Game Discussion > Early Dev

The Red Prison - roguelike based on 5th edition D&D

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pat:


The Red Prison is a roguelike adaption of the Basic Rules for the 5th Edition of D&D. It’s been in development for about five or so months and it’s quickly progressed to a fairly advanced playable prototype.

Download: http://patjw.itch.io/theredprison

Every week I upload compiled builds for Windows and should be playable for Linux through Wine.

The game features four classes (fighter, rogue, wizard and cleric) and four base races with subraces (human, mountain dwarf, hill dwarf, wood elf, high elf, lightfoot halfling and stout halfling). Currently most low level content is in the game along with an ever expanding bestiary. I’m in the process of working on mid-level content and high level features is an eventual goal.



The game features auto-explore, detailed character creation and party selection. All classes and races are complete enough to be playable. There is a real focus on party mechanics and you and your allies can be revived by others after being knocked unconscious if your team manage to win the battle before you die. You can meet and recruit other NPC’s in the dungeon and there are a few different types with different skill sets to explore, although magic-using allies are still a work in progress.

Another feature is a detailed lighting system combined with some races having darkvision and others going without. You will need to decide whether you use an offhand equipment slot for a torch or whether you explore in the dark or ask your allies to light their torches for you.

The game follows the rules as closely as possible so the Basic Rules double as a quasi-manual. All of the various statistics about weapons, armour, monsters and spells are faithfully created in-game from those rules. They’re included with the game but available here for download: http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/basicrules

Some features of 5e D&D don’t translate well to roguelikes, such as initiative, bonus actions, reactions and some other things but hopefully players will find that the game aims to be as accurate a conversion as possible.

I’ve only really posted about this game in the roguelikedev subreddit to date but I’m starting to realise that I need more playtesters to help me shape things with the benefit of fresh eyes and more importantly, I think the game is fun enough now to be worth distributing!

The general development goals from here are to keep adding the more complicated features (such as attacks of opportunity and grappling etc), along with more spells, more items, more monsters, more detailed party interactions and a much more sophisticated encounter system where monster distribution makes more sense than just random placement of enemies in a random dungeon.

If anyone is keen to give it a go and give me some feedback, I’d be very appreciative!

getter77:
Sounds extremely promising.

Troubler:
Didn't the Incursion guy do a similar thing but was really careful not to reference D&D for legal reasons?
You might want to look into that.

pat:
I’ve looked into it in great detail, and I’m a lawyer myself. Incursion is a similar concept in relation to 3.5e but a much more complicated project. I’m not sure what licensing issues (if any) Julian came up against, but I’ve been careful to comply with the law with this game.

Everything in the game is part of the SRD and the Basic Rules are mostly a very stripped back version of that. Where something comes up which isn’t part of the SRD then I remove it. There’s only a few instances of that so far and the game follows the Open Game Licence, the text of which is distributed with the game.

getter77:
Should be fine, 5e's orientation on SRD/OGL is more straightforward compared to the 3.x era---and even that era was still ample enough to give rise to Incursion, Knights of the Chalice and the soon to be sequel, Low Magic Age, etc without them chafing overly much on adaptation.

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