Duels

Can you find it by yourself or would you like a delivery?

What.
I do have and appreciate the pdf.
It's available for free on the official site.
Thanks for the offer, though, if it wasn't sarcastic.

What I meant is that realism is the reason why I like this system.

It is realistic in the way that an actual wound makes any kind of action harder to do.
But it kinda miss the point of adrenaline (keep going despite wounds and such) and make for game were no mistakes are possibles.

It would be the case if people were duelling naked and the first true blow would destroy you, but since most opponent are armored, it would be more akin to box fights. Yes, taking a hard punch sucks and can cost you the match, but if it doesn't end the match, you have a fairly good chance of winning anyway

tl;dr death spiral is not that realist and kinda bad

Oh yeah we have an official site now, I'm not used to SoS being easy to find.

I mean you do subtract Will from Pain, some more talents or a mechanic for temporarily ignoring some pain would be nice.

Maybe add limited one-use "ignore injury malus for one turn/round/whatever" resource. Like you gather your forces for another assault despite growing weak, but you can only do it an handful of time at best.

If I recall correctly, there's a talent by the name of Juggernaut that allows you to ignore all Pain for one round.

Mmmh, might be a good idea for pure adrenaline.

But it's quite infuriating that the merest hit lower your chance to fight and win.
Let's say the combat started, and you took a clean hit on the arm (from a sword, but you're full armored). Taking the hit will hurt (less HP or whatever you want to go down when you get hit). So yes, using that arm to fight will hurt more (hence hence the idea to have maluses). But that's often the place where people can and will just endure the pain.

I get that trying to come up with a realistic answer is kinda fuzzy. But in game, feeling that your every action are "doomed" because you took the first hit kinda sucks. (which is purely subjective from my experience in a few games with death spiral such as Shadowrun or L5R)

>the merest hit lower your chance to fight and win
But it doesn't, a weak hit will not hurt you through armour and low level wounds can often be ignored by higher Will values.

If Will helps against low level wounds, that's either good, or not death spiral at all (which is also good)

Death spiral often came with system were there are no much difference between the kind of wounds.
Just stacking the first few wounds actually put at adisadvantage.

but i don't know the SoS system so good to hear

then why are you talking about it like you do. we've got a dude asking for recommendations and you're in here saying wrong things about systems like you know what you're talking about

>Songs of Swords has a MASSIVE issue with death spiral, though.

>but i don't know the SoS system

Top kek

Well, one guy just said that SoS had a massive problem with death spiral. Which is a bad thing, despite it feeling realistic.

Now you say that there is no death spiral, and since i don't know the system, i can't say if there is one in it or no. If there is death spiral despite the will system and low level wounds, it sucks.

On a similar topic, is there any system that has a good way of resolving quick-draw gun duels?

Could you use a card game for it?

I've heard Dogs In The Vineyard is good for that, although I can't personally vouch for it as I don't possess a copy.

the doomtown LCG literally used poker for duels. each card in your deck had a poker value and you drew five or more cards and discarded based on your guy's stats, then allocated wounds based on how many ranks you won by.

>What RPG systems handle one-on-one fights in the most satisfying way?

If by "satisfying" you mean accurate, look at "En Garde" by GDW. It's maneuvers were developed from the materials used in fencing schools.

While SoS has many more details and other bits, it's duels too often end in death for the system to be entirely accurate. There is a great difference between dueling and combat.

That reminds me, Legend of the Five Rings has a good system for samurai duels. It's a dicepool game and you choose which dice take effect. So you can pull punches if it's non-lethal, but there's always the risk of hitting harder than you wanted to.

Legends of The Wulin

aces and eights had a kind of cool targeting system

There's also Honor + Intrigue, a swashbuckling game based on Barbarians of Lemuria, if you looking for a more pulp style duel.

Basically, in a fight, alongside their hitpoints everyone have three advantage points that represent that you are able to fight. If an attack hit you, you can either try to dodge/parry it, take the blow, or lose one advantage point, representing you character losing ground or moving to another room, if you use all your advantage, you lose the fight.

The game is also filled with manouvers to shke things up, from lunge to disarming or throwing your weapon to pin your oponent's clothes to the wall.

to expand on this a bit, i think you put this transparent targeting thing wherever you want on a silhouette, draw a card and roll a die, which places your shot somewhere on the grid, so you can hit or miss, or hit a location you weren't aiming at, and your stats and gun and stuff modify how accurate you are,

Legends of the Wulin is my preferred system for duels. It takes a very different approach to most systems, throwing away realism and focusing instead on emulating an awesome fight scene, but with the same weight of mechanics you'd see in a realistic combat system.

LotW uses pools of d10's, reading sets- That is, multiple dice showing the same number. The value of a set is ten for every dice in the set, plus the number on the die, so two fours is 24, three eights is 38. Singles can also be used as a set in certain cases, for a simple value of 10 plus what they roll, but they're more restricted in the actions you can take.

The amazing thing about this is that it means you can often make multiple actions on every roll, and in combat there's a significant number of options for attacks, debuffs and ways to manipulate the battlefield that give a lot of depth to the combat, choosing what you throw at an opponent and them choosing how to assign their dice for defence, figuring out what's the best thing to block and what they can get let through.

As great as the mechanics are, I also love the way the system gets your characters personality involved in the fight. Your characters beliefs, passions, quirks or spiritual focus can all have a tangible, mechanical benefit, making a fight a meeting of souls as much as a clash of blades, and the system supports this. Manipulating enemy conditions is an important part of a fight, while you win by inflicting your own conditions on your opponent, usually injuries but also with options for others.

All of this can get a bit overwhelming in a large combat with multiple people present, but in a duel it's fucking sublime.

I also love how LotW does the end of fight consequences- Each person gets to choose a condition to put on their opponent. This doesn't need to be an injury, or a penalty. An old master can beat the shit out of you, and then give you a condition to ensure you'll be a worthy challenge next time.

Sorry, I'm an exhausted idiot and missed out an important detail-

The standard dicepool in Legends of the Wulin is 7d10, a set value based on your overall power level, although it can be increased by temporary resources and in the long term your pool will grow.

Even with the 7d10 starting pool, however, you're decently likely to roll two sets, and even with one set you can make two actions, as every roll has a single action you can make on a single dice, so you're not screwed if you roll no pairs.

It is a highly flawed system in a lot of respects, sadly. It's awfully edited, laid out and explained so actually learning it is rough, requiring a lot of experimentation to figure out how ambiguous wordings are meant to be interpreted and such like. Having made it past that barrier I fell in love with it, but I won't blame anyone who sees the total mess up front and is turned off.

SoS has a luck mechanic which you can use to ignore wound penalties for a round.

This is pretty cool, I like these kinds of approaches to combat and aimed shots.

You could perhaps repurpose the basic idea of the system from Space Cadets: Dice Duel.

You would basically have both sides roll their dice pool at the same time, putting aside rolls that suit them and rerolling the ones that don't.
When a player is satisfied with the chaces he has with rolls he has got the player says "Shoot".
The rolling stops, and result of his attack is determined.
Then the rolling starts anew .

SoS is also unfiltered autism where is takes multiple hours to do a few rounds of combat.

>multiple hours to do a few rounds of combat
Just how many fighters do you have on the field?

So to sum up:

>I want a system that's not too fast
>but also not too slow
>People sperg out over SoS having both of these problems at once

The Riddle of Steel is pretty good for realism if that's what you're after.

Aces & Eights is by far the best system for anything western.