Spellcasting is broken backwards where a caster can lose a spell before ever getting to use it. Very poor design.
Nobody has to like this mechanic, but "very poor design" is opinion, not fact. Having played a lot of Shadowdark, the people I play with have found the mechanic to be a ton of fun. If you do the arithmetic you'll see that Shadowdark Wizards...assuming they don't have terrible Int...on average get a lot more spells per day than D&D Wizards. And, yes, it's on average so they will have both terrible days and awesome days.
And even when they run out of spells, Shadowdark mechanics mean that Wizards can contribute meaningfully with dagger or staff.
It's like a D&D clone BUT no one has infravision? Weird.
'Clone' is not accurate here. 'Derived' is better.
But regardless, the impact of nearly ubiquitous infravision has been a source of complaints for years and years. You may not share the complaint, but if somebody is going to write a variant to D&D, targeting the features that a lot of people hate makes a lot of sense. Far from weird.
Also the way the books are formatted is crazy because there's GM information in the players' book & player info in the GM book
Umm....there's only one book. So I'm not sure what you're talking about here.
Plus how do you capture an "old-school feel" with a game that has 5e-like Death saves AND Long rests? That isn't old-school at all . Finally there's nada for long-term campaigns outside of the very new-school method of fighting monsters until you hit level 20 or whatever. No land-ownership. No strongholds. No armies. No political intrigue. You're literally stuck in the dungeon FOREVER
This is getting stranger and stranger. Long rests? Level 20? Are you sure you are talking about Shadowdark?
Overall I put Shadowdark in the same class as RISUS or Maze Rats: Beer & Pretzels rpgs that play more like a board game. All it really did was reaffirm how complete and expansive the D&D Rules Cyclopedia is.
Ok, I find that one of the strangest comment of all. We must have a very different view of what "like a board game" means. In my mind, a board game is one that uses rules to rigidly define what is and isn't permissible. In Monopoly, you can't improvise and try to convert your hotels to condos. That's simply not in the rules.
One of the most defining characteristics of RPGs, on the other hand, is that they free the player from those constraints. Players are encouraged to think of creative solutions to problems that aren't in the rules and weren't considered by the GM.
Now, everybody is free to play any RPG however they want. But in my experience the more mechanical options that get packed on the character sheet, and the more adjudication rules given to the GM, the more likely that the game gets played within the confines of those rules, and the less likely players are to improvise.
One of the things I have been loving about Shadowdark is that players spend less time looking at their character sheets, hoping to find some button to press to solve the problem, and more time inventing completely unexpected solutions to those problems. And as a GM I spend less time worrying about specific rules to adjudicate their ideas, and more time leaning into the Rule of Cool. It's a ton of fun, and really brings me back to how we played in junior high school 45 years ago.
So, yeah....I really don't understand the 'board game' comment.
