Which System To Use?

I haven’t blogged much about The Broken World (TBW) campaign because I’ve been playing a 5^th Edition D&D campaign called the Age of Worms for almost a year now and that has kept me pretty busy, but I have been working on my TBW campaign in OneNote.  I’ve come to a point where I’m seriously considering using a different game system for my homebrew campaign and that system is Shadow of the Demon Lord (SotDL) by Schwalb Entertainment.  I originally started designing TBW to be played using D&D rules, but I had some problems reconciling some things in my world with how D&D works.   

The main thing I had a problem with is the magic system.  I really want magic to be a unified system in TBW, so having “divine” and “arcane” magic doesn’t work for me since, in this world, there are no gods.  The great thing about SotDL is that its magic system IS unified and, in addition, the way that the system is set up with Traditions instead of schools of magic make is very easy to customize characters to be the kind of magic-user the player wants to run.  In D&D, you have to take levels in a divine class to have access to divine spells, despite the fact that divine spells have schools associated with them, which you would think would be accessible by a specialized arcane spell user.  Nope.  

Some other things I like about SotDL over D&D include the class system, called “Paths”, which allows for some great customization that D&D simply can’t match.  I also like the Boon/Bane mechanic better than the Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic of D&D. 

Of course there are some things about SotDL that I don’t like so much.  I’m not entirely sold on the Initiative system.  The Slow/Fast turn sequence has been a little confusing in my few times running SotDL, which may be just a familiarity issue with me, but it seems to slow things down unnecessarily while people decide if they’re taking a Slow or a Fast turn.  I like to have as few decision points as possible once game play starts because each decision point delays and slows encounters.  I’m also not sure about the replacement of Skills with Professions, as the latter seems to be almost too loose and undefined and require the players to basically convince me that their profession should be considered in whatever skill attempt they are making.  I do like the simple “10” target number for all tasks, but I can see where that may be too simplistic at some point.  That one will have to wait until I’ve had a chance to see it in play more before I pass final judgment.  I’m also disappointed that SotDL doesn’t include Armor as Damage Reduction and, instead, basically emulates how D&D handles armor.   Finally, I dislike that SotDL only uses a D20 and D6s.  I like using all of the polyhedral dice in my RPGs and, in fact, I’m still looking for a system that has found a way to incorporate the D30 (I may have to invent that system myself).

SotDL isn’t perfect, but it seems to be the better match for me.  I still need to run it more to fully decide.  I’m hesitant to drop D&D 5E altogether because it is a system that is near and dear to my heart.  I could probably house rule D&D to make it what I want, but that would be too much work and I really just want to use a system that is already built and mostly meets my expectations, which SotDL seems to do.   I plan on running a SotDL mini-campaign this year and once I’m done I should know whether or not that system is the best fit for TBW.  In the meantime, I still have lots of world building to do that doesn’t require a game system to work on.