The Game Testers group finished up the Dragon Age RPG: Quick Start Guide adventure last night. Below is just a few quick thoughts about the system and the Quick Start Guide.
Dragon Age is a BioWare video game with a rather expansive back story that the RPG is intended to explore.
Dragon Age RPG Mechanics
The Dragon Age RPG functions much like other fantasy RPGs that include a hefty system for combat such as D&D. In my opinion, Dragon Age feels more cumbersome than D&D 5e but certainly isn’t over bearing when it comes to rules during combat.
Probably the most notable aspects of this RPG is the innovative “Stunt” system that is somewhat like D&D’s critical roll but much more common and fun. Anytime doubles are rolled on a successful attack you get points, call Stunt Points, that can be used to make your attack more effective. The stunts include things like extra damage, making a second attack, or knocking the enemy down. The amount of Stunt Points is determined by the unique die known as the “dragon die”. The more Stunt Points you’ve got the more stunts you may do… so with a high roll on the dragon die you might end up knocking the enemy down, moving forward, and then attacking another enemy all in one attack action. This system leads to some very exciting fights that have cinematic qualities to them.
The Quick Start Guide
In the included adventure the Game Testers were quickly thrown into an escort mission using pre-generated characters included with the Quick Start Guide. The adventure was primarily just a way of simply showing off the combat mechanics and some of the non-combat interactions without requiring much knowledge of the Dragon Age lore.
As the GM the only aspect I’d be critical of was that the PDF doesn’t have the NPCs well organized so you keep having to flip pages back and forth as you run the battle scenes. Otherwise I’d say that they put together an excellent introduction to their game that has got me excited to try the full version in the future.
