Once upon a time, I would have been like, "What? No way in hell will I ever be posting about freaking role-playing games. That's a batshit crazy idea."
But here we are. The world's on its goddamn head anyway, so why not?
Embarrassingly enough, I could even do a comparison on five or six of the damned things at this point. Let's see, we've played Broken Worlds, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Dungeons and Dragons, Old School Essentials, Mothership, Dragonbane ... is that it? I guess that's it. I'll spare you that epic-length fiasco, though. We'll start with two, and if I don't humiliate myself this time around, maybe I'll do another one later.
Right now, we're playing Dungeons and Dragons, and Christ if it's not the second edition of this game we've played. Have I really reached the stage of my life where I care about that kind of shit? Even worse, when I typed "second edition" right now, my brain actually said, "Better clear up that it's not literally Second Edition Dungeons and Dragons, just the edition after the one we played the first time we did D&D." Who the fuck cares? But I guess if I'm a big enough loser to be typing this, somebody else out there is a big enough loser it's really important for them to know these things, so here we are.
(Just to be even more clear, the only ones I'm calling out for being losers are the ones who got all horny over the possibility I was going to be writing about Second Edition Dungeons and Dragons. These days Dungeons and Dragons isn't just for losers anymore, but I'm pretty sure back in the Second Edition geological era, it was. If it's any consolation and you're one of those losers, so was my boyfriend, and now he's doing that hot chick in my profile pick, so "loser" is kind of a term of endearment. Fool yourself about that if you need to.)
So what we're playing right now is the Dungeons and Dragons that came out in 2024 -- which, I've just got to gripe for a second about the art. Really pretty art, right? On average, I'm saying better than the other version we played, "5E." But it's so bubblegum compared to that version. No weight to it, and in some cases just plain half-assed. Like, there's this picture of these Victorian-looking D&D motherfuckers fighting undead on the porch of Dracula's castle or something, and boo-yah for inclusion because there's a dude in a wheelchair in it ... but guys, seriously, why did you make the dude in the wheelchair such a do-nothing dweeb? He's not even pointing his gun at anything. Look, here's what my barely-an-artist boyfriend did in like ten minutes to fix it:
Top version: "Pleeez, everybody clump around me and protect me from the creepy-crawlies while I hunch my shoulders helplessly! I'm not sure what this gizmo in my left hand does ... maybe it will hypnotize them?"
Bottom version: He's just pasted one of the zombies with his magic pop-gun and he's about to bring the hurt on more of them with his bad-ass amulet.
I mean, if you're going to represent, then frickin' represent, okay? Don't just stick the dude in there and give him nothing to do. Hell, even if you took the first version and just made him point his right hand dramatically out and forward, the guy would look like he was in charge instead of just being wheeled around with zero to contribute.
Whoosh. Sorry. What the hell am I doing here again?
Oh yeah, RPG comparison. So obviously the first game we're comparing here is D&D 2024 -- which now that I think about it, having some bad art decisions kind of makes sense, since that was a year for some really bad fucking decisions, wasn't it? Anyway, second game is: Dragonbane.
Zero bad art decisions here, folks. Every piece in the whole book is done by one guy, basically, and let me tell you, they'd better not ever fire that guy, because he's goddamn incredible.
Really didn't mean to make this an art-criticism post, though, so let's move on.
Why am I comparing these two games? Because I'm a mean bitch and no one will play with me, so I'm left doing this.
(Kidding.)
Straight up, I'm going to tell you, I like one of these games better than the other, and the fact that I realized that and then the fact that I started wondering why added up to me deciding I should blog about it. (Disclosure: everybody around this house thinks I should blog more, so there's that too. Not that they ride me about it or anything. I can just feel them thinking it.)
Now, don't get me wrong ... I'm having a blast playing Dungeons and Dragons. Our Dungeon Master is a zany babe and very creative, the party is full of really fun and whack characters, and I'm getting to be this blunt-as-fuck orc barbarian who I am having a lot of fun with. But it's a little bit low-stakes, and everything about the rules feels very engineered. Here's how many points you've got to get to advance to level 2. Here's how many times you can use your special "rage" ability before you've got to rest. Here's the number of spells your wizards can cast in a day. Here are this monster's attack options for the DM to pick from. Here's a table for the Dungeon Master to compare character level to monster challenge rating and figure out how many baddies to put in the room for the good guys to fight if you want a cakewalk versus a rough-and-tumble versus a bloodbath. Here's the list of skills, which is not all that long, and you're gonna pick a couple of good ones and the rest you'll more or less suck at.
Dragonbane, though, is more about, Here's a bunch of shit you can pick from to see what you can do with it. Knock yourself out.
In D&D, the class you choose locks down your range of powers and skills like crazy. And as you go up in level, you can make a decent number of choices about those powers and skills, but your wizard's never going to be able to go toe to toe with a monster and your fighter's never going to roast waves and waves of minions with fireballs or bring a toes-up party member back to life. Plus, your choices get railroaded at some points if you really want your character to be a badass. Yeah, you can multi-class and get a bunch of different powers to be more versatile, but if you do that, you're never going to get the top-notch, epic, do-not-fuck-with-me pinnacle abilities of any of your classes.
In Dragonbane, your profession guides some of the choices you make, but a starting Bard can be a better front-liner than a starting Fighter, and a starting Fighter can be much more skilled than a starting Bard, depending on where you've put your stats and whether you decide to play a wet-behind-the-ears kid (better physical stats, not so many skills) or a creaky oldster (worse physical stats, better mental ones, more skills).
In D&D, fights are structured pretty tightly. You roll initiative at the start of combat, and you go in that order round after round unless you decide to drop to a lower initiative for some reason. You've got one and only one reaction you can use to do something on someone else's turn. Each monster has a specific set of combat options for the DM to pick from, and if you've fought a monster type before, you've probably seen everything or most everything it can do.
In Dragonbane, you draw initiative cards at the start of every round, and when your turn comes up, you can trade your card with anybody else's, including your opponents. Like D&D, you've got a single reaction each turn, and for starting characters, you just about always sacrifice your initiative card to use it -- meaning you can dodge during the round or take an action during the round, but not both. But if you pick the right abilities as your character advances, you can spend Willpower points on dodging and dodge as many times as you want to and have the points for. Tough monsters get multiple initiative cards every round, so they can gnaw on your characters several times. This means strategy is not just about getting yourself in position to use your character's individual powers -- it's also about timing your actions relative to the monster's and relative to your teammates'.
The biggest deal, though, is that Dragonbane monsters don't make attack rolls. They just pick their victim(s) for the turn, and if the character doesn't dodge or parry, the attack takes effect. They also don't choose what they're doing for the round, only who they're doing it to: the Game Master rolls on a table to see which monster power the creature uses -- which means you can easily go through a combat and never see all of the monster's abilities. The monster also never does the same thing two turns in a row.
All of this means the players had better work as a team, and the GM only needs to worry about who to mess with for the monster's turn(s), not what power to strategically use. Fights are very fast-paced, mostly short, pretty goddamn brutal, and flow with a constantly changing dynamic. There's no waiting for your turn to come around, deciding what to do, rolling, and then waiting until initiative cycles back to you. Something could happen to your character at basically any time in the round, and if you want to be effective on your next turn, you'd better be paying attention to what goes on with everyone else's.
In Dungeons and Dragons, gaining levels a pretty damn drawn-out process, and you've got to do bookkeeping along the way -- it's a requirement. In Dragonbane, you pick a handful of skills at the end of every session and see if any of them go up by a point. Skills you're bad at are easy to notch upward; skills you're good at take a lucky roll of the advancement die. You either get better or you don't, no math required. When one of your skills hits 18, you get to pick a new Heroic Ability, which you can pore over the rulebook to make the most strategic choice for, or you can just chunk it into hit points or willpower points and not have to worry about it.
So it's easier to play Dragonbane by a lot, and there's way less heavy lifting for the Game Master, and every character can evolve into a completely different skill and power set than every other character.
Anyway, who you're playing with is always the most important part of any RPG, but if you've got a good table of players, my money is on Dragonbane.
Okay, that's a wrap.
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