NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Retreater" data-source="post: 9545845" data-attributes="member: 42040">I posted this in my Dragonbane Post-Mortem thread, but thought it might be handy to have here..."The main theme I appreciate the most after spending years of wrecking my brain with over-thinking is the shear randomization of choices. It really takes so much of the weight off a DM. More than any game in recent memory, it felt like a long-long friend sitting next to me and helping me run a game. It doesn't have the pushy, heavily codified rules of something like Pathfinder 2. It doesn't have the "you're the DM - figure it out" mentality of 5e.The first aspect of this is in character creation. While your players can completely customize every aspect of their character, there are charts to make creation quick and easy. You can roll on charts to decide your class, species, stats, equipment, name, appearance, roleplaying quirks, etc. You don't have to labor over "what the party needs" or "what's the best weapon" or "which feat do I take?"In the monsters, you're presented with a chart you can roll on for your actions. Every one of them is flavorful, from a troll vomiting on a character to a giant picking up a hero and tossing him across the battlefield. Combats are fast, but you don't have to worry about enemies never getting to use cool abilities (because they're all cool abilities) or getting locked into repetitive actions (if you roll the same action twice in a row, you have to select another one).Want to give interesting tactical options and encourage interaction with the environment? There are cards of terrain features that you can roll randomly to be used by characters and enemies. For example, during a battle in the woods the party was attacked by harpies and few of the heroes could reach them. But the cards showed that a boulder was there, and the rogue got to leap off it and stab a harpy through the chest. The knight was able to launch a hornet's nest at one of them and get it stuck on her head.Add these to random encounter charts, mishaps for getting lost in the wilderness, critical fumble and success charts.We praise the elegance and simplicity of Advantage/Disadvantage in D&D 5e. It's also used here. But it's stackable. You can have multiple Advantages that can give more flexibility and require teamwork. In desperation, the knight was trying to climb a slippery cliff in plate armor, so he had double disadvantage. The rest of the party is scrambling to toss him a rope to negate a disadvantage. He is considering leaving his armor in the pit. The monsters are closing in.Dragonbane is not only a great game, it's the best game I've played in a decade. That boxed set has months of play in it and the full rules. It's a tremendous value that anyone who likes fantasy RPGs should consider."</blockquote>

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