Sunday 13 May 2018

The Awesome Pain in the Ass That Was DragonQuest

Continuing my trio of bargain-bin rescues from Glasgow (actually a gift from Paolo, in lieu of buying an adventure from the system) I present to you DragonQuest, 2nd edition!

Why does this RPG system set my teeth on edge? My nostalgia should be all for SPI and the days of punching out wargame counters, all for Deathmaze and Citadel of Blood and War of the Ring and Sword and Sorcery. But good boardgaming chops do not guarantee a good roleplaying game.

Let's judge a book by its cover. Sorry guys, RPG players are not just dreaming of being Conan. D&D art got that right more often than not. They are in a fantasy-hero world, but team players; just like they're in a horror world, but not doomed, and in a science fantasy world, but stone cold medieval. The Frazetta muscleman hoisting up the results of his DragonQuest like a trophy bass is someone else's idea of "sword and sorcery".

The writing style of the game is a 180 degree reaction against the fast, loose but evocative D&D writing of the time. No gaps and confusing terminology here! DQ is buckled and strapped into the case law structure of an SPI wargame's rules (see 3.7.5.1 and apply the Rules Writing Procedure). If the GM has leeway, we'll tell you exactly where that leeway is. It's meant to be clear, but it's mechanizing and alienating on the page. The wargame influence also shows in the tight regulation of combat on a hex grid.

Maybe case-law would work if the mechanics were more elegant, as in Metagaming's contemporary offering The Fantasy Trip. But they're standard Rolemaster-type fare, a percentile skill system with "RPG 2.0" features like separate fatigue and physical damage, damage-reducing armor, critical hits, background packages, custom advancement ... Determining target numbers might have you multiplying 39 by 2.5. Damage involves frequent table lookups to see if a crit and physical damage happen. God forbid you should have a d6 laying around the house, here, roll one of your d10's and take half for a d5 instead. And roll four of those d5s to determine your character's stats.

What's a Satanic panic?
But it's funny how often interesting magic systems come attached to clunky base mechanics, while elegant systems like TFT or RuneQuest have difficult or prosaic approaches to magic. Certainly, something was possessing SPI around the turn of the 80's. They had a boardgame about the demons from the Lesser Key of Solomon, and worked some of those names into their Citadel of Blood adventure game. And yes, there's a whole school of DQ demon summoning that ramps up to 16 pages of fully powered Goetic infernal royalty. That menu is clearly where all the love lies, and the other magic schools suffer collectively by comparison. Some are solid, some near-unplayable like the Water Magic school with its Aquaman-style restriction.

By the way, there is a lot of cribbing from D&D, especially in the monster list. And in the kind of rules that compel game balance. Wizards can't cast near cold iron or while being distracted by damage. Player characters who poison their weapons might nick themselves. This points at the heart of the problem, that Dragonquest isn't built around a compelling setting (implicitly, as in D&D, or explicitly, as in Runequest). So much of it is generic that the special stuff fails to stick.

For example, instead of alignment, your characters get a quasi-astrological Aspect which gives them bonuses and penalties for very short periods of the day or year, or around a birth or death. Sounds cool, but it doesn't really resonate with any other social or magical structure, mostly boiling down to an optimum time and place to do housebound skill tests. Only the death aspect has any impact on the typical adventurer, with a +10% bonus just after a mammal dies near you.

At least the 2nd edition book concludes creditably, with a tight little sample adventure in a bandit oasis. It maybe shows, though, that DQ doesn't really know what kind of fantasy game it is. The journey to the camp is described last of all, oh yeah, you might encounter a sand golem. The real detail is put into the characters at the camp, their secrets and intrigues. It's not really necessary that one is a halfling and another is a hobgoblin. The magic, too, is subtle, pulp-story stuff. There are other consequences of aping the pulp era (the camp is run by one "Alla Akabar," and roles for NPC women comprise jealous wife and sex victim). Perhaps the game is more suited for would-be Conans after all?

10 comments:

  1. I kind of always wanted to play DragonQuest. It looked very... complete, encyclopedic almost, but wasn't that large of a rulebook (never mind the three-column layout) and was classless, with an interesting magic system to boot! For some reason, this game still calls to me, despite the fact that I can barely find anybody who's even heard of it. But I kind of doubt that I'll ever run it. I'd love to sit at some grognard's table and play in a few games, to see what I've missed, if anything; but the prospect of learning the system just looks like Work to me now, the way that a lot of RPG 2.0 games from that period just seem like Work. So maybe this one will continue to get away.

    Besides, I'm busy teaching myself RuneQuest right now. Maybe one day, I'll see about porting the magic system from DQ over...

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  2. Yes, long ago my friends played the RuneQuest basic system with an altered magic system that ran off spells from D&D (with a spell casting skill and POW=level to cast). Probably even easier to use DQ, based as it is already on spending fatigue points and rolling a % skill.

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  3. I have to admit, DragonQuest was always "that game". The one I kept picking up to flip through, the one I kept threatening to buy.

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    1. Yep, luckily my friends and I found The Arcanum which was a much more accessible and flavorful "improved D&D". I am still curious about the DQ modules though.

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  4. Always a delight to read about these 80's oddities of gaming, hanging heavy with the fruit of the path not taken.

    Great to have you back, Roger.

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  5. DQ was playable but, yes, needlessly complex. There are some good ideas hidden in there but better to apply them to other systems.

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  6. I am running DragonQuest at the moment, on my 4th adventure in the campaign. It has faults, many of them down to editing, and there are missing social and investigation mechanics/stats

    But the central quick and dirty check mechanic is absolutely to notch, multiply stat by value from 0 5 to 5, the more easy the check the bigger the number, that is your chance

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  7. DragonQuest is Awesome!!! Don't believe a word this dudes saying.

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  8. Have to agree with the comments that say the OP doesn't really know anything about DQ. Sure it has its faults and oddities, but focusing on the cover not being to his taste or its "cribbing from D&D" (so what?) just looks like he hasn't played the game and doesn't really care one way or the other.

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