Playtesting XD20

After weeks of coaxing and beating around the bush with the teens at work (who would generally prefer to be doing techy things in the library's tech lab) I finally got one of them to build a fantasy roleplaying character and playtest XD20 with me.

XD20 is Dragonlance author Tracy Hickman's pared-to-the-bone version of Dungeons and Dragons. This one has an interesting character sheet that focuses more on imagining the character than on determining his stats. In particular, there are three questions to answer that not only help create the character but provide ready motivations for play, and would be useful in any game. 

Once my player realized he could make anything he wanted ... he wanted to make a Yugi-Oh character. 

Now Yugi-Oh is not a game or story I know anything about. I don't go in for collectible card games. But there is something in allowing players to start with their favorite universes when devising characters. I've done it myself when creating NPCs and entire armies for Warhammer - my go-to Imperial Guard regiment was basically Bill Slim's 14th Army in 40K, complete with bush-hats and kukris custom-made by Eureka Miniatures. Stereotypes and popular culture are good for one thing - they engage the mind, providing shortcuts to the nature of personality and even images in the mind's eye.

Our hero for tonight's session is a 1st-level mage with a curious ability. He owns a magical pack of cards that summons monsters to fight for him.

I decided that the game mechanism for this would be: whenever he draws a card, a monster will be selected at random from the DnD Monster Manual, and he may use its abilities, at the cost of his magical Stat, which will fall with repeated uses. He may dismiss the monster at will, and it will disappear into a veil of magical sparkles.

Unfortunately, I didn't have a Monster Manual handy. I had Monsters and Creatures: A Young Adventurer's Guide by Jim Zub.

Now, I'm not saying this isn't an awesome book (and series!) But it does tend to focus on the larger and more dangerous critters of the DnD-verse. Read on to see.

Our hero stands outside a dark cave, which he is told contains monsters and treasure. What will he do?

He draws a card. I opened the book at random:

Before marching into the clearly dangerous cave, he had the banshee howl into it. There was nothing within, though the howl was reflected back out the cave into his ears, and a door at the back of the cave was shattered, revealing a tunnel.

Hoping to have something else investigate the tunnel, our hero summoned an:

This turned out to be a very large owlbear (did I mention I watched Grizzly the other night?), which could not get into the tunnel at all and was rather disgruntled. Our hero marched down the tunnel. He triggered an alarm trap and goblins at the other end started shooting at him. He used his backpack to shield himself, advanced to the end of the tunnel, and summoned a:

Which barely fit in the smallish cave, and automatically squashed the five or so goblins within, their nest, and their treasure. Our hero got the spoils - a bloody, messy cave and some coins which, having been mashed against the walls, were no longer legal tender.

XD20 does not do XP; the players level up when the GM says so. But I think our hero has learned some valuable lessons about using his newfound powers...!