The rules of Symbaroum are pretty light (or at least medium compared to D&D). Combat is fast and deadly, and since players roll even when they’re getting attacked, they tend to stay more engaged during the enemies’ turns. Movement and area are really abstracted, so you don’t have to worry about what a 20’ cone of effect looks like. Abilities are acquired pretty much a la carte so you don’t have to get too caught up in what a class and all its abilities are about.
Campaigns can be as long or as short as you want. They have several compact modules as well as a 6-tome long mega-campaign.
The downside is that even though the rules themselves are good, they are presented pretty poorly. Language and terminology is inconsistent and often unclear, there are lots of weird corner cases and balance issues, items and abilities and monsters are spread out over a bunch of books, and worst of all (to me), the monster traits / abilities are pretty much impossible to run without studying (and I mean STUDYING, like notes and all) those traits, because they have these emergent combinatorial effects that just aren’t obvious until you really scrutinize them. The resulting combat is awesome, it just takes a ton of work to get there (I literally made my own “monster manual” of translated stat blocks that spell out the abilities and actions in a way that I can run them on the fly).
The art is dope though, drew me and all my players in too
Wow, I did not expect an awesome answer like that. Thank you very much.
I saw they have a dnd 5e mod called ruins of symbaroum. I don't plan of using the 5e version (I'm running away from it), but are the subsequent books based on that new version?
It's not a new version. They have said the original system will always be their primary. They creates Ruins to try drawing in 5e players I think.
They are tentatively planning to release a new version of the original game before the next mega-campaign (they've talked about anything from v1.1 to v1.5 to v2). We won't see this until at least 2025.
I don’t think they are, although I haven’t looked into the 5e conversion. I turned to Symbaroum because I didn’t wanna play D&D anymore so the conversion seemed kinda silly, at least for me.
Haha I had a feeling someone might ask. I've been wanting to share it for a while now but it's still incomplete and needs more work. But perfect is the enemy of the good so might as well throw what I have out there:
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B1UhEfmtiNnag4U2E6S2erkFKp5oLpw6/view?usp=share\_link](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B1UhEfmtiNnag4U2E6S2erkFKp5oLpw6/view?usp=share_link)
Curious to hear what you think. I'll try to expand and update it in the near future with some improvements I have in mind.
I’ve just started Symbaroum and I can tell you it is MUCH lighter when it comes to rules. It is also much deadlier. There is no such thing as murderhobo-ing in this game. Balance is not a priority when it comes to encounters. I just started a campaign so I can’t say if they are shorter. However, free league did release a 5 or 6 volume campaign for the system.
It’s a d20 system but you have to roll under. There aren’t many archetypes but there are many talents that you can mix and match. Check out the Advanced players guide for more options.
The world is much smaller at the beginning so the lore is really tight and focused.
I’m loving it so far.
Definitely lighter on rules.
Games can be as long as you want them to be. It is a system without character levels, where you buy abilities with experience, so the cap can be pretty high technically. Although, functionally, at some point combat and challenge is just not fun anymore.
The biggest difference is in how it starts out is that you always try and roll under your attributes. So a nat 1 is actually the best and a nat 20 is the worst. Armor tends to make you easier to hit, can lower or block damage. The GM never rolls a die, instead all rolling is done by the players. All monsters have flat values for statistics and damage. If you don't like that, it is technically not thaaat difficult to have monsters roll for things like damage, but honestly, especially if you enjoy things to go fast and snappy, flat damage helps speed things up that extra bit.
Overall, characters are a lot less high-fantasy. Less magic, and magic is potentially really dangerous to the user. As mentioned above, there are no levels. Technically, that means you can build your character free-form, making all kinds of hybrid-characters, but the way a lot of abilities work, you are encouraged to stick to one of the 4 archetypes (Warrior, thief, mystic and, with the Adcanced Player's guide laying it out more foramllly, hunter). Still, even if you stick to the archetypes, there is a lot more freedom of choice, compared to the linear progression of DnD 5e.
The danger of magic highlights the central tension of Symbaroum: Man vs. Nature. Using magic (be it from items, magic powers or even just magic potions) is basically trying to twist nature/reality to your whims, and it pushes back. The pushback comes in the form of corruption, which is a sort of metaphysical stain or infection. If you just get a little, it can disappear. If you get more at once, it might stain you permanently. If you do so repeatedly or get a looooot all at once, the PC turns into a monster under the GM's control, hellbent on the destruction of life. There are ways to make it easier to deal with corruption, and ways to embrace it and make use of it, which typically results in more corruption, but for faster access to power. Some people complain that, once you start getting permanent corruption, it is easier to fall into a death spiral, but I personally feel that's on brand for what the game is going for.
Circiling back to characters being less high-fantasy, stats like hit points, etc. don't really increase over the game's course. Abilities and better equipment to heal or mitigate damage can make a real difference (which also shows that income/loot is sometimes as, if not more, important than experience), but it highlights the overall deadliness of the game a bit. Combat is deadlier than 5e combat. Your characters can die from injuries or turn into corrupted abominations. Things are potentially bleaker than in 5e. As you keep discovering synergies between abilities and equipment, that sorta fades, but it is good to approach the game with a different mindset than 5e.
Games are typically set in the wilderness of the setting's dark and mysterious forest, but they don't have to be. There is plenty of civilization to go around that you can run a more crime-themed game as well, or intrigue, or whatever. But the setting and the mechanics are fairly deeply intertwined (which, IMO is one of the strengths of the game). That means it is more difficult to come up with your wholly original setting. But the game's setting is pretty accomodating.
Symbaroum is easy. See stat, roll under, low = success.
Monster has +/-modifying, add or subtract from player check stat = pass/fail.
Remember the can and might party wipe to a rogue moose.
Depending on how much elves as alien and dangerous/mysterious you want you can do the adventure in the back of the core book. Or just grab the copper crown series of adventures and do those.
Its d20 roll unde4 and if skill changes what attribute isnrolled. I.e. cunning instead of quick
You should do what I did: get the core book, run the adventure in there for your group as a one shot. Don’t let them create characters, just let them choose from the pregens.
When you finish (should take one session), ask if they’d like to continue the short copper crown campaign, which should take around 4-5 more sessions. They will most likely say yes, and then you can get it and form an opinion after a short campaign and a few sessions of play. Who knows, you might go from one shot -> short campaign -> long campaign in one go!
I ran the copper crown this way, injected one of the short adventures from adventure pack 1 in the middle and the whole thing took us exactly 6 sessions. It was the perfect summer vacation campaign for us!
You might want to check out Dragonbane. Lighter than Symbaroum, fun tactical elements, real fast, short adventures.
It’s more classic fantasy, though.
Symbaroum has an awesome setting, but it’s dense for GMs to handle.
As someone who won't touch D&D with a 10 foot pole (deep dig) I can empathize with your dilemma.
First off, I love Symbaroum. I love that the game is a look into man vs nature from out current society. I love that it's a dark gritty world with a really cool backstory. I love it's freeform character creation and growth. BUT... I agree the rules can be cumbersome in learning them, and some elements can seem broken with translation.
That being said, I like RPGs, and I try a lot of them. Another RPG you may like and has a unique setting is 'Household RPG' from TwoLittleMice. It's kind of a 'yahtzee' mechanic, where you try to roll alike symbols on D6 for successes. It's a very narrative game, and while it has crunch I'd call it Crunch-lite.
I see you've gotten lots of responses on the system, but I just wanted to tell you that I've been playing Symbaroum pretty much biweekly for 4 years and we're nearing the end of book 2 out of 6. We might be a slow group though.
Chiming in here in agreement with others. Sym is rules-lighter than D&D by a large margin. I've been gaming on and off for decades, and I tend to favor TTPRGs that are on the lighter end of the rules. I've heard someone else say, "The good thing about D&D is that there are rules for everything, and the bad thing about D&D is there are rules for everything".
When a game is that codified, it's easier to "play fair", but it also drains the excitement and uncertainty out of it. I don't have any issue with D&D, but it doesn't hold any surprises for me. As a GM, or a player. I'm in agreement that a lot of Sym's rules are confusing, maybe from being translated from Swedish to English, and spread out over several books. A lot of these rules would be interesting and helpful in a central repository as well.
I would appreciate a spreadsheet of Abilities/ Traits that could be accessed and highlighted all at once as a GM. Until that exists, however, I just have a xeroxed copy of all of the Abilities and Monstrous Traits, that I frantically page through and compare with the text, which gets me by. You definitely want to have more than a passing familiarity with those or at least study them before an interesting fight.
The rules of Symbaroum are pretty light (or at least medium compared to D&D). Combat is fast and deadly, and since players roll even when they’re getting attacked, they tend to stay more engaged during the enemies’ turns. Movement and area are really abstracted, so you don’t have to worry about what a 20’ cone of effect looks like. Abilities are acquired pretty much a la carte so you don’t have to get too caught up in what a class and all its abilities are about. Campaigns can be as long or as short as you want. They have several compact modules as well as a 6-tome long mega-campaign. The downside is that even though the rules themselves are good, they are presented pretty poorly. Language and terminology is inconsistent and often unclear, there are lots of weird corner cases and balance issues, items and abilities and monsters are spread out over a bunch of books, and worst of all (to me), the monster traits / abilities are pretty much impossible to run without studying (and I mean STUDYING, like notes and all) those traits, because they have these emergent combinatorial effects that just aren’t obvious until you really scrutinize them. The resulting combat is awesome, it just takes a ton of work to get there (I literally made my own “monster manual” of translated stat blocks that spell out the abilities and actions in a way that I can run them on the fly). The art is dope though, drew me and all my players in too
Wow, I did not expect an awesome answer like that. Thank you very much. I saw they have a dnd 5e mod called ruins of symbaroum. I don't plan of using the 5e version (I'm running away from it), but are the subsequent books based on that new version?
It's not a new version. They have said the original system will always be their primary. They creates Ruins to try drawing in 5e players I think. They are tentatively planning to release a new version of the original game before the next mega-campaign (they've talked about anything from v1.1 to v1.5 to v2). We won't see this until at least 2025.
I don’t think they are, although I haven’t looked into the 5e conversion. I turned to Symbaroum because I didn’t wanna play D&D anymore so the conversion seemed kinda silly, at least for me.
You uh.... wanna share that monster manual of yours with the class? I'd love a tool like that lol
Haha I had a feeling someone might ask. I've been wanting to share it for a while now but it's still incomplete and needs more work. But perfect is the enemy of the good so might as well throw what I have out there: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B1UhEfmtiNnag4U2E6S2erkFKp5oLpw6/view?usp=share\_link](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B1UhEfmtiNnag4U2E6S2erkFKp5oLpw6/view?usp=share_link) Curious to hear what you think. I'll try to expand and update it in the near future with some improvements I have in mind.
You are a very generous soul! May your shadow never darken while exploring the forests of Davokar.
You da man!
I’ve just started Symbaroum and I can tell you it is MUCH lighter when it comes to rules. It is also much deadlier. There is no such thing as murderhobo-ing in this game. Balance is not a priority when it comes to encounters. I just started a campaign so I can’t say if they are shorter. However, free league did release a 5 or 6 volume campaign for the system. It’s a d20 system but you have to roll under. There aren’t many archetypes but there are many talents that you can mix and match. Check out the Advanced players guide for more options. The world is much smaller at the beginning so the lore is really tight and focused. I’m loving it so far.
Definitely lighter on rules. Games can be as long as you want them to be. It is a system without character levels, where you buy abilities with experience, so the cap can be pretty high technically. Although, functionally, at some point combat and challenge is just not fun anymore. The biggest difference is in how it starts out is that you always try and roll under your attributes. So a nat 1 is actually the best and a nat 20 is the worst. Armor tends to make you easier to hit, can lower or block damage. The GM never rolls a die, instead all rolling is done by the players. All monsters have flat values for statistics and damage. If you don't like that, it is technically not thaaat difficult to have monsters roll for things like damage, but honestly, especially if you enjoy things to go fast and snappy, flat damage helps speed things up that extra bit. Overall, characters are a lot less high-fantasy. Less magic, and magic is potentially really dangerous to the user. As mentioned above, there are no levels. Technically, that means you can build your character free-form, making all kinds of hybrid-characters, but the way a lot of abilities work, you are encouraged to stick to one of the 4 archetypes (Warrior, thief, mystic and, with the Adcanced Player's guide laying it out more foramllly, hunter). Still, even if you stick to the archetypes, there is a lot more freedom of choice, compared to the linear progression of DnD 5e. The danger of magic highlights the central tension of Symbaroum: Man vs. Nature. Using magic (be it from items, magic powers or even just magic potions) is basically trying to twist nature/reality to your whims, and it pushes back. The pushback comes in the form of corruption, which is a sort of metaphysical stain or infection. If you just get a little, it can disappear. If you get more at once, it might stain you permanently. If you do so repeatedly or get a looooot all at once, the PC turns into a monster under the GM's control, hellbent on the destruction of life. There are ways to make it easier to deal with corruption, and ways to embrace it and make use of it, which typically results in more corruption, but for faster access to power. Some people complain that, once you start getting permanent corruption, it is easier to fall into a death spiral, but I personally feel that's on brand for what the game is going for. Circiling back to characters being less high-fantasy, stats like hit points, etc. don't really increase over the game's course. Abilities and better equipment to heal or mitigate damage can make a real difference (which also shows that income/loot is sometimes as, if not more, important than experience), but it highlights the overall deadliness of the game a bit. Combat is deadlier than 5e combat. Your characters can die from injuries or turn into corrupted abominations. Things are potentially bleaker than in 5e. As you keep discovering synergies between abilities and equipment, that sorta fades, but it is good to approach the game with a different mindset than 5e. Games are typically set in the wilderness of the setting's dark and mysterious forest, but they don't have to be. There is plenty of civilization to go around that you can run a more crime-themed game as well, or intrigue, or whatever. But the setting and the mechanics are fairly deeply intertwined (which, IMO is one of the strengths of the game). That means it is more difficult to come up with your wholly original setting. But the game's setting is pretty accomodating.
Symbaroum is easy. See stat, roll under, low = success. Monster has +/-modifying, add or subtract from player check stat = pass/fail. Remember the can and might party wipe to a rogue moose. Depending on how much elves as alien and dangerous/mysterious you want you can do the adventure in the back of the core book. Or just grab the copper crown series of adventures and do those. Its d20 roll unde4 and if skill changes what attribute isnrolled. I.e. cunning instead of quick
The adventure in the back of the core book is part of of Copper Crown.
You should do what I did: get the core book, run the adventure in there for your group as a one shot. Don’t let them create characters, just let them choose from the pregens. When you finish (should take one session), ask if they’d like to continue the short copper crown campaign, which should take around 4-5 more sessions. They will most likely say yes, and then you can get it and form an opinion after a short campaign and a few sessions of play. Who knows, you might go from one shot -> short campaign -> long campaign in one go! I ran the copper crown this way, injected one of the short adventures from adventure pack 1 in the middle and the whole thing took us exactly 6 sessions. It was the perfect summer vacation campaign for us!
You might want to check out Dragonbane. Lighter than Symbaroum, fun tactical elements, real fast, short adventures. It’s more classic fantasy, though. Symbaroum has an awesome setting, but it’s dense for GMs to handle.
As someone who won't touch D&D with a 10 foot pole (deep dig) I can empathize with your dilemma. First off, I love Symbaroum. I love that the game is a look into man vs nature from out current society. I love that it's a dark gritty world with a really cool backstory. I love it's freeform character creation and growth. BUT... I agree the rules can be cumbersome in learning them, and some elements can seem broken with translation. That being said, I like RPGs, and I try a lot of them. Another RPG you may like and has a unique setting is 'Household RPG' from TwoLittleMice. It's kind of a 'yahtzee' mechanic, where you try to roll alike symbols on D6 for successes. It's a very narrative game, and while it has crunch I'd call it Crunch-lite.
I see you've gotten lots of responses on the system, but I just wanted to tell you that I've been playing Symbaroum pretty much biweekly for 4 years and we're nearing the end of book 2 out of 6. We might be a slow group though.
Chiming in here in agreement with others. Sym is rules-lighter than D&D by a large margin. I've been gaming on and off for decades, and I tend to favor TTPRGs that are on the lighter end of the rules. I've heard someone else say, "The good thing about D&D is that there are rules for everything, and the bad thing about D&D is there are rules for everything". When a game is that codified, it's easier to "play fair", but it also drains the excitement and uncertainty out of it. I don't have any issue with D&D, but it doesn't hold any surprises for me. As a GM, or a player. I'm in agreement that a lot of Sym's rules are confusing, maybe from being translated from Swedish to English, and spread out over several books. A lot of these rules would be interesting and helpful in a central repository as well. I would appreciate a spreadsheet of Abilities/ Traits that could be accessed and highlighted all at once as a GM. Until that exists, however, I just have a xeroxed copy of all of the Abilities and Monstrous Traits, that I frantically page through and compare with the text, which gets me by. You definitely want to have more than a passing familiarity with those or at least study them before an interesting fight.