Stop recommending Dragon Rampant

I try not to crap on other people’s work if I can avoid it. I don’t see it as productive and the internet is filled with people and places that just seem to revel in casting dispersions on other people’s work. That said, when people are recommending game systems to play online, Dragon Rampant is one that inevitably gets suggested. And every time it does I find myself reposting the same critique of the rules. So to help save myself some time I am going to list the issues I have with Dragon Rampant in this blog post so I can just link to it in the future.

So let me start off by saying that the author of Dragon Rampant, Daniel Mersey, has written a lot of rule sets (certainly more than me) including Lion Rampant, which Dragon Rampant is based on. I have played a few games of Lion Rampant and, aside from the activation system which I will discuss later, it is actually a fun set of rules for the period that it covers. So my apologies to Daniel for the following.

Homogeneous units

The range of possible unit stats in a game of medieval combat is significantly more narrow than you’d find in a fantasy game. So the system of unit upgrades that work in Lion Rampant tend to create some very homogeneous units in Dragon Rampant. Even the new unit upgrades that are a part of the Dragon Rampant rules don’t seem to help create units that are distinct.

This is understandable given that the Lion Rampant rules were created for units that are all human and tend to be distinct from one another based on experience, morale or equipment. This is fine for a medieval period game but in a fantasy game the narrow range of possible unit types and stats makes your games seem a bit bland. A Bellicose Foot unit is a Bellicose Foot unit no matter what you do to it. And while this is fine when the units are both made up of human miniatures, it tends to dispel the suspension of disbelief when your Bellicose Foot unit made up of three Trolls has the same game impact as the Bellicose Foot unit made up of six troops in light armour.

Part of the appeal of a fantasy game is that you have varied unit types with a wide range of abilities and Dragon Rampant doesn’t deliver that. You may as well be playing with squares of cardboard that have the unit stats on them.

The Activation system

Quite possibly the worst part of the game is the activation system. Units in DR have different activation stats depending on what type of action they are doing. This is actually a nice touch. Ranged combat units are more likely want to shoot than they are to charge into hand-to-hand combat. The problem is that your turn ends if you fail an activation roll. Fail your first activation and you are done and your army just sits there. Now a strategy in games like this, Warmaster is a good example, is that you try to activate the units that are more likely to succeed. In Dragon Rampant though most units have a 5+ or 6+ activation value so it almost doesn’t matter what unit your pick.

Now the immediate response to this critique is that you just need to take a bad dice roll in stride but I think it is bad design to put a player in this sort of position. Especially considering how similar the activation values are in the game. In one of our test games of the Dragon Rampant rules we had a situation where we only activated two units over the course of three turns. Any time the rules arbitrarily punished a player in this way it leads to a poor game experience. And frankly I never want to play a game where I can be so overwhelmingly beaten just based on bad dice rolls.

My experience of the activation system in Dragon Rampant (and Lion Rampant) was so bad that I put the rules away and have never played either game again. It is a critical problem with the rules. And it seems that Daniel Mersey has acknowledged this issue since his latest version of the rules, Pikeman’s Lament, has actions that units can now automatically perform.

Blue Book peril

Dragon Rampant is published by Osprey Publishing as part of their Blue Book series of wargame rules. I have played many of them and I can’t recall a single one that I liked aside from In Her Majesty’s Name which is no longer offered by Osprey. They all seem to suffer from a lack of playtesting and all seem rushed to market. I don’t know if the line was an experiment but Osprey have certainly moved away from the series and have been producing rules, like Oathmark, that seem to have undergone more testing and focused on providing a better game experience. Dragon Rampant seems to have been a response to the popularity of Lion Rampant and the publisher decided to commission and produce a fantasy variant without really looking into whether the rules would work. Dragon Rampant is, like almost all of the Blue Book rules, rushed and not properly tested or thought out.

It gets better

I find the contrast between Dragon Rampant and Saga: Age of Magic to be very interesting. Both games have units that are very generic. AoM is probably even more generic in its approach than DR is. And yet it provides a much more satisfying fantasy game experience. I think this is because it provides a thematic framework that works on the army level and allows you to create a force that has fantasy themes and rules applied from the top down. Dragon Rampant doesn’t do this so its ‘cookie cutter’ units all seem the same no matter what army you build.

There are many different rulesets that you can use to create fantasy armies and play battles that give you a better experience than Dragon Rampant. All of which allow you to take whatever minis you have and build armies with them. All of which are much better suited to fantasy gaming than Dragon Rampant.

So please stop suggesting the rules when someone wants a fantasy game. Sure they may work for you but they are clearly a substandard ruleset.