Oct 18, 2012

Big Bad Con: Dungeoneers & Dragonslayers Playtest


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!

3 comments:

  1. Don't a lot of people already use something like the slot system, except without using a video game inspired term like "slot"?

    For 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.

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  2. 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.

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  3. man, but I am jonesing for Ds & Ds! Any more to share? How close was it to BWG?

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