Why I like Adventure Hour!

I’ve run several games of Adventure Hour! over the past year, and I’m loving it. It feels like I'm finally playing the game I've always wanted D&D to be. Here's some musings on how Adventure Hour! seems to me to combine the best of point-and-click adventure games, cartoon homages to D&D, and ultra-light coin flip action resolution. 

The Promise of TV Homages

My first introduction to adventure games came from TV episodes that paid homage to the hobby. "D & DD" is an episode of Dexter's Lab that starts off in media res from the perspective of a knight, a magician, and a Robin Hood-ish archer traveling through the dungeon of an evil wizard. These turn out to be PCs in a game of "Monsters and Mazes" that Dexter's running. Dexter is an adversarial referee that fudges a die to kill the PCs and then screams "You all fry!" You know the type.

Note the gore graph...

Then Dexter's sister DeeDee runs a game and assigns Dexter a halfling character (he hates his signature ability: "I dig holes.") DeeDee literally turns the GM screen upside down, then improvises a story, turning the dragon into a piñata with a pixie stick that literally has a pixie in it. 

And the party in that episode have a cool tree fort headquarters! I still feel excited and tickled and inspired just thinking about it.

Then there's the "Lord of the Nerds" episode of Recess. The protagonist T.J. breaks an arm and has to spend recess inside with "the pale kids." T.J. befriends Frank "Knarf" "Tiny" Sedgwick, a "level 42 sword master" voiced by the archetypically nerd-voiced Eddie Deezan, who inducts T.J. (character name: J.T.) into the world of "Daggers and Dragons." It's just badass. It's like that one scene in the first episode of Stranger Things where the game is portrayed in terms of its essence - a ref setting a wondrous scene and players reacting - rather than being about numbers and dice.

There's also an episode of Reboot (remember Toonami?) called "A Dungeon Deep," where the characters, who live inside a computer, end up as character avatars in a computer RPG. Loved it. And an episode of That 70's Show called "Radio Daze" where the super cool DJ Jerry Thunder is revealed to be a huge nerd played by Curtis Armstrong. Incomprehensibly, the protagonist decline's Jerry's invite to play D&D, but he leads some adventure gaming with Alice Cooper in that show's classic "circle shot" format at the end of the episode. Maybe it wasn't the greatest of great TV, but I ate it up.

I'll let you play Mandar, the half-elf!

For years I knew I liked Adventure Games, not because I'd actually seen any, but because of these shows. They were my first brush with the game. That game, that TV game, was so exciting, inspiring, wondrous, fun and funny. Once I actually got to the table to play the third edition of the world's most mostest role playing game, I got some of those emotional flavors. But I also got: Confusion. Overwhelm. Anxiety. "That's not what the rules say!" "How do I actually prepare a session?!" "How do I design a monster stat block?"

I've played more and simpler systems since my first foray into the hobby, and Adventure Hour! feels like finally coming back home to the simple, wondrous, free game of creativity and mystery and make-believe I saw on Dexter's Lab.

The Legendary Coin Flip Dragon Battle

Now, my best friend Matt was the first person I played D&D with. I still remember him face-palming after his fighter was killed by giant rats and our friend Andy chose rather to die by rat bites than drag Matt's body to safety, all while screaming a line from his pre-generated cleric character sheet "I can hold my own in battle! I CAN HOLD MY OWN IN BATTLE!!"

Ah, good times. 

Anyway, fast forward eighteen years or so. There I am, in Matt's apartment, lazing on a couch with our friend Cole after trading off the controller for some remastered Sly Cooper platforming. I told Matt I wanted him to run some D&D. Cole - who had never played before - agreed. (sidebar: brand new players are and always will be the best players). 

Matt took a coin out of his pocket and asked, "What class do you want to be?" Naturally, I was a wizard, and gym-rat Cole played a warrior. Matt set a scene: a Godzilla-sized red dragon tears away a wall around the castle of the capital city!! You're on the castle ramparts as the horn of Flondor sounds - what do you do? 

Lightning bolts! *Flip the coin* Curtains of flame and smoke! *Flip the coin* Ice-meteors; scaling towers and leaping off; climbing the side of the monster using swords like bloody ice picks!! Flip the blessed, terrible coin. 

I've played a lot of adventure games, mostly iterations of a certain game named after dragons, but I've only properly fought a handful of the terrible winged lizards with elemental breath. This dragon fight was far and away the very best I ever had. 

And the only mechanic was a coin flip! 

Cole and I watched with baited breath as the coin tumbled in the air, leaned over the edge of our seats to see Matt lift his hand and reveal the result. Will it be heads? Will the fighter be able to prize open the titanic jaws with his outstretched arms and legs? Or will it be tails, and the knight swallowed whole?! Out with the math and the bonuses and the finicky legalize of complex spell descriptions - the only question that mattered was: do you succeed in glory, or fall calamitously? 

All rolls in Adventure Hour! are 50/50. Roll a d6: 1-3 you fail, 4-6 you succeed. There's an advantage/disadvantage mechanic which is just: the results are better/worse depending on the situation. Yes. When I saw that Adventure Hour! had a coin clip as an alternate mechanical resolution medium, I was transported to that fabled dragon skirmish, and I knew I had to play it.

Point and Click. Point and Click Forever!

So, Humongous Entertainment made four point and click adventure franchises that I collected and played for hours and hours on my dad's office computer as a kid: Pajama Sam, Spy Fox, Fredy Fish, and Putt-Putt. Also, the Blazing Dragons point and click adventure game for PS1 - but that final level was stupidly hard and I broke two controllers in a rage over it. I digress.

In those games, you explore the environment, clicking on the scenery and NPCs to see funny animations, using your random stuff to interact with things and people, picking up more random stuff, combining it, using it on various parts of the environment. It was constant engagement with the environment, constant playing around, constant fun. 

The turnstile...

With its focus on inventory, Adventure Hour! feels to me like those classic point and click games. Except it's better! because it's a tabletop game, and the possibilities of leveraging your equipment on the environment is limited only by your imagination! It's item-based problem solving, which I find more inventive and creative than attack action / skill-roll based play. And no system does it better, or at least as purely, as Adventure Hour! 

Knave has a great 10-inventory-slot system too, which Cairn hacked together with Into the Odd, doing away with classes and levels for an even more inventory-focused game. But Adventure Hour! took it a step further and did away with classes, levels, and attribute scores. Like Pajama Sam or Spy Fox, a player-character is simply their title and their gear and what happens to them, and that keeps the focus on the situation, narrative, creative problem solving, choices, and actions. It also makes character capabilities immediately understandable to anyone. "So I'm an urchin with a sack, a blow gun, and an invisible monkey." Check. I like that.

And Those Spells!

One more thing about the item-centric design: in Adventure Hour!, all spells are tied to exhaustible items. Namely: scrolls (one charge) or wands (three charges). This makes it so anyone can produce odd or supernatural effects, not just wizards. It also welcomes the GM to give away powerful, wacky, experimental effects, because however game-breaking they may be, they'll be depleted eventually. 

Casting a spell depletes one charge of a wand/scroll and has a 50/50 chance of saddling you with a fatigue condition that takes up one of your precious 10 inventory slots. I like that spell casting has a consequence like that (although I like the idea of adding more flavorful magical mishaps). 

Okay, that's it! That's my schtick! I'm editing a video of me running The Waking of Willowby Hall with Adventure Hour! right now and expect to post it...within the next 6 months. Meantime, here's one of me running Undertree Temple of the Elf Gods with Adventure Hour!