RPGnet : The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Donjon is an interesting little creator-owned game produced by Clinton R Nixon, one of the guys over at The Forge (a site that focuses on “indie” RPGs), and available from his Anvilwerks site. You pay $10.00 through PayPal and he emails details of how to download the PDFs.

Yes, this would have been better as a playtest review, but I want to write it now. Never whinge at a man who’s striking while the iron is hot. If I get to play it I’ll add a forum post.

The Big Idea

What you get is a system and a style of play. It’s a homage to Dungeons & Dragons – though you could use it for other stuff, like sci-fi or horror, it takes on a lot of the core concepts from D&D like classes, levels, experience and – crucially – killing things and taking their stuff. It’s very up-front about encouraging this old-school style of play for simple fun. However, it makes two big changes.

First, it throws away the obsession with detail, particularly detail-in-advance. It replaces this with player creativity and rules for pulling stuff out of the air when you need it. There are no predefined lists of classes and races and their abilities – the player identifies what they want to play and comes up with the abilities to suit (there are no predefined skills either). There are no spell lists – you decide what effect you want when you cast it, within general areas of ability. There are no lists of fancy combat options – you can narrate them as you go. Nor are there long lists of weapons and equipment.

Second, it enables players to co-create the story more than the usual model where they just respond to what the GM throws at them. This is a feature of the mechanics, which give you an output in terms of successes. Each success lets you either establish one fact which is worked into the story or add one die to a subsequent roll. Overall success on the roll also affects the story. For example, you’re playing a paladin with the ability to Detect Evil, and you make a roll. If you succeed, there is Evil. You could then use your successes to establish facts about it, like “It’s a group of ghouls” and “They’ve cornered a terrified man”. If a player fails a roll the GM has successes, and these can be used in a similar way. (“One of the orcs finds the Phial of Galadriel and takes it to brighten his cave.”)

“This game is different than what you’re probably used to – if you’re a hard-core dungeon crawling machine, you’ve probably not seen mechanics that allow players to drive the situation like these. If you’re some sort of narrativist bleeding-edge pansy that’s used to having players run everything, you’ve probably not had the chance to wallow in the blood of your enemies like this.”

The chapter on running the game gives some help with this rather different style, though I think the only way to really “get” it would be to have a go. Adventures have a simple structure – start in “town”, get sent somewhere on some mission, beat the Big Bad (a technical game term), grab the loot and return as triumphant heroes and/or wealthy psychopaths. There’s a 12-page sample adventure – more than half of this is monster stats, which is handy for showing how to do it. It’s a simple and slightly whimsical quest into a dangerous area to retrieve a stolen whatnot.

More mechanics

Character definition is through a set of six attributes with funny names common to all characters (they’re basically the D&D attributes), and a set of “abilities” which are made up for each character. Examples: Fight With Sword, Lie Convincingly, Wild Animal Lore. They can also be magical stuff like Breathing Fire or Eating Rocks.

Basic resolution is an opposed roll with pools of d20s. In fact, the back cover blurb boasts that it is “guaranteed to have more d20s than any other game system”. This is true. A pool of 10 dice is not unusually large, and if characters get up to high levels they could be rolling over 20 regularly. This is a potential problem, because most people don’t have vast numbers of d20s. You’d have to pool your dice, one set for the players and one for the GM. You’re at liberty to use other die types, but it’ll make resolution outcomes screwier.

Anyway, the player rolls a pool of attribute ability other bits, and the GM rolls a pool based on the opponent’s ability or the difficulty of the task. The one with the highest result on one of their dice wins, and gets one success for each die that exceeds the other’s highest result. There’s provision for ties and stuff. Then, for most rolls (there are actually lots of exceptions) each success is a fact or a die. One roll can give its successes as bonus dice on a subsequent roll – the example given is Jumping across a wide ravine by Climbing out along a tree on the edge first. It’s interesting to note that when the player gives facts the GM narrates what happens, but when the player fails and the GM gets to set facts the player narrates what happens. The GM can rein in excesses if necessary (for instance if players try to get benefit out of a failure).

Items are rated by abilities in the same way as characters, and have a “Worth” linked to this. Instead of putting effort into long lists of potential shopping and keeping track of 7 different kinds of metal pieces, you have ratings for Wealth and Provisions. Wealth reflects your cash (on an exponential rather than linear scale) and you use chunks of it for rolls to buy stuff. If you come across more Wealth you roll to see whether it’s enough to increase your score. Provisions reflects how well stuffed your backpack is, and if you want to pull some item out in play you spend bits of it to roll to see whether you have that thing. If you loot the body of a fallen foe you say whether you’re looking for wealth or a specific item, then roll to see if you get it. A character can only have a very limited number of permanent possessions (though it increases with levels), and all others are crossed off at the start of a new adventure. In other words, Stuff follows Play rather than dominating it. There are rules for modelling a “town” (any moderately safe starting location) in terms of what kind of stuff is available and how pricey it is.

Magic is an ability like any other, and characters that can cast spells have a number of magic words (like “fiery”, “cloud” or “madness”). To cast, you spend an action gathering magic power (with a roll that provides bonus dice for the cast) then release it into an effect based on one or more of your words. Extending the effect to lots of targets or a long duration costs dice, making the magnitude of effect less. You can cast as many spells as you want, but if you spend extra time gathering power for a big spell you strain yourself and are less effective for the rest of the day.

Combat is resolved in “flurries”, subtly different from rounds, in which characters can take rather a lot of actions. For initiative you roll a pool of attribute level possible bonuses and act on the phases indicated by the dice as the GM counts down from 20 (a bit like 7th Sea). You have a basic chance to defend against any attack and can defend actively for a better one; on a hit there’s another roll of damage against soak. There’s actually a fair bit of dice rolling involved here, and it is resolved blow-by-blow rather than for the whole encounter at once as in some narrative-style games. The analogue of Hit Points is Flesh Wounds. When an NPC runs out of these they’re down and out, but when a PC runs out they just become vulnerable to being knocked out by a special damage result. A character dies only when knocked out and deliberately finished off. You can also do damage to attributes, making it harder for an opponent to do stuff (like a leg strike to reduce agility).

Those who study such things might find it interesting that players only get opportunities to control the story when the results of random rolls favour them. There is no reliable pool of points to draw on when you think it’s important. The closest you get is choosing to spend time using one ability to boost another. However, it should be very good at enabling players to do the kinds of things they want, given that they have total free choice of abilities and can then use some of those to summon encounters at will. If a player is bored and wants enemies to fight, they just have to succeed in listening at the next door and they can nominate their own opposition. If the party needs a healing potion they can try to find one on the next orc they fell.

Presentation

On purchasing the game you get access to three files: a print-ready version, a version with simplified layout for reading on screen, and the front and back covers. This review’s based on the print version.

The last few pages have a couple of ads for other games and two appendices where Clinton gives tips on getting a game published cheaply and lists some websites and creator-owned games that he likes. Those are decent reading, but a bit tangential. The game content comes to about 75 pages.

It’s well written, in an engaging and often wickedly humorous style that kept me reading through. I often lose steam in the middle of a game book, so keeping it short and snappy is a plus point. Layout is nice and clear – single column text in a decent size, with an attractive page border. Illustrations are sprinkled around – it’s not high art, but decent stuff in a cartoony style very reminiscent of old D&D and Tunnels and Trolls books.

The Horrible Spiders of Niggle

The names of attributes are chosen for eccentricity: Virility (strength), Cerebrality, Discernment, Adroitness (agility), Wherewithal (toughness) and Sociality. The author says you don’t have to play for laughs, but these would make a serious atmosphere difficult. One isn’t a “real” word, and most are uncommon and/or used here in an unusual way. Players may find it difficult to remember what they mean, particularly if they don’t have great vocabularies.

There are, as always, a few typos and other bloopers. (For instance, repeated references to ending the adventure with a “climatic encounter”, which I envisaged as fighting an angry rainstorm.) Breaking words with hyphenation at the end of a line is something I dislike.

A stronger reason why another editing pass would have been good is the way things are explained. In a few cases I found it difficult to catch something, and stuff is sometimes used before it has been introduced properly. For instance, the chapter on buying and selling items, which requires rolls, comes before the one on general task resolution – although some basics are given earlier, I think this is probably a mistake. (It’s also not stated explicitly whether you start out with any gear at all or have to buy everything you want before setting off – though it seems to be the latter.) When I’d finished reading through it made sense, though I’d need to look again before running. The game is asking people to think in a way they may not be used to, so this kind of thing is important.

Conclusion

This looks like a really fun little game, with mechanics that automatically mould it to the playing experience people want and opportunities for everyone to contribute their creativity to the story. There might be a bit of a hump to get over before you “get” it, and the style won’t suit all players. There’s also a hump in terms of assembling all the damn dice you’ll need.

Another editing pass to clarify things a bit more would have made it even better. I think a Donjon Master’s Screen would be nice: 1-2 pages collecting together the various tables used, perhaps with short reminders of what’s rolled for what, which can be printed out to save crazed page-flipping in play.