Review: Relaunched Dragon Warriors

[Thaluikhain]

In 2008, quite some years after the original DW came out, Magnum Opus published a new version, which I've been planning on rambling about for a while now. Firstly, though, I've gone and made up a list of things that I feel should have been changed for the new version. Now, admittedly, this is after looking at the new version a bit, so knowing a lot about what has and has not been changed will have influenced this. There's a TL:DR at the bottom if you want to skip the rambling.

By changes, I'm excluding anything that basically rewrites the game. For example, I'd prefer it if to hit you rolled above the enemy's Defence minus your Attack, rather than under your Attack minus their Defence. Cause, roll high rather than roll low. But, that's a bit of a change for no mechanical advantage.

For another example, in Old DW melee fighters have the option of hitting something with their sword every turn, and magic users have the option of casting a few spells or feebly hitting something with their sword. That isn't great, but it's workable. Trying to improve that would likely make things really fiddly unless it was a ground up rewrite, and thus basically a new game. The game might be better for those changes, but it works as is.

Monsters need the same sort of stats as PCs. Now, the game says to roll 3d6 for Reflexes for every monster or group you encounter. Your undead rhyming vikings, and everything else, has have the same roll as PCs. No mention if they get Defence bonuses for having an above average Reflexes like PCs do, and it's not actually easy to find that rule if you don't know where to look. But the game works (here) as is. Other stats, like Strength and Intelligence? Nope, no rules for those. This is a problem. Poison, for example, works or not based on a roll against the victim's Str. PCs might want to use poison (making poison is one of the skills the Assassin PC has), but there's no rules for determining the Strength of anything that isn't a PC.

Also, there just needs to be more of them. Now there are technically a fair few already provided in Books 1 and 4, but the monsters in Book 4 are explicitly described as being rare, high level, Saturday Night specials, so you can mostly discount those. For example the Blue Men, undead vikings of fairly high level that sail around the icy northern seas and challenge other ships to rhyme offs. Nothing inherently wrong with them, but you are going to need to kill a lot of low level common stuff before you get to those monsters you might, might, maybe use once at most at high level in a special setting.

Sticking to one consistent Setting would help a lot. In fairness, I think the assumption is that the game will be set in not!Britain, or something like it, but there's bits and pieces from all over not!Europe, and neighbouring not!Asia and not!Africa. Especially in Book 6, which has space for a couple of paragraphs for some entire nations. You've got monsters like Pythons and Crocodiles which are appropriate for jungles, but not many, not enough to really support a campaign unless you just pop down to the jungle briefly on your way to leveling up to fight the rhyming dead vikings who hang around the part of the world the majority of the material is all about. Pick somewhere, make sure you've got everything you need and some leeway, and only then worry about other places.

On a note related to that, explaining what the creators were going for would have helped. Oh, it's about the old ways/paganism being driven back by progress/Christianity/whatever? "Fantastic creatures in Legend are the embodiment of passions and places"? That makes sense, but I found that our some decades after I first got the books when I looked up Dave Morris's blog so I could do the previous reviews. Now, nothing to stop you making it about Tolkien style Elves and Dwarfs (they are in the rules, after all, because you have to rip off LotR if you want to sell, it's a rule), and people did, but a lot of people were apparently unable to make up their own scenarios and have them really seem to be "proper" DW. That doesn't need DW rules, of course, and every now and then people make a DW setting for D&D, say. Bloodsword, which is sorta kinda Dragon Warriors, but high fantasy epic stuff, is apparently getting a 5e D&D thingy.

You really need to muck about with the PCs. I'd contend that the Linear Warrior/Quadratic Wizard thing doesn't really apply. The problem of them having different working days is how they supposed to be balanced. Ok, if your scenario is done right, I guess. But Elementalists are just useless and Warlocks almost are as good as Knights at the one thing Knights do and do their own thing on top. The effects of some spells need to be expanded upon, can you use Dragonfire to set a building on fire? Can you use it without setting a building on fire?

Oh, and the rules need to be Reorganised. They were a bit off a shambles, even before they stuck a bunch of stuff in Book 4, either because they'd ran out of room in Book 1 or they'd not realised they were important at the time.

TL;DR version:

Monsters
Setting
PCs
Reorganise stuff

So, putting aside simply reorganising stuff, I like old DW, apart from the Setting, Monsters, and how the PCs work? Um...that sounds a lot more negative than what I intended.

[angelfromanotherpin]

My question is: what does Dragon Warriors bring to the table that another already-existing already-better system doesn't? Because all I can think of is nostalgia.

[Thaluikhain]

My question is: what does Dragon Warriors bring to the table that another already-existing already-better system doesn't? Because all I can think of is nostalgia.

That's a good question. I suppose the obvious answer is setting, but then lots of people (including the original designers, apparently), said they play DW games using GURPS rules.

OTOH, there are people (myself included) that sorta like the rules. Or maybe the idea of the rules, there's lots of problems, but when it works properly, everything is simple, easy to remember and understand. Nobody ever has to look up a table to work out a melee combat.

Having said that, that's probably in part nostalgia talking. And this was not a commercial success. It kept going for a bit, but that was official or semi-official fans keeping it ticking over and releasing new content occasionally (or updating stuff from old DW that didn't make it to the relaunch right away).

[angelfromanotherpin]

I played DW occasionally in the 80s and 90s when it was competing with the earlier, less complete, less coherent D&D editions. It was a reasonable choice in that context. That's not really true any more. I don't remember the last time I had to look up a table to resolve melee. And a lot of DW 'simplicity' is mind caulk because the game is just so incomplete. The setting also seems completely unremarkable to me; it's just some guy's fantasy crypto-Earth with no particular cool hooks.

I too feel the nostalgic attraction, but every time I've actually looked at and thought about the game in the last 20 years, all that occurs to me is that there's almost nothing there except some atmospheric illustrations.

[amethal]

From what I can remember, all the monsters were scary, in that if you met (say) a harpy you'd have to roll to see if you ran away in fear. That seemed very much not-fun to me, and also (again, unless I'm mis-remembering) you got no benefit for having defeated the monster previously. Thus you could kill the harpies and the boss-harpy in their lair, but if you met another harpy as a wandering monster you'd still have to roll to see if you ran away screaming.

[Thaluikhain]

I played DW occasionally in the 80s and 90s when it was competing with the earlier, less complete, less coherent D&D editions. It was a reasonable choice in that context. That's not really true any more. I don't remember the last time I had to look up a table to resolve melee. And a lot of DW 'simplicity' is mind caulk because the game is just so incomplete. The setting also seems completely unremarkable to me; it's just some guy's fantasy crypto-Earth with no particular cool hooks.

I too feel the nostalgic attraction, but every time I've actually looked at and thought about the game in the last 20 years, all that occurs to me is that there's almost nothing there except some atmospheric illustrations.

True. I want to say something like people were more concerned about the idea that the execution, but really I'm thinking it's for hipsters who do not want to play mainstream games people have actually heard of.

And/or people who are old and out of touch with the way things are these days. Is "hipsters" still a thing the cool kids complain about these days?

From what I can remember, all the monsters were scary, in that if you met (say) a harpy you'd have to roll to see if you ran away in fear. That seemed very much not-fun to me, and also (again, unless I'm mis-remembering) you got no benefit for having defeated the monster previously. Thus you could kill the harpies and the boss-harpy in their lair, but if you met another harpy as a wandering monster you'd still have to roll to see if you ran away screaming.

Not exactly. While the harpy did have that rule, that was a new thing introduced in Book 3. The vast majority of monsters didn't work that way, and the odds of failing that roll were very low.

Having said that, yeah, that also seems very much not-fun. Most likely it doesn't happen so there's no point, but if it does, you're stuffed. Bit like poison, it either is useless or fatal, nothing in between. Of course, you can just not have the harpy in your game, it's not a vital creature by any means, but it means that one monster that otherwise could have been fine gets thrown away, the beastiary which is too small as it is is effectively smaller.

I suspect that Book 3 wasn't play tested, not studied this in great detail but it seems that if you go in with the recommended party you can expect a TPK about a third of the way through the first scenario. Though, lots of the DW material seems that way.

[Nath]

Dragon Warriors occupied a niche at the time, but it was a narrow one.

The setting can be described as 1) almost historical, but also 2) high fantasy, and 3) not very detailed. DW is a hack an experienced Gamemaster with a modicum of historical knowledge can put together over the week-end, with only the spellbooks and the bestiary requiring a bit more work (though an experienced GM would probably realizes the Elementalist class is way to weak).

There was a market for that in 1985 because there weren't a lot of Gamemasters with 10+ years of experience when the hobby itself was eleven years old to start with, let alone ones with the time to write down such hack and then write its own adventures. In 2021, there are much better "turnkey" RPG system for the beginners, and I guess an "almost historical" setting has much less appeal for an audience that has Jackson's Lord of the Rings or HBO's Games of Thrones as references.

That being said, the existing DW adventures had an overarching theme about old gods versus new religion that I found interesting, and which may be difficult to run with other high fantasy games where divine magic and ancient races such as elves would shape the issue diffrently and remove much of the mystery.

Also, the rules for PC social origins and their spoken and written languages still stands out thirty-five years later, as does the chapter on medieval justice.

[Thaluikhain]

So, ok, the new rulebook starts off with new stuff. And it's about the setting, or rather the flavour. Rules aren't important (it mentions uses GURPS), the world isn't important...ok, I'd say the flavour is part of the world, but whatever. Actually, there's a nice quote:

"In Legend, faerie creatures are as amoral as cats and as heartless as children. A goblin in the rafters can spoil a whole night’s sleep, while a troll under the bridge ahead is reason to change your travel plans. And these creatures are rare. Walking into a tavern in Legend and finding an elf at the bar would be like strolling into your real-life local and seeing a polar bear."

An elf, you say? Let's go to the beastiary (not Chapter 20 in the rulebook, that has just basic info for reference with monsters in alphabetical order, but the same monsters are desribed in more detail in a seperate beastiary, and divided by type, Elves are under "Men and Man-Like Creatures"). The entry for Elves is a copy and paste job of old DR, minus the picture. It includes the line "As GamesMaster, you may allow your players to be Elves".

Um...ok. Elves are rare, except you can play as one. To be fair, it does say "may allow", so you can, of course, choose not to have elves. But, um, yeah. Bit of a disconnect there.

Ok, after that, copy and paste job of the stuff about fantasy role playing games (including the acronym RPG as well as FRP game cause their original terminology terminology didn't win out). The section on dice has been updated, most notably saying you can get physical d100s. Ok. Don't imagine people would need to have RPGs explained to them, but it doesn't hurt, I guess.

On to creating a character. And Warlocks have one less Defence and one less Magical Attack than previously. Warlocks previously seemed overpowered, so fair enough. Knights and Barbarians get a new tracking ability. Assassins don't get all their special abilities by default, they get one every odd numbered Rank. Ok, tones them down a bit, and lets Assassins be a bit different, more choices for the player. They flat out aren't going to get all of them, have to pick and choose, and some probably you won't want. But fair enough. Other Professions don't get to add skills, or don't until they hit Rank 8, which seems optimistic. Well, I guess it makes Assassins feel different?

The Elementalists...um. Ok, they were flat out broken in old DW, so there had to be changes. This was obviously recognised, and there were big changes. Some are fine. They now get to recover their magic with 1 min rituals at the appropriate time, don't have to wait for 24 hours to do another one (for another type of magic). Ok, I get that the old rituals made them feel different to the other magic users, but the difference was the others weren't rubbish, so losing that uniqueness isn't a bad idea. The level 1 Air Elemental spell was replaced with a new one that ups your Intelligence to 18 (19, if it was already 18, but I don't think there's rules for having 19 anyway) and gives you +2 Attack with missile weapons. That's ok. The other spells seem to be the same, though, just that one got changed. The level 1 Air Elemental spell in old DW was rubbish, sure, but so were the ones for Earth, Fire and Water as well. And quite a few after level 1.

OTOH, as well as using their MPs to cast specific spells, they can summon raw elemental power which can be used to do elementally sorta of stuff, things that weren't and aren't in the spell list but elementalists should be able to do. No rules, just some examples. I get that coming up with a proper spell list for each element would be time consuming and fiddly, but a proper spell list for people who cast spells is sorta important. They also get bonuses when attacked by another elementalist using their elements, and maybe when something related happens (at GM's discretion). Again, not actual rules, just some examples. It's good in that it adds some much needed power to an underpowered Profession, and it does so it a way that's an important part of their flavour. It's bad because the rules don't have rules in them and so it's up to the GM to decide how much that "some" is on a case by case basis. Sigh.

They can also take raw elemental power and just lob it at their enemies, and the effects increase based on how many magic points you put it, no upper limit given. With proper numbers and stuff, nothing left to GM's discretion here. Putting 4 Mps into it, the same as a Sorceror casting a 4th level spell like Shadowbolt, and it's got twice the Range, same Speed and about twice the damage of Shadowbolt, and armour doesn't help the victim. And you don't have to be 4th Rank to do so. And Elementalists can use raw elemental power when they can't cast spells. Ok, so you've overcompensated for Elementalists being underpowered and now, in terms in raw hurting people power, they outdo Sorcerors. Going to guess that hurting people is going to be important for the game. Again, sigh.

As an aside, because magic users are "rare" (despite 4 out of the 7 Professions being magic users and the virtual guarantee of at least one in every party), casting magic can scare the locals. At the GM's discretion, no rules again. Not even examples this time. Ok, nice to point that out for flavour, but could be expanded on, a lot.

Most of the rest of the rules seem to be a cut and paste job. It's still a 3d6 roll for Reflexes for everyone, and that's still buried away in a non-obvious place. Armour works the same, except it's been renamed. Chainmail is now full mail. Ok. Also, good armour has to be tailored to a specific user. Well, it doesn't, it says there's no in-game penalty or anything, but other adventures make fun of you. Ah-huh.

The stuff about the world of Legend is a cut and paste job of Book 6. The section on world building is expanded a bit with some variant rules and some suggestions. Not in a big way, but, ok, what's there looks decent enough, if you aren't expecting much.

And...that's about it. The rules are, mostly, a copy and paste job (and I just realised I should copied and pasted that phrase instead of typing it out every time). To greatly oversimplify this doesn't seem to really be a 2nd edition of Dragon Warriors, it's more a reprint with some updates. They have new artwork, and, being old and grumpy, I think that the old stuff was better (apparently, they even spotted an error in the new artwork and decided to make a competition of who else could see it rather than fix it).

Now, as to my list. Not seeing any great addition of monsters, am seeing stuff from the scenarios, sometimes seemingly intended as one-offs, all stuck in the common beastiary. Not seeing that as an improvement, TBH. They weren't given Reflexes and Strength stats etc. There is very little additional setting stuff, beyond saying what the flavour should be like. PCs were tweaked a bit, Warlocks and Assassins reduced in power somewhat, Elementalists increased. Has this fixed the problems? I'm not sure they have. I'm not sure they haven't, so the Maybe Broken of New DW is better than the Definitely Broken of Old. Progress? Things were re-organised, I think the rules are set out in a better order. The thing about monsters having 3d6 Reflexes still isn't that easy to find if you don't know where to look for it, though.

No fundamental problems were fixed, because there were no fundamental changes. I guess they thought some people didn't get the old paperback books so they need a glorified reprint? If so, well, this was not a commercial success. There was enough of a fan base for some new content (and redone old content, some of it obscure even in the old days) to have been created, but not a lot and it's all died away again. There is talk of a new version, Jewelspider, which is a total ground up rewrite, which may or may not happen at some point.