Sir Caradoc Gets His Ass Beat, Lies, and Doesn’t Fuck
In my personal tabletop circles, Pendragon has historically floated
around as something lots of people love the idea of but haven’t found
time to try yet. It’s all about the grand campaign and its reputation,
friends having friends who are involved in games that have already been
going on for 5 years, often organized by players a few generations older
than me who have an extensive history as wikipedia editors and who you
sort of have to feel out how chill they are with people who aren’t
cishet yet have compellingly mesmerizing stories about their longform
game exploits. The opposed passions stats stand out easily to a player
taking their baby steps into ttrpgs, and the intrusion of family history
with the deeds of your parents coming back to get you and the need to
train a successor add some appealing weight to the world if you have (as
I had at the time I first heard of Pendragon) mostly played pretty
discontinuous games of DnD where consequences are handwaved away.
Recently, approximately a decade on from when I initially heard of
Pendragon, I was invited to play in a game of Pendragon 6th
Edition, a shortform game of the starter scenarios of The Sword
Tournament, The Forest of the Silver Deer, and The Broken Sword. I
played Sir Caradoc, a knight rolled up randomly in a way that did
produce some notable and fun results: his best characteristic being
Appearance, best skill being Flirting, not being particularly lustful
but being remarkably selfish and cruel: all this suggested to me someone
who knows they can leverage their good looks for social advantages. The
squire-life-simulation lent itself well to this sort of interpretation,
in a way that not every game where you have to fill in this much
character sheet reaches. Unfortunately the book itself did not feel like
a good reference object to use: information is spread out awkwardly over
too many pages.
The adventures themselves felt extremely linear and made me wonder how
they compare to the Grand Campaign itself. The sense I got was that,
rather than playing to achieve any particular outcome, I was playing to
see if my knight stayed relevant to court life during predestined
events. The “starter adventure” guardrails were firmly in place with
last minute saviors arriving at the big battles at the end of the first
two adventures to turn losing battles. As a guy who was until the finale
bare minimum competent at fighting, Caradoc was outclassed by all but
the underequipped pictish goons that served as early antagonists, and he
got consistantly fucked up in big fights. Even after raising his sword
skill significantly, the third adventure was brutal on him: in an
honorable duel, Sir Pellinore one shot the poor bastard into
unconsciousness, and having to face a nuckelavee with the wound
Pellinore gave him led to another knockout. This part is not a
complaint! I threw him at those situations on purpose to not lose face
and I actually really like the simultaneous action choice and resolution
combat of this game, it’s a far more interesting animal than a lot of
other modes of involved tabletop combat. A cleaned up and clarified
separate version of the combat resolution chart would be appreciated
(running theme of the book as a reference object).
The second of the two starter adventure scenarios, in which Caradoc and
two fellow player character knights sought to navigate the politics of
delivering several gifts to various petty lords who we hoped would join
the war effort, felt like the most interesting of the bunch, with
numerous decisions to be made as to navigating the bickering and
treacherous nobles and the opportunity to find clever solutions and make
impactful calls as to course of action. It definitely gave Caradoc his
most notable moment: in response to King Nym’s theft of the gifts for
the other lords, Caradoc put that flirting skill to use and put the
moves on Nym’s son, convincing him to spill when and where the treasures
would be. Caradoc of course is dedicated to his beloved Bernard, the
hunky stableworker he brought with him from Cambria, and isn’t overly
compelled by romance, and so breaks the poor boy’s heart by just
absconding with the stolen treasure rather than meeting up for a
promised tryst, winning an enemy and cementing Caradoc as famously
cruel. That’s some delightful Arthurian bullshit and it felt like the
object firing on all cylinders!
Tragically a lot of the rest of the time the game and adventure feel
like a cumbersome obstacle to the playing. I cant help but wonder if a
play by post format would be ideal for this game: the intrusion of
choosing what to roll from a large menu for the likely result of “you
don’t learn/know much about this and so you stand there while
predetermined events happen” would be less of a pain as something you
give a moment of attention per day, and still could get to the fun
results. I also could see the stripping down of the game to just the
opposed passions being generative to better feeling play for my tastes:
if the levers of chance are removed fully from skill at specific action
and placed entirely on capacity to bring ones self to take action, it
would produce much less frictional experience I think. This is of course
also contingent on the given adventures: I’d love at some point to see
if other published adventure material has a significantly different
shape across authors and editions.