More thoughts on Dragon Age RPG & AGE system

Been a while since I did any kind of post regarding the Dragon Age RPG, which is a tad lax of me seeing as how a few weekends ago our merry little band of miscreants got together for another adventure. This time, we played through "A Bann Too Many," the adventure that comes with the GM screen. Good thing we'd gotten an early start on that Saturday, as we played it straight through in a single day.

Have to say it was a pretty well-done adventure, and reflects the generally bleak nature of Thedas, and how even when you win, you can still lose. Even though our characters came out with a pretty good haul in terms of loot, there was a price to be paid by the folks of Logerswold given what we learned about the bandit raids, of which I'll not say more to avoid spoilers as it caught us by surprise. I also think our group may have acquired a long-running nemesis, but it remains to be seen if anything will come of it.

Also, the more I play this game, the more I find myself enjoying the simplicity of it. We've got a pretty broad range of character types, and everyone has a way to contribute both inside and outside of combat. Most of us are 3rd level at this point, so we've either picked up new talents (both rogues and the mage) or gotten the next step up in a starting talent (what I did for my sword&board warrior). On that note, it does seem that in a lot of instances, the sheer wealth of talents available are bound to be overlooked, at least if your group has any interest in improving their combat effectiveness. While Rogues tend to start with non-combat talents, I imagine that for a lot of them, their talent choices for the next few levels, starting with 3rd level, are going to be combat talents focusing on their preferred style of combat, while Mages are bound to do the same and pick talents centering on their preferred school of magic. Warriors are already encouraged to focus on beating up bad guys, though I'd expect some branching out to occur once their major combat styles are seen to. Maybe it's just my being jaded by 3rd edition D&D and the sheer overkill of feats, but I see a bit of that trend in Dragon Age, with all these neat flavor/fluff talents being overlooked for ones that give you a direct bonus in combat. Then again, maybe it's just that our group is still pretty low-level, and that we've not even reached the point where Specializations are an option. Hopefully, I'll have a chance to see if time will tell.