A Song of Ice and Fire RPG

[Cikomyr]

Hi there

Yhea, another thread about me seeing something at the game store a few days ago :smallbiggrin:

The game I saw was, as the title said, A Song of Ice and Fire. The guy at the store said the "personal" system wasn't top-notch, but that the rules regarding House conflicts and integrating a system to participate in the "Greater World" was actually damn fine.

Someone here tried it? What have you taken out of it? Had fun? What is your opinion about the system to build and game with a House? would it be a fun way for a team to actually.. you know, feel like they belong as a group?

[Black Jester]

The green Ronin atempt to create a Westeros-RPG is actually a pretty bad game. It is, for instance, utterly impossible to recreate any of the novel characters as PCs, and the resolution mechanics are muddled and diffuse. And I have no idea who thought that the inclusion of fate points in ASOIAF RPG was a good idea. The rules for noble houses is its one boon, but even that is mostly repetitive and not really well thought out. Again, if you want to create a noble house as it is presented in the books, it again will fil to deliver.
At no time, the rules are able to depict the medieval grimness, the dire consequences or the depth as shown in the original works.

As with many truly bad games, the rules aren't completely free of usable ideas, but they are usually not implemented well.

I don't think that the game is recommendable. It is not a very good game in its own right, but as an adaptation of the setting it utterly fails to deliver.
If you are interested in a Westeros-based RPG, you find more than enough information without needing the RPG and you are much better of with a better system - Harnmaster for instance fits the setting and the moot much better and is a significantly more enjoyable game. Don't waste any money or time on the green ronin product. That just encourages them, and stands in the way of one day getting an actual good ASOIAF RPG.

[Plague of Hats]

I think the game system is pretty average. It's not super kicking, but it's not outright awful either. If you have buy-in for how the system is meant to evoke the novels (i.e., you want to play characters that tend to survive so that you can keep playing them), it's serviceable on individual character levels.

The House system is fairly nice, but is inconsistently fiddly and handwavey. The associated mass combat system has some elements that remind me of the better parts of the Decipher Lord of the Rings battle subsystem, but it gets bogged down in too many details and I think over-explains itself while at the same time explaining itself poorly.

I might just go ahead and play it in Fate instead, but I tend to say that about everything these days.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

It's an alright system, has a few neat things, but altogether...I'd much rather use Burning Wheel, because it's ideal for that style of game.

[houlio]

It depends on what kind of game you want to run in the setting. It pretty much runs games about some noble house that the characters serve. If you want to do other things, it doesn't work as well, as people have mentioned.

[Knaight]

It's an alright system, has a few neat things, but altogether...I'd much rather use Burning Wheel, because it's ideal for that style of game.

Burning Wheel is probably the best system for ASoIF, provided that you want to deal with the crunch. That said, it is a really, really crunchy game, which can't be said of the Green Ronin game.

[vgunn]

Pendragon would be my first choice. Other choices: House of the Blooded http://housesoftheblooded.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=1941 , Reign http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?345258-Reign-A-Game-of-Thrones-Stat-the-Great-Houses-of-Westeros , Elric/Stormbringer http://basicroleplaying.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=82 , Chronica Feudalis.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Ooooh! I never thought of using Pendragon for it, but that would be just about perfect. Passions and Virtues are a remarkably good fit for the setting, in a weird way.

[Knaight]

Pendragon would be my first choice. Other choices: House of the Blooded http://housesoftheblooded.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=1941 , Reign http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?345258-Reign-A-Game-of-Thrones-Stat-the-Great-Houses-of-Westeros , Elric/Stormbringer http://basicroleplaying.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=82 , Chronica Feudalis.

REIGN could work quite well, though enough of the crunch is tied into the setting that it would be a fair amount of work to convert. I don't see it working as well for the rest of these, and I say this as someone who loves Chronica Feudalis.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Houses of the Blooded would actually be pretty good, only I'd recommend basing the game off of Blood & Honor--it's more concise and has less of the subsystems that don't fit with ASoIaF, like gentlemen's duels.

[Poppyseed45]

I've run both ASOIF RPG and Burning Wheel for Westeros, and BW beats the actual game hands down. Mostly, it's what Black Jester said: you can't actually get a lot of the outcomes from the books/show, and you can't play a character or a House that would actually stack up in the game of thrones.

For example, the players wanted to be major movers and shakers, one step below the Great Houses; big enough that no one can ignore them, and people have to take them seriously, which also makes them targets. We tried rolling that up, and after 6 attempts at rolling for House Influence never got there. The only way I can see it rules-wise is to roll awesome for the history stuff, IF your house is old enough.

Characters were a bit of a mishmash. The dearth of Qualities is a big problem. While the rules state many times that it's okay not to take a certain Benefit to have a certain "job" in the game, it still felt silly to make a Maester who couldn't take the Maester trait thingy, or a knight who couldn't take Anointed. And the bonuses/penalties for aging were horrendously badly thought out. It's a mess.

I'd love to give this some sort of up tick, but this was one of the few games I was actively sad about buying. Thinking over it again, it might have been better to run the game in Reign (easier I think in the long run, and MUCH less complex) but BW is so much better than ASOIF, that even that wasn't a deterrent to my group.