[DL] DSA - an introduction [way OT and pretty long, but since chris asked...]

[<markus.finster@chello.at>]

> Von: "Mr. Christopher McGlothlin, M.Ed." <sosentinel@adelphia.net>
> 
>          Thanks for the post!

You're welcome!
 
>          I'm not familiar with Aventuria. So what's DSA about?

Hmm. It's a bit like a crossover from Renaissance Europe (concerning the tech level) with Medieval Europe (concerning society). It's a fantasy game, so you got Elves, Dwarves and Humans as playable races, you got magic (which is pretty much heavily institutionalised).
The game takes place on a planet called "Dere" (which is an anagram for Erde = Earth, so it's not really original) which mainly features one continent called Aventurien. There is another, fabled continent to the west, beyond the great sea and another to the northeast, seperated by a huge frickin' mountain.
Not much info on these two exists.

Aventurien itself has everything you need: deserts, ice, woods, swamps, cities...

To the game itself: DSA is pretty much an assembly of cliches, i.e. in the desert are various tribes of "Novadi" which are in an epic campaign united by a white guy from civilized Gareth, who becomes an icon for the tribes and something of an honorary Novadi. That should sound familiar. ;-)

There are the other ingredients of fantasy games, like orcs and trolls, they are different in this game though and little more than opposition for the players.

The game system features a D20, but the skill system is very different from D&D. I know 2nd and 3rd Edition, the recent 4th Edition simplified a bit (or a lot, depends who you ask) - since I never played it, I can give you an overviw over 3rd Edition.

Every Character, be it Knight, Thief or Wizard, has the same skill list, with each skill scoring between -20 and +18.
In the same skill, say "Axes", a starting dwarf will have a score of 5, a thief a score of 1 and a wizard a score of -5.

Aside from the fighting skills (which do make a difference between two-handed-swords, spears, axes, hammers, swords, rapiers and so on...) each skill is based on a combination of three Attributes.

The combination could be, like for Hiding: Courage/Intuition/Dexterity. Each has a starting value from 8 to 13.
And you have a skill level. Let's say you're a Thief, so you'd start with something like 6 or 7.
Now you would roll your D20 three times. The lower the better. You compare each roll to each Attribute. If you have a negative skill level, you have to add that malus to each roll. With a positive level you may roll above your Attributes for a total of your skill level.

If you think, that's complicated - be assured, it is.
An example:
A thief tries to hide. He got 12 in each Attribute (for sake of easyness) and a kill level of 7.
Now he roles 10 for his Courage (fair enough), 20 for his Intuition (that's bad) and 1 on Dexterity. He failed to hide and is easily spotted. If he rolled a 19 on his second roll, he would have negated that with his skill-level.

The combat systems is based on Attack and Defense: the one with the highest Courage goes first, roles his attack, his target roles his parry, if it's a hit, damage is roled and vice versa.

I know that sounds pretty dull. To be honest I find that it is. The rule system is one of the worst I came to know. Yet still, if you can master these (and DSA is the one RPG which most beginners choose) you're not afraid of trying anything else.
But the world is wonderfully described, there are lot of adventure hooks, the many cliche-characters help especially new players to get into it (hey, that guy is like that other guy from that movie...) and the Line Developers really tried to introduce some new ideas with the  4th Edition. There was a huge campaign about an evil sorcerer which took somthing like a year of realtime to play - in the end, some rules were simplified, combat was accelerated (it's because of DSA that I never join any of those "in DL, combat takes soooo long"-debates), there is now somthing like a domain of the undead...

So, that was a pretty long post. Personally, I don't think that DSA has a chance on the US market (or in the CS, Mr. McGlothlin ;-) ) since it's not innovative enough to compete with D&D.

It's main reason for it's success in Germany and Europe is that it was available in German around the time when D&D first came out and you had to buy it in US or England to get a copy and then it cost a fortune. And now, it's somthing like 15 or 20 years old and a lot of people play it out of nostalgia (I assume with heavily modifeid houserulus, as we did), and others start it because it's the biggest selling game and they just want to try this roleplaying thing.

If anyone has any more questions, I suggest to contact me privately ;-)

Markus