The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
One Year with Shadowdark
Mon, 21 Oct 2024
Mike discusses his experiences running the Shadowdark RPG for a year Visit the Sly Flourish Blog Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books Shadowdark RPG
Hello friends, it's your pal Mike Shea from Sly Flourish. Today, after finishing up my one year Shadow Dark gloaming campaign, I now feel like I have the experiences to talk to you about Shadow Dark. I have a bunch of experiences that I want to share with you about this incredible
uh role-playing game spoilers i really love shadow dark so if you're looking hey does he like it or not i really love it my group had a great time i had a great time today we're going to dive deep into shadow dark now that i have all of this wealth of experiences i talk to my players about it afterwards we have lots of different things that we want to share and we're going to talk all about it in today's show which is one year with shadow dark
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Thank you so much for your support. So, yes, I finished my Shadow Dark one-year campaign, and now, even though I've talked lots about Shadow Dark, and I think I've done other videos where I've talked about Shadow Dark, now I have true experiences that I can look back on for sharing Shadow Dark. So, what are the big things? Right up front, I want to tell you what my biggest...
kind of the biggest impact things are for shadow dark number one is that i really feel like shadow dark truly captures the feeling of old school dnd but with the modern mechanics of 5e which is exactly how it is built it is built around the idea of like let's make mechanics that that are based upon 50 years of experience running these style games but
try to continue to hang on to the original feeling of D&D with the idea of more of a grimdark fantasy rather than a superheroic fantasy. And I think it does this nearly perfectly. I think the rules are really streamlined, really straightforward. I've taught them to brand new players. I've watched brand new players pick them up.
It is super easy to pick up, super easy to run with, and really captures that idea of battles are always dangerous, and a bad roll can be devastating.
players need to be really thinking about what they're doing and making choices rather than just falling back upon skill checks for everything lots of different stuff like that that i think it does really really well contrary to popular opinion there's there's a couple of different things criticisms i have heard of shadow dark which i wouldn't say all come from people who just read it and didn't play it but i i even even if they have played i don't know that they've played that there's probably not very many people who have played with the amount of time and experience that i've played
now, and I think there's two common things that I had heard. One is, this is probably good for one-shots, but not good for a long campaign. I can tell you that that, at least for me, is false. That we ran a long campaign with it, we had a great time with it, it was really, really fun, as good as many of the 5e campaigns that we've run. And so it definitely held our interest.
Another common complaint is that the simplicity of the characters isn't going to continue to hold the attention of the players. And that also wasn't true. And that's not true for a couple of reasons. One is characters die. So every one of our players swapped characters at least once. Some of them swapped like five or six times.
And building new characters with new backstories with new features meant that they were seeing a lot of interesting things going on there too. But also the focus on the story and the focus on what their characters could do in the game meant that they didn't worry too much about just the stuff that they had for statistics on their sheets.
Now, I do have some players, when I asked them, in fairness, they did say, yeah, I still think I prefer a crunchier 5e than to the simplicity of this. But they never seemed bored, and I didn't have any player who was like, you know, I was glad this campaign is done so we can move on to something else. Everybody there was really happy with how things went. They really enjoyed it.
And all of them said that they would play this again. I really think that Shadow Dark is a fantastic RPG, and it's a pillar of the fantasy RPGs that we have, and probably will be so for the end of my days. It's just a really, really great RPG, and its style is so solid, and it had so few problems. that I think it's fantastic.
I never ran up against anything where I was like, oh, that is a real problem. This is a big mechanical problem that somehow we're going to have to work our way around. There were definitely some sharp edges and little tricky bits. There's some areas where the DM has to kind of come up with some rules for things because it's not really explained in the book.
I think there's a couple of areas where there's some contradictory sort of information, but nothing I ran into made me think like, oh, wow, that doesn't work. I'm going to have to redo that. I didn't hit anything like that. And I have hit stuff like that in 5e. So, you know, I'm not saying like, is it a better designed game than 5e is? Some people might argue because they like that style.
I'm not going to go that far because I think 5e is an absolutely outstanding system. But I think that overall I had fewer things where I felt like I have to change things in Shadow Dark in order to make it work for me. I didn't have anything like that.
so those are really the big things that i wanted to kind of drive forward it really captures the old school feel but but it modernized for current players and modernized around current the current styles and mechanics that we've grown used to with 5e it definitely works well for long campaigns players definitely can hang on to the interest of their characters even though they're mechanically simple and i think it's just an absolutely outstanding role-playing game so those are the main things i want to get now but we're going to dive into details that's the big stuff
But I want to dive into the details here. I mentioned that it feels like a very refined version of D&D that captures that feeling. And these are two things that are very clear in the design. Shadow Dark is definitely based off of fifth edition D&D. That if you look at the mechanics of it, you look at things like advantage and disadvantage.
the way that rolling works, that it definitely is built off of the bones of 5e. But what it managed to do was strip back some of that stuff. There are no proficiency bonuses. The math is very flat. You don't add your ability modifiers to your hit points. You don't add your ability modifiers to your damage.
You can get bonuses to your damage as a character, but you have to work to get there, which means the whole math is way flatter than 5e. which actually fits that style of OD&D first edition and second edition D&D more so than third and up, where the math sort of scales heavier. The game definitely had legs. I mean, you've heard me prepping games for 46 sessions.
I had players at the table for 46 sessions. We had a good time. People were very excited. I really liked it. Now, here's one observation. This isn't a criticism. But it's an interesting observation that I'd come to, and I came to it pretty early, which is it wasn't necessarily easier for me to prep or run Shadow Dark than it is to prep or run 5e. And my experiences for this are pretty interesting.
I was in a unique—I don't know if it's truly unique, but I was definitely in a position that I don't think a lot of people are in, where I was not only running a year's worth of Shadow Dark games, but during that time I was also running a year's worth of 5e games. So in any given week, I might have one or two 5e games that are right alongside my Shadow Dark game.
So I got to experience prepping and running 5e directly next to prepping and running Shadow Dark. And what I found is I didn't find Shadow Dark harder to prep, but I didn't necessarily find it easier to prep. And I think something that you can sometimes run into from people who really love Shadow Dark is the idea that, oh, this is so much easier to run than 5e.
It might definitely be easier for people to run than 5e for certain people. One thing that I think makes a difference in this is that I have spent 10 years refining how I prep and run 5e games. And I think that I'm pretty good at that. I think that I've got a style now that works for me. And when I use that, I basically use the same style to prep my Shadow Dark game that I did to prep my 5e game.
Some would say you don't need to do the same kind of prep for Shadow Dark that you need to do for 5e. And they may be right, but I know that I'm pretty efficient when it comes to my GM prep, that I've really stripped it down to just the things that I think I need to run my game and not much else. And I don't feel like I, other than skipping things like treasure, I almost never prepped treasure.
in my Shadow Dark game I would roll treasure at the time but I still want my secrets and clues I still want NPCs I still want to have an idea of what kind of scenes can take place not specific scenes not like an outline of scene A to scene B to scene C generally speaking what kind of things might happen in this next game just so I have my head around it I still think a strong start is important I still think it's important to review the characters though I probably reviewed the characters less in Shadow Dark than I do in other games because they were so ephemeral they died a lot and you're really not supposed to build it around that
So I changed the prep process a little bit, but I wouldn't say like I was able to cut half my prep out and therefore it was that much easier. I know that there's probably some GMs who feel like just with the random tables in Shadow Dark alone, you don't need to do any kind of prep. And maybe you can get away with that.
I know that I would feel unprepared if I was to just grab the book and run random tables. I did that. And actually some of the random tables led to some of the amazing stories. I still liked having the general prep notes that I had. Now the same is true for running the game.
In this case, I would say that some of the extra elements that Shadow Dark adds onto the game actually can make it a little harder to run than 5e for certain GMs in certain circumstances. And that example is you add your torch timer. The torch timer is one. You now have torch and light matters, and that's something that a GM needs to be keeping an eye on and keeping track of.
keeping track of turn order so that everybody is always operating in turns and you're going around the table. For my group, we often skip that and often players would just do things like we did normally. The problem with that is if you have anything that's taking time in turns, you're not keeping track of that.
So exploring meant a lot of times, one of the things I would do is I just rolled for random encounters when I felt like it was time to roll for a random encounter. I didn't keep track of round by round. Oh, they've had, you know, they've been here now for, you know, whatever, three rounds. So I need to roll another random tape. I need to roll another random encounter or something like that.
likewise they would cast spells we had one player who admitted at the end of the campaign that he hadn't been using mage armor right at all that mage armor only lasts like so many rounds and he's like i thought it was all day and so he was casting mage armor and just automatically adding it to a sheet and i was like your character died five times because of that so you know
The spell, everything has sort of a number of rounds that it lasts. And if you're not keeping track of turns, you're not really keeping track of rounds. And if you're not keeping track of rounds, then people are either getting away with stuff or all of a sudden this stuff that is supposed to fit in a certain style ends up being kind of loosey-goosey.
So if you're tracking turns and you're tracking rounds and you're tracking torch timers, all of those are like three things I don't typically do in 5e unless we're in combat or something like that. And even in combat, I'm not really keeping track of the number of turns.
But those are all things that Shadow Dark at its default rule set does require, which means in that way, it can actually be a little harder to run Shadow Dark than it can be to run 5e if you're not used to running that stuff. It wasn't insurmountable, and it didn't mean we didn't have a fun time. But that was something that I know that I struggled with as I ran things.
One of the things I talked about before, a lot of these, by the way, is like a list of different things that are kind of out of order from one another. So these aren't in any kind of priority order other than those big tips. But since one of my big tips was that it really captures the old school feel with 5e mechanics, I still think that Shadow Dark may be the best D&D starter set that exists.
You can download the Shadow Dark Quick Play rules from DriveThruRPG or from Arcane Library for free. You can pick up the Shadow Dark Quick Play Quick Start set for $19, which includes a player guide, a GM guide, and a bunch of pre-gen characters. It is a really good set.
I own two to three copies of this, because I like to throw it in my bag to run with, because I know that I could run a game like this really, really easily. But also, I think it's an outstanding system to teach people how to play RPGs because of how streamlined the game is. That you don't have to explain things like proficiencies. Spells are a lot easier to understand.
The descriptions of stuff is much easier to pick up. And it's free, so you can hand people the rules and you can give them PDF copies of the rules so that they can read them themselves. Very, very easy to play. And therefore, I think it's an outstanding system.
to teach people how to play D&D, even if they're going to upgrade into, I don't want to say upgrade because it makes it sound like it's better, but even if they're going to move into like D&D 2024 or other fifth edition RPGs that are meatier, starting with the fundamentals of this one can lead them into that. And I think from that style of game, it's really, really fantastic.
The flat math and the way the flat math operates in Shadow Dark is a really interesting thing. And it exists all the way up. A D8 damage, even when players have more hit points, is still like an 8 is really bad. And a 1 or 2 is really not that bad. So the flat math matters all the way up. Attack bonuses never really go that far up.
I did see players that started to have some really high attack bonuses and some really high armor. We're going to talk about that in a minute. But generally speaking, the flat math really is something that you'll see all throughout, and that that is a lot of fun to deal with, too, because it means that the rolls matter a lot more.
When you're rolling a d20, that d20 roll matters a lot more than all the extra modifiers and all the other stuff. However, I did find that as the players leveled up and as they got those new perks for their characters and as they got magic items— and we had a couple of treasure rolls where they got plus three magic items— We got a suit of like plus two armor.
When the characters start to get to like 20 armor class and their attack bonuses are like nine, 10 and 11, they're gonna hit everything and nothing's gonna hit them. And I found that to be the case at high level. And this is something, this is an experience that high level cheese still exists in Shadow Dark as it does in pretty much every version of D&D I've ever seen.
High-level cheese existed since OD&D, and it has existed in every version of D&D, and it's still here, too. That once players have figured out how to optimize around the abilities that they've got, once they've got the right set of magic items, they can become nigh-invincible in different circumstances.
And I noticed this when I threw 20 monsters at the characters at their last level, and they really didn't have a hard time dealing with them, because they knew exactly what spells they could use to crowd-control stuff. They rarely, if ever, missed their spell bonus, or their spellcasting check, They hit often and they were very, very difficult to hit.
And that because of the flat math, magic weapons and armor and stuff like that, those bonuses that they get matter a lot more than they typically do.
Because when you have something like proficiency bonus in 5e, one of the things that I didn't really think about this until I saw it in kind of operation in Shadow Dark is one of the things that the proficiency bonus does is it smooths out some of those other bonuses. The proficiency bonus in 5e starts at plus 2, ends at plus 6. It jumps up to plus three at fifth level.
I don't know when it hits four, but it's a pretty slow progression. But one thing it does is monsters get it too, which wins. It's sort of like the magic item booster that monsters can get later on as they get to higher challenge ratings. Those monsters are going to be more challenging because they have that proficiency bonus in there.
When there isn't a proficiency bonus, it means things like magic items or bonuses that you get for things like character options are going to be way more significant because they will always give you that advantage over monsters because monsters never get those sorts of proficiency bonuses.
I think you will see that some monsters, as they get to higher levels, have a bigger bonus for things than just their abilities go. So there's... I think there's like a hidden proficiency bonus in there in Shadow Dark a little bit. But it's not something that's nearly discreet. And it means that characters, when they get those bonuses, they really matter. And again, that's by design, right?
That's part of the design of the game. That's part of the design of the old one. It's like when you get a plus one weapon, that plus one really matters. It matters more than the plus one weapons you get in 5e because 5e's math is a little bit more incremental than Shadow Dark's math is. So those bonuses matter. But it can mean that for a GM...
who likes to see characters challenged from time to time is going to be disappointed when it's like, oh, these guys are super easy. Of course, you can always put more monsters and you can always put in bigger monsters. I mean, they were down.
We had one character who was the guy that had super high armor class and super high damage who almost got killed and only made it by a single spot of initiative. He would have been killed except that one guy acted before him and that guy managed to save him. So, and that was a 10th level. I think the character was 10th level when that happened.
There are holes that need to be filled in the rule set that Shadow Dark is definitely a, like, when you don't have a clear definition of what something does, the DM makes a determination of it. There are a couple of times where I really would have liked a little bit of guidance. And an example is when a character is at zero and takes damage, what happens?
And I, you know, it was one of the first things I ran into was when a character is down, but not dead, but they take damage from something, what happens? And I went to, I went to the Shadow Dark Discord server to ask, and there was like a bunch of different opinions on it. But the, and one general opinion was it's up to the DM. Well, no kidding. It's up to DM. Everything's up to DM. I get that.
But like generally, what should we be doing? And a lot of it was like, well, then it depends on the situation. What kind of stuff would happen? But it feels like if you take, you know, should you die because you took a single point of fire damage? Well, that seems a little bit much. But should you be invulnerable to that fire damage? No, that doesn't seem right either.
But you don't have hit points anymore, and there's no negative hit points. So there's this sort of weird state. So I came up with a rule which is similar to how 5e does it, which is essentially when you drop... The DM, and this was like a little house rule that we had, but my players were on board with this, they liked this, is I would roll a D4. When their turn came up, I would roll a D4.
And that would tell me how long until their character is going to die from being down. And any time they took damage, that die would go down. So if they only had one, and then they took damage, they would die. If they had two and they took damage, it would drop by one. That worked well. I explained it to the players, they understood it, and then I did it too.
Now also, though, creatures could coup de grace a character. So if a character is down to zero and a creature uses its attack directly against that character to kill it, it's going to kill it regardless of how many death saves. So that meant that it was still pretty lethal, even with that rule.
But that way you have something that says, if you fall down in a pool of oil and the pool ignites with fire, but it's only like a point of damage... it's not going to kill you outright, but you are going to lose one of your deaths. You know, I'm calling them death saves. You're, you know, a death tick, right?
That if I rolled a three and you're in lying in fire, now you're at a two automatically, you know, every time you take damage from that, you're going to lose a point on top of losing a point because the rounds are ticking down. That works really well, but that's not explained anywhere. I had to kind of come up with that. I think it works really well. It was really elegant.
It kind of kept that danger, the danger of shadow arc there, but also had this other element of, of progression that worked well. But then there's other areas, too, where every so often there are things that sort of contradict. One of the general rules of Shadow Dark is that characters detect traps by finding them. The player describes what they're doing to try to find a trap.
and if they find it, they find it. But then you look at the thief class, and it has things like thievery. You're adept at thieving skills and have the necessary tools and trade secreted on your person.
You are trained in the following tasks and have advantage on any associated checks, climbing, sneaking, and hiding, applying disguises, finding and disabling traps, and delicate tasks such as picking pockets and opening locks. Now for some, like picking pockets and opening locks and stuff like that, but finding traps doesn't have a DC. So you don't really get advantage on that.
And this is something when one of my players is playing a thief, they're like, I don't know when I should be rolling on this because a lot of these things, we don't roll checks on this, right? We don't always roll checks. For sneaking and hiding, for example, it's like if you're hiding, you're hiding. If you're not, you're not. So, you know, some odd bits like that. Backstab is an interesting one.
If you hit a creature who is unaware of your attack, you deal an extra weapon die. We had to kind of figure out that unaware means generally you're only getting it right away. But there is no perception bonus. There is no stealth check. There is no way to kind of determine mechanically what it means to be to have a creature unaware of your attack.
So that means that it's firmly in the hands of the game master. And if the game master is busy, like I'm often very busy, it meant I got to kind of work with the thief in order to decide, like, can I, you know, the player had to be explicit about saying things like, I want to try to get up to that person and make sure they're unaware of me.
Because otherwise they're never going to get the backstab. And they're not intended to get it all the time. One of the things we came up with, which we had to kind of make a firm rule, is that once you're engaged in combat with an enemy, you're not going to be able to backstab them. You don't get to backstab an enemy that's already aware of your presence at all.
Which is different enough from 5e that that's a tricky bit. That's something I could have used a little bit more guidance than the book allowed for. But generally speaking, these are rare occurrences where I came up with something that we couldn't noodle through. It was pretty rare for me to find these things. And usually a conversation with... Trying to understand like...
what's the intention of the game, and what do we imagine the intention of the description is, and then figuring out what that means for us when it manifests at the table. That's something that we had to do. Not a disadvantage, exactly, but one area where I certainly could have used more guidance. And there is actually sort of a FAQ on the Discord server for Shadow Dark.
One of the things I might recommend would be, it would be really cool if there was an official FAQ for some of these things, that now that the game has been out for more than a year, there are common questions.
I think it would be pretty cool if Kelsey was to have a list of, these are the intentions for these kinds of things, these are how they're supposed to work, or here are some house rules that you can put in place, which might be something that comes out in a future supplement of, hey, here are specific house rules for these things, sort of like what Xanathar's Guide did for D&D 2014.
was hey we've learned some things since the original game came out and now he had those things but i think it'd be pretty cool to like have a fact in the meantime the discord server is always there but discord is its own thing it would be nice to have like an actual pdf that actually showed some of the common common ways to handle situations that people regularly run into when they're playing shadow dark that'd be a neat thing to see
Another interesting thing is about how spell rolls work. So in Shadow Dark, you roll to see whether or not you're able to cast a spell. This is actually on both sides. Monsters, when they cast spells, do the same thing. They have to roll a spell check to see if they can do it. If you fail the check, you lose access to the spell. And if you succeed, the spell totally succeeds.
So there isn't sort of like a half damage on a failed saving throw sort of style thing, which means it's sort of all or nothing. It's math and stuff like that. What's interesting is as characters increase in level, their ability to cast spells becomes easier for them to do. And then they get specializations and other things.
They might get other access to luck points, which means that they are going to be nailing their spells pretty often. And it doesn't matter how powerful the monsters are. They're going to be affected by those spells.
Now, one thing Shadow Dark does, which I really like, is that many of the sort of save or suck spells have a level limit, that creatures of a level or equal to or lower than a certain number are the only ones affected. And that can be a disappointment for some players because what they'll do is they'll say, is this creature level seven? And you don't want to be like, I'm not telling.
And they're like, I'll cast. I'm like, you fail, you suck, it's level nine, right? Like in some cases they wouldn't necessarily know. So I just told them, right? I just said like, no, that you're pretty confident that it's not going to work against this creature. Because they're already going to waste spells. They're already going to blow chances. I didn't want them to do that, too.
So I like level-limited spells. I think that that's actually a really good way of dealing with the save-or-suck problem that has existed in D&D since the 70s. But I think you need to tell them. I knew that I felt like I needed to tell them when they were going to blow a spell. But then otherwise, the other interesting factor, though, is...
They became very effective at throwing out big spells because of their spell specializations, their ability to kind of roll advantage when they would roll certain spells or other bonuses they had or other access to luck and things like that. So that enabled them to do that.
So it meant that it was how things operated were different than the balance of having a difficult creature against the character's The balance wasn't quite there because even if it's a difficult creature, the character who's able to cast spells more easily is more able to easily nail that creature with those spells anyway. So that was kind of interesting.
One thing that one of the players brought up, I asked all of my players to give me three things that they would want to share with other people about having played Shadow Dark for a year. And one person that brought it up, and I think he's absolutely right, is the book is just physically great. It's a really fun book to hold on to. It's a trade-sized, you know, it's not a full big book.
Everything is in it. You have everything you need to play in that one book. You could play forever with just that one book. And it was really kind of cool to just have that one book, throw it in your backpack and go. I had the GM screen. The GM screen is really cool and the curse scrolls are really great.
I'm not really a GM screen guy and I found myself referencing the GM screen so little that eventually I just didn't use the GM screen. I really just needed the book. And what I did is I got the book and I got a bunch of little adhesive tabs that I could tab into the book and stuck those in the back of the book. And I just used that for a year. And it was awesome, right?
I used it all the time, but I never needed to like look stuff up online. I never did anything else. I just had the book and I just flipped through the book and roll and it worked great. It was really, really outstanding. So it's just, it's a physically great book. Like it's a really good book.
And if you plan on running it, if you're going to run it, I would get the physical, I would get the physical book if you can. It's really, really great. I'm very lucky. I got both the original and a collector's version and, and I love them both. Oh, Shadow Darklings. My players loved Shadow Darklings.
If you go to shadowdarklings.net, you have a character builder where you can build up a character for Shadow Darklings in, like, 20 seconds. And we used a joke about, like, we're going to, let's see, random zero, random one. We will do best fit. And you bring Spickrick, the goblin thief.
And you immediately get a character ready to go, and you can export it to PDF, and you get a really nice character PDF super fast. People love this because it meant that they could whip up a new character super quickly in their game. It meant that they really love ShadowDarklings.net, and it's outstanding. I would love to have a downloadable version of Shadow Darklings.
I think it's great that it's there. It's totally free. I know it was developed by a developer that ended up, I think, getting hired by Kelsey as part of Arcane Library. It's now an official character builder for it. It's got a login and all that. I would still love to have even a simpler version
of a downloadable version of shadow darklings because it is one of these things where like, I feel like this game has such legs. And when I look at it and I feel like when I hold that book, that this is a 50 year RPG, right? This is an RPG I will have on my table for the rest of my life.
I don't know if I'm going to have shadow darklings the rest of my life, but I know that if I, I would feel more secure about it. If I knew I could have like an HTML and JavaScript that,
page that let me generate a shadow dark character locally without having to go to a website that would be outstanding too it's not absolutely required because it's actually not that hard to generate a character in pen and paper anyway but one of the things is that the license of something else that i would that i would be happy with in this would be an open-sourced version of shadow darklings or an open-sourced version of a character builder like an authorized open-sourced version that was up on github or something else so that we knew that other people could host it if shadow darklings ever went down
Because that would be nice. The current Shadow Dark fan license does not allow you to build digital tools to build characters at all. And it's a simple enough system that it's really not hard to do so. But it violates their license agreement to do so. They do not want you to do so. They've said that they don't allow it. It would be really cool to either have like an open source version.
So we knew that other people could host it or have a downloadable version that we know we could keep locally so that we don't have to feel like, and then, you know, depend is really heavy because again, it's a very lightweight game, but if I'm giving crap to D and D beyond for the same thing, I, you know, same, same issue here, right? It's a hosted, it's a hosted tool that's around.
What if Mattel or Disney buys shout or dark? Well, I know that I'm still going to have shout or dark links.net for the rest of my life.
not necessarily but if something is in the open if the if the if the if the code is in the open i know that somebody else could host it if somebody else goes down that's something that i i talk about it all the time my talk show i think is we're talking about here but boy my players love shadow darklings and it's really funny when you think about a game that's this lightweight and they still love digital tools for building their characters because it's so fast to do and you know i did it like i built characters say there's my my which we're gonna delete him delete delete my character
You know, you can create zero level characters four at a time, right? And you can build, and I did. So I'm running a Shadow Dark game for a Shadow Dark gauntlet. And look, one page that has four characters on it. So it would be really, really neat to have a downloadable version of this. Do I need it? No. Can I roll up characters super quickly otherwise? Yes, I can.
But right now, the idea that both the license does not allow for other people to make a digital tool so that I can be confident that somebody else will have one or that Shadow Darklings isn't downloadable so that I can have a version on my local computer and know that I always have that version, even if the site goes down and stuff like that. Experience is kind of interesting.
So experience is sort of another sort of fuzzy area of Shadow Dark where how much experience do you give for certain stuff? And it's kind of left to the GM to say there are different levels of experience and different amount of experience points that you give out depending upon the level of, you know, the amount of impact of the thing. I just made it up, right?
And there were times where, like, if they faced a particular foe that they'd been hunting for a while, I said they got experience just for even seeing the foe or defeating the foe. or milestones. You can still throw all that sort of stuff like milestone experience in there and not just have it be treasure-based.
It feels like Shadow Dark kind of stuck between this thing of like, well, we want it to be treasure-based, but not so close, not so tight that like gold piece value is your experience point value or something like that, that they wanted to abstract it so that GMs have some control over this. It was difficult for me to understand what the curve was of leveling.
And so I was always kind of surprised when characters would either level and even have big discrepancies. We had some characters that were like level nine and other ones were level six. And I couldn't understand, like, how did that happen? Like, we've all been playing and it wasn't like the player played level six and missed it.
What happened is when one of those sort of house rules that we had is character, if you died, you could bring in a new character at the level of your previous character, but at zero experience points. Which means any experience points that you had gained during that level, you lost. And some players lost a lot, right?
At one point, I did joke and I gave somebody a half an experience point, and they were literally one half of an experience point away from level seven. They were like 69 and a half experience points, and they needed 70 experience points. Like, can I find a half? And I'm like, nope. And I gave him 30 experience points. And I was like, well, great. Now I'm at 29 and a half at the next level.
I kind of like the fun of having half an experience point. So you can kind of make it all up as you go. But again, this is one where maybe a little bit more guidance would be good. And some discussion about like the leveling curve across campaigns. I sort of had to discover that on my own.
There also wasn't any real rules about what do you do when a player joins in partway through a campaign or if a character dies, do you bring them to levels? There wasn't any options for that. There's no discussion of it at all as far as I know. And we just had to make something up. So that's another one where I could have used a little bit more guidance. The other interesting thing is
items lasted longer than characters did by far because a lot of times a character would die and their stuff would still be around and the next character would come in and you know take all their stuff or the other characters would take all their stuff and carry it around which meant swords like prophecy lasted the whole campaign even though the character that wielded it died like three characters back so uh it's interesting to see that treasure lasts but characters don't
Not a total surprise, but kind of an interesting thing that a GM should be thinking about when they're running a long campaign. So then I got some direct feedback from my players. The stuff that I described, a lot of that came from my players as well, but I wanted to offer some direct feedback that I got from the players who played along with me for this awesome one-year campaign.
One thing is I asked them, like, would you play in another Shadow Dark campaign? And they said, yes. Now, I think that, and I did have players who said they're happy to kind of jump back into 5e again. I had one player who really loved Shadow Dark, who really loved story games, who was like, you know what?
I'm really looking forward to more of the tactical, crunchy bits of 5e now that we've played Shadow Dark for a year. Because I've been playing Baldur's Gate 3 and doing all of those kind of like crunchier sort of bits will be a fun thing to do. And we're playing in Tales of the Valiant, which is going to have plenty of crunch. So she's definitely going to get that.
and it wasn't a criticism against shadow dark it was just like you know i'm looking forward to a style of game that's different than the one that we just did but all of them said they would play it again you know they they definitely felt like it played different than more heroic systems and some of the criticisms that i had heard from them were things like i really wish i had more equipment slots and i think one guy i can't tell if he was joking or not he said i really wish we could bundle torches into like a bundle of 10 instead of having each torch take up a slot
And what I realized is like, well, you know, that's why the game works. Like that's there for a reason, right? If you had more inventory slots, inventory wouldn't matter. If you didn't have to use up inventory for torches, then light wouldn't matter. So those things are important, but they felt frustrated by it at the same time. So I thought it was interesting.
And these are, again, GMs who have run games for a long time. So it's interesting that they want these things, but they don't really want them. And this gets into that philosophy, I think, I don't know, Sid Meier or somebody who brought up that gamers will optimize their way out of the fun. And that's one where if they could have an ideal set of equipment slots...
Well, you know, then that part of the game is gone and then they might get bored with the game because that doesn't matter anymore. They don't have to like nitpick about what slot they're going to use for something like that. It'd be really interesting to play a game like Nave where your equipment slots are also your hit points. That would be kind of a fun one to see. It's even worse.
One of my players
said it felt like the monsters upgraded faster than the players did or monsters got abilities that characters never got and i can understand where that came from like one of the players is like he was a level 10 knight of saint yidris who still only had one attack around and he's like are you kidding me i'm 10th level i'm the equivalent of like that archmage and and i'm still only getting one attack that knight who's only level three he gets two attacks like why do those guys get two attacks they're a knight they're another human being like me why do they attack in twice and i only get to attack once
And it's because monsters and characters are not built the same way. But it was still an interesting thing for him to kind of recognize that I sure feels like I should get more stuff. Again, optimizing the way out of the fun. The minute you give a character more than one attack, now you're playing 5e.
So then your monsters have to have more hit points, and then monsters are also going to have more attacks, and then you might as well add proficiency bonus, and then you're back to 5e again. So, but it was kind of interesting.
And I've, I've actually heard this complaint at 5e as well, that like rogues only get one attack, but a swashbuckler rogue monster gets three or the master assassin gets multiple attacks. And it's because monsters and characters are not built the same way. They're not, they're not designed the same way.
So, but, but sometimes from the player perspective, it's like, I don't know why the monsters, they, the way he referred to it was the monsters are upgrading faster than we are, that the monsters are getting new stuff, more stuff, more dangerous stuff than we are. And we're the threat. But then the other hand is like, This is from the dude at a 21 AC and never got hit.
So I'm like, I don't know what you're complaining about. They don't have plus three armor and a plus three weapon. You're dicing these guys down like crazy. So that was pretty interesting. And one thing was like the nostalgia of it. They really love the nostalgia of this.
Some of the players there, so I have some younger players, I have some players that are more experienced, more of an experienced age, unlike me.
and who remember playing in like first edition second edition and i remember i had a player and i threw rust monsters at him and he literally teared up and he's like this feels just like dnd like this is exactly what dnd felt like when i was a kid like i'm worried about my gear getting disintegrated this is a great and it was funny because he's like he's like i got emotional about a rust monster
And it was because he's like, I remember Rust Monsters. And I remember when we really cared about Rust Monsters. So it was really, really fun to see that kind of nostalgia. But I think in the end, the one message that I got from my players, which is something that I certainly agree with, is we all love this game. We love the campaign. We would definitely play it again.
And we just had a really, really good time with it. And I think that that's how I really want to end this one-year Shadow Dark retrospective is that we just, we really, I love Shadow Dark. It's a fantastic game. It's going to be on my shelf forever. I think it's fantastic. I look forward to seeing it expand in the future. I know I am running two Shadow Dark games in the next month.
I'm running a Shadow Dark Gauntlet at a convention that I'm going to, and I am running my one-year, my Halloween Ravenloft game using Shadow Dark once again.
so shadow dark is probably a permanent staple in the rpgs that i run and i'm really excited to do so i hope you enjoyed this video if you did and you liked this and you want more stuff like this please consider subscribing to this life flourish newsletter you get a free adventure generator for signing up you get a weekly rpg related email that has links to all of the other stuff that i do so you can see the other videos that i'm putting out you can find tips for your rpgs you can find all kinds of stuff it's the best way to keep in touch with all the stuff that i do
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The Lazy DM Companion in particular, I think works really well side by side with Shadow Dark. All the different kinds of random tables and things that you get in The Lazy DM's Companion, I think would work really, really well side by side with Shadow Dark. You can get all of that on the Sly Flourish bookstore. Thank you so much. Have a great day and get out there and play an RPG.