Dragonbane BETA

The Beta documents for Free League Publishing's new fantasy role-playing game Dragonbane, were released several weeks ago and have received steady updates throughout the beta process. Kickstarter backers have been able to play and test the system. Here at the RPG study, we have had the opportunity to playtest these rules, just a little bit, and have some thoughts on some of the content that we've seen so far.

A lot of skill(s)

Reading through the rules document we got the impression that Dragonbane presents a swingy, but fast resolution mechanic. Nearly every situation encountered in the game is resolved through the skill system. Want to make an attack with your sword? Want to look for traps? That's a skill. Want to see if you remember an interesting bit of lore? That's a skill.

What makes the game quick is this resolution mechanic. Dragonbane flips the traditional convention of rolling a D20 on its head, at least compared to a system like 5E. In Dragonbane, 20’s are no longer the number you want to roll.  Instead, lower is better with 1’s being the best result. This is because you want to roll below the target number which is your skill value. Therefore, the higher your skill value is, the more likely you are to succeed.

From a resolution standpoint, this is very quick to adjudicate. Now there are no modifiers that need to be added to the die. You immediately look at what’s been rolled on the die and compare it to your relevant skill. In this way, too, combat has been simplified. It's no longer a test of whether you as the combatant are skilled enough to inflict lasting damage on your opponent by exceeding their armor class. But rather it's a question of are you as a combatant skilled enough with the weapon that you are using. It’s a subtle difference but an extremely interesting one. If you are skilled with swords and you roll under your sword skill, you have hit your target and are able to deal your damage. This makes combat quick.  

Combat is similar to many other RPG’s where once it is clear a confrontation is beginning, initiative is determined and turns are played out in order. Dragonbane uses a deck of cards number 1-10, drawn randomly, to determine initiative order. There are of course specific cases where the cards and draws can be manipulated to gain more advantageous turn orders. Like d20 rolls, lower on the card order is better. Lastly, initiative is determined each round with the cards being collected, shuffled, and redrawn so turn order varies round-to-round.

The action economy and the round-to-round initiative reshuffling provides a dynamic feel to combat. It also makes combat feel very tactical. Combat itself is also quite a bit different from what you may be used to, if you cut your teeth on 3^rd, 4^th, or 5th edition D&D, though 1^st edition players might have a little bit more of a leg up here. Earlier editions of Dungeons and Dragons often used a round-to-round initiative order system.

The varying initiative order is important to mention, because in Dragonbane, monsters always hit. Since your character has no armor class, an enemy NPC who's a humanoid will have to roll their weapon skill to see if they succeed, like a PC would. But the entire class of enemies known as Monsters always hit. Monsters don't always deal damage, but when they do deal damage, oftentimes it is an extreme amount of damage. The game does provide ways to soak this damage using armor. Oftentimes it won't be enough to soak all the damage dealt to your character since hit point maximums are set at character creation and very rarely change this level of lethal damage will be a concern throughout the entirety of a Dragonbane campaign.

There is a way to mitigate this lethal damage, though. If you haven't acted yet in combat, you still possess your action for the round. You can spend that action outside of your turn, to attempt to either parry an incoming attack or evade it all together. Some monster attacks may be parried, but not all, but most of them can be evaded, thus negating the monsters attack and damage completely.

There is a chance of failure for this though, and on a failure, your character will still receive the full effect of the monster’s attack. One of the consequences of this mechanic is that the Evade skill is very important, and if you're not going to play a character with a high Evade skill you need to have lots of armor or be good at parrying.

So again, this limited action economy, but changing initiative order, provides a very strategic feel and allows for dynamic combat. Decisions must be made situationally, am I going to act after the monster? If so, I'll wait to see if I need to Evade. Maybe the effect of the monster this round is that I must resist being frightened, or I must roll to resist poison. If that's the case, then I still have my action and can use it to attack or try some other option in combat. If I act before the monster, I must do a lot of mental calculus to see if I could I kill it or if our party can collectively stack enough damage on this monster this round that I won't need to worry about evading its attacks. This adds a consistent level of tension that can feel bad when you miss and then get pummeled by the monster. But when you succeed with your plan to evade or to attack and stack enough damage to take a monster down in a given round, it can feel very rewarding.

The RPG study play tested the opening encounter where on the road to the Misty Valley and to the town of Outskirt, you discover a dying man along the mountain pass. The scene is an ambush, and the party is attacked by a number of goblins equal to the number of players followed a round later by a wolf and a mounted goblin. The wolf rider is not considered an NPC, but rather as a monster. We had two party members, so we had two goblin soldiers and then wolf rider as well. The goblin soldiers went down quickly. The real trouble was the rider.

The goblin wolf rider, as a monster, can make multiple attacks a round due to a stat that monsters have called Ferocity. Ferocity as a score determines the number of initiative cards a monster draws and acts on in a round. Each round, the wolf rider was able to move and potentially attack twice with big attacks that could easily drop either of the two PCs that we had. If we had a larger party, the overall effect would have been mitigated as we would have been able to stack more damage more quickly, and distribute the damage that the goblin could deal across more party members.

We were able to overcome this initial encounter and had a lot of fun doing it. The big take-away that we had was that Dragonbane provides a fun, flexible, and fast system for adjudicating and resolving most of the kinds of encounters and challenges that arise in a typical fantasy role-playing game. The other notable take away that we have though is, it feels similar to the advice or what you would see printed on adventure modules, for say first edition D&D, that it requires large parties to have any kind of success. Again, this is mainly due to resource limitations.

Sometimes that resource is hit points. Sometimes that resource is actions per round. But the more PC’s you have in your party, the more likely you are to succeed. Now there is some scaling in later versions of the Beta documents where we see some monsters Ferocity score is equal to the number of PCs minus one. So, a party of 6 might fight a monster who acts five times in a round, which is a lot, but it still does seem like more will be better in any Dragonbane campaign.

One thing that hasn't really shown up in either the beta rules text or the beta adventure would be followers or NPC's who might tag along with the party. Personally, as a GM, I don't love tag along NPC's that follow the party into combat, but it may just be a necessary requirement for Dragonbane if you can't get enough Players.

Character creation

Character creation is a very fun aspect of any game, Dragonbane included. Characters can be generated completely from random rolls, and it feels good to generate characters in this way. We generated two different characters using the rules found in the Dragonbane Beta document, and everything about them was random, even their names. In as little as 15 minutes, with just a couple of dice we had fully formed characters who were ready for the game. It was a fun and quick way to get into the game and should help pull new players into the system once they see how quickly they can get up and playing. Hopefully it will also make them a little less upset when a character likely dies because they can quickly bring a new character online.

One big change, or house rule that players in a longer running campaign may need is rather than bringing a new “first level character,” replacement characters should come with a certain amount of additional skill points or maybe equipment that they may have found throughout their career prior to introduction to the campaign.

This idea of extra starting resources is notable for a couple of reasons. One of the characters we created was a Mariner with one of her starting pieces of equipment being a short bow. However, she cannot use a short bow without a quiver. This didn't appear to be an oversight for the Mariner as the Ranger class does start with the quiver. Unless this was an oversight by the designers, the Mariner is therefore completely unable to use a weapon from her starting gear package. On top of that, she did not start with enough money to purchase a quiver in town. While this is motivation to get out an get adventuring to earn some coin, it is frustrating on an initial playthrough.

Final (Initial) Thoughts

The adventure text itself is compelling but we won’t discuss it too much here. There are 10 adventure sites, oozing flavor and personality with different takes on classic fantasy tropes. Not all giants and trolls or even Orcs are going to be your enemies, depending on how you approach them.

All in all, this is an early impression of Dragonbane, but it's very promising. I personally love a self-contained game in a box like Free Leagues original Forbidden Lands (affiliate link) releases. A game like Forbidden Lands has been successful and has had multiple expansions, including one which is about to be released soon. Likely Dragonbane will see the same overtime, but the initial release very clearly provides a self-contained campaign with a tight, fast rule system. The main crux is just making sure that everybody involved is alright with a certain amount of character lethality and rolling up new characters.

- The RPG Study