Welcome to Just Dragons!

Just Dragons is a minimal role-playing game framework, designed for players who want to put character first and game mechanics second. With a few friends and a good dealer, Just Dragons can provide a smooth and natural role-playing experience unencumbered by complex rules.

Overview

Just Dragons is best played at a tabletop with three or more players. One of the players is the dealer. The dealer is responsible for introducing the setting and telling the other players what happens in the game world. The other players each role-play an in-game character and narrate their actions as they explore the setting and interact with non-player characters.

Creating a Character

The first and most important step to creating a character is defining their personality, motives, and background. These decisions will inform the rest of the character as well as how you role-play them in a game. Here are some helpful questions you can ask yourself when creating a character:

  1. How does your character behave in social situations? Do they act differently around different people?
  2. What does your character want? What are their priorities?
  3. How does your character live? What do they do every day?
  4. How has your character’s life and personality changed over time? What’s their background, and how did that shape who they are now?
  5. What is your character’s physicality, and how is it related to their personality?
  6. What material possessions does your character have? Where do they keep them?
  7. Does your character have any friends or relations? How have they influenced your character’s ideals?
  8. Who has your character influenced and inspired? Are they known and recognized by strangers?
  9. What is your character’s culture, and how has it influenced their beliefs and way of life?
  10. Is your character part of an organization or society? Does your character agree with their purpose and practices?

Strong answers to these questions will keep your character grounded throughout the game and will make it easier for you to improvise in unexpected situations.

Skills

Each character can have up to five skills. A skill is a verb describing something your character is good at or has practiced for a long time. Each of your skills should be related to a specific event or period of time in your character’s backstory, and will inform the way you role-play that character during the game. For example, a character might have the “boating” skill if they lived by the sea, or the “lying” skill if they worked with a criminal organization. Only verbs can be skills—“maps” is not a skill, but “wayfinding” is. If you’re unsure about how you’ve described your skills, talk to the other players and see what they think.

Make sure you know which backstory elements are associated with each skill, as this will inform how you can apply the skill during the game. Two characters could both have the “climbing” skill, while one climbs cliffs and the other climbs trees. When you want to apply one of your skills, consider how your character’s personal experience enables what you want to do.

Statistics

A character’s physical attributes are quantified as statistics. Each character has three statistics:

  • Strength is your character’s physical strength. It helps you hit things, carry things, throw things, and lift things.
  • Agility represents your character’s control over their body. A high agility score will help your character walk quietly, scale walls, and dodge falling debris.
  • Stamina tells you how tough your character is. High stamina allows your character to hold their breath for longer, run farther before getting tired, and more easily withstand a heavy blow.

To set your character’s statistics, assign each one a number between 1 and 6 so that they all add up to 8. Each time your character is injured during the game, your stamina statistic decreases permanently by one point. When it reaches 0, you die.

Classes

Your dealer may give you the option to choose a class, which grants special abilities. Ask you dealer which classes are available for your game.

Playing the Game

Ability and Contest Checks

During a game, your character might wish to take an action that can’t be resolved through role-play alone. In these situations you’ll make an ability check to see if your action succeeds.

To make an ability check, the dealer first sets a threshold. They may or may not tell you what it is. Then, you roll an 8-sided die. If your action is directly related to one of your statistics, add that statistic to the roll. Then, if the result is equal to or higher than the threshold, you succeed in your action. Otherwise, you fail.

You can also apply your skills to an ability check. If one of your skills is relevant to your action, you can roll the die twice and take the highest result. Skills can stack—if two or more of your skills apply to an ability check, you can roll the die that many additional times and choose the highest result.

If the threshold of the check depends on another character, then the ability check becomes a contest check. In a contest check, each character in the contest makes an ability check. Then, instead of comparing the results to a threshold, the character with the highest result succeeds and the other character fails. In the case of a tie, the winner is chosen randomly by flipping a coin. The contesting characters do not necessarily need to use the same statistic for the check.

Initiative

If multiple characters all want to act at the same time, then each character rolls an 8-sided die and is assigned a turn in the turn order based on their result. Break ties randomly. The character with the highest initiative roll acts first. After they have taken an action, the turn passes to the next character in the turn order. If a group of characters all want to act together, then they only make one initiative roll for the whole group and take their turns together.