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="jedijon" data-source="post: 8057900" data-attributes="member: 49099">I’m presuming the Drakensang video game (2008 release) uses the rules pretty darn close to printed material’s rule set.[URL unfurl="true"]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drakensang:_The_Dark_Eye[/URL]If so, this Wikipedia article contains about everything I could want to know to learn more about how this game works.There’s 8 attributes, you have different stats in each weapon, every spell is it’s own skill, there’s even some info about action resolution. Seems that “crunchy” is right—appears there was an easy enough translation of that into a video game engine, moreso even than Neverwinter Nights. And people rag 4E for the idea that somehow playing it is tantamount to playing a video game and or the designers took too much “influence from” them...One thing that’s always touted as desirable in an RPG is when capabilities diminish as characters push farther. D&D of course generally lacks this—full HP and 1 HP see your character function just the same. Exhaustion can be brought into play. It’s not very finely granular, but it is there to say “you’ve been doing a lot...and it’s catching up to you”. In this game, a failed check sees you taking stat damage to compensate. It’d be neat if that was optional. Optional in the sense that I could roll—and choose to fail rather than taking stat burn. Or not. As the situation warranted. I suspect not though—RPGs always struggle with the “well, just try again” problem and burning 3 pts of a skill addressed that.Combat though looks like a book-keeping mess. You’ve got to procedurally calculate initiative order based on each persons choices, results of their rolls, and then generate damage, apply it to stats, and track each one of those many factors down through the remainder of the turn’s unresolved actions. And of course we all know that diminishing capability—while awesome at simulating a certain realism—is just like spell slots, HP, and uses of Rage/Day...it’s an abstraction whose practical outcome is to tell the players “it’s time to take a long rest now”.I love skill check mechanics. In a lot of ways the simplified skill list and lower granularity of skill rank make them inherently harder to use in 5E. So I’m always on the lookout for new wrinkles and I’ll take a look at this for that purpose.That said, I suspect I’d be as likely to pick this up as to dust off my old copy of Cadwallon. Neat to know that in the German region D&D is second fiddle. I wouldn’t have guessed. Ich bin beeindruckt.</blockquote>

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