Is it as fast as they say?

[Ingenious]

Whoah, hey. hey now. come on.. I hadn't looked at this post in a good while and it appears that maybe I misrepresented myself.  I don't know seeing as how it would take far too long to re-read what I said about the subject, I will clarify that in my comparison to DND and ROS is that ROS was slow at the beginning(like the first two practice duels) but once actual game play started I was astonished at how fast it really was. First combat in-game lasted about.. 2 rounds.. or 4 exchanges. Only because the guy was not wearing a helmet, got stabbed in the back of the head.. and said head was then cleaved in two by myself. So while DND has its vast complexity and slow combat and round-table style.. ROS seems more 'shoot from the hip' style. It's fast, bloody, and cruelly efficient. Now, compare ROS with something that has even less rules and restrictions on game-play and it seems slightly more complex, but it isn't really complex at all. The easy thing to tackle is the combat system, the magic system in my case, has yet to be used or even explored by myself from a simple research of the rule-book. From a game that has far less rules ROS might seem more stable, or more complex...  but I am just assuming on this.

Simple solution to the problem, sit down with the players, go over the rules.. run some practice one on one combats, research some more topics of interest.. then hash all of that stuff out before game play. If you set-up the game-play before hand.. I'm quite sure ROS will live up to its brutal efficiency.

-Ingenious

[Jaif]

From my experience, RoS is faster than D&D, sometimes by a good margin.  More importantly, combat rounds are vastly more meaningful.  Many D&D combats are an exercise in proving that you achieve statistical averages as you roll many, many dice - you're just standing around knocking down hit points.  Only in RoS do you watch the hurt guy with two people on him frantically doing full evades begging for every extra terrain die (c'mon, it's a bigger rock than that!) while his friend the longsword-wielding dynamo carves his way to the rescue.

-Jeff

PS  The hurt guy lived - Mr. Longsword had two SAs at stake, if memory serves; he was pretty unstoppable, and quite in his element as a player.