Roll Player Adventures
About
A "Choose Your own Adventure" Book crossed with Yahtzee. A cooperative game where you work together over a set of adventures to complete an overarching story. With 11 separate adventure books each taking from 2-3 hours you should get plenty of play time.
So how about a simplified example of how this works?
Move your player to a space on the map. The map will have a letter and number. Find the letter and number in the Adventure Book you are playing read the description. Something like "You encounter a Troll on a bridge. If you want to fight the Troll skip to page 24. If you want to talk to the Troll skip to page 34". If you fight you will likely be rolling red colored dice while if you talk you might be rolling Purple dice. Fighters can modify red dice and Thieves Purple, so you will want to choose options that play to your parties strengths.
The story continues from adventure book to adventure book telling a fast fantasy story of a Kingdom. Your characters will get new abilities along the way and the story will have the plot twists that you expect.
There are even some choices that will come back to you for good or ill. Did you decide to help the thief get away from the police? If you did the police in the future might not help you, but the thieves guild might.
House Rules
This game can use a bunch of them.
General
- On a rest regain 4 Fatigue for each Experience point spent instead of rolling a die
- Using an item costs Zero Fatigue
- If no item in a Market has a cost (after discounts) <5, pull all new items if you have <5 gold
- At the end of Adventure 1: Increase your experience to 9 if you are below 9
- Adventure 2: Ignore any directions to lose an item
Start of the Game: Role Play
One of complaints many people including myself have about the "role playing" aspect of the game is that it lacks a clear direction and objective. After playing the game you can see that the Author intended you to choose a faction and stick with it. Unfortunately there is very little reason for doing so. My suggestion is to choose one of the following Starting Backgrounds.
The Scarlet Door
You are a member of the Kings guard, just like your father and your fathers father before him. Honor and Duty are Life itself. While at times it may be difficult, allegiance to the crown will eventually lead you to greatness.
Kings Guard
Joining the Kings guard was always more of way to see more of the world than a higher calling. The mysteries of the world are what call you. Magic and secrets are your life's blood. For the time being these two paths walk the same line but who knows what the future holds.
The Dragul
The Kings Guard? What a bunch of hypocrites. You have seen the evil they have done in the name of peace. You are secretly a Dragul double agent . Your people were driven from their lands and killed just to satisfy the ego of some mad king. You have bid your time for years just waiting. If you ever get close enough to the king you would gladly put a knife in his back.
Start of the game: Choosing a Character
Each of the characters has a deferent ability and there is definitely a difference in how strong they are. I suggest the Wizard and the Warrior as the best starting characters.
Thoughts
Tim:
4/5 Very Good with some warnings
It's complicated. It's a fun and unique story that has many thing to like. It also has a few major problems only some of which can be fixed by house rules.
The largest issue by far is that the game suffers from the snowball effect. The more encounters you win, the more items you get to help you win encounters. Likewise, the more encounters you lose, the more difficult it is to win the next encounter. By about adventure 4 or 5 you will have either gained enough power to be unstoppable, or lost so much progress you can never recover.
You need to be comfortable with the occasional House Override. The Story Books are complicated and can "break" causing you to get in an endless loop, or kill your entire party permanently losing all of your progress, or even setting you back so far that you can never recover for the next adventure. If that happens you need to be ok with just saying "We are just going to ignore that". Otherwise you are just going to get frustrated.
So if you are looking for a story driven game, I would recommend. If you are looking for something more tactics heavy, this may not be your cup of tea.
Laura:
3.5/5
I really enjoyed the story element but wished some of the decisions were better tipped off. Several times the decision points felt like "Here's a group you know nothing about. Would you like to join them or the group you learned very little about, but might not be good?" "Would you rather help person X or person Y?" You know helping one or the other will change your favor with groups, but you don't know which one this person has an alliance to. I absolutely enjoyed the stories building upon each other, but some of the ties seemed a bit weak or confusing. I also would have made the combat a little harder after a certain level. After reaching mid-game, we rarely lost the first round of combat, and we might not have lost an encounter past module 5 or 6. I would also allow for a second round for the skill check, as we often opted the combat route than skill check as it allowed to play more toward our strengths and have three rounds of combat rather than one round for a skill check.
7-20-2022