User:Ezekiel Stargazer/sandbox

Dungeonslayers

Dungeonslayers (abbr.: DS, Subtitle: "An old-fashioned roleplaying game") is a free German pen & paper roleplaying game, which was released in 2008 by its author Christian Kennig. The focus of the game is the classic dungeon crawl, but the game also supports other, more serious scenarios, which the author has emphasized repeatedly. Dungeonslayers is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

History
Dungeonslayers has existed since 2008 and was - according to its author - developed in just a few days for Kennig's gaming group. The game very quickly spread over the internet thanks to a highly active community, various supplements, and one-page adventure scenarios called Dungeon-2-Go. Dungeonslayers has been translated into several languages including English, French, Spanish, and Italian.

In 2010 a fourth edition of the game was released, first available only as a softcover book published by the German Uhrwerk Verlag. On December 8th, 2010 a free PDF version was released as well. The Dungeonslayers core rules grew from 20 DIN A4-sized pages in DS 3.5 to 168 pages in a DIN A5 format. In particular Talent and Spell lists have been expanded in the new edition. In addition to that DS 4 includes an introduction into the fictional world of Caera.

In March 2011 the first printing of DS 4 sold out. The second printing was released as part of a boxed set. The Uhrwerk Verlag also released a few adventure scenarios in print since then.

In June 2012 the English translation of DS 4 was released as a free PDF download. A printed version will be published by the British publisher Chronicle City later in 2012.

Characters
Characters in Dungeonslayers consist of 9 core values (3 attributes and 6 abilities). Values like Hitpoints, Defense, Melee Attack and Ranged Attack are derived from these 9 core values. Character creation has no random factors.

Player characters can be one of the classic fantasy races such as Humans, Dwarves, and Elves. The available core classes are Warrior, Scout, and Spellcaster. Spellcasters have to choose one of the three specializations: Healer, Wizard, or Black Mage. Dungeonslayers 4 also introduced hero classes like the Paladin, which characters can choose later in their career.

Game Mechanics
Basically there's only one game mechanic in Dungeonslayers, the d20 check. To succeed in a task the player has to roll one twenty-sided die (called a d20) and get a result lower than or equal to a set check value. This mechanic is used for all combat and non-combat actions. In the case of attack rolls, the rolled result is also the damage caused.

It's notable that Dungeonslayers doesn't use the popular concept of magic points, but each spell has a certain cooldown time. This allows for example Healers to use Healing magic continuosly without the fear of running out of magic points.