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A Review of Riddle of Steel
::by Dylan Craig
Remember I was musing on this game a while back? Well, I ran a demo game using the downloadable
Riddle of Steel demo rules for a CLAW 'Monday Night Mayhem' team last night, and had some
observations regarding the game which I thought y'all might find interesting. You can download the
demo rules at www.theriddleofsteel.net .
Initial impressions: Archers are NASTY. A well-aimed longbow arrow from 25 yards is almost
invariably fatal or crippling unless it passes through a shield or heavy coat of mail on its way.
Crossbows are similarly nasty: hard to dodge and easy to shoot, but in a system with one-second
combat rounds you better have a couple cocked, locked, and close at hand if you want to play
Legolas. Crossbows take between 3 and 8 seconds to load, depending on how hasty and badly-aimed a
shot you want to pull off and whether the quarrel is stuck in your belt or lying in a quarrel case,
so that means a bladeslinger gets to shish-kebab you six to sixteen times while you're winding your
little crank. Makes sense, I guess, but its a bit harsh on players with archer PCs?. Thrown daggers
seem to get you the best bang for your time buck, but do very little damage; called shots to the
head or belly (or the leg of a disengaging foe) are the order of the day.
Combat: My god, these rules make descriptive combat easy. We all started off with a pretty standard
'I hit him' attitude, but once the players realised that the actual RULES made it easier on them if
they could come up with cool moves, they started hanging back, swiping at their opponent's legs, or
faking him out with phony shield bashes and then swinging an axe into his hips with the best of
them. Tricky handling damage though; each hit does Shock Damage (which is saved against), but also
contributes Pain and Blood Loss, and while its OK keeping track of one set of numbers for ones own
PC, handling it for six to ten NPCs? is a little on the frightening side. I'd probably need to start
using index cards or come up with a simplified 'mook' damage ruleset if I played this game
regularly. Armour (given the nasty damage system) is thus a highly useful thing to have, but like
D&D a heavily armoured character moves slowly and is really only good for static combat -
perception, movement, and ability to do anything except stand in one place and dish it out against
another immobile tower of chain mail go out the window as soon as you so much as put on a
closed-face helmet. A chain shirt and steel buckler is about as heavy as your armour can go without
penalties of one kind or another, and if you are carrying a tower shield you can pretty much forget
about carving Zs into your foes' chests; you're almost impossible to hit, but you're going to have
to be pretty clever with feints, ripostes, etc., if you plan on landing blows of your own.
Magic: Open-ended, like a sort of powered-down Ars Magica with only 3 Forms (Temporal, Mental,
Spiritual) and a similar modular/cumulative spell difficulty dependent on range, number of targets,
duration, etc. You allocate dice out of a pool to cast the spell: the more dice you allocate, the
easier it is to get the spell off BUT the less you have left over to resist the energy drain - an
energy drain which manifests as immediate, visible aging. Explains all those haggard grey-haired
wizards pretty neatly, doesn't it? A semi-powerful spell might age you four months in a few seconds;
lose more than a month at a go and you run the risk of falling into anything from a brief faint to a
short-term coma. So, like the poor archers, there's a lot of potential for spellcaster-players to be
sitting on their hands doing nothing. We also couldn't find the rules for spell speeds, although
that might be the fault of my crappy disintegrating printer head.
Other things: 'Vocations' (skills) are super-easy to use, with the only limitation being whether you
can convince the Seneschal (DM) that a task falls under their penumbra. So, 'Inkeep' might let you
cook food, put a poultice on a black eye, counsel morose old men, or whatever. Character creation is
a breeze, involving assigning priorities (from 1 to 4) to Attributes (stats), Proficiencies (spells
and weapon skills), Social Standing (and thereby possessions), and Vocations. Apparently, this is
the way they do things in Shadowrun too, and it works pretty nicely. Finally, it's a dice pool based
system; that means digging out, and rolling, up to ten d10s at a time. This may or may not be your
cup of tea. Luckily, it's not an open-ended or additive system; you just roll the bones and count
successes.
My final vote: 4 out of 5 for style, 3 out of 5 for substance. If you do SCA heavy combat (or
whatever it's called), up that to 4 out of 5 for substance, because the combat system is built for
you and your weird terminology.
My thanks to Yanka, Mike, Conrad, Sean, and Tai for being my guinea pigs. Big kudos to Sean and
Conrad for their (almost) suicidal frontal night attack on the enemy ranks, a distraction which let
the archers 'make their point' to the head honchos in the back lines so effectively. Special mention
to the GuildMistr?- err, I mean, to Mike for providing the game with plenty of turbo druid action (TM)
and taking it so well when the gargoyle spewed in his face. Big raspberries to Yanka and Conrad for
their tower-trashing. "His tower's on the map, he must be a bad guy", indeed!
I summon the spirit of RoleplayingSystems.
