Song of Swords: The Last Redoubt

Reminder to upvote:

reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/600dxx/kickstarter_reminder_song_of_swords_tabletop/

This thing brought in thirty backers today, far above the (mode) average of 8. And they may be relatively small backers (average $50) but that's still enough to pop our numbers higher and higher, especially since the thread is still pretty new.

>This thing brought in thirty backers today,
Nope, it was this

Oh. Well, still. Jimmy said that we got a lot of referrals from reddit before, so it's still a good idea to upvote that and join the discussion.

No, the reddit threads do help.

What was the name of that Dacian invisible tiger thing?

I don't know, so let's say it's the Dacian Invisible Tiger.

Found it. Ostockroznock

>Invisible Tiger
Tigers are already fucking invisible, this is unfair.

My number doesn't translate to elf.

>all that talk about Genosians and their craftsmanship
It is due to remember a blurb Jimmy gave, about weaving among the peasantry in Galli,
that a Karthacki adventurer who slept in a stable and was given a horse blanket for warmth,
was so awestruck by the craftsmanship and detail work of this horse blanket,
that when he became Zoph'Kaga he commissioned this peasant family for a tapestry,

and it still hangs in the palace to this day.

It's little shit like this that I love about Jimmy's lore.

Jimmy your system is garbage and you should kill yourself pls thanks

Truer words come out of a politician's mouth.

Well, you're not wrong.

And they say manners and polite discourse is dead.

This user is my girlfriend.

I'm not Yonda you fat slut

I'm not Brad you slutty fatass

can confirm, reading the system now and it's trash. "realistic" my ass when you spend a chapter talking about drama-driven character advancement and shounen asspull mechanics for the middle of a fight.

Spiritual Attributes were better

arc isn't even some sort of unique system at all

its just "hurrdurr same thing", but without dice

Should we all be taking shots, it is Dia de San Patricio after all.

I thought we were taking shots, at Jimmy

Go shill on the reddit 48 hour reminder thread you fat fucks.

It's not a direct accusation of being a ripoff, so it doesn't count. I too think Arc is a bit lackluster. I've been fucking around with a Runequest-like Passions system for a while, and will probably post it as a possible houserule at some point.

And mothers in the Kaselreich knit the quilted armor of their sons to keep them safe from monsters.

Hey Bones you forgot to swap the graphic out on the kickstarter to show that the monster cards are unlocked.

Eyy, probably. Quilts being anathema to one of those scwarzvald horrors and all.

As if they have examples of the monster cards and did not just make the stretch goal up on the spot.

>smug anime girl photo
>14...88.png

Jimmy, why didn't you make monster cards like you promised.

I know its you

So can we actually do anything with add-ons yet? Because either I'm functionally impaired, or there's nowhere in the Kickstarter to choose add-ons. You know, despite the "check out the add-on section (but be quick!)." in the latest e-mail.

I guess they'll send out a poll to backers on completion?

Yes, that's how kickstarters work.

Cool cool, the way the team is speaking about them is just confusing as hell.

I'm off to shill so we can hit 35k!

Shill hard and shill strong.

>King Henri II of Galli once tricked hundreds of Kamen knights into constructing for him a series of fortresses that he was able to use to hold the border against them the following year, by offering solid gold masonry tools to whomever completed the finest of them.

Cant wait for the iconic really hoping one of them is bloody stupid compared to the rest.

>the combat system tries to be realistic
>BUT CHARACTER ADVANCEMENT ISN'T
No one ever claimed anything but combat tried to be realistic
You're getting mad at a strawman in your own head

Would it really be worth 150$ to shitpost though?

>Go shill on the reddit 48 hour reminder thread you fat fucks.

hey. not all of us are are fat fucks

it's 300

We should all pony up 1~10 $$$$ a piece and buy a visionary slot for the whole thread

each post can make one thing true about the character and see where we end up

By all means possible and any means necessary, shitposting shall be done.

>40k stretchgoal is King Daki
youtu.be/26zZk_33Dek

Now that's an idea.

>No one ever claimed anything but combat tried to be realistic
>Song of Swords is a historical and fantasy tabletop role-playing game that puts its emphasis on realism.
Uh-huh.

>At any time, including during combat, characters can spend Arc Points to upgrade elements of their character.
Realistic as fuck, dawg.

>Endurance and Health measure the same thing, physical fitness, but are split because reasons
Super realistic to split attributes up by fine hairs. I love the "gotcha" with one health halving other stats, by the way.

>Grit measures a character's ability to resist fear and, inexplicably, physical pain, despite the two not being the same thing at all.
>Grit advancement table deals entirely with how jaded they are, which has nothing to do with your capacity to endure physical pain, meaning you could jump someone in a back alley and become more resistant to pain without ever actually being hit
Hyper-realism, ho!

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Yes, giving criticism is seeking attention. It's trying to alert the developers to issues with their system. Are you going to explain to me how I'm wrong, or just post more image macros?

You used strawman arguments/greentext and snarked like a faggot. You're not worth it.

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Ok, I'll be neutral.
Do you, or do you not, see any problems with the following mechanics, when the system claims to have realistic combat alone:

1. Spending Arc points in the middle of combat?
2. Grit measuring both fearlessness and resistance to physical pain, and being able to advance Grit without experiencing or training to withstand physical pain?

Not him, but I have no problem with either of those.

>1. Spending Arc points in the middle of combat?

That I don't get and I don't think most people will do it. It might be an artifact if they intended to let you spend Arc points instead of Luck points (something that exists in Ballad).

>2. Grit measuring both fearlessness and resistance to physical pain, and being able to advance Grit without experiencing or training to withstand physical pain?

Yes, since it's your mental fortitude stat.

1. Figureing something new out in the middle of a fight doesn't feel that out there.

Actually pretty good points/questions to throw out there. The one thought of the three I mind the least is grit covering both the mental and physical in definition.

Do you think there could be conflict between strictly realistic combat and drama-driven advancement mechanics, when the rules say that you don't become more experienced by experiencing combat?

It's conflicting tones to me. Combat may be realistic, but everything outside of it, including your personal ability in combat, is not driven by realism, and in fact one could unrealistically improve within combat. That may not have any direct bearing on the realism of combat itself, but if you can just get better at combat... in the middle of combat, because you rescued your wife from slavers last session, which could have been via subterfuge or diplomacy? There's a disconnect there to me that says the game doesn't know what it wants.

I find it strange (possibly even drama-driven, rather than realistic), because pain training that I've seen involves physical suffering to build up resistance to physical suffering. If you base your ability to withstand physical pain purely on someone's force of personality and their ability to use magic, which is a mental attribute, not physical, where does that leave people who have a weak personality, but are able to withstand pain? The system is saying that such a person cannot be realistically made at chargen.

I primarily take issue with it because Song of Swords splits your physical fitness over two stats, neither of which affect your ability to withstand pain. It's baffling for a system purporting realistic combat to do that.

Ability to withstand pain has nothing to do with your physical form.

It's mental.

>I primarily take issue with it because Song of Swords splits your physical fitness over two stats, neither of which affect your ability to withstand pain. It's baffling for a system purporting realistic combat to do that.
Both Health and Endurance affect Toughness, which affects your ability to ignore physical wounds.

Or did you think that Health and Endurance magically makes your flesh tougher to penetrate or something?

Vote SoS best game on plebbit!
reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/5ww7td/rpg_of_the_month_voting_thread/df3ez74/?st=j0ffcwh3&sh=cb094309

You uh
You just said the same thing.

If the difference between 1 TOU and 2 TOU is having a level 1 lower wound, then toughness does make you magically harder to penetrate.

Part of the reason they're separate is to lower the ability of Naked Dwarf Syndrome to happen.

But Health and Endurance are somewhat different. A real life person could have a high Toughness and low Health.

>We do have to insist that nominated games be both complete and available. This does mean that games currently on Kickstarter are not eligible.
Don't think it fits this contest.

>enter game in contest it is explicitly banned from
How embarrassing.

>(“Complete” is somewhat flexible; if a game has been in beta for years--like Left Coast, for instance--that’s probably okay.)
Literally the next sentence.

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Can someone give me a quick run-down of the default setting?

the 'ole speedy encyclopedia

I agree with you. These have been issues that have existed in the game for a while. Arc sucks. Nobody likes it, and nobody I have ever played with actually runs it as intended. Most of the time they require you to only spend Arc on stuff that you did during the session you got it in or to seek training for it.

Grit also kind of sucks, but it sucks less. You can have high grit and no Will due to the True Grit boon, and one of the ways to go up in Grit is to actually endure pain. So it can very reasonably represent physical endurance on top of being a PTSD weirdo.

How do people use arc differently than the core game?

Basically it's a cheap knock-off of late medieval Europe until you start looking closely.

15th century Fantasy Europe and Near-East Asia.

It tries to maintain a balance between being familiar and being different. For example: Genosism has a lot of Christian elements to it like confession, mass, catechism, and then also has human sacrifice and ziggurats.

Grit would be way, way better if they actually created the insanity rules. The whole idea is that as you amass Grit, you become a tough, stone cold motherfucker, but you also get mental problems. They forgot to make insanity rules though.

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No uh, I didn't just uh say the uh same thing

The difference is what constitutes a wound of import. Getting gouged an inch deep matters more when an inch is all you've got to give. Your physical hardiness affects what physical wounds you're able to ignore because they're not really serious enough yet.

This should be a simple concept to grasp

I mean, my idea is pretty stupid

I believe they actually removed them, not forgot them

Could you tell me how the Zells' abilities affect the world? Living on seawater with no chance of scurvy and being able to basically teleport to shores with an unlimited amount of cargo seems like it'd radically affect the world.

Word on the street is that toughness is getting changed, so the problem is on the way to getting fixed.

No, they never put them in in the first place.

>No uh, I didn't just uh say the uh same thing
Cute attempt at mockery, but yes you did.

Having 1 more toughness can be the difference between having a limb cut off, and not having it cut off. It is your skin being magically tougher to cut than another man's.

They're a water based nation. Their abilities let them stay at sea essentially indefinitely unless they need to get something they can't grow or make, so they're able to stick to giant floating tribe-based navies which is exactly what they want to do in life. Their number and the power of their ships makes them huge players in international sea trade, and a lot of nations have deeply underdeveloped nations as a result of many of them being fiercely territorial and hating humans being on the sea at all. Some of the fleets are threats to entire regions, like the fleet of Rade Sark the Zell Nationalist and the Zells that hunt for pagans in the northern seas.

I've seen a couple give it out as blocks to everyone, basically as story based XP, with individual arcs serving more as a guide post for characters than anything else. I've also seen it used as a resource that isn't allowed to be used in the middle of combat and needs some sort of excuse to be used, like practicing the skill or finding a trainer.

And I've also seen it used just as RoS Spiritual Attributes, providing rerolls or extra dice if you're doing something related to your Arc.

>magically
It isn't magical, the process is very clear. The idea is that more physically robust people are more difficult to injure.

Not the other guy, but it seems that the rate how much more uninjurable you can be compared to another guy feels kinda much.

That's actually pretty fair

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Jimmy puts off everything by two months. This just means it's his top priority.

#excuses

Damn, I really wish I could contribute to the kickstarter, but I don't have a damn credit card to do so with.

I got myself a prepaid credit card at a gas station for this KS. If you want to pledge below 100 bucks it should be quite easy. Everything above that is a fucking hassle.
At least with the brand of prepaid CC that this gas station had, which is mycard2go.

I'll check that out - thanks for letting me know

I don't know if my local gas station carries that sort of thing, but if it does, then I'll actually be able to contribute.