Dragon Age Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook Review (Pre-Play)

The cover of the book

The first thing you'll notice about the Dragon Age core rulebook its sleek appearance, even if it is a decently sized tome at over 400 high-quality pages.  What used to be a few boxed sets is now wrapped up together in one book, which is easier to store on a shelf but a bit harder to manage in other ways.  It's not easy to reference the PDF of such a tome on digital devices unless they are prepped to handle the load, and my book's binding started to have problems shortly after I actually started to use it.  I have started to wish that the GM's section and adventures had been printed separately.

There's an itemized table of contents and an index, so it's nearly impossible to get completely lost in the material (which wins some bonus points from me).  With that being said, I can't imagine trying to get into the material without already knowing a good amount about the video games.  The book opens with a few pages of the most basic introduction to roleplaying and then takes off running, without really explaining what Thedas is all about.  And as many have noted, spells are arranged in the wrong order for the system, making quick reference difficult.   

Very soon, you're neck-deep in character backgrounds, which isn't a bad thing.  Each background is a package consisting of race, class choices, static bonuses, and a table of options you can roll on or choose from.  The brief descriptions give flavor to each background but the tables provide plenty of variety.  Snags might arise when choosing backgrounds for characters that come from places that haven't been covered very much.  For instance, you might be able to dig up some information about life in Rivain online, but the book doesn't add much.  This is to be expected but also feels like a missed opportunity, particularly for future sourcebooks (about which I've heard nothing).  

Next, you're facing the three core classes, which seem almost frighteningly simple after the many classes and lengthy write-ups in other games.  The basic foundation of characters will become more personalized as you gain levels and choose spells, focuses (areas of expertise related to your base stats that grant bonuses), and talents (tiered skills like music or horsemanship).  The leveling system forces you to spread out your focuses, which hopefully will lead to a more well-rounded character.  A warrior can't kill all the time, right?  Specializations take the base classes in new directions but are optional, and once again, everything is easily read in a fraction of the page count you might expect.

One thing that's nice is that the book invites the reader to start playing sooner rather than later.  It directly advises folks to take the basics and run with them, and to add more complexity as they go.  Another thing I liked was that the game has players choose goals from their characters from the start, and encourages them to update their goals as the story progresses.  Goals are things that I've been patching into games for a long time; it's nice to see them officially supported.

Needless to say, the art is very well done throughout, and everything about the layout resonates with the themes established in the video games without just copying all of the flourishes you've seen before.  The writing is tight and easy to follow until you get to the chapter on magic, where it starts to get repetitive in a few places talking about the life of mages in Thedas.  That doesn't last long, though, before everything picks up again.  

There is a hefty section about Thedas's history, arranged by nation.  It gets a little difficult to follow in places since there are multiple calendars (which isn't the book's fault; that's how it's set up in the lore) and no real timeline for easy reference.  A timeline could have helped a great deal to understand the flow of events.  And again, the focus is on the nations you already know best from the games.  Minimal information is offered for any of the others.

Refreshingly, there is a mass combat system which could be tied to the organization system if player characters spearhead large groups.  It's nice that they're baked right in, but I do wonder how often they'll see use.  The rules for setting up organizations seem like too much fun not to use them, but I can see how a number of gaming groups might not see their potential. 

The Gamemastering section gave me pause in a few ways.  First, it suggests GMs set up games with plots and sub-plots, a style of running that seems to have fallen out of fashion in recent years.  It goes on to talk about needing to improvise later, but seems to encourage more planning overall.  That seemed a little odd for a game with such a rules-light system, but might be necessary, if only to set up combat encounters that don't wipe out the party all the time.  

It directly gives advice about keeping track of information in a campaign, but without any reference to more modern methods.  It's all note cards and white boards, even when they offer a link to their web site for PDFs of some reference sheets.  This also feels like a missed opportunity, not just as guidance for modern gamers but also as a way to offer supplemental materials like spell cards, apps, and the like.  Most tabletop games seem to remain out of sync with the digital world in this fashion.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be interested in digital offerings that go beyond PDFs, however.

A number of systems are set up to be as low maintenance as possible.  Advanced tests for extended actions rely on handy tables (but don't seem to take into account that characters might not be able to succeed, even if they take a long time to try).  The GM is advised to roll initiative for groups of minor NPCs, depending on their type.  Surprise rounds are encouraged to be swift, enemies might break and run through the Morale system, and hazards of all kinds are determined by one series of questions and one table.  

The leveling up and treasure options have some fun things, like earning titles and attracting minions.  I had hoped for more runes and such to be converted, but I suppose that once I get used to the system, the ones in the book will help me fill in the gaps.  I haven't gone through the adventures in the back of the book yet, mostly because I don't use pre-written adventures when I run.  I do plan to make use of any enemies and elements I can steal from them, though.  And while I like how brief and simple the monster stat blocks are, I'm thinking I'm going to need quick reference materials to use them effectively, at least to start with.

I am in no way sorry that I bought the book, and it looks like it is going to provide what I need to run adventures in Thedas.  The value for the dollar is good and if anything, I wish that more had been produced for the series by now.  I can't really give a full rating until I run/play it a while, but as you can tell by this blog, it's kept me excited.  We'll see how this experiment goes as soon as I can get my Tevinter 800 TE game off the ground.  Wish me the Maker's blessings - I'm going to need them.  =)