You can also find this review in video form if you prefer to listen!
⚠️ Some things changed since I wrote this review a while back! My thoughts and opinions on the game still stand, however you can now find the softcover version of EZD6 on the Runehammer website. The hard cover version is still available on DriveThruRPG at the time of writing.
Ok, I finally got hold of my copy of EZD6 Rpg by DM Scotty, published by Runehammer games via DriveThruRPG.
I’ve already gone through the PDF version a few times, played out a couple of test scenarios, and was just waiting to get my hands on the hard copy to do a review of it.
This is not a sponsored review; That said, I do think that both DM Scotty and Runehammer are very awesome people, so I am a bit biased and you may want to keep that in mind as we go through the review.
Let’s start with the book itself.
I got the hardcover version, but you can also get softcover or pdf if that’s your jam. The binding looks good, and it’s printed on good quality paper. Print on demand can be a bit hit and miss, but I think DriveThruRPG nailed it and this book is going to have a good long life.
The internal artwork by Sean Bova looks great, but what I especially like is that most of the book is taken up by large friendly text. I love looking at pictures but sometimes rpg books tend to have massive illustrations and cram tiny tiny text on colored or textured backgrounds.
Not here.
The level of legibility here is excellent and Runehammer did a fantastic job on the layout.
The first part of the book is the how to play section, which covers the rules and character creation, while the rest of the book is game master – or rabble rouser – information, including advice on running the game, stats for common fantasy monsters, stats for new monsters, and a few handy charts.
But let’s get down to the nuts and bolts of the system.
Basic Rules
Decades of experience went into designing this, and everything is smoothed and sanded down to perfection. This ruleset is the gaming equivalent of aerodynamic. It flies. Pretty much every situation is handled in the same way.
- A player decides what they want to do.
- The rabble rouser decides if a roll is needed, and if it is how difficult it will be on a scale from 2 – 6
- The player rolls a six sided die. If they meet or exceed the target number, they succeed.
That’s it.
Let’s say Kind Wilhelm is trying to pick a lock on a door. It’s a pretty average lock, so the rabble rouser picks a 4 for difficulty. Wilhelm’s player rolls a 6, and the door opens. Play continues.
Sometimes you might have a situation where you have opposed rolls. Say some guards spotted Wilhelm picking the lock, and objected to his activity. The guard tries to grapple Wilhelm, so the rabble rouser rolls a dice for him and gets a 5. This is the target number Wilhelm has to beat to get free. In this case, he rolls a 3, fails and gets pinned down.
Nice and easy; I remember when I started playing back in AD&D second edition, the rules for grappling were spread across three pages and had modifiers for size, the armour you were wearing, the number of legs you had and so on. Detailed, sure, but in the end I don’t think my group ever did use those rules because looking them up and calculating was more time and effort than we wanted to sink into that. Here, I’m more interested in what happens to Kind Wilhelm than the mathematical reasons for it.
Karma and Hero Dice
Now heroes are supposed to do awesome stuff beyond what we normal people can do, and EZD6 has two mechanics for that.
The first one is hero dice. Each player gets one per session, and they can use it to reroll a failed roll. Let’s say the player playing Wilhelm decides to use their hero die to reroll the failed grapple roll. This time they roll over, and Wilhelm runs off into the night.
Going straight by the rules, a success on the hero die means that the character straight up succeeded – in this case, Wilhelm managed to avoid the grapple. Personally, I like to think of these reroll successes as close calls to flavor them up. Maybe the guard did manage to grab hold of Wilhelm, but he managed to shrug off his coat and left the confused guard holding up an empty garment.
In the end though, you can play whatever way you and your group enjoy most.
The other mechanic for saving failed rolls is karma. Players gain 3 karma at the start of each session, and they can use them to boost their rolls.
Let’s say Hans is searching a corridor for secret doors. The rabble rouser sets the difficulty at 5 and Hans’ player fails the roll with a 3. The player then decides to spend 2 karma to boost the roll by 2 points, so the roll succeeds.
Again, this is normally a straight up success but narratively I’d play it so that Hans discovers the secret passage by accident rather than through his actions. Maybe he gets tired, leans against a wall, and accidentally triggers a button to unlock the door. This is my opinion, and not rules as written.
Karma is a renewable resource, and you get 1 point every time you fail a roll assuming you don’t boost or reroll.
There are only two situations where you can’t use karma; the first one is if you roll a natural one on the dice. You can reroll that with hero dice, but you can’t boost that. The second situation is any time you’re using magic, but we’ll get to that later.
Boons and Banes
Obviously not all characters and situations are created equal, and a straight d6 roll doesn’t really represent a lot of possibilities. The system represents more nuance by using boons and banes. Short version, if there’s something that will make a task easier, you get a boon and roll extra dice. This can be from favorable situations, a helper, specialized training and so on. They also stack, so if you have multiple boons you add multiple dice.
Say The Great Oswald is trying to decipher the runes on an ancient portal. The rabble rouser rules that this would be a difficult task and sets the target number to five. However, Oswald spent many years studying ancient runes, and he enlisted the help of one of his buddies so his player gets to roll two extra dice and pick the best result.
Banes work the other way around. Let’s say that instead of Oswald, it’s Hans, who has no training but has seen a few things. The runes are also damaged, so the rabble rouser decides to impose a bane. Hans’ player has to roll two dice and pick the worst result.
I think this is a very elegant way of handling things, and it’s certainly faster than going over a crowded character sheet, getting into an argument about whether you should be using decipher script or arcana, rolling a 20 sided die, and adding and subtracting stuff.
Combat rules
By now we’ve gone over pretty much all the core mechanics, but there’s one additional rule that applies only to combat. Everything else we covered above still applies, so you get a target number, you roll, you still get boons and banes and you still get to use hero dice and karma.
If you score a six though, the critical hit rule kicks in and you get to roll another die and potentially score a second hit. If this also comes up as a six, you get to roll another die, and so on.
Now you might ask yourself how likely it is to roll several consecutive sixes, but remember that you can use karma to boost rolls, so if you have enough karma stockpiled you could come up with some pretty devastating attacks.
Let’s say Sir Forscale is fighting off some skeletons. He’s trained so he rolls two dice and picks the best one. He spends some karma to boost this up to 6,
and gains an extra die. He spends some more karma to boost this to 6, and gets an extra die. Let’s say he has enough Karma left so he also boosts this, and rolls one more die. He decides that’s enough, so he has scored a total of 4 hits.
These skeletons can only take two hits each, so he obliterates his target. Because he has hits left over, he can assign them to another target within reach, so he wipes out another skeleton.
Weapons all cause 1 strike of damage per hit, except for oversized weapons like cannons or giant clubs. I know some people will turn up their noses at this but personally I find it much easier since you don’t need to pick which specific dice to roll for damage, or keep a detailed track of how much damage everything has – the numbers are small enough that you can easily use counters if you need to.
Some people will say “But realism”, to which I say
a. we are talking about a game that involves beating goblins up for lunch money and
b. in the grand scheme of things a battle axe won’t make an orc deader than a dagger will, it’s just messier.
Player characters take damage in the same way, but they do get an armour save to avoid damage.
Let’s say the remaining skeleton attacks Sir Forscale and hits. As a warrior with a shield, Sir Forscale has a save of 3 or more, which he rolls, avoiding damage.
Another thing EZD6 does away with is initiative. Players go first, then monsters. You don’t need to keep a detailed chart of who goes before what, which certainly speeds things up.
I really want to talk about the magic system because that’s one of my favorite parts of the game, but we should probably look at character creation first.
Character creation
Like everything else in EZD6, character creation is a breeze.
First, you pick the general type of character you want to play – they’re called Hero Paths here, and you have a standard choice of fantasy archetypes – Warrior, Warden, Delver, Brute, Rascal, Friar, Conjurer, Beastmaster or skald.
Each of these gives you boons and a couple of special abilities – for example the beastmaster gets a boon when dealing with animals, training
in melee or ranged weapons, and a few other goodies like being able to talk to animals.
The hero path you take also defines the number of strikes you can take, and your armor save. With the exception of the brute, you can take
three strikes, and that’s your maximum for all of your character’s career – but we’ll talk about that in a second.
Next, you choose your race – Human, Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, or Goblin. This will give you additional abilities – for example elves get twilight sight, which lets them see further in low light.
Next, you pick inclinations for your character these are special skills and abilities your character has, and you get 3 if you’re a human or 2 if you’re anything else. These range from giving you boons on avoiding traps, to letting you tap into divine magic, and let you round out your hero. Say you want to make a druid type character. Grab a beastmaster, slap on the devout inclination, and you have a magical forest hobo.
You can round out your character further with aspects – these are small details about your character which flesh it out, but don’t necessarily have a mechanical effect.
For example, you could say that your character travelled with a circus when they were younger, or that they were born in a fishing village. It’s mostly for flavour, but there are situations when the rabble rouser can give you a boon on a roll if you’re trying to do something that fits your aspects.
Finally if you’re a conjurer, you get to pick the type of magic you can use – plenty to pick from here including elementalism, shadow
magic, and my favorite, illusion.
And that’s it.
You’re good to go.
The mechanical aspects of a character are pretty much fixed at creation; if you start with three strikes, you’re always going to have three strikes. If you picked elemental magic, you know how to cast all elemental magic out of the gate, you’re not going to learn any new spells along the way.
What about progression?
And that brings me to one of the main criticisms levelled against this game – with no character advancement, this system is only good for single shot games yeah? I say thee nay.
First off, the concept of character levels is very artificial – in many systems it’s pretty much like becoming tougher by picking locks. Or becoming better at electrical engineering by hitting people with a stick. It’s kinda weird, and if it was in any way an approximation of reality, I’d be a latter day Nikola Tesla.
Second, while skills improve with practice, someone who is already competent won’t improve that fast. Sure if your campaign has time jumps of several years that might be the case, but if you’re playing a very long continuous campaign, you might want to represent this improvement in different ways.
Third, if you look at most fantasy classics people don’t change very much – Conan, or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, don’t really grow as characters so much as gain and lose treasures, connections, and make friends and enemies. Ged from the earthsea cycle doesn’t really become a stronger wizard once he’s out of school, the entire story is him learning to apply the power he already has more responsibly. The hobbits in Lord of the rings do pick up a few skills and in two cases grow taller, but that’s something that could easily be represented in play by giving them extra aspects or even inclinations.
Honestly, I think it’s a lot more interesting this way as it works more on the narrative and the story of the characters rather than just adding up points and hitting some kind of arbitrary threshold. That’s just me though, and if you disagree feel free to drop me a comment to tell me why I’m wrong.
Ok, now that’s out of the way I get to talk about the magic system, which is absolutely awesome.
The Magic System
First off – there are no spell lists.
If you’re playing a conjurer, you decide what magical effect you want to create. It’s completely freeform and a hell of a lot more interesting than picking pre-packaged spells off a list that requires its own index. When casting a spell, the rabble rouser determines the difficulty by rolling a d6, although more dice may be involved if the caster is trying to affect multiple targets or some kind of magic resistance is in play.In any case, the difficulty is the highest number rolled.
Let’s say that Oswald is trying to use illusion magic to convince two guards that he’s the stable boy. The rabble rouser rolls one die for each target, and picks the highest result. This is the target number Oswald needs for his illusion to work. The more targets, the more chances there are for the difficulty to be higher.
Now, Oswald’s player can choose to roll between one and three dice to power up the spell, and if any of those dice meet or beat the difficulty, the spell works.
There’s a catch obviously.
If any of the dice come up as a one, the spell fails. At this point the player has a few choices. Obviously, they can just let the spell fail. If they have a hero die, they can use it to reroll ones. Finally, the player can opt to use spellburn and take one strike of damage to remove one roll of one. Remember a conjurer only has three strikes total, so if a critical spell fails with two ones that’s going to be a very hard choice!
Miracles work in a similar way, though they can be accessed by any path as long as the character has the devout inclination. There is also a proviso that miracles may never be used to deal damage. The resistance here is determined by the rabble rouser according to how simple or outrageous the request the character is making is, and can go from three dice for a small divine intervention to a whopping six dice for something major like raising people from the dead.
Unlike spells, ones on miracles can’t be removed with spellburn, though you can get rerolls by making appropriate offerings.
There’s a lot to love about this system. Freeform systems allow for a lot of creativity, which is ironically lacking in many magic systems which tend to be very clinical. It also allows for a lot of utility other than lighting things on fire. The risk of failure and the spellburn mechanic also bump up the stakes. In Dungeons and dragons I always found it weird that hitting something with a sword had a higher chance of failure than summoning fire from the very fabric of the universe to burn them using magic, so there’s that.
The way it plays also allows the rabble rouser to create situations that encourage the creative use of magic, rather than trying to guess what spells the wizard will have prepared that day.
Now one area where a freeform system might jar with your setting is if you have strictly research bound magic – you know, where wizards study their magic, set it down in tomes, and so on – a wizard just suddenly creating a new spell on the fly could look a bit weird. Luckily that can be solved narratively with a bit of flavor in presenting the spell they just made up – “Oswald hurriedly leafs through his spellbook. AHA! I knew I had just the thing for this situation. Dresden’s Discombobulation!”
Overall, I think this system is an excellent example of how a magic system should be done.
One thing I might play with is the spellburn mechanic so it deals a random effect rather than straight damage – randomly turning the
conjurer inside out is always fun.
Conclusion
Now I’m pretty sure that any group would find something useful in this book, but it will be a better fit for some groups than others.
If your group prefers lots of combat oriented or dungeon crawl type play, I suspect you would want a crunchier rule system with more variation between weapons and armour and damage types and mechanical rewards.
If your group prefers story driven scenarios, and keeping the flow of the narrative is more important than having an exact rule for every situation, EZD6 is a perfect fit. There are just enough rules to keep things consistent, without ever having to pause to look something up.
The system is excellent to get beginners started as there aren’t a ton of different rules to remember, though they might need a bit of guidance. With more rule-bound games like D&D, characters kind of have a built in menu of things they can do which makes it easier for beginners to pick an action. With freeform systems like EZD6, it’s a blank slate so some people wouldn’t know they can do something because they haven’t been explicitly told they can. They’ll probably catch on real quick though, and I’m sure it will take them less time to ramp up than they would to figure out which dice to roll when, and what spells they have available and what they do.
Overall, this book will be a solid addition to many people’s gaming library.
You can pick it up from DriveThruRPG, but if you’re still not convinced and want to hear more about it straight from the horse’s mouth, check out this chat with DM Scotty about it.