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I stared at Battle Dragon several times at GenCon. I do like dragons, and do enjoy the occasional chances I get to play them, but there's a lot more to draconic life, and gaming, than just fighting. But I was pretty annoyed at GenCon for other reasons, and a fighty-sounding game sounded like it would meet my mood, so I got it.

And I'm glad I did: it's a very satisfying game. It is not a very broad game: while it does spend a few pages on setting and background material, and a few more on draconic society -- and they're even good pages -- it's mainly about battling dragons. It's intended for use as both fighting using miniatures and role-playing. It does the first excellently (I tried), and I think it will do the second adequately.

It does quite a good job at building and running battling dragons (including hydras, basilisks, wyverns, and other mighty lizardly people). Most of the book is about character creation. It has a point-based power- and shape-construction system, straightforward enough so that I could make my first, nicely-tuned dragon at the airport in under an hour, without a calculator.

Every dragon is very much an individual, with capabilities chosen from a wide menu. While there are species stereotypes, they are enforced by cost modifiers rather than absolute rules. So, wyverns are usually poisonous, because they get nice discounts on poison. You can build a wyvern who doesn't rely heavily on poison -- and surprise your enemies, who come at you expecting poison and finding lightning and sharp horns instead.

There's even a sensible in-world reason why dragons are so variable. They can modify their bodies and magical abilities, over a matter of weeks to years. So, as you-the-player are building a dragon with a fancy powerful fireball breath weapon, serrated claws, and a collection of healing spells, you-the-character are working to elaborate your breath weapon and grow your claws and learn magic. It's a fairly minor detail, but an elegant touch: I consider it one mark of a master game designer to have the game mechanics match the world's physical laws properly.

The powers include breath weapons, fangs, claws, wings, eye-beams, magic of half a dozen colleges, armor, and so on. Dragons may take some or all of these, though if you're missing a breath weapon or fangs, other dragons will laugh at you. You don't have enough points to be good at everything. The tradeoff between specialization and generality works nicely: if you put most of your points into a ferocious firebreath, for example, you'll be very effective -- except against enemies whose scales reflect fire.

Each topic has a good but not overwhelming selection of options: seven kinds of firebreaths (fire, cold, poison, etc.), each with a few subtypes (fireballs vs. sticky hellfire vs. flameless heat). Most of the choices are about weaponry, more powerful weapons for more points -- the game is Battle Dragons after all. But the tradeoffs aren't just to make your dragon more macho for more points, as my butterfly-winged scholar-mage of a dragon understands. There's a bit of game mechanics to encourage you towards roleplaying: free points usable for certain non-combat skills, and extra points available for various roleplaying flaws. And, crucially for a game of this sort, the point costs seem to give the right effect: the 12-point breath weapon seems about 3/4 as effective as the 16-point one.

The resolution system is a close relative of the Storyteller system: each action uses a pool of a few d10's, and the number of successes matters. It's usually easy and unambiguous to figure out the scores required for success -- the miniatures battle side of the game can be played without a referee. There are some places where it seems insufficiently detailed (e.g., there aren't any modifiers on target numbers for non-attack spellcasting), but on the whole I prefer that to having too much detail. Certainly the trial battles I played went smoothly.

There are some nice touches in the mechanics. Dragons do huge amounts of damage to each other, enough to kill half a dozen humans in a single claw-strike. They are protected by correspondingly vast amounts of heavy scales, and take little damage from such blows. Most kinds of scales are 'ablative': one of those huge claw-strikes won't hurt the dragon's body much, but it will rip off a hunk of scales. As the dragons' scales get thinner, the huge blows start doing more damage. So dragons need to worry about defense as well as offense -- and fights between dragons don't drag on.

The game has a few bad features. If you don't like dragons fighting, you may consider the entire game to be a bad feature, but you probably wouldn't buy it in the first place. For those of us who do like dragons fighting, there are still a few issues. The game sometimes chooses words out of the wrong genre: 'ablative' is very much a SF term, which breaks the mindset of a fantasy game; 'breakable' armor might have been a better word. There are a fair number of editing problems, mostly spellchecker-resistant mistakes (using 'form' for 'from' or vice versa), and a few "See Page XX". The art isn't very good considering how easy it is to find excellent amateur artists who love to draw dragons.

Some of the organization is poor: terms are sometimes defined three pages after they're used, or, in the case of "Agility Check", sixty pages. There's no index, either. The game does use standard terminology (except that 'Turn' is shorter than 'Round'), so I knew that an Agility Check was based on Agility -- but I didn't know whether it was, say, a number of dice equal to your Agility rolled against some target, or some number of dice rolled against your Agility. This wasn't a problem for understanding the game, but it did annoy me the first time I actually tried to do a fight and had to figure out how to do it.

(As an aside: if you turned the elves into ninja and filed off a couple serial numbers, you could use Battle Dragon as an excellent kaiju combat game. You could, for example, build Mothra -- arguably the least draconic of the kaiju -- as a Mystic Dragon with butterfly wings and light- and electricity-based attacks. You could presumably modify almost any system to do so if you wanted, but Battle Dragon would take very few modifications, and those would be more style than substance.)

It's a narrowly-focussed game, written by people who really love and understand their topic. I found it extremely satisfying: a very good execution of what it is.

Battle Dragons
Battle Dragons Playtest Review by Bard Bloom on 13/08/02 Style: 3 (Average) Substance: 5 (Excellent!) A rpg/miniatures game of fighting dragons, designed with skill and love. Product: Battle Dragons Author: Casey C. Clark and Gabe Ivan Category: RPG Company/Publisher: Spartacus Publishing, LLC Line: Battle Dragons Cost: $25 Page count: 130 Year published: 2002 ISBN: 0-9710623-0-7 SKU: Comp copy?: no Playtest Review by Bard Bloom on 13/08/02 Genre tags: Fantasy	I stared at Battle Dragon several times at GenCon. I do like dragons, and do enjoy the occasional chances I get to play them, but there's a lot more to draconic life, and gaming, than just fighting. But I was pretty annoyed at GenCon for other reasons, and a fighty-sounding game sounded like it would meet my mood, so I got it. And I'm glad I did: it's a very satisfying game. It is not a very broad game: while it does spend a few pages on setting and background material, and a few more on draconic society -- and they're even good pages -- it's mainly about battling dragons. It's intended for use as both fighting using miniatures and role-playing. It does the first excellently (I tried), and I think it will do the second adequately. It does quite a good job at building and running battling dragons (including hydras, basilisks, wyverns, and other mighty lizardly people). Most of the book is about character creation. It has a point-based power- and shape-construction system, straightforward enough so that I could make my first, nicely-tuned dragon at the airport in under an hour, without a calculator. Every dragon is very much an individual, with capabilities chosen from a wide menu. While there are species stereotypes, they are enforced by cost modifiers rather than absolute rules. So, wyverns are usually poisonous, because they get nice discounts on poison. You can build a wyvern who doesn't rely heavily on poison -- and surprise your enemies, who come at you expecting poison and finding lightning and sharp horns instead. There's even a sensible in-world reason why dragons are so variable. They can modify their bodies and magical abilities, over a matter of weeks to years. So, as you-the-player are building a dragon with a fancy powerful fireball breath weapon, serrated claws, and a collection of healing spells, you-the-character are working to elaborate your breath weapon and grow your claws and learn magic. It's a fairly minor detail, but an elegant touch: I consider it one mark of a master game designer to have the game mechanics match the world's physical laws properly. The powers include breath weapons, fangs, claws, wings, eye-beams, magic of half a dozen colleges, armor, and so on. Dragons may take some or all of these, though if you're missing a breath weapon or fangs, other dragons will laugh at you. You don't have enough points to be good at everything. The tradeoff between specialization and generality works nicely: if you put most of your points into a ferocious firebreath, for example, you'll be very effective -- except against enemies whose scales reflect fire. Each topic has a good but not overwhelming selection of options: seven kinds of firebreaths (fire, cold, poison, etc.), each with a few subtypes (fireballs vs. sticky hellfire vs. flameless heat). Most of the choices are about weaponry, more powerful weapons for more points -- the game is Battle Dragons after all. But the tradeoffs aren't just to make your dragon more macho for more points, as my butterfly-winged scholar-mage of a dragon understands. There's a bit of game mechanics to encourage you towards roleplaying: free points usable for certain non-combat skills, and extra points available for various roleplaying flaws. And, crucially for a game of this sort, the point costs seem to give the right effect: the 12-point breath weapon seems about 3/4 as effective as the 16-point one. The resolution system is a close relative of the Storyteller system: each action uses a pool of a few d10's, and the number of successes matters. It's usually easy and unambiguous to figure out the scores required for success -- the miniatures battle side of the game can be played without a referee. There are some places where it seems insufficiently detailed (e.g., there aren't any modifiers on target numbers for non-attack spellcasting), but on the whole I prefer that to having too much detail. Certainly the trial battles I played went smoothly. There are some nice touches in the mechanics. Dragons do huge amounts of damage to each other, enough to kill half a dozen humans in a single claw-strike. They are protected by correspondingly vast amounts of heavy scales, and take little damage from such blows. Most kinds of scales are 'ablative': one of those huge claw-strikes won't hurt the dragon's body much, but it will rip off a hunk of scales. As the dragons' scales get thinner, the huge blows start doing more damage. So dragons need to worry about defense as well as offense -- and fights between dragons don't drag on. The game has a few bad features. If you don't like dragons fighting, you may consider the entire game to be a bad feature, but you probably wouldn't buy it in the first place. For those of us who do like dragons fighting, there are still a few issues. The game sometimes chooses words out of the wrong genre: 'ablative' is very much a SF term, which breaks the mindset of a fantasy game; 'breakable' armor might have been a better word. There are a fair number of editing problems, mostly spellchecker-resistant mistakes (using 'form' for 'from' or vice versa), and a few "See Page XX". The art isn't very good considering how easy it is to find excellent amateur artists who love to draw dragons. Some of the organization is poor: terms are sometimes defined three pages after they're used, or, in the case of "Agility Check", sixty pages. There's no index, either. The game does use standard terminology (except that 'Turn' is shorter than 'Round'), so I knew that an Agility Check was based on Agility -- but I didn't know whether it was, say, a number of dice equal to your Agility rolled against some target, or some number of dice rolled against your Agility. This wasn't a problem for understanding the game, but it did annoy me the first time I actually tried to do a fight and had to figure out how to do it. (As an aside: if you turned the elves into ninja and filed off a couple serial numbers, you could use Battle Dragon as an excellent kaiju combat game. You could, for example, build Mothra -- arguably the least draconic of the kaiju -- as a Mystic Dragon with butterfly wings and light- and electricity-based attacks. You could presumably modify almost any system to do so if you wanted, but Battle Dragon would take very few modifications, and those would be more style than substance.) It's a narrowly-focussed game, written by people who really love and understand their topic. I found it extremely satisfying: a very good execution of what it is.

Battle Dragons