The Player vs. Torchbearer: Second Edition

Torchbearer Second Edition has been out for a while now. Here are my thoughts.

Circa 2013, Torchbearer was kickstarted and released by Burning Wheel Headquarters, an indie game publishing house most notable for--you guessed it--fantasy RPG The Burning Wheel. Unlike BW, which is a Tolkien-esque high fantasy Heroic Journey simulator, Torchbearer is an old school D&D pastiche all about dungeon delving...and nothing else.

I love Torchbearer 1E. Although not without its share of flaws, it's probably my favorite tabletop roleplaying game. Every system works together brilliantly, in a Swiss watch fashion, to capture the lost art of early D&D graverobbing, and they do so in conjunction with character-focused rules partially imported from The Burning Wheel.

So, last year, when Torchbearer 2E was announced for Kickstarter, I was ecstatic. With only a few changes this was a game that could be made perfect. It needed small revisions to its classes, expanded content for levels 6-10, some tinkering with balance, rules for travel, and basically nothing else. And when playtest rules were released, I wasted no time in porting my current Burning Wheel group over to try them out.

Before I move on to the review, there are a few things that must be disclaimed:

#1: TB2E is still not officially released. It probably won't be for a while. Bear in mind, then, that this is technically a review of the beta rules we played. With that said (as far as I can tell) the game is content locked and feature complete. Nothing mechanical will change between now and its release.

#2: I have only GMed TB2E. I have not yet had a chance to play it. This review will be written entirely from the gamemaster's perspective, although I have played First Edition extensively.

#3: I have only GMed about 15 sessions of TB2E total. This was more than enough for me to make up my mind on how I felt about the changes to the rules, but, given how BWHQ games are meant for long-term campaign play, 15 sessions is hardly a lot.

Finally, #4: The campaign I ran ported itself over from an earlier 1E campaign, which meant I started the players at level 5. This seemed the best way to get to more of the new rules anyway.

The question of the day is "is Torchbearer: Second Edition a better Torchbearer than Torchbearer?"

Because this is a question that requires context to interrogate, the text that follows will be written with the presumption that the audience already possesses a degree of familiarity with the system.

Now to the review.

Too Many Books in the Kitchen

TB1E is 200 pages long. Only 100 of these need to be read by the players. Given how complex Torchbearer is, this is quite an impressive achievement. It was always my opinion that 200 pages wasn't nearly enough. 400 would have been fair, given how difficult it can be to master to the system.

An expansion is what we've received. Not only are the rules much longer, 2E is no longer a single book: it is now three books, all of which handle different aspects of the system. These are:

The Dungeoneer's Handbook, AKA the player's guide

The Scholar's Guide, AKA the GM's codex

and The Loremaster's Manual, AKA the graveyard for all 'optional' and extra rules (including most of the new stuff to Second Edition)

All in summary, Torchbearer has gone from precisely 200 pages to 848 pages.

There are 848 pages between "The Dungeoneer's Handbook," "The Scholar's Guide," and "The Loremaster's Manual."

Yes, TB needed an expansion, but this expansion is at least 100% too expansive. Torchbearer is not 850-pages complicated. It isn't The Burning Wheel.

But that's hardly the worst of it, because in actuality splitting the game into three books has introduced far more problems than it solves.

Torchbearer, complex and finely tuned as it is, demands a lot of rules-checking and referencing. After three years of regularly GMing First Edition I knew the book by heart, and I can navigate it very easily. Now, in 2E, I don't even know which book to check for which rule.

Let's take Camp Phase as an example. Is that in the player's book or the GM's? How about the Market rules? Town Phase? An explanation of the Might mechanic for me to give a new player? How about details on earning rewards at the end of each session?

The answer to these questions is who knows. There is a lot of repetition of the basic rules of the game between "Dungeoneer" and "Scholar," so often times 'either' is the correct answer. But not always. Now every time I sit down to play 2E and a question of rules comes up, I spend an extra ten minutes floundering about with two books instead of one.

This does not improve the game.

The problem is even worse than it sounds because some rules that were 'core' in 1E, and so seem like they should naturally be included in "Scholar" for an experienced player and GM like myself, have been demoted to 'extra' in 2E, which means they're hidden away in "Loremaster" instead for no particularly obvious reason.

I'm sure I could get used to this in time, but it will still never be as easy as having all of the information needed for rules referencing within a single (searchable PDF of a) book.

So why split the game into three? I don't see the benefits. I see only detriments. This was the first sign of bad things to come.

The Grind

The most obvious difference between 1E and 2E is that 1E has no interest whatsoever in anything that isn't part of the dungeon-delving cycle. This is what makes the game so brilliant. If you want more than that, The Burning Wheel exists right around the corner.

2E is different. 2E has decided it wants to be about more than going into dungeons and being traumatized, and so it has a whole slew of rules for things like war, starting settlements, being aligned with factions in the world, running businesses...

In short, 2E is trying to be both Torchbearer AND The Burning Wheel, and I cannot comprehend why.

We didn't spend much time fussing around with these new rules because they simply do not interest me. The notable and unavoidable exception is that, in addition to their Belief, Instinct, and Goal, each PC now has a "Creed:" a statement that aligns them with a force larger than themselves in the setting. This incentivizes being more than a dirty selfish adventurer and encourages you as a player to behave more heroically.

BUT WHY IS THIS IN TORCHBEARER?

We tried to use Creeds. We worked hard to think of Creeds that made sense for our partially pre-established cast and that everyone at the table would find interesting.

The bottom line?

Torchbearer characters are selfish, dirty adventurers. They don't care about the world. TB isn't about that. TB is about dungeon delving. We do not need Creed.

No one at my table, all experienced BWHQ game players, could come up with a Creed--even in the abstract. The mere concept was anathematic to what we wanted out of the game. These characters are selfish people, fundamentally. They aren't heroes. They're adventurers, in it for power and profit.

So it is with almost every new rule. They seem rooted in a misunderstanding of what Torchbearer is for. I find the game seriously break down when doing anything that isn't exploring dangerous for loot, even in 2E. Phases become a burden. The Grind ceases to make sense.

If TB is the only game you and your table are up for playing, maybe this expansion of the rules will be welcome. All of this certainly gives players stuff to do at level 10, when no sensible person would still be adventuring.

But I have no interest in any of this. I won't be using Torchbearer for campaigns that involve shopkeeping or heroism. Torchbearer is for self-serving dungeon-delving graverobbers.

I can hear your cries already: "Just ignore the new rules! Stick to the basics! You don't need to play with Creed or Base Camp rules!"

Alas, this is not an option. The shift in the rules' focus is present all throughout the systems, in small ways that can't be excised easily. For example, at level nine or ten the Elf can now put a glamor over a settlement to make it impossible to find without magic. Why would a character in Torchbearer ever want to do this? I don't know. But if you're playing an Elf, you can't avoid this shift in the rules' focus. It's baked into the systems.

This is what kills Second Edition for me. All throughout the rules there are little ways that the game is trying to tell you to do more than go places and get loot, and I don't get it. Rather than being a better Torchbearer, 2E is trying to be something else altogether.

Class Conflict

The classes in 1E are an homage to Basic D&D. They are Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, Cleric, Magician, and Warrior. Yes, Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling are classes, not races. Race and class are inseparable in Torchbearer.

Although I'm much too young to give a shit about Basic D&D, or even the Old School Renaissance in general, I love this choice in 1E, especially in conjunction with the old Law vs. Chaos alignment system. It makes Torchbearer feel like pastiche. It's just a little bit silly and it gives your campaigns a distinctive aesthetic that makes them stand out from modern D&D.

This has changed in 2E. The classes have received major overhauls and alignment has been keelhauled. In general, the rules have moved in a more Burning Wheel (AKA Tolkien-esque) direction and away from old school D&D . The game's primary designer has also decided to throw in some elements from his personal campaign setting Middarmark, which is Norse-inspired.

I loathe these changes.

Magicians and Clerics (now renamed Theurges) have both been completely changed. The magic systems are totally reworked. This was welcome in the abstract, but I do not like the implementation of either.

The Theurge

The Theurge now must manage his Divine Burden to avoid Stigmata through careful use of his "Urðr." What the fuck is an "Urðr" and why are we using Norse characters in our rules that no one knows how to pronounce? I don't know.

But worse than being unpronounceable is that the new rules are massively overcomplicated. They aren't poorly designed, but they're cumbersome and challenging to manage, especially for new players. With the exception of the pointless use of non-English, I think Theurges are better overall than Clerics in 1E, but I long for something leaner.

Magicians are a different matter.

The Magician

I played a Magician to level 9 in 1E. No one knows better than me that 1E's magic system is deeply flawed. Changes were welcome. 2E introduces plenty of them.

Magicians receive fewer spells per phase, they now earn more passive benefits to make them less shit as they level up, and they can specialize more into certain types of magic (such as combat spells). It's also much harder to de- and re-memorize spells now.

Again, as with Theurges, these changes have only made magic more complicated. But I can live with that. What I can't live with is that the new rules are cumbersome, feel kludged together, and are actively uninteresting.

By level 9 it's true that, in 1E, a Magician had more spells than she could reasonably cast per phase. But in 2E you're so limited in what spells you can take that all of the fun of magic is sucked out of the room. Even at level 9 you can never have more than four First Circle spells memorized, and if you want to memorize a Fourth Circle spell? That takes up all four of your mental slots. I hope you manage to use it!

This would be more reasonable if the effects of the spells were buffed, but they haven't been. In fact nearly every spell has been nerfed, some hard, and most now require a Turn to cast, which makes magic strictly worse than it was in First Edition. Some spells requiring a Turn and others not bothers me more than it should, because it introduces seeming arbitrariness into the rules for balance's sake--whereas 1E's 'magic never takes a turn to use' rule was simple, consistent, and elegant.

Magicians in TB are already hard mode. They can't wear armor or use weapons and they need to do more prep than the other classes to be effective. They don't start with the Fighter skill, need to carry around heavy spellbooks wherever they go, and have a habit of being useless.

I think the designers were of the of the opinion that Magicians had too many options at high level, and while there's some truth to that, this solution has gone so far overboard that there are now wizard robes floating at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Everything about playing a Magician in 2E is punishing and requires immense bookkeeping. It was already bad in 1E and now it's ten times worse. And in exchange, you get fewer spells, that are less fun to use, that are harder to use, that are worse in every respect.

I like that Magician get perks now. That's a good change. But the Memory Palace is a terrible system.

The Elf

Elves, who were Warrior/Magicians in 1E, have been nerfed massively and brought more inline with a Tolkienian vision. As with changes to the magic system I'm onboard with this in theory, but I don't like the execution. Their highest level benefits seem to have very little to do with dungeon delving. If you want to play as Elrond in Torchbearer, I suppose this is fine.

I don't want to play as Elrond in Torchbearer. I want to play as Legolas.

The Others

The changes to Warriors, Halflings, and Dwarves are all positive and make the game better.

As for the bonus classes in "Loremaster," I can only speak to the Thief: she continues to be awful. More than having terrible utility, as was her problem in 1E, she now receives a bunch of benefits that only apply in Town, and that are more importantly boring as hell.

Allowing a Magician to substitute Arcanist for any other skill, once per session, is fun. It bends the rules. It's a great change to the system. Giving Thieves +1D to setting traps or +1S to Feint actions is not fun or interesting.

Once again, these changes take TB down a path I didn't want to see it on. Rather than making 2E a more perfect 1E, they made it a different game--introducing plenty of new problems with the rules in the process, while simultaneously failing to solve old ones.

More Pointless Changes

The Embodiment end-of-session reward has been removed.

Embodiment at my table was earned regularly, primarily for roleplaying Conditions--because no other incentive exists encouraging the players to do so.

In its place we now have Gallows Humor. Gallows Humor earns a Fate point rather than a Persona (a worse reward).

Why was this changed?

Maybe this shift in the rules better reflects how Thor plays the game at his table. It doesn't reflect how I play it at mine, and to be honest I don't see the point. Are the rules of 2E really telling me that dark humor in the dungeon is more important than roleplaying your character's deteriorating mental state? Really? That's the behavior we want to incentivize in 2E?

I don't get it. Embodiment was perfect. It was the first thing we added back in to my campaign.

There are also enormous overhauls to the game's Check economy.

In 2E, you can only use each Trait against yourself once per session. This is a horrible change. As a GM I already have an unbelievable amount of trouble trying to get my players, even good, experienced players, engaged with the check economy. Most gamers do not like voluntarily suffering -1D penalties. What my players DO NOT NEED, therefore, is EVEN LESS of a reason to engage with the check economy.

In addition, Synergy--marking advancement for Helping--is now done with the expenditure of a Fate rather than a Check. This is also a horrible change. Synergy is never worth Fate. It would maybe be worth it if you could decide to spend it after the test, to mark Pass or Fail, but you can't, which means the Synergy rules are as good as removed as far as my players are concerned.

And how about "The Loremaster's Manual's" extra rules?

They're utterly pointless or introduce complexity where none was needed.

The new travel rules are a microcosm for why I dislike 2E so much. One major flaw of the original game was that it lacked any rules for travel, but this was easy to get over--because the game didn't really care about traveling that happened outside of the dungeon. But in "LMM," you'll find hilariously overcomplicated rules for traveling, which unravel over the course of 23 PAGES.

We used these rules once and I hated the experience so much that I vowed to never bother again. Torchbearer did not need 23 PAGES of rules for going from one place to the next. But more than being cumbersome, they're terrible and overcomplicated, full of arcane tables and confusing interactions. The party ended up traveling about 50 miles and it cost every player every ration. What? Just getting to one nearby place? Seriously?

And the other changes?

In Town Phase the price of Torches has been raised from an Ob 1 test to an Ob 2 test. I don't understand this at all; Torches were already less competitive than Lanterns. Now they're worthless.

A more reasonable change to the game is that its 2d6 random events tables have been modified to use 3d6 instead, and each town now has its own table.

I was in favor of this initially. I'm against it now.

Why?

3d6 veers too much toward averages. We received the same Entering Town events endlessly, to the point where I had my players rerolling until something more interesting happened. This might be less of a problem if results of 9-12 were something generic, but they aren't. We consequently found ourselves wondering why we kept finding sacks full of babies falling off of wagons every time we went to the Dwarven Halls.

I hate the new 3d6 tables. Good in theory, bad in practice.

The monsters in the book have also been altered to reflect Thor's Norse-ish setting. I'm not opposed to games being about specific things, but what does this Norse aesthetic actually have to do with Torchbearer?

In 1E, the monsters taken from Gygax and the Monster Manual made sense. This fits the old school pastiche aesthetic and matches the kind of TB I want to GM. What I don't want is Norse versions of werewolves or trolls. They don't fit in my setting, WHICH I IMPORTED FROM 1E!

But moreover, the game now walks a line that doesn't make sense. 'Race = class' was an easy pill to swallow when TB was a Basic D&D pastiche, but if it isn't that anymore, then what's the point? Why are Elf and Dwarf and Hobbit still classes?

With the game taking itself more seriously, this seems less like genre, more like vaguely racist stereotyping, and it frustrates players from other systems who want to do things like play Dwarf Theurges. Why can't they play Dwarf Theurges in 2E?

When a player asked me that in 1E, I could say 'because this is genre pastiche and all Dwarves are Gimli.'

But I can't claim that anymore. So what's the point? Why not change the class system entirely? It wouldn't even be all that hard to divorce class and race; surely we should at least receive bonus rules for doing so in the "LMM?"

Nope. For whatever reason that artifact of Basic persists. Who knows why. There's no obvious external, thematic reason, which there most definitely used to be.

Finally, "Loremaster" adds in tons and tons of new equipment for no reason. 1E's gear was beautiful in its simplicity: three types of armor, a bunch of weapons, and that's it. Take a look at the LMM market, though, and you'll find dozens of new types of non-magic armor, new weapons that do more or less what the old ones did except better, and a lot of extra miscellaneous equipment.

There are also new skills, such as Butcher, Fisher, Tanner, and Smith, all of which do...basically the same thing as already extant skills, except less elegantly. This game doesn't have FoRKs. Why do we need a Butcher skill when Cook already exists? And Armorer is the exact same thing as Smith!

All of this is easily ignored, except for the fact that the gear listed above appears on the game's random loot tables, but it once again speaks to the fundamental problem with 2E: it expands the game, adds new rules, and all for nothing.

TB did not need official rules for Longswords or Gambesons. You can use the power of imagination and narrate your Thief's leather as actually being a Gambeson, or your Warrior's 'Sword' as being a longsword (as I always had when I played a Warrior). TB1E was a game with a certain amount of abstraction, and that was one reason why it worked. So why are we trying to cut back on the abstraction?

There are a few positive changes to the rules, it must be said.

Everyone will agree that 1E had a major problem with weapon balance. The adjusted rules for weapons in 2E are far superior. Bows are still good, but not as good. Spears are much better. Shields are far more competitive. Greatswords now have an interesting niche. Each weapon has its place.

In addition, the new Nature questions for character creation are far superior to 1E's, as they no longer punish players for choosing the 'wrong' answer.

The additional factors for recovery from Exhaustion have been made less punishing, which is an improvement (if for no other reason than that we always forgot to apply them at my table).

And as much as I don't like the 3d6 tables, they work well for gear. Elf/Dwarf weapons and armor in particular were way too common in 1E when rolling for loot, since they occupied the 12 and 2 roll positions on 2d6 tables. I once played in a session where the GM rolled a 12 and a 2 back to back, thereby earning the party a cool Elf sword AND cool Elf armor...all for overcoming some random Bugbear in the forest. That was a common occurrence in 1E and I'm glad it's been rectified.

When I say 2E should have tried harder to be a more perfect 1E, these are the sorts of changes I'm referring to. There aren't enough of them to save the game as a whole.

Now for the Mumakil in the Room...

What really zips the bodybag on 2E for me are the changes to the Exhausted Condition.

In 1E Exhausted was far too punishing. Since it was often the first Condition given out by the GM to fail the players forward, it was in need of a rework.

Unfortunately, the rework it received ruins the game and its rewards economy.

Rather than increase Obstacles, Exhausted now compounds with Hungry and Thirsty and adds a further -1 to Conflict disposition. All good so far. But in addition to this much, it also takes away the player's Instinct.

In Torchbearer, every PC has an Instinct. Having an Instinct allows you to make rolls and bypass the Grind. You also get a Fate point (AKA experience) for 'benefitting the party' with your Instinct, once per session.

If you're Exhausted in 2E, you lose your Instinct. Acting on Instinct still costs a Turn or a Check, just like normal. The fact that the Instinct section of your sheet is being triggered fictionally makes no difference whatsoever. It has no effect on the rules.

This significantly alters the game's rewards economy. It allows the GM to rob the player of his ability to earn XP, which is a huge issue in a game that's so player driven--where earning XP is all about playing well by your own parameters.

Thankfully the designers realized this, so the rules specify that, if you act on your Instinct while Exhausted, you still earn a Fate point at the end of the session.

Except the rules also specify that you only earn Fate if your Instinct benefits the party.

Logic would dictate that, if your Instinct is doing nothing because you're Exhausted, then you can't use your Instinct, and it is not providing any benefit. It doesn't matter if you make a roll that would have helped. Your Instinct categorically cannot meet the requirement of the rules to earn that Fate. Something that is inert and invisible cannot 'benefit' anyone.

The passage about still earning Fate while Exhausted is an enormous kludge. It really bothers me. It's a huge flaw in the logic of the game.

This is the final straw for me.

In Conclusion

I see no compelling reason to prefer 2E over 1E, beyond the fact that 2E has nicer Roll20 sheets. It takes the game in an entirely different direction, and that direction is not one that interests me at all. While there are some positive changes, such as the addition of level benefit perks for Magicians and improvements to weapon balance, this good does not outweigh the bad.

I actively dislike TB2E. I think it's a bad game. The rules seem to be fighting against what TB should be about in favor of pursuing the versatility of The Burning Wheel. But BW already exists, and what I wanted was a better Torchbearer, not a worse Burning Wheel. If it's heroic fantasy I crave, or in fact any fantasy that's character-focused and goal-driven, that's the game for me.

So when I get the itch to GM Torchbearer again, it won't be 2E. I'll be perfectly happy to stick with what I know instead.

UPDATE: It’s been two years since I originally wrote this review. Having played plenty more of both TB 1E and 2E, I can report that Thor and his team completely dropped the ball. My opinion has only hardened. TB2E is a calamity of a game, and I don’t recommend it to anyone.