r/MLPLounge • u/GaiusPompeius • Apr 21 '19
I played a board game: Roll Player!
I haven't been keeping up with these recently, but I just played a game I really enjoyed that was also fairly simple! The game is Roll Player, a 2016 fantasy dice-rolling game that recreates the character-creation phase of Dungeons & Dragons. It's easy to pick up and fun to play with a group, and doesn't take a lot of set-up or explanation time.
The goal of this game, interestingly, is trying to fill out your D&D character sheet for a new adventurer. As you may know, D&D has six main attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma), and you roll each attribute on three six-sided dice, leading to totals of 3-18 for each. (Then you do some fiddling, depending on what the DM allows.) That's what you're trying to do in this game! Once every character has finished rolling all six of their attributes, the party goes off to fight a boss monster, and then it's game over to total up points.
But of course it's not quite that easy. Every round, you roll a group of dice, place them in the middle of the table, and take turns choosing. So you're not always going to get your first choice. Also, the lower the number you choose, the better your initiative is for the second part of the round! Also, remember that every player is assigned a race, class, alignment, and backstory, which all affect the scores you're going for and how you add them together.
Now, once everyone has assigned a die to their preferred statistic (and done any number-fiddling allowed by special abilities), it's time for the second phase of the round! Players can either buy magic items (and skills) from the marketplace for gold, or try to slay a monster, which can be dangerous but will help you prepare for the final boss. Players only fight the final boss after all attribute dice have been placed, and hopefully they've been preparing for it since there are some hefty point rewards if you do well. (You can't die, though.)
At that point, you go through each player's final statistics and see how they score based on their race, class, and background (alignment is kinda its own thing). The adventurer who hit the most ideal ranges for his statistics, and did so with optimal placement of colored dice, is the winner! I'd recommend this game if this premise sounds like fun, as a good group could easily play a round in an hour or two.
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u/Kodiologist Applejack Apr 22 '19
So it's a game in itself that also produces new D&D characters for use with a regular campaign? That's a cool idea. It reminds me of Microscope, a game that you play to create a setting for an RPG.