes wanting high numbers, and sometimes low, but initiative was d10. It seems like the game could be better if this was made consistent throughout, which is not a hard thing to do. It appears that the creator was trying to branch away from Vampire’s system, as to not steal it entirely, so he tried to get creative with imperfect results. However, this is such a small point, I would forgive him for it, but it was just one more brick in a wall of shoddy game construction, it had to be mentioned.

The Bad

TROS has more bad points than good. Here are a few:

If you like your combat so realistic that combat is avoided or approached with extreme caution, few games will suite you better than TROS. The game was pretty much made around the combat system, and the deadliness of it forces characters to tread carefully. This could be a good thing if this was implemented properly, but like much of the rest of the game, it’s not. If you know what it’s like to be a 1st level wizard in D&D, you still have no understanding of the peril that awaits you in this game. This isn’t a bad thing inherently. I much enjoyed the realism of GURPS and other games as well. But TROS doesn’t balance that realism with playability very well, so you end up with characters that die often or avoid combat. A good description would be akin to that of owning a Ferrari. You’re thinking, wow, what a fast car. So sleek and elegant, too. Yet, the $150,000 price tag and $3000/month insurance drive you to drink, so you park it in the garage in an air conditioned glass cage, and never drive it for fear of wrecking it. This is TROS. Combat is fast and fun, and yet, because one blow will likely seriously injure, maim, or kill your character, it’s avoided like the plague. It forces combat to be approached with caution and a plan. You’re thinking, “That’s not so bad, is it?” Well, at first, it may not seem that way, but after a while, the need to plan out every combat like Bush invading Iraq got a little old. Remember, your characters are closer to farmer Brown than Aragorn, so combat can be very bad. Realism for the sake of realism isn’t always a grand idea. Playability must be measured as well. In this case, my group really preferred a more heroic system, which allowed for realism, yet was playable and still fun. I liked the realism in the maneuvers and the weapon types, etc. in TROS, though, and felt with a more heroic edge to it, it would have been superb. There are naturally a number of flaws which inhibit the system from being great. The first is that your characters are not heroes. They are better than commoners to be sure, but heroism is nearly void in this system (or at least it feels like it). Your girlfriend has to be kidnapped or some other passion threatened before your characters are good in combat, and even then, it’s risky. The Monty Python skit of the bunny with sharp teeth comes to mind. “It’s just a bunny”. “Yes, with sharp, pointed teeth!!” Every opponent could ruin your character’s day. Second, the fact that the game gives no rules for how to fight non-human opponents is just silly. The system works well if you are fighting one other guy. But if you are planning on fighting a group, or a snake, or a basilisk, there are not rules for such. Now, if your cup of tea is sword fighting in duels, ala Robin Hood or Zorro, this system will work, despite its deadliness (and the fact that you’re no Zorro). But, if you prefer a Lord of the Rings tale, with demons, wraiths, and god knows what else, you are going to be disappointed (unless you never actually encounter them, and only use them to drive the story). Unlike most other games, where if something doesn’t exist, it’s easy to modify or add it, this game is so hard to modify for anything, much less a dragon or an ogre, as to make it annoyingly one dimensional. This is where other story telling games are better. It’s easy to keep realism and yet allow for fantasy with wound levels, ala Legends of the Five Rings or Vampire. But TROS only has a damage table for humans. Not even other humanoids shaped creatures can use it, such as a zombie. The GM is forced to make his own rules for them. This is very annoying at the very least, and not necessary. Then, as if to add insult to injury, the company releases a book for fighting monsters (finally), something that should have come with the book originally. But now, I’m reminded of “Roll”Master where every creature has its own table. It’s just annoying and unnecessary. Other systems have similar realism (as far as fatality is concerned), only they did it much much better. Third and most important perhaps, is the fact that the system requires player skill to fight, not character skill. I’m sorry, but I’m role-playing. I shouldn’t have to be an expert in the system to play the game. That’s why my character has stats and skills! It basically means that an experienced player, such as the creator, can whoop any bad guy a novice GM can throw at him, using only a stick, because the game relies almost entirely on your skill as a player. So, while in some respects, the combat system looked cool at first, beware! It is heavily riddled with flaws that make the game annoying to play. Last, although the system brags about being so realistic, I have found numerous examples of play that prove otherwise. The biggest example of this is the parry rule. If you parry someone’s attack, you immediately gain initiative the next round. So, you can never catch someone “on the run” with your attack, because the minute they parry, they attack you back. Now, even simple games like Warhammer have been able to successfully implement this effect. Why not TROS?

Most systems have a setting that is rich in color, and deeply described. Well, in TROS, you have 40 nations to choose from, none of which are adequately described. There is a reason why other games give you only a handful of choices in this area. It’s too hard for new characters to try to envision 40 different cultures that are not described well in the first place. With 40 nations, a whole book would have been needed to detail these cultures. Even then, why bother? A well designed setting with 5 to 7 nations to choose from would have been much better. Another example of TROS attempting to do something different, without much success. There’s a reason other games don’t do things like this. Maybe those reasons should have been considered first before going off half-cocked.

It wasn’t the artwork that attracted me to the book, which is good, because the art inside this overpriced book is so bad, it often hurts the eyes to look at them. Often, I winced at some of the bad drawings, wondering if my 12 year old nephew had gotten hired as an artist. The cover being no exception (there are still people wondering what the heck is going on in the picture), the artwork throughout this book is no better, but can not be much worse. But art being the least important attribute, I could overlook this if everything else was good, but because the game fails in so many ways, how could I not mention the poor artwork?

The Ugly

The character creation system has got some major bugs too. First, assigning priorities for your character only means that the slave will be more attractive, better skilled, and a better combatant than the knight, who we will call Stumpy because of his flaws, because the knight must waste a high Letter choice to become a noble, thereby obtaining flaws and low skill points or low attribute points. For a game that has focused on realism so much, this is such an unrealistic way of handling this. Further, because of the combat system, characters are pigeon-holed into making two types of characters: The knight/fighter type or the sorcerer. Sorcerers are gods (described below), and the knight will give you a chance in combat. The problem with the game is that there are no bells and whistles for other types of characters. There are only a small handful of advantages and disadvantages to choose from, and you’re likely to only have one of each. The skill list is short, and there are no other fun tidbits for you to choose from. Even in D&D, if you choose to make a thief, you gained something the fighter didn’t, and if you choose the cleric, you gained something else. And with the feats, you’ve got some fun things to get excited about. In GURPS, you had your pick of advantages and a plethora of skills. Well, in TROS, you get none of that. There are no benefits to making that thief character. There are no benefits for making a priest. The only type of character that benefits is the fighter type and the sorcerer, which is too bad, because one of my favorite parts of character creating in any system is looking at the fun things my character can do. Now, if the system for creating characters was fast, maybe he could claim a reason for this, but I have never seen a slower character creation system in my life. Picture this: You and a group of new players decide to play TROS. Well, expect to spend all day creating characters. Even if the players own the books, they should create their characters with the rest of the group, thereby coordinating their SAs, and eliminating any conflict, and making the GM’s job easier. It took my first group two days to work this out. Two whole days. My second group had devised a plan ahead of time after speaking on the phone to me, but they still took one whole day. Now, this is completely unavoidable, and only an experienced group would do better, but my grief with the system is that it should be fast regardless of experience. A newbie can learn GURPS, D&D or Vampire and create a character in an hour or less. This system isn’t worth spending a day to learn and create characters!

Now, if none of that bothered you, there is still one item that ruins the game regardless of everything else: the magic system. Sorcerers in this game can create spells on the fly, and are akin to gods. The lack of play balance here makes me cry at night. I understand that Jake wanted to make sorcerers powerful. My problem with that is that why must wizards be born gods? I would think realistically, that they began as apprentices, and then became gods in time. D&D does this well, as do most other RPGs. It’s evident that Jake liked Ars Magica and the power of the wizards in that game, and wanted to do something similar. Unfortunately, in Ars Magica, everyone is a wizard (generally), and of equal power. Second, it is assumed that the characters passed apprenticeship already. In TROS, neither of those is true. I understand wanting to make magic powerful, but play balance overrides this need. Somehow, he thinks that adding an age penalty will shun most characters from using their magic. This is similar to the Ferrari example above. Why bother giving characters such power, and then put up roadblocks to prevent them from using it? It makes more sense to start characters at a lower level of power that they can gradually increase, than to make them gods to start, and then try to put weakly founded constrictions on them. Now, on top of that, magic is based off of science. Sorcerers must use scientific explanations to cast their spells. This really spoiled the fantasy mood for me. Can someone explain why such a ridiculous system was made? This is the same brain thought that told George Lucas that JarJar was a cool character.

So what can be done?

Still wanting to play? Here are some things that should have been done to improve this game, and make it playable.

1) Have character creation use a point based system. In this way, all characters are created equally and realistically. You can end the silly Stumpy the knight issue we discussed earlier. Further, instead of giving 43 points for attributes, it makes more sense to have all stats start at 3 and give them 10 or 12 points, something like that. This would speed up the process immensely. All characters should receive the same amount of points. There is no reason why the slave gets a possible 43 and the knight a possible 27. Are all knights inbred, and therefore have physical abnormalities? This is just crazy talk.

2) Destroy the entire magic system and devise a new one. Perhaps Ars Magica could be altered and then powered down, allowing fun mages that can cast a plethora of spells, but can’t destroy the world. The aging thing would have to go. No mage would live long enough to become great if every spell he cast aged him a year and knocked him out.

3) Make the characters more heroic! In Vampire, you get to play an undead creature of the night, in L5R, a deadly samurai or shugenja, etc. People want to role-play heroes. They want to play Aragorn, they want to play Robin Hood, and they want to play Indiana Jones. On average, they don’t want to play Pippin, the innkeeper Bob, R2D2, or farmer Brown. By keeping the combat deadly, but lessening its edge a tad, you would have an exciting game that people would love to play, and every combat would be fun and interesting instead of nail-biting and avoided at any cost. The combat system would be used more often, to better results.

Conclusion

While TROS offered some interesting elements to the RPG world, namely its spiritual attributes, it falls short of even being playable. It’s too bad that such good ideas were so poorly implemented. It really seems as though the creator had this combat system in mind, and wanted to create an RPG around it. The results suggest that the rest of the game was thrown together haphazardly, almost as an afterthought. There’s so much wrong with this system, I would need a book myself to tell you all about it! Suffice to say, there are one hundred better books to buy than this one. Find one of them, and save yourself $40. There’s nothing here that can’t be done elsewhere.