How to play Dragonbane   Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Dragonbane. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own Dragonbane game at home.   I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections. Game category Attributes Skills Pushing Conditions Dragons, demons Boons, banes Initiative How to attack Zero hit points Sneak attacks Actions and reactions Armor Weapon durability Movement Terrain Encumbrance Resting Magic Building a character     Game category. Dragons, demons, and player characters of fantasy races. Magic, mystery, and adventure. Dragonbane is a tabletop roleplaying game designed in the mirth and mayhem roleplaying style. Mirth and mayhem means there is room for laughter and a pinch of silliness, and also brutal challenges for adventurers to face in combat. Dragonbane is a translated and updated version of the Scandinavian game Drakar och Demoner, first released in 1982. Its main author Tomas Harenstam intended Dragonbane to facilitate fast and furious play, with less prep time than other d20 based ttrpg systems. Players embody characters whose professions give them specialized skills and weapons, to roll four, six, eight, ten, twelve, or twenty sided dice to fight against enemies such as harpies, minotaurs, giants, manticores, griffins, wights, trolls, and of course, dragons.   Attributes. Your character has six attributes: strength, constitution, agility, intelligence, willpower, and charisma. The character’s ability to do everything from wield their weapon, to sneak undetected, to barter with a shop keeper, to how many hit points they have, is derived from their numbers in these core attributes. You’ll determine those attribute numbers by rolling dice during character creation, and I’ve gone through an example of character creation at the end of this how to play guide to show you how attribute points are rolled. But basically, the higher the number, the better your character is at that thing. Here’s an example of the attribute number ranges. A five in the strength attribute would mean you’re not great at lifting or carrying things. Your inventory would be scant, and you’d get over encumbered easily. A ten is pretty average for an attribute. A sixteen in the strength attribute means you’re really strong, and are way better than a regular person at brawling and axes.   Skills. Every Dragonbane character has a number in thirty skills. Some example skills are the agility attribute based acrobatics skill, the charisma attribute based persuasion skill, the intelligence attribute based languages skill, and the strength based brawling skill. To see if you succeed when doing one of your skills, roll a twenty sided dice, also called a d20. If the dice result is the same as or lower than your skill level, you succeed at what you were trying to do. If the dice shows a number higher than your skill number, then you failed.   Here is an example skill roll. You want to spot something hidden. Your spot hidden skill is a 14. You roll a d20. If the dice is a 14, 13, 12, 11, etc, down to 2, you see the hidden thing, yay. If your dice is a 15, 16, 17, 18, or 19, you don’t see the hidden thing. The higher your skill number, the more likely you are to succeed. If you fail, that might impact the story. Not only do you not see the hidden thing, which could allow an enemy to deal extra ambush damage to you, but also it might cost you more time, risk, or gold to achieve your goals. Failure never stops the story completely, but it is expensive to some of your consumables.   Pushing. Failing a skill roll doesn’t have to be the end. You could choose to push, which means gainin