Fantasy | Movies | Roleplaying Games
‘Honor Among Thieves’ Looks Way More Fun Than Actual D&D
Mazes, EZD6, and Risus do ‘Honor Among Thieves’ better than D&D.
The trailer for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves feels NOTHING like actual D&D. D&D is slow and boring. The rules are overly granular and dense. The whole game is an un-fun slog.
Its price-to-fun ratio is terrible. The Dungeons & Dragons Essentials Kit, which is only an intro game, is $25 and the three core books are $50 each. Most people don’t get $175 worth of fun out of D&D, and you probably aren’t the exception.
Dungeons & Dragons isn’t just a money sink. It’s also a time sink. Character creation is tedious and so is preparing an adventure. Playing the game is an endurance test crossed with a math quiz. Unless you’re rich and literally have nothing else to do, there are better games to spend your time and money on.
Mazes — Fantasy Roleplaying Reforged
“Mazes is a return to the classic sword and sorcery dungeon crawler with award-winning, yet delightfully simple modern rules. The first TTRPG to use the polymorph system, Mazes is easy to learn and teach, and ready to play without a lot of prep.
Designed for episodic play, Mazes is ideal for one-shots and conventions. It’s a distillation and modernization of the classic Dungeon Delve, making it a perfect introduction for those new to roleplaying, as well as a great excuse for grognards to get back into the dungeon!”
Mazes is a bog-standard old school sword and sorcery game about plundering dungeons, or mazes, for treasure. Players never roll anything but their dedicated die, determined by their Role. The Paragon uses a d4. The Vanguard uses a d6. The Fighter uses a d8. The Sentinel uses a d10. ALWAYS. Aspects and Classes add more capabilities and details, but there’s still no math in Mazes.
Mazes simplifies classic roleplaying by abstracting everything it can. Situational danger is abstracted as three levels of Darkness: Bright, Torchlit, and Bleak. Instead of tracking gold pieces, character Lifestyle has four levels: Gold, Silver, Copper, and Broke. And so on. All this abstraction and simplification means the rules are never in the way of daring-do and weird adventure.
The game even features OSR conversion rules. You can pull monsters, classes, weapons, etc from D&D, Mörk Borg, or even Gamma World in to Mazes.
Mazes’ one book is $40, 10 bucks less than any single D&D core book.
EZD6 — A fast-moving game of fantasy mayhem
“A rules-light D6 RPG system that puts creativity over complexity, but delivers a surprising amount of variation and mechanical wiggle.”
As the name suggests, EZD6 is easy to play and uses six-sided dice for almost everything. Damage is easy to track: three strikes and you’re out. Almost all attacks inflict one strike. The ten flavors of magic, from Blastmaster to Shadoweaver, are flexible but risky to use, as they should be. Money is abstracted into six Wealth Levels, from Pauper to Kingly Wealth, and distance is similarly simplified. In short, the rules never stand in the way of heroic good times
The Rabble Rouser “prepares the mayhem (adventures, encounters, enemies and twists) for the other players to explore and discover”. Their job is to make things interesting for the other players, called Pushers and Shovers. They use “skill and willpower to overcome anything and anyone between you and your team’s ambitions”.
The artwork is exaggerated, the rules were designed to be remembered even after a few drinks, and the monsters are both familiar and ludicrous. EZD6 is all about gonzo adventurous mayhem and FEELS way more like Honor Among Thieves than actual D&D.
The hardback EZD6 rulebook is $25, half as much as a D&D core book.
Risus: The Anything RPG
“For some, Risus is a handy “emergency” RPG for spur-of-the-moment one-shots and rapid character creation. For others, it’s a reliable campaign system supporting years of play. For others still, it’s a strange little pamphlet with stick figures. No matter what you think it is, there’s no wrong way to play.”
Risus is a lightweight comedic RPG that can be made to work for just about ANYTHING that isn’t devoid of comedy (like Star Wars). It delivers Honor Among Thieves’ adventurous criming and irreverent banter far better than D&D. Tactics are nonexistent. Exciting descriptions are everything and the Rule of Cool is king.
Because Risus is an “Anything RPG”, there’s no default setting. It’s mostly DIY. But if you’ve spent any time on TVtropes.com, you’ll grok Risus fairly quickly. Statting up the heroes and monsters and whatnot depicted in Honor Among Thieves will only take a few minutes.
This is the cheapest game on the list. The core game is free and the Companion is only $10.
Other Options
Other RPGs share some DNA with Honor Among Thieves but don’t quite hit the thematic mark.
Heart: The City Beneath
“Heart: The City Beneath is a tabletop roleplaying game about delving into a nightmare undercity that will give you everything you’ve ever dreamed of — or kill you in the process.
It is a dungeon-crawling, story-forward tabletop RPG from the designers of Spire that focuses on what characters have to lose in pursuit of their dreams in the chaotic darkness beneath the world.”
Heart is D&D mashed up with Call of Cthulhu. Delvers explore a bizarre pocket dimension in search of riches and reality-shaking discoveries. All the monsters are pure nightmare fuel.
Heart explores why anyone would want to crawl a dungeon, which is so suicidally dangerous you’d have to be beyond desperate to do it. The art is disturbingly delicious. D&D wishes it was as cool and edgy as Heart.
Heart: The City Beneath is far grimmer than D&D or the movie it vaguely inspired. The fun lies in the maddening setting, ghastly monsters, and disturbing personal drama. If you want fun-loving thieving, this isn’t your game. If you want dark dungeon delving, psychodrama, and people that are willingly, symbiotically colonized by bees, play Heart.
Dusk City Outlaws
“Dusk City Outlaws is a tabletop roleplaying game for 3–6 players, set in the sprawling city of New Dunhaven. In this game, the players take on the roles of criminals on the wrong side of the law, collectively known as the Right Kind of People to those who run in outlaw circles. These criminals come together to form a crew, and take on a Job, a criminal enterprise brokered to them by a third party.”
Dusk City Outlaws is a roleplaying game that sort of plays like a board game. The rules are short, and the game uses a lot of cards, tokens, and whatnot, like its sister game Spectaculars.
But the setting is low-magic compared to D&D. If you want to turn into an owlbear, this isn’t your game.
Blades in the Dark
“Blades in the Dark is a tabletop role-playing game about a crew of daring scoundrels seeking their fortunes on the haunted streets of an industrial-fantasy city. There are heists, chases, occult mysteries, dangerous bargains, bloody skirmishes, and, above all, riches to be had — if you’re bold enough to seize them.”
If Michael Mann’s ‘Heat’ was set in a demon-powered Victorian city, you’d get Blades in the Dark. The game’s setting is darkly gorgeous. The plethora of rival gangs, guilds, merchants, and whatnot makes the city come alive with scoundrely drama.
Blades in the Dark is far heavier in tone than Honor Among Thieves. It’s less zany fantasy misadventure and more haunted crime drama. Still, this is the game you want if you liked Gangs of New York, Arcane, or Peaky Blinders.