from What These Rules Have to Offer:
These rules are worthy of your consideration for the following reasons:
These rules can be freely copied and amended. This allows users to record the changes they make to cover the needs of their particular campaign, and the extensions to the rules the make to handle situations the authors did not envisage or dismissed as unimportant. This recording can be done in a searchable form, by modifying the copy of the rules your campaign uses as authoritative, directly.
The skill based structure of the game allows flexibility in character construction that class and level games lack. The combination of abstract skill increase awarded at the end of gaming sessions and opportunities for skill increase when a character manages a critical hit or a fumble means that characters learn from experience without restricting characters to learning only skills they frequently use in the game.
The system scales effectively, partly because the rate of character skill increase is non-linear, decreasing at the highest levels.
The relatively simple combat rules, relying on opposed D20 rolls, do not depend on hit points. This eliminates a bookkeeping hassle; eliminates frustration when the Game master wonders if the players are really subtracting the results of blows from their character’s hit points; similarly insures that the players do not wonder whether the GM is failing to subtract the damage their characters do from the hit point totals of his monsters. This somewhat reduces the time spent in in-game argument, and allows combat to be resolved more quickly, or larger combats to be conducted, in a given session.
The combat rules have relatively realistic results, ranging from incapacitation followed by recovery to walking wounded status, to death. This results in improved feel, relative to bashing away at each other until one side is at negative hit points, at which point the loser dies.
Each of the three magic systems, divine, shamanic and sorcery, has a different “feel”. Players who dislike math can play a theist or shamanist, players who like math can play a sorcerer.
There is a clean system for recording a character’s political status – who he owes favors to and who owes him favors, how much a favor is worth, etc. This system includes a wide array of sample titles and offices.
There is a clean system for dealing with economics, which handles extraordinary expenses without bogging the game down by forcing a player to subtract three copper pieces each time his character buys a dagger.