Dragonbane Readthrough, Part Three

As mentioned in my previous posts about Dragonbane, Skills are at the very heart of Dragonbane’s engine.

It is hence no surprise that the third chapter, Skills, doesn’t start with a skill list but with detailed explanations as to how skill rolls are resolved.

In a nutshell, the Dragonbane engine is the Basic Role-Playing (BRP) System, but with a D20 instead of a D100, i.e., everything is divided by 5, so that the Characteristics are consistent with the skill values– kind of the opposite of what CoC 7th edition did.

This entails some simplifications: rolling a 1 is a critical, and rolling a 20 is a fumble; no complex computations of what is or isn’t a critical/a fumble any longer.

Instead of penalties/bonuses expressed in terms of negative/positive modifiers to the skill value, Dragonbane has a system of banes and boons. A bane is when you roll two D20s and keep the highest roll. A boon is when you roll two D20s and keep the lowest roll.

At first I thought this was a blatant rip-off from D&D 5th edition’s advantages and disadvantages. Well, maybe it is, but it has been skilfully blended into Dragonbane’s underlying BRP engine and I suspect it works marvellously (more about this later).

You can also push a roll, but this works quite differently from CoC 7th edition: you simply re-roll and, irrespective of whether the re-roll was successful or unsuccessful, you get a condition on one of your Characteristics: all further rolls on skills whose base chance is based on said Characteristic get a bane until your next stretch rest.

Then we get to the list of the core skills, all 30 of them (of which 10 are weapon skills). This is somewhat like Mythras’s standard skills, and about half the number of the core skills in BRP/RuneQuest (and yet I do not really feel like anything important is missing).

The list of the core skills is followed by the list of the heroic abilities. There are 44 heroic abilities, and they are extremely diverse: some of them read like hugely specialised skills (e.g., Backstabbing), some others are quasi-magical (à la Sense Assassin in RuneQuest), some others are a one-off benefit (e.g., Robust, which gives you +2 starting HPs), and some others give bonuses to a single core skill (e.g., Hard to Catch, which gives a boon to Evade rolls).

I also quite like these heroic abilities. Not that they are anything revolutionary (if I remember them correctly, the legendary abilities from Mongoose RuneQuest worked in a similar way), but they are a nice way to add, er, heroic skills to your game without having a looooong skill list on the character sheet– a common criticism levelled against BRP/RuneQuest [which I have never understood in the first place; if you think there are too many skills, just remove the ones you feel are unnecessary!].

I can also imagine adapting Dragonbane to the world of Glorantha, and instead of giving PCs heroic abilities based on their profession, giving them based on the cult they belong to, e.g., the already-mentioned Sense Assassin.