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[Andraste_Reborn]

(First of all, forgive me if I'm posting this in the wrong place. It seemed like the best option available. I'm crossposting from the Green Ronin forum, but thought people here on the BioBoards might also be intersted.)

I’ve recently begun running a Dragon Age tabletop campaign, and I thought it might be a good idea to keep a campaign log for once in my life. I hoped other people might find my notes interesting.  Player names have been changed to protect the innocent.

I’ve been addicted to the CRPG version of Dragon Age since it came out and have played DA2 five times already, and I’ve been planning to run this game since I heard Green Ronin was releasing a pen and paper version. As a fan of Mutants & Masterminds, the news that they were involved made my day, and I really like the AGE system so far.

My players aren’t fans of the setting themselves - one of them has played about half of DAO and may finish it eventually, although a bug that makes his game crash every time he enters combat isn’t encouraging him. Another recently enjoyed Mass Effect 2 and has talked about playing Dragon Age 2, but hasn’t bought it yet. The other two don’t play CRPGs at all, although they enjoyed Baldur’s Gate back in the day.  I think two years of listening to me talk about Thedas has rubbed off on them, though, because they seem to be following the lore fine so far.

This is not a group that takes its roleplaying too seriously, although they don’t mind having heavy situations thrown at them - imagine playing DA2 with a party of Sarcastic!Hawke, Varric, Isabela and Merrill and you would not be too far off.  (Before one session I had to clear the My Little Ponies off the floor and confiscate all the brushes so we could get started. ) Our group meets on Friday nights, so it’s nice to have a relatively straightforward rules set that won’t break anybody’s brain as they attempt arcane calculations at the end of the work week.

Last year I ran a few test sessions with pre-generated characters  to see what everybody thought of the rules, which went pretty well. (Except the time a player completely derailed The Dalish Curse by going on a spontaneous murder spree.  Needless to say, I did not invite him to join my current game.) I was holding out for Set Two before starting a real campaign, though, and now I've finally  managed to round up four friends from my larger gaming group who liked the game well enough and had time to make an ongoing commitment.

My players weren’t very enthused about the random character generation, but I was delighted to do things that way.  I have made characters with these people before, and some of them take forever about it.  (Part of the problem is that my friend Elle is bad with numbers. Really, really bad. It once took us three weeks to make her a Mutants & Masterminds character because she kept changing her mind about what powers she wanted, and then she would have to add it up all over again.)  I let them roll their dice eight times and then assign the numbers to stats, and it only took two hours for everyone to have a workable Level One character. The random character creation system really helped mitigate the problem of players getting hung up on minor choices, and I pointed out that there would be plenty of opportunity for them to customize as they levelled.

I decided that I wanted to start the campaign with the characters around level five. Partly this was because the players are more used to systems where they get to be powerful from the beginning, chiefly Big Eyes, Small Mouth and Vampire: The Masquerade. They’ve all played low-level D&D in the past and hated it, so I wanted to get them past the stage where you can get killed by Blight Rats as quickly as possible. The other reason is that I’m basing this campaign around the Grey Wardens. I want them to join as soon as possible, and the Wardens don’t recruit n00bs.

However, one of the fun parts of DAO was playing out your character’s origin story, and I wanted my players to have a similar experience. I decided that I would begin the campaign by running each character through a short solo scenario detailing their first adventure. Well, the scenarios were meant to be short. Not all of them have ended up that way, as my campaign notes will reveal. The other players didn’t mind sitting around providing a running commentary while one person played.

Anyway, after character creation, we had:

Gorenzo, an Antivan pirate warrior.
Auduna, a surface dwarf rogue from Kirkwall.
Ashling, a Ferelden Circle Mage.
Gwenthiel, a Dalish Keeper apprentice whose name I think I’m misspelling.

Next time: Ashling undertakes her Harrowing. The GM is bribed with icecream.