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Catalyst Game Labs To Publish D&D Dragonfire Deckbuilding Game
April 26, 2017 by deltagamegirl22
Catalyst Game Labs is excited to announce that they will be publishing Dragonfire, a D&D deckbuilding Game, for Wizards of the Coast.
Dragonfire combines the vast lore of the D&D universe with the fast play of a deckbuilding game. Players will choose from several classic fantasy races-from dwarf to elf, half-orc to human, and assume one of the quintessential roles of cleric, rogue, fighter, or wizard.
Equipped with weapons, spells, and magic items, players begin their adventure along the famed Sword Coast, then journey to other Forgotten Realms locales, such as Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter, and Waterdeep, in future expansions. Along the way, they can level up their characters, find additional equipment, learn new feats, and much more.
Dragonfire is built on the award-winning, critically acclaimed Shadowrun: Crossfire game engine. Crossfire’s roots are in Shadowrun, one of the most enduring role-playing settings of all time. Adapting that engine to Dungeons & Dragons is an exciting opportunity to build new ways for players to experience both quick adventures and long-term campaigns in this legendary high-fantasy setting.
When players open a copy at the table, regardless of what they enjoy playing, RPGs, deckbuilder games, or both, they’ll find a complete box of fun.
Will you be having a go at this D&D Deckbuilder?
"Dragonfire combines the vast lore of the D&D universe with the fast play of a deckbuilding game..."
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I hope this won’t be as punishing as Shadowrun! I liked the setting and the system was both fun and easy to learn.. but oh boy was it hard!
I was excited until I saw it was from Catalyst. Having been burned by then in the past and given how many other publishers exist, I will pass.
I really like the sound of this. It seems like Pathfinder Adventure which seemed rather cool but I never got into, and I like the Forgotten Realms which is a plus.
Be interesting to see how this plays and I’ve got a few friends who will be pleased that its difficult @siygess
@brennon Why don’t you grab a copy of Pathfinder next time you are in the studio. The first two core sets have been sitting on the shelf there for years lol. Also, did your friends try Shadowrun? I’ve played it 14 times so far – 4 times solo, 8 times with two players and 2 times with three players and I haven’t beaten it once. Even the LotR LCG core set wasn’t THAT punishing!
I was never that into Shadowrun so didn’t quite get into the card game. I’ll have to try Pathfinder for sure though!
@brennon Me neither – back in the day, you had Amiga vs Atari, Betamax vs VHS and Cyberpunk 2020 vs Shadowrun. I was very much a fan of the former and wasn’t into “Cyberpunk but with elves and magic!”. However, the execution of the HBS Shadowrun games was good enough to finally convince me to look at the Shadowrun RPG and from there, the Shadowrun Crossfire game (although if the card game that spawned from CP 2020 had evolved into something other than Netrunner, I’d probably be playing that instead).
The Crossfire game wasn’t necessarily a good example of Catalyst’s ability to adapt some rules or an existing setting into a deckbuilding game; If you didn’t have the art the game wouldn’t have anything to link it to Shadowrun at all, but the colour matching approach was very effective and I could see how that would work here; Defeating a troll isn’t simply a matter of hitting it a lot – you can abstract the process to finding the troll, hitting the troll and finishing it with fire, which must be done in that order.
The trick will be ensuring those mission cards don’t keep steam rolling the players!
It seems like one “Dungeon Crawl” card defines the entire scenario for that session along with rules for how many encounters you have to face between each ’round’ where you can rest and how many turns you have to play through before other bad things start happening. Dealing with two normal encounters, followed by a short rest, followed by one hard encounter and three normal encounters, followed by a short rest, followed by two hard encounters and two normal encounters.. is a lot for the players to deal with even before you consider that Very Bad Things will start happening from turn 3 and those normal and hard encounter cards might not be well balanced. To draw parallels with Shadowrun, it is akin to:
Normal Difficulty Deck (2 Kobolds, 2 Goblins, 10 Orcs, 5 Orc Champions, 2 Trolls)
Hard Difficulty Deck (4 Giants, 2 Liches, 2 Orc Swarms, 2 Zombie Plagues, 2 Dragons)
Bad Stuff Deck (1 Bag of Coins, 5 Your Sword Broke, 5 Fight With One Hand Behind Your Back, 5 Poisoned! 5 Those Monsters have Rabies!).
If you happen to draw a Kobold and a Goblin for that first arc of the story, it might be possible for the party to have defeated both creatures in only 2 turns, have their rest and just started the second arc (fighting an Orc Swarm, two Orc Champions and a Troll) before you hit turn 3 and start drawing from the Bad Things deck (which you will do, every turn, for the rest of the game).
..but my experience is that most of the time, you will draw a pair of Trolls for that first encounter and you will struggle to defeat them both before turn 5 or 6. That means the players are very badly banged up (mitigating the benefit of the rest) and are handicapped by the fact that have already started drawing from the Bad Things deck before they even get to the second arc.
Oh, and if anyone dies, the mission is a failure, but if at least one of you can make it all the way to the end and get back to the village alive, you get 1 XP. Grind that 5 (maybe 10) more times and you will have enough XP to buy the cheapest upgrade which will have almost no influence on your ability to complete the next mission.
So.. yeah. Quite an elegant system that could work well in the D&D setting, but punishingly difficult.
a D&D card game looks interesting.
and it is by selling the D&D IP to other companies that Hasbro is making profit off it … Heaven forfend that they actually regularly produce a physical RPG product themselves…. (The operative words here is “regularly” and “physically” ……….. I am all out of “gruntled” when it comes to D&D ……and 5 Ed IS a good game….sigh)