RaW: Sword World

In this week's episode of Rules as Written, we dig into Sword World 2.5's Power Table and its runaway criticals, its faction based combat, its firmly centralized GM authority, and party roles gated so tightly the rulebook explicitly closes the loopholes you might reach for. We also trace what survived from the 1989 original which turns out to be most of the arithmetic and almost none of the combat engine. Japan's best selling roleplaying game for thirty five years is a study in how much structure a system can impose while still calling itself welcoming.