Dungeoneers & Dragonslayers
"Ds & Ds", as Luke jokingly called it, is a new game under development by Luke Crane (of Burning Wheel and MouseGuard fame) and others. The idea is to turn Burning Wheel into an "old school dungeon crawl" game. I will say it has the most clever inventory system I have seen and all RPG's in the future should adopt it, especially if they involve collecting "fat loot" like old school D&D games did. Basically each part of your character's body has 1 "slot" and each item you carry takes a slot. Pouches, sacks, backpacks increase your slots but at an expense. For example a small bag takes up a hand slot, so now you are restricted to one-handed weapons. A large sack takes two hands...
The system is quite heavy (in a good way), I was expecting something more rules light. But Dungeoneers & Dragonslayers turns social interaction and the process of roleplaying into a complex set of steps and modifiers. This is not a bad thing as each piece is intricately designed into the overall system to encourage those really great moments in the game when cool things happen. In particular I like the Goal system where at the beginning of a mission you declare what you hope to get out of the mission. If you succeed you get extra bonuses.
The best thing about the Dungeoneers & Dragonslayers game was the excellent adventure. Which I don't want to spoil for anyone who might get to play it. All I can say is if this game is as polished as MouseGuard when published it will be awesome!
Don't a lot of people already use something like the slot system, except without using a video game inspired term like "slot"?
ReplyDeleteFor example, I've talked about being able to store 6 items on a belt, one or more of which could be a bag that contains other items. And that's not even original; it's in The Fantasy Trip.
And I think it was Roger G-S who's been posting cards for pack animals with different numbers of "slots" to represent how much they can carry.
I'm not familiar with how The Fantasy Trip handles encumbrance, and certainly the idea of slots is not new, but I really liked how elegantly Dungeoneers and Dragonslayers handled it.
ReplyDeleteman, but I am jonesing for Ds & Ds! Any more to share? How close was it to BWG?
ReplyDelete