Sword Chronicle - Opinions?

[Malkavian]

Hey everyone,

I've been eyeing up the Sword Chronicle book from Green Ronin and have been toying with the idea of grabbing it. The idea of a Game of Thrones meets Witcher game sounds quite intriguing to me, and I remember liking the system when it was used for ASIF RPG.

Does anyone have this? If so, what are your opinions on it? I'm just curious before I invest money in the pdf.

[Kolbrandr]

I picked it up, and I'm pretty happy with having done so.

A lot of it is the SIFRP system with the serial numbers filed off, as it were, which mercifully includes the best part (in my own view anyway), the house creation system. They also make some solid choices like removing the combat defense penalties from armor onto your defense value (they still apply to the initiative equivalent), thereby making armor actually useful with tradeoffs instead of a thing that gets you killed. There's a further refinement of the intrigue/social contest system to make it less potentially, uhm, unfortunate, and also add clarity into how it works and what you can do with it. There's some minor cleaning up of a few other rules issues in terms of some of the more broken quality/benefits.

In terms of new or newish stuff, they included a (relatively low) magic system that is essentially the magic system that they had in some of those chronicle system pdf releases they would do, but again with some cleaning. It's not bad really. You won't be hurling fireballs around or anything but you can certainly curse, bless, ward, divine, what have you. If you want it to have more oomph there's a pretty solid basis for creating your own homebrew magical powers from it, and I imagine the creative common license for Sword Chronicle will mean someone will eventually do just that.

They also, for having filed the SIFRP serial numbers off, are free to put in place rules for nonhuman ancestries/races (elves, dwarves, orcs, etc. etc.), and take advantage of that to do so.

I haven't dived too hard into its signature in book setting, but it looks decently solid from what I've eyeballed. It's also pretty ignorable as far as instead using the book to do your own thing.

Main drawbacks? It still includes some of the creakier bits from the SIFRP rules, including the potential broken character creation combos I cringe and eyeroll to see whenever I join an SIFRP game, and that the scaling at high stat levels to given difficulties remains wonky in favour of said high stat levels.

But overall it's a pretty good buy for what it is, a generic and lightly cleaned up version of the SIFRP Chronicle system, with additional rules that let it do broader takes on the fantasy genre.

[Kolbrandr]

I should probably add, I do in fact really like the SIFRP system Sword Chronicle is making use of. For the most part it works quite well for what it does and is enjoyable in the way I prefer systems to be. I'm just after a bunch of years using it also aware of the flaws it has (no system is perfect after all).

[Thufir Hawat]

So you now can play a knight and not feel overshadowed by all the water dancers ?

[Kolbrandr]

Knights certainly compare much better to Water Dancers this time than previously, yes. Your damage soak means by contrast you can actually get hit, and you are now not trading that for garbage combat defense, so people will actually miss you when they attack, or otherwise hit by totals that will let your armor eat the damage they do. Being able to afford and wear heavy armor is seriously a good thing now. Slap a shield on besides and you can totally in your own way fight a relative bunch of dudes at once.

(there's still an easily abused/broken water dancer combo that is possible but it's so solveable by a GM being willing to for once say no to it! You have the power to say no to busted things GM! The power is yours, Captain Planet style!)*


*I may be tired of seeing that combo all the time such that it has damaged my sanities. I am beginning to suspect that it's all the same guy doing that same combo over and over across interchangeable water dancer pcs across the entire internet. Yes, I totally have some Pepe Silvia style conspiracy board as related to that somewhere.

Terrible Short Notice Conspiracy Board Version:

[Malkavian]

Thanks for the feedback! Sounds like I'm going to need to get my hands on the rulebook and consider a SC in the future.