A Song of Ice and Fire RPG

It never turns them in to cripples, they will not take it in combat useful stats, they will take it in stats other people have bonuses in. It encourages and sets a precedent for min-maxing.

Nobody will create a Tyrion or a Hodor, they will create the Mountain.

Nah, I mean Status. It will help you reign in combat monsters by making them adhere to their House Lord or his boss or the king or whoever.

Oh and are the blood attributes really so broken?

Maybe not all of them but in my experience it's just what people take when they want to min max a guy that can chainsaw through Lannisters left and right. The system heavily favors attackers and if your players are smart, they'll stack that shit.

This game has social combat, right? I remember reading it and it looked like there was a package of two or three diplomacy related options that seemed like you could never lose social combat if you had them.

Given what and are saying about combat I'm guessing that was accurate?

You can, but in my experience people tend not to abuse it as often as combat.

The system is not super bad, but it does have a lot of flaws.

House creation is weird and house advancement is largely crippled, which means the odds of you starting with or ever gaining any level of significant power within the game is extremely low, using the rules as written. You are meant to be, and will pretty much always be, a shit tier noble house.

Conversely, it is extremely easy to make INSANELY overpowered fighting characters. You can easily build a knight who will not only kill any other knight in the game, but can probably kill three or four at once without trouble. Water dancers are unstoppable. In the game I played in, the water dancer was never hit once. Fought in a 7v7 trial by combat where half the other guys were kingsguards, annihilated them. Took on groups of high level knights, brutally destroyed them. Could engage entire infantry units and destroy them by himself.

Archery is also insanely overpowered. Every battle we were in, we won, and we won like those battles in the old Total War game, where at the end it says, Casualties 3, Heads Taken 465. Like those sorts of victories EVERY time, even outnumbered 2 to 1, because of archers.

The social system seems like it was probably okay, but it was rather complicated and after using it a few times, we just preferred to roleplay conversations and make a few rolls here and there, rather than this tactical mini-game of social checks with so many god damn variable rules.

And character creation is stupid bullshit. Mainly because older characters gain skills but lose feats. Being older means you are more physically fit, up to elderly at least, but have fewer social advantages and accumulated benefits.

It's almost as if they designed the entire game by making a list of all the major houses and all the major characters, and saying, "make it impossible to be these".

You can be Sirio Forel or The Mountain no problem, but good luck making a Lannister.

>balance it
The issue is, combat is designed like this.

>You kill them in one hit
>They kill you in one hit
Pick one.

So, NPCs rarely if ever manage to hit a properly made player fighter, but I think that's by design. They wanted it to feel realistic. If you balance it by making NPCs stronger or players weaker, probably you will end up with PCs dropping dead in every fight. Which, regardless of it being Westeros and all that, will make a game really hard to run. Especially since it's meant to be a story based game more than most.

How do I create a broken character?

>Archery is also insanely overpowered

I can vouch for this. I didn't even mean to be broken. I just thought Double Shot looked neat and Night Eyes would just be a fun situational thing. Dear god I was pumping arrows into everyone with no remorse. I think some of our other party members were technically stronger than me, but I could do my thing at a distance and basically never be touched outside of being ambushed, which also never happened because I gave my archer dude good eyesight for thematic reasons.

Fighter? Put at least 5 dice in one of these:
Athletics/Awareness/Endurance/Fighting.
Archer?
Agility/Awareness/Endurance/Marksmanship
Army Commander?
Fighting/Persuasion/Status/Warface/Athletics
Shittalker?
Cunning/Deception/Awareness/Status/Persuasion

Don't give too many exp or you'll let your player grow too strong.

Wait, so you can be a great Fighter, Archer and Shittalker all at once by putting 5 dice in Awareness?

Not quite, Awareness is a defensive ability mainly it also serves in game as a "dontactdumb" stat, in that you become more aware of how people react to you and what you or they say.

Alright so it is even worth to play this system then? If the character skills are so easy to be abused, the army tactics are really easy to abuse, and house advancement is nearly impossible whats the point? I don't even care about the setting that much just liked the army and house system at a glance

The intrigue rules make sense when you read them but they quickly become a clusterfuck in play. When two high defense characters meet you wont get any results ever.
Its important to have people actually cone up with arguments when their characters are arguing and ending a conversation with no clear winner is perfectly fine.

Acrobatic defense is only ever picked by Mary Sues, ban it.

Other than that I really enjoyed it.

Any good supplement books for this or is just reading the main book fine?

I ran the Wedding Knight Module for this a while ago and I throughly enjoyed it. However, purely because I made this mistake my main advice is that the "role" or "class" suggestions are not like classes in other games! There's no benefit to picking leader over fighter as there is no mechanical difference.

For those wondering: I gave my players an extra dice in their role stats. Our maester ended up with a 7 in knowledge, which basically made him omniscient.

Also, ignore the in-book suggestions for what numbers mean what in context. It should not be possible at character creation to make a house with all of Westeros as its domain, or as wealthy as all the kingdoms combined.

>Acrobatic defense is only ever picked by Mary Sues, ban it.

Just throw Winter at them, Without any armor to warm them they'll freeze their balls off and gain malus dice just by staying still.
>Oh, so you want to go kill the bandits but you don't want to wear warm clothes as it would negates your Acrobatic Defense? Okay, but they're more than 3 hours away in this snowstorm and we cannot take our horses as the terrain is too dangerous since it's a goddamn mountain(reduce movement by half, bandits gains +2B Fighting/Marksmanship dice and +5 CD)

They really need to add fighting skill or something else to defense.