Labyrinth is a system based out of a cave system in south-east London, just inside the M25. The weapons manufacturers Eldritch practically have a stall on site, the massive network of tunnels is ideal for dungeon crawling, and the system refs are experienced and competant.
It is a victim of its own success. The tunnels are poor for anything other than dungeon crawls, and in order to continue paying the rent on them (they're a old series of MOD munitions stores), Labyrinth PCs pay to play. Quite a lot, I believe. This means that people who've driven miles to get there want to play not monster. And then they want to carry on playing. The system therefore usually has a tiny monster crew, and has been getting more complex and developed for years, as players add bits to background, keep alive old effects and adversaries, etc. They have player guides, guides for areas of the gameworld, and class guides published for them.
Their system is a multi-hit system, with ablative armour, many different damage calls, more spells than you can count and playability seems to have been sacrificed for what the players want. I regret I know nothing of how charatcer advancement works.
Monsters - those few people who don't turn up with lots of cash to play. Generally outnumbered 5 to 1 by the players.
- I played Labyrinthe from about '95 to '02, and I still follow the online discussion boards. The most striking weakness is the extreme emphasis on dungeon crawling on the weekend dungeons at the caves - I believe this is less pronounced on the week-long overland adventures they run at a holiday cottage in Wales every summer, but I never played one. My experience was that the ratio of monsters to players was usually closer to 1-3 than 1-5, and that the nature of the caves meant that this was usually perfectly adequate.
- The system is nice, but far too wide - at last count it runs to something 8-10 different sizeable publications, although most players don't need to memorise nearly all of that. The rules set is heavily geared towards a high fantasy (in the sense of "lots of hits, lots of magic", not in the sense of "fantastical"), high-crunch, dungeon-crawling, resource-management style of gameplay, but works very well for that, I found. Armour is subtractive, not ablative, and to facilitate this all hits for players are divided into six, so that a triple actually does 18 points of damage (although monsters have hits as standard). This makes fairly frequent battleboarding necessary, which can disrupt the flow of an adventure somewhat.
- One thing which I very much like about the Labyrinthe system is the non-standard points requests: Any player can pay £2:00 for a sheet of yellow paper, write an ability on it, and hand it in, and the system manager will write a cost and a set of prerequisites for it (or sometimes just write "no" across it in green pen). This gives a great deal of character customisability, without needing get more publications. --Jacob