PAX Thoughts: D&D Sword Coast Legends

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D&D Sword Coast Legends was another game I had never heard of before PAX.  My brother had heard a little bit about it and wanted to check it out.

We finally got to the game on the last day of the convention and it ended up being a cool experience.  You could be forgiven for thinking this is a generic action RPG set in the D&D world.  I certainly thought so until we got half way through the line.  Then we were made into groups of 5 and asked who in our group wanted to be the Dungeon Master.  No one else jumped at the chance so I volunteered... and I'm so glad I did.

I think I might have been bored being one of the players, but being a DM was amazing.  I got to control the dungeon and tweak it on the fly.  I could add things and take them away.  I made their first encounter easier which got me some DM currency to make a later encounter much more challenging.  I laid traps in tricky places.  I dropped monsters in behind them when they thought they had completed an encounter.  I changed the mood lighting on the fly.  I even took direct control of the final boss in the dungeon and duked it out with the players.

D&D Sword Coast Legends jumped from a game I had never heard about to a game where I want to dive in and make dungeons.  I would love to sit down with the DM tools and craft intricate encounters for players.  Tweaking the dungeon on the fly was a cool touch, but I think the real power is in sitting down without players and creating the dungeon for the first time.

This is a game I'm going to be watching closely.  If a good community forms around it I will be very interested to see what kind of things they come up with.

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