I recently chatted with Rascal (tabletop news outlet) about the history of Ironsworn and what the future might hold.

Let’s say I am sneaking up onto a guard or unsuspecting foe to attack them.

Is there a point to a Secure an Advantage with Shadow vs. just Enter the Fray with Shadow? They almost seem redundant.

I’m having trouble coming up with combo moves that don’t feel like a bunch of extra steps.

Can anyone share some scenarios of when to use other things before Enter the Fray?

Thanks!

So I'm redoing my first combat with the advice given and this is the results using lonelog. Please let me know if I made any mistakes:

@ Enter the Fray
d: Action+2=7, Challenge=8,4
-> Weak Hit
=> Khyra prepares to act, aiming her bow and taking initiative.

@ Strike
d: Action+3=6, Challenge=9,3
-> Weak Hit
=> The arrow flies, striking her enemy. He engages her before she even has a time to react.

@ Clash
d: 1d6+3=5, 2d10=1,5
-> Weak Hit
=> Khyra is able to inflict damage, but doesn't gain the upperhand

@ Pay the Price: Endure Harm
d: 1d6+2=5, 2d10=8,1
-> Khyra presses on

@ Face Danger
d: 1d6+3=7, 2d10=8,1
-> Weak Hit
=> Khyra manages to just barely dodge his next attack and starting to think she may be in over her head. -1 spirit

@ Face Danger
d: 1d6+3=6, 2d10=7,3
-> Miss
=> He attacks to quick for her to be able to dodge again and she gets slashed at her side.

She is down to 1 health and 4 spirit. I'm not sure if I want to keep trying or have her yield. If I have her yield, how exactly do I do that? If I choose yield, I might change the slashing her side to punching her gut to knock the wind out of her and knock her to the ground, still enduring the harm.

Edit: For context, he's burning down her hamlet to get to the old man that joined their settlement shortly before winter. Her settlement wouldn't have made it through the winter without him (mystic). The guy razing her hamlet has come for justice though, because the mystic had cursed the hamlet this guy came from so they would suffer. I'm imagining that they did something wrong to him, but haven't got that far so the dice haven't told me yet lol.

Which system would be better for playing a 40i game where the players are on a feudal world and can either be locals or from other plates

Me and my friends are trying to get into ttrpg and we ended up stumbling into ironsworn as an because of its accessibility and apparently simplicity, but we have absolutely no idea how ttrpg work like I would like to get some explanation on how to set up a campaign and keep it going how to use the rulebook and stuff like that, so we would really appreciate some help and beginners

So coming from D&D, this game is obviously very very different.

D&D combat is fun because you have a long list of spells and special abilities to chose from, and the goal is to use those in the most effective way possible. Pretty intuitive.

Blades in the Dark is a little less intuitive, but still smart. The GM sets the Position and Effect of any given action, depending on the fiction. Players want to be clever and think about the most effective way of fighting an enemy (or solving any other problem), and clever tactics reward better Position and Effect.

I'm struggling to get my head around Ironsworn. It seems players can just strike or clash over and over again. How does the GM reward players for clever solutions? How does fictional position affect mechanical success.

Like I mean really dumb down, like I’m 5. I come from fnd and just can’t wrap my head around it. Like whats up with initiative? Why can’t my cat attack on top of me attacking? Whats the difference between strike and clash because the only difference I see is initiative and they’re just different names. Why do I have to pay the price on a failed face danger, isn’t taking harm price enough? I’m just extremely tempted to make my own rules up for the combat. For example:

Enter the fray will strictly be initiative.

Attack will just be that, no strike or clash but you’d still roll edge or iron depending on ranged or melee. On a strong hit you do full harm, weak is half, miss is none.

Face danger, or, in case of combat block, on a strong hit full block, weak hit, half damage, on a miss, full damage.

As for my cat also attacking, I feel like this would balance out the small amount of health players get, especially against epic foes.

As for the second skill of the cat where if you choose to attack with them, on a hit you gain 2 momentum, this can be balanced out by saying strong hit you get momentum.

I really don’t understand why it wasn’t this simple to begin with.

I'm rather new at Starforged, but I'm having a blast while figuring things out. But I have difficulty deciding what is a Vow, just an exploration or both.

Recently finished a Formidable exploration to find a planet and couldn't help feeling it should have been a vow also.

Now my character has landed and has three objectives:

1. find the lost colony
2. find a way to dissable the fleet of murder robots waiting in space.
3. find what happened to the people that lived here.

I Think #1 is an exploration, but not sure about the others.

Hi, I currently have two PCs fighting an enemy from opposite sides of a room, so the enemy can only tackle one of them at a time. The enemy focused on Arwen, and currently has the initiative, but Grimli also has the initiative stored up from an earlier action. Is it reasonable for both the enemy and a PC to have the initiative at the same time? I suspect I may have been too free with the rules...

I want to make a Rimworld (a Colony Sim video game) like setting for this game and a big part of that game is the limited to lack there of space travel, You get a gravship but that ship is only good in orbit of the planet and is more for moving to different spots on a planet. I know Stargforged can handle galaxy wide stuff but would a single planet story be possible to do in the game?

As I understand them, ranks can be understood as a measure of the narrative weight and focus of an endeavour in the protagonist story. They can be seen as the actual time they take in the narration. Hereunder I use TV series to get an understanding of the relative importances and durations of progress ranks. The durations are indicative and can be shifted up or down for your game pacing.

Quests/Vows and Explorations

Troublesome : an act
Dangerous : an episode
Formidable : a double episode or a feature film
Extreme : a season (or an arc)
Epic : the whole series (or an handfull of seasons)

Combat

Troublesome : a beat, just getting rid fast of an ennemy or a couple of
Dangerous : a scene
Formidable : a long scene, couple of scenes or sequence. Here the point is to have a shift in the combat, be it a stage or location shift, means, reinforcements, objectives, anything that can redistribute the cards
Extreme : an act
Epic : a whole episode or feature film

In extreme and epic, the way your character experience combat is not continuous as in the other ranks. You play alternatively the combat and inside the breaks and breathing space of the combat. You alternate between combat moves and regular moves to win the battle at the end.

Connections

The rank of a connection shows how frequently they would come back in an arc, a season or the whole series.
A note on villains : you can have epic (or lesser) bonds with recurring villains whose relationship with your character will evolve during play until the end of your character adventuring life. One can think of Q in Star Trek or Murdoc in MacGyver.

Montages

A few moves can be seen as montages :
Battle
Explore a waypoint
Gather information
Set a course
Sojourn (and all the other recover moves)

Momentum

A momentum point can reflect how much the protagonist is ahead of the menace in terms of time (or beats).
1 momentum point can be 1/10th of a second to a second in combat ; or a minute, an hour, a day, a week or a month depending of the rank of the vow.