So today we're going to be doing a little bit of a review of the Czech exclusive RPG Drači Doupě Plus, or as it is known in short hand: DrD+. In case this wasn't immediately obvious from the name alone, this is an old school Dungeons & Dragons clone. The things that make it different from any of a thousand fantasy heartbreakers you will never play is that this one was designed behind the Iron Curtain by Czechoslovakian gamers in secret, and then released to the masses shortly after the wall came down in 1990. It has retained something of a Czech fanbase, being the only RPG written for a Czech audience, and we are dealing with the 2nd edition (from 2004).

This review will necessarily be incomplete, because the book is written in pretty dense Czech and I am crawling through it on my tongue. Also because I only have the player's guide, which doesn't have the whole of the rules in it. There is also the PJ book (essentially the Dungeon Master, although an excessively literal translation is "Mister Cavern"), and the Beastiař (Monster Manual), and a separate book for each class that tells you what the class' actual abilities are (yes, really).

[size=16]Copyright Violation? This is Eastern Europe![/size]

The first thing you have to remember when reading this is that this was designed by people who had nothing but contraband copies of original D&D and maybe Die Schwarze Auge to work with. So they totally missed the boat on nearly all innovations of gaming through the 80s, let alone 90s. Really, we should be comparing this work not to its literal contemporaries like Shadowrun or Vampire, but to its conceptual contemporaries like Tunnels & Trolls or Rolemaster. But the second thing you notice is that in Czechia, noone has to hear you bitch about copyright laws, so they gleefully rip off anything they were able to get their hands on. Here's the race table:



Yes. Really. They have Hobits, because Tolkien's estate never bothered to sue them and force them to use some gaming code word like Halflings or Pucks. Also, Dark Elves (Temny Elf), Dwarves (Trpaslik), and Orcs (Skřet) have Infravision. Seriously. Because we are totally gaming in 1978 here. Also note that Trolls (Kroll) regenerate. I don't think they have access to copies of 3 Hearts and 3 Lions, so they are doing this simply because Gygax's Trolls regenerated and nothing more.

It isn't all bleakness, their is seriously a tiny essay about how the races are all rebalanced from Tolkien because the races in Lord of the Rings are totally unbalanced. However, you will note that even a casual glance at the table will indicate to you that the stat mods are pretty damn harsh and that the correspondence between race and class are probably pretty harsh. This impression is correct.

You could even call with 80% accuracy the nature of the six attributes that characters possess just by looking at that chart. Sil is Strength, Int is Int, and so on. The only one you'd be blindsided by is that they dropped Constitution and replaced it with Agility - that's Obr.

[size=16]Outdated Ideas Run Rampant[/size]

We're pretty familiar with arguments as to whether some new gaming system or expansion piece is a good one or not, but we almost always come to them from the standpoint of people who live in the modern era and have built upon experiences of older experiences and the modern zeitgeist of acceptable behavior. This is in no way similar to the situation from which the DrD+ writers came to the table. So in addition to such simple things as characters being unable to leave one of the six starting character classes and wealth being measured in Copper, Silver, and Gold - you got really offensive things that the rest of the world abandoned a long time ago. For example, here are the stat modifiers for different sexes for each of the basic races:


What this means is that if you are a Wizard, the chances are very good that you are a Dwarf. And specifically a female Dwarf at that. Because that way you get a Willpower boost and no Intelligence penalty. If you are a Cleric, you are almost certainly a female Hobbit. And chances are very good that if you are a Thief that you are a female Elf. All Fighters, and I do mean all of them, are men.

The classes are Fighter, Thief, Ranger, Wizard, Theurg, and Cleric. Of those, they pretty much do exactly what it sounds like they do. The only part that is at all confusing is the Theurg, which is basically a Wizard with a different spell list. I don't know how different, because the spell list does not appear to be in this book.

You might have also noticed that there were asterisks on several races and sub races. Those are the races that you are not allowed to play without PJ permission because the default assumption is that they will be attacked when you go to town. Seriously.

[size=16]Balance is a Decadent Western Ideal[/size]

One thing I can see is that the manner in which characters gain abilities is not the same. That is, while I am unable to tell you what abilities a Fighter actually gets without reading a different book, the rules do graciously tell you how you would go about getting them as you go up levels.

If you are a Fighter or a Wizard, you pick something called an "archetype" at character generation, and that gives you a pile of abilities to begin with. Thereafter, it locks you on an advancement railroad where you get more abilities as you go up in level. You can apparently plead with the PJ to have some of these incoming abilities replaced with other ones more appropriate to your character, but the PJ only is supposed to agree to this if you have been doing stuff relevant to some other archetype. The actual example is that if you have been living in the wilderness as part of your adventure, the PJ might let your knight character take fighting abilities off the Barbarian advancement instead of the Knight Advancement. Be prepared to suck a lot of DM penis or min/max your character background.

If you are a Thief or a Theurg, your powers come to you in selectable skill trees. Apparently, things with a lot of prereqs are very powerful compared to things that don't, so if you specialize a Thief or Theurg character you are probably better than one who doesn't. We've all seen advancement like this, so I don't need to go into it overmuch.

But the real descent into madness is the advancement scheme of the Ranger and Cleric. They don't have one. The player asks the PJ for stuff, and the PJ either gives it to them or not. They don't even gain powers when they level. Stuff just happens. If the PJ decides that your Cleric needs to get some divine intervention, they do. Otherwise, they don't. The book suggests that the PJ should set up some sort of puzzles or something with an interactive world that the player can then attempt to figure out what the fuck they are supposed to be doing in order to have power rain down on them, and if they don't they are specifically supposed to sit down, shut up, and like it.

Meanwhile, character generation allows you to select having good stats or having a good background. If you choose better stats, your stats are higher, if you choose a good background, you get more points to distribute between family connections, money, and skills. I don't know how good skills are because I can't find them in this book. Family connections don't seem to do anything except act as a limit to how many points you are allowed to put into Skills or starting cash. But yes, there is nothing stopping you from rolling up a nobleman with shitty stats and a pile of money and then get them killed and have your next character come in as some wundrkind orphan halfling girl who is a genetically superior Cleric.

[size=16]Welcome to the Kafkaesque Nightmare[/size]

So just to make sure you haven't forgotten that we are living in a bizarre Kafkaesque wilderness of nonsensical numbers and contrary information, I present to you, this:


What the fuck? Is that gamma and beta functions? Yes. Yes it is. And you're probably wondering why the hell anyone would do that to a set of rules that people are supposed to follow. And I don't have a good explanation. What I can do is simplify that concept to something that makes a tiny bit of sense: The idea is that there are completely arbitrary game numbers and there are real world weights and measures. And there are tables that convert one to the other. And for some reason they decided to name the process of applying the identity of things on a table gamma and beta functions. So throughout the rules, you will be given Greek letters and function notation instead of being told to look something up on the table.

But let's get to how crazy those tables actually are for a moment. Here's one:



So what do we see there that makes it so crazy? Well, first of all the tabular information is not written up in blocks. They only list the midpoint of each table entry, so if something is traveling at 4,240 km/h you are expected to use subtraction to figure out that this number is closer to 4000 than it is to 4500, so you use that table entry. Apparently, it would have been too much hassle to write "3800-4249" on the table. Much easier to simply ask the players to do math every time they want to derive a number.

This sort of counter intuitiveness permeates every part of the game. It is extremely common for a set of directives to give a quite round about description of what you're supposed to do. For example, rather than buying up your attributes to a maximum of 3 and applying modifiers for Race and Sex, you apply modifiers to race and sex to a set of zeros and then create a new set of racial maximums by adding 3 to all of those numbers and then buy your stats up to no more than those numbers. Part of this is because Czech is just inherently bad at describing how math works, but a goodly portion is a willful decision to be excessively baroque and florid by the authors.

The rounding rules are actually pretty simple. Things round off, halves round to an increase in magnitude. This means that when you are averaging negative numbers, halves are bad and when you are averaging positive numbers, halves are good. But at least the concept is simple. Explaining this takes them about five paragraphs, during which they insist that the process in question is easy. While they have a great many examples, they do not have an example showing the difference between rounding a -1.5 and rounding a 1.5 (or anything similar). Which is odd, because that's the only point that is at all tricky about the rounding rules at all.

[size=16]d20s have not been invented yet[/size]

The RNG of the game is handled with d6s. This being Czechia, they are k6 rather than d6, but the concept is identical (the K stands for "Kost" because you are literally "rolling the bones"). Normally you roll 2d6, a roll they call "2k6+" because they fuck with you if you roll a 2 or 12. On a 2, you subtract an exploding coin flip from your roll. One a 12, you add an exploding coin flip to your roll. On average, that means that a 2 is about equal to a 1 and a 12 is about equal to a 13, but it's a lot more work.

You'll note immediately of course that those stat modifiers are therefore titanic. As a Troll you get +3 to your Strength just for getting up in the morning, which when combined with the 3 points you are likely to put into Strength during point allocation, shifts an effecting target number of 7 to an effective target number of 1. Which is pretty much the entire RNG.

But you may have noticed that the speed table I linked to was talking about bonuses in the 30s. I... really don't know what the fuck that is about. But as near as I can tell, when they say "bonus" they don't always literally mean a number that is going to be added to a die roll. Sometimes it's just a game usable number. Your hit points are a "bonus" for example, as is your speed. You don't roll them, or at least, I hope you don't because they have a tendency to be more than 10 and the RNG is still 2d6. It's not even distinguishable to check the "bonuses" that have pluses in front of them, because sometimes they just do that to distinguish them from negative numbers. And sometimes they don't. It's really kind of a crap shoot. Actual bonuses to die rolls don't always get pluses in from of them either, so they might list an Agility number as "3" or "+3" even within the same paragraph. It makes it hard to figure out what is going on sometimes, even leaving aside the language barrier.

More later. But probably not right away, because it takes me a while to get through this stuff. I'm leaning heavily on Odango-chan here to translate words I don't understand. Which is a lot of these words.

-Frank

Entertaining. Coincidentally, Hungary's first homegrown RPG, Harc és Varázslat (Combat and Magic, 1990) also had hobbits as a playable race, as well as art blatantly ripping off^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H who are we kidding, depicting scenes right out of the Lord of the Rings. The game also had a Conan-like aspect to it, and has a naive charm the gaming scene in the country subsequently lost, much to its detriment.

Also, the most egregerious copyright violation was the publication of the 2nd edition AD&D Player's Handbook. By that, I mean, its publication without TSR even knowing such a thing had taken place.

Yeah. Things have gotten better on the copyright front, though.

Thanks for the review, that's totally fascinating! I am going to be in Prague this summer and hoping to meet some local gamers, and am glad for these glimpses of the RPG culture.

holy shit where can I get a copy of this in english!?

Quote from: thedungeondelver;386107holy shit where can I get a copy of this in english!?

I second that. I'd love to have an English edition of this game.

Quote from: RandallS;386125I second that. I'd love to have an English edition of this game.

Unfortunately, almost certainly not going to happen, at least any time in the near future. Dračí Doupě is reasonably big noise here in the Czech Republic (and I'm guessing in Slovakia as well, considering that it was the same company back when Dračí Doupě got its first non-contraband printing), but it's still so small scale that Tolkien's estate hasn't even noticed their flagrant use of "Hobiti" enough to sue them to stop even now.

So while summer camps here advertise that they are going to play Dračí Doupě right along with swimming and archery, it's still a much, much smaller game than Das Swarze Auge. Translations in and out of Czech are pretty expensive (running to 1 Kč a word or even more), and it's difficult for me to imagine it being profitable to do so.

I'm trying to wrap my mind around the combat system, and I'll have another part for the review up when I do. It's pretty complicated - it differentiates whether you are kicking or kneeing someone when you do an unarmed attack. and there is division involved. There is a rule to resolve fractional hit point damage, where it is converted to a number of sixths which are in turn the number of results on a d6 that will result in the infliction of 1 hit point of damage (if you roll over the number of sixths on a d6, the damage is reduced to zero).

The magic system I got straight up no clue. First of all, because I have to pick up another book to see any of the spells. But not the least because the Theurge has a Mayan Calendar on his character sheet, where you are supposed to write things in for days, months, and years. I'm guessing it's seasonally adjusted somehow.

-Frank

Frank, it's "Das Schwarze Auge", not "Die Schwarze Auge".