First, a little about me. I came into the hobby in 1989 with AD&D 2nd edition. It seems that I'm one of the few "old timers" without a basis in B/X or BECMI. But I really enjoyed 2E and played it for a decade until 3E was released. After a few years of 3E, I started getting nostalgic for the simpler era of gaming. Castles & Crusades caught my attention when it was released, but I couldn't find a group interested in "going backwards." Even close to 20 years later, I haven't been able to interest a group in trying an OSR game long term - despite a short campaign with Swords & Wizardry.
When Shadowdark was released, I didn't understand the hype. To me it seemed just like any other OSR game sitting unplayed on my shelf (the aforementioned Castles & Crusades and Swords & Wizardry, but also Hyperborea, Five Torches Deep, Basic Fantasy, and Old School Essentials.) It wasn't until the latest Western Reaches Kickstarter promotion that I started to understand - Shadowdark was the core D&D experience, distilled into four simple classes that had the most basic of rules to allow a game to progress. In short, if I were stranded on a desert island without any rulebooks, it would be similar to how I would recreate D&D from memory. I took a chance and backed the Kickstarter.
Over the past month, I've been able to play Shadowdark three times, and unfortunately I've been unimpressed. As I write my thoughts, please keep in mind that these are my experiences. If you love Shadowdark, I think that's awesome. However, I'm disappointed to say that it's not for me.
Two of the games were at a convention, run by professional GMs....
Convention Game 1
Not awful. But it was too long to complete in the 2-hour time allotment. The adherence to "dungeon turns" felt a tad artificial and slowed our progress. (For example, we could have just went through the adventure the same way I've done since 1989 - "here's our marching order: thief is in the front, checking for traps; fighter is behind, shield raised and ready to intercept enemies; wizard is next, holding the torch and taking cover behind the fighter; cleric is bringing up the rear, checking behind." It doesn't have to go turn-by-turn.
Convention Game 2
I'm going to chalk this up to a bad GM. She admitted to having never played or run Shadowdark. Reading the adventure in real-time, it was a surprise in every room. We went through the rooms in numerical order, like a Choose Your Own Adventure. "Ok - you're now in room 2, what do you want to do?" "Oh, you walked in here and are now surprised by beetles that are the size of horses!"
The complaints that aren't specific to the GM style were the systemic issues. I was a 3rd level wizard. I had one attack spell (Burning Hands). I failed the casting roll on my first attempt. Ergo, I had a dagger the whole game and nothing else to do in combats. I was in a crumbling tower and needed to escape - luckily I had Feather Fall; however that was a 50/50 chance to literally live or die.
In short, the spellcasting rules are terrible. They are so unpredictable as to be basically worthless. Spells (especially utility spells) should work if you had the foresight to take them. Preparation and good play mean less in Shadowdark than in an D&D-adjacent game I've played in 30+ years of experience.
Home Game
Okay, let's ignore the lackluster convention game and the bad convention game. Let's look at a long-form game among an established group of friends who started playing together in the TSR-era. My old college friends and I got together for a weekend of gaming. One of the players (himself an experienced OSR GM) was going to run the game.
1) Rolling the characters according to the game rules produced ability scores that were unsuited for play - even by the standards of Shadowdark. We each had to scrap around a half dozen sets of rolls to get something that Shadowdark said could be played. This took too long. The system should be designed that the standard rolling method produced characters that the system says are "playable." In the end, we ended up rolling 6X6 matrices of ability scores, taking the best from each column. Which I think is Method 3 from AD&D1e's DMG.
2) I explained my dislike of the spell rolling and the issue with Feather Fall, so the GM implemented a popular house rule that you can't lose a spell on its first casting.
3) We started at 3rd level. To prevent having characters with 3-4 HP, the GM let us max our 1st level HP.
We played a conversion of the classic adventure The Lost City. Even though we attempted to play intelligently, we had 3 TPKs in an afternoon of play. Some of us lost 4 characters. During the session, each of us was able to try every character class in the core game. In some cases, making the characters took almost as long as that character survived in play.
Of the 5 of us, the only player to have a good time was the guy we call the contrarian who likes comedically underpowered games of parody. Another player who had excitedly purchased the Shadowdark rulebook to prepare for the weekend (hoping it would be a good alternative to 5E) said "I'm never playing it again. It's going on my bookshelf to collect dust."
Deconstructing My Bad Time
Let's accept the core concepts of Shadowdark. Darkness matters. It's designed to be quick and streamlined. It needs to feel like D&D. All this I'm good with.
1) A player needs to trust that they can successfully cast a spell at least one time. (Fixed in houserules.)
2) Die rolling ability scores as presented takes too long to produce an acceptable character. The 3d6 method of the past does not work in "d20 + modifier" systems. (It worked in old-school games because ability scores weren't as tied to your character's role in the party. It might've granted a slight edge to attack or damage, an XP bonus, or an extra language slot.) Shadowdark should either have a Standard Array and/or present die rolling methods that have a statistical likelihood to create characters that aren't going to be trashed (per the rules).
3) Dungeon turns and constant Initiative are immersion breaking and take too long.
4) HP and damage are out of whack. Yes, this is a compatibility issue with old D&D, but it should change. 1HD monsters shouldn't have a 50/50 chance to kill a PC with one hit in a dungeon adventure where you face swarms of them AND you can't reasonably avoid combat. (If you open a door to a 30 X 30 room and see the monsters, they see you, you can't avoid them, you can't run away because they have the same - or better - speed.)
5) The DCs of Shadowdark are mathematically wrong if players should have a reasonable chance of success for mundane tasks. An Easy DC 9 is a 60% chance of success. You only have a 37.5% chance to have rolled 12 or higher on your 3d6 ability score. So there's a slight chance that you have better than a 60% chance of success to achieve an "Easy" success. If we look at a lowly kobold's Armor Class [13] as a DC skill check, it's on the high end of a Normal check. You have a less than average chance to hit, even assuming you might have a +1 or +2 to hit.
6) Levelling up is disappointing. You get a handful of HP (average is 2-4) that don't really matter or add to survivability in a substantial way. You might get to roll on a chart that could make you 5% better at something you could already do. Assuming you're not a spellcaster, you don't unlock special capstone abilities at higher levels. (Extra attacks for a fighter, for example.)
Ultimately, I'm not so invested in Shadowdark to try to figure out how to bring it inline with the experience I'd want. I'm just disappointed in encountering another "rules deadly" system that focuses on what I find to be the least appealing elements of OSR systems to make an experience that doesn't resemble the D&D I actually played.
When Shadowdark was released, I didn't understand the hype. To me it seemed just like any other OSR game sitting unplayed on my shelf (the aforementioned Castles & Crusades and Swords & Wizardry, but also Hyperborea, Five Torches Deep, Basic Fantasy, and Old School Essentials.) It wasn't until the latest Western Reaches Kickstarter promotion that I started to understand - Shadowdark was the core D&D experience, distilled into four simple classes that had the most basic of rules to allow a game to progress. In short, if I were stranded on a desert island without any rulebooks, it would be similar to how I would recreate D&D from memory. I took a chance and backed the Kickstarter.
Over the past month, I've been able to play Shadowdark three times, and unfortunately I've been unimpressed. As I write my thoughts, please keep in mind that these are my experiences. If you love Shadowdark, I think that's awesome. However, I'm disappointed to say that it's not for me.
Two of the games were at a convention, run by professional GMs....
Convention Game 1
Not awful. But it was too long to complete in the 2-hour time allotment. The adherence to "dungeon turns" felt a tad artificial and slowed our progress. (For example, we could have just went through the adventure the same way I've done since 1989 - "here's our marching order: thief is in the front, checking for traps; fighter is behind, shield raised and ready to intercept enemies; wizard is next, holding the torch and taking cover behind the fighter; cleric is bringing up the rear, checking behind." It doesn't have to go turn-by-turn.
Convention Game 2
I'm going to chalk this up to a bad GM. She admitted to having never played or run Shadowdark. Reading the adventure in real-time, it was a surprise in every room. We went through the rooms in numerical order, like a Choose Your Own Adventure. "Ok - you're now in room 2, what do you want to do?" "Oh, you walked in here and are now surprised by beetles that are the size of horses!"
The complaints that aren't specific to the GM style were the systemic issues. I was a 3rd level wizard. I had one attack spell (Burning Hands). I failed the casting roll on my first attempt. Ergo, I had a dagger the whole game and nothing else to do in combats. I was in a crumbling tower and needed to escape - luckily I had Feather Fall; however that was a 50/50 chance to literally live or die.
In short, the spellcasting rules are terrible. They are so unpredictable as to be basically worthless. Spells (especially utility spells) should work if you had the foresight to take them. Preparation and good play mean less in Shadowdark than in an D&D-adjacent game I've played in 30+ years of experience.
Home Game
Okay, let's ignore the lackluster convention game and the bad convention game. Let's look at a long-form game among an established group of friends who started playing together in the TSR-era. My old college friends and I got together for a weekend of gaming. One of the players (himself an experienced OSR GM) was going to run the game.
1) Rolling the characters according to the game rules produced ability scores that were unsuited for play - even by the standards of Shadowdark. We each had to scrap around a half dozen sets of rolls to get something that Shadowdark said could be played. This took too long. The system should be designed that the standard rolling method produced characters that the system says are "playable." In the end, we ended up rolling 6X6 matrices of ability scores, taking the best from each column. Which I think is Method 3 from AD&D1e's DMG.
2) I explained my dislike of the spell rolling and the issue with Feather Fall, so the GM implemented a popular house rule that you can't lose a spell on its first casting.
3) We started at 3rd level. To prevent having characters with 3-4 HP, the GM let us max our 1st level HP.
We played a conversion of the classic adventure The Lost City. Even though we attempted to play intelligently, we had 3 TPKs in an afternoon of play. Some of us lost 4 characters. During the session, each of us was able to try every character class in the core game. In some cases, making the characters took almost as long as that character survived in play.
Of the 5 of us, the only player to have a good time was the guy we call the contrarian who likes comedically underpowered games of parody. Another player who had excitedly purchased the Shadowdark rulebook to prepare for the weekend (hoping it would be a good alternative to 5E) said "I'm never playing it again. It's going on my bookshelf to collect dust."
Deconstructing My Bad Time
Let's accept the core concepts of Shadowdark. Darkness matters. It's designed to be quick and streamlined. It needs to feel like D&D. All this I'm good with.
1) A player needs to trust that they can successfully cast a spell at least one time. (Fixed in houserules.)
2) Die rolling ability scores as presented takes too long to produce an acceptable character. The 3d6 method of the past does not work in "d20 + modifier" systems. (It worked in old-school games because ability scores weren't as tied to your character's role in the party. It might've granted a slight edge to attack or damage, an XP bonus, or an extra language slot.) Shadowdark should either have a Standard Array and/or present die rolling methods that have a statistical likelihood to create characters that aren't going to be trashed (per the rules).
3) Dungeon turns and constant Initiative are immersion breaking and take too long.
4) HP and damage are out of whack. Yes, this is a compatibility issue with old D&D, but it should change. 1HD monsters shouldn't have a 50/50 chance to kill a PC with one hit in a dungeon adventure where you face swarms of them AND you can't reasonably avoid combat. (If you open a door to a 30 X 30 room and see the monsters, they see you, you can't avoid them, you can't run away because they have the same - or better - speed.)
5) The DCs of Shadowdark are mathematically wrong if players should have a reasonable chance of success for mundane tasks. An Easy DC 9 is a 60% chance of success. You only have a 37.5% chance to have rolled 12 or higher on your 3d6 ability score. So there's a slight chance that you have better than a 60% chance of success to achieve an "Easy" success. If we look at a lowly kobold's Armor Class [13] as a DC skill check, it's on the high end of a Normal check. You have a less than average chance to hit, even assuming you might have a +1 or +2 to hit.
6) Levelling up is disappointing. You get a handful of HP (average is 2-4) that don't really matter or add to survivability in a substantial way. You might get to roll on a chart that could make you 5% better at something you could already do. Assuming you're not a spellcaster, you don't unlock special capstone abilities at higher levels. (Extra attacks for a fighter, for example.)
Ultimately, I'm not so invested in Shadowdark to try to figure out how to bring it inline with the experience I'd want. I'm just disappointed in encountering another "rules deadly" system that focuses on what I find to be the least appealing elements of OSR systems to make an experience that doesn't resemble the D&D I actually played.
