Deconstruction: Dragon Age RPG

Put out by Green Ronin, the Dragon Age Roleplaying Game adapts Bioware’s great Dragon Age Origins computer game into an RPG. Unfortunately, the roleplaying game falls short of the greatness of the computer game.

It’s worth noting ahead of time that calling this a complete RPG is being especially favorable to it. The game goes from levels 1-5, which kind of roughly map those in DA:O. The part of the game the RPG covers is the first two hours – your intro story. There are no rules or details on the Grey Wardens, none of the info on some of Dragon Age’s memorable monsters, and despite each school of magic in the computer game having a dozen spells in, in the RPG they each have 3 – for a total of 12 spells in the entire book. The art doesn’t even reflect the limited game - in the 102 pages of rules between the player’s guide and gamemaster’s guide, there are seven pictures of monsters that the game doesn’t include, including the ogre right on the cover of the gamemaster’s guide. Yes, that’s right – the ogre, the very first boss of the game, who was featured in all of the promotional material, is not included. Unfortunately, this limitedness doesn’t seem likely to change soon. The game has been out for seven months as of the writing of this article, and the second book, supposed to cover levels 5-10, has yet to be released. An adventure pack, called “Blood in Ferelden” was supposed to be released five months ago, and still isn’t out.

Onto the system itself. The character creation process begins by having you roll 3d6 for each of the eight stats in order, assigning a bonus depending on what you roll (you don’t keep the roll – if you rolled a 9-11 you get an ability bonus of a +1, and the actual roll is ignored). These starting stats range from -2 (if you roll a 3) to a +4 (if you roll an 18). After assigning these eight stats in order, you’re given an opportunity to switch two of them. The designers have come out saying that this method “helps the old school feel” and that it’s friendlier for new players. Unfortunately, it completely ignored any sense of balance (a +/-6 difference is huge on a 3d6 range), and ignores the needs of new players who have a specific character type they want to play, and don’t feel comfortable playing anything else. This wouldn’t have been a problem had the designers just offered some sort of point buy or array method. Unfortunately, “old school” apparently means giving no options, not letting people play the characters they want, and purposefully injecting imbalance. And this isn’t hyperbole – if a player has three stats he feels he needs in order for his character to fit his ideal (say, constitution, communication, and strength for a warrior-leader), he has a 25% of not having an above average stat in one of those abilities. The characters in Dragon Age Origins show good proficiency in most stats – Loghain, for example, certainly has Constitution, Cunning, Strength, and Willpower, and if you want four stats to be above average, you only have a 42% chance of playing that character. That is a serious problem. It’s worth noting there are also ability focuses, which treat your stat as +2 higher for a certain purpose, like Magic (Spirit), Constitution (Running), or Strength (Axes).

Background selection comes after stats, and it just compounds the problems. You pick a background, and gain a stat bonus and an ability focus or two from it. You then roll twice on 2d6 table to determine two bonus benefits you get – most of them include a +1 to a stat or a focus, but some are real stinkers. Picking a surface dwarf might give you +1 Strength and Focus: Strength (axes) randomly, turning you into a real powerhouse. Or you might get Focus Cunning (engineering) and +1 Communication which might not even fit your character. If you choose to play an elven mage, you might end up with Speak Elven and a focus in bows, which mages aren’t even proficient in, compared to someone who was lucky and rolled two different +1s to major stats as a human mage! This just increases the randomness in how good you are, or what character you want to play even more. Not to mention that the backgrounds also feel incomplete – the only dwarven background is for surface dwarves – and the stats don’t even match the game – again, dwarves don’t have their magic resistance as they do in the game.

Finally it gets to classes, of which there are three – Warrior, Mage, and Rogue, just like in Dragon Age Origins. Unfortunately, due to only having five levels, none of the really neat subclasses like the Ranger, Bard, Blood Mage, Champion, or Templar appear. It’s worth noting here that a lot more stuff is random – starting health, health at level up, mana at level up and starting mana for a mage are all rolled for. There’s really no need for this. You gain a few things at level 1, and then each additional level you gain some minor perk – a single new spell or talent (covered next), an extra ability focus, or so on.

The talents are another facepalm-worthy bit of game design that should have been avoided. Talents are like D&D feats – certain classes can take them, they sometimes have requirements, and there are two ranks for each talent. Some of these talents are pretty good – there are talents that let you reroll some tests, like Stealth, Lock Picking, Traps, and so on. Other talents might give you +1 to hit, lower the cost of stunts in combat, increase your defense if you use a shield, or even read someone’s mood with magic or gain new spells. But then some of the talents are just not interesting. The Music talent requires you to have a focus in either performance or musical lore, and it lets you… play an instrument and sing. Yup, even if you took that focus, you couldn’t sing or play music without that talent. And no, there are no rules for singing in any way helping in anything but flavor. If you take ran two of music, you get to… play a few more instruments, equal to your communication, which may just be one or two extra. There are a few other lame duck talents thrown in there that serve no purpose except to punish people who choose to make their characters interesting, rather than focusing on being competent.

Before continuing, I want to talk about the one thing I actually LIKED about the system – the dragon die. When you roll an attack, you roll 3d6+X against the opponent’s defense, and if you hit you then roll damage. Simple enough. But one of those 3d6 is supposed to be a different color, and is called the “dragon die”. If you roll a pair on any of your 3d6 (including with the dragon die) you’re allowed to do a stunt. There’s a list of stunts, each with a Stunt Point cost – you get a number of stunt points to spend equal to whatever the dragon die is. The stunts include all sorts of things, like an extra move, knocking a target prone, disarming someone, dealing extra damage, attacking again, or hurting an extra enemy. This is all great stuff, and I’d like to see other systems use this.

Onto the magic system, and this is where the troubles continue. Each mage gets to start with three spells, and will gain a few more as they level. The magic system is MP based. To cast a spell you pay the mana, roll 3d6+magic against a DC based on the spell, and if you pass, the opponent rolls something against 10+your magic. The problem is, the attack scales as you level up – as a mage, you will be boosting your magic stat, and taking a specialization for an extra +2 asap! – and the defenses do not. So at level 2, you’re looking at a character rolling 3d6+7 or +8 vs a target number 11, and if he succeeds, the opponent has to roll 3d6+will power against  17 or 18 or be stunned for a turn. In short, a very basic entropy mage will stunlock the biggest enemy in the battlefield. That enemy will not get to act, ever. The dragon dice stunts only make this worse, and are not as interesting as the melee ones. For 1-3 stunt points, you can add that number to the target number, virtually guaranteeing a lock down. For 4, you can cast a different spell this round, too. The spell choices are limited, and virtually guarantee success if you’re smart enough to specialize.

Finally, I want to point out how the Gamemaster’s Guide has horrible advice that nobody should follow, and poisons the well for new RPG players to come. To quote:

“The dreaded rules lawyer is one of the most common problem player types. … The Rules lawyer often quotes rules and “official” interpretations of them as justifications for his behavior, and argues rules decisions he disagrees with. … By pointing out your mistakes, these players try to score points and control the flow of a campaign. …

While it talks about the good of knowing the rules, it always does so in a “as long as the person is quite and bows before the almighty GM” manner. Never is the GM who arbitrarily changes rules told that he’s wrong, or that he SHOULD be corrected. It’s always the fault of the rules lawyer. This attitude is utterly childish, and completely unnecessary. And of course, there's no listing of the problem player who bitches and moans that other people, while playing entirely by the rules, are playing by them in a way he doesn't like.