Dragon Age, Terrain and Diet Bet Victory

This morning I weigh 14st and have won my Feb Diet bet. I’m doing another one in March, this month I bet that I will be able to do 100 Push ups by the end of the month.

Last weekend we played Dragon age, with our friends from across the pond Charles and Tammie over a G+ Hangout.

I loved the Dragon Age stunt system, the resolution system is 3d6 with one of them a different colour, the Dragon Die. If you roll doubles you get stunt points equal to the roll on the Dragon Die which you can spend on doing interesting things in the fight; Knocking people back or over, extra damage or ignoring armour. It’s a really interesting critical hit mechanic.

Dan ran us through the intro adventure and one of the things that stood out for me was that each of the fights featured some sort of terrain, and each time it came into play because of the stunt system.

**Spoilers for the intro adventure below.**

The first fight was an ambush by a gorge where the rope bridge had been cut by Darkspawn seeking to trap us against the ravine. During the fight I got knocked down the ravine along with several of the darkspawn.

The 2nd was on a steep hillside with a switchback road leading up to it, and we started on the wrong side of a gully, everyone had to get across the gully and get up the hill in time to save the defenders from a massive Darkspawn attack.

Playing through it reminded me of this article from Criis perkins: Things I learnt from various editions http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4dmxp/20130117

In it he mentions that the thing that 4th ed brought home for him was making sure there was some sort of interesting terrain in each fight.

The fights in dragon age all had some cool piece of terrain I them, even if it was just big pits. combined with the stunt system that meant that everyone gets to do the cool cinematic style fights with knocking opponents over or pushing them back and things like that. It made all the fights more interesting.

It is something i’m taking ino my This is Thracia adventures, making sure I put fights in locations more interesting than a 20ft by 20ft room.

What is the most interesting terrain you have put into a roleplaying adventure?