The Riddle of Steel: why not using all dices to attack ?

[Lacco]

That's good advice. Puncture wounds were way harder to treat than cuts, given that they reched deep in the body.
If you can't completely close a wound you can end up winning the fight and then dying during the night for an hemorrhage.

This is actually one thing that I implemented during our games: puncture wounds required additional successes to be treated. First Aid - which usually serves to stop bleeding - needed additional 1/2/3 successes to actually treat level 1-2/3-4/5 wound. This made the party healer really important role.

Thinking about this, I wonder how good fights against nameless bandits are. For a training fight it should be ok, but considering the whole "choose your fight" mentality and the importance of spiritual attributes... well, it would be pretty lame to die against a mook.
So, should the master tone down on the opponents, offering wide chance to the PC to avoid useless fights? Or not?

Well, RoS made me step up my game and actually discard nameless bandits. All bandits had names. All bandits had a reason. Those who did not ran away after first wounds or after the party killed their leaders.

Of course that there will be some fights where you go in without SAs and there will be those guys in taverns that just want to draw blade without any forethought about getting killed.

But most of the time those guys will go for fists and when someone flashes a blade, they step back. Nobody wants to die just for nothing.

For example: the situation you described with captain and Oscar - Oscar has a good reason to go fighting. And had it happened in front of all the soldiers, captain would have a good reason not to step back. But here, alone? She would definitely hear his cause - and I assumed she has an SA regarding the book.

Otherwise she would not fight.

You could provoke her - using Ridicule or through failed Intimidation roll - to fight, but usually that would mean she goes Red (you can actually manipulate opponents using those two skills to either go all in/overinvest or go defensive).

It's a strange game.

My advice is: do not tone it down. Think about the NPCs - do they have a good reason to fight? If yes, they may fight even to the death, but not usually. Give them a chance to back down - both NPCs and PCs - from a fight they do not want.

Of course, players will jump on the opportunity to fight at first. Fights are fun, energetic, exciting. But you will soon see they actually start to let enemies go more often. When you draw your blade, all bets are off - and someone will most probably die or get seriously wounded - so take it as your last resort.

But once blades are drawn, hold nothing back. It's kill or be killed. Even rats will fight to the death if cornered - and if PCs are going to kill them, the least an NPC can do is hurt them bad before they get a chance.

So if my character is motivated by revenge and wants to kill a certain person/group... is that a passion? Or an oath? Or a drive?
Ok, I get that it could be all of these, but then why make the distinction?

It could be any of these: an oath to take revenge, hatred against the entity or drive to see them dead.

For me, the distinction is mainly for roleplaying and to ensure SAs are not all focused on one thing. It's a subtle thing, but you'll most probably notice differences.

Passions are irrational. When my players had a hatred, they suddenly really went for the neck of the enemy. I've had two players who started with "Hatred: Slavers" - both for backstory reasons - and any time slavers entered picture, they did everything they could to destroy them. No holds barred.
Drives are decisions and are more rational - the same two players, completely different approach. "Should I do this dangerous thing that will follow up on my drive?" vs. "CRUSH THE SLAVERS!"
Oaths are usually a source of conflict. An oath is "the easiest to break", but players seldom do so. It's the "paladin" stuff - you want to show off that you can pull the oath off even in face of insurmountable obstacles.

Again, it's interesting to watch how they motivate and form your players' choices in play.

I will go for a "blind fight". Let's see things from the PC point of view.

Good choice. Feel free to add commentary on how it feels

Oscar swings his swords towards the captain's blade: it's a Beat with 7 dices, +2 for aggressive stance, +4 for his drive, for a total of 13 if I'm not mistaken.

You are not mistaken, but FYI: Drive adds to your CP, so you can consider it part of CP (you get it once per round). Stance bonus is separate, so you did that correctly.

Captain responds with a lightning fast counter for 14 dice (2 dice activation cost in addition).

Feints? Feel free to roll for us both. I will then go over results.

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I much preferred 2e over 3.x myself, but that is a whole other matter. The complexity I was referring to was the actual combat side of things, which is a step up from d&d melee combat. But I do get the clunkiness side of things. Grappling for starters. And trying to wok out which of the dozen or more different modifiers apply...

Interestingly, for RoS there are two grappling systems. The basic one, in RoS Core Rules and the "detailed" in Flower of Battle.

While the detailed one is a bit on the complicated side, we have done some grappling matches and it worked well. Just do not let them build a dagger/grapple guy as first character: the learning curve there is too steep and you both will get in trouble.

It's best to go with swords, axes, shields and spears for first characters. Even pregens, so they can learn the basics and then build their own chars.

Dark Sun has three different forms of 'magic.' The first is of the arcane type, which nobody likes, because it sucks the life out of living things around it, leaving the land dead. Defilers are happy to do so, as long as they don't get caught, but Preservers try to avoid it and instead only pull out enough life to cast their spells without killing the land. Most people can't tell the difference though. Preservers would probably work with a reduced dice pool, or some other mechanism.

Good news: the system handles this easily.
BoIT handles its magic via Sorcery Pool, which consists of your magic attribute and your proficiency. Let’s say you have 10 dice to cast a spell (e.g. to attack with magic you use Witchfire proficiency; you can shoot lightning out of your eyes, fire out of your hands, or just collapse a part of a building or shoot mana daggers – the actual damage type is for you to specify).
You then split the pool into two parts – a spellcasting check and containment check. If you get spellcasting successes, the spell works. If your containment check beats your spellcasting check, you acquire no Taint.
If not, you get Taint equal to not contained spellcasting successes. Meaning Preservers will put most of their pool into Containment, but Defilers will happily shoot away with most of their dice pool.
Also: by the virtue of not amassing Taint, Preservers are able to cast more spells (on average) than Defilers this way (Taint slowly blocks dice from your dice pool). You could also implement a Corruption mechanic I was working on, giving some advantage to Defilers, but at cost of increased Taint, working on death spiral once they reach certain threshold.

Then there are the priests of the elements - earth, air, fire and water, plus various combinations of them. One who tended to a geyser would have access to water and fire spells, and one who oversaw a region of magma would be fire and earth. A lot more respected than arcane users as they don't destroy the land, and the druids actually try (in vain mostly) to heal it.

Divine magic in RoS: some characters can buy a gift to use divine magic. It works through spending of Faith attribute. You decide what you pray for and you invest Faith – rolling invested Faith dice against TN set by the GM. If you succeed, it works – and you may do miracles this way.

Lastly there is psionics. Every single person (and most monsters) have some minor psionic ability, a wild talent, which can range from minor and not very useful to a very powerful ability, like disintegrate. Some people are a lot more skilled at it as well.

Well, no idea what to do there. You’d have to give me more information on how it works.

Plus you'd have to work on the races. Ones like muls, thri-kreen and half giants are a lot more power than others.

No problem.
RoS and BoIT both use priority build, which means that races do not have to be „balanced“, but they have to be tiered.
If half-giants are more powerful than average humans, you put them higher on the list – so if you have a race that has clear advantage, you put it to priority A. Once a player chooses priority A race, they can not choose the same priority for attributes, proficiencies, skills or social standing/wealth.
So it’s not really problem to build something like that.