Dragon Age the RPG – first impressions
Just before Christmas Green Ronin announced that they were starting to take pre-orders for their new licenced RPG, Dragon Age. As an extra insentive they offerd a free PDF version for ever hard copy ordered. Being a bit of a Green Ronin fan, and also having just spent the majority of my free time playing the Xbox version of the game, I decided to take advantage of this offer (which if any one is interested is still avalible).
After cracking it open and having a read a few things hit me to begin with.
- There is a good amount of background info on the setting with out being too bogged down. As I mentioned I’ve been playing the Bioware game a lot, but due to playing on the Xbox I haven’t been reading all that much of the huge amount of setting info that they included in the game. So getting to read up on a little of this history in the Green Ronin RPG was great.
- The character creation options are basically the same as the CRPG, but with a few differences. You still have only three character classes and three races, but the backgrounds have been opened up a little. The two biggest ones for me are the option to play an Avvar Hillsman or a Fereldan Freedman. Both of these are human backgrounds, but so culturally different that they are almost different races. I think from a campaign point of view that will allow for a lot of different adventures and tensions than just a Fereldan noble as in the Bioware game.
- The game system itself is an interesting mix of a litte True20 and a little Song of Ice and Fire Roleplay with one major difference in the Dragon Dice & Stunts System. The basic mechanic is that you roll 3d6, add your ability and any extras and see if you’ve beaten the TN. The Dragon Dice is one dice in your three that is a different colour, it’s used to break ties and say how well you did a task (successes). It’s most important function though is to decide how many stunt points you get. Stunts are (as far as I can tell from my initial read throughs) basically extra actions you get to do in combat. They are triggered when/if you get a double on your 3d6. This is meant to make combat a little more dynamic and different than just “I swing my sword and hit”. I’m looking forward to see how this works in play.
Green Ronin have very obviously tried to make Dragon Age easily accessible for new RPG players with streamlined rules, a setting which is likely to b at least a little bit familar to people interested in table top gaming and from the outset plenty of adventures. They announced just the other day that one of their next releases will be a book of three adventures with another three adventure outlines (the other release wil be a GMs Toolkit. More here).
It is also being released in a series of box sets, this first one (due for release in Jan ‘10) is to take characters from level 1-5. There is a Player’s Guide, a GM’s guide and (in the first box) 3 special d6. The GM guide ships with a pre-written adventure straight off the bat called The Dalish Curse. I haven’t read it, as I’m playing it next week, so I can’t give a review but I will certainly do a follow up actual play then.
All in all I think Green Ronin has started something good with Dragon Age and I look forward to seeing where it leads. At this stage, if I decide to run another high fantasy campaign I think it will be with this system. I just hope that the lengthy approvals process that stopped the table top game being released with the CPRG doesn’t stop the momentum in the same way that approvals for Green Ronin’s other current licenced product has.
2 Comments to Dragon Age the RPG – first impressions
[...] rolled up for (possibly) a one off game of the new Green Ronin Dragon Age RPG (first impressions here), but for some reason I’ve got a really good sense of who she is, maybe due to her being from [...]
I played in the first part of Dalish Curse as run by Nick Cole.
I liked the system for that kind of simple low-level adventure, and I really liked the stunt dice as a nice way of adding a bit of flavour without adding much complexity.
I will be interested to see how it expands, because at least in this box, your character doesn’t seem to change much from level to level.
I got the impression the system will work well at conventions. I’m not too sure how well it will work for campaigns – whether it has enough substance.
December 31, 2009