Has anyone played this? if so how is it

Has anyone played this? if so how is it

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mediafire.com/file/atr064sg5jsaxm4/Dragon Age - Core Rulebook.pdf
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No, but I'm interested. Bump

>The Dragon Age RPG brings Thedas to your tabletop! Now you can experience BioWare's rich and engaging world in a classic pen & paper roleplaying game. This new Core Rulebook combines the rules and background of the original game under one cover for the first time, and adds a brand new adventure as well. The game system is easy to learn and play, and the book is packed with lore from the world of Thedas. Dragon Age also features an innovative stunt system that keeps combat and spellcasting tense and exciting. So gather your friends, grab some dice, and get ready to enter a world of mages and templars, of Grey Wardens and darkspawn, of gods and demons... The world of Dragon Age!

who would ever want to play this

me

I was a little disappointed that martial special moves are restricted to having to roll doubles before using them.

Here's the full core book mediafire.com/file/atr064sg5jsaxm4/Dragon Age - Core Rulebook.pdf

Me too. Dragon Age games might not be very good, but the setting isn't the reason for this. Thedas is a pretty cool place.

thanks, may do a one shot with it and see how it goes

The first one is good though, that's why I would consider it.

However the problem is that you can do the whole setting in DnD of all the games out there. Blood magic isn't even that hard to insert.

Exactly. This game is completely unnecessary and should have been just a supplement for D&D. It adds nothing mechanically and Thedas is fairly boring as campaign settings go.

I like Thedas the setting. However, having browsed bro-user's pdf up above it is clear that detailing the setting is one thing they couldn't be bothered with.

this. maybe a setting book or something for d&d would be better than having a diffrent system for it

It's pretty cool

The system is meh. It's kind of works and doesn't seem to have absolutely crippling problems but you could use a lot of other systems which would either be better or easier to use.

GURPS / WHFRP for gritty and hardcore feel
WEG d6 for ease of use and modification
And so on.

>However the problem is that you can do the whole setting in DnD of all the games out there.
But then you'd be playing D&D.

I played it.

The stunt system is kind of interesting. As says, if you happen to roll well enough you can add additional effects onto your attacks. That optimising of the random number of stunt points you get is where most of the decisions in combat take place. Slowed down combat a lot, but without it everyone not playing a mage would spend every turn saying "I attack". (If you play a mage, then you spend every turn saying "I try to cast a spell, but roll to low and do nothing". Or maybe the mage in my group just had terrible luck.)

Character advancement is a bit weird. Sometimes you get points for your primary stats and sometimes points for your secondary stats, which means rogues get increases to strength. One of the guys playing a warrior HATED the fact that my rogue could get strength boosts when he couldn't. As with every new RPG, there's a drive for character optimisers to try to master the system and therefore have the best character. This game doesn't really have that as an option, which lowers and raises its appeal depending on what sort of player you are.

Personally, I thought it was a pretty inoffensive system. The experience I had with it was mostly about the story the GM was running, with the rules not really having an impact on that. It's a better fit as a system for Thedas (hilarious that the name is literally "THE Dragon Age Setting") than DnD, because DnD's casting classes are actually less generic than you might realise with the Arcane Divine split. It's aggressively simple and set up to be opposed to traditional system mastery as infests all discussions of DnD online. It's very much a game designed to be a fantasy RPG that isn't DnD. As for whether you and friends would enjoy playing it, it's really down to the friends and the campaign. I had fun, but I would have had fun if I'd just been playing DnD in a similarly generic racist fantasy setting.

The world of Thedas books do a better job explaining the setting.

Are there penalties for playing a monogamous straight dude? Cause in the games if you don't act like a faggot or a slut NPCs can end up hating you, & such.

Considering that this is a game by Green Ronin, based on a newish BioWare IP, playing a monogamous straight dude is surprisingly not penalized in the rules.

>notsureifoversight.jpg

I played a year long fantasy age campaign that went past level 10. Ask me anything.

Don't ever play this system except for a one-shot. The flaws really come out after level 4.

Blue Rose is their lady game, and being a lady I was hyped for some pretty watercolours and weird cat-people or whatever. I played a con game, officially sponsored by green ronin, and it was quite simply the worst RPG experience of my life (been playing many games with many dm's over about 15 years.) The gm was a blue haired lesbian (which would be fine... but she made a point of mentioning that the npcs are gay and that people 'kept misgendering them' last game.) So she's this tumblr whatever. Fine, I can put up with that. I'm a girl and I'm literally there with my trans friend. I'm progressive. Except the real problem here is she's a huge SJW cunt who can't run a fucking game.

We were playing a premade adventure and she like... changed it a bunch to make it worse. I pulled it up after and checked, every huge issue we had was something she changed. The story is you're looking for these lost guards. You find one and he says his BF was corrupted by some skull mask. She never describes the skull mask accurately and just says it's a skull on his head. A skull of a demon (she uses some setting-specific word for this, but never shows a picture or describes it.) She kept getting annoyed when we asked what they were and would just say "it's an undying!" or whatever the word was. Oh and there were these satyrs but she called them Fey Revelers. And didn't describe them and, again, when asked what that was would just use their name.

(cont...)

Ok so anyway we find the guy and he's with a satyr who has these pan pipes. It blows the pipes and we have to roll a will save- with an insane DC that none of us pass. So she's like oh, well that'd be a TPK so i'll be nice and say only one of you is out of the fight. The guy falls asleep and the rest of us are fighting. The healer takes his turn and, being an awakened cat, goes over to the asleep fighter and tried to cast a spell to wake him up. He even does a little batting with his hands and says he smacks his face like a cat. It's some Grade A rping, but she just looks confused. So he is asking which spell might help and she's like "just pick one and tell me what it does cuz there's no descriptions and it doesnt matter." So he's like..uh..oh.. um.. cure..??? and she's like YES finally. It's insane.

Anyway, in the fight. We're all trying to disarm this satyr of the pan pipes and she finally says "why are you doing that?" and the girl next to me is like "so he can't use them again?" and she's like "the pipes are over! That's done!" Then the fighter wakes up and gaks the satyr in one round.

Now we have to save the bewitched skull wearing boyfriend. We try to beseech him. We have the bf npc beseech him. No reaction at all. We try to restrain him, it doesn't work. Finally the fighter is able to knock him out. So we're told we have to get the mask off to stop the spell. I've been trying to like.. put his head on the bf's lap, have the bf talk about memories, etc. Nope. We try to physically remove the mask- nope. I'm literally like "ok well I want to see if this skull is merged to his head so I put my fingers under the edge" and she cuts me off and says "nope!" so I say "well.. ok I want to like.. look into the eye holes" "NOPE." "uh.. I.. ok.. So, I want to take my dagger and gently run it across the skull to see if he reacts in pain" "NOPE." At this point everyone gets quiet and awkward, too afraid to get yelled at. (more..)

Eventually she just tells us the solution. We have to break the psychic link between him and the skull- a series of rolls we can't fail. bopbop the skull pops off and the guy is perfectly fine.

So she tells us we have to bring it to the big city, how do we get it there? I say, I'll use a stick to push it into a sack and fill the sack with flowers as we travel to keep the Wyrm taint at bay. The fighter, in a nice 'im roleplaying' voice that deserves some credit says " I shall bear this cursed object, for I am the strongest!" etc and he picks it up and she's like "you pick it up?" and he's like "yea?" and she's like "you put the mask on." (no save.) We're all quiet and confused, and we decide to think about a better way to carry it before taking it off of him (same guy now out of the game btw)

There had been this tinkerer satyr that was making clockwork pixies, so we go over to him and I'm like "yo can you make a box to carry this skull?" and it shakes its head. so I'm so "yo can you make a big clockwork fae to carry this skull?" and it shakes it head.

And then we're out of time and she tells us we needed to put it into something to carry it and not directly touch it. So I said "I have another event I need to get to, bye." and left.

The real fun begins when I look up the adventure later. The satyr with the pipes? Yea he has to dance and concentrate on playing to do it, and it's an easy save, and you just dance if you fail- it's not a big deal. And the mask is literally a mask. If you knock it off the guy he's freed. Touching it gets an easy save and isn't that big of a deal. Also, it specifically says you can appeal to the bf to break the spell. It's encouraged. Because it's supposed to be this romantic fluffy game about heart and feelings. Not a weird terrible dungeon crawl.

Oh and the demons were called Dark Fiends I think. "It looks like a Dark Fiend" she says. Yea, thanks.

OH and early on we fought wolves and only I passed the check to see them and I was like "I draw my sword" and the fighter rp'd at me "what is it, [character name?]" and I was about to reply and the dm was like "what are you doing? no, you all see them. It'll save time if we just assume you rolled as a group and you all see them." the fighter and I awkwardly shuffled out character sheets. fun.

I'm really not sure what any of that had to do with Dragon Age. Is this pasta?

I just realised I posted a long ass story about how much Green Ronin and this one dm sucks but I didn't really talk about why FAGE sucks, but trust me, it does. I played a campaign for a year and it's awful. There are a few neat ideas hidden in it but seriously if you're ever thinking "I like Wil Wheaton so I'm going to run this stupid fucking system I saw on Tabletop because for some reason D&D 5e isn't good enough for my combat-focused fantasy game" then just don't. Run 5e instead.

If they ever released a 2nd edition with some big fixes I'd be interested in looking at it, but as it is it's frustrating as fuck to play. You'd need to be a very experienced DM who can handle making decisions on the fly- because you will need to. You'll have to make calls and homebrew shit when you realize the system is broken. It can work, but you can save yourself the trouble and just run D&D at that point. Or Savage Worlds or whatever.

It's the same company/system. And no I just typed that madness myself. I'm not sure why.

I've never played the AGE-system, but I frequently see it put forth as a "modern red box" and, as puts it, inoffensive.
I don't see it doing anything other games don't, and in many cases do better.

Pretty much this. The character generation is easy and simple. It could do better with an increased set of background as they're all fairly pigeon holed and follow closely to the tropes of the game. Combat too is fairly easy and streamlined.

>Run 5e instead.
I agree, unless you're actually running Dragon Age as a setting. DA doesn't work so well in DnD. The casters don't work in the same way as DA mages, not to mention that DA non-mages have access to abilities that are exclusive to DnD casters.

That said, you could probably make it work if you said "divine casting OK, arcane casting is Satan" and went from there. It wouldn't be Thedas, but it'd be less work than if you tried to take the DA Mage and make it into a DnD class while removing all supernatural elements from every non-Mage class. (You'd end up with about five archetypes total for every non-Mage PC. Not that the games themselves don't ask you to content yourself with six total.)

>The flaws really come out after level 4.
The flaws? We know martials/casters really split after lvl 4 in D&D.

I always thought it was level 6, at least for 3e. Poorly designed martial features (old style iterative attacks were terrible), combined with 4th level spells that are defined as only being defeatable with another spell. Not to mention spells that create benefits that endure past the 24h spell refresh period.

I appreciate it user. I figured it would be like that, & with your confirmation of it, I will never buy the system

It's one of the best-selling RPGs of this decade if icv2 is to be believed, surely someone here has played it.

But D&D is a mediocre system, why would anyone same want to play all fantasy in it, in particular DARK fantasy?

What?

If a game/system appears repeatedly in the icv2 Top 5, it's safe to label it as one of the best-selling games. The number of games/system who accomplish that is limited.

>Source: enworld.org/forum/content.php?1984-Top-5-RPGs-Compiled-Charts-2008-Present

Yeah, for dark low fantasy Zweihander is much better

You're forgetting the coffee table-factor of this one.

I wouldn't consider DAO low fantasy. You can get health potions at your local merchant.

What is Zweihander?

Just a retroclone of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e. You can find WFRP 2e here if you're interested.

Zweihander has become something of a meme since it's been getting shilled a lot and its creator goes to absurd lengths to issue takedowns against PDF sharing, even against troves and groups that weren't actually sharing his game and had agreed not to.

rogue is best class by far but you need a mage to be an effective team. dont play warrior.

doing cool shit is luck based, not skill base.
want to disarm? hope you roll a double to even try!

It's a pretty cool Warhammer 2e with the serial numbers filled off but done well & with many improvements. It's monsters are interesting & give a Brothers Grimm vibe. The professions are flavorful & the book has a shitton of art & personality. /tg kinda hates it & some have good reasons, but the game is more than solid & better than half the games people dedicate themselves to anyway. If you want well handled dark fantasy without needing Warhammer give it a try. If you want well handled fantasy with Warhammer give ita try.


Inb4 "Shut up Daniel"

So there's no PDF of it then?

3d6 + Stunt points sounds like a compromise between loads of special subclasses and 4e powers.

Does it work well?

I liked WFRP 2; I backed the kickstarter of Zweihaender but never actually got a group to play it. Is it a better playing experience?

The "DARK fantasy"-blurb is an outright lie. There is nothing particularly dark about Dragon Age.
Rumour has it BW initially meant to release it as a stock D&D-game. That should tell you the level of dimness.

Honestly, its pretty dumbed down/kiddo's first rpg
I'm not super into crunch but this is lacking it quite a bit.

Crits are cool tho.

Compared to WFRP, it's pretty solid, but suffers badly from wanting to do everything except competent editing and a non-cunt doing PR.

But it has partially clothed sex! That means it's mature.

This is far more accurate. It's "adult" & "gritty" but not really "dark"

Play is similar, characters have more actions/options, the book is an all-in-one so its a doorstopper at 700 pages. That leads for a bit of page turning for rules but its not too bad. A few post-its with suffice. The index & table of contents are good.

There is, but it gets taken down very, very quickly if it's shared. The creator is really protective of his shit and trolls the chans waiting to his chance to bitch

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Sounds like a loser.

See, I'm reasonably certain that the reason why Dragon Age didn't have fully nude character models was because it was cheaper to not model a separate model just for a 15-second "sex" scene and because the team working on Dragon Age were against the sexualization of the female form.

Blue Rose was pretty much the RPG precursor of the Current Year. It's sold all inclusive Utopian progressive RPG.

The characters play Mary Sue agents and diplomats from liberal utopia kingdom. Trying to convince other nations why they should be all like them

Which isn't necessarily bad thing, after it's basically the premise of Star Trek after all. But awkwardly tries to appeal to Classical Mediaeval Fantasy Romance tropes as well divine right of kings and everything. So hope you can swallow "enlightenment despotism".

Game wise I don't know why green ronin system they made for a song of ice and fire.

It's gritty unabashedly sexist and racist feudal setting might be the exact opposite of Blue Rose. But emphasis on court intrigue and diplomacy is spot on.

This was made for Origins, long before the disappointing sequel and shitfucked trequel. IE it was made when Dragon Age was good.

Considering this was just after Mass Effect, they (or their corporate overlords) may have just wanted to avoid another VIDYA GAEMS IS THE DEVIL shitshow. This was before that weird social justice shit took off.

Flipping through it, it does feature some things from the sequels, like the qunari being goatmen.

I can't really think of anything good that Green Ronin has put out except for Mutants and Masterminds.

I was going to bring up Legend Of The Five Rings. But then realised they had nothing to do with it I was just thinking of the name.

It's remarkable they did nothing note with the song of ice and fire. Was there some sort of locations issues there? Becuase most companies would let their sister screwed by a whole tribe of Normans and their horses to get their hands on something like that.

If I'm not mistaken, they wanted to make them horned in Origins, but it was decided later in the production cycle and they couldn't really get it to look good, so they scrapped it. Which is a shame since it looks baller as fuck

They've said that in the past, but it doesn't line up with any of the concept art for DA:O (specifically Sten's concept art). It's possible they nixed the idea before the concept art. Personally, I don't like the horned look.

I really don't think so. Look at how they wrote DA2; the staff was SJW before SJWs were a meme. And I doubt they were really that miffed at the reaction to ME's sex scenes; it was not even a 10 minute news segment.

>Was there some sort of locations issues there?
Basically there isn't much they can do with the setting unless they set the game before the Blackfyre Rebellion.

Bland and uninteresting. Babby's first fantasy heartbreaker.

I mean the lore for darkspawn is pretty dark. The fact that they force feed females the males of their race and darkspawn blood all while corrupting them into broodmothers that spawn more darkspawn is pretty messed up.

Eh, imho it makes them more visually distinct. Otherwise they look kind of like big greyish black dudes

Think of Warhammer Fantasy made by fanboys with more rules than GURPS and Traveller put together.

Am I edgy for thinking that's a neat bit of monster lore, and not dark.

I just liked the qunari of Origin better, where they weren't some fantasy race but rather a group of normal humans (plus dwarves and elves) that followed a weird religion.

Sten was the best Qunari of the series, but it's pretty clear he's no normal human.

What would make him not human?

He is noticeably bigger. His facial structure is off. The way his mind works (there is of course the chance that he just happens to be retarded, but he seems lucid enough in any matters not involving basic social mores).

>against the sexualization of the female form.
What is the Lady of the Woods?
What is the desire demon?
What is the Pearl and Isabella?
What is Morrigan's 'shirt'?

You're probably right about saving money but come the fuck on.

This. Even in Origins they were more philosophical neanderthals than regular humans.
Personally, I think grey skin and white hair looks rad, so I'm all aboard with the DA2 design.

>Bland and uninteresting. Babby's first fantasy heartbreaker.
>icv2 top 5
>fantasy heartbreaker
'K

I'm playing Fantasy AGE, which is generic variant of this. I really like it so far, though I might just like it so much because I'm playing in a great campaign.

Stunting is an interesting system but it can be unreliable. Character creation is pretty flexible, the classes have very few core features, rather they let you choose what your characters good at by picking "talents" (which are like feats) and focuses (skill proficiencies) and Specialzations (subclasses, but you get two of them)

You get a new stat point and focus each level, but you can only spend them on your classes core stats and skills every other level, which makes most characters well rounded. So, you can have your fighter be charismatic leader without gimping his combat abilities, or have your wizard be an expert fist fighter, etc..

The game also seems to be pretty well balanced, though I have a suspicion that a few character options might be better at higher levels (basically anything that does armour piercing damage)

I've heard it can be a slog at higher levels due to everyone having super high armour scores. Also it feels kind of unfinished, there's not nearly enough character options.

Also, make sure you use the point buy character creation rules, all the classes have 4 core stats that are all very important, and by base the game wants you roll 9 stats down the line with 2 switches allowed, I have no idea how it expects you to end up with a decent character.

This mirrors my experience pretty accurately too, FAGE is not a bad game, however i feel it does not do anything amazing that would set it apart from others.
It's a different take on the class/level system with it's own flavor, it does what it sets out to do adequately.

Dragon Age is such an incredibly dull setting to begin with. Not only does it have such a complete lack of new ideas, it also doesn't have a lot of ideas in it total. The games were pretty good RPGs, but certainly not because of the setting.

>Not only does it have such a complete lack of new ideas
New ideas are overrated, how you apply and execute your ideas is where it's at.

They did that poorly as well. "Well OUR horde of corrupted netherworld beings look like LotR-movie orcs rather than demons!" Woow.

>if you're ever thinking "I like Wil Wheaton

Who in their right mind would ever think this

The demons and darkspawn weren't the same thing.

You can use "and", user. It's cool.

I meant that the Darkspawn, the corrupted netherworld beings, don't look like demons as per the usual, and instead look like Jackson orcs. Shit, they behaved like Tolkien orcs, too.

I bet he's the faggot who got the star wars novels purged

>Run 5e instead
Get the fuck out of here and back to your containment general.

If you don't like Firefly then something is wrong with you.

That was Joss Whedon

Wil Wheaton is the guy who annoyed everyone half to death as Wesley Crusher on Star Trek, wiggled his way back into everyone's good graces with a few Op Ed pieces regarding his experiences on set, and then promptly annoyed everyone the second half to death by being a loud obnoxious asshole who tried to crown himself king of all nerddom.

Oh. Wesley Crusher.

Try as i might, i'm not really seeing a problem.
They take the same slot in the setting as orcs typically would, they share some characteristics with orcs, which is fine, but they also have some other non-orc stuff added to them.
Are they the most imaginative monsters? No, but so what?

I haven't ever actually played it, but I do like the basic mechanics.
>3d6+modifier for task resolution gives a nice bell curve, making high skill more impactful
>dragon die/stunt system is an interesting alternative to critical hits
>needing to know basic elemental (or healing, or necromancy) spells before you can learn the more powerful spells in the same type of magic makes sense
>armor makes you easier to hit but harder to damage
Overall, though, I find the total game a little bit half-baked. Because it's based on a video game franchise and sticks reasonably close to it, practically everything in the game is combat focused, aside from a little bit for dialogue trees I mean social stuff. The bestiary is a small fraction of the size I would want.

Oh, and a few more positive points I forgot to include
>Mages have to make skill checks to cast spells
>Attacking is basically a skill check with a weapon
>If I remember right, characters can become specialized in using certain stunts
Again, however, there are several ways in which the rules can really break down, and you can tell that pretty easily. A dwarf in the heaviest armor can barely move, for instance.

>armor makes you easier to hit but harder to damage

Armour only makes you easier to hit if you're not trained in it.

>A dwarf in the heaviest armor can barely move, for instance.

Plate armour is supposed to be optional, not optimal. You gain +3 armour but lose 2 points of speed, which may be worth the trade off depending on your build. Also one of the warriors core stats is dex , which improves their move speed and defense which helps make up for plate armours weaknesses, the idea is that if you want to use most protective armour you have build your character towards it, in the same way you have to if you want to use the most damaging weapons.

Also the charge attack helps to make up for low movement, it is an attack +1 and lets you move half your speed, in addition to moving using your minor action, it is an objectively better option than just attacking and helps make up for the the low speed of warriors.

When I see this game discussed, one complaint (or THE complaint) is bad HP-bloat. Is that a problem, an annoyance or just wrong?

I'm I actually generally agree with your criticisms of the system. I'm just pointing out where I disagree with you

I can't tell you, my campaign is still low level. But from what I've seen, there's a lot more ways to buff your defense than are to meaningfully increase your offense. And everyone has a lot of hitpoints to begin with

Not so much a problem, just saying it's a dull unimaginative setting made decent through decent writing. As for the balance, it was hilariously broken.

>it's a dull unimaginative setting
Meh, i don't feel Dragon Age is any more duller as a setting then your average fantasy rpg setting is.
I mean, i will readily admit that it is by no stretch the most imaginative setting under the sun, but i feel the same way about a vast majority of settings.
So i just find it strange that this accusation is leveled at DA setting, when it's not any worse than the competition.

C'mon man, can you really think of many settings of note that have as little going for them as DA's?