Thoughts on DragonLance Fifth Age

​There were several reasons compelling me to pick up a copy of TSR’s 1996 DragonLance Fifth Age game. The original trilogy of novels holds great nostalgic value for me.  While I don’t think I ever played any of the D&D modules from the ‘80s, I owned a few and enjoyed reading them.  I’m also a sucker for card games and love to see how RPGs utilize cards instead of dice.  That this game used a custom deck was all the more intriguing.  And finally, I heard great things about the expression of the fate deck in the Marvel version of the system and wanted to be able to compare the two iterations.  All these things sent me to ebay to hunt down a reasonably-priced edition of the boxed set.
 
While my excitement was high, my expectations were actually quite low.  I am entirely immersed in the indie side of TTRPGs and have been for six years.  Neither D&D nor fantasy games call to me these days.  I expected to dig through the rules and find a gem or two worth admiring.  To that end, I was glad to see that the main rule book is digest-sized and a mere 128 pages.  But what I found there surprised and delighted me well beyond my expectations.  Many parts of the game’s rules and design read as early iterations of ideas the indie design scene worked on throughout the first decade of this century.
 
First, the GM and their characters don’t engage directly with the mechanisms of play and resolution.  If an NPC attacks or acts on a PC, then the game looks to the PC’s reaction to determine the success or failure of that NPC’s action.  We see this today in games like Apocalypse World, where the MC doesn’t roll dice, facing all the mechanical interactions toward the players.  Apocalypse World does so (in part) to center the PCs as protagonists, putting them in the driver’s seat of the narrative as it unfolds.  While DragonLance Fifth Age still positions the GM, literally, as the “Narrator,” giving the Narrator the responsibility of the “plot,” an unfortunate convention that the game does not escape, the designers specifically center the PCs as actors and reactors because they are “heroes,” and regardless of what happens within the narrative, it is their story.
 
To describe the other early inventions at the core of this game, I need to take a moment to explain its central mechanics.  At the heart of play is the Fate Deck.  The Fate Deck is made up of 8 suits with values 1 through 9, and a ninth suit with values 1 through 10, making the deck of total of 82 cards.  Each of the main suits correspond to an “ability” score on the PC character sheet.  The ability are split evenly between physical and mental abilities, and then halved again within each of those divisions.  So the physical abilities are divided into coordination and physique, and the mental abilities are divided into intellect and essence.  Coordination is made up of agility and dexterity, physique is made up of endurance and strength, intellect is made up of reason and perception, and essence is made up of spirit and presence.  While each of those 8 abilities can be used as the basis of a character action, they are paired up so as to be active and reactive.  For example, if you are making an attack with your sword, you will use your strength; if you are responding to an attack by an enemy wielding a sword, you will use your endurance.  Likewise, if you are using you are making a magical attack, you will use your reason; if you are resisting a magical attack, you will use your perception.  Each of these abilities will have a starting value of 1 through 10, with 5 considered the human average.
 
Players have a hand of cards at any time, all drawn from the same Fate Deck.  The size of their hand is determined by their “reputation,” which represents their experience as heroes.  The more experienced the hero, the more resourceful they are.  Starting characters often give their players a hand size between 2 and 5 cards.  When a player declares that their character is taking an action, and the Narrator says that such an action has the potential for failure, they turn to the cards.  First, they determine what suit is appropriate for the action.  Climbing a wall might require strength. Moving across a narrow ledge might require agility.  Then the Narrator determines a difficulty rating for the action.  The difficulties range from easy to impossible, and they move in 4-point increments.  So an easy action requires a 4, an average action an 8, a challenging action a 12, all the way up to an impossible action requiring a 24.  The player than plays one card from their hand, adds the value of that card to their ability score, and compares that totaled number to the difficulty number.  If they meet or exceed the difficulty rating, they succeed in their action.  So, if a player’s character has an ability with a score of 8, they can succeed in an average action without playing any card.  When an action is opposed, then the difficulty rating is beefed up by the ability score of the thing opposing the action.  So let’s say you’re fighting an ogre.  Swinging your sword is an easy action, giving it a difficulty rating of 4.  But an ogre’s physique ability is 13, so that gets added to the 4, giving you a total of 17 to hit and damage the ogre.  If you have a strength of 9, you’d better have an 8, 9, or 10 in your hand to land that blow.  And when the ogre swings at you, you can try to dodge his club, which is an easy action, again a 4, which is added to the ogre’s 13, again giving you a target number of 17.  Now you look at your agility score (for dodging) and play a card to add to it.
 
The final element to consider in these actions is the suit of the card you played.  It the suit of the card matches the ability you are using to make your action, then that suit is considered trump and you get a bonus.  In the examples above, if you play a card of the strength suit to hit the ogre, or the agility suit to dodge the ogre, you have played trump.  When you play a trump card, you get to flip over the top card of the Fate Deck and add the value of that card to your action’s total.  Better yet, if the flipped card is also trump, you can flip the next card as well, and keep doing so until you hit a non-trump card.  This method allows characters to achieve seemingly impossible tasks, although the odds are never in their favor.  Still, if you have the 9 in your trump suit, you will draw an average of 4.5—let’s just call it a 4, which means that you have 13.  If your basic ability is high, you can get just shy of impossible at 24.
 
You may have noticed that I haven’t yet spoken of the ninth suit, the one that doesn’t correspond to an ability score.  That suit is the suit of Dragons.  It offers more power by going higher than all the other suits, to 10, but it also threatens to harm you.  If trump allows for critical successes, then the Dragon suit allows for critical failures, or what the game gently calls a “mishap.”  When you fail an action in which you played a card of the Dragon suit, the Narrator is given permission to make your failure particularly painful.
 
Whenever you play a card, you immediately draw a new card, so you won’t run out of cards by taking actions.  Bigger hands of cards help by giving you more options and access to greater odds of having a high card or a trump card in the action you’re taking, or to avoid being forced to play a Dragon card when failure looms, which is how hand size represents experience and resourcefulness.
 
To return then to the innovations of the game, now that you understand the basic mechanics, actions are essentially player-facing moves, reminiscent once again of Apocalypse World.  The rule book lists a number of common actions, such as breaking down a door, telling a convincing lie, picking a lock, or intimidating someone.  When such a thing happens in the fiction, the players can turn to the move, see the typical difficulty, the typical ability used, the opposing ability if there is one, and the common fallout from mishaps.  The players are taught by the rulebook how to create their own actions, and adventure-specific actions come with each published adventure, just as an MC for Apocalypse World will create custom moves for locations or certain NPCs.  I was stunned by the similarities.  Of course, the actions in DragonLance are restrained by the idea that they can only denote success or failure, so actions are inherently less interesting and playful than Apocalypse World moves, which are interested in branching narrative paths that come out of any given move.  The other important difference is that Narrator’s are encouraged to keep hidden from the players the specific difficulty rating for the specific action at hand, whereas the targets and results of moves are apparent to all players.  This hidden information is intended to spice up gameplay by keeping players on the edge of their seat to know if they put forth enough effort to succeed at their task.  That doesn’t particularly appeal to me, but I can easily see how looking at your hand and seeing that you will either succeed or fail before a card is even played can suck the wind out of a moment of resolution.
 
Another cool achievement by the DragonLance designers is doing away with hit points altogether to measure your heroes health.  Instead, the designers take advantage of the affordance that the hand of cards provides.  When a hero sustains an injury, they must discard from their hand cards that total up to the damage taken.  These discarded cards are not redrawn until the character can heal up.  When a player has zero cards in their hand, the character is out of commission, passed out, dying, whatever.  This makes for interesting choices and a cool kind of death spiral in play.  If you need to discard 8 points of cards, and you have, say, 5 cards that are 2, 2, 4, 4, 8, you have a tough decision to make.  You can lose the 8, only be down one card, but have a fistful of mediocrity; you can ditch the two fours, keep three cards, one that is good and two that are woefully unimpressive; or you can throw the two twos and a four, be down three cards but have a strong card and a medium card left for the fight ahead.  The fewer cards then restrict both your ability to achieve and your ability to resist.  This feature reminds me of nothing so much as the dice penalty for injuries you see in Ron Edwards’s Sorcerer.  Bad wounds can have long and serious effects.
 
The cards mean that you can also stop keeping track of gold and silver coins.  DragonLance is not about delving in dungeons and scrounging for money.  It’s about heroics.  So instead of a place to count your currency, you have a wealth score that you can use like any other ability when attempting to buy things, like you see in Burning Wheel.  All of these achievements are impressive, I think, because they show that the designers knew what they wanted the game to be about and shaped their mechanics and procedures to reinforce that.  The pressure to follow traditional design is always strong, but I can imagine it was even more so for a fantasy game, especially one that began its creative life as a D&D module. 
 
I could go on and on.  I didn’t touch the magic system, which attempts to allow wizards and spiritualists to create extempore spells.  I didn’t talk about the elegance and ease of using weapons and armor in combat, keeping the math simple.  I didn’t talk about how all this simplicity allows the main rule book to include a 15-page bestiary (on digest-sized pages, remember) that covers just about everything you need.  I didn’t talk about the way the cards are used to help the Narrator get quick answers to questions about smaller things that the Narrator wants to declaim responsibility for but that the table still needs to know.
 
It’s not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a thoughtful game, a well-designed game, a focused game.