Dragon Age Origins: Some Table Top Fun

I couldn’t resist Green Ronin’s pre-order deal for the dead tree version and get the PDF free offer. And I have to admit that I’m addicted to the video version of the game but this little review is about the table top version.
So what’s this whole Dragon Age thing about? The video game is by the fine folks at Bioware (who gave us such greats as Baldur’s Gate). It’s billed as a dark fantasy. Fereldan is not a happy go lucky place. It’s rife with racial, cultural and religious biases. Various human factions have battled for centuries and have their own problems. Elves are either living a nomadic life or are regulated to slums (called alienages) in the cities. Either way they are second class citizens at best. Dwarves live by a strict caste system. Mages are closely watched by the Templars just in case one of them goes astray. And the major bad guys, the Blight, that was the making of mortals. But the setting boils down to getting past all those things and some how managing to be a hero.
Green Ronin has done a good job at mixing an old school feel into the game. First, the game is being released in a series of sets. This is Set 1 and covers Levels 1 through 5. Subsequent sets will cover five level spreads up to Level 20. Kind of reminds you of the old D&D boxed sets. That was the idea. Intermixed with the release schedule will be various adventures. The sets will be spread out over a period of two years. That’s right one set per six months is the announced schedule. I’d really like to have the sets more quickly but I think that this may have to do with Bioware and their schedule for having two years worth of downloadable content for the video game. But I really wish that they were coming out much closer together. Heck, one a quarter would make me happy.
Character generation is pretty old school. Roll 3d6 (compare to chart) straight down and take like a man. OK, you can switch two ability scores. But this is not as bad as it sounds. Ability scores raise fairly quickly as you level so any bad rolls you started with will be taken care of after a couple of levels. But this does give a little concern. Like some old school games, there’s no cap on ability scores. The average for an ability score is 1 and your character can easily min-max and end up with some whomping high scores like 14 or so at higher levels. I might be wrong on this but with the character advancement as written in the first set this is real probability. So eventually some tasks will be difficult at early levels then incredibly easy at higher levels.
The table top game has pretty simple mechanics. Roll 3d6+a couple modifiers against a target number. Skills are replaced by Foci which grant a flat +2 bonus to your roll. Each class; Warrior, Mage, and Rogue, have their own little bonuses and abilities that come into play. And there the Talents which are similar to Edges in Savage Worlds or Feats in d20 that give you even more special tricks to use.
It’s supposed to be an introductory game but after reading through the first set, I’d like to think of it more as a rules medium game. It’s a little more crunchy than Savage Worlds but less than a d20 game. New gamers shouldn’t have that much problem with it and it looks to be a good gateway game for them. Plus there’s the good old sections on “What is an RPG?” and GMing tips for the newcomers. For some more experienced gamers somethings may be a little tough. I’ve ranted on this before about Savage Worlds and I’ll do it again here. It ain’t D&D. Combats in DA:O are going to be mobile and dynamic. There aren’t any attacks of opportunity, so you can run around the battle field. It’s easy for combatants to move each other around (more on that later). Disarming an opponent is pretty easy. You can get knocked on your ass. And, well, pretty much a whole of wild and crazy shit can happen during a battle.
Which leads me to the really neat parts of this game. First you have the Dragon Die. Before I mentioned that all your checks are on 3d6. One of those die is your Dragon Die. It’s just another d6 but a different color. It’s used several different ways in the game. In the case of a tie, whoever rolled higher on their Dragon Die wins. If a degree a success is needed then the higher the Dragon Die, the better. Now some folks have had a little problem with this. Mainly in the case that if you need to beat high target number then your doing to have to roll high on your Dragon Die. Yeah, true. But this use of it really isn’t a crunchy one, it’s more fluff/creative means for the GM or the player to throw in some description that really doesn’t have any game mechanic effect.
Finally, during combat the Dragon Die grants you Stunt Points. Now this is so cool. Here’s the basic mechanic. If you roll doubles and succeed then you get a number of Stunt Points equal to whatever you rolled on your Dragon Die. You spend these points on that round, you don’t save them up. The player or GM gets to do a little description of what happens and you move on. This is like it’s own little build your critical hit system. Fighter types can knock opponents back or down, they can do more damage, they can by pass armor. Spell casters can reduce the mana (Yeah, it uses a Mana point system for spells) cost of the spells, increase save TN’s and a few other tricks. This is the mechanic that makes the combats dynamic and more than just two sets of numbers banging it out toe to toe.
Do you really need this to play in the world of Dragon Age? No. There’s plenty of the fluff material online that you can easily convert it to your favorite system be it d20, GURPS, Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying or Savage Worlds (Yes, a Savage conversion has crossed my mind.) If you’re a fan of the video game and aren’t too sure about table top games then it’s a good buy. If you’re an experienced gamer and not slavishly loyal to one game system then its still a good buy as fantasy game that isn’t D&D. For me personally, I haven’t pitched it to my gaming group yet but it has gone my list of games that would be fun to play or run.