For The King - D&D Made Easy

When I was younger, Dungeons and Dragons was stereotyped by the media to be for the "nerds" and was always portrayed as a lame thing to do with your friends until I tried it for the first time. They were right. It absolutely is for the "nerds". I had so much fun my first time playing because I was so happy to be using my imagination and creating things that could change in an instant due to so many factors. D&D was the first modernized role-playing game that really set the guidelines for how this genre is used today. One thing that started to get harder for me playing was the number of people, the timing, the location, and honestly the list goes on for some people because D&D was a time consuming activity that parties planned sessions long in advance. This leads us to the actual game topic that I wanted to talk about.

For The King is a strategy based role playing game that incorporates reminiscent elements from modern D&D, as well as a video game spin into the genre of a roguelike. The game allows you to choose a party of three characters from the classes that are provided by the game (which are loosely based on recognizable tabletop RPG roles) and customize their appearance for your current run. You chose a game mode to play, each with different victory conditions and gameplay phases, but there is a general method of exploration and combat in order to progress your character through the adventure. Each game mode has their own given ruleset and difficulty, but this can be modified to make it easier or harder with the game's "House Rules" that allow you to modify your life pool, economy inflation and mode specific event timing. This is really nice for players who are looking for any kind of variation to the game, maybe you want to make it easier so you can experience victory, or more challenging because you won too fast. Once your rules are set up and your party is customized to your liking (or even your friends' liking thanks to online and offline co-op), you are ready to embark into the world.

This is where D&D is made easy. Although the universe of For The King is not pulled out from Dungeons and Dragons, there is a clear inspiration of fictional aspects in order to make the game come to life for players. Gameplay consists of exploring tiles in the world and engaging in events or quests to progress to the end. These events are game mode specific but are mostly transferred to remain consistent, and could things such as combat, skill checks, quests objectives, and other random pop-ups.

The most common event players will run into is combat, which occurs when any player comes in contact with an enemy (be it by choice or ambush event). Depending on encounter location, other players could be drawn into battle if they are close enough. Similar to combat in Dungeons and Dragons, your character has a set of skills, some of which are better than others depending on your class. For example the Scholar class has a higher intelligence stat whereas the Woodcutter class has a higher strength stat. Each character has a weapon that uses one of those stats to make an attack, and each one has a different chance. The Hunter class has an innately high awareness stat, and uses primarily bows and spears because these two weapons check awareness when making an attack. So instead of verbally stating what attack you are going to use and who you are targeting then rolling for your attack, For The King handles that for you by making the check (attack roll).

Other events work in the same way, such as a random cliff pop up where if you successfully complete a strength check you can gain a random item, but if you fail you could be damaged or thrown into combat.

All of this is really just making the DM (Dungeon Master) a computer and simulating the adventure for the party. All the events are calculated and randomly chosen based on what the party chooses to do. Dungeons and Dragons is always fun and definitely comes with more options and creativity, For The King allows players to sit back and relax and experience similar elements that they enjoy, in a less chaotic way.