The tabletop hobby is so wide and covers so many genres that I would be remiss in covering only fantasy wargames. I've covered nautical wargames in the Golden Age of Sail before, and now I'm turning to another of my favorite style of games: Role Playing Games. I've played with a few different systems now, and while none of them are perfect I quite enjoy Dungeons and Dragons.
Now before people start asking me what edition I play, it's technically 5th edition but I'm not actually using the D&D rules, more the ideas and tools that RPGs provide to spice up my games of Age of Sigmar. The spirit of the game is what I was after, not the system and its crunch.
Now, I know that Soulbound exists, and I'm sure it's a fantastic game in its own right, but the problem I have is that I don't want to teach an entirely new game to my players. I'd rather jump right in with a few tweaks to the Age of Sigmar formula to work with a party of adventurers. Yes, you could probably use Warcry rules, but again, I'd have to teach a whole new system to my players.
My solution is a little more simple: I would customize warscrolls to make standard units more survivable and dynamic to play. I used the excellent custom Warscroll Designer by Runebrush, to create the new warscrolls, ensuring to leave some room for players to write in new abilities or items that the DM can give them. Obviously, this will take some work on the DMs part, but this can be completed in the standard Session 0 of D&D.
You want to make sure that you're player characters are survivable, so I gave everyone an increase in wounds to rectify the situation. For a feeling of progression, I started everyone off with basic troop units. I ended up creating 3 of these for my players: a saurus and 2 elves. If you want, you can start them all off as heroes, which usually have 5 wounds, allowing players to jump into the action early without dying. I kept to the basics, but still gave them some abilities like re-roll save rolls of 1 etc to make sure they could take at few punches.
Speaking of dying, I I took the idea from D&D of conditions and death rolls. So when a player lost all their wounds, the character would be knocked unconscious and they would get 3 chances to roll a 6 on a d6 to wake up with 1 wound remaining. Enemies could attack the unconscious player if there were no other players visible to that unit.
Now that I had the characters, I needed an adventure to take them on. While I was planning all of this, I happened upon a Black Friday deal, where the D&D Essentials Kit, shown above, was half off. At that price I couldn't say no, so I scooped it up and started molding it to the game of Age of Sigmar. The kit comes with a pre-written adventure, Dragon of Icespire Peak, which would serve as the basis of the game. It also came with handy reference cards, a map, and a DMs guide to running the adventure.
The role playing elements of the game came from this guide as well as the cards provided. This includes the story, combatants, items gained, and locations visited. The combat came from Age of Sigmar, essentially taking some of the skirmish rules but with different objectives and beefed up units. Turn-order, or initiative, was determined by rolling a d6 and adding the results to the movement characteristic of units. Unlike Age of Sigmar, once the turn order was established it stayed the same throughout. No double-turns here.
I know that some of this may seem confusing, but I will be cataloging the adventures of my party here, with examples of how the combat system adapted into the storyline. Stay tuned to see more, as well as how I learn from my mistakes and tweaks I make along the way to make the game run more smoothly.
Until then,
-The Space Dinosaur
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