Anyone got anything to say about Shadow of the Demon Lord?

I am finding a new system for my group. Shadow of the Demon lord looks like it would work well. The main things that draw me to it are:
> grimdarkness/horror of Warhammer but is d20 based like 5e/pf (systems my group has played before)
> Pike n' shot fantasy
> Martials have more to do
> Character progression is non-linear but isn't a free-for-all buffet.
> Bane and boon system seems good

Things I am worried about:
> Is remembering how many banes and boons rolls have basically the same as having all the different modifiers in PF?
>In the same vein, is remembering what attribute is used for attack and defensive painful as well?
>The target number for challenges seems very low, do players just succeed most of the time? Are they meant to?
> Anything else?

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Forgot one thing.
>How are the premade campaigns and adventures?
I struggle to find the time to make my own content so have to be a shitty GM sometimes and use premades. I've got a megaupload to read the campaigns before I buy them but how do they actually play out?

The two times I've played it felt very gamey like a tabletop diablo

>Is remembering how many banes and boons rolls have basically the same as having all the different modifiers in PF?
I've never played Pathfinder but, in the rules, you can just roll the difference between Boons and Banes. Like if you have 3 banes and 2 boons, you just roll 1 bane.

Bump.

Do you mean that it felt like you were playing a wargame? I.e. you played mechanics not an rpg?

I play roughly weekly and just hit level 3.

It's fine.

Some interesting ideas but nothing really brilliant to make it stand out. Modular class things may be better than flat D&D classes but not as good as a classless system. There are spots that it is trying to be a bit "rules light" but others where it isn't. Parts feels like the designers kind of wandered off on tangents and didn't get reigned in on bits. The setting is pretty mediocre as well.

It's fine, it works.

I don't understand this. Tonally you mean? I guess, it's just that dark fantasy kind of thing.

Another thing you have to worry is that its insanely lethal and lethaly insane. But in general, its a very solid game with a interesting system and really dark lore (probably because of the art) that feels like taken from a daemon planet from 40K. But seriously though,the game its lethal as fuck and you should be careful when writing encounters.

I see a lot of people say this and not sure what games they play to think it.

Hit points are about equivalent to D&D 3&5 but without Con mods, but healing is much harder to come by than in either, even in spite of most (all?) classes having a built in heal, there are only 3-4 of the little "spell schools" that have any healing. Someone specialized in heals* always makes a difference.

So while more lethal than D&D 5e, it isn't substantially so than many other games, certainly as a player coming from GURPS, Savage Worlds and Warhammer 2e I don't feel it.

*The healing system is a bit broken I'll admit, much like I mention in this post it seems like another mechanic they gave up half way through designing. They tried to take some of the good ideas from 4e D&D's healing, but tone them down. This is fine in itself, but they seemed to do it without understanding how it worked or made it good to begin with.

Again, the more I analyze the game, the more I feel that is was made by an excited person who looked at highlights of several systems and tried to combine them into something better, but didn't actually understand how those systems worked well enough that it lost a lot in translation.

Which adventure should I run first? My group is familiar with rpgs but not this system yet.

>Again, the more I analyze the game, the more I feel that is was made by an excited person who looked at highlights of several systems and tried to combine them into something better, but didn't actually understand how those systems worked well enough that it lost a lot in translation.
Please explain. You are either onto something profound or are full of shit.

Let me think of some good examples... Well, healing is a good one.

In 4e D&D and SotDL healing is more of less based on a set "healing surge" value, that is essentially 1/4 of your health, right? In 4e healing is all based around this, generically based around healing your surge value + something. This means your healing ability you pick up at level 1 is still handy at level 30, because the surge value goes up. This way healing more or less maintains it's value as you play, a level 30 Cleric tends to have a wider breadth of options on how to heal than straight massive increases.

In Shadows of the Demon Lord, it has this same "healing surge" value, but the heals don't use it properly. Healers of lower ability (I want to say "lower level" but that isn't inherently true in SotDL) are stuck with "half surge" or plain single-surge healing, which is very weak and unsatisfying, as a single surge is less than a weapon hit, never mind a half-surge heal (half of 1/4 of your health). Now, this is fine if you want healing to be universally weak, but the game doesn't follow this logic. As you gain ability the heals start becoming multiples of surges, so you go from healing one surge per cast, to two, then three then four with higher level spells *in addition* to getting more castings of lower level spells.

Now, I haven't played SotDL to higher levels, but I can see the progression and how it works. Having any primary caster take the healing school means at early levels they help you recover from fights faster than regular healing but at high levels they can massively swing fights.

(con't)

To me this seems to massively change the tone of fights as you progress, which is another kind of built in issue. The whole game is kind of presented as a Warhammery dark fantasy type thing, and certainly is in the beginning levels. Later levels though, things seem to go a bit mad where you have people flying around the battlefield and shit.

Another example of both points is magic. In a more high fantasy D&D game, magic is everywhere as there is no reason not to have some, at least as far as PC's are concerned. In a low or dark fantasy, say Warhammer or Conan, magic is either rare or dangerous or both, even for PC's. SotDL wants to give us this tone of a dark fantasy game with grittiness and what not, but there is little reason for a PC to not have some kind of magic.

Rather than having to rely on mundane abilities with a strong skill system to help you through it, there is a very weak skill system but lots of magic to solve issues. It just doesn't work tonally in my opinion.

I'm not saying it's a bad game, just that it is flawed, it seems to not know what it wants to be. It looks at D&D and Warhammer and some "rules light" games as things to aspire to (which is good!) but isn't able to reconcile them into a comprehensive whole that works very well.

1. No, it's not. I don't remember it being spelt out explicitly in the rulebooks, but you should probably never give out 'description' boons/banes in combat. Why? Because a lot of 'buttons' already manipulate those boons and banes, and throwing in extra by yourself is gonna wreak havoc on the balance.

2. Speaking of balance, combat-wise, it's very decent (that is to say much better than DnD). But there's a wee bit ass-backwards design going on: SotDL is made with combat balance in mind, and everything else is just sort of bodged on, using the same leftover design parts with little care as to how it's gonna play out-of-combat.

3. It may be, but consider having a sort of cards. Builds on general will have around 10 'buttons' to operate, including passive stuff, and mages can have upwards to few dozens depending on the build. The number of options is bigger than in DnD. Print out spell/ability wordings, make casting trackers. Otherwise you'd run into analysis paralysis issues.

4. Remind magic users that Traditions scale either off either Intellect or Will. There's a handy table on p.111. Spells within a single tradition scale off the same attribute.

5. Base success chance at lvl0 is 55% (d20+0 vs. a TN=10). Attribute bonuses are scarce, so your players will be hitting around 80% success chance before boons/banes at lvl10. It's not an easy system.

6. Speaking of boons and banes out-of-combat. The math is such that +1(one boon)/-1(one bane) are the most impactful modifiers (±17.5%). Starting from ±2 and beyond it hits diminishing returns very hard. There's no meaningful difference between, say 3 or 4 boons. So, as a DM you should be actively aware that the meaningful stretch of the scale is basically -1, 0, +1.

7. If you don't like the amount of scat going on, you can perform an easy surgery on the system and just remove everything that insults your sensibilities. Because the system is so modular and linear, you won't be breaking much anything.

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8. Beware of Demon Lord's Companion 2. It has weird options. I've never used the book myself, but I feel like it's a bit gamebreaking.

9. Never used the premade campaigns, can't comment.

>tabletop diablo
10. It is indeed tabletop diablo, and it's best played as one. For more story-driven purposes refer to other systems like 13th Age.

>The healing system is a bit broken I'll admit
11.After playing it for some time on higher levels I found out that you don't need healing much at all if you do combat well. There are some ridiculously effective builds out there, CC-wise and damage-wise.

12. I never cared about out-of-combat balance (namely, how the game handles resources your party has etc.), but it's definitely a possibility that healing after encounters and so on is wonky across levels.

The half Healing Rate heals from Life's Minor Healing spell isn't as bad as you make it sound, it's still very useful even at higher levels. If you've gone full caster and have 5 Power you've got 6 castings of rank 0 spells, and 3 castings of rank 1 spells. Minor Healing is rank 0 and heals half your Healing Rate while Light Healing is rank 1 and heals your full Healing Rate. Depending on your Healing Rate you can heal just as much, or a few points less, with Minor Healing as you can with Light Healing. It's a very useful spell for out of combat healing and a small heal is sometimes more efficient than a larger one if you need to remove certain effects, such as some Health penalties.

The multiple Healing Rate heals can swing things but even at level 10 it's still easy to go down, or even die, in a single round of combat. With how turns work in SotDL healing to full at the start of a turn can easily be the only thing to save your life. If there is a lot of potential damage on the battlefield, which there often is, if you aren't in good shape before the enemy gets to take all their turns at the same time you can very easily lose your character to a couple of hits. It's not too uncommon to come across opponents who roll 20 average for their attack roll, 14 average for their damage and they can do 4 attacks a round. Basically anything with Epic Adversary can easily kill a PC in a round.

(cont).

While magic is common in SotDL for PCs there is plenty of reason not to use it, mundane builds easily keep up with magic PCs and can outmatch them in a lot of areas without much work. Magic isn't the be all end all of this system, it's a big part of the system but mundane characters aren't kicked to the curb to make room for more magic, in content or in effectiveness. Even after the 150+ releases there is a pretty even split of magic and mundane paths to choose from, it's about 100 paths for each side. Just because it's easy to get magic that doesn't make it necessary, you can't learn magic without sacrificing something and for a lot of character builds and concepts it makes no sense to take a path just to learn some magic just because you can. SotDL's skill system (Professions) lets you do anything you could in basically any other game, you have professions and then get boons or auto-successes towards things in that professions purview at the GM's discretion, it's a quicker and more flexible system to achieve more or less the same thing. You aren't going to be running into situations where your skills/professions aren't right for the situation any more than in any other game. You can't solve all your issues with magic either because the scope of traditions is limited and you can't discover enough of them to cover every situation.

(cont.)

As for the thematic side of the game, SotDL is first and foremost a horror fantasy game. It has Warhammer influences but it's not trying to be Warhammer, by the time you hit level 1 you aren't an average joe anymore, it's not low-fantasy and it doesn't act like it is. The prevalence of magic for PCs doesn't weaken the theme because it's not Warhammer and it's not Conan, if it wanted all magic to be scarce and dangerous I'd agree with you that it's a tonal inconsistency but it's not either of those things. (That being said magic at much higher ranks does become dangerous, but that's rank 9 and 10 stuff which is only out in playtests. Rank 10 spells are incredibly strong but come with the risk of dying in a variety of horrible ways, summoning Demon Princes, ending the world, that kind of thing. It's all for a supplement for level 11-20 characters that's coming at some point though)

At the end of the day it's not D&D and it's not Warhammer, it's inspired by those things but judging SotDL against those things and then complaining it's different is the wrong attitude to have. Treat it as it's own unique thing with it's own rules and it's own theme

This.

I haven't run it but I planned to at one point. Doesn't look bad per se, but it definitely leans heavily on the gamey side.

Social skills seem to be nonexistent, it refers to non-combat interactions as combat, and at least two games I looked over were very bare bones.

The first, an introductory adventure, was a literal hexcrawl. The players are innawoods and they have to go to the road. No explanation, no story, no motivation, nothing. Walk on hexes, roll for a number of pregen combat encounters.

The other, a full adventure, was along the lines of "You walk into a town, the villagers look scared, this kid has these leech-like growths on his body, and THEY POP OUT ROLL FOR COMBAT".

Not like everything needs to be an arpee slog to be good, but this game looks combat-heavy to the point that it basically is Grim Dawn or Diablo, and despite the detail in its background there's no premade material to explore it, and all of its mechanics assume every campaign is going to be a dialogue-less, intrigue-less dungeon crawl. Even OD&D wasn't this heavy on it.

Yeah. At least for me, that's the point I'm trying to make.

Like, a game like Warhammer or CoC blends combat and non-combat well. You've got options for doing both, for exploring the world, and often you want to AVOID combat altogether, because there's a high chance of you dying, even if you take the bad dudes with you. That's a staple concept of dark/gritty fantasy games.; combat is usually the last resort, and when it happens, it's deadly and dangerous much of the time. Not to say combat is rare, but your players usually get into the mindset of "Let's try not to get shot/stabbed/cut/maimed ok?"

SotDL not only encourages combat, it seems to force it. Like I said in my other post, one of its adventure campaigns begins with the players walking into a town and immediately rolling for initiative against these bug-leech things. No time to look at the body, to ask what'a going on, to see about healing the kid, to get away from there, they just walk in and combat's immediately expected to happen.

Some people may like that, but I don't feel like it's dark fantasy. Not in the TTRPG sense. It's more like Diablo or Darkest Dungeon. Combat is the main squeeze and anything else, when it's even there, are the tacked-on scraps.

>> Is remembering how many banes and boons rolls have basically the same as having all the different modifiers in PF?
Nah, you just subtract one from the other and roll however many you have left from the the one remaining.
>>The target number for challenges seems very low, do players just succeed most of the time? Are they meant to?
Boons and banes are supposed to be apart of nearly everything. Just about any kind of negative situation will start to add banes to rolls so treat each dc as 3.5 higher in combat.

A novice one. I think "a Year without rain" is supposed to be a good starting one. Otherwise the one where you trek through a forest was pretty fun.

>At the end of the day it's not D&D and it's not Warhammer, it's inspired by those things but judging SotDL against those things and then complaining it's different is the wrong attitude to have. Treat it as it's own unique thing with it's own rules and it's own theme

It is it's own thing from those two, I agree with that. It is just the thing that it creates doesn't do anything to make it compelling to play over any number of games. Which is why I say "it's fine". I don't dislike playing it like I do some systems, but neither does it mechanically or tonally fill a role on my gaming shelf that I'd pick it up or recommend it over something else.

SotDL actually has a fair amount of social stuff going on it's just that most of the crunch is combat so social stuff seems a little nonexistent because it's actually just looser and more free-form. If that makes sense. You've got a 5 social attacks (It's not combat you just make attack rolls, it makes sense for everything to use the same terminology) which mirror the standard social skills in something like D&D and all your professions can apply to social encounters, so if you are a soldier you should get boons to dealing with other soldiers for example. Professions require a little more work on the PCs side of things than traditional skills do because it's less clear exactly what you can use it for so you might need to justify your reasoning but if you can get over that I think the Profession system offers a great deal of flexibility and as professions are entirely non-combat you'll feel like SotDL lacks enough RP tools if you aren't taking advantage of them. There are also a fair few Paths that are totally RP focused, although there aren't a huge amount of them they do cover most of the bases you'd want. Sage, Thief, Couriter, Red Cloak, and Diplomat are the ones off the top of my head, and there is also Enchantment ad Telepathy traditions for some social spells as well as a few fluffly spells in most other traditions.

The starting adventure your talking about is "Survival of the Fittest" and either you must have missed it because it does give your backstory and narrative motivations for the adventure. It's not the most story dense starting adventure and I honestly think it's one of the weakest, but there is fluff there to explain the situation and your goals. The short version is your caravan bound for a village is attacked by bandits, you've got to make it to the village to warn them of the bandits and if you get there you can drum up some support and go and take them out. It's not the best story but it's a story.

Cont..

Survival of the fittest if you like hexcrawl or From dusk till down for some zombie survival are nice and simple.
The witching wood is a little too hard imo.

Each of the big supplements comes with an adventure set in the area of Rul the supplement is about, there is a whole series of releases dealing with the towns, cities and regions of the setting, most come with a decent amount of adventure ideas which can be used to make something from scratch or you can take pretty much any of the pre-gen adventures and move them to a different location without too much work. If you want to really get into the setting there is a lot there for that but at it's core SotDL is designed to be fairly setting neutral. There is plenty of RP to be had if that's what you'd like to run, it's just not as rules heavy as the combat is and i'm glad for it, I don't think it's lacking anything that makes RP not work in anyway and the freedom it offers more than outweighs the drawbacks to more rules-light social mechanics.

As for pre-gen adventures it really depends on what you're after, they are all written by different authors so they come different styles. I would recommend Dark Deeds in Last Hope as your Starting adventure. It's full of great advice on how to get the best out of what it offers. Then I'd suggest you play the novice tier version of A Year Without Rain it is my personal favourite Starting adventure but the Novice version is just as good, it's got a good mix of RP and combat, it showcases the sort of game SotDL is really well too and is really easy to link into anything you'd like. Most adventure are written to be easily changed too, so if there isn't a lot of RP and you'd like to add more to it that's really easy to do.

For me, mechanically it's a replacement to 5e. There isn't anything 5e does that I don't prefer SotDL for, Boons/Banes is better than Advantage/Disadvantage, I far prefer Paths to Classes, I adore the magic system it offers far more diversity to casters even if you take the exact same paths you can both end up very different, and the choices are very meaningful, I prefer the flexibility of Professions over Skills, and there is actually some amount of risk involved in combat. I very rarely felt like I could lose my character in 5e, where as every adventure in SotDL I have a brush with death and that sort of lethality combined with it's more casual rule set strikes a really nice balance of intense and dramatic encounters, where picking and choosing how to use your actions is very important but you don't need spend a lot of time figuring out exactly how to do that so combat stays fast.

Tonally it fills the horror fantasy role. There aren't a lot of good horror fantasy games in the same style as SotDL. Most RPGs that come close to horror usually come at it from the low-fantasy dark and gritty angle, and while there is nothing wrong with that and I do enjoy it I have yet to find a system that actually has an emphasis on horror in the way SotDL does.

I get you might not have a space for it but it fills a niche that other games just don't for me

Anywhere to pirate?