I'll be honest, I don't play many video games these days. The ones that I do play are exclusively roguelikes and roguelites. When I got to play a session of the Roguelike TTRPG three years ago at GenCon, I was absolutely stoked and the system delivered. Recently I got to preview the quickstart guide, which includes the core mechanics and the first level of The Tomb of Time.
What makes Roguelike TTRPG special is that it brings the feel of a roguelike video game to the tabletop. From a new player perspective, it was trivial to jump right in. All it took was a basic character concept, a brief description of what we looked like, setting three stats to a value (from 1 to 3), and four pieces of starting gear that you'll always get to keep. As players, we knew going in that we were going to die. And die we did! Death wasn't a meaningful punishment nor a dramatic story beat, as it might be in a system where character creation takes multiple hours. For one thing, as long as the party doesn't have a full wipe, dying in a single room isn't enough to end a character's run. For another, even after the party succumbs, you just start right over at the beginning of the dungeon. This dynamic lets you learn through trial and error. Your characters aren't getting stronger, but the players learn the patterns of enemies, their strengths and weaknesses, and cobble together victory as they get loot throughout the dungeon.
Other systems have options for players to control characters who are mostly doomed to die, sometimes referred to as the "level 0 funnel". These tend to manufacture a situation where players control many low level (and low health) characters, and whoever emerges from the trials alive can become full PCs. Roguelike TTRPG looks at that idea and throws it out. The character you create at the beginning of the first session is the character that's going to make it through...eventually.
Where this system shines is that the mechanics give you the feel of the video game genre, without locking you into a specific setting. There's no prescribed world or setting, nor tone of the campaign. So often these days, someone comes up with an amazing idea for a world full of vibrancy and lore, and they want to share it with everyone, so they staple a mechanical system to it. Similarly, mechanics get built from the ground up and then get a half thought-out world introduced to take the spotlight away. Here, the mechanics are simple enough to make a character in minutes, understand the possible actions, and get running immediately.
As for specific mechanics, each character gets a fixed pool of dice to take actions with. Enemies go first, so players have to choose between spending dice to attempt to dodge, or taking a hit to save those dice for a stronger counter-attack. When you only have three hearts and every hit takes out either half or a full heart, it can be hard to take a punch on the chin. The current list of status effects all work similarly, while still including stylistic elements. The status has a number which determines duration and sometimes severity. Characters can take actions to negate the effect, at the cost of action dice. Frozen characters can shiver. When you are on fire, you can stop, drop, and roll. The Dungeoneer (person running the session) can juggle the numbers if players are nervous about learning the difference between Stun and Stuck.
Because this game doesn't force a world onto you, there's plenty of possible variety in the setting and the tone of play. While the session I played was full of hijinks and laughter, there's plenty of room for characters to grapple with the horrors of a groundhog day cycle of violence and death (as well as being stuck with a party you might not like). The quickstart guide includes a setting and a dungeon layout to give you a place to start from. Want to play a gritty sci-fi vision of the future? Fine. What about a dungeon-crawling romp with medieval peasants? A little cruel, but allowed.
There's only a few minor gripes I have with Rougelike TTRPG. First, since there's a hub world where new stores can appear and characters can buy items to bring into the dungeon, this is technically a roguelite. Second, the ease at which players can jump in is not matched by the ease for the Dungeoneer. If you are just reskinning items and events from the quickstart guide, you'll probably only need a little time to prep. However, if you try to play without the quickstart guide or want to spice up the Tomb of Time because your players have run the same rooms a dozen times, you are going to need to sit down with plenty of time and some creativity. While the latter is something most people running games have, the former is not. It makes me a bit nervous to run this for the same group for too long, but it should be easy to run this a bunch for different groups. Overall, I'm excited to check this out once it's released.
Check out the Kickstarter which launches on April 28. This is going to include more adventures and more loot, which takes some of the burden off of the Dungeoneer.
