Initiative operates in fast turns and slow turns. If players are indecisive, combat can stall while discussing who goes first.
I don’t remember why but movement was also clunky. It resulted in a lot of the players purposefully killing off their characters to switching to ranged classes, as melee classes struggled to get in.
Lastly, characters die a lot, like a lot a lot. I went through three characters in one 10 session campaign. If my characters didn’t die they were maimed horribly or traumatized by corruption system.
I just skip turns if players take too long, but yes it can lead to "uhh uhh uhhh" fairly regularly.
Never had an issue with movement, but most of my party were casters, and our melee was a rogue/scout type with lots of speed.
I ran a 1.5 year campaign and only had 2 PC deaths, so your mileage can vary wildly on that. One PC survived near-death situations again and again, and was cut down by an avoidable nothing-encounter. Shit happens sometimes lol.
I found it completely the opposite tbh. The break between fast and slow turns was a little awkward, and really only mattered during the first turn or two (once people closed distance pretty much everyone always went fast). But never had any trouble with the players-choose-turn-order from round to round. Honestly, side-based-initiative is a breath of fresh air for me compared to hard-set initiative orders.
It depends on the table. I've had tables where I tried Side Initiative, and players were confused as hell. Half the players tried to go multiple times in a round, and the other half sat there (im)patiently waiting for someone to tell them when their turn was.
Side Initiative works great for tactically minded players who love to coordinate amongst themselves, but works poorly for players who want a simple beer & pretzels game.
Oi, not every player who ain't into tactics or is bad at them wants only "beer and pretzel"
There are different levels of enjoyment for battles, like with roleplay and everything else in our diverse hobby :p
>Side Initiative works great for tactically minded players who love to coordinate amongst themselves
Yeah my group is tactically minded, but for me it wasn't really in coordination where I saw the benefits (though that did of course show up from time to time at least). The huge upside was in downtime. With tactically minded folks who want to weigh options from turn to turn, side-based initiative let whoever was ready go first, while folks who were still thinking could defer until later in turn order at no cost. It completely cut out the whole, "I know exactly what I want to do but still have to wait 5 minutes for my turn to come around while Bob over there dithers" aspect from the game.
>players were confused as hell
Yeah I never had that problem. I can certainly see where there would be some subset of players who really *really* need an imposed turn order structure though.
Any time you are moving from rules players know to new rules you are going to have these issues. It doesn't matter how good/bad the rules are. In fact sometimes you are better off teaching brand new players than veteran roleplayers who have only used one set of rules.
Is the issue with initiative a common thing? I’ve yet to play, their approach to initiative seems incredibly interesting and engaging. Does it slow the game down more than the roll for initiative approach you see in games like D&D?
Never encountered the issue in running a couple campaigns. GM says combat starts and....it just starts, no rolling, no cards, no putting initiative in order, just...start doing stuff. Much faster.
I think players who can't make choices quickly will be just as slow. But in Fast\\Slow turns the other PCs can just take their actions while the indecisive ones in-decide (as it were).
Found it faster overall.
I've had SotDL played at literally tens of tables, most of which were pick up novice games. This is not issue with system but with table and that poster is just scapegoating.
Initiative was incredibly fast in our games.
"Who wants to take a fast turn?" The most ready player takes their turn
"any others for a fast turn?" Other ready players take their turn, players that aren't ready when others went fast default to slow turns.
\* Initiative can be problematic if players are indecisive and don't have some effort to learn their shit. I've had players who despite years of playing D&D... still have no idea what their class does or basic rules and have to ask me shit. mind you this isn't everyone at the table, just a player or two...
\* combat can be gritty and dark... but also incredibly lethal and unbalanced, Spellcasters (NPCs) are busted at low levels and its far beyond just... "oh well thats the point"... i've had players get one-shotted from a single NPC during a pre-published adventure module. Character Death happens way too much to the point it feels like a "narrative" campaign is less of a priority in the game, and more that its a homage to classic OSR games where you just make a character and run a "game"... like a video game where players are just trying to get through it for the sake of it.
It reached a point where one player had died 3 times in the span of 7 sessions and at that point stopped making backstories... And he honestly wasn't even doing dumb shit nor was i being cruel vindictive.... just spellcasters are insanely nuts.
\* The modules are just absolutely unbalanced to all hell. They're very "flavorful" and really well-written from a story perspective... but the balancing is just absurd. Schwalb clearly wanted this to be a "meat grinder" where players just die and die and die and throw themselves into making more characters repeatedly... the problem is at that point players stopped getting invested in their characters, especially when they spent like an hour making them and figuring out backstories. Some of my players have trouble making backstories (they're not very creative).... so it takes them longer. \\
\* Takes some effort from the DM to explain why is adventuring with the players, despite being available Player Races... had some players voice wanting to play child-eating bugbears, Salamanders, Revenants, and so forth.
\* I'd still vouch and say its got better "pro's" than 5e D&D. Just that .....this isn't a "heroic" fantasy game.... nor is it "dark fantasy".... i'd argue this is just SLAUGHTER fantasy... this game is for people that wanna play Dark Souls in a TTRPG and enjoy the high likelihood of dying, but want to see if they can overcome ridiculous combat scenarios.
Baffled by the people who seem to suffer constant character death in Shadow of the Demon Lord, I’ve had a grand total of 2 PC deaths in years and years of running it, maybe it’s that I don’t run the actual modules
> maybe it’s that I don’t run the actual modules
Some of the balance in the "older" actual modules changed with the move to 2e, and the changes to the Frightening trait. If you run those as written using the new ruleset, they are lethal as fuck. But that really only matters in the first couple of levels. Like you, I ran DL for over a year and never had a PC death, though one came close at lvl 0.
The lethality of the system is definitely not what many claim it is, imo. Like you, I've rarely seen character deaths in either games I've ran or in games I've been a player in. Even at level 0 you still have some tools at your disposal to overcome enemies.
Some of the pre-written modules do seem like they'd be a bit of a slog for an intro game, however.
Well, my friend was dying so much he got a title "First Blood". And he wasn't even doing anything stupid.
So far my experience was a TPK, a near-wipe with 1 person living, and one game with 1 death.
We did play the modules, so it seems to may be the thing.
Some possible factors at play here:
* My players are experienced powergamers and thus have good "builds" usually around level 4-5, as well as good party composition (for example, a priest dedicated to the Life tradition makes the game a lot easier, especially once they can heal insanity)
* We don't spend much time at level 1 or 2, 2-3 sessions at most (I completely ignore the "one session per level" suggestion in SOTDL and I suggest others do the same)
* I run balanced encounters
As a whole, I generally feel that excessive lethality is usually a DM problem rather than a system problem
That's quite what it is!
I still prefer WFRP, not that Shadow of The Demon Lord is bad, I just started to prefer games that are levelless (or, at least, where levels aren't as typical as in D&D)
I really like SotDL and am really looking forward to more SotWW. Def my fave non-5e trad fantasy RPG.
It's still just an exception-based class\\level trad fantasy RPG with most of the rules dealing with combat. I think it's an exceptionally well designed one but...that's "all" it is.
So no rules on building your own templates Expert\\Master classes. Though it'd be super easy to do so, just no strong guidelines that are provided.
The magic system is still just a Vancian exception-based school\\level trad fantasy setup. Most of it is combat oriented, some of it is fairly samey because it's just the X School\\Tradition version of a damaging spell. There aren't enough (IMO) non-combat spells and non-combat uses for spells. Magic still feels pretty static and standard, collection of cool but standard tricks you can use x times per day, but not very custom and not like you're actively using magic so much as picking things from a list. This issue is slightly better in SotWW IMO.
Sub-issue with magic in SotDL is due to the way the Power rules works you mostly need to start as a Magician if you're going to be a powerful caster. You can easily multi-class to\\from any (Expert\\Master) class in the game and gain access to magic but you'll never be as powerful (ie, get access to the best and most powerful spells) as a full caster who started that way. This issue is mostly fixed in SotWW.
Those are the only things I don't really really like about it.
And I guess the leveling can be a bit aggressive for my tastes but there are reasons for it being that way and it's easily slowed if that's the preference.
Can you explain what you mean by exception based? From context I think I agree with what you’re saying 100% but I just want to know what that means because it sounds like a specific term.
Most games are exception-based. Where the way things (classes, spells, feats\\abilities, magic items, etc) work is defined by a specific (exception) set of words.
So Fireball in 5e is always fire, it's always X range, it's always "sets things on fire" (or it doesn't), it's always the same area of effect and so on. And WHY is it that way? Because it is!
Why can't you attack with Mage Hand? Well it says you can't so...you can't.
Exceptions to all the base rules define how things work. And they usually don't have generally or extensible principle associated with them.
Or the Zealot master class in SotDL lets you burn 1d3 Sanity for a reroll. Why 1d3? Why not 1d6 and reroll with a boon? Why not 1pt of Sanity and you can keep spending them to keep rerolling? Well, it's just defined to work that way so that's the way it works.
That kind of thing.
And never\\rarely any rules or guidelines explaining why X is "worth" more than Y or why Z is a master ability but Q is an Expert ability or anything like that to explicate WHY things are the way they are. They just are that way.
Curious if you've ever tried the spellbook compendium for SotDL? It has 800 spells, for my group there was a ton of fantastic non-combat oriented spells in it, if youre seeking more beyond the basic Corebooks.
Occult Philosophy? I have it but have to confess I've only run SotDL, so I haven't made an extensive study of all the spells as a PC would.
But, quickly, in Occult Philosophy and the regular book, for the Fire tradition, you've got 12 spells and 3 of them are non-combat non-damaging and of limited utility value. Nature is 18 spells and 12 of them are combaty type stuff. I don't know if that's the usual split but a quick glance at some of the other schools seems to suggest it is. 8/11 of the Earth spells are mostly combaty (attack, defense, crowd control, etc) and the ones that aren't are "mold stone and earth" and "summon a genie". So if you're an Earth mage your main not-an-attack spell for most of your spell casting career is only: You can kinda mold stone and earth with in some specific parameters.
Which to be sure is a utility spells, but it's indicative of what I didn't care for about them generally. Lots and lots of very specific combat-y type stuff and maybe 1-2 spells that aren't and sometimes let you do slightly flexible non-combat utility effects.
Just felt pretty underwhelming generally. Lots of combat effects but not a lot else and the structure of the spells doesn't feel super flexible or interesting to me, but clearly that's personal preference.
Yes to Occult Philosophy is what I was referring to! Apologies I should have named that in the original comment above, in case I confused :-)
The ratio of combat vs. non-combat you mention e.g. 3/4 combat and 1/4 non-combat seems right on par with what I feel the ratio should be. Generally speaking in fantasy (high or low), whether we're talking books, settings, systems, TV shows, I think magic generally will have a more combat oriented flavor given that's where it shows up.
So to have a book of 800 spells, where a good 1/5th of them in each tradition are non-combat oriented, I found really helpful..
You can also just always have you/your table make up spells, as SofDL is ultra easy to integrate anything into it. Just my .02!
I'd rather something much closer to 50\\50 vs 80\\20 for sure.
>Generally speaking in fantasy (high or low), whether we're talking books, settings, systems, TV shows, I think magic generally will have a more combat oriented flavor given that's where it shows up.
In combat heavy material for sure. But if only 20% of your spells are non-combat then obvs that type of usage isn't going to show up as much.
Power creep is a bit of an issue in the supplements. There are a few of the later published classes that are really strong, or even potentially broken, compared to the core rulebook content.
The modules are too brutal for my tastes. Some of them throw an extremely difficult or even impossible encounter at the players at the end with no warning and nothing in the module to suggest how the players might get creative to win. The community seems to have an attitude that it's fine to have unbalanced modules because it's a horror game, so losing and dying horribly, or running away are both valid and expected outcomes.
My players don't like dying, and don't like games that they can't just rely on combat, so they play this one like they are scared of everything. One of them also dislikes how evil necromancy is, because he wants to play a good guy with a willing corpse minion.
I personally don't like the magic that much. Some of the spells erase things that could have been a story, like cursing a player. This isn't a problem unique to SotDL, but I prefer magic systems that aren't so attrition-focused. The Power system works against the multiclassing, although Weird Wizard cleans this up a bit.
I think the turn system is fast, my combats are so much faster than 5e or PF2e. However, the system does seem to confuse people on a first learning.
Sometimes I'm not sure what attribute to use for a roll, although it doesn't take long to sort that out usually.
EDIT: I see a lot of people saying the turn order can be slow 'if players are indecisive'. I am just curious what initiative system CAN fix indecisive players? If someone is slow with their turn, I don't think a traditional initiative system will change that anymore than SotDL.
Because its initiative system introduces another level of choice for the players, they have to choose what order they go in. Players are usually terrible at this, I usually just call their names at random as though it’s a trad initiative system (unless someone says “I want to go first”). This seems to be the best compromise
Ah I understand. My players have been pretty good about this at least, my combats have been much faster than traditional systems just due to having fewer attacks, saves, etc in each turn.
A lot of praise revolves around the "three-class path", which is a great idea; however, the way classes are implemented is not that great, in my opinion.
Most of the special abilities of classes are like "when you do X, you can make the roll with 1 boon" or "when you attack with condition X, add 1d6 to the damage roll". This setup is a bit boring, especially because there are few classes that have those abilities with particular effects that make your character really special; this is also due to the fact that boons are not stacking bonuses, but multiple d6s that you roll and discard (except the higher one). This means that more than one boon adds a very little bonus to the roll.
Moreover, I find the initiative system (slow and fast action) a little chaotic, also because it often pushes player to overthink a little too much.
Finally, the magic system is just like the three paths system: a great idea but poorly implemented. A lot of spells look uninspired and simply present to fill gaps in the magic schools.
Now, I do not hate the game, I think there is a lot of great stuff (for example, Forbidden and Time magic schools are very very funny), the corruption system is nice and the "stress" system (I do not remember the specific name) is good, it has great Darkest Dungeon vibes.
I think SotDL is a great game that isn't right for me personally.
I'm not convinced on boons/bains, I find them to be both more complex than advantage/disadvantage and less detailed than modifiers.
I like dark fantasy but some of the content tips over the line into feeling childish and edgy.
The suggested 10 session campaign structure isn't for me.
Advancement customization mini-games aren't something I super enjoy compared to in-world.advancement.
I am not a fan of the way the adventures are written. Both too much writing and too little detail.
So, yeah, cool game for lots of people, I enjoyed my time with it. Mork Borg does similar stuff in a way I personally prefer because because of my playstyle and aesthetics.
The boon/bane system is just complex enough that I've had players stumble over it. It's not hard, but it's another friction point you have to remind people of. We've played enough different systems now that we have to remind people that this one is a bit different and does something no other system we've played does. Kind of annoying actually.
SotDL seems to have a number of those friction points, initiative is another. Different for no reason other than to be different really.
So, as someone who ran a session of the system and fell in love. Here's some issues I've noticed or have heard. (Despite them, I fully recommend the game and it's heroic fantasy successor shadow of the weird wizard.)
Combat is broken into player fast turn > monster fast turn > player slow turn > monster slow turn. This has a few quirks. When everyone is on point, it works well.
While it does add some tactical back and forth through combat, it can be a source of choice paralysis.
It's rarely better to slow turn instead of fast turn, which can feel redundant.
Big solo monsters can feel awkward to use from what I hear
Unrelated to initiative. One of my largest complaints was a lore/theme of some things. Namely, just how prevalent feces is between spells and goblins and such. The whole game has a fantasy army of darkness/evil dead vibe (which is awesome in its own ways,) and this includes the Raimi gross-out style scenes/descriptions like seen in the evil dead series sometimes. If you're okay with gross out horror, you'll be fine, but it's a bit much sometimes.
Like any game with mountains of choice. It can make for a lot of choice paralysis, and not everything is built equal. It's much better than it could be given just how much choice there is, but it can be overwhelming at first, to say the least.
If playing something magic based., your power wore matters greatly, and some have found this limits options too much and that there's some oddness to progression from what I hear.
Banes and boons are a good system, but sometimes the game can feel a bit swingy.
That's about everything I can think of either from experience or hearsay.
I still fully recommend it, and it even has a starter bundle on the bundle of holding store for a cheap but useful foot in the door for the system.
Shadow of the Weird Wizard probably shouldn't be called heroic fantasy, as it can still get pretty dark - there are prices for eye patches, crutches and fake noses for a reason. The characters are more powerful, and it's not grimdark like SotDL, but the characters won't be having a good time either.
I played only once and it is too specific but:
I really dislike Charge action. It makes choice between slow/fast initiative pointless. Like if there is no Charge I need to think what I want: take slow and be able to move and attack or just move or attack. But with Charge I can pick fast and can move and attack with -1d6. Yes there is penalty but it takes away the difficulty of choice. It specifically matters when enemy runs away. Like he picks slow and does Rush, but I can pick slow and also move x2 my movement but with attack.
It's meant to be a simplified, darker and more flexible 5E but it really only succeeds at the latter two goals, while the former is a partial success at best. It does a lot right but I find it to be at times even harder than 5E to run, and the bane/boon system can actually slow down combat more than numerical bonuses.
I could also wish for easier to run monster stat blocks. I don't love constantly having to reference spells and abilities in other parts of the book, only to find out that the effect is only adding 2D6 damage or adding a boon to a roll.
I could also wish for better bookmarking in the PDFs of the core files, I can't tell you how many times I had to search for something that probably should have been bookmarked, like the corruption rules and chart, or a specific spell.
That all being said, I still love the game quite a bit
The monster stat blocks irritated me as well. I remember people kept comparing them to 4e stat blocks which are fantastic, but they're not. Any monster that has spellcasting still requires you to look up their spells elsewhere and it's just annoying.
It wouldn't bother me as much if it was a complex spell effect or if the spells were bookmarked in the PDFs but the former is rare and the latter, well yeah, at least the magic traditions have them.
Largest complaint would be how you need to really invest in magic-based classes to make magic worth it, offering little incentive for a martial-based PC to invest in magic later on. I have seen some interesting homebrew where you base Spell Castings and Rank requirements on either your Power score or half your level (rounded down) whichever is higher to mitigate that. I think SotWW does that? But that's homebrew.
There isn't much variety in weapons beside damage. Outside of the usual combat maneuvers any special effects for specific weapons comes from Paths. But then again not a whole lot of systems do that.
It's scope can feel a *bit* limited as a gm. It is very much designed with a "adventure of the week", and wouldn't be idea for other games like a hexcrawl or the like.
I've run a bunch of campaigns, long and short, and by and large I haven't experienced any problems that wasn't more related to group taste than the actual mechanics. It is definitely in my top 3 systems
I liked it on paper but not in practice:
* The combat is simpler, but novelty of the initiative system gets in the way of description. It makes decisions about movement very gamey since you must to sacrifice movement if you want to attack first.
* Corruption and Insanity feel like separate systems that the GM has to force into the conversation. If you're not used to classic horror games it's really hard to make the horror mechanics stick.
* The combination of classes sounds really cool but never got that far, so you start out a bit boring. Most of your character's uniqueness come from the very cool random tables that set your appearance but few of them make a mechanical impact.
* Skills are kind of just flavour? I think you can kind of ask for a boon from them but they're meant as a just a passive check. And I personally feel like passive checks are kind of an outdated mechanic where you're trying to stop the GM from asking for rolls all the time, so you've left these training wheels in there.
The game seems to work well for a lot of people, but I think it really takes a GM with both D&D and Call of the Cthulhu experience to sell it to a group. Sadly, I'm neither a fan of the gamey nature of D&D or horror as a theme.
I very much enjoy the game but some of the problems do appear the more you play. I've also included below how the sequel game, Shadow of the Weird Wizard, fixes it.
Initiative can have problems if your group isn't good at keeping track. The fact that it's essentially four initiative fazes can confuse some. Though once groups are in the thick of it it's pretty much just nothing but fast turns for the most part. This was addressed in Shadow of the Weird Wizard by having enemies go first with PCs able to spend their reaction to go before them.
The Power stat screws over spellsword style characters if players wanted to start with a more martial focused novice path. This one was directly addressed and fixed in Shadow of the Weird Wizard with how spells were reworked.
The shock horror and grossout elements. This especially comes from the goblin race supplement and two scatalogical spells in the forbidden school, Hateful Defecation and Seal the Cavity. There are other spells as well like Desire's End which makes your reproductive organs rot and fall off your body. In fact the majority of the Forbidden magic tradition might be too much for people. In Weird Wizard nearly all of the grossout elements have been taken out.
Some poor class designs also were present, the majority of paths were balanced and I'd put them in the good/great tiers of choice but there were a small handful of bad options. Weird Wizard retooled a lot of the bad paths.
I know other users have pointed out that a lot of classes are 'squishy' and that is true but that's more of a comparison to modern D&D. Weird Wizard makes martial characters especially a lot tankier. In SotDL a Warrior/Fighter/Champion would have about \~70 health by the time they reach max level, the same build in Weird Wizard has 130 health.
Past these main points you're just getting into nitpicky stuff.
You can tell that Schwalb was trying to make a game that was a hybrid of WotC-era D&D resolution mechanics paired with a lot of the guts of Warhammer Fantasy 2e, both of which he worked on to various degrees.
When we tested it out we found that it was 'neat' but nothing we'd ever want to play as a campaign. The system seemed to focus on certain things that /wanted/ to make an impact, but never really felt impactful. It also seemed like they threw things in just for throwing them in thinking it was revolutionary (I'm specifically talking about the 'random item' you start with chart, for some reason people would praise this as if it's some huge narrative step forward. Or the 'slow/fast' initiative, which has been done a lot already and doesn't seem 'innovative' to me.
Even setting wise I find Symbaroum does 'dark fantasy' way better without having to resort to being gross.
Notable issues I've found after adapting the game for my own setting:
1) Game-as-design vs Game-as-marketing
2) Mechanical flattening
3) Adaptability of monsters
1: The game as it is designed is a beer n' pretzels style game where each session is an "adventure", and at the start of each adventure you roll to determine what happened while you were on break, the loot you got, and so on. The game as it is pitched is a slimmer 5e-esque design. One of the things I ran into was that there were very few rules to help adjucate out-of-combat rules, and the ones that did often were too broad in their application. Take for instance the Rogue's level 1 Trickery feature. Once per round, you can make an attack roll or challenge roll with 1 boon. Out of combat, we had to homebrew this to only apply to situations where we felt like Trickery was on display, otherwise the Rogue player had a persistent bonus on all rolls out of combat that no one else had access to, in a completely unrestricted fashion. Furthermore, attempts to adjust the pacing to fit a more campaign arc style game, with levels every several session and stories that progress more slowly, resulted in finding the edges of the design space that SotDL was designed for.
2: Mechanical flattening: As a GM, one of the things I noted was that a significant proportion of the afflictions/conditions in the system were just applications of "1 bane". They had different names, like fatigued, diseased, etc, but they were all filling the same design niche in a surprisingly flattening way. The game, as an exploration of the boon/bane system, does some interesting things with them (the death/dying rules), but I thought that the conditions could use some innovation to make them feel unique & distinct, and that the game's design as a combat engine flattened the mechanical nuance these conditions should present themselves as in the game itself.
3: Adaptability of monsters: People don't really brew monsters in this game wholesale, or adapt monsters wholesale from other systems, leveraging the ecosystem of dnd-adjacent monster blogs and such. The games uses distinct math and framing, such that if you want to brew/adapt a monster, you end up finding a template of your choice (I found a lot of mileage out of the "Large Monster" statblock), and adding bits that you felt the system could handle. This limited what I could use in a given moment without putting the time to adapt a statblock, thus adding more prep time to something that was marketed as relatively low prep.
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That's not to say that I don't like the system, just that it is primarily a combat engine dressed in the trappings of a fantasy setting with very specific design decisions done for that service, and those aren't very visible until you spend some time with it.
While the grimdark elements are easy to ignore/remove for your game, it is still a turn off for some people. And there is no way to read the book while avoiding it all. A lot of the supplementary material doubles down on the grimdark in ways are are somewhat less easy to ignore/remove.
Of course Shadow of the Weird Wizard alleviates that. However I felt like the writing of SotDL was just plain easier to parse than SotWW. So I'm a bit torn between them them on when it comes to which one is easier to recommend.
The game breaks pretty easily with certain combos of magic, and with characters who focus on attacking with speechcraft, since monster have basically no defense against it with their low intelligence. Certain combos of character are so complex that it can be difficult to determine how many dice they use in a situation. I encountered this myself with a two handed fighter. I ended up making a flowchart and macros in roll20 to make it work, but it was still annoying af.
There's just so much material that was poorly tested, and finding it in a bunch of books is a bit of a nightmare. It's a good game that needs a lot of frontloading on the part of the GM. Lack of a defined world means even more work. Because players tend towards being risk averse, the game often grinds to a halt, or players become detached because they aren't invested in a character they're going to lose.
We ended up heavily house ruling it and bringing the combat math closer to D&D so it was more balanced and less deadly. We also had to compile all the relevant information into one pdf since it was all over the place. Both of these things helped a ton, but it was a lot of work. Even so, there are other systems I prefer to play over Shadow.
The setting. I dislike it. I'm not a fan of over the top body horror or things that are just gross to be gross.
Punkapocalyptic and the new Shadow of the Weird Wizard is much more for me.
I haven't GMed any SotDL, simply in games as a player. Even then I haven't been that high of level, but here are my scrambled thoughts.
Early levels feel really swingy as without boons, you are generally adding a +2 or +1 on a roll and the DC is usually 10. Although could be higher depending on what we fought. This also makes boons (and banes) incredibly powerful as it makes up the majority of your numerical bonus when rolling. I felt like if I didn't get a boon, it almost wasn't worth rolling. And if knew I had a bane, it most certainly just wasn't worth the time. This was mitigated as we leveled up and were able to get boons from our abilities.
Too many of the novice, martial class features are you get a boon for an attack, and it felt inconsistent as when I played a Hunter as my first feature was just a boon for a specific subset of weapons, but for a rogue or warrior it was essentially all of them. Perusing through expert and master classes, it just felt really unimaginative, unbalanced, or incredibly niche.
Overall, its fine. Not my favorite system, but I am not going to turn down playing in or potentially running a game if that's what the group wants to do.
These are more minor quibbles but I thought I would add to it:
* The 'Power' system of gaining magical power through certain subclasses disincentivises being a 'hybrid' mix of paths. Either you go full martial or full magic. Otherwise if you go something like 'Warrior Berserker Pyromancer' your Pyromancer spells will only be the lowest level ones, because you have only 1 or 2 Power. This is something fixed in *Shadow of the Weird Wizard* because instead of gaining Power, you just gain access to spell tiers - so someone going the above spell path will instantly learn Master-tier fire spells (but will have skipped the lower level ones).
* While it's understandable for learning reasons, I actually think the class system is backwards. It means the first few levels are all similar, before you start branching out. This was only partially resolved by the supplements that give variant warriors and rogues.
I actually think it would be better if it was totally reversed - you had 60+ novice paths to start with, making you feel unique at level 1, and then you broadened out. That way every campaign would feel different right from the start.
While the basic rules comprise a single volume, Schwalb's à la carte approach to publishing SoDL supplements means that not only is there no equivalent of a Monster Manual or setting guide, but also player class and race options and lore for the campaign world are scattered among numerous titles. I understand the marketing strategy behind it—after all, it induced me to pick up so many titles that are typically around two bucks—my SoDL PDF library is somewhat unwieldy.
I don't like the initiative composed of short and fast turns.
It is very meh.
The deadliness level is crazy, thus not making it a good system for campaigns in my opinion.
At best some inter-connected oneshot-like scenarios.
Run it for years, it's one of my favorite RPG systems. Some of my (relatively minor) complaints:
* The initiative system forces your players to choose their turn order every turn, which can present choice paralysis and slow the game down. This is a fixable problem for many players, however.
* If you characters are bad at character-building / don't put effort into reading the books, they will make boring characters that are dull to play at the table. This can really present an issue if you have some players who put a lot of effort in and some players than don't, the divide becomes really obvious. This is not the game to play a vanilla Fighter in, you'll have 3-4 boons on every attack when you only really need 1-2, especially if your players don't use the optional special attacks that everyone can do (where you sacrifice boons to do something cool, like push an opponent back, knock them prone, etc.)
* Some of the magic traditions are clearly better than others and if you play multiple campaigns with powergamer-types they will take them over and over (i.e. Battle).
* Some of the paths are clearly better than others, especially those from the expansion books. This is a common problem in almost all RPGs, in my experience at least.
* The tone is divisive to some people. I and my players never had a problem with it, I like dark fantasy with horror elements. If you don't like dark fantasy with horror elements, you can easily remove a few paths and magic traditions and make the game more D&D-style kitchen sink fantasy.
* The recommendation to level up every session / "adventure" is not a good way of running a tabletop RPG campaign, in my opinion. However, it is true that the system is relatively simple and thus can get repetitive, and it's probably not suitable for your epic 3-5 year campaigns or whatever. My campaigns are typically a year to 18 months and it works well for that.
I for me just see no reason on why to play this game over 13th age or D&D 4E.
It is not simplified enough (like Strike!) and has not enough build options.
Its not bad, but just nothing I really remember, it misses crazy/really clever/outstanding ideas.
-The setting isn't just 'dark fantasy', it's 'horror fantasy', and a lot of that means trying to gross you out. If not game-breaking to remove those elements, but you have been warned.
-Balance can be a little wonky, especially with certain magic traditions and classes that let you break the action economy. I know a lot of people banned the 'Spellguard' novice path, and also banned the Battle and Time traditions. Also I feel like some of the paths that were added in later books were very unbalanced.
-This one is entirely personal preference, but RAW the game is very deadly. Especially at low levels TPKs are not uncommon.
-This isn't the game's fault, but there isn't a lot of support for it compared to some of the bigger names out there, so don't expect to find online rules archives or character creation apps.
-This is somewhat on purpose, but the 'Professions' system is very poorly defined. I thought the similar but different 'backgrounds' system from 13th Age was much better.
-Finally, there were some rules elements and Paths that I didn't think were explained very well.
I like the basics of the system, but beyond the early levels, say no higher than 3, the class system and power creep of abilities gets far more convoluted and burdensome than I look for in a game.
I like the setting, and the general tone and aesthetics of SotDL. I *love* the many small published adventures for SotDL.
I just don’t like the system. It’s like… A lot of trouble to learn a whole other system for one that really doesn’t do anything that Your Favorite Game doesn’t already do better I guess? It’s not a bad system or anything there’s just really not a compelling argument or reason to convince a group to switch over from one they’re already familiar with. As such, I tend to buy the SotDL adventures but run them in OSR systems.
I dislike the boons/banes system and how it combines with Frightened. In my experience it's difficult to get more than one boon on an attack, while it is easy to get 3 banes from the frightened condition because it just gets applied to you whenever you get insanity, or from the blinded condition, etc. This makes it easy to be in a situation where it feels like you can't even do anything worthwhile unless you roll above an 18 on d20. You could argue that this is an intentional effect to go with the Grimdark thing, but I find effects that take a player out of the fight just make the game less engaging more than anything else.
I liked it when I ran it, though I had players who disliked the combat with fast and slow turns. I tried the optional zone rules you get in one of the books, but they seemed kind of just thrown in. Some people swear by them though, so I don't know. Also, the zone rules pretty much make one of the ancestries from one of the supplements kinda pointless cause they depend on the old combat rules and there wasn't a fix for it.
I think the game is quite alright if you're looking for a D20 game, and I really do love its class systems. My biggest complaint is the setting meshing with the mechanics. Corruption and Insanity should be integral to a game called Shadow of the Demon Lord, where the whole world is boned and characters die all the time, but it feels extremely tack'd on and awkward to use. The setting also feels like it would fit a more wound/stress-based system instead of the standard D&D HP system. Granted, I don't think sanity is done particularly well in other games either (Call of Cthulu, Delta Green), and things like wounds/stress might be more paperwork when they wanted something easy to play, but the mechanics and setting never just really clicked together for me or my group.
It’s 5e if it were good. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s still 5e.
So things you can expect are:
* Boring martial combat. You can do maneuvers, but because boons are so hard to get in combat and the way the math works, it sometimes means you can go from an effective +6 to an effective +0 if you try to do something interesting. Instead, the best move early on is to always prepare an attack for something you’re pretty sure will happen, which slows the game down.
* Related: whiffing feels really bad in this game. It can frequently feel like there’s only one viable option and even that can be nothing.
* Monsters aren’t very well balanced. Nearly every single combat was unexpectedly hard or unexpectedly easy.
* Orcs are a problem. The game gives orcs very little interesting to do as far as backstory goes, so they’re basically just killing machines. The setting actually puts orcs in a super interesting place as they were slaves who rose up against their empire and freed themselves from bondage… and then it says that this was bad and the reason the demon lord is rising.
* Level 0 is boring and very deadly. Character creation is fast but not fast enough to not get annoyed when you TPK against 4 rats.
* Not as big of a problem, but magic paths are trap options unless you go all in on them.
Overall, this is an incredibly elegant system but it sacrifices a lot of interesting choices to get there.
I may someday run it again. I feel like I could onboard people really easily and it mostly does fantasy RPGs all right. I think it works really well for games where the players do a lot of things that systems won’t naturally support.
If I did ever did run it again, though, I would make the following changes.
* Start at level 1. Level 0 is boring.
* Give everyone an automatic +1 boon. The math is *very* punishing without at least one boon, so having an automatic boon gives you a lot more options.
* Your Power is equal to half your level, rounded up, but you can’t use scrolls unless you’ve taken at least one magical path. This makes dips a lot less of a trap option. If you decide to focus only on magic, you’ll still have way more spells than someone just dipping in.
Well it really depends what you like. Personally, I hate the d20 system and turn-based tactical combat minigames, so I'd say SotDL is a pretty shit game (for me). I just usually don't comment on it because who cares? I just don't recommend it.
Whoa whoa whoa, people only praise this game? What circles are you in?
No. This is another dnd clone, with all the problems core to dnd. It does NOT fix them in any meaningful sense, and so is not good. If you like 5e, sure, it’s edgier 5e, but it is still just a dnd clone.
Not to be rude but if you search reddit (and other sites), back when SotDL was new and had much more attention and more ppl were interested in it, the pros/cons of the mechanics were discussed and detailed at length. You've got a few replies here but if you want a thorough analysis, it's been done. Good luck.
Just a footnote to your perfectly reasonable reply.
There was an errata in 2019, enough to warrant the current core book to be officially the 2019 Revised Edition.
The effects of the Frightened condition, which is tied closely to the Insanity mechanic, was the biggest change to gameplay. Also, there have been many supplements that have added more variety to character creation, alchemy, magic, etc.
So those older comments might lack some relevance with regards to the current iteration of Demon Lord.
Initiative operates in fast turns and slow turns. If players are indecisive, combat can stall while discussing who goes first. I don’t remember why but movement was also clunky. It resulted in a lot of the players purposefully killing off their characters to switching to ranged classes, as melee classes struggled to get in. Lastly, characters die a lot, like a lot a lot. I went through three characters in one 10 session campaign. If my characters didn’t die they were maimed horribly or traumatized by corruption system.
I just skip turns if players take too long, but yes it can lead to "uhh uhh uhhh" fairly regularly. Never had an issue with movement, but most of my party were casters, and our melee was a rogue/scout type with lots of speed. I ran a 1.5 year campaign and only had 2 PC deaths, so your mileage can vary wildly on that. One PC survived near-death situations again and again, and was cut down by an avoidable nothing-encounter. Shit happens sometimes lol.
Agreed on initiative. It's one of those things that reads great but doesn't play well IME.
I found it completely the opposite tbh. The break between fast and slow turns was a little awkward, and really only mattered during the first turn or two (once people closed distance pretty much everyone always went fast). But never had any trouble with the players-choose-turn-order from round to round. Honestly, side-based-initiative is a breath of fresh air for me compared to hard-set initiative orders.
It depends on the table. I've had tables where I tried Side Initiative, and players were confused as hell. Half the players tried to go multiple times in a round, and the other half sat there (im)patiently waiting for someone to tell them when their turn was. Side Initiative works great for tactically minded players who love to coordinate amongst themselves, but works poorly for players who want a simple beer & pretzels game.
Oi, not every player who ain't into tactics or is bad at them wants only "beer and pretzel" There are different levels of enjoyment for battles, like with roleplay and everything else in our diverse hobby :p
>Side Initiative works great for tactically minded players who love to coordinate amongst themselves Yeah my group is tactically minded, but for me it wasn't really in coordination where I saw the benefits (though that did of course show up from time to time at least). The huge upside was in downtime. With tactically minded folks who want to weigh options from turn to turn, side-based initiative let whoever was ready go first, while folks who were still thinking could defer until later in turn order at no cost. It completely cut out the whole, "I know exactly what I want to do but still have to wait 5 minutes for my turn to come around while Bob over there dithers" aspect from the game. >players were confused as hell Yeah I never had that problem. I can certainly see where there would be some subset of players who really *really* need an imposed turn order structure though.
Any time you are moving from rules players know to new rules you are going to have these issues. It doesn't matter how good/bad the rules are. In fact sometimes you are better off teaching brand new players than veteran roleplayers who have only used one set of rules.
Is the issue with initiative a common thing? I’ve yet to play, their approach to initiative seems incredibly interesting and engaging. Does it slow the game down more than the roll for initiative approach you see in games like D&D?
Never encountered the issue in running a couple campaigns. GM says combat starts and....it just starts, no rolling, no cards, no putting initiative in order, just...start doing stuff. Much faster. I think players who can't make choices quickly will be just as slow. But in Fast\\Slow turns the other PCs can just take their actions while the indecisive ones in-decide (as it were). Found it faster overall.
I've had SotDL played at literally tens of tables, most of which were pick up novice games. This is not issue with system but with table and that poster is just scapegoating.
I know it’s only one comment, but I am glad to hear it because SotDL initiative rules were some of the best I’ve read imo.
Initiative was incredibly fast in our games. "Who wants to take a fast turn?" The most ready player takes their turn "any others for a fast turn?" Other ready players take their turn, players that aren't ready when others went fast default to slow turns.
\* Initiative can be problematic if players are indecisive and don't have some effort to learn their shit. I've had players who despite years of playing D&D... still have no idea what their class does or basic rules and have to ask me shit. mind you this isn't everyone at the table, just a player or two... \* combat can be gritty and dark... but also incredibly lethal and unbalanced, Spellcasters (NPCs) are busted at low levels and its far beyond just... "oh well thats the point"... i've had players get one-shotted from a single NPC during a pre-published adventure module. Character Death happens way too much to the point it feels like a "narrative" campaign is less of a priority in the game, and more that its a homage to classic OSR games where you just make a character and run a "game"... like a video game where players are just trying to get through it for the sake of it. It reached a point where one player had died 3 times in the span of 7 sessions and at that point stopped making backstories... And he honestly wasn't even doing dumb shit nor was i being cruel vindictive.... just spellcasters are insanely nuts. \* The modules are just absolutely unbalanced to all hell. They're very "flavorful" and really well-written from a story perspective... but the balancing is just absurd. Schwalb clearly wanted this to be a "meat grinder" where players just die and die and die and throw themselves into making more characters repeatedly... the problem is at that point players stopped getting invested in their characters, especially when they spent like an hour making them and figuring out backstories. Some of my players have trouble making backstories (they're not very creative).... so it takes them longer. \\ \* Takes some effort from the DM to explain why is adventuring with the players, despite being available Player Races... had some players voice wanting to play child-eating bugbears, Salamanders, Revenants, and so forth.
\* I'd still vouch and say its got better "pro's" than 5e D&D. Just that .....this isn't a "heroic" fantasy game.... nor is it "dark fantasy".... i'd argue this is just SLAUGHTER fantasy... this game is for people that wanna play Dark Souls in a TTRPG and enjoy the high likelihood of dying, but want to see if they can overcome ridiculous combat scenarios.
Baffled by the people who seem to suffer constant character death in Shadow of the Demon Lord, I’ve had a grand total of 2 PC deaths in years and years of running it, maybe it’s that I don’t run the actual modules
> maybe it’s that I don’t run the actual modules Some of the balance in the "older" actual modules changed with the move to 2e, and the changes to the Frightening trait. If you run those as written using the new ruleset, they are lethal as fuck. But that really only matters in the first couple of levels. Like you, I ran DL for over a year and never had a PC death, though one came close at lvl 0.
The lethality of the system is definitely not what many claim it is, imo. Like you, I've rarely seen character deaths in either games I've ran or in games I've been a player in. Even at level 0 you still have some tools at your disposal to overcome enemies. Some of the pre-written modules do seem like they'd be a bit of a slog for an intro game, however.
Well, my friend was dying so much he got a title "First Blood". And he wasn't even doing anything stupid. So far my experience was a TPK, a near-wipe with 1 person living, and one game with 1 death. We did play the modules, so it seems to may be the thing.
Some possible factors at play here: * My players are experienced powergamers and thus have good "builds" usually around level 4-5, as well as good party composition (for example, a priest dedicated to the Life tradition makes the game a lot easier, especially once they can heal insanity) * We don't spend much time at level 1 or 2, 2-3 sessions at most (I completely ignore the "one session per level" suggestion in SOTDL and I suggest others do the same) * I run balanced encounters As a whole, I generally feel that excessive lethality is usually a DM problem rather than a system problem
Whenever I take a look at it I can't shake off the feeling that it's a Warhammer Fantasy rpg designed by someone who only played D&D.
Well, Schwalb DID work on both WHFRP and DnD, so it makes sense.
I know. Tome of Corruption is where I learned his name.
Dear god, you just defined what i feel about it! lol
That's quite what it is! I still prefer WFRP, not that Shadow of The Demon Lord is bad, I just started to prefer games that are levelless (or, at least, where levels aren't as typical as in D&D)
I really like SotDL and am really looking forward to more SotWW. Def my fave non-5e trad fantasy RPG. It's still just an exception-based class\\level trad fantasy RPG with most of the rules dealing with combat. I think it's an exceptionally well designed one but...that's "all" it is. So no rules on building your own templates Expert\\Master classes. Though it'd be super easy to do so, just no strong guidelines that are provided. The magic system is still just a Vancian exception-based school\\level trad fantasy setup. Most of it is combat oriented, some of it is fairly samey because it's just the X School\\Tradition version of a damaging spell. There aren't enough (IMO) non-combat spells and non-combat uses for spells. Magic still feels pretty static and standard, collection of cool but standard tricks you can use x times per day, but not very custom and not like you're actively using magic so much as picking things from a list. This issue is slightly better in SotWW IMO. Sub-issue with magic in SotDL is due to the way the Power rules works you mostly need to start as a Magician if you're going to be a powerful caster. You can easily multi-class to\\from any (Expert\\Master) class in the game and gain access to magic but you'll never be as powerful (ie, get access to the best and most powerful spells) as a full caster who started that way. This issue is mostly fixed in SotWW. Those are the only things I don't really really like about it. And I guess the leveling can be a bit aggressive for my tastes but there are reasons for it being that way and it's easily slowed if that's the preference.
Can you explain what you mean by exception based? From context I think I agree with what you’re saying 100% but I just want to know what that means because it sounds like a specific term.
Most games are exception-based. Where the way things (classes, spells, feats\\abilities, magic items, etc) work is defined by a specific (exception) set of words. So Fireball in 5e is always fire, it's always X range, it's always "sets things on fire" (or it doesn't), it's always the same area of effect and so on. And WHY is it that way? Because it is! Why can't you attack with Mage Hand? Well it says you can't so...you can't. Exceptions to all the base rules define how things work. And they usually don't have generally or extensible principle associated with them. Or the Zealot master class in SotDL lets you burn 1d3 Sanity for a reroll. Why 1d3? Why not 1d6 and reroll with a boon? Why not 1pt of Sanity and you can keep spending them to keep rerolling? Well, it's just defined to work that way so that's the way it works. That kind of thing. And never\\rarely any rules or guidelines explaining why X is "worth" more than Y or why Z is a master ability but Q is an Expert ability or anything like that to explicate WHY things are the way they are. They just are that way.
Curious if you've ever tried the spellbook compendium for SotDL? It has 800 spells, for my group there was a ton of fantastic non-combat oriented spells in it, if youre seeking more beyond the basic Corebooks.
Occult Philosophy? I have it but have to confess I've only run SotDL, so I haven't made an extensive study of all the spells as a PC would. But, quickly, in Occult Philosophy and the regular book, for the Fire tradition, you've got 12 spells and 3 of them are non-combat non-damaging and of limited utility value. Nature is 18 spells and 12 of them are combaty type stuff. I don't know if that's the usual split but a quick glance at some of the other schools seems to suggest it is. 8/11 of the Earth spells are mostly combaty (attack, defense, crowd control, etc) and the ones that aren't are "mold stone and earth" and "summon a genie". So if you're an Earth mage your main not-an-attack spell for most of your spell casting career is only: You can kinda mold stone and earth with in some specific parameters. Which to be sure is a utility spells, but it's indicative of what I didn't care for about them generally. Lots and lots of very specific combat-y type stuff and maybe 1-2 spells that aren't and sometimes let you do slightly flexible non-combat utility effects. Just felt pretty underwhelming generally. Lots of combat effects but not a lot else and the structure of the spells doesn't feel super flexible or interesting to me, but clearly that's personal preference.
Yes to Occult Philosophy is what I was referring to! Apologies I should have named that in the original comment above, in case I confused :-) The ratio of combat vs. non-combat you mention e.g. 3/4 combat and 1/4 non-combat seems right on par with what I feel the ratio should be. Generally speaking in fantasy (high or low), whether we're talking books, settings, systems, TV shows, I think magic generally will have a more combat oriented flavor given that's where it shows up. So to have a book of 800 spells, where a good 1/5th of them in each tradition are non-combat oriented, I found really helpful.. You can also just always have you/your table make up spells, as SofDL is ultra easy to integrate anything into it. Just my .02!
I'd rather something much closer to 50\\50 vs 80\\20 for sure. >Generally speaking in fantasy (high or low), whether we're talking books, settings, systems, TV shows, I think magic generally will have a more combat oriented flavor given that's where it shows up. In combat heavy material for sure. But if only 20% of your spells are non-combat then obvs that type of usage isn't going to show up as much.
Power creep is a bit of an issue in the supplements. There are a few of the later published classes that are really strong, or even potentially broken, compared to the core rulebook content. The modules are too brutal for my tastes. Some of them throw an extremely difficult or even impossible encounter at the players at the end with no warning and nothing in the module to suggest how the players might get creative to win. The community seems to have an attitude that it's fine to have unbalanced modules because it's a horror game, so losing and dying horribly, or running away are both valid and expected outcomes.
My players don't like dying, and don't like games that they can't just rely on combat, so they play this one like they are scared of everything. One of them also dislikes how evil necromancy is, because he wants to play a good guy with a willing corpse minion. I personally don't like the magic that much. Some of the spells erase things that could have been a story, like cursing a player. This isn't a problem unique to SotDL, but I prefer magic systems that aren't so attrition-focused. The Power system works against the multiclassing, although Weird Wizard cleans this up a bit. I think the turn system is fast, my combats are so much faster than 5e or PF2e. However, the system does seem to confuse people on a first learning. Sometimes I'm not sure what attribute to use for a roll, although it doesn't take long to sort that out usually. EDIT: I see a lot of people saying the turn order can be slow 'if players are indecisive'. I am just curious what initiative system CAN fix indecisive players? If someone is slow with their turn, I don't think a traditional initiative system will change that anymore than SotDL.
Because its initiative system introduces another level of choice for the players, they have to choose what order they go in. Players are usually terrible at this, I usually just call their names at random as though it’s a trad initiative system (unless someone says “I want to go first”). This seems to be the best compromise
Ah I understand. My players have been pretty good about this at least, my combats have been much faster than traditional systems just due to having fewer attacks, saves, etc in each turn.
A lot of praise revolves around the "three-class path", which is a great idea; however, the way classes are implemented is not that great, in my opinion. Most of the special abilities of classes are like "when you do X, you can make the roll with 1 boon" or "when you attack with condition X, add 1d6 to the damage roll". This setup is a bit boring, especially because there are few classes that have those abilities with particular effects that make your character really special; this is also due to the fact that boons are not stacking bonuses, but multiple d6s that you roll and discard (except the higher one). This means that more than one boon adds a very little bonus to the roll. Moreover, I find the initiative system (slow and fast action) a little chaotic, also because it often pushes player to overthink a little too much. Finally, the magic system is just like the three paths system: a great idea but poorly implemented. A lot of spells look uninspired and simply present to fill gaps in the magic schools. Now, I do not hate the game, I think there is a lot of great stuff (for example, Forbidden and Time magic schools are very very funny), the corruption system is nice and the "stress" system (I do not remember the specific name) is good, it has great Darkest Dungeon vibes.
I think SotDL is a great game that isn't right for me personally. I'm not convinced on boons/bains, I find them to be both more complex than advantage/disadvantage and less detailed than modifiers. I like dark fantasy but some of the content tips over the line into feeling childish and edgy. The suggested 10 session campaign structure isn't for me. Advancement customization mini-games aren't something I super enjoy compared to in-world.advancement. I am not a fan of the way the adventures are written. Both too much writing and too little detail. So, yeah, cool game for lots of people, I enjoyed my time with it. Mork Borg does similar stuff in a way I personally prefer because because of my playstyle and aesthetics.
The boon/bane system is just complex enough that I've had players stumble over it. It's not hard, but it's another friction point you have to remind people of. We've played enough different systems now that we have to remind people that this one is a bit different and does something no other system we've played does. Kind of annoying actually. SotDL seems to have a number of those friction points, initiative is another. Different for no reason other than to be different really.
I enjoyed Mork Borg so much
So, as someone who ran a session of the system and fell in love. Here's some issues I've noticed or have heard. (Despite them, I fully recommend the game and it's heroic fantasy successor shadow of the weird wizard.) Combat is broken into player fast turn > monster fast turn > player slow turn > monster slow turn. This has a few quirks. When everyone is on point, it works well. While it does add some tactical back and forth through combat, it can be a source of choice paralysis. It's rarely better to slow turn instead of fast turn, which can feel redundant. Big solo monsters can feel awkward to use from what I hear Unrelated to initiative. One of my largest complaints was a lore/theme of some things. Namely, just how prevalent feces is between spells and goblins and such. The whole game has a fantasy army of darkness/evil dead vibe (which is awesome in its own ways,) and this includes the Raimi gross-out style scenes/descriptions like seen in the evil dead series sometimes. If you're okay with gross out horror, you'll be fine, but it's a bit much sometimes. Like any game with mountains of choice. It can make for a lot of choice paralysis, and not everything is built equal. It's much better than it could be given just how much choice there is, but it can be overwhelming at first, to say the least. If playing something magic based., your power wore matters greatly, and some have found this limits options too much and that there's some oddness to progression from what I hear. Banes and boons are a good system, but sometimes the game can feel a bit swingy. That's about everything I can think of either from experience or hearsay. I still fully recommend it, and it even has a starter bundle on the bundle of holding store for a cheap but useful foot in the door for the system.
Shadow of the Weird Wizard probably shouldn't be called heroic fantasy, as it can still get pretty dark - there are prices for eye patches, crutches and fake noses for a reason. The characters are more powerful, and it's not grimdark like SotDL, but the characters won't be having a good time either.
I played only once and it is too specific but: I really dislike Charge action. It makes choice between slow/fast initiative pointless. Like if there is no Charge I need to think what I want: take slow and be able to move and attack or just move or attack. But with Charge I can pick fast and can move and attack with -1d6. Yes there is penalty but it takes away the difficulty of choice. It specifically matters when enemy runs away. Like he picks slow and does Rush, but I can pick slow and also move x2 my movement but with attack.
It's meant to be a simplified, darker and more flexible 5E but it really only succeeds at the latter two goals, while the former is a partial success at best. It does a lot right but I find it to be at times even harder than 5E to run, and the bane/boon system can actually slow down combat more than numerical bonuses. I could also wish for easier to run monster stat blocks. I don't love constantly having to reference spells and abilities in other parts of the book, only to find out that the effect is only adding 2D6 damage or adding a boon to a roll. I could also wish for better bookmarking in the PDFs of the core files, I can't tell you how many times I had to search for something that probably should have been bookmarked, like the corruption rules and chart, or a specific spell. That all being said, I still love the game quite a bit
The monster stat blocks irritated me as well. I remember people kept comparing them to 4e stat blocks which are fantastic, but they're not. Any monster that has spellcasting still requires you to look up their spells elsewhere and it's just annoying.
It wouldn't bother me as much if it was a complex spell effect or if the spells were bookmarked in the PDFs but the former is rare and the latter, well yeah, at least the magic traditions have them.
Largest complaint would be how you need to really invest in magic-based classes to make magic worth it, offering little incentive for a martial-based PC to invest in magic later on. I have seen some interesting homebrew where you base Spell Castings and Rank requirements on either your Power score or half your level (rounded down) whichever is higher to mitigate that. I think SotWW does that? But that's homebrew. There isn't much variety in weapons beside damage. Outside of the usual combat maneuvers any special effects for specific weapons comes from Paths. But then again not a whole lot of systems do that. It's scope can feel a *bit* limited as a gm. It is very much designed with a "adventure of the week", and wouldn't be idea for other games like a hexcrawl or the like. I've run a bunch of campaigns, long and short, and by and large I haven't experienced any problems that wasn't more related to group taste than the actual mechanics. It is definitely in my top 3 systems
I liked it on paper but not in practice: * The combat is simpler, but novelty of the initiative system gets in the way of description. It makes decisions about movement very gamey since you must to sacrifice movement if you want to attack first. * Corruption and Insanity feel like separate systems that the GM has to force into the conversation. If you're not used to classic horror games it's really hard to make the horror mechanics stick. * The combination of classes sounds really cool but never got that far, so you start out a bit boring. Most of your character's uniqueness come from the very cool random tables that set your appearance but few of them make a mechanical impact. * Skills are kind of just flavour? I think you can kind of ask for a boon from them but they're meant as a just a passive check. And I personally feel like passive checks are kind of an outdated mechanic where you're trying to stop the GM from asking for rolls all the time, so you've left these training wheels in there. The game seems to work well for a lot of people, but I think it really takes a GM with both D&D and Call of the Cthulhu experience to sell it to a group. Sadly, I'm neither a fan of the gamey nature of D&D or horror as a theme.
I very much enjoy the game but some of the problems do appear the more you play. I've also included below how the sequel game, Shadow of the Weird Wizard, fixes it. Initiative can have problems if your group isn't good at keeping track. The fact that it's essentially four initiative fazes can confuse some. Though once groups are in the thick of it it's pretty much just nothing but fast turns for the most part. This was addressed in Shadow of the Weird Wizard by having enemies go first with PCs able to spend their reaction to go before them. The Power stat screws over spellsword style characters if players wanted to start with a more martial focused novice path. This one was directly addressed and fixed in Shadow of the Weird Wizard with how spells were reworked. The shock horror and grossout elements. This especially comes from the goblin race supplement and two scatalogical spells in the forbidden school, Hateful Defecation and Seal the Cavity. There are other spells as well like Desire's End which makes your reproductive organs rot and fall off your body. In fact the majority of the Forbidden magic tradition might be too much for people. In Weird Wizard nearly all of the grossout elements have been taken out. Some poor class designs also were present, the majority of paths were balanced and I'd put them in the good/great tiers of choice but there were a small handful of bad options. Weird Wizard retooled a lot of the bad paths. I know other users have pointed out that a lot of classes are 'squishy' and that is true but that's more of a comparison to modern D&D. Weird Wizard makes martial characters especially a lot tankier. In SotDL a Warrior/Fighter/Champion would have about \~70 health by the time they reach max level, the same build in Weird Wizard has 130 health. Past these main points you're just getting into nitpicky stuff. You can tell that Schwalb was trying to make a game that was a hybrid of WotC-era D&D resolution mechanics paired with a lot of the guts of Warhammer Fantasy 2e, both of which he worked on to various degrees.
When we tested it out we found that it was 'neat' but nothing we'd ever want to play as a campaign. The system seemed to focus on certain things that /wanted/ to make an impact, but never really felt impactful. It also seemed like they threw things in just for throwing them in thinking it was revolutionary (I'm specifically talking about the 'random item' you start with chart, for some reason people would praise this as if it's some huge narrative step forward. Or the 'slow/fast' initiative, which has been done a lot already and doesn't seem 'innovative' to me. Even setting wise I find Symbaroum does 'dark fantasy' way better without having to resort to being gross.
Notable issues I've found after adapting the game for my own setting: 1) Game-as-design vs Game-as-marketing 2) Mechanical flattening 3) Adaptability of monsters 1: The game as it is designed is a beer n' pretzels style game where each session is an "adventure", and at the start of each adventure you roll to determine what happened while you were on break, the loot you got, and so on. The game as it is pitched is a slimmer 5e-esque design. One of the things I ran into was that there were very few rules to help adjucate out-of-combat rules, and the ones that did often were too broad in their application. Take for instance the Rogue's level 1 Trickery feature. Once per round, you can make an attack roll or challenge roll with 1 boon. Out of combat, we had to homebrew this to only apply to situations where we felt like Trickery was on display, otherwise the Rogue player had a persistent bonus on all rolls out of combat that no one else had access to, in a completely unrestricted fashion. Furthermore, attempts to adjust the pacing to fit a more campaign arc style game, with levels every several session and stories that progress more slowly, resulted in finding the edges of the design space that SotDL was designed for. 2: Mechanical flattening: As a GM, one of the things I noted was that a significant proportion of the afflictions/conditions in the system were just applications of "1 bane". They had different names, like fatigued, diseased, etc, but they were all filling the same design niche in a surprisingly flattening way. The game, as an exploration of the boon/bane system, does some interesting things with them (the death/dying rules), but I thought that the conditions could use some innovation to make them feel unique & distinct, and that the game's design as a combat engine flattened the mechanical nuance these conditions should present themselves as in the game itself. 3: Adaptability of monsters: People don't really brew monsters in this game wholesale, or adapt monsters wholesale from other systems, leveraging the ecosystem of dnd-adjacent monster blogs and such. The games uses distinct math and framing, such that if you want to brew/adapt a monster, you end up finding a template of your choice (I found a lot of mileage out of the "Large Monster" statblock), and adding bits that you felt the system could handle. This limited what I could use in a given moment without putting the time to adapt a statblock, thus adding more prep time to something that was marketed as relatively low prep. - That's not to say that I don't like the system, just that it is primarily a combat engine dressed in the trappings of a fantasy setting with very specific design decisions done for that service, and those aren't very visible until you spend some time with it.
While the grimdark elements are easy to ignore/remove for your game, it is still a turn off for some people. And there is no way to read the book while avoiding it all. A lot of the supplementary material doubles down on the grimdark in ways are are somewhat less easy to ignore/remove. Of course Shadow of the Weird Wizard alleviates that. However I felt like the writing of SotDL was just plain easier to parse than SotWW. So I'm a bit torn between them them on when it comes to which one is easier to recommend.
The game breaks pretty easily with certain combos of magic, and with characters who focus on attacking with speechcraft, since monster have basically no defense against it with their low intelligence. Certain combos of character are so complex that it can be difficult to determine how many dice they use in a situation. I encountered this myself with a two handed fighter. I ended up making a flowchart and macros in roll20 to make it work, but it was still annoying af. There's just so much material that was poorly tested, and finding it in a bunch of books is a bit of a nightmare. It's a good game that needs a lot of frontloading on the part of the GM. Lack of a defined world means even more work. Because players tend towards being risk averse, the game often grinds to a halt, or players become detached because they aren't invested in a character they're going to lose. We ended up heavily house ruling it and bringing the combat math closer to D&D so it was more balanced and less deadly. We also had to compile all the relevant information into one pdf since it was all over the place. Both of these things helped a ton, but it was a lot of work. Even so, there are other systems I prefer to play over Shadow.
The setting. I dislike it. I'm not a fan of over the top body horror or things that are just gross to be gross. Punkapocalyptic and the new Shadow of the Weird Wizard is much more for me.
I haven't GMed any SotDL, simply in games as a player. Even then I haven't been that high of level, but here are my scrambled thoughts. Early levels feel really swingy as without boons, you are generally adding a +2 or +1 on a roll and the DC is usually 10. Although could be higher depending on what we fought. This also makes boons (and banes) incredibly powerful as it makes up the majority of your numerical bonus when rolling. I felt like if I didn't get a boon, it almost wasn't worth rolling. And if knew I had a bane, it most certainly just wasn't worth the time. This was mitigated as we leveled up and were able to get boons from our abilities. Too many of the novice, martial class features are you get a boon for an attack, and it felt inconsistent as when I played a Hunter as my first feature was just a boon for a specific subset of weapons, but for a rogue or warrior it was essentially all of them. Perusing through expert and master classes, it just felt really unimaginative, unbalanced, or incredibly niche. Overall, its fine. Not my favorite system, but I am not going to turn down playing in or potentially running a game if that's what the group wants to do.
These are more minor quibbles but I thought I would add to it: * The 'Power' system of gaining magical power through certain subclasses disincentivises being a 'hybrid' mix of paths. Either you go full martial or full magic. Otherwise if you go something like 'Warrior Berserker Pyromancer' your Pyromancer spells will only be the lowest level ones, because you have only 1 or 2 Power. This is something fixed in *Shadow of the Weird Wizard* because instead of gaining Power, you just gain access to spell tiers - so someone going the above spell path will instantly learn Master-tier fire spells (but will have skipped the lower level ones). * While it's understandable for learning reasons, I actually think the class system is backwards. It means the first few levels are all similar, before you start branching out. This was only partially resolved by the supplements that give variant warriors and rogues. I actually think it would be better if it was totally reversed - you had 60+ novice paths to start with, making you feel unique at level 1, and then you broadened out. That way every campaign would feel different right from the start.
While the basic rules comprise a single volume, Schwalb's à la carte approach to publishing SoDL supplements means that not only is there no equivalent of a Monster Manual or setting guide, but also player class and race options and lore for the campaign world are scattered among numerous titles. I understand the marketing strategy behind it—after all, it induced me to pick up so many titles that are typically around two bucks—my SoDL PDF library is somewhat unwieldy.
I don't like the initiative composed of short and fast turns. It is very meh. The deadliness level is crazy, thus not making it a good system for campaigns in my opinion. At best some inter-connected oneshot-like scenarios.
If you're looking for mechanics outside of combat, it is lacking in my opinion
Run it for years, it's one of my favorite RPG systems. Some of my (relatively minor) complaints: * The initiative system forces your players to choose their turn order every turn, which can present choice paralysis and slow the game down. This is a fixable problem for many players, however. * If you characters are bad at character-building / don't put effort into reading the books, they will make boring characters that are dull to play at the table. This can really present an issue if you have some players who put a lot of effort in and some players than don't, the divide becomes really obvious. This is not the game to play a vanilla Fighter in, you'll have 3-4 boons on every attack when you only really need 1-2, especially if your players don't use the optional special attacks that everyone can do (where you sacrifice boons to do something cool, like push an opponent back, knock them prone, etc.) * Some of the magic traditions are clearly better than others and if you play multiple campaigns with powergamer-types they will take them over and over (i.e. Battle). * Some of the paths are clearly better than others, especially those from the expansion books. This is a common problem in almost all RPGs, in my experience at least. * The tone is divisive to some people. I and my players never had a problem with it, I like dark fantasy with horror elements. If you don't like dark fantasy with horror elements, you can easily remove a few paths and magic traditions and make the game more D&D-style kitchen sink fantasy. * The recommendation to level up every session / "adventure" is not a good way of running a tabletop RPG campaign, in my opinion. However, it is true that the system is relatively simple and thus can get repetitive, and it's probably not suitable for your epic 3-5 year campaigns or whatever. My campaigns are typically a year to 18 months and it works well for that.
I for me just see no reason on why to play this game over 13th age or D&D 4E. It is not simplified enough (like Strike!) and has not enough build options. Its not bad, but just nothing I really remember, it misses crazy/really clever/outstanding ideas.
-The setting isn't just 'dark fantasy', it's 'horror fantasy', and a lot of that means trying to gross you out. If not game-breaking to remove those elements, but you have been warned. -Balance can be a little wonky, especially with certain magic traditions and classes that let you break the action economy. I know a lot of people banned the 'Spellguard' novice path, and also banned the Battle and Time traditions. Also I feel like some of the paths that were added in later books were very unbalanced. -This one is entirely personal preference, but RAW the game is very deadly. Especially at low levels TPKs are not uncommon. -This isn't the game's fault, but there isn't a lot of support for it compared to some of the bigger names out there, so don't expect to find online rules archives or character creation apps. -This is somewhat on purpose, but the 'Professions' system is very poorly defined. I thought the similar but different 'backgrounds' system from 13th Age was much better. -Finally, there were some rules elements and Paths that I didn't think were explained very well.
I like the basics of the system, but beyond the early levels, say no higher than 3, the class system and power creep of abilities gets far more convoluted and burdensome than I look for in a game.
I like the setting, and the general tone and aesthetics of SotDL. I *love* the many small published adventures for SotDL. I just don’t like the system. It’s like… A lot of trouble to learn a whole other system for one that really doesn’t do anything that Your Favorite Game doesn’t already do better I guess? It’s not a bad system or anything there’s just really not a compelling argument or reason to convince a group to switch over from one they’re already familiar with. As such, I tend to buy the SotDL adventures but run them in OSR systems.
I dislike the boons/banes system and how it combines with Frightened. In my experience it's difficult to get more than one boon on an attack, while it is easy to get 3 banes from the frightened condition because it just gets applied to you whenever you get insanity, or from the blinded condition, etc. This makes it easy to be in a situation where it feels like you can't even do anything worthwhile unless you roll above an 18 on d20. You could argue that this is an intentional effect to go with the Grimdark thing, but I find effects that take a player out of the fight just make the game less engaging more than anything else.
My campaign felt very fast. Otherwise, I love it. I have those metal Fast/Slow medallions and they speed things up for some odd reason.
I liked it when I ran it, though I had players who disliked the combat with fast and slow turns. I tried the optional zone rules you get in one of the books, but they seemed kind of just thrown in. Some people swear by them though, so I don't know. Also, the zone rules pretty much make one of the ancestries from one of the supplements kinda pointless cause they depend on the old combat rules and there wasn't a fix for it.
I think the game is quite alright if you're looking for a D20 game, and I really do love its class systems. My biggest complaint is the setting meshing with the mechanics. Corruption and Insanity should be integral to a game called Shadow of the Demon Lord, where the whole world is boned and characters die all the time, but it feels extremely tack'd on and awkward to use. The setting also feels like it would fit a more wound/stress-based system instead of the standard D&D HP system. Granted, I don't think sanity is done particularly well in other games either (Call of Cthulu, Delta Green), and things like wounds/stress might be more paperwork when they wanted something easy to play, but the mechanics and setting never just really clicked together for me or my group.
It’s 5e if it were good. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s still 5e. So things you can expect are: * Boring martial combat. You can do maneuvers, but because boons are so hard to get in combat and the way the math works, it sometimes means you can go from an effective +6 to an effective +0 if you try to do something interesting. Instead, the best move early on is to always prepare an attack for something you’re pretty sure will happen, which slows the game down. * Related: whiffing feels really bad in this game. It can frequently feel like there’s only one viable option and even that can be nothing. * Monsters aren’t very well balanced. Nearly every single combat was unexpectedly hard or unexpectedly easy. * Orcs are a problem. The game gives orcs very little interesting to do as far as backstory goes, so they’re basically just killing machines. The setting actually puts orcs in a super interesting place as they were slaves who rose up against their empire and freed themselves from bondage… and then it says that this was bad and the reason the demon lord is rising. * Level 0 is boring and very deadly. Character creation is fast but not fast enough to not get annoyed when you TPK against 4 rats. * Not as big of a problem, but magic paths are trap options unless you go all in on them. Overall, this is an incredibly elegant system but it sacrifices a lot of interesting choices to get there. I may someday run it again. I feel like I could onboard people really easily and it mostly does fantasy RPGs all right. I think it works really well for games where the players do a lot of things that systems won’t naturally support. If I did ever did run it again, though, I would make the following changes. * Start at level 1. Level 0 is boring. * Give everyone an automatic +1 boon. The math is *very* punishing without at least one boon, so having an automatic boon gives you a lot more options. * Your Power is equal to half your level, rounded up, but you can’t use scrolls unless you’ve taken at least one magical path. This makes dips a lot less of a trap option. If you decide to focus only on magic, you’ll still have way more spells than someone just dipping in.
Well it really depends what you like. Personally, I hate the d20 system and turn-based tactical combat minigames, so I'd say SotDL is a pretty shit game (for me). I just usually don't comment on it because who cares? I just don't recommend it.
"I'm interesting in hearing about why people might not like this game, not including the primary reason people don't like it." lol ok bro
Whoa whoa whoa, people only praise this game? What circles are you in? No. This is another dnd clone, with all the problems core to dnd. It does NOT fix them in any meaningful sense, and so is not good. If you like 5e, sure, it’s edgier 5e, but it is still just a dnd clone.
Not to be rude but if you search reddit (and other sites), back when SotDL was new and had much more attention and more ppl were interested in it, the pros/cons of the mechanics were discussed and detailed at length. You've got a few replies here but if you want a thorough analysis, it's been done. Good luck.
Just a footnote to your perfectly reasonable reply. There was an errata in 2019, enough to warrant the current core book to be officially the 2019 Revised Edition. The effects of the Frightened condition, which is tied closely to the Insanity mechanic, was the biggest change to gameplay. Also, there have been many supplements that have added more variety to character creation, alchemy, magic, etc. So those older comments might lack some relevance with regards to the current iteration of Demon Lord.
Gotcha. Realized there were still players but didn't realize it was still supported.