So, I know it's really late to be thinking about buying TROS. It's been out for ages, it's got 2000+ posts at RPG.NET - I mean, heck, I've even *designed* with Jake, and I still haven't bought his game.

But the thing is expensive... it's a hard-back book! It's got actual art! It's like buying freakin' D&D for crying out loud. Indie-games are supposed to be 2-page PDF things with bad spelling that you download from the internet for two bucks. Right? RIGHT?

If I'm gonna drop $40 on a game, it's gotta be something I'm really going to use. The reviews have sold me. it sounds like George R. R. Martin: The RPG. But search / handling time is where it sticks, for me. I can't play games where play keeps pausing for system maintanence. The web site hype says TROS plays fast.

So, how fast is it? Faster than SORD? Faster than FUZION? Faster than D&D? Faster than D6? Faster than T&T? Anyone got some actual play examples that showcase the velocity of the mechanics?

A five-a-side battle in D&D3e takes usually somewhere around 60-90 minutes or so to resolve.

The same battle in TROS, no more than 10-15.

And the TROS one is more satisfying and fun too.

Brian.

TROS is waaaaaay faster than ANY version of DND.
Most of my NPC kills have been one or two hitters, usually lasting no more than 4 rounds(8 exchanges). Even one memorable one where the NPC was hopped up on SA's and was throwing a CP of 27. That one took awhile... because on the first exchange he hit me for a total damage of 19, shield took 8, blocked 3, armor of 3, and toughness of 6. So I ran to get my halberd and I ended up giving the guy a blood loss of around 45+ not to mention shock, etc... only because I wanted to really kick his ass and not wait for him to bleed to death.
Oh, and I killed some magical being with one arrow to the back of the skull, so combat is extremely fast.(All of these cases however have been against opponents without helmets)

-Ingenious

I'm replying from the limited experience of "this is how it played in our first session".

It played about as fast as other dice pool games such as Seventh Sea or WW's World of Darkness games. There was a bit of search and handling time in looking up tables in combat that I don't think would ever entirely go away, but which would be lessened by photocopying the relevant pages as a reference.

Combats did tend to be quite quick however, in terms of number of rounds/actions (I suspect combat may get longer as people get more tactically adept).

HTH

Not having tried it yet (but looking forward to it!), my guesstimate is that it should play faster than the Storyteller system, in large part because initiative must only be figured out once, after that, it's a natural flow of battle. Secondly, the penalties for multiple action are much faster and easier to figure out.

I'd say low-level D&D might play faster (because low-hit point characters just tend to croak fairly fast), but at higher levels, the fights become a slugfest and TRoS will win. My estimate.

Definitely a learning curve - when it comes to combat manouvres, especially. But once you're confident with these - certainly plays quicker that DnD.

Alan.

I found that the first couple of engagements took some time...as the players and myseelf were getting our bearings. With practice, however, we all got much faster. I have found it to be quite fast, certainly faster than what I remember from AD&D (2nd Edition...yeah, it has been a while) and roughly equivalent to AEG's d10 dice pool games (L5R and 7th Sea).

Ian Charvill wrote: There was a bit of search and handling time in looking up tables in combat that I don't think would ever entirely go away, but which would be lessened by photocopying the relevant pages as a reference.

Nathan, dude, who cares about handling time (it's very low, really). Characters are more powerful when they're fighting for something they believe in. That's so on your wavelength that you have to buy this game.

Put it this way. If/when it does take longer, you don't mind, because what's taking longer is actually interesting itself.

Mike

Hehehe, see, Mike speaks my language. I'll have to add the $40 indie game to my get list now. I hope I get cash for christmas... ;)

Two days until my books arrive!

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to GM, and I really want to play!

wandering around the sewers of Firenze (Florence) during the seige of 1530. The party consisted of four PCs and they all managed to get involved and the thing was dead in about four to five minutes of game time. This includes the build up as the thing approached them in the dark of the sewers.

So We have a particularly nasty critter with special rules fighting four PCs. Four to five minutes from dark foreshadow of its appraoch to the bits of the thing crawling after them at a snail's pace... Pretty fast, I think...

Hi Ian! (I'm in the same group.)

Based on our two or three sessions of play: it's not fast, it's decisive.

In terms of handling, I'd say RoS is slower than D&D. It's quite complex, with lots of stuff to think about and keep track of, whereas D&D is simple. However, in D&D you usually get the whittling effect where characters stand there clonking each other over the head till one falls down. The damage disconnect (good hit not equal to big effect) adds on to this, so combats can get stretched over many rounds at the whim of the dice. RoS doesn't do this, because any hit is likely to make a big difference, so the whole thing takes fewer rounds.

Let me extrapolate from this statement, sometimes a good hit, or AWESOME hit, wont even make a scratch. Case in point... my character was hit once for a total damage of 19. Shield absorbed 8, 3 block successes, 3 for armor on the groin, 6 for toughness. For a total defense of 20. So you see how even an awesome hit can be completely nullified.
After all of this, I cleaved the guy in the right shoulder for a level 3 and 4 hit, then I finished him off with a level 5 thrust to the head. However, this guy had been hit with a full combat pool attack from the other guy in my party, for only a level 2 wound to the neck... which didn't weaken him as much as I had assumed... since I did not know this guy had a CP of like 27 with all of his SA's firing....

So a small wound, to a player with a small CP... it will change the momentum of the fight, the entire fight. Likewise a small wound to a guy with a large CP, wont make much of a difference.

-Ingenious

Tim Gray wrote: Hi Ian! (I'm in the same group.)

Based on our two or three sessions of play: it's not fast, it's decisive.

In terms of handling, I'd say RoS is slower than D&D. It's quite complex, with lots of stuff to think about and keep track of, whereas D&D is simple. However, in D&D you usually get the whittling effect where characters stand there clonking each other over the head till one falls down. The damage disconnect (good hit not equal to big effect) adds on to this, so combats can get stretched over many rounds at the whim of the dice. RoS doesn't do this, because any hit is likely to make a big difference, so the whole thing takes fewer rounds.

I think that the level of enjoyment you will get from TRoS depends on what you are looking for.

If you are sick of 3e D&D and want to get into some serious roleplay, then I would say that TRoS is for you.

If you don't like high hit point invulnerability, then TRoS is for you.

There are some things that D&D and it's clones do better, but not many... ( I know that that is an unpopular sentiment here).

above all enjoyment of TRoS depends on having a GM who listens to the players wants and desires (in the form of SA's) and isn't bent on telling the story that GM wants to hear regardless of what the players want.

In my experience it takes a few sessions to really get into the swing of things, but once you do the rewards are well worth the effort of adjusting the way you approach the game.

Dave, for Nathan the question is not a D&D comparison. He's used to playing games with very few rules at all. So what he's worried about is that the system will slow things down much slower than he's used to playing.

And, as Tim and Ingenious note, it will be slower, slower even than D&D.

But it doesn't matter, because it's all fun stuff. And, while one side will tend to be hard to put down, the other side will not. So combats do tend to be decisive as noted, IMO. So what you get is a flurry of meaningful and interesting action. As opposed to D&D where you get a drag of nigh pointless action. More importantly, compared to say, The Pool, which Nathan likes, what you get is a mechanical sense of the character's drives in combat. Which is just more interesting than a barrel of monkeys.

Mike

I would disagree that it's slow at all, especially when compared to WoD or D&D. I've played both lots, and TROS is faster.

Jake

Jake Norwood wrote: I would disagree that it's slow at all, especially when compared to WoD or D&D. I've played both lots, and TROS is faster.

Tim:

I've been running TRoS for about two years now, and I've seen some pretty big fights, the largest was 6 PCs + their allies (four additional NPCs) against fifteen other assorted baddies. That fight resolved in about half an hour. Everybody was in armor and they were all relatively skilled. I've yet to see any combat in any other system resolved that quickly.

YMMV

Draigh, I think you're misreading my posts. I'm specifically saying that I don't think RoS combats will take a long time.

Oops... sorry.

:-)

How about if I clarify by saying that if you want Simulationist gaming TRoS is pretty good. If you are after a Narrativist game with some Simulationist elements then TRoS is great.

probably about as clear as milk. But the clearest way that I can say it.

deltadave wrote: How about if I clarify by saying that if you want Simulationist gaming TRoS is pretty good. If you are after a Narrativist game with some Simulationist elements then TRoS is great.

Tim, I think you're being a little bit more snappish than you need to be re the whole GNS thing.

It's probably worth observing that in our gaming group (Tim's and mine) Riddle of Steel is being run by a very competent illusionist sim GM. It occurs to me that the handling time is affected considerably by this - frex whether SA's affect the combat pool for an entire combat or for a single round. The former would have turned our games one hackfest into a more decisive affair.

In other words: if SAs are used sparingly and the situation is not geared 100% to responding to people's SAs then combats are slower, more cautious affairs - and the whiff factor in general goes up - and so handling times go up. More liberal use of SAs would lead to an increase in speed until you start coming across NPCs with SA's too (i.e. the high-powered, dramatically important NPCs where you probably want a long scene anyway).

So to bring it back to Nathan's original point - handling time in the game is responsive to whether you play the game narrativist or drift it to sim.

Nate fully understands the meanings of the GNS model. At least as well as any of the rest of us do, anyhow.

I guess I'll weigh in on thie primary topic now.. The basic skill system is as fast as any other dicepool -vs- TN system.. which is to say, fairly quick. Tell them the attribute to roll, the skill to roll against, and how many successes they need. As necessary determine and roll an opposed roll. Compare successes.

The combat system is in some ways quicker, but also slower. Once you've gotten up to speed on how it works, it flows fairly quickly, back and forth. It's fluid enough to deal with situations where you don't roll initiative (sometimes, a combat begins when a character attacks, and no squaring off is done) or when one party surprises another. The only part where the flow bogs down at all is when one party actually hits strongly enough to wound the other. Then it's a matter of a fairly quick chart referencing, and another die-roll (to determine precise location of hit) to determine the effects.

Some factors may slow game-play down even further, but these are foibles of play, not of system. If the player has not written down his weapon stats, or the Seneschal has not written down stats for the weapons his NPCs use, that will be an additional reference or two. If the Seneschal is overly picky about referring to the rules for opposed skill-roll TNs (like, say, me) that causes additional references as well. But once you know the rules, and are familiar with them, nothing really takes that long.

So, yes. It's as fast as they say.

My general experience is that, although TRoS combat tends to be slightly faster than D&D, it has the potential to be somewhat longer, and feel much longer. Why?

Rounds are longer. There are meaningful decisions to make every round, something generally not true in D&D, and the decision field is larger (how many dice?) There tend to be less rounds in a tRoS combat than in mid-level D&D, but it tends to "feel" longer. If both players are fighting cautiously, it can be VERY long, extending even into D&D-like numbers of rounds.

Now, this is comparing play of reasonably sophisticated tRoS players with reasonably sophisticated D&D players. Have highly sophisticated players (Jake and Brian play tRoS, Monte and John play D&D) and I imagine the whole thing will speed up considerably.

yrs--
--Ben

I would say that speed of play is dependant on the GM. If they allow the players to lollygag and make decisions slowly then of course it will take forever to play. If the GM requires players to make decisions in fairly quick order, then it will go fast.

In one group that I play with, if the player doesn't start speaking immediately on his turn then the character will stand around in confusion for that round. In another group, the GM allows players to deliberate for quite a while and solicit opinions from other players as to what would be the best course of action. Same type of system, but two dramatically different results. TRoS is subject to the same issues.

For my RoS game the maxim is : It's better to do something now, than the right thing after your guts are spilled on the ground. If a player thinks for too long then I treat them as suprised for the remainder of the exchange. Players have been known to just grab a handful of dice from the bowl, swing and count later rather than be bashed with no defense.

Presumably you'd only apply these techniques for speeding up play once the players had spent some time getting to grips with how the combat system works.

Tim & Ian,

I'm printing off the moves cards from the website as I type so we can all be faster next week - feeling guilty over having knocked Andrew out in the very first exchange so he was a spectator as you lot battled away.

sheesh,

Tim Gray wrote: Presumably you'd only apply these techniques for speeding up play once the players had spent some time getting to grips with how the combat system works.

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

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.