Dragon Age Pen-and-Paper: Playtest Report #1

We played the quick start rules adventure for the Dragon Age RPG, and we noticed a couple things about the game. Well first, we noticed one big thing about the sample adventure included with the quick start rules, it supposedly forces you to make a moral choice in the middle of the adventure which turned out to be an entirely morally reprehensible choice.

It is really a terrible situation to put fresh characters in, even as a supposedly moral choice it is on one hand horrid, and the other a terrible way to start a campaign with the local royal family hunting you down. It’s dark fantasy, I know, but I would never play a situation like the one in the module as lighthearted as the module designer attempted to do (I felt the consequences of 'go dark' were dealt with a bit hand-wavedly and flippant).

Even as “dark fantasy” it is just not what my players expected or liked. To be fair, this isn't the big book (as shown), this is just the older free starter adventure, and it left us a bit wanting.

Our Adventure: Inquisition Prolog

We ended up running through the first scenario of Dragon Age Inquisition as our sample adventure instead of the quick start adventure and found a couple more observations.

DarkgarX plays a ranged rogue in the videogame, and we noticed an immediate lack of damage output with ranged rogues in this game. Compared to the videogame, rogues with bows have it good, and they are a decent damage dealing class. In the pen and paper game ranged damage per second for rogues felt woefully inadequate. They addressed this concern in a forum post where a developer suggested letting rogue ranged attacks use the rogue melee talents, such as backstab and dirty tricks. They further corrected this with an even better solution in the sister game Fantasy Age.

We ran into a situation where our melee character in our playtest, the heroic warrior Cassandra from the videogame, where she out damaged the rogue using the bow with her sword. DarkgarX was playing the rogue, and his arrows struggled to get through the darkspawn’s armor. As if the darkspawn should have any armor, as I was using the sample darkspawn monsters out of the module. That was probably a mistake on my part, but I did not have any monster statistics on hand so I used those.

DarkgarX expected to be able to do decent ranged damage, but his bow only did one die plus five, where Cassandra’s longsword was doing two dice plus three. This was to five points of armor, and Cassandra’s blows were consistently cutting through and the bow was typically rolling 1 to 3 points of damage per hit. He got this feeling of “why bother, grab a sword” and we struggled to replicate the feeling of the videogame. It was a frustrating start, and we found ourselves wondering why a longbow would do a base of 1d6+3 damage to the longsword’s 2d6 base. I could see a shortbow doing 1d6+3 (which does 1d6+1) and the longbow 2d6, or possibly halving armor versus bow damage (and keeping the damagers the same), but as it is the bows feel weak in this game.

Mind you, there is little need for a shortbow at all, and the game doesn’t go into too much detail on why and when each was used. I wanted more detail in this area as well.

Fantasy Age makes a huge improvement with rogue bow DPS, allowing rogues to add 1d6 to one attack per turn if their DEX is greater than their opponent’s with a “pinpoint attack”. This solves a lot of problems, and I am sorely tempted to port in this rule to make rogue bow DPS feel on par with what we experienced in the videogame.

Hell, I am sorely tempted to port in the videogame’s power list and give the characters some cool pyrotechnics. I would love to have the videogame’s ‘explosive shot’ available as a rogue archer spell to charge up an arrow and let fly. The pen-and-paper game is decidedly “down” on powers, so the characters play more like real people than action game shoot-and-blast MMO characters. Still, the videogame powers are fun, and they are what the world is like for us now.

There is something to be said for reflecting the world as most people enjoy it, and I would love to have an Inquisition sourcebook listing all the powers, magic items, and other cool bits for use in the pen-and-paper game. Actually, I would pay good money for that, and I would love for the game's super cool stuff to make it into the pen-and-paper game somehow.

Maybe I will spend some time with the Inquisition hint book and do a full conversion. If my hint book would stop being back ordered and ship, that is....

I am hoping we get another session in, this looks like a fun game and I like how it plays. It’s just how it plays isn’t really matching up with how we expect, and that is our problem. Fantasy Age looks to have better, more cleaned up rules, but I don't want to feel I have to pull in rules from that game to compensate.