Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="SlyFlourish" data-source="post: 9610379" data-attributes="member: 54840">I actually have a house rule that you can't stabilize at zero hit points. This way you're not dragging around a stable PC with no way to heal them. In my game, you have to get them to 1 hit point or they die. I also roll the rounds until death secretly so the players don't know how long they have.On the flip side, I let spell casters get at least one successful casting of a spell before they lose it due to a failed spellcasting check.I also have the characters start with one luck point at the beginning of a session and they can trade them around. They cannot, however, use them to change the roll on the GM side -- only their own rolls. No silvery barbs here!Regarding the feeling of Shadowdark, one of the reasons I think it's so successful and popular is that it hits a point that D&D just isn't aiming for these days. D&D 2024 and all the 5e variants, got more complicated and crunchier with more heroic options instead of less. A lot of folks clearly like that direction but there are also others who like the more focused simplicity of a game like Shadowdark. Every time I hear a conversation about how many draws and stowings of a weapon a character can do in a turn, I'm reminded of the value of a game like Shadowdark.D&D 2024 went one way and Shadowdark clearly goes another way. There are different people who love both.I will say, I think Shadowdark is the best introduction to D&D right now. I've had the chance to both play and run it with people brand new to RPGs and it's so much easier to pick up than trying to explain the income-tax-form-like character sheet of full 5e in any of its variants. Shadowdark is extremely easy to teach new players and get into the game. It also helps them learn the basic mechanics of 5e should they want to get into the crunchier 5e versions. And it's really easy to teach to 5e players because the mechanics are the same.From my own experience, we ran a year long campaign based on Cursed Scroll 1. Kelsey actually commissioned me to write about the experience in the introduction of the new special edition of Cursed Scroll 1. My group are all veteran players and all of them are GMs and they universally loved it. The players got t-shirts made with all of the deaths of their characters listed on the back (I think it's like 18 of them?). They did say they were eager to jump into a more crunchy tactically heroicy sort of RPG when we finished. Now we're playing Tales of the Valiant which we're all enjoying. But all of them said they'd gladly play Shadowdark again.For me, it's the perfect convention game and a fantastic system for one-shot games. I use it both for my yearly i6 Ravenloft game and use the Scarlet Minotaur adventure in the free Shadowdark Quickstart pack when running con games. It's fantastic.So yeah, I love Shadowdark and I think it nails a sweet spot in the whole hobby for a more refined version of 5e focused on the grim and darker exploration of normal folk instead of D&D 2024's more crunchy superheroic high fantasy.</blockquote>

Verification