How to play Dragonbane

Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Dragonbane. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own Dragonbane game at home.

I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections.

1. 
   

   Game category

   
   


2. 
   

   Attributes

   
   


3. 
   

   Skills

   
   


4. 
   

   Pushing

   
   


5. 
   

   Conditions

   
   


6. 
   

   Dragons, demons

   
   


7. 
   

   Boons, banes

   
   


8. 
   

   Initiative

   
   


9. 
   

   How to attack

   
   


10. 
    

    Zero hit points

    
    


11. 
    

    Sneak attacks

    
    


12. 
    

    Actions and reactions

    
    


13. 
    

    Armor

    
    


14. 
    

    Weapon durability

    
    


15. 
    

    Movement

    
    


16. 
    

    Terrain

    
    


17. 
    

    Encumbrance

    
    


18. 
    

    Resting

    
    


19. 
    

    Magic

    
    


20. 
    

    Building a character

    
    

Game category. Dragons, demons, and player characters of fantasy races. Magic, mystery, and adventure. Dragonbane is a tabletop roleplaying game designed in the mirth and mayhem roleplaying style. Mirth and mayhem means there is room for laughter and a pinch of silliness, and also brutal challenges for adventurers to face in combat. Dragonbane is a translated and updated version of the Scandinavian game Drakar och Demoner, first released in 1982. Its main author Tomas Harenstam intended Dragonbane to facilitate fast and furious play, with less prep time than other d20 based ttrpg systems. Players embody characters whose professions give them specialized skills and weapons, to roll four, six, eight, ten, twelve, or twenty sided dice to fight against enemies such as harpies, minotaurs, giants, manticores, griffins, wights, trolls, and of course, dragons.

Attributes. Your character has six attributes: strength, constitution, agility, intelligence, willpower, and charisma. The character’s ability to do everything from wield their weapon, to sneak undetected, to barter with a shop keeper, to how many hit points they have, is derived from their numbers in these core attributes. You’ll determine those attribute numbers by rolling dice during character creation, and I’ve gone through an example of character creation at the end of this how to play guide to show you how attribute points are rolled. But basically, the higher the number, the better your character is at that thing. Here’s an example of the attribute number ranges. A five in the strength attribute would mean you’re not great at lifting or carrying things. Your inventory would be scant, and you’d get over encumbered easily. A ten is pretty average for an attribute. A sixteen in the strength attribute means you’re really strong, and are way better than a regular person at brawling and axes.

Skills. Every Dragonbane character has a number in thirty skills. Some example skills are the agility attribute based acrobatics skill, the charisma attribute based persuasion skill, the intelligence attribute based languages skill, and the strength based brawling skill. To see if you succeed when doing one of your skills, roll a twenty sided dice, also called a d20. If the dice result is the same as or lower than your skill level, you succeed at what you were trying to do. If the dice shows a number higher than your skill number, then you failed.

Here is an example skill roll. You want to spot something hidden. Your spot hidden skill is a 14. You roll a d20. If the dice is a 14, 13, 12, 11, etc, down to 2, you see the hidden thing, yay. If your dice is a 15, 16, 17, 18, or 19, you don’t see the hidden thing. The higher your skill number, the more likely you are to succeed. If you fail, that might impact the story. Not only do you not see the hidden thing, which could allow an enemy to deal extra ambush damage to you, but also it might cost you more time, risk, or gold to achieve your goals. Failure never stops the story completely, but it is expensive to some of your consumables.

Pushing. Failing a skill roll doesn’t have to be the end. You could choose to push, which means gaining a condition in exchange for rerolling the dice. To push, first explain how the condition you’re choosing to gain results from the action you’re performing. You can’t choose a condition you already have. And then roll your dice again. Whether or not your new roll succeeds, you have gained that condition. A small note, if the first dice was a twenty, a demon roll, it can’t be pushed.

Conditions. There are six conditions, one for each attribute. The conditions are: exhausted for strength, sickly for constitution, dazed for agility, angry for intelligence, scared for willpower, and disheartened for charisma. For as long as you have the condition for that attribute, roll it with bane, meaning roll two dice and keeping the higher of the two numbers, whichever is worse. You can recover from conditions by resting.

Here is an example of pushing to gain a condition. You went fishing as part of a diplomatic delegation with a prince. The fishing roll was an 11, and you have a 10 in fishing, it’s a failure of a fishing trip. The prince is getting pretty frustrated because you and him haven’t caught anything and it has been hours. You’ve been out since the crack of dawn, and it’s getting hot, a trickle of sweat runs down your skin, and the flying bugs are swarming, and it’s really unpleasant here on the water with no shade. If you two could just catch one thing, you could go back in to shore and the fishing trip would have been a diplomatic success. The happy prince would be more likely to continue the marriage negotiations with you, lots of good stuff, all hinging on this one rod and reel. So you decide it’s worth it to push. You name a condition, sickly. You explain how this condition results from the action you’re trying to do. The action is that you are going to bait the hook not only with those fancy designer reusable lures, but you’re going to actually bait the hook with a live bait. It’s gross and you feel a bit sickly, but the live bait gives you another chance. You roll again. A nine! Success! You and the prince finally catch something, turning the fishing trip into a good day. The giant pike you pull on board is an excellent platter on the royal dinner table tonight, facilitating smooth communication between the political parties. However, if someone sneaks poison into your portion during the dinner tonight and you have to roll a constitution attribute check to see if the poison hurts you or not, the sickly condition bane means that you wo