Dragon Age TTRPG

[...You Lost Me]

So Borders is going out of business, and I went in for a 30% discount on RPG material. I got the Dragon Age TTRPG: Set 1 for chars level 1-5. I'm gonna delve into it and report back.

Before that, though, can I get some opinions on game balance/what to explore/whether I should have bought this or not/etc?

[TheFlatline]

This game was reviewed/discussed a while back. It met with a resounding "meh". A forum search will turn the thread up where the serious offenses pop up.

[DragonChild]

http://karriusrpg.blogspot.com/2010/07/ ... e-rpg.html

My previous essay on this trainwreck.

[Lago PARANOIA]

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=51227

A review I did about a year ago. I still think that Dragon Child is smoking crack cocaine about that Dragon Die (it's a really bad idea from a playing standpoint) but our reviews synch up kinda nice.

[Longes]

Out of curiousity I've downloaded sets 2 and 3 of the game.

"Arcane Warrior" Mage specialization makes fighters feel small in the pants. You use Magic instead of Strength for melee weapon's requirements and damage rolls, and reduce strain of armor.

Getting to level 20 requires 123500 xp. Game Master's Guide 2 and 3 don't have any suggestions about XP, so I assume you still get 500 xp per session. Good luck, that's only 247 sessions..

[Shady314]

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=51227

A review I did about a year ago. I still think that Dragon Child is smoking crack cocaine about that Dragon Die (it's a really bad idea from a playing standpoint) but our reviews synch up kinda nice.

The Dragon Die is great fun! For a quick one shot.

[hogarth]

"Arcane Warrior" Mage specialization makes fighters feel small in the pants.

Just like the video game!

[TheFlatline]

Speaking of Dragon Age after playing through Inquisition I thought the general idea of being in charge of "the Inquisition" and the Logistics & Dragons & stuff might be a lot of fun to run as a campaign. DA works in a D&D mindset because you have a gargantuan organization at your fingertips but you still have to go out personally and gather fucking iron ore to supply swords to your troops.

[Longes]

Speaking of Dragon Age after playing through Inquisition I thought the general idea of being in charge of "the Inquisition" and the Logistics & Dragons & stuff might be a lot of fun to run as a campaign. DA works in a D&D mindset because you have a gargantuan organization at your fingertips but you still have to go out personally and gather fucking iron ore to supply swords to your troops.

Well, to be fair to the DA:I, you only gather iron ore for your personal weapons. For your troops you just claim lumber and quarries. Although many other infuriatingly minutae things are required in Inquisition. I mean, really? I, the Inquisitor, have to go and kill ten rams to get supplies for the hungry?

[angelfromanotherpin]

It's the model of the BioWare protagonist: very competent, cannot delegate.

[Aryxbez]

Well, since this game got brought back again, this gives me the excuse to bring up these news:

They're apparently bringing back The Blue Rose RPG under the same system they used for this RPG. My question is how such a game like that would be ran, what popular material can we draw from for inspiration of what it should be like? It seems like the closest these days, would kinda be Game of Thrones. What I've read of the wiki article, wasn't much source material that jumped out at me (I figure old Medieval stories fall into this in some fashion, which I've read a few).

Secondly, they're making another game for this system called: TitansGrave: Ashes of Valkana, a Scifi-Fantasy RPG inspired by likes of Thundarr the Barbarian and stuff like that (which back then, just seemed like D&D, but embracing more Tech-esque stuff in background). I know D&D and fantasy embraced that back in the 80's, hell Star Wars was part of that. As per the link, its going to be featured on that show, though I'm not so sure how well it's really going to show the rules at all.

[Longes]

Well, since this game got brought back again, this gives me the excuse to bring up these news:

They're apparently bringing back The Blue Rose RPG under the same system they used for this RPG. My question is how such a game like that would be ran, what popular material can we draw from for inspiration of what it should be like? It seems like the closest these days, would kinda be Game of Thrones. What I've read of the wiki article, wasn't much source material that jumped out at me (I figure old Medieval stories fall into this in some fashion, which I've read a few).

Secondly, they're making another game for this system called: TitansGrave: Ashes of Valkana, a Scifi-Fantasy RPG inspired by likes of Thundarr the Barbarian and stuff like that (which back then, just seemed like D&D, but embracing more Tech-esque stuff in background). I know D&D and fantasy embraced that back in the 80's, hell Star Wars was part of that. As per the link, its going to be featured on that show, though I'm not so sure how well it's really going to show the rules at all.

You can take a look at Tabletop episodes where they play Dragon Age and make a rough guess at how much the system is shown.

[Dogbert]

While I like Blue Rose's setting, as long as you roll for stats and starting HP it's a no go as far as I'm concerned.

[souran]

So with the Will Wheaton Show coming maybe this game system should get a more in depth look.

Interesting notes thus far: Wheaton has said that they thought D&D when conceiving the show but didn't want to deal with Hasbro. So Hasbro/WOTC incompotence strikes again.

Green Ronnin isn't looking much better: They released a list of products for the rest of the year and it has exactly 1 non-Dragon AGE book for this system on it. If they were really serious about swimming in the big kids pond now is the time to have enough stuff that people who see the show will buy more than 1 thing from you this year.

Wheaton is playing with professional actors/comics/improvers these are all people who know how to tell stories. They are also producing a show. It will be interesting to see how often they interact via the rules and how often they go to MTP. Not that this is particularly different from most peoples games (which include a fuckload of MTP for divergent reasons). However, if they do interact via the rules a lot and it DOES NOT hinder their ability to keep the game moving as a story it would be a BIG feather in Green Ronnin's cap.

Will this effect sales or change what games are typically popular? In Wheaton's release video he talks about some of the things he wanted in his system. Basically it boils down to

a) no minatures/minimal table accessories
b) A set of rules that are lighter than d20 D&D
c) A game whose power level mimics fantasy/action movies and jrpgs.
d) Something that feels like playing when he was 12.

Point D is obviously bullshit, but the others are actually interesting. My typical group as well as several other groups I interact with at my FLGS and other boards I frequent often find people looking for a game that does abstract positioning and gets rid of a lot of the pushing around of minis for combat (even tough many of us have spent 100s of dollars on stuff for exactly that).

Points B and C are also important because thats what a metric fuckton of people who roleplay want. Both pathfinder and D&D are really rules heavy games and they both are basically in the D&D genre where you start out as a mud farmer who has to tap wall, ceiling, and floor tile in the dungeon with a 10ft pole to not get killed by a poisoned arrow trap and ends with you being a reality-redifining god-mage who chases divine beings across infinite planes.

Most people want to play the conan/LOTR shit thats about 1/3 of the way up the scale. Most people don't want like the low power shit but will play it if offered. Most people never get to play the high level shit and so are often excited to give it a try...until they figure out that there is no challenge there and that its nearly impossible to think of compelling/entertaining stories and challenges for characters with those kinds of powers.

Each one of these episdoes will be an extended comercial, but it will also be a bunch of people playing one of these games without the games developer sitting in the room saying "WAIT, we really meant this not that" as is more typical with these kinds of videos.

Again, if the on-camera rules interactions don't seem to suck ass then you actually could really get people to buy this system. However, it really depends on the game not being terrible when played 5 people who are drinking lightly.

[Username17]

c) A game whose power level mimics fantasy/action movies and jrpgs.

The thing is that those are laughably obviously not the same power level, and both of those genres have extremely well known failure points as regards translation into the TTRPG milieu.

First of all: Power Levels. Holy fucking shit. Sepiroth's big attack destroys multiple planets and then makes the Sun envelop the Earth. There is dickall that Bruce, Arnold, or Silvester are going to be able to do about something like that. They certainly aren't going to be able to take it on the god damn chin and keep fighting like Cloud does. Laharl's special attack is to jump into space, grab a meteor, and ride it back through reentry into his opponents while laughing. The high end Brawler move is to open up a portal under your feet, transporting a chunk of crust with you and all your opponents on it into space, and then jumping off and pushing the block into the fucking Sun. These are not remotely on the same "power level" as shit that Conan and Aragorn get up to, and pretending otherwise is incoherent gibbering.

And then there's the fact that both of those genres are frankly bullshit. In action movies, everything is scripted. So characters routinely attempt actions that they very specifically have a very low chance of succeeding at. And they succeed at just enough of them at just the right times to save the day. In an unscripted storytelling game, anything you are very unlikely to succeed at is something that you are probably going to fail. And to pretend otherwise gives you the game design chops of Elennsar. Meanwhile, in JRPG land, characters have as their opening combat gambit: chopping the damn Moon in half, throwing their enemies into the space between and then crushing them between the two hemispheres. And despite that fact, they still can't get through a blue door without a fucking blue key because it's a fucking computer game. In a table top role playing game, the fact that characters can chop through entire planetoids with their swords would indicate that they could at the very least go through the wall next to the Blue Door no matter what that thing was made of.

When people say they want their Table Top RPGs to be like Action Movies and JRPGs at the same time they are telling me that they do not understand Action Movies, JRPGs, or Table Top Role Playing Games.

-Username17

[Koumei]

The high end Brawler move is to open up a portal under your feet, transporting a chunk of crust with you and all your opponents on it into space, and then jumping off and pushing the block into the fucking Sun.

Actually, as of the second game, they changed that, for balance reasons. Now they just punch you so hard it creates a black hole, sucking a 3x3 square of enemies into the hole and compressing them down to the size of a single atom or whatever, at which point the nuclear fusion causes an explosion similar to the Big Bang.

I think everyone will agree that's much more reasonable, and something that people should be able to replicate in tabletop.

[Aryxbez]

c) A game whose power level mimics fantasy/action movies and jrpgs.

Where and when did he make such mentions of this? I watched the video, I didn't catch him referencing those points at all. I know he wanted Thundarr the Barbarian as a main part of the inspiration.

You can take a look at Tabletop episodes where they play Dragon Age and make a rough guess at how much the system is shown.

I actually watched those long ways back, as RPG bits what mostly interested me in that show. There was definitely a mix of expectations with the experience, 1-2 had silly/parody characters, one enjoyed more "Narrative or story" to the experience, other seemed kinda monotone though he enjoyed it (Sam Witwer, he's a cool actor). Rules-wise, as been said kinda goes as you'd expect, Players aren't really familiar with the game to care, so don't necessarily take full use of the rules before them. I had also wondered if that adventure custom made for the show, pad-up any existing problems help make the game look good. That all said, I still enjoyed it, but it wouldn't highlight the problems of the game any better than just playing it casually with bunch of friends. That all said, I enjoyed those videos at the time.

While I like Blue Rose's setting, as long as you roll for stats and starting HP it's a no go as far as I'm concerned.

What's the strengths of the Blue Rose setting? I'm unsure how such stories are told in a cooperative storytelling medium for "Romantic Fantasy". Otherwise same here, I'm hoping they intend to fix the issues of Random generation BS, mixing flavor abilities with ones that have actual function, more than 3 classes, 2/3 of which only matter, and only 1-2 options within each class. Lastly, fixing the stunt system to make it less binary, speaking of, how would someone fix that?

[Lokathor]

First of all: Power Levels. Holy fucking shit. Sepiroth's big attack destroys multiple planets and then makes the Sun envelop the Earth.

As someone who's never played FF7: What the fucking fuck. There'd be no planet left over to save at that point. What the hell. I thought "oh he's gotta be exaggerating" and then I clicked and watched the video and you didn't overstate one bit. What the hell.

When people say they want their Table Top RPGs to be like Action Movies and JRPGs at the same time they are telling me that they do not understand Action Movies, JRPGs, or Table Top Role Playing Games.

I think you're picking the highest powered JRPG and then saying that all JRPGs are that power level. Also that's a final boss. Also, JRPGs tend to have a stronger distinction than TTRPGs do about things the PCs can do and things the NPCs can do, so when people say they want JRPG power level I assume that they mean they want the (lower) power level of the PCs.

FF1: Some time loop nonsense with the final boss being the first boss that you threw 10 years into the past, but mostly ADnD power level. Flying ship and "prestige class" sorts of upgrades partway through.
FF2: Pretty standard ADnD adventure about an evil empire and stuff. In the GBA remake there's a side quest where you play as the NPCs that die and they battle it out with demons in hell, which is sweet.
FF3: Again, some crystals that make the land float and stuff, and a demon, and it's all kinda normal.
FF4: Alright this time you go to the moon in a flying ship, which is cool. You can call down a meteor to hit your foe if you know a high level spell, but it just does the damage of a high level spell, and just to one dude not to the sun to make it explode.
FF5: Meteors that are used to go between planets, but they always crash hard and knock out the pilot it seems, which is kinda shittier than just using Plane Shift.
FF6: Here we have a magic dimension and a material dimension, and there's three god statues that can be pushed around to power a laser that tears up continents. This is mostly a plot effect though, not a thing that the PCs access. The PCs get mech suits that let them cast Fireball, then later they can cast Fireball by using soulgems.
FF7: Apparently Jupiter gets blown up and the Earth is consumed by the Sun? This seems like a major outlier compared to the others.
FF8: dunno, never played
FF9: dunno, never played
FF10: A godzilla-demon terrorizes the populace from time to time, and adventuring parties go around to learn how to summon demons to fight godzilla (but godzilla reincarnates anyway, so it's all bleak until the heroes take the Third Option to break the cycle).

FFT: Knights and wizards and demons and tactical squares. So more like 3e than like ADnD I guess.
FFTA: Knights and wizards and teddy bears and lizardmen and refusing to grow up.
FFTA2: Mostly the same as FFTA

Chrono Trigger: Swords and magic and magitech, and you get a time ship that can go between pre-defined eras, and you're out to save the world but you can't stop the mega-alien until you're really powerful, and even once you do that your powers are more of the form "i can murder a dude really hard" than they are world shattering.

Bahamut Lagoon: Knights and Wizards and Ninjas and stuff, but you fly between flying landmassses on dragons, and the dragons are units that you direct around. Each dragon is as powerful as a whole squad of guys, but they can still get knocked out when you over extend.

So when someone says "JRPGs" I'd argue that there is a sort of power level that most JRPGs use most of the time.

Either way, Will didn't actually mention JRPGs in his video. He said he wanted no minis so people could sit on the couch, he said that he wanted to have a system that can get out of the way when you want to tell a story, something that feels like when he was 12, and he said that he wanted to go with an indie system so that he could promote the system as part of the show. The actual media that he said were the inspiration for his setting are Heavy Metal (1981), and Thundarr the Barbarian.

[Username17]

Again, in Chronotrigger, your top end attacks involve opening black holes and shit. Mechanically all it does it kill some dudes, but Black Hole really does do exactly what it says on the tin.

-Username17

[Lokathor]

Yeah, but it affects targets within like 15ft of Magus. It doesn't even destroy the terrain because it's magic that's pulling in one creature and sending them to a black hole, not opening a black hole right there. 3e lets you use Plane Shift as a touch attack with a will save to send people to the negative energy plane or some other "you're as good as dead" location. Black Hole is basically that, and it even affects 1 target at a time like Plane Shift does when you attack with it. Which is good and all, but it's not "blowing up jupiter and melting venus as a single attack" good. There's save or die magic at like every level, and sometimes the fluff is fancier but it's still just a single target save or die.

Or like, 4e DnD has those warlock attacks where "you open a gateway to a distant star and blast your foes with stellar plasma" or whatever, and then it does like 8d6+ChaMod damage as a daily attack... but no one would call 4e a very high powered system really.

[Josh_Kablack]

FF9: dunno, never played

Here's the top PC-available (hidden sidequest needed) summon from FF IX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p82ZY3wubL4

There's a bigger badder one as a plot device in the game, and neither of them are quite as powerful as dropping frogs on an enemy or being a dragon slayer.

[Lokathor]

Apparently the transition to playstation really kicked FF up a notch.

FFX is also sorta up there with the Aeons and all the Overdrives, but not quite "summon a space ark" level.

[Dogbert]

When people say they want their Table Top RPGs to be like Action Movies and JRPGs at the same time they are telling me that they do not understand Action Movies, JRPGs, or Table Top Role Playing Games.

Either that, or that they have no idea at all of what they actually want, and thus cannot be taken seriously.

[Shady314]

Apparently the transition to playstation really kicked FF up a notch.

They wanted to show off their FMVs. A desire that started FF downhill ever since.

In my experience when people say they want something like X they have something very specific in mind. Few people understand or are even aware of genre conventions. Even geeks. So when a player tells me they want something like an action movie I make them be more specific. Sometimes that means they want guns/gunfights. Other times its code for a less serious game of over the top one liners and bad assitude.

In the most recent game I was running my players all unanimously said they wanted something post-apocalyptic like Fallout. Pretty much their exact words. Did that mean they wanted to roam a nuclear wasteland? Nope. Have a bizarre 50's aesthetic? Nope. Mad science? Nope. Further questioning revealed they just didn't want there to be any widespread law/government and to be able to rapidly travel between wildly different settlements they could screw with.

And then there's the fact that both of those genres are frankly bullshit. In action movies, everything is scripted. So characters routinely attempt actions that they very specifically have a very low chance of succeeding at. And they succeed at just enough of them at just the right times to save the day. In an unscripted storytelling game, anything you are very unlikely to succeed at is something that you are probably going to fail. And to pretend otherwise gives you the game design chops of Elennsar.

Isn't this why a lot of games have a limited resource to spend that makes success likely or even guaranteed.

[hyzmarca]

Apparently the transition to playstation really kicked FF up a notch.

FFX is also sorta up there with the Aeons and all the Overdrives, but not quite "summon a space ark" level.

Final Fantasy IX I think handled overpowered summons better than any other game. Eidolons are city-killing WMDs, and are used as such in story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GemT2kn1TC0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLEXKuXwbQ8

But the random battle summon cutscenes obviously don't happen, because of the lack of craters in the proper places. Obviously Supernova doesn't actually happen. because if Sepheroth could do that he wouldn't need to use Meteor to accomplish his goal of injuring the Earth and using the resulting energy to become a god. But he does. And obviously he doesn't destroy the same planets multiple times, though the animation is the same every time he uses Supernova.

The actual plot-device ultimate attack from Final Fantasy VII just summons a dinosaur-killer asteroid to make a giant crater and cause mass extinctions across the globe. Which Sephiroth is summoning because a multi-terraton impact will force the Earth to summon massive amounts of Mako Energy to the impact site in order to heal itself, and Sephiroth would absurb that energy, become a God, and turn the Earth into a a giant spaceship and use it to visit other star systems.

And Sephiroth wants to do that because he's batshit insane, and obsessed with an alien named Jenova whom he thinks is his mother (she isn't).

The more interesting thing is that Mako energy is literally both the planet's life-force and the souls of the dead waiting to reincarnate. And the evil power company that controls most of the world and has an army of genetically engineered magical supersoldiers, is using it to provide everyone with clean and cheap electricity.


And when people say that they want something that feels like a modern Final Fantasy game, that's what they're talking about. They give not a fuck about Supernova. They care about this bizarre magical kludge setting where swords are more powerful than guns and totalitarian fascist electric companies burn the souls of your ancestors to provide you with electric lights at extremely affordable rates.

It's the combination of magic, high tech, modern tech, and low-tech that's interesting.

Tech kludge is, of course, something that you have in Thundarr. It takes place in the future after the apocalypse, so there's a lot of high tech floating around, but it tends to be in the hands to wizards and sorcerers who hoard it, and most people don't know how it works. Thundarr himself has a freaking lightsaber.

And, in fact, Thundarr was inspired by the same Dying Earth novels that inspired Greyhawk, you know, the classic D&D setting that contains actual ray guns from outer space.