OSSR: The Riddle of Steel (and successors)

[angelfromanotherpin]

15-Skill rating? It's very good and smart that newbies are incapable of learning, and masters are very capable of improving.

Your skill rating is your TN when using it, and as such is a lower number the better you are.



Trust me, I'd have called out that failure point if it was there.

[Username17]

It does call attention to a general point about "low is good" shit in game design. Whatever steps you think you're simplifying by making some good things count down instead of up, you're almost certainly wrong. In this case, you end up subtracting a number from a constant to calculate how good it is when you could have just been counting up in the first place.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

How did 'low is good' dominate grognard thought anyway? Is it just because Call of Cthulhu did it? People latched onto a bad Chainmail chart? What?

[deaddmwalking]

How did 'low is good' dominate grognard thought anyway? Is it just because Call of Cthulhu did it? People latched onto a bad Chainmail chart? What?

In Chainmail and OD&D, you generally had to roll under your stat on a d20. If you had an 18, that'd be pretty easy, and the actual results tended to be pretty good. If you were BAD at something, you'd probably succeed half the time, and if you were good at something, you'd probably succeed 90% of the time.

In 3.x, if you have a +4 from your Stat (good) and you're rolling against a DC 15 (low) you actually fail more often than you succeed, and the likelihood of being 'shown up' by one of the weaklings in the party is pretty high (there's a 65% chance that if you have 3 companions, one rolls a 15+).

So Grognards like that 'roll under stat' usually gave them satisfying results without really thinking about WHY. Nor did they think about differing levels of difficulty in the task...

[Iduno]

15-Skill rating? It's very good and smart that newbies are incapable of learning, and masters are very capable of improving.

Your skill rating is your TN when using it, and as such is a lower number the better you are.



Trust me, I'd have called out that failure point if it was there.

Ah, I forgot they count skill levels like Thac0. Apologies.

[violence in the media]

How did 'low is good' dominate grognard thought anyway? Is it just because Call of Cthulhu did it? People latched onto a bad Chainmail chart? What?

I don't think this is at all the actual reason, but I vaguely remember some GM at a con game telling me (back in the early 90s) that it was so people couldn't get away with using "trick" or "lucky" dice. If you had a d20 that rolled unusually high you'd get punished on your ability checks, and vice versa.

[Username17]

In the original D&D, "low is good" and "high is good" are handed out pretty much at random. There's no central mechanic and things are just extemporized. Armor Class is the way it was because they were originally defined as classes. That is, "2nd Class Armor" is better than "3rd Class Armor" but worse than "1st Class Armor". We came to AC 0 and AC -1 and such because people wanted to expand that and there aren't any ordinal numbers better than 1st so everything switched to cardinal numbers instead.

But if Arneson and Gygax had called your defense "Armor Level" instead of "Armor Class" it would have counted up instead of down. That's the core issue with grognard mechanics as a whole - there was never a unified theory of how things should be modeled and things are not on the same scale as each other because there was no effort made to standardize.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

Armor Class is the way it was because they were originally defined as classes. That is, "2nd Class Armor" is better than "3rd Class Armor" but worse than "1st Class Armor". We came to AC 0 and AC -1 and such because people wanted to expand that and there aren't any ordinal numbers better than 1st so everything switched to cardinal numbers instead.

That suddenly makes a lot more sense.

[OgreBattle]

Armor class wasn’t from a battleship game right? Or was that hit points

[deaddmwalking]

Armor class wasn’t from a battleship game right? Or was that hit points

Both.

I adopted the rules I'd done earlier for a Civil War game called Ironclads that had hit points and armor class. It meant that players had a chance to live longer and do more. They didn't care that they had hit points to keep track of because they were just keeping track of little detailed records for their character and not trying to do it for an entire army. They didn't care if they could kill a monster in one blow, but they didn't want the monster to kill them in one blow.

Edit - More about Ironclad

The game is intended for 1:1200 miniatures on a table top of at least 3' by 5'. Each turn represents 5 minutes of real time, and ships move 1" (100 yards) for every knot of speed. Each ship gets a card with hit boxes for armor, speed, midships, stacks, draft, guns, and battering ram. A ship is sunk when all draft boxes are gone. Forts get similar cards.
The rules are only about 12 pages, plus a couple more for charts, pictures and background data. There are charts for penetrating and non-penetrating gunfire, critical hits, lucky hits, ramming, minefields, and loss of stack. There are also three different turning circles.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Book Four: The Codex of Battle



Each of these chapters opens with a flash fiction, and this one is slightly memorable because while it's the prologue to the combat system chapter, it's all about the protagonists killing their enemies not by combat, but by poisoned wine and avalanche.

The introduction to the chapter is mostly about how combat is very dangerous and you should fight as unfairly as possible, accompanied by a palpable frustration with low-thought hack-and-slash-style play. What's interesting to me is that the dynamic he wants to create by being 'closer to representing real fighting than any RPG combat system ever written' is actually real close to the dynamic of low-level AD&D. If you look at his list of advice:

• Never ever get hit.
• Use your head.
• Even the smallest weapon can kill.
• Teamwork wins.
• Know the difference between brave and stupid.
• Have a back-up plan (or a back-up character).

That's all basically applicable to low-level AD&D, an environment where most players learned to be pragmatic as Stalin to survive. Sure, AD&D is more abstract than Riddle of Steel, but that's not inherently bad. Using less moving parts to accomplish the same goal is usually referred to as elegance.

I don't judge Norwood for preferring high-engagement low-heroic play. But I do wish his text was less judgy about other styles.

---

I don't think there's a lot of value in going into depth on the combat procedure. I'm just going to talk about parts of it that stand out as particularly good and bad.

Downside 1: Rounds are super short.
The combat round in RoS is 1-2 seconds. Other games, like GURPS and Shadowrun, have similarly short rounds, and it causes issues there as well. People in combat monopolize table time, and everything outside of a very small radius around the fight might as well be time-stopped.

Upside 1: Terrain & Footwork
I really like how RoS handles bad ground. Combatants have to set aside some of their combat die pool to roll against the ground's TN or trip. This is also how the game handles using footwork to avoid having to fight more than one person at a time. It's fast, tense, and a managed risk.

Upside 2: Reach
Each weapon has one of six possible lengths as if this were Dominions. Attacks against a longer weapon have a penalty equal to the difference, until they successfully hit, at which point they have 'gotten inside' and then the longer weapon has the disadvantage. It's an elegant depiction of a messy situation.

Downside 2: The Toughness Problem
For a guy obsessed with realism, the author skunked up hard when it came to Toughness. The damage mechanic is this: You add the attack's MoS, the attacker's Strength, and the weapon's (positive or negative) damage modifier. Then you subtract the target's toughness and armor value. The result is the level of wound, from 1 (cosmetic) to 5 (ludicrous gibs).

The problem is that human resistance to injury doesn't really scale like human strength does, except against punch-like impact. A character who maxed it could get to Toughness 8, where he was literally as resilient as an ordinary Toughness 4 dude wearing full mail. And he could wear full mail on top of that and become so tanky that most of the 'gritty realism' stops applying to him, literally shrugging off full-commitment attacks from trained warriors with no defensive effort at all.

Expansion books released a number of inadequate kludgy 'optional rule' patches for the issue, but the author was never able to come to grips with the idea that Toughness should probably never have been an attribute at all.

Missile Combat
The basic dynamic is that archery has a very slow rate-of-fire compared to melee, but is also very dangerous because there are few defenses against it. The design succeeds in making you have to be tactical with your ranged combat. And IME, the people who play archers are somehow only slightly less engaged than the melee fighters, even if the majority of their turns are some variety of wind-up.

The big flaw of the ranged system is that having missile Proficiency is actually worth very little. It only tends to come up at all if you're taking even more time between shots to aim. This is, frankly, bullshit on every level, from relative value of character resources to realism.

Next Up: Not Fighting

[angelfromanotherpin]

Book Five: The Laws of Nature


Movement
I really don't know what to do with this section. It is so committed to fiddly detail that it implements a turn radius for running people, but it is also so half-assed that the fatigue section trails off mumbling halfway through. The whole text is: 'Endurance determines how long a character can keep a certain speed up. Hurried characters must test EN/TN7 every five minutes. Those sprinting must test every minute.' What happens if you fail the test is left as an exercise for the reader. There's a system of accumulating fatigue penalites that could be used, while the text suggests that you just have to stop moving so fast for an unspecified duration.

Also, I don't think the author has ever walked any significant distance. He has a whole table for various Move scores and how far they allow someone to travel in a day 'assuming 10 hours of travel,' and the bog-average person can apparently walk 36 miles in a day on good road. Are you fucking kidding me? I guarantee you that is the result of some sort of web search for 'average walk speed,' multiplied by 10 without any concern for fatigue. That rate of daily travel is certainly possible, but it qualifies as 'rapid military march' for Roman Legionaries or even U.S. Army Rangers, not the everyday pace of Fred of Nostril.

Encumbrance
The encumbrance system recognizes five states of encumbrance, each with modifiers to your movement and combat pool, and you determine how encumbered you are by looking at a series of pictures and seeing which one you feel best represents your situation. This is one of those things that sounds like a joke but isn't.

How fat do you feel?

Lifting/Carrying
I think the worst part of the encumbrance non-system is that the author took the trouble to make a strength chart with actual numbers for weightlifting purposes, but apparently decided that should have nothing to do with the encumbrance system. The actual lifting procedure is actually fine, but nothing special.

Fatigue/Rest
The fatigue rules here contradict the fatigue rules in the combat chapter, taking the recovery time for a fatigue point from a few seconds to 30 minutes. That's not a small difference! Realistic fatigue is complicated, but consistency is not.

Healing
The healing rules are typical for a 'realistic' game, which is to say that healing is painfully slow and playability is severely compromised because if an injured person needs days or weeks or months to recover, but the next three sessions are going to cover half an hour of palace coup, what's the injured character's player supposed to do? 'Take over a minor NPC' is the usual answer, but the text of this game is uninterested in addressing the question. In particular, the rule for old wounds reopening due to vigorous activity is unnecessarily harsh.

Aging/Sickness
I don't know why there are aging rules – there's nothing to suggest that any game of RoS is going to be particularly long-term. They are simplified Ars Magica – every year you roll to not lose stat points. The Sickness rules are so incomplete as to be useless, because there are rules for suffering and recovering from diseases, but not for acquiring said diseases in the first place. Diseases are also abstracted in a very cinematic way, where all sickness is the same and only the intensity varies.

---

This chapter fits very well into the ongoing theme of a game that wants to sell itself as hyper-realistic but actually doesn't care at all about anything but technical fencing. Make sure to keep fairly detailed notes on every single injury you take until it's completely healed in case it reopens because realism. All diseases are generic 'unwellness' because <ugh>. Make sure running people don't turn on a dime because realism. Have all travel times be armchair math because who cares. Over and over.

At least the sorcery will be differently bad.

Next up: Magicsauce.

[Iduno]

So encumbered I can't even wear a shirt or belt.

[jt]

you determine how encumbered you are by looking at a series of pictures and seeing which one you feel best represents your situation. This is one of those things that sounds like a joke but isn't.

I actually kind of like that. It'd need to be backed up with actual descriptions, but I could see a lot of rules that boil down to a GM call being simplified by backing the rules up with a set of pictures. The example that jumps to mind is climb DCs - show a picture of a DC 10 wall, a DC 15 wall, a DC 20 wall, etc. It's quicker to reference and communicates a lot more than "very rough" or "some natural handholds." These specific pictures are bad, both technically and at doing their job of highlighting the differences. It should be the same people in similar garb, not a bunch of random examples.

The encumbrance levels it's trying to communicate look like they're an entire category higher than I'd expect. Their "unencumbered" looks like they're trying to get at something like gym clothes, which is off the bottom end of the scale from what I normally think of as encumbrance. Their "heavily encumbered" has people carrying packs that are only a third as big as the largest ones I've carried.

[angelfromanotherpin]

D'oh, I somehow completely forgot that I didn't finish this yet!

Book Six: Sorcery 101


The magic chapter opens with a terrible flash fiction. It's not only truly bad writing, but it also depicts a magical context that is nothing like either the stated goals or the reality of the actual mechanics.

I'm not going to do a deep dive into the magic system because it doesn't deserve it. The author straight admitted that what was published was a barely-tested alpha, and it shows. That said, there are some things of interest here.

See, in the text they talk about how there was an intended conceit that spellcasting was supposed to be analogous to getting into a swordfight; a high-risk high-reward activity which you didn't really want to do unless it lined up with your Spiritual Attributes to give you the bonus dice to hedge your bet. It's a cool idea, and you can see bits of it, but it did not come together.

The first reason why is that nobody did the required math. The basic RoS resolution system is quite dodgy, and the magic system leans hard into some of the worst parts. I'm sure it's possible to configure the system inputs to produce the outputs that they were supposedly looking for, but it would have required a certain amount of work and understanding that was missing.

The second reason why is that the system is total insanity. It's trivial to build a starting character who can create arbitrarily large amounts of destruction at literally unlimited range, up to and including entire worlds and indeed solar systems, and he doesn't need bonus dice to do so at minimal risk. Sorcerers just aren't playing the same game that other characters are at all. There's probably a cool story to be had where iron age societies try to cope with people who can do that sort of thing, but it's not a story that has a lot of room for some rando swordsman.

There are a huge number of failure points, even if the spells were merely 'very powerful' and not 'setting-erasing.' Spell effects are supposed to interact with normal physics, but the writer didn't have enough chem or physics to understand the gaping loopholes he created. The fastest casting is too slow for combat time, but even the biggest rituals are too fast for anyone to respond to unless they are in the same town. The spells are build-your-own, and the system is not nearly robust enough to deal with giving players access to the root commands. You're meant to be able to create new spells off-the-cuff, but the system is fiddly enough that doing it at the table is going to cause unwieldy delays.

But the crowning failure is that the price is just too low even if you fuck up. The cost of poor spellcasting is some months of premature aging and a possible KO. It feels bad from an RP perspective, but mechanically it just doesn't mean much. You need a lot of premature aging before there's any real bite, and the KO doesn't count for much because casting in action sequences is mostly too slow anyway. It isn't actually dangerous like getting into a swordfight, it's not even in the same league.

The really irritating thing is that this game had like three supplements and they all conspicuously avoided doing dick about the sorcery rules.

One last thing I want to mention is that the book suggests having a list of things that magic can't do, and provides a sample one. Some of them are important setting elements, like being unable to raise the dead or turn back time. One is the baffling 'cannot create matter from nothing' when there's a whole Vagary for making things expand to 100 times their original size. One is the strangely specific 'cannot make fire appear and burn on nothing,' which appears to exist because the author dislikes the classic fireball, and is meaningless, partly because there's no Vagary that makes fire ex nihilo, and partly because you can transmute air into explosive chemical compositions at which point the fire is burning perfectly valid fuel.


Book Seven: The World of Weyrth


This is a Hyborian-alike world with offensive ersatz versions of real cultures, and it is profoundly uninteresting. The various nations are only worth looking at so that you have some idea of what the authors think a nationality should give you. The only intriguing thing about the world is that it has six moons, but this has no apparent effect on the tides.

The Role of the Gods is that they are functionally non-existent. There are several religion write-ups, and the only one worth reading is Riddle-Seeking.

The Children of Weyrth is where you learn how bad a deal you got for paying to be a non-casting fairy.

The History of Weyrth is not a thing you care about.

...and the chapter ends with a price list, which is at least practical. It's quite extensive, even if it's clear that they started with the AD&D equipment list and just added some things (the water clock is a dead giveaway).


Next up: The Seneschal

[OgreBattle]

What were the different pieces of the build a magic system?

I think there were 9 bits you mix and match?

[Username17]

The "no something from nothing" restriction has been floated in a lot of games and settings as if it was a serious limitation. The fact that there's literally always air and dirt around you and that limitation means absolutely nothing seems to be completely missed by a lot of people.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

Having slept on it, it occurred to me that large chunks of the magic system are plainly derived from Mage: The Ascension. There are nine areas of knowledge (called Vagaries instead of Spheres) with multiple levels that unlock increasingly bonkers ablities, and there are certain combinations you need to make certain things happen. For instance, in Mage you needed Prime to make permanent effects and Correspondence to do things at a distance. In this you need Vision to affect things on a cellular or smaller level and Summoning to give things a duration. That connection puts some perspective on how this came out as badly as it did.

But yes, there were nine things you could combine into a spell's effects, and also you built the spell's TN by selecting its target/range/volume/duration off of a table, and you can get a TN below zero.

Every part of the system is full of broken exploits. You could probably have some fun exploring that, but it would be the entire game and you couldn't have any enemy sorcerers because they could nuke your county from their living room as soon as they hear about you.

[OgreBattle]

Found 'em

Sculpture, Growth, Movement
Conquer (Mind), Glamour, Vision
Summoning, Banishing and Imprisoning

I think "turn the air into explosions" is sculpture+vision?

[angelfromanotherpin]

The 'transmute air into explosives' is indeed Sculpture/Vision. The 'turn literally anything into arbitrarily large explosions' exploit is simply Movement.

The description of Movement states that 'the effects of rapid movement and acceleration realistically affect a target, including any harmful side-effects from sudden acceleration/deceleration', and Movement 3 allows you to instantaneously accelerate things up to the speed of light. Relevant xkcd.

[Thaluikhain]

Getting a bit off-topic, but XKCD gets that slightly wrong there, it's Light then Heat then Blast.

XKCD seems to miss the heat altogether, and it's worth noticing that the blast can be some time later (depending on how far away you are), so survivors might think it's over and get out of cover to see what happened.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Book Eight: The Seneschal


I'm going to be honest, I've been really tempted to skip this chapter because there's very little system in it and unlike World Tree the advice for MCs isn't that interesting. But unlike many RPGs, this includes a whole section where they talk about the reasoning behind their design decisions, which is probably worth going over.

I will say that the vibe of the MC-advice is very strange, and it seems strongly indicative of an abusive environment. For instance, there's a whole bit where they make a joke about how you'll need pencils to stab your players with, and then repeatedly insist that this was a joke and you shouldn't do that, and the whole thing is a pointless unfunny waste of words. Normally I'd ignore that as the natural product of publishing a first draft, but it's not isolated. The Seneschal is told to 'always make [the players] beg' for the use of your copy of their character sheet, and to beat any player who doesn't bring their own dice. Maybe those are supposed to be funny too, but to who? I think it's just an unintentional confession of being a huge jerk.

It's not all bad, there's some genuinely worthwhile advice in there, chiefly about foregrounding the PCs and paying attention to the players so you can cater to their interests, but all the good stuff is sandwiched between joke abuse and open instruction to lie and cheat (in the name of fun, but still). Taken as a whole, it's sewage.

---

Anyway, the design discussion comes in the form of a Q&A, and a lot of it is useless. The answer to the question of 'why so many dice?' is 'we like rolling big handfuls of dice.' It's certainly revealing that it has to do with tactile pleasure and not probability curves and desired outcomes, but you can't really do anything with that answer except stare at the answerer like he's an idiot.

Of the questions with engageable answers, there are two that I want to talk about. The first is 'Why is combat set up like it is?' to which the simple answer is obviously realism, but the answer we get is about how the system is 'one-of-a-kind in the world of RPGs' with victory attained by 'tactics, teamwork, and strategy' instead of 'brute force and superior stats.' Again, it really feels like this guy played in an oddly low-thought hacky-slashy D&D environment and thought that was the whole thing, because people had been doing high-engagement tactical teamwork combats in D&D for as long as it had existed. But he was also at least aware of Shadowrun (because the system is a Shadowrun hack), which also facilitates tactical asymmetrical victories, so I think a lot of this is just blowing his own horn and hoping other people are ignorant.

Towards the end of the very long answer to a question adequately answered by one word, it is mentioned that the 'taking turns around a table' model is a poor fit for the game, and you should run your combats focusing on one player for a few rounds, then essentially 'flashing back' to see what the next player was doing during that time. There's some dramatic value to the technique, but it fucking kills any use of tactics or teamwork if people can't coordinate their actions.

The second question I want to look at is 'Why is Sorcery so powerful?' and the first sentence of the answer is 'We strongly reject the classic RPG tradition of "balanced" play.' They go on to talk about how magic is overwhelming and terrifying in various fictions and rhetorically ask 'Why should that change for the game?' Apparently none of the differences between prewritten single-author narrative and interactive multiple-author narrative ever occurred to them as a possible answer.

This brings us back to the running theme where huge chunks of the game are just completely and even admittedly unexamined. Decisions were simply made and then never questioned for lack of interest. The attitude was amateurish and half-assed all the way through, apparently except for (obviously) the technical fencing content.

So the game is bad and we actually know more-or-less why it's bad. And yet, something about it resonated enough for the game (when it imploded) to have not one, but two successors. I'll examine those in later posts, but I'm not quite finished with this one yet.

---

The rest of the Seneschal section includes a monster manual, with various humans, animals, elves, trolls, mythical beasts, undead, demons and devils. Intriguingly, most provide no particular tactical variety, being simply smaller and larger piles of numbers, which seems counter to the stated interests of the author. There is also a section on adventure seeds, which is thoroughly mediocre, being unimaginative generic fare. One has an example of how to hook each of the different social classes together into one scenario, which is worthwhile, and one at least mentions weaving the PCs spiritual attributes into a story, something which needed a lot more ink than it got.

The book ends with The Golden Rule of Roleplaying, being that 'THE SENESCHAL IS ALWAYS RIGHT!' and I think we're done here.

Coming soon: Successor game #1: Blade of the Iron Throne.

[angelfromanotherpin]

II. Blade of the Iron Throne

My basic recollection of this game is that it was a substantial improvement over its predecessor in almost every way, and yet still somehow unexciting.

Instead of doing my usual close-read of everything before Chapter One (and yes, this game calls its chapters 'chapters' instead of 'books,' a small but appreciated reduction in pretension), I'm going to engage with the introduction, written not by the author, but by one of the playtesters.

Eleven years ago today Jake Norwood and team were wrapping up development of their revolutionary RPG, The Riddle of Steel. The following March the game was released at GAMA -- and the first print run sold out. A second printing soon followed and it is this version of the game that most players remember so fondly.

The 'first print run' was 300 copies, iirc, so that they sold out is not super impressive.

The fact that we’re still talking about a game that was released nearly eleven years ago, a game that hasn’t had any official material published for it in the last five years, a game that still has an active community behind it, is testament to the originality of Jake’s game. What attracted gamers to it all those years ago still holds true today -- player-driven story and detailed, realistic combat mechanics producing a true Narrativist-Simulationist hybrid that appeals to players and referees alike.

I'm pretty sure that 'player-driven story' means the Spiritual Attributes mechanic; and indeed, if I had to choose two things about Riddle of Steel that made it at all worthwhile, it would be that and the technical fencing system. So this guy understands what people are here for - tearing what worked from the steaming corpse of TROS and building a new and sounder home for it.

About two and a half years ago the trosfans community broached the subject of a successor game in earnest. Over the years many had asked whether a new version of TRoS could be produced, one that addressed the inconsistencies prevalent in the first edition. Issues over ownership and copyright ruled out that option and so the idea of a successor game was introduced. Ninety threads and nearly two thousand posts later every aspect of TRoS has been picked apart and alternatives suggested.

I have no idea what 'issues over ownership and copyright' could have existed besides Jake Norwood's plain refusal. My speculation is that Norwood rejected the critique of 'inconsistencies' and wouldn't let anyone else touch his baby.

Upon this maelstrom of ideas order needed to be imposed. The greater pool of concepts needed to be gleaned, the numbers winnowed, until a coherent whole was formed. Who better to do this than two of the communities’ most active contributors? Phil and Michael had a clear vision for an RPG that worked seamlessly within the classic genre of Sword and Sorcery fiction.

Activity is perhaps not the best indicator of talent, but enthusiasm counts for a lot when it comes to getting a project finished at all, and this one did get finished, putting it ahead of most RPG projects, so I can't say they chose badly. And Blade of the Iron Throne absolutely has a much clearer sense of its Sword and Sorcery genre than Riddle of Steel had.

Today, with Blade of the Iron Throne they have produced a successor to TRoS that has none of the anomalies, none of the inconsistencies, none of the gaps -- yet retains a clear link to TRoS through player-driven story and
demanding, realistic combat scenes.

It's plain that I wasn't the only one to find Riddle of Steel significantly half-assed. The whole 'none of the' rhetoric sounds like simple salesmanship, but we'll see how well they did as we go on.

If Conan were to pick up a role-playing game, he’d choose this one.

Oh, please.

Anyway, the chapters to come are:
One: Mechanics
Two: Characters
Three: Training
Four: Melee
Five: Travel and Health
Six: Sorcery
Seven: S&S Gaming
Eight: Xoth
... and Appendices.

[Thaluikhain]

If Conan were to pick up a role-playing game, he’d choose this one.

Oh, please.

Well, he doesn't like Final Fantasy.

Actually, that might have been Conan O'Brien.

[OgreBattle]

Thought Blade of the Iron Throne was d20 for some reason... so it's straight up an improvement of RoS cool. I hear the original creator plays Burning Wheel now.

I'm particularly curious on how Botih handles multiple combatants in melee.