Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells: Another Dull, "Modern" RPG
Really quick: if you want something similar to Dungeons & Dragons, but which focuses on fun, usability, and quality—yet isn't grossly overpriced—as opposed to social justice progressive politics, propaganda, and irrational, obsessive hatred over mere disagreements and arbitrary thought crime violations, check out Dungeons & Delvers.
Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells is a self-described rules light sword and sorcery roleplaying game with an “old school spirit” which, when translated from misleading, predictable and predictably empty marketing puff, means that it’s a barely playable, substandard simulacra that plagiarizes but a handful of elements and concepts from Dungeons & Dragons, which it then waters down with changes both pointless and trite, missing content, and bafflingly stupid gimmicks.
What it really feels like is 5th Edition D&D with most of the rules and content pared off, and then Dungeon World clumsily shoehorned into the innumerable gaps in a failed attempt to justify its existence.
You roll a d20, as you do, but instead of rolling against a target number you want to roll equal to or under an ability score, which in this game have been pointlessly renamed to attributes. Even more needlessly convoluted, you want to roll high, just not higher than your stat, your result possibly being used to determine whether an opposed roll succeeds.
The description has the qualifier “usually”, as in you “usually have to roll equal to or lower”, but instances where this isn’t the case aren’t mentioned.
Now, the GM can impose a modifier, presumably only for some reason to make things more difficult. If the player is rolling it's a positive modifier, added to their d20 roll, because I know when I think penalties I think of positive modifiers. A more intuitive method would be to penalize the ability score first, then roll, so a negative is a negative, but there’s a lot I would change about this game.
Namely everything.
But we’re not done, as there are “resisted tests”, where two people roll, with the victor being who rolled the highest whilst still counting it a success, and ties going to whoever has the highest attribute (but no guidance on what happens if both participants have the same attribute).
It also renames the Advantage and Disadvantage mechanic, going with the equally awkward terms Positive and Negative dice. It basically works the same, except for “negative” dice the GM gets to pick which d20 result to use.
You can also “push” the roll, where you bullshit a reason why you’re trying harder than normal in order to get a re-roll (I guess in at least some cases players just aren’t doing their best, even when their lives are on the line). But, if you still fail, there is the uncertain possibility that your situation will get worse in some way.
I know what you’re thinking: this sounds much, much more elegant and straightforward than, say, rolling a d20, adding a modifier, and then trying to meet-or-beat a target number. It’s also obviously far easier than handling opposed rolls by whoever rolls higher, period (and just re-rolling ties, or having the tie go to the defender/attacker).
There’s something called a Usage Die, which is in the Core Mechanic section even though it explicitly states that usage dice are “not part of the core mechanic”. You’re supposed to roll them to determine if a limited resource runs out. It ranges from a d4 to a d20, each time you roll a 1 or 2 it degrades one step: if a d4 would degrade, you instead run out.
It’s a gimmick for lazy, stupid players, unable or unwilling to put in a modicum of effort to track their rations, torches, arrows...you know, a few simple things that even children manage to monitor.
Worse, I have no idea how it is really supposed to apply in game, as it’s never referenced again. It specifically mentions equipment durability (not a limited resource, but okay), ammunition (ammunition isn’t even mentioned in the book), and “other resources”, but there’s no trace anywhere in the paltry selection of abstracted weapons, armor, or adventuring gear.
There’s a Luck gimmick, but it’s only really used to avoid dying. It relies on the Usage Die gimmick, where it degrades on a 1 or 2, but you can downgrade it to autopass something.
There are only four ability scores, which are now called attribute scores. Other very meaningful and necessary changes are referring to Strength as Physique, Dexterity as Agility, Intelligence as Intellect, and Wisdom as Willpower. I guess, to be more than fair, Physique is a combination of Strength and Constitution, whilst Willpower seems to mix Wisdom and Charisma.
Still no reason to change the rest. Or other things, which I'll get to in a bit.
You roll 3d6 and record them in order. The book, knowing its intended audience, makes sure to repeat this order in case you didn't realize it the first time. While I find amusing is that it tells you to record them in the order it appears on the character sheet, but the sheet looks like this:
So, where do you start? Where do you go?
There aren’t any races, and only three classes, rebranded as archetypes in what I can only assume is another blatant attempt to appear novel, or to perhaps distance it from one of the games that allegedly inspired it.
You pick from a fight—, I mean warrior, a rogue, er, that is, specialist, or a wiza—, whoops, sorry, magic-user (going 2nd Edition with that one, are we).
Your class frontloads you with abilities, determines your Hit Dice (curious why these of all things weren't renamed), Luck die, and the ability scores you can “easily improve”. This last bit isn't explained here, and not after the section on classes, or even the section intended for the players in general, but near the end of the book on page 38, after the section titled magic items that provides no examples of any, and the monsters.
Contrary to what it says, you can't “easily improve” these ability scores. See, when you level up you pick an ability score, roll a d20, and if you roll higher it goes up by 1, to a maximum of 18. Where do your prime ability scores factor in? You don't have to pick them: you roll for them automatically, as well as whichever one you picked.
What's funny is that this is explained twice on the same page:
Beyond class, you pick a Vocation and a Complication.
A Vocation can be anything you can justify to your GM, and when you do anything you can also justify as something related to it, you have Advantage on the roll. There are no limits beyond what you can rationalize, no restriction or scope, so your fighter could theoretically be a mercenary and have Advantage on all attack rolls.
You have to have a complication—because as we all know people always have exactly one, and they never overcome any or develop more—there aren’t very many, they must be randomly determined, some are duplicated, and can be very vague, such as lotus powder and obsession. It’s an ill-defined storygame gimmick where you, the player, can call upon it to up your Luck die one step, and only once per adventure.
That’s it. There’s no implication that the GM can use this as desired to inject complications, story hooks, or other events in the game, it’s a purely gamist gimmick solely used to recharge your Luck if you feel like you need some more, and think you can handle however the GM might interpret your complication. So, just save it, and only bother with it if you think you can weather whatever consequences the GM might contrive.
You know what would be superior? Let players just have whatever sort of complications they want. Let them choose if their character is, say, an alcoholic. I did that in 2nd Edition. We'd go adventuring, come back with cash, I'd blow a bunch getting wasted, sometimes buy everyone in the tavern drinks. I did this as a teenager, which no stupid storygame incentive to do so. I just did it, because it made sense.
It's funny how storygamers like to pretend that by tying mechanics to personality, to actions and goals, that it somehow makes for better stories (which isn't the purpose of a roleplaying game), better roleplaying, when all it does it get in the way, and encourage players to only really act in character some of the time, when there's some sort of payoff or they botched a roll and must now briefly behave in a detrimental fashion. Disturbing how it reflects the SJW/woke mentality.
Anyway, every class starts with 3d6 x 10 silver pie—, er, coins to buy your gear.
Under the pretense of “simplicity”, I’m sure, weapons are lazily categorized as small, medium, and large, and whether they need one or two hands to use is entirely up to the GM. So, if you can find a way to justify a one-handed large weapon, you’ll always use that. At the least you should be able to get away with a medium one, and there’s absolutely no benefit to going small.
Cost and damage is based on size, common sense be damned, so you’ll pay 5 silver pieces—sorry, sorry, coins, for a dagger and short sword, even though the short sword clearly would take more time and materials to make. Even a club would run you 5 silver coins, despite being just a stick. Why adventure in this game? Just gather sticks in the forest and sell them: you’ll wrack up cash really quick, and with no risk, too.
Want to make it somehow even more preposterous? Use a quarterstaff. Or a long stick. That would at least be a medium weapon, which means you can bonk people for arming sword damage (not long swords, as those are the two-handed variety).
Armor is equally bad, with the dubious studded leather and scale armor—which at this point I’m not surprised is incorrectly referred to as scale mail—being just as effective and expensive as chain mail. That’s right: chain mail. Why would anyone even bother inventing it, if leather with some metal bits attached is somehow just as good?
Ditto for plate armor and whatever the hell full mail is supposed to be: chain mail that covers the entire body? If that’s the case, why bother with plate, even though plate is far superior than chain mail by any and every metric?
And why the hell does studded leather cost as much as chain mail, anyway? It not only uses more metal, but would take far longer to make, and more skill to do so! It’s like this was cobbled together by a lazy loser that read an early edition of Dungeons & Dragons, wanted to make his own game years later, but just wrote down bits and pieces entirely from memory.
The adventuring gear table is spectacularly pathetic. It looks like he copied the one from the 3rd Edition Player’s Handbook, but then trimmed it down so that he could squeeze in encumbrance rules that only the laziest, stupidest gamers would conceive of and tolerate: you can carry any combination of items equal to your Strength.
Doesn't matter what they are: got a Strength of 10? Whelp, you can carry ten candles, or ten suits of scale armor. You can go over this, up to twice as many objects, but you suddenly have Disadvantage on mobility-related checks. There's no other penalty, no gradient: you either have it or don't. Oddly, backpacks and sacks don't count. There's no qualifier, so by this game's absurd rules you can carry an infinite number of backpacks and sacks.
To hit things you make a Strength or Dexterity check. It doesn't just say you need to succeed on one of these checks, it explains the rule all over again in case you were too stupid to remember it. You die at 0 HP, unless treated within an hour and pass a Luck check, but even if you live you permanently lose Strength or Dexterity (doesn't say how to determine which, or if you just get to choose).
You heal via resting. Short rests force a Strength check, and you regain 1d4 HP if successful. There's no limit on the number, but you can arbitrarily only take a short rest after an “action scene”. So, no resting for 20 minutes to make another save, an easier save, or regain extra HP. Gotta do an “action scene” first.
Long rests are funny in that you must rest an entire day to regain a single Hit Die's worth of HP. So, you can luck out and pass a bunch of short rests, regaining something like 5d4 HP (assuming there's enough action scenes to break them up), but if you rest the entire day might regain all of 1 HP.
After all this game gets around to explaining “powerful enemies”. Not in the combat section, where it is mentioned but not described despite having the space to do so (and no page number is given). Not in the monsters section, but three pages later, after dying and healing.
Basically, you add +1 to rolls for each HD the monster exceeds your level by. Note that this doesn't go both ways, no no no, it just benefits them. So, if for some reason you bother getting to, say, level 5, you have the exact same chance of hitting a "sinister knight" as you do a flying rat, and they have the exact same odds of hitting you.
Spellcasting works on Dungeon World mechanics: you make a check to cast a spell, and if you fail choose to lose it, or let the GM mess with you. Armor hinders this for no discernible reason other than it also does in some editions of Dungeons & Dragons. There's a spell “catastrophe” table which, regardless of the spell cast, makes it harder to cast spells, prevents you from casting spells, makes you fall asleep, causes the spell to hit you, or summons a random monster.
It suggests adapting results to the spell and character vocation, but provides no examples for doing so.
There are fifty spells, which is fine. Given what I’ve seen so far it’s way more than what I was expecting. Really, I wouldn't have been surprised if it said to just buy D&D and provided a sentence or two on how to “convert” them, but the descriptions are inline with the paradigm of indifference that really defines this trash: most spells get a sentence, or sentence fragment of description, with a few getting two sentences.
There’s nothing innovative about any of them. They’re all the classic D&D spells you’d expect, just some are renamed. For example, instead of Charm Person you have False Friendship, which is described as “the caster can convince a creature with up to PL HD that they are friends for PL hours. Can be resisted.”
That’s the entire spell’s description. Is there a range? Do you have to touch the creature? Talk to them? Are there any limits to what they will or won’t do? I’m guessing there’s no limit to how many you can affect.
What about Fly, which is called Ride Wind? The entire description is “strong winds carry the target, allowing him to fly clumsily for PL turns”. Does it only work on you? Is there a limit to how many creatures you can affect? Range? What does “fly clumsily” mean? Is there a penalty? A reduction in speed? I guess not, because it’s not specifically stated, so this is all pointless description.
The section on magic items is just a lengthy paragraph. There are no examples provided, just suggestions on what they should do. I think this is the worst part of the entire book. It’s so blatantly phoned in, like the author forgot about magic until the last minute and thought, crap, I don’t want to add more pages, so he just found a spot where he could tuck in a bit about how they just up your stats, grant Advantage, and “allow the use of special abilities and spells, and all matter of other things”.
Wow, thanks man. Glad you went the extra mile, there. Good to know magic items in your game can grant you “all matter of other things”.
They’re also all supposed to have drawbacks. I don’t understand this mentality, where all magic items need some sort of downside, as if that for some reason makes them better, more interesting. It comes across as...I don't know, cynical? Bitter? Like, something just can't be beneficial. You can't have strived for a purely beneficial reward, however superficial: there has to be a downside, possibly one that makes the entire venture irrelevant.
It certainly doesn't necessarily make sense, especially if the item was created (whether by mortal hands or a god-like entity), and it’s not even how most of them work in mythology. But then, why would you play this game at all, when there are actually complete games out there?
Another example of this trash game's numerous shortcomings is the monster section, where you get less than 40 to choose from. What makes this especially sad is that each monster just takes up a row on a table, so it would have been trivial to include more. Here’s what I’m talking about:
Some of the monsters are honestly comical in how stupid and out of place they are: two-headed lion (very iconic, I know), sorcerous snake, fire skeleton (what, are you nine?), flying rat (what?), sinister knight, an ice howler...the author has already copied so much from D&D, why stop now? Especially if this is the best you could do:
But, again, why bother with this trash game at all: none of these things are described in any capacity. What does a “thing of the deep” look like? What is its motivation? Is it even notably intelligent? What does a face stealer look like? Does it just want to steal a face? How does it steal your face? We at least get some sort of motivation with the “blood dryad”: it wants to sacrifice you in front of its Blood Tree.
Very spooky, I’m sure, even though it’s just an evil dryad. Actually, not even that. Dryads typically have various skills and magical abilities. This one just tries to charm you so that you’ll go to her blood tree: she has no particular talents in stealth or deception, no way to teleport from tree to tree or otherwise disguise herself, so just hit her a few times. Problem solved.
SS&SS doesn’t do or add anything new or interesting, and it tries to distract you with surface-level rebranding and cheap gimmicks, as if rolling under a target number—but trying to get as close to it as possible—instead of trying to meet-or-beat it is in any way more intuitive, or even provides any additional benefit. As if renaming terms like classes, and the classes themselves takes difficulty or is deserving of praise. As if reducing every single monster to a table entry is something to be admired.
It’s billed as a game with “old school spirit”, but it doesn’t have any spirit. It barely has an identity, which is the game equivalent of Ikea furniture assembled by a child with no patience or experience. No passion, either: the child just wants to get it over with as soon as possible. The end result is an at best half-complete table, parts taken from another, professionally assembled one, the whole mess taped together and propped up by a chair, or perhaps just some random sticks.
Why use it? You could make your own, and do a better job. Or just buy one that someone else made, save yourself the time and effort. And that’s what you should be asking about SS&SS: why play it (as much as it could be played, at any rate)? There are plenty of alternatives that are complete games—or at least have far more content to offer—as opposed to hastily cobbled, unfinished vanity projects.
Looking for a roleplaying game that, based on what others have said, actually has an old school spirit, as well as an actually complete selection of weapons, armor, and gear? That doesn't burden you with clunky task resolution mechanics and contrived gimmicks? That isn't woke? Then check out Dungeons & Delvers.
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