Compromise and Conceit

The Warhammer  Fantasy Role-playing campaign in which I am “particpating” (in the sense that I turn up, and fail to achieve anything for 3 hours in a row) was meant to come to its messy and incompetent conclusion on Wednesday, probably with me being eaten by crazed mutant ratmen. However, for the second time in 3 months, half the group just didn’t turn up, so we had nothing to do. We were invited to join a different group, which was running a trial of the new “A song of Ice and Fire” system. This is a system developed for play in the world of George RR Martin’s books of the same name (he’s certainly a beardy chap isn’t he!).

The adventure was just a tester – a group from the same noble family travelling to a tourney to get famous, and encountering trouble on the way. It was quite refreshing – no intrigue and no double-crossing, just a simple hack-and-slash (though we still acted as if the whole world was after us).  I played a squire who was very good at running and hiding, and not much else – this is 2 ways in which the character was better than my useless bludger from Warhammer. This Squire also had a few secrets, which I shan’t divulge here. 

The system itself seemed simple enough, of the kind where your character sheet lists only the skills and traits you do have, talents affect your ability to use certain skills (rather than granting special abilities per se), and everything is run by numbers of six-sided dice used to beat some GM-established target. For example, my Squire had a stealth of 4, so got to roll 4 6-sided dice for stealth attempts. Presumably the number said Squire had to beat would be expected to be between 5 and 20 for most tasks, or was set by the target person’s roll. Because my Squire had some special talents, he could reroll 1s, and got to add his agility to the result, which meant that said Squire was pretty good at hiding. Just as well, because I subsequently discovered he really wasn’t very good at fighting…

The downside of this gaming system was really very simple. No magic and no monsters. What is the point of that? I want fantasy role-playing, not just role-playing. I did plenty of the latter at workplace training in the early noughties, thank you very much. Give me wizards and fantastic stuff, please sirs!

Fortunately we won’t be going back to it. Next session is the latest incarnation of Traveller. Groovy covers and random character generation… I can’t wait…