Does Veeky Forums play Das Schwarze Auge? German pen and paper, I think it is called The Dark Eye in English

>it's fine once you have someone go through the whole thing with you once and you learn the dos and don'ts
Yes, that's what I said and that's a major failing of the system. You need experience to start playing the game, but you need to start playing the game to gain experience. Shadowrun 5e managed to fix that with its Priority system and various JRPGs have a "Construction" mode to ease players into the system. That said, I don't know anyone who plays DSA, so I won't be trying it again anytime soon.

Most systems I know don't award fights with experience points. That's a distinctly D&D problem, and even then, few people I know actually use XP and instead just hand out level-ups when convenient. From what I gathered, DSA does not discourage combat by making it particularly deadly or "realistic", as it were, but because the combat system is such a pain to use. The one person I know who could be considered to play DSA houseruled the system so heavily as to no longer be recognizable and even the game of DSA I played just skipped the combat rules because they would have made people leave the table.

Spell names are not fine. This horrendous mix of German and pseudo-Latin is just off-putting. Even the purely German ones like "Blitz dich find!" sound rather asinine.

Haven't played it in 25 years. Not much that compels me to go back. But then again, I also dislike D&D.

>DM
Le Sigh

>As far as I know it is the market leader in Germany, but maybe that information is a bit aged.

It used to be at least. Dunno about 5th edition but many German players don't play anything else.

Can't play "evil" chars like Assassins and the like though.

bump

Well, yes and no...

You can play a pimp and beat hookers if they don't bring in enough money. I think that qualifies as rather evil. I never understood why they did draw the line at assassination.

The 5th edition of DSA is pretty awesome by the way. They just need a better editor.

Drakensang is a great rpg.
Literally nobody plays it though.

>Shadowrun 5e managed to fix that
Pretty sure Priority has always existed in SR, and it's only 4e that defaulted to Karmagen.

are any of the books actualy in english? and if not, are there any decent translations out there? I have always been really interested in it but I could never find anything

If that's the case, it makes DSA's system seem even worse in comparison.

Well, unless you live in Germany.

Where nobody plays it, you are right.

I play it, but I am German. It was my first and only RPG I played as pen and paper. Still play it a few times a year.

On the pro side, the combat system comes with a certification as accountant.
But yeah, the combat is a mess. In 4th edition they tried to fix a few bugs and make it more realistic. But that turned it into an unwieldy mess. If you use all standard rules, you need to administer life bar, an separate endurance bar, and an separate exhaustion stat. And mana if you are an magician, and/or some kind of divine mana if you are a priest. No one I knew ever used the full set of rules, which is a problem because it was supposed to be balanced with use of endurance.
A GM I once managed to turn a short fight with orcs into a 4 hour waste of life by giving them a too high evasion stat; I forgot to write it down and rolled it. In general battle is tedious.

On the plus side, the rule system is much, much more open than DnD. There are no NPC classes, so you can be an aristocrat, a medic, or a smith and still pull your weight in your group. The character creation system is a pain in the ass, but it also allows you to create individual characters with unique stories and skills. I love my urban dwelling thieve and cardsharper with the perfect looks and the bounty on his head for banging his bosses' daughter

Been playing since 2nd edition. really liked the last edition, but I didn't have time yet to check out the new one.
Ordained of Praios masterrace here.

Continue:
The main draw is however the world. The setting is VERY detailed. It is basically a history simulator, with an official bi-monthly publication moving the timeline on, roughly 2 years in-game for every real year. This means the game is geared toward experiencing the game world, not dominating it like in DnD. However, every few years comes a major campaign where heroes will save the world/realm. This results from the origin of the game world from a private campaign of the founders, and they had the tendency to use their old characters as self-inserts who save the day.
A lot of silliness is also a relict from the founding days in the 80s. The creators suffered from the issue of many amateurs and tried to be "funny". Originally players had to actually shout the names of the spells to have them work in the game. They also had adventures where they had to guess the names of Presley's albums form the 50s. Those days are long gone however. But like the Hippy Goddess of Non-Violence or the anti-Catholicism they are still in there.

Also, fun fact: the guys who wrote the system also translated DnD. SO they had to try to not look like a rip-off and tried to do the opposite. For example, the best result on the d20 is the 1, not the 20. Makes the expression "natural 20" a bit confusing for German speakers who never played DnD.

Aventurien is a better setting than anything that was put out for D&D. It harkens back to europeans myths without going over the top like Forgotten Realms, etc.

The adventures that get published tend to be a bit childish though and could use some edge.

I dislike the name. Aventurien. Though it's kinda fitting, I suppose.

>I dislike the name.
See, that's how I feel about most things in this game.

That's good for you, I suppose?

DSA or rather TDE may experience a surge in popularity once the english translation gets published.

I'm currently working on my first proper character (meaning for an actual group and not just a oneshot or convention) and my only problem with it right now is how overwhelming the choices for characters are.
I've tried to narrow myself down as much as I can but still ended up with 4 wildly different versions of my initial concept.

The only thing I'm sure about is that it's going to be a human from north aventuria (thorwaler, norbard, nivese or similar). I'm torn between a blessed one and a mage.

...

I played an adventure game in the setting on Steam. Good to hear that it's a bigger deal, the world seemed to be pretty cool and I like to hear about more games from other countries.

The first edition had a french translation back in the days. A few years ago, a bunch of people made an RPG out of their medfan-parody-of-rpg-logic audio drama (which is pretty well known in France nowadays). Said RPG is the main gateway to the hobby aside from D&D in here. So in a way, The Dark Eye holds a special place in my heart, and is an unsung hero of the french community.

I'm not a fan of the more recent ones though, too much number-crunching and not efficient as a fantasy heart-breaker.

>silliness
The first campaign I ever bought was the one where you had a solo adventure in Borbarad's abandoned fortress in the Gor desert, which was rife with robots, rayguns and aliens. Really damn weird, but like Ultima and the like a product of the early 80s.

Any idea when that will happen? I know there are something like 6 corebooks relating to different aspects of the game

kickstarter.com/projects/1216685848/the-dark-eye-rpgenglish-edition

Hot damn! I knew they went over their initial 10k $ goal, but that is seriously surprising.

4th edition had six corebooks but they're translating the new 5th edition, which afaik has only one.