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Message: <blockquote data-quote="niklinna" data-source="post: 8621476" data-attributes="member: 71235">It's a mixed bag for me. The game delivers on the tone it promises: Everything is scarce, every choice is difficult, danger is ever-present. Unrelentingly so, as your personal strength is ground down the whole time. Even when we got the dragon hoard we were like, "How are we even gonna carry all this stuff!?" and had to plan a return trip, and then lost a bit of our loot on arrival at town too. I'm not sure how much I need to be emulating that feeling in a game given the state of the real world right now, but Torchbearer 2 certainly has it, which has made for some very engaging play.I find the rules overly complicated, poorly written, and poorly organized. It has many distinct yet interlocking subsystems: abilities & skills (with several special ones that have additional rules), instincts, traits/checks, wises, persona points, fate points (because why have just one currency?), conditions, conflicts, arcana, invocations, and more. Every rule seems to have exceptions. No given thing is described completely in any one place, except perhaps spells & invocations: I was routinely surprised to learn new things about something I thought had been covered as I read through the two base books—which do not split material into player/game master stuff, but mostly PC creation and "everything else, including some stuff you wish you'd known while creating your PC".Speaking of character creation, it's a mix of package-deal classes, questionnaire-based "customization" via a few either/or choices, and a random roll or two just for good measure. I'm not a fan of any of those methods of character creation and the particular combination here, along with the winding prose, made this process not at all fun for me. The game seems to assume a party of three as the baseline, and there's no way to cover all the bases with only three characters—which does perhaps fit back into the tone they're going for!Gameplay is interesting. The rules are difficult to learn, but once you have a grasp of them, they do work. But they are always front and center, standing in between me and the unfolding drama/action, as we go from the description of the situation, to determining which currencies we have in what amounts and how to combine them to deal mechanically with the situation. The agony of small and dwindling inventories is cool; the agony of calculating how many points of this currency feed into that currency is more like bookkeeping (which is funny because in most games I've played, players hate tracking inventory/supplies but don't mind tracking hit points and spell slots and such!). It's nowhere near as smooth as Apocalypse world or Blades in the Dark, where the rules do their best to keep things moving along—any delays are usually due to player dithering on position & desired effect.Skill tests are cool. I can see some traditional players not being happy with "fail" not meaning, well, failure, and I'm still adjusting my gut reaction to the term in play. But it's really neat that you can fail the test and still get what you want, but also get something you don't want, rather than merely whiffing, which I've always felt is boring (which I also like about Apocalypse World & Blades in the Dark). Scrambling for more dice to boost your roll is fun, but again there are too many fiddly different ways of doing that.I like the advancement system, in spite of its exceptions. It makes sense that you get better at something after some number of both successes and "failures".I found the conflict rules utterly confounding at first. They simply don't make sense to me and occupy this weird Tunnels & Trolls space of "throw some points around", but in a way more complicated manner. Again, as I become more familiar with the process, it's going a little more smoothly, but it's definitely an odd beast of a system compared to those I'm familiar with. (God help the people in the simulation thread if they were to try it.) Planning actions and then revealing them for resolution is interesting, and captures some of that feel of "no plan survives first contact".I gotta run soon, I'll try to write more later.</blockquote>

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