Symbaroum RPG? Wut do

codeGlaze · Post by **codeGlaze** » Sat Mar 05, 2016 1:36 am

Has this been on anyone's radar?

Symbaroum RPG core rulebook popped up on my feed. Sounds like it may be a rules lite.

Miniature Colossus · Post by **Miniature Colossus** » Sat Mar 05, 2016 9:35 am

This is another Swedish RPG that's gotten translated to english it seems. While I'm guessing a lot a swedish roleplayers know about it, it's not really gotten any buzz since it was released. I can barely find any reviews or comments about it. I think the reason people have heard about Symbaroum is because the makers, Järnringen, are pretty well known. I have only played one game of theirs, Coriolis, aka "Arabian nights in space", now sold off to another company. It was ok. Nothing to phone home about, but it did have a decent number of official adventures and it looks like they are doing the same for Symbaroum. None of them seem to have been translated to english yet but they probably will as it's the biggest selling point I can find.

Miniature Colossus · Post by **Miniature Colossus** » Mon Mar 21, 2016 7:44 pm

So I read up on this a bit and it turns out to be more popular than I though at first. Mostly people are enamored with the setting. It lacks the breadth of the typical D&D setting since it's mostly focused on a single mystical forest, but it still has some variety in things to play around with. The biggest criticism seems to be that the published material i quite uneven in what it covers, spending most of the page count describing the town Thistle hold.

Rules wise the game aims to be rules light while still offering a lot of character options, with mixed results. Besides the core rulebook they also have a players handbook with extra options. The biggest complaint I can find is that the texts explaining the rules and options can be very unclear and hard to interpret at places. Nobody complains about it being wildly unbalanced, but then again, nobody is claiming it's well balanced either. Likely to be the result of magic being on the low to medium side of power.

Overall it has me intrigued and I may pick this up at some point.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Tue Mar 22, 2016 5:10 am

How's the rules, what makes them lite

codeGlaze · Post by **codeGlaze** » Fri Mar 25, 2016 9:08 pm

I know its a bit late, but thank you for the sleuthing MC.

Miniature Colossus · Post by **Miniature Colossus** » Fri Mar 25, 2016 11:44 pm

I'm still sleuthing on the rules though. Most reviewers don't seem to care much about that part.

As far as I can tell the basic system is that you have 8 ability scores (as opposed to 6 in D&D) with starting scores between 5 and 15. There are no skills and all normal actions are dealt with by a d20 roll under vs appropriate ability score with modifiers. For special actions such as magic and special combat maneuvers you have to buy special abilities that all came in three different levels (I have no idea what these are called in the english translation). The only way to raise your ability score is the purchase a special ability for just that, hence you can never raise an ability score more than three points above the starting value. Starting values come from a stat array: 15, 13, 11, 10, 10, 9, 7, 5.

Then things get a bit weird. The idea is the GM never rolls any dice, so if a PC attacks an NPC the PC rolls to attack and the NPC's defense modifies the target number. Similarly if an NPC attacks a PC then the PC rolls to defend and the NPC's attack modifies to target number. If you have a PC vs PC (or NPC vs NPC) situation I don't know what happens, probably something pretty convoluted. The modifier for an ability score is the score minus 10, so a 15 is a +5. And no, I have no idea why this couldn't just be played as a roll-over-system.

Some things seem to indicate that the system can be seen as NPC's always take half the maximum on their die, i.e. take 10 for d20. When it comes to damage it means that there's technically both a damage roll and a soak roll involved, except for PC vs NPC only one of them is ever rolled and the other is always half maximum. Maybe it's explained better in the actual book.

Don't know how action economy works, but the special abilities have different classifications and sometimes they can't be combined in the same action. I think you can only use one 'active' ability at a time.

Magic comes in four schools: nature based witch magic, academic magic, holy magic and black magic. I think I read somewhere that you can learn spells from all schools but you can only be proficient in one and if you cast spells from other schools you get 'corruption' which can lead to bad things and is not to easy too get rid of.

I should probably just get the books instead of reverse engineering this nonsense. We'll see.

codeGlaze · Post by **codeGlaze** » Sat Mar 26, 2016 5:53 pm

Miniature Colossus wrote:I'm still sleuthing on the rules though. Most reviewers don't seem to care much about that part.

This probably gives us more of an answer than anything else.