Dragon or Demon: Dragonbane Review

Dragonbane from Free League is a branch of the RuneQuest/Basic Roleplaying mechanics, where the d20 and not the d100 is used to resolve actions, so probabilities are in 5% rather than 1% increments. When you throw that d20, a 1 (the best result) is a "dragon" and a 20 (the worst) is a... demon actually (the bane of dragons?), but it's fun to roll at the table and the dragon-signed critical are memorable and decisive. 

We've been playing Dragonbane for a couple of years now, using it as the engine to run Tales from Eriador and Ruins of Eriador (the conversion is light) from Free League's other Middle-earth based games line, and here's a selection of the dragons and demons of the experience.

Dragons

The Dragonbane boxed core set is great value. The card minis alone are worth it, and with the battle maps they have made a big change to our tabletop. With a full core rules, a campaign (with map), a workable solo system booklet, and various treasure and adventure cards, this box set is complete and can support years of play.

BRP roots: Since it's based on Basic Roleplaying it's a grounded, mostly coherent system that fits together and provides quick, satisfying resolution. Dragonbane filches boons and banes from D&D 5, but that's a fun mechanic that encourages creativity without adding more modifiers.

It's got an easy and fun character generation system based on skills and professions. A slight departure from core BRP is that there's a range of special abilities character can acquire, which are mostly interesting and help round them out. The system uses general hit points and will power points to fuel special abilities. 

Combat, if anything, is slightly quicker than BRP, partly because characters get only one significant action each round: attack or parry-evade. Doing both is an option that usually requires a resource.

NPC profiles are short and easy to read and deploy.

Demons

Card-based initiative: Free League do love their initiative cards, and to be sure, the players like them too. It's easy to tell who's going to take a turn, when, and when they're done. But nothing says a combat is beginning quite so clearly as picking up the initiative cards (or rolling dice, for that matter) and I prefer the seamless, if fixed, initiative of DEX-based priority. Card-based initiative is also random, so a character's agility and presence of mind doesn't apply. It does provide for some tactical decisions, on the other hand. But it takes time to shuffle and draw cards every round.
My preference is for the first round of initiative to be free-form, based on who is quickest, in a position to strike, and makes the decision to attack first. After that, I'm considering house-ruling Agility-based initiative again.

High weapon damage: compared to BRP weapons damage can be up to twice what you would expect. It's as if every regular hit is a "special" in core BRP. These damage rolls could easily be fatal in one or two successful hits. This suggests that the designers of Dragonbane expect fighters in the front line to be as heavily armored as possible, but my players preferred to play stealthy, agile characters not laden with a great deal of war-gear. So far, despite a few close calls, they have survived, but combat is very dangerous in this game. Perhaps for gritty travels in Middle-earth, this is just so.

Monsters always hit: Monsters in Dragonbane (your trolls and dragons and such) always hit. In effect, they have 20 attack skills, and the only roll to make is on a d6 subtable to assess how they attack and what damage they do. While this is fun and inventive, with a smaller party you find yourself looking for the luckless player who will take the brunt of the monster's punishing attack, and hoping you don't misjudge and kill your lightly-armored treasure-hunter in one roll. Also, whereas standard encounters are notes in quite a compact format, a monster has a six-row table or behaviors to manage, and how do you generate and original creature when you need one?

Otherwise…

Ducks: yes, there are Ducks, known here as Mallards, a minor race. It’s a RuneQuest thing. Don’t use them if they don’t fit.

Magic: my particular game is low magic, but the magic rules in the core set are relatively thin. Most elemental spells are variants on blasting something, a wall of something, you get the drift, although there are also animist and mentalist magical disciplines. Serviceable, but simple.

There are also a few details, like weapon damage, that we don't use or haven't come up yet. On the other hand, the "push" mechanic for re-rolls based on temporarily breaking an ability score to gain a second chance is something I would import back into regular BRP.

On the whole, though, Dragonbane is a great game that is fast and fun at the table, easy to draw players into and with a lot of interest to keep going with, and the boxed edition is a complete set that supports the table for a long time. It's a grittier, more challenging world than the power-fantasy of later editions of D&D, and more engaging for it.