Revisiting: D&D Adventure System Games

I have Ravenloft and Ashardalon. They never see the table; my group didn't care for them. I think Ashardalon is better than Ravenloft and I'd play it by myself, but I never get around to it.

wadenels wrote: I like to get into the storyline in a dungeon crawl game and the D&DAS games didn't really do much for me in that department. I haven't read any of the D&D source material, and the game didn't spark me to do so. Mechanically they work great, but I prefer all the fiction and fluff in Mice & Mystics for a DM-less crawl.

I think that's an advantage LoD has over the others. Anyone, like myself, who read a bunch of Salvatore's Drizzt books knows all about the characters, villains, and scenarios.

I've gone a couple different directions on these games. At first I was really impressed at how easy they were to play. Then I wondered for a long time why I didn't like them as much as I wanted to. I think it must have just been my own mindset that needed adjusting, because now they are among my favorite games. I don't really want something as heavy as Gears of War, and the license doesn't appeal to me anyway.

I think part of my enjoyment is that I just don't much like dungeon-crawls in the first place. I find them a little slow-paced and sloggy. (To be fair, that opinion is colored heavily by Descent.) These ones fix most of my problems. The trade off might be that they lose a little texture and detail, but I can live with that.

I don't play them as often as I'd like, but this past Thanksgiving I got to play like three games in two days with my sister and her husband. We had a terrific time. I think my sons will like them too, because they are easily my four-year-old's favorite games.

The one thing that keeps me from being super-enthusiastic about DM-less dungeon crawl games is that the AI needs to be really good for it to be engaging. The D&DAS games do a good job with this. The monster placement is simple and effective, their movement is interesting, and there are the monsters that influence other monsters like the sentry (I think?) type that pulls other monsters. It works pretty well. What is lost a little bit is the "What're they gonna do next?" tension. I think that's the big reason I like the storyline and fluff that comes with a game like Mice & Mystics; I can get into that more because I'm just as focused on the developing story as I am on the mechanics.

I like DM crawls just a little bit better than the D&DAS and other DM-less games because the overlord can be unpredictable. I also tend to like one-vs-all games just a little bit more than straight cooperative games for the same reason. Games like Doom, Level 7 Omega Protocol, Letters from Whitechapel, Nuns on the Run, etc let you play against someone who is (hopefully) intelligent and unpredictable.

Back to D&DAS games; they and Mice & Mystics are among the best DM-less crawls available right now. If the D&DAS games are lacking anything it's a storyline campaign that has some fiction to back up the scenarios. Claustrophobia, Earth Reborn, L7 Omega Protocol, and Mice & Mystics all provide just enough storyline material to keep me engaged. Even Arkham Horror has enough fluff on the cards to provide some semblance of motivation for your character's actions. D&DAS lacks that. I bet the D&DAS games really shine if you have the type of player who DMs RPGs to provide some backstory for the scenarios and narrative for the game play. Mad Dog makes a good point of how knowing the backstory for Legend of Drizzt makes the game more engaging. I feel the same way about the LoTR coop. The LoTR game provides almost zero narrative other than the names and artwork, but since I know the source material I'm able to really get into it.

I don't know, I don't tend to care too much about some elaborate story in a hack-and-slash game like these. I like to have some structure "go blow up this thing to keep that thing from happening" or whatever, but I think the minute-to-minute narrative is really the action- what gets fought, what gets found, what terrible shit happens.

Dungeon crawls tend to have some of the same problems as race games...too slow, too much counting, and too long.

I think Claustrophobia is pretty much the gold standard for the genre, to be honest. Dungeonquest is up there too, but it's far more capricious. These games give a full sense of a D&D game with plenty of fighting, loot and a threadbare story to give you a reason to be there. That's enough for me.

I love GW DungeonQuest because it's basically a Death Machine. Every tile matters. Not knowing how many HP a monster has is also genius and more games should do that. I don't know if I consider it a dungeon crawl though. It's almost in a category by itself.

If you're spending a lot of time counting and contemplating in a dungeon crawl or a race game then they lose their flair and you might as well be playing a puzzle game or abstract like Fealty.

My biggest complaint against the D&D games is the die. I don't want just one die, and I don't particularly enjoy rolling D20s in the first place.

I like the handful of dice that Tomb gives me. I never play that one either, but a combination of the two systems would appeal to me.

That's d&d though, you roll a d20 to determine a hit/miss. There could have been other polyhedrals in there to determine damage, but having the damage determined by the type of attack you used is cleaner for a board game and seems to work fine.

Yeah, having multiple dice types would not have been the way to go. There was a smart decision made to stick to JUST the D20, which is the iconic D&D die anyway.

I don't usually do stuff like this, but I went and bought color-coded D20s for each character. They are, in fact, stored in a Crown Royal bag in the box. It's tradition.

I think these are great games, although they're starting to wear thin now. The limited variety permitted in the simple rules is beginning to feel repetitive. However, that's after 30 games - mostly Ashardalon - which is a damn site more than most modern games can manage.

Much as I love them, I can't help but feel that a bit of extra depth - some terrain, a few more monster or class powers - might have kept them on the table an awful lot longer. That said I haven't tried the Thunder Shaman campaign yet, and I think I probably should before I scale them down properly.