"What?" I hear you ask, and possibly "by whom?" if you're of a grammatical bent and your curiosity is deepened? Well, the latter question is the easiest to answer - Tied to a Kite is a very, very small development company which produces only a very few games and all of them are excellent (Numerix absolutely defies description, but I tried, once upon a time). The former... there's a boring answer to that, which attempts to trace the game's pedigree, and there's an interesting answer to that, which is basically 'it's D&D for Blackadder fans with every rule you don't need ripped out'.
Like D&D, the game revolves around the use of the twenty-sided die - you roll them to make attacks, attempting to beat a target's Defence score, or to make saving throws, attempting to meet a target number defined by your class. Ranged weapons operate over a variety of distances, but all of them do d6 damage per level to the target, making them significantly deadlier than melee weapons, which do a flat d6 - the idea being to keep guns and bows scary, and close combat as a thing that lasts long enough for people to buckle some swash.
There are three basic character classes. There's the Fighting-Man, whose practiced eye allows them to size up opponents as better or worse in a barney than them, and whose skill at arms is such that they can wade through 0-level mooks several at a time. There's the Scoundrel, who does all the classic thief/bard/rogue nonsense of picking locks, sneaking about, knowing what's going on and generally being cool. And there's the Cunning Man or Wise Woman, who knows how to do mysterious things with herbs and sticks, and manifests an increasingly broad range of useful, low-level magical abilities like dowsing for more-or-less-anything, poisoning and curing poisons and other village witch stuff like that. One thing I really like about these is that they all gain experience in different ways. The Fighting-Man gets their XP for overcoming opponents in battle; the Scoundrel for spending money, at a rate of 5 for each penny spent (and it uses real British money too, or at least a simplified version that most people can actually understand); the Cunning Man/Wise Woman for being helpful (and not being hanged for witchcraft by being too obvious about it).
And the thing is, that's basically it. There's not much else to the core book other than a map of Elizabethan London, a sample adventure exactly one A5 page in length, and a few titles of novels and reference works that inspired the game.
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| Not least among which is one of the finest situation comedies ever to escape the British Isles. |
So why do I like it so much?
I like it because I've never sat down to run a heavily planned 'campaign' or even a one-off pre-written 'adventure' without the players immediately coming up with something the author of this material I'm supposedly running the game from has never thought of. This is par for the course in a roleplaying game, and it has always made me wonder why in the name of sanity people bother writing these heavy, detailed, proper-succession-of-events-contingent adventure documents at all. Actually, scratch that, I think I know why, or at least have a theory, which I will now share with you. 'Tis this: the majority of RPGs out there are written not for players, but for writers.
Most RPG writers have five brilliant ideas a second and naturally they want to include all their brilliant ideas in their games. It's been argued by crueller folks than I that many RPG-writing folk are frustrated novelists, which might explain the mind-boggling amounts of crufty flavour text and insignificant, game-irrelevant details about worlds that find their way into RPG books. I just think it's a reluctance to leave anything out. Rules accumulate the same way; someone has had a bare bones mechanic, like 'roll a d20 and compare it to a target number' and at some point they've had to work out how parrying an attack works within that metric, and so they write that down and add it to the system so that nobody else has to work it out...
... hang on, though. For one, working things out is fun, it stretches and exercises the mind. For two, it's entirely possible that I might work out a different way of, say, parrying, that works better for my group for whatever reason, only now it's pulling against a proscribed standard and people are getting fretful because they'd best use the rules right, after all they're the rules... and never mind that these are rules for using your imagination and frankly the only reason we need any at all is to work out whose imagination gets to have its own way in this particular situation.
And for three, if the developer has a problem with shooting their darlings, they'll never stop adding rules, until the system becomes so big, with a corner-case rule for anything, that it stops being a tidy and convenient way to decide whose imagined version of events will be definitive and becomes a framework for defining those events in the first place, while imagination wanders off around the back of the sausage factory for a quiet smoke.
Now, I don't deny that some people do derive a strange (to me) and inexplicable (also to me) pleasure from navigating Those Big Fat RPG Rulebooks and ensuring that everything is done strictly properly. And I don't deny that there's a time and a place for clear and definite rule structures which are strictly and properly applied - but to me that place is in a competitive environment where we are, first and foremost, trying to work out who's the best at something, and frankly 'being the best at something' is not what I've heard anyone, anywhere express as their reason for playing an RPG.
I'm of the opinion that the rules of an RPG are the means to an end, not an end in themselves; the point of the parry isn't so that we can go through a fourteen-stage grapple process and make sure that every aspect of that process is done properly to accurately simulate every factor that might influence the success or failure of an attempt to stop someone's character hitting yours... it's to stop someone's character from hitting yours. Let's go with a quick and efficient way of working out what happens, because presumably there's some dramatic reason why your character's being hit in the first place, and isn't that dramatic reason why we're playing this game in the first place?
Anyway, Backswords and Bucklers isn't like that. It's clearly been written by people who are thinking about the actual experience of play. Players will come up with something you didn't think of, so don't plan a fifty-stage chain of events and then look hurt when they get off at stage three; create a situation in which there's a job to be done and let the player characters work out how they're going to do it. Likewise, when you're actually steering your character through a tense mano-e-mano fight, what you want to know is whether they hit the other dude with their sword or not, so let's not put too much stuff between you and that. If I say "they hit you" and you say "nu-uh", what we need the rules to do is tell us whose version of reality is going to happen, and nothing more. Naturally, this can't be a straight fifty-fifty chance all the time - some fights will be harder than others. Backswords and Bucklers provides just enough mechanical grift to process that, and leaves the rest on an 'if you need it, make it up' basis. I've always ended up doing that with RPGs anyway, and I like a game that encourages - nay, demands - that I do that, rather than discouraging me by having all these rules that people feel obliged to follow because, you know, they're the rules.
This doesn't mean that I don't add rules to any given instance of Backswords and Bucklers; I've borrowed the idea of 'testing a stat' by rolling equal to or less than it from, ooh, any number of games, and in the name of consistency and treating all players equally, I've borrowed the parrying, dodging and grappling basics from Rifts. One of my players wants more defined goals for their character, so I'm looking at ripping off the Ambitions from Errant. Oh, and I've decided that the saving throws and attacks can be extended out of the purely physical and into the realms of spellcasting and social interaction as well, because sometimes people just want to roll to seduce the guard.
The appeal of Backswords and Bucklers is that it's left me free to improvise my own simple extensions of its core mechanics into doing these things, rather than providing me with a huge, clunky, corner-case mechanic for each of them. And because it is at its heart so simple, for the next gaming group, I can go back to those simple core principles again, and make up whatever that group needs, however different it ends up being.
Bloody marvellous, if you ask me.
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