A friend of mine is starting up a campaign of AGOT, so I've had a bit of a look at this system now.
In a lot of ways, I think Keith is right. He's a little harsher than I would be, but then I 1) haven't bought the book; and 2) haven't read the novels (yet).
The absolute first thing I noticed: the character sheet sucks. Horribly. The designers made a huge mistake by trying to cram everything onto one page. There is place to write a weapon entry, not a whole lot of room for feats, and even less for reputation, influences, and physical description. By far the worst flaw in sheet design, though, is the space for skills (or lack thereof). In a game that seems to be more skill-based than your average D&D game, you're given four lines that extend only halfway across the page on which to write your skills. Now, the D&D sheet devotes most of the right side of the front page to skills, and yet this apparently more skill-based game (the Maester class gets 9+Int skills/level) gives you roughly a third of that space. Absolutely terrible design.
I've not had much time to look over the combat system yet, but I've heard good things about the ability to pinpoint weak spots in armor and such. I'll comment more on this as I learn about it. The influence and reputation system seems like a cool idea, but after reading through that whole section twice, I'm left scratching my head. Hopefully once we try it out it will make more sense.
As stated somewhere already in this thread, the gratuitous history of the fantasy genre is a waste of space in this book. That space would have been better spent explaining some of the game rules or different campaign styles in better detail, or better yet, deleted from the book entirely (thus dropping the hefty price tag a few bucks).
The layout of the book is confusing at best. Things we're accustomed to seeing right at the beginning (character classes, for example) aren't found until nearly 100 pages into the book. The first time I looked through this, I spent nearly 5 minutes flipping pages trying to figure out what classes I could choose from. As mentioned above, it's also quite a headache to read a bit about how some feat or ability works, then be referred to the section in which it's actually described, 200 pages further into the book.
Organization aside, the majority of the content in this book seems to be solid, though. The brief summary of the first novel really helps the AGOT novice like me, and after reading that and the bios of the major characters (inexplicably located near the back of the book instead of near the novel summary), I feel as though I understand the world well enough to begin playing in it. So in terms of friendliness to newcomers, this system definitely gets two thumbs up.
I also quite like the classes, which are better balanced even than those in some WotC products (Star Wars, I'm looking at you
). The feats are well thought out as well, although I was disappointed to learn that the Legendary Feats category contains all of about 3 or 4 feats.
I'll give some more feedback when I've actually played the system, but so far it looks like a usable system, so long as you keep one finger in the table of contents section whenever you open the book.
