Finally played The Riddle of Steel: demo session

[arxhon]

Actually i played on monday night, but have been too busy to post until now.

The setup: I only managed to round up two players for the game, which makes me sad, but i'm sure i can convince another one or two more to play. This was intended to be a quick demo session, and as such had a fair amount of railroading (but with purpose. Before you freak out, bear with me).

I pregenerated the player's characters, Duke's guardsmen, who were stopping for the night in a small town in a County of Cyrinthmeir. I made sure to give them SA: Drive, Protect the Dukes Family. They were guarding the Duke's daughter.

The sergeant gave them leave to carouse a bit for the evening, but to return by midnight. Being guardsmen, the players quickly trooped off to the closest tavern (actually the only other drinking establishment in the small town), where they started gamblin with a grizzled old man. Only one player gambled, the other sat and watched. Dunno what he was afraid of.

To make a short story even shorter, once the player won a couple of rounds, the gambler started accusing the player of being a thief, taking his money without giving him the chance to win it back. Eventually they were thrown out by the batman; he didn't want thieves stealing from his loyal and upstanding customers. The players accusing the old man of being a bandit didn't help.


This was intended to allow the players the chance to make some skil rolls to understand the skill system.

After they left the tavern, a couple of toughs followed them out and started pushing the PC's around in the street. A fight broke out, of course. Two quick swings later, one tough had his leg hacked off at the knee and the other was bleeding profusely from a very deep thigh wound. The player who caused that wound wants to roll "Surface organs destroyed" so bad he can taste it.

The PC's went and hid in the stable near the inn they were to return to. The town militia showed up, looking for them, and the Sergeant of the Duke's Guard bribed them off. When the party did return to the inn, they got chewed out and docked a week's wages.

The next morning, on the road with their VIP (the Duke's daughter), they were attacked by heavily armed and armored footmen. This encounter allowed them to use their SA. The combat was lengthy, with all of us going "hmmm... what does this do?". The character package i made earlier was quite helpful in this regard.

After several rounds of combat (something like 10), i finally managed to kill the PC's. Actually, that's not quite true. We finally called it after an hour of combat, with both PC's suffering from blood loss 15 or above.
After this, the players made characters.

My views:

1. The combat system has a steep learning curve. Even with my previous practice with it, and the very excellent combat simulator, there was a lot of "hmmm....who gets initiative? How does this maneuver work?" This is really just a matter of practice and getting familiar with the system, so i'm not bitching about it.

2. The system needs something to determine how to get up after a knockdown. Someone (i believe Brian Leybourne) had discussed this on the TROS forum, but i forgot what it was during play.

3. Certain areas can have wildly differing values for armor, esp. area IV (which covers upper arm, shoulder, neck, and chest). This is confusing to keep track of on the paper man/armor diagram.

So yeah, that's about it. We should be playing again next tuesday, when the game gets under way for real.

[Brian Leybourne]

The player who caused that wound wants to roll "Surface organs destroyed" so bad he can taste it.

Coffee. Keyboard. Damn you :-)

The system needs something to determine how to get up after a knockdown. Someone (i believe Brian Leybourne) had discussed this on the TROS forum, but i forgot what it was during play.

I think you're referring to this thread.

So yeah, that's about it. We should be playing again next tuesday, when the game gets under way for real.

Sounds like you guys had a great game, that's fantastic. Good to hear how well TROS can work with only 2 players as well.. mayy RPG's just dont work well that that few number of people.

Brian.

[Jake Norwood]

I'm actually very surprised that combat took so long. I've never heard of it taking so long. A few questions:

Were you trying to do "everything" or did you take the first few fights simple, with only cut, thrust, parry maneuvers? What was the most confusing part? Did you all enjoy yourselves?

Jake

[arxhon]

I'm actually very surprised that combat took so long. I've never heard of it taking so long.

Err....That's because we suck? :-P

Actually, i had given the players all of the maneuvers available for a Level 4 Sword and Shield proficiency, so one guy kept throwing strange things like counters and bind and strikes. This is want slowed things down considerably. In retrospect, i should have only allowed cuts, thrusts and parries/evasive maneuvers. I kept trying to use feints, to no effect.

Explaining took a lot of time as well. One of the guys required things explained to him a few times, which is odd, because he's the smartest guy i know. I'll take the blame and chalk it up to poor explanations on my part.

I may be overestimating the amount of time spent, and underestimating the number of combat rounds. I know there was a lot of rounds of "I slash at area VI for 5 dice" "He parries with 5 dice". with no result. The PC's and the footmen had 11 dice each, after armor and SA's. Even if the PC's hit, the chain would usually soak up the damage.

Anyway, we all had a good enough time to stay up much later than we should have (e.g. 1 AM, when i had school, and one guy had work the next day) in order to make characters.

I know things will get better as we continue to play. One of the guys bought himself a copy of the book (Hurray for Jake!), and is super pumped to play again.

[Jake Norwood]

Excellent! Thanks for the reply. Thank your buddy, too.

Jake