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Episode: 3293
Title: HPR3293: HPR RPG Club reviews Dungeon Raiders
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3293/hpr3293.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 20:22:44
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3293 for Wednesday, 17 March 2021.
Today's show is entitled, HPRPG Club Reviews Dungeon Raiders,
and is part of the series' tabletop gaming that is the 250th show of Clot 2,
and is about 54 minutes long, and carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Clot Ubeni, and McNally Review NOS RDND Clone.
This episode of HPRPG is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge
by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
You are listening to Hacker Public Radio, my name's Clot 2, and in this episode,
I talk to Benny and McNally about Dungeon Raiders, a simple tabletop RPG that we played
in order to review for the Hacker Public Radio RPG Club, which you're invited to play in at any time
if you're interested to keep an eye on the mailing list for more information.
So the Hacker Public Radio mailing list. So the Dungeon Raiders is maybe a 30-page booklet
written committed to the public domain written by Brent Newhall, a game designer I quite like.
He says in his introduction, and this is a quote,
I wrote Dungeon Raiders to experience the construction of a classic Dungeons and Dragons Retro Clone.
I wanted to mold a simple system out of the earliest editions of DND, what would it look like?
So in other words, when he's saying a Retro Clone, he is attempting in this booklet to recreate
the feeling of very, very early Dungeons and Dragons gameplay. And apparently, he succeeds.
Point of interest, I've never quite understood this concept that old school gaming
was a simpler style of gameplay, because in my memories, while I never played DND as a kid,
but I did build a lot of DND characters. I wasn't allowed to play, so I just built characters.
And in my mind, that was a very long and drawn-out process. And you'll hear me discover
why there's a difference between my memories and a lot of other people's memories
around old school gaming. You'll hear that in the review. You'll hear me and McNally was
sort of reverse engineer that. Okay, so this booklet is about 31 pages. The rules only take up
about 11 pages and few of those are full pages. So I could literally just read the rules to you
right now, and that is one of the huge advantages of this gaming system. So I kind of will just
do that. So when you sit down to build a character, you need a piece of paper so that you can write
down your stats, your little statistics of your character. And you have first to choose a class.
Class is like a job or a type of character, so you can be a fighter, a rogue, a wizard, or a
cleric. And if you're a fighter, you have eight health points. You attack within eight-sided die,
and all of your damage gets a free plus one to it. So anytime you deal damage, you'll add one more
than what you roll on your damaged dice. If you're a rogue, you have six health points. You're attack,
you attack with a six-sided die, and you have some bonuses to some special abilities that you'll do,
such as looking for traps or moving quietly or picking locks, and that sort of thing. If you're
a wizard, you have four health points, you attack with a four-sided die, and you have a specialty
involving the fact that you cast spells. You use magic. If you're a cleric, you have five health
points. You attack with a six-sided die, and once again, your special ability is that you get to
choose, is that you get to cast spells, granted to you by your god. And that's the first step. You
choose a class. You choose one of those four classes, and then you roll three six-sided die
six times. What that does is it covers strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom
and charisma. These are known as your ability scores or your attributes. Those are the six
standardized dungeons or classic dungeons and dragons attributes that pervasive through many
different game systems. Anything that's taken its cue from D&D generally has either those exact
six attributes or something that's quite close to those or inspired by those anyway.
You roll three six-sided die for each one of those, and then you jot down the score that you
receive next to each attribute. For instance, you might have, I don't know, 15 in strength,
and 12 in dexterity, and 14 in constitution, and 13 in wisdom, and so on. At various points during
the game, the game master asks you to make a check against some of these ability scores.
For instance, if you're trying to move very quietly, then your game master might ask you to make a dexterity
check to check whether you are being agile and dexterous enough to do something with stealth.
You roll a D20, that's a 20-sided die, and if you roll a number that is less than or equal to
your ability score, then you succeed. For instance, if I had rolled on my three six-sided die for my
dexterity, 14, then I would roll my D20 now, and if it's anywhere up to 14, then I've succeeded.
I am successfully very, very stealthy, and the game master would proceed with the game accordingly.
If I roll 16 or 17 or 18, then the game master proceeds under the assumption that my character
was not successfully silent. Some noise was made. If there's an enemy nearby,
that enemy would notice that character moving through the room or whatever the scenario is.
Now, if you roll a 20, that's what people generally call a natural 20, meaning it's just a 20 that
you rolled on the die. You didn't have to add any bonus points to that or anything. It just comes
up 20, then it's an automatic success, even though it's above all the numbers. 20 is magic. If you roll
that grants you success to whatever you have done. That's the ability scores and your attributes.
You next choose an alignment. That's lawful good, good, chaotic, good, lawful, neutral, chaotic,
lawful evil, evil, or chaotic evil. You choose that to guide you as you play the character through
the game. A lawful good character might be very inclined to follow rules and to do the right thing
morally, whereas someone who's maybe neutral just wouldn't care one way or the other.
This also has effects sometimes in magic, because some magical spells will target creatures that
are good, but be ineffective against creatures who are evil, or they might be able to affect someone
who's lawful, but ineffective on upon someone who's chaotic or whatever. That's kind of important.
And then finally, the last rule, the last rule set is combat, and combat in this game works
around the target number of four. If you're trying to attack a creature, you roll a six-sided
sorry, you roll your attack dice. Your attack dice is whatever was listed by your character class
when you were choosing what kind of character you wanted to play. So if you're a fighter,
remember I said they had some number of health points, and their attack die was an eight-sided die.
The rogue had a six-sided die, a wizard had a four-sided die, the cleric had a six-sided die.
So you would roll that. If you roll a four or greater on your six-sided die,
then you successfully hit the creature that you were attacking, and then you roll another D6
to figure out how badly you damaged them. This system is kind of neat, because rolling a four
or greater on a D8 on an eight-sided die is easier than rolling a four or greater than on a four-sided
die, meaning that the fighter has a greater chance of hitting creatures than, say, a wizard who
doesn't really necessarily know how to use a sword all that well, but certainly has a bunch
of spells that he could cast and do damage that way instead. So it's kind of a cool,
a cool little system, and of course as you level up or find different equipment, there might be
numbers that you get to apply to those roles. So even if you did just roll a three,
maybe you're using a sword that has a plus one to it, and so suddenly your three becomes a four,
and it becomes a hit, isn't that nice? Those are all the rules of the game. You now know how to play
Dungeon Raiders. This is a very cool little system. It is super simple. As you can tell,
it can be explained in about five minutes. You can build a character in about five minutes.
Here's the Hacker Public Radio RPG official review.
Let's everyone roll for initiative. In this game, we rolled just a D6, I think,
isn't that correct? I think so, yeah. I just rolled a one. So guess, McNeil will be the first
I rolled a four. Cool. Well, how did you like the character build process? Well, it was
extremely easy and rapid. I built a character because I was being somewhat absent-minded. I
got my dates bottled up, and so I hadn't built a character, rid the rules or anything. So, yeah,
it took almost no time to learn, and literally minutes to construct a character. So as this was
build as a lightweight role-playing game, did exactly what it said in the tid, very impressive?
Yeah, I mean, it consisted of what, rolling for your abilities, and choosing your class,
whether you're a fighter, a magic user, or a thief pretty much, and that if there was any other
thing that you had to do, like choosing a spell, you chose your spell. Yeah, it was, and I think
the only thing about it was it was so simple that it seemed to be, it was my class, then rolled,
and I mean, I don't know, maybe I didn't look at the rules closely, but I just rolled and then
put the number next to the attribute to strength decks, in order that they came. So it was a good
bit of luck that I first of all chose a wizard and ended up with my highest score, being intelligence,
both times I had to generate a character. Yeah, Benny, what did you think?
Especially for me, it was extremely easy because I chose to fight the fighter class and
didn't have any spells or anything, so basically only consisted of like five rolls of 3D6s to figure
out your decks, strength, and so on. And of course, this can't turn out in a pretty bad character,
I mean, in the end you could have a character with like three or four or something in every
ability, but in the end, I mean, it's designed to just get a new character whenever you need one.
So I went during our two-hour session, I went through three characters, and I think one of them
was pretty crap, and the other two turned out to be quite good. It's a good system to have like a
short one-off shot. You mentioned conventions, so I think it's definitely something that's designed
for an event like this, not something you're going to play for like weeks and longer sessions that
continue next week and so on. Yeah, agreed. I think that the very rapid character build
is a nice feature, and I think one could learn a lot from it when I was playing my live games here
where I live. If a character would die, I would just have people roll a new character and just
I would just tell them just roll your stats for now. Just do your six rolls for your stats,
and then start, you can jump back in the game, and then when you go home, you can finish off
your character, and I don't think I'd have ever thought to do that if I hadn't played this version
as well, because you know, you kind of think of when you're playing D&D Fifth Edition, you just
think, well, you got to build a character, and you have to take like an hour to look through the book
and choose all your things, and it's like, well, kind of you don't, like you can just to get back up
and running, you can just roll your stats and jump back in the game, and you've got basically
everything that you need to know. Yes, the other thing that was very simple here is there are only four
character classes, Fighter Rogue Wizarding Cleric. Yeah, true. It really boils everything down to
just kind of the bare minimum. Yeah, and there's no races there. I mean, there's not like Dwarf
and Human Neural, that's it, there's just the four character classes. I mean, supposedly this
is supposed to evoke the feel of earlier editions of D&D, which, you know, I don't know that,
I don't know for me that it succeeds because it is so simple. The first and the second edition
character build process was not fast. You'd still have to look through a bunch of tables while you're
making your character and assign different attributes and percentages and stuff like that to your
character. Whatever this was attempting to do, I think it was like either trying to attempt what
people thought earlier editions of D&D were, which, you know, I think a lot of people remember
things being very quick and haphazard in the early days, because people, a lot of people didn't
actually read the rules, you know, as one of those sort of false memories, or, or maybe it's
talking about some other aspect of the game that it's trying to emulate. I'm not really sure,
but I think the simplicity is charming. So you're saying it kind of imitates
with the short rules, it imitates that no one basically read the rules because it's only like a
couple of pages. So everyone has almost no knowledge about this game because there isn't anything
more to know about, right? Yeah, exactly. It's like, you know, you didn't, here's here's what you
did read, and I'm gonna print that in this book. Yeah, exactly. And then you lost interest after
everything else, so we just won't include it in this book. I mean, the rules of this game, as
you pointed out, Benny, are basically on one page. It was page 11, and that's where everything that
you really needed to know how to play was contained. Yeah, I mean, McNally forgot to read the rules, and
he was into the game in minutes. So he got basically everything he needed to know within minutes
to play. Well, you know the interesting thing that you just said, they acquired to, is this from me
very much evoked the original time I played Dungeons & Dragons, and I've just gone and checked,
and I started playing with the 1983 revision of the basic rules set, and it did feel like that,
I'll be honest, it is simpler than that, it's no doubt about it, but I guess you would play,
you would back in the old days, you would have played the advanced rules AD&D, has the gold at
then? That's a really good point, yeah, I hadn't thought about this. Yeah, and actually it was one
thing about playing 5, he still annoys me, especially just too much for my poor little brain to
cope with, you know, I really don't like having to pick up the rule book too often. Yeah, so
as much as something like it. Exactly same for me, yeah. Yeah, and I know different, you know,
obviously when we play, when we play some people love going through the book and reporting over
it, I'm just not like that, I like simplicity, so this is actually more like what I remember playing
back in the early 80s. Yeah, I'm the kind of person who forgets what he has read like three pages
ago, so I have to reread and reread everything, I mean, I couldn't imagine reading multiple books
about Dungeons & Dragons and still know what was in the first one. That's this is really interesting
perspective from both of you actually, so it's funny, yeah, I never thought about the difference
between basic D&D versus AD&D in terms of what you remember, because yeah, I'll bet that's exactly
the difference, like because I definitely hear people talk about old school D&D talking about how
simple it was, and then I'm looking through my AD&D books and remembering back when we would build
characters as a kid, and it's just like, I don't remember being like this at all, but that was because
it was AD&D, you're right, and then it's funny to hear you both say that 5E is complex because 5E
is famously and sometimes criticized for being like the simplest addition yet, or at least in
recent history, so it's kind of kind of interesting to hear the difference between true simplicity,
which is this game, and where D&D has gotten to where they think, oh, we're simple now, and it's
like, yeah, it still takes me an hour to fully build a character. I mean, to play, I think five years,
not that hard to play along the basic rules, but to remember every single aspect from the book
of your class and of your race, this is pretty hard, and I keep forgetting what my wolf can do,
or what the monk can do, and have to reread everything I actually have, and then some sessions,
I just discovered something I forgot about for three or four sessions, and then I use it again.
Yeah, we'd never used your dwarf stone cunning until what, two sessions ago?
This is one of the things you were both dwarves, and we hadn't used it because none of us thought of it.
I remember, I just forgot, because I think that's the problem when there's so many things,
you race stuff, your class stuff, and then your stuff that's bespoke to your character,
build along the way that, yeah, there's a real risk you forget stuff along the way.
I don't know what your guy's problem is, Patrick remembers everything,
yes, it's actually a point for these, I mean, I just figured he has more time to spend
to read the indie books, this was just my impression, but I mean, I had those
amount of times on my hand when I was in school, but I don't have this anymore.
Yeah, that's certainly true, I used to spend a lot of time listening to my books when I was younger,
now there's an internet, of course, which gets in the way of doing that.
The next topic is, which I think we're kind of dancing around anyway, how was it to actually
play the character that you built? Well, I think, and this is probably where I can be critical,
and it was so fast beyond my character's class and name, I knew nothing else about my character,
so there was no, maybe if I read the rules more closely, there was some encouragement to think
about your background, but I think I could... I don't think there were, no. There wasn't, yeah.
I think it's worthwhile. I mean, just the name of my character immediately conjured up an image,
it was called, was he called, furl and furl and one skank? Yeah, I don't remember.
Von Sank, skank, I think. Well, the reason that he was called that is because he was going to be
called something the slim of some reason, I don't remember why. And then I thought, I know,
I can't call him the slim, that's on the rubbish, he's a wizard, so I'll be Von somebody,
and then I thought, I'll look in some Germanic language, and so the word I chose was actually
Dutch for slim, and that's where the name I don't know. Okay, good to know why I went through this,
but I did in my head, so I was a skinny wizard, and I think I said, I did see, that I was really
into my wizard dress, I think, did I mention that? Yeah, so I wasn't a powerful wizard,
but a very vain one, but that was it, that's, I've now summarised the entirety of the character
that I had in mind. I don't think that really came out in the story as being relevant. Oh,
sorry, alignment, alignment, what's the other thing? Yeah, so the alignment helped with that
a little bit, because I was- You had to roll for alignment if I'm recalling correctly, isn't that true?
Yes, I- No, you didn't have to, right? Oh, right, yeah, okay, that's what I chose to do.
Vinnie, what do you think? It was exactly the same for me that the characters seemed a bit shallow,
because you didn't put that much thought into who this person actually is. I solved this problem
in the end by just numbering my characters, I mean, my characters were called Fighter No. 1,
Fighter No. 2 and Fighter No. 3, a short No. 1, 2 and 3, and they were, I mean,
when I created the second Fighter, it didn't feel like a different person than the first one,
because it was basically exactly the same class and just different stats, so it felt more like
you just played a general type of character with some stats, and that's it. Not really a background,
you didn't have to put too much thought into what the background stories of this person. Of course,
if you play a game that goes on over multiple sessions, it's kind of your character kind of
develops, and if your character dies after like 20 minutes, there is not a lot of time to put
thoughts into their background anyway. Yeah, I think the coming to mind, the solution to this would
have just been, and I mean, this is in the public domain, so I could actually just add this to the
book myself, and I might, but the solution I think could be just like a D20 table of character
traits, or a background, you know, just like a one-liner, like your character is a former criminal,
your character loves nothing more than gold, your character, whatever, just one-line description
of a character, and just have you roll that as part of the character creation process. Oh yeah,
or a week at that 1,000 radiations or something there. Okay, maybe not 1,000. We see this
in the thing is, is it simple to play, doesn't, or is it simple, or are the rules simple? They're not
the same thing actually. What might be simple, are the rules concise? No, the rules are very concise,
but actually having a table, a look a table at that, doesn't complicate the rules, it just makes
the rules bigger. I think that's what I'm driving at, but adds quite a lot, and it doesn't
do at all with the gameplay, because you just do it during character creation, and if you make it
optional, and they have, and there were optional things in there, then you don't interfere with
the simplicity. I mean, you could just add a table as an appendix, and you don't actually have
to read the whole table. I mean, you just roll a number, and then you read your sentence
for the number you roll, right? That's your, that's your character, so it doesn't, it doesn't even
blow up the rules in terms of what you have to read to get started. No, do not. What did you guys
think about the rules themselves, and since a lot of that sort of thing probably doesn't
maybe resonate with a player, but like, so think of the times that I had to make rulings as the
game master, and kind of consider that as well when you're answering. I don't think that came up,
but at least it didn't, and that comes up a lot, and when we've played other things, but it didn't,
I don't know, it could be my poor memory, but I just don't remember that being an issue,
I think, yeah, I don't think why that might be, I think the more rules, the thicker the rule book,
the more you get, well, I think I have read somewhere that this thing, you have to do this,
you have to do that, so there's that kind of complication of the rules where you get, it's like,
you get a player appealing to the rule book over the dungeon master, and then the other one is,
I guess you call this the common law thing, you know, the I'd even common law, create a new law
by applying one or more precedence of previous rulings that have existed, not, you know,
one judge ruled in this case, this happened, and then the other judge ruled in that case,
that happened when you can bring the two together to imply a new law. If you have very complex rules,
then there are lots of unintended rules that can come from it, and of course, this game is
completely free of the latter, and mostly free of the former, especially since I didn't read the
rule book in advance, so yeah, I guess maybe it meant that you are probably making a lot of calls,
but they were silently at like dungeon master type calls, but they're a lot more silent than usual,
because we weren't really appealing to any, you know, higher authority, like the rule book.
I mean, we had, we had a couple of discussions how garlic and wooden steaks affect vampires,
because there were not like regular weapon, or regular weapons in this case, the weapon section
was extremely easy. I mean, you could have whatever weapon you would like to, but it would have
exactly the same strength for your type of character, right? Yes, you're absolutely right, so I
was appealing to bram stalker vampires, and Klaatu, you were thinking of Buffy style vampires.
And I think Benny was thinking of Buffy style. I think I was probably thinking of D&D style,
which is kind of a mix between both of those. Not that I did this any good whatsoever,
because it turned out there's the vampires were something completely different in this.
I mean, my main reference for vampires is from Dusk till Don, just for Ford.
Yeah, that's a good one too. Yeah, that's basically whatever, that's always comes to my mind when I
hear vampires. I think that the rules for me, yeah, I did feel like they were, they were very absent,
and it made me very nervous about making calls, because I did, I think I had an awareness of what
you're saying McNally, that if I do one thing at one point, then that is going to have to be the
same thing that I do in the next situation that's similar, and just knowing that I was building a
rule set as play went on, I think I was quite aware of that. But then again, I think because it is,
because I knew that this was just going to last one session, there was also the comfort of knowing
that I'm only building a rule set for these two hours, you know, that my memory and sort of
consistency would only have to last that long. Yeah, there were a couple of times where I remember
thinking that I would have maybe appreciated a little bit of sort of definition of what's
like supposed to happen. I guess that's largely just because I'm used to be there being definitions,
and in reality it's just, it's fine to just shrug and say, okay, yeah, that's good enough.
Yeah, I mean, generally, generally when you forget something isn't consistent with something,
something you did before, mostly the players forgot to anyway, so it actually
consistency only matters as long as someone noticed, right? If no one notices, it doesn't matter.
Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, so that's quite interesting. To me, a good game,
role-playing game, it has a bit of pace to it, and too much stopping to look up rules is just
to me a bad thing, I'll be honest. I mean, it's very worst case, you know, you could have somebody
debating laws of physics or something like that, and I think one time, yeah, you put, you just ruled
that D&D was not a non-cartesian space to stop me going on about, which was quite right.
So I, you know, I went off and recorded an HPR episode or two about, on that very subject,
a little steam rather than it let it interfere with the game, but I think, I mean, you can imagine
that, you know, I mean, I was invited to play a game with physicists recently, and the guy
you invited me, very nice from to invite me, I didn't go in the end, but he described how much
bickering there was over the rules, and I thought, oh wow, maybe not, you know, was it,
I'm going to talk debate about the gravitational constant and the height you're up the mountain,
the trajectory of crossbow balls, you know, like, yeah, I'm just joking, I'm sure it wasn't like that,
but it did some that there were a lot more, you know, they were, I actually spent a good part
each session arguing over rules, which we really just don't seem to do. Definitely know about
myself that I like games with a hefty amount of rules, and I think there's this sort of illusion
that that provides, you know, that this is a game game, like, this is a real game, like, there are
things you can and cannot do, whereas in this simplified version, the rules are just being made up
on a spot by one person, and it just feels like less of a game that way, because, well, we didn't
know those rules coming in, you know, they're being made up as they present themselves, but I don't
apparently that doesn't come through for the player so much, which tracks with my experience,
with playing this as a player, it is just a ton of fun, and you don't really think about whether you
excelled in this way or that way, you just remember the moments that you did something and
something really worked out for you, and it was cool or whatever. Generally, in a board game,
just a regular board game, you need a lot of rules and extremely precise rules, because mainly the
game is about winning and losing, and if someone loses or wins, there will be discussions if the
rules aren't clear, but role-playing is basically about having fun, it's not about someone losing
or winning. I mean, in the end, it doesn't matter whether you lose a fighter or your win as long
as the whole story around it, and the action is fun. What did you think about having your character
die so often though, Benny, you went through three characters, did that not affect anything for you?
No, basically, at least not for those two hours, I mean, I created exactly the same character,
as I said, I created the same character with different stats, and so it was like continuing to play
with a character who has a little less experience points, and I lost whatever objects I found,
but apart from this, it was just continuing, basically continuing playing, right? I mean, I would
have minded if this was like, well, now your character died, now you have to listen to us
continuing the game, and you can't play anymore, because you're dead on the ground, right?
Because I was just able to recreate the character and end up at the scene of action again,
didn't really matter. I'm curious, why did you just keep building the same character? You didn't
want to try the different classes? Pure laziness, I didn't want to read through all the spells,
and I'm not very used to playing characters who have spells anyway, because in our D&T session,
the session that I play among, and I think I think I never played a class who actually had spells
to use, so I just decided to keep this simple because the rules are simple and the game is supposed
to be simple. Okay, let's talk about combat. What did you guys think about combat, McNally?
Anyway, it's extremely straightforward, because the actual rules of combat were so straightforward,
you had to put more thought, I think, into the other actions around combat, about how you engage
in the combat and your planning and tactical strategy, and that kind of thing, which turned out
to be very important in this adventure, actually, I'm in a direct assault on the vampire,
wasn't going to get you very far as it turned out. In fact, it was going to get you dead,
which is exactly what happened twice in Benny's case during the story, and only once in my case.
So, I think my main criticism is that it just seemed awful to be a wizard in a small party,
because your combat was a default, my combat was a default to start with, and you have one
offensive spell, which is fireball, which is a good spell, don't get me wrong, but because we ran
the approach where you can choose your spell at the point you first cast it, and then that's you
chosen your spell. You have available to you, so I chose it both to be fireball, because it seemed
to me a direct combat was what we needed to do, and my wizard was just hopeless, otherwise, you know,
really none of the other spells were useful in a small party, so yeah, so I felt that was one thing
about the game is that yeah, you don't play a wizard to be a fighter, play a fighter if you
want to be a fighter, to a small party, and this game really there wasn't enough offensive spells
to make the wizard worthwhile. I think the one of the changes that I would make, and again,
I might since this is in the public domain officially, is that the wizard can use as many spells
as he wants, except when you roll your spell, you have to roll a percentage die to see whether your
spell works correctly, and if you roll high, it works correctly, if you roll low, something horrible
goes wrong, and you zap your friend, or you miss and knock a suit of armor, and it comes to life,
and joins the combat against you, or, you know, who knows, essentially, you have access to spells
as throughout the whole game, because yeah, having one spell slot, I just think it kind of cripples
the character, or at least it makes it not very fun. Yeah, and actually, if you look, I mentioned this
during the, when we were playing, but I didn't read it properly, but if you look, the optional rule
for combat, where you can add a modifier to your target, so, and at first I thought that benefited
wizards, but it doesn't necessarily, because it actually, the target in this game is 10, and
that optional rule increases it for wizards to 11, and decreases it fighters to 9, but it does give,
I think, another direction, it gives a benefit to wizards and defence, but still it doesn't
pull a trace, the wizard in the attack. Then what do you think of combat as a fighter?
Compared to Dead Earth, we reviewed last time, it was very boring. I mean, Dead Earth, the combat
was the interesting part, and here was everything around combat was fun, and combat was, it was so easy,
it was kind of, you just roll, and then either you hit, or you don't, and as a fighter you hit
a bit more often than, as a wizard, there wasn't a lot to do, there wasn't like, I mean, you couldn't,
yeah, you couldn't, like, choose different weapons, I mean, you could choose different weapons,
but the effect was exactly the same, so it didn't matter, why do you pick a sword?
Well, there was a differentiation between melee weapon weapons, and like, you know, ranged,
but apart from this, basically, every weapon did exactly the same amount of damage, depending
on your class. Also, there were no modifiers to add to your roles or anything, or at least not
modifiers that would change, I mean, there were modifiers that come with your class, but not something,
well, in this case, you have to roll this to achieve whatever, and in the other case,
you have to roll lower or higher, something like this, or like, I'd say, like the proficiency
bonus or something in D&D. Yeah, I do feel like it's a little bit weird for it just to behave, you roll
a, what is it, a fiber of six, or is it a four, five, six, four, five, six, you know, and it just,
it does feel like pretty much a 50-50 chance of either hitting or not hitting, and that's, and that's
it. Well, it depends on the class, right? As a fighter, I roll the D8, and with a D8, it's easy to
achieve a four, and it's even more than 50 percent, and McNally as a wizard had a D4, so it was
like only 25 percent chance to hit, so it was extremely different for the two classes. I think
that's what McNally was talking about before. Yes, it's had forgotten actually that, but that is
the crucial detail that made it impossible for the wizard to do any damage at all. Very unlikely,
yeah, and it's probably significant to consider, I guess both of you are comparing it to 5e obviously,
but Benny specifically is comparing it to the monk, which for me it has always been one of the most
exciting fighter classes of D&D 5e because you just have so much you can't do as well. Exactly,
pick literally anything and it'll become a weapon, you can spend a key point and do other cool
things, so yeah, you just have so many options. As the game master, I have to say combat, I felt
pretty similar to you guys that the combat was a little bit of a weak spot. The monsters weren't
well-organized in this book. I ended up for that first fight where you were fighting a giant spider.
I chose the giant spider because it made sense for being a creature that was in the forest,
in that moment, and only after I chose it and started the battle that I sort of scanned through
the rest of the stats, and it's a very powerful creature actually, which no surprise because it
filled Benny's character with one strike, I think. It was very difficult to come up with stuff,
and I kind of realized after the fact two things. One was that I probably should not have just,
I should have just, who cares? They don't consult the chart. Just in the spirit of the game,
just invent a monster, invent stats for it, and just deep down I know that that combat should
have only lasted about maybe two rounds. It should have gotten a hit off, and then if you guys had
hit it once or twice, then it would have died no matter what. Trying to be too strict to the rules
in this setting, I think, didn't make sense. And then the other thing that I realized, I think,
now that you were talking about it, is that probably an interesting combat in this context
would have been up to the game master to make sure that the characters had interesting
magic items or cursed items, which did happen eventually for the characters to sort of have to
deal with during combat to add that element of surprise. Yes, I think, actually I'm just looking,
as you spoke, we're speaking there, I went and looked at the table, I looked at the stats of the giant
spider, and I take it, you didn't roll the number appearing, the dice, did you? Good. Because what
you were doing to that table, you were supposed to roll a 1D8, and then we'd have had, you know,
up to eight spiders. I mean, that would have been the whole game. The game would have been you hunting
spiders, or not you, but many, many of your characters hunting spiders. But I mean, that isn't the
goblin, it's 1D10 times 10, so you could be end up fighting, if you fold these rules strictly,
end up fighting your ugly goblins. I think once you reach page 11, you just stop reading, and like,
that's the game, and that's all the rules you need, so yeah, that's what I should have done.
I have done here to talk about the world setting, but it's probably important to note that the
world setting doesn't really exist in this game. The game is about building a character,
and how those characters, you know, go through combat, stuff like that. There's not really a world
setting. The module that we played is by a company called Adventure a Week, and I guess they
must release an Adventure a Week, and it was just, it's a one-page thing, and this was the
something like the blood curse of the vampire, or something like that. So yeah, what do you think
about it, McNally? I liked it. I thought it was very simple, but it was quite evocative, you know,
it was using a classic, you know, creepy house in the age of tone, everyone's talking about sort of
a ploy, I don't know, ploy whatever the word is, and theme, and that made it, that gave it very
quickly, just enough to, you know, ignite my imaginations. I really had a great mental picture of
what we were facing, what we were doing, you know, and that's what you need, because like, say,
there's no big background, there's no big backstory going on here, it is, so I think that makes even
more important that the Adventure quickly gets some picture in your mind of where you are,
so if something were complex or subtle, yeah, I can imagine that just not working with this,
it had to be, it had to, what's the word, immediately borrow something from the, from the lower
that players are likely to know, in this case, as it haunted mansion vampire type idea.
Yes, this was exactly my impression, when we started for things we knew were, well, this is
basically a mansion has a cemetery in the back, and we are hunting vampires, and basically this
gives you all that, all the information you need, at least if you've watched a couple of movies.
Of course, we, we then just assume things in the world, and in the end, we ended up assuming
slightly different versions of a vampire world, or especially vampires, because we were discussing
what, what kills a vampire and what doesn't, right? It's what we spoke about before, but I mean,
the general setting is most likely the same for everyone, and you didn't have to go through a lot
to explain to us what the world looks like, and how it worked. Yeah, well, I'm glad I went that way
then, because yeah, I definitely, I was, I was aware that we, that none of us had any information
about the, this, the world setting, and so I, I thought that a leaning on a trope was probably
a good thing for such a short game. My other thought was just to, just to throw you into a dungeon,
just a very traditional kind of like dungeon crawl, but I felt like we were, I felt like you'd kind
of gotten that experience in the normal D&D game, although looking back at it, I'm not really
sure that you've been in that many dungeons in our regular D&D game. I mean, you went to the
mall creature caverns, which was a little bit dungeon-esque, but I don't know if you've done that
many room-to-room exploration of dungeons in our normal game. No, the only one I remember there
was a bit like this is the lizard folk. It wasn't a dungeon. Oh, that's right. Yeah, the lizard folk
there. That's, that made you agree with that, that came to my mind too. But I mean, I do like the,
the dungeon crawl, but I think that was good that we didn't do that with this, because that was,
you know, that was a bit too obvious a link in the vampire, because, yeah, because it gives
that sort of a central puzzle that we had to solve. And, and it was quite interesting going at it
using the, the lore, which I think quickly everybody missed, would mislead us thought of vampires
in a traditional sense. So I quite like that, actually, I quite like being knocked back once,
having to regenerate our characters and, you know, come back at it. I think that the computer
and not the confusion, but the differing versions of the trope really did benefit, because characters
obviously wouldn't necessarily know exactly how to kill a vampire either. So the fact that you
guys weren't sure whether, you know, what you needed to do actually vanquish this creature,
and had differing opinions on what happens when you, for instance, stab a vampire in the
heart or whatever. And this kind of even gave the characters kind of a bit of a personality,
that that's what we were talking about, which, which was lacking before. So, because it wasn't,
basically it was us discussing, but in the end it was basically the knowledge of the characters
who, which was, which was different. Let's do final thoughts and let's include in that,
would you play this game system again? Oh, definitely, yeah, definitely, and definitely with younger
players, because let's face it, you're just never going to get them following any set of rules.
You're better not trying, it depends how old they are. I mean, I'm talking of my daughter,
who's maybe, I wish she's about 10. I should know exactly, she's about 10. So for younger,
younger children, I think this is ideal. In fact, to be honest, what I used to do when
children were even younger than that, you know, maybe back down to age about five is, you know,
it's about throwing the dice, it's about igniting their imagination, getting them excited,
and you have to keep it fast-paced, because they just get bored. If there's too many players,
and you're all going about rules and looking up tables, they're just literally going to wander
over them. So this is perfect, perfect for that. I think I'd also played again, especially,
you could also, not only for kids, you could also use this for a couple of friends who come over,
and if you just want to play a role-playing game, and they basically don't know anything about
role-playing. To introduce someone to role-playing, I think this would be a good start. In
case, you can come up with a good world to play. Apart from this, there is one other final thought
that I'd like to mention, I thought the rules are concise and short, but not very well organized,
because I read through the rules, and in the end, I was like, well, those were the rules, but
I wasn't told how to create a character. It wasn't like a page where it says, well, to create a
character, you do step one, step two, step three. You had to figure out from the rules, and in the end,
everything that was important wasn't page 11. I wouldn't put everything that's important on page 11,
this should come earlier. Definitely, before they list all the classes. I mean, the rules start
with listing classes, and then, like, on page 11, they explain what you do with those classes,
so I would definitely reorganize the rules. Absolutely, I agree. Yeah, it's funny. It's one of those
things where, once you're used to it, you lose sight of what's not clear, but looking at it again
after so long, and then remembering that I was remembering a different game anyway. I was thinking
of Dungeon Raiders, which is by the same author, but we played Dungeon Raiders. I'm thinking of
Dungeon Raiders, and so coming back to the rule book, and having to quickly reread it, because I
was thinking of the wrong one, it made me realize, yeah, there's no, there's, it's page one, should
be step one, role three, D6 for such and such, step two, choose your such and such. Yeah, exactly.
I mean, just spell it out. Like, make it really simple. We have to roll for your stats anyway,
so why not just mention this at the beginning of the rules before they list classes. I mean,
if the classes matter what's not to get, they don't have to mention the classes first.
Yeah, the funny thing is, I didn't have, my impression was totally different, because I was kind of like
panic, oh, oh, we're playing now, oh no, and I leapt into the rules, and quickly grabbed the bits
that I needed, and okay, I got some advice from you guys as well, that's better than mine. Yeah,
I mean, you basically read page 11, right, and then you had everything you needed to know.
Actually, well, not quite, because what I did was, I first of all, opened up as an EPUB I had,
so opened up quickly, saw adventure classes, not as only four of them, so I said, yeah,
I'll be a wizard, so then I clicked on wizard, and that's actually one page with what, five lines
on it, says you hit points, attack dice, and then there's four with really three lines of text
describing a wizard, so did that, then then I saw experience points and levelling up, well,
forget that, because I'm creating a character, ability scores, then page 11, and that was it.
So actually, I found that better in a way than an I-step-by-step guide,
because I could just instantly see what I needed to know and jump into it.
Yeah, that's kind of the difference, though, I think that sums up the way that people come to D&D
in general. It's like, you're either coming to it as someone who picks it up off a shelf,
and has no context for anything. You're coming to it because your friends have told you about it,
and they sort of, and you've heard the stuff, like, oh, what class are you playing?
What's your stats? So you have context, and those are the two ways to come to this game,
and I think Benny's experience was picking it up off the shelf with no context.
I mean, he does have context, because he knows D&D.
Yeah, I mean, to be fair, we should mention that the forward says you should know D&D,
and if you don't know how D&D works, you shouldn't have to be reading this at all.
There was a link to another role-playing game, so he was going like, go, go read this,
because you don't have any business here. I'd forgotten about that. Yeah, you're totally right.
I just, I do think it's interesting, though, like, the different, the different experience levels,
and what that and sort of how that gives you an impression of what you're reading. I think it's
good to note. And yeah, I agree with you guys about the replayability and the suitability for
either younger or new players to the game, because I've gotten D&D character creation down
pretty much to the bare essentials. And it still takes a while, because it, you know, even if you're
there to step someone through it and gloss over the non-important stuff, it still gets bogged down
once you start talking, well, oh, you want to play an elf? Okay, well, let's look up the different
abilities of this elf, and oh, you want to play this class? Okay, well, let's look at what you
specialize in. You know, and it's just all of a sudden, people are just like, I thought this
was going to be a lot different. This game here, I mean, anyone can roll 3D six, six times. I mean,
that's, that's easy. And then you're up and running, that like, that's, it's gold, that's magic.
So I think that, that having a simple system like this for, for a quick game, I think it's just
so, absolutely. I should say, this is not the simplest game-based and dungeon dragons I've
played. It's, it's, but by some major, the second simplest, and I suppose I'm being a little
unfair here, but it, it, it, I'm thinking of the board game called dungeon that was, I think it
was produced by the company that produced dungeons and dragons. Do you know the one I'm referring to?
The board game called, just called dungeon. No, yeah. No, it's, it's, it's, it's very, it's highly
simplified. It's got four classes, not the same classes here. I think there's different editions
of it. In fact, I don't know if you, if you watch Stranger Things, which I had D&D in it, of course,
in the episode where the, the government authorities raid the house and take stuff out, you'll see
one of the secret agents carrying the dungeon board game under his arm. And I was, I was like,
pointed at the screen, because I played with my kids, and it's a great game to play with kids,
and they really, really enjoy it. To anyone who's into role-playing game, it misses our,
the whole point of role-playing game. There's no role-playing. It's taken that out, and it,
but it's incredibly simple, um, and much simpler than this, actually. But so you're saying
this is a simpler game, but it's another role-playing game, so we're, we're not comparing role-playing
games here then. Correct, yes. So I quite deliberately said it was in Dungeons and Dragons derived
game, because it has the, it has the feel, but it doesn't have what I consider to be this
sensual thing about, that I like to touch on dragons, which was the role-playing bit. I do think
this game does kind of highlight how little you need for a good, a good role-playing game. You just
don't need much to get together with your friends and go through an imaginary story for two hours.
Like it's just not that big of a deal. Like you could probably do with even less. You could just say,
okay, whenever there's a fork in the road, we're gonna roll a, a, a, a D6, and, you know, and make
a choice based on that. I mean, it could be even simpler than this probably. Yeah, but I think
it depends a lot on the dungeon master, what he makes. He has furniture. What he makes out of it.
So you did a great job doing this, but I think if I, if I just run something like this, I might end
up having, not having the correct ideas or not having interesting ideas to keep the game going.
I mean, you have a lot of experience, like running a role-playing games, and I think this,
this definitely helps. That, that's a good point. But I mean, ultimately, it's a group effort too.
So with the right people, I guess, in theory, you know, who knows. But I mean, honestly, once you
start breaking things down too far, though, I start to lose interest again, because I'm like, well,
now you're not playing a game at all. Like you're just telling a story, like a, what, one of those
stories where you go around the campfire and kind of add on to the, under the story that the,
the last person did, you know, you, you, you, you leave off at a certain point and then let the next
person pick up the story. It doesn't really interest me, because it's, it's just not, there's not
enough there. So I think this is probably the lowest I'm willing to go. Yeah, like, like, like,
those points and, yeah, exactly, where you had to do exactly the right thing for more
adventure. I mean, I, I love that. Me too. Yeah. Like Monkey Island. Yeah. It's definitely more
interesting if you, if you play a tabletop role playing game, if there are different options to
what can happen. I know. I mean, to me, my favourite, using my favourite moments in games is where
the Dungeon Master has a moment's pause of silence where they're thinking, I know we've done this
to you, Claire, too, is where I'm thinking, I didn't expect to do that. What am I going to do now?
You mean like, you did those. Yeah. So I think, I think, I mean, that's what, that's what sets
for the game apart from even the best, even Monkey Island, the best computer games is that
there's only unlimited available options. And I think that's what it highlights. This is what I
think it's good about this game is if you've got nimble players and a nimble dungeon master,
then there's a lot you could get out of this game. Let's take a game. The rules stay out the way.
Yeah. Very much agreed. Okay. I think that's the review then.
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