Dragon Age Tabletop RPG Designer Diary #1

Green Ronin’s Chris Pramas has penned the first installment to a series of designer diaries about their upcoming Dragon Age tabletop RPG system. This first entry provides a little history on the project before tackling what sort of system we can expect:

The most important question was whether to design a new game system or use an existing one? The easy thing to do would have been to take one of our systems like A Song of Ice and Fire or True20 and adapt it to the world of Dragon Age. At Green Ronin, however, we take our licensed games seriously. We want to provide a tabletop experience that best captures the source material, be it the novels of George R.R. Martin or a computer game. So I had to assess Dragon Age and how it matched with our existing games.

Dragon Age: Origins uses a classic class and level system. That put A Song of Ice and Fire, a skill-based game without classes, out of the running right away. True20 looked better on first blush. Dragon Age: Origins has only three classes (mage, rogue, and warrior), as does True20 (adept, expert, and warrior). However, Dragon Age takes a more old school approach and True20 didn’t feel quite right. The powers system in particular was not a good match for magic in Dragon Age.

So fairly early in the process I decided that the game would best be served by designing a new system. I also decided I wanted to do it myself, as I was up for a game design challenge and had a lot of ideas percolating in my head about how to approach a new class and level game. I would draw inspiration from the computer game, but ultimately the tabletop RPG would be its own animal. What works for a computer game and what works for a tabletop game are not necessarily the same and first and foremost I wanted to be sure we made a great tabletop RPG.