Dragon Age Rules

Basics

So, it looks pretty straightforward as a system, if I am honest. The basics, at least. I do believe that, from what I have read in the past, there is one major innovation in the AGE system and I will get to that later. For now, let’s just get a grip of the basis of the whole thing, ability tests.

Ability tests

You need to roll an ability test to do any sort of action in the game. In general, you can try to do anything, even if you don’t have the appropriate ability focus, which is kind of like a skill or proficiency in D&D and similar games. Sometimes, the fiction of the game or the situation might require you to have a particular ability focus to even attempt a roll, but this seems to be the exception and not the rule.

Anyway, the way it works out is you roll 3d6 when you want to try to do something. One of these dice needs to be identified as the Dragon Die, more on that later. Then you add the ability you are rolling and another 2 if you have the right focus.

3d6 + Ability + 2 for Focus

Obviously, the intention is to roll high. The GM sets a Target Number depending on difficulty and circumstances. The higher that number is, the harder the action is. If you roll the Target Number or higher, you succeed. Simple enough.

They identify the Opposed Test as a separate type in the rules but essentially they work the same way, except, instead of having a Target Number, both characters roll their opposing ability tests to see who rolls higher. Also, if your scores are tied, you use the number on the Dragon Die to decide who wins.

It also makes it clear that you will need to use tests, in some situations, as if they are saving throws. So, you would make a Dexterity test to avoid falling off an unexpected cliff. That sort of thing.

There is a short section here on degrees of success. But, honestly, it doesn’t make an awful lot of sense and I would be loath to include it. Essentially, it seems to be a narrative tool, only. It allows you to show off how well you succeeded in a test, or how you only just scraped by. You do this by referring to the result on the Dragon Die. The higher the Dragon Die roll, the more spectacular the action. But, from my point of view, it’s still a success and, if you want to see how well a character did in their success, can’t you just look at the number you beat the Target Number by? (Since I wrote this, I was chatting with a mutual on Instagram, @otherstuffrpg about this very subject. They were a big fan of this mechanic! They felt it was a unique aspect of the rules that added a lot to the game. It might be one of those things that comes alive in play.)

Time and Actions

So, time is explicitly divided into Narrative Time and Action Time. It’s pretty much always Narrative Time until the Action starts, is more or less how they put it in the book. There’s not a lot to explore regarding Narrative Time, to be honest.

Action Time happens when you get into any scene that requires the rolling of initiative. Once that happens you are dealing with rounds. Each round is 15 seconds. Within a round you can take one Major Action and one Minor Action or two minor actions. There is a list of major and minor actions that are possible within a round. Major ones include stuff like All-out Attack, Heal, Melee Attack and Ranged Attack. Meanwhile, Minor Action examples are Aim, Guard Up, Ready and Press the Attack. I’m not going to get into the description of each and every action. Suffice it to say there is quite a lot of detail here. I imagine a cheat-sheet would be all but essential at the table to help players remember what they can do in a round and how each action works.

Initiative is sorted by everyone making a Dexterity (Initiative) roll. Ties are broken by the result on the Dragon Die and only PCs and major NPCs get their own individual initiative rolls. Minor NPCs act together in a group. You only roll initiative at the top of an encounter, not every turn.

Combat

I realise I already started the combat stuff above but that is the way it’s presented in the book. Also, it does suggest that the initiative and Action Time rules can be used in any situation that could be an action scene in a movie. You could lump chases, hunts, and other similar activities in there too.

Anyway, here’s how you do violence in Dragon Age:

• Make and attack roll. That’s a test using the ability associated with your weapon type, Strength or Dexterity.
• Add any bonuses from focuses, magic etc
• Compare the result to your enemy’s Defense rating
• If your roll is equal to or higher than that Defense rating, you hit! Well done!
• Then you inflict damage. Everyone’s favourite part
• You roll the damage dice of your weapon and add the relevant ability to it. This is usually Strength, but, interestingly, you add your Perception score to a ranged attack roll, rather than your Dexterity.
• If your attack is Penetrating skip this step, otherwise, subtract your opponents armour rating from the damage roll
• The result is the damage you do to the enemy’s Health

@Otherstuffrpg suggested an interesting house rule for damage, which I thought was a pretty fun way to speed up combat a little and beef up the Dragon Die. Instead of rolling damage for every hit, you take the result of the Dragon die and add a +4 for each damage die your weapon normally has. So, if you roll a 3 on your Dragon Die on your attack roll and you are using a longsword, which normally does 2d6 damage, you get 11 damage, 3 + 4 + 4 (plus whatever other miscellaneous bonuses you might have.) Sounds good, right?

There are a bunch of other rules around how you deal with dying characters, pulling killing plows and coups-de-grace but I am not going to get into them here. Most of them are the sorts of things you are more likely to tackle using your own judgement at as a GM anyway.

Stunts

This is the part I was most interested in getting to. It is also the mechanic that I feel provides the most uniqueness to the system, was I hinted at earlier.

Here, I am only referring to Combat Stunts but the game has Exploration, Roleplaying and Magic Stunts too, which is interesting.

Essentially, in combat, if you roll doubles on any of your dice in your attack roll, you get Stunt Points. You get a number of Stunt Points equal to the number on your Dragon Die, so, you want to roll high on that too. If you want to do a stunt, you have to use those points immediately or they disappear. Now, different stunts cost different numbers of points. There is a table of stunts and their SP costs.

You can see from the table that it includes some pretty cool little tricks and actions. I particularly like the Set Up one, that allows you to help another PC on the battlefield and Seize the Initiative, which means you literally move to the top of the initiative table.

But, when I first heard about stunts I was imagining something a lot more freeform. I guess, even when restricted to the items on this table, you are relatively free to describe how you achieve the results. I think I would almost certainly play stunts much looser at the table, allowing players to come up with their own stunts on the fly and assigning the required stunt points to what they are trying to do.

Healing

You can recover a few Health points by taking a Breather, like a five minute break, you can recover more by sleeping for a solid 6 hours or you can gain some back instantly by using the Heal action or the wizard spell of the same name.

Magic

I am skipping the chapters on focuses, talents, specialisations and equipment, mainly because I touched on them in the character creation post, but also because I just want to get to the section on Magic.

Magic in Dragon Age the video games, while not necessarily very different o to other games in how it is presented on screen, is such an interesting and integral part of the lore and story of the setting. With most mages being controlled by the Chantry, or church, due to their volatility and the potential for them to become possessed by demons and turned into violent abominations, you have a fascinating dynamic in place already. If you then throw in the apostate mages on the run for the chantry and their enforcers, the Templars, the existence of the Magocracy in the Tevinter Imperium and the fully enslaved and tightly controlled magic users of the Qunari, things get pretty explosive. It is always at the centre of the stories in Dragon Age games and I am hoping they have retained a lot of that flavour here.

The chapter on Magic does take quite a few pages to cement your understanding of the subject in the setting, which is good, although, once again, potentially a bit too much for the beginner.

It then gets into the rules, starting by suggesting several basic mage builds that equate largely to those from the video games, Creation Mage, Entropy Mage, Spirit Mage etc. These are essentially just the selection of three spells that you should start off with if you have a preference for the type of magic you would like your mage to cast.

Mana

We then get into Mana Points. Once again, I got into this a little during character creation. A mage gets a 10 + Magic + 1d6 MP to start. You have to spend MP to cast spells. Each spell has a set cost but this cost can be increased if you are wearing armour, the heavier the armour, the higher the cost. Once you run out of MP, you are done casting spells until you recover some. Resting/meditation or sleeping will regain you some or all of your MP. Pretty straightforward there.

Casting Spells

You have to make a Magic ability test to cast any spell. Every spell will have a Target Number in the spell block and you have to hit that number or the spell fizzles, taking your mana with it. This seems pretty rough. You only have so many MP and even if your spell fails you lose them. This smacks of the spell casting rules in Dungeon Crawl Classics. There are even a number of tables in here describing specific Spell Stunts and Magical Mishaps that might happen depending on the results of your rolls. Magical Mishaps happen on a failed casting roll where the Dragon Die shows a 1. Here’s the table:

You can see there, that the mage risks becoming an abomination on a roll of 6!

Spellpower

This is another one of those rules that makes me wonder why they have bothered with it. Some spells will require a character to make a test against your Spellpower. Now your Spellpower is calculated like this:

10 + Magic + Focus (if applicable)

So, it is not a constant, like a D&D magic user’s Spell Save DC. What I don’t understand is, why not just use the roll you made to cast the spell and make your opponent roll against that? This whole Spellpower business seems like an unnecessary mechanic.

Spell Stunts

These work just like Combat Stunts. If you roll doubles on your spell casting test, you get the number of spell stunt points that shows on the Dragon Die. You have to use them straight away and you do so by spending them according to the cost of the spell stunt. See the table below:

I really like Fast Casting and Imposing Casting. No surprise really since they are the most powerful.

There are also Spell Stunt tables for each type of magic, like Creation, Primal, Spirit etc. And, if you want, you can include the optional Advanced Spell Stunts but only at higher levels.

I like the stunts a lot. It feels like something really special that I could imagine players hoping and praying for sometimes. I can imagine the burst of excitement at the table whenever doubles are rolled!

Spells

The spells themselves, I am not going to get into. I think it’s enough to state that the spells accurately reflect those presented in the video games. As a piece of flavour and lore, I really appreciate that. Spells like, Death Magic, Crushing Prison, Frost Weapons and others are very evocative of the Dragon Age games for me so I am glad they have chosen to stick so closely to them.

Also, the most iconic of the magic specialisations in Dragon Age, Blood Magic, is very much an option here, but to emphasise its otherness, the Blood Magic spells have all been listed separately. They’re pretty horrific, most of them, too.

Although there is no level requirement for the spells, as such, many of them have another spell as a requirement. I like this as it will force mage players to take a certain path through the spell lists if they want powerful, top tier ones. Just like in the video games, once again.

Conclusion

So, thems the rules for Dragon Age, pretty much. They are not as crunchy as I was expecting given the size of the tome but there are definitely a few mechanics that I would probably just not use. I would also definitely consider @Otherstuffrpg’s home-brew damage rules.
I am a fan of the stunt mechanic overall, but I would probably be quite happy to allow a lot of improvisation of stunts at the table too.

I didn’t expect this, but getting to grips with the rules has made me excited to play it!

How about you, dear reader, have you ever played this game? Would you be interested to give it a try now that you know a bit more about the rules?