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Nerdarchy > Free Nerdy Things  > Review: Challenger, a free role-playing game

Review: Challenger, a free role-playing game

In Role Play, Description isn’t Always a Good Thing
To Game or Not to Game?
cover

The cover of the Challenger RPG.

In the early days of tabletop role-playing games, mainly meaning the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, there was a certain amateur charm and excitement to the products. The artwork was decent, but not quite up to professional levels. The writing was personal, not full of corporate speak, with the occasional error. Even the rules were somewhat questionable, fairly simple but not always making sense.

The Challenger free role-playing game reminds of those days.

Obviously an amateur work, though a work of love, the Challenger game is written as if one of your gaming buddies was sitting across a table from you while excitedly telling you about his or her latest creation. The rules are simple, especially by modern standards, but they still seem to get the job done. The focus is upon rolling fewer dice so the role-playing aspects of the game can shine through, all while working hard to present a system with a fantasy core, but one that can be expanded into other genres.

Rolling the dice in Challenger

At its heart, Challenger is something of another D20 game, but one of the big differences is that in a combat between two foes, the dice only gets rolled once per exchange. Instead of your character rolling to hit an enemy, and the enemy rolling to hit your character, there is one roll of the dice. If you hit, your enemy automatically misses, but if you miss, your enemy hits you. There are some exceptions, which is where armor comes into play, but for the most part the attacks are a trade-off of blows.

Admittedly that’s unrealistic, but this isn’t a system for those seeking an abundance of realism. Again, this harkens back to the days of yore in RPGs.

Not only is rolling less dice an important part of this game, but so is keeping the dice in the hands of the players as much as possible instead of the game master. Sure, the GM will have to roll some dice for secret checks and the like, but for the most part it is the players who have control of rolling the bones.

One other way this game brings that to the fore is through its initiative system. Basically, there isn’t one. The players go first. Always.

And when it comes to savings throws, which will look familiar to most RPG players, the bad guys don’t get any.

Again, unrealistic, but it does speed along play.

Challenger classes

character sheet

A Challenger character sheet. See anything that looks familiar? Or anything that’s missing? Don’t worry, there are character statistics. Apparently you have to write them in on this sheet.

For those familiar with D&D, you will recognize a class system when you see one, but this one is a bit different from most. While there are classes, and multi-classing is available, there is still something of a point-buy system as powers and skills are purchased through points. One nice element to this is that characters within the same class could look vastly different from one another.

As can be expected, there are typical classes to be found here, your warriors and wizards and the like, but even these break down into subtypes, allowing for assassins, witches, telekineticists, ninjas, even henchmen and much more.

Variety would seem to be important here.

That variety continues into the skills and powers portions of the game, allowing for a little bit of everything. Also, the author of Challenger makes a habit of suggesting players create their own skills and powers. Often such is alluded to in RPGs, but here it seems more than that. This game wants the players to have the characters they want, not characters who all look alike or who can easily be pigeonholed into simple categories. This is further evidenced by the fact that when a character goes up in a class level, his or her new skills or powers are purchased by the points mentioned above, and the player has a broad choice of skills and powers to pick from, including some not from one’s own class or race.

Then there are the races and the monsters. As expected, here you’ll find the traditional humans, elves, dwarfs, etc. But have you ever wanted to play a dragon? Or how about a table? Or a lamp? Or a genie? Or gargoyle? Challenger offers all of these possibilities.

So, this game has plenty of variety when it comes to character creation, and it’s a fairly easy system to pick up.

Even free, is it all good for Challenger?

But what are the downsides?

Well, while the Challenger game is easy to learn, it also feels a bit clunky to me. And while I’m not one to want too much realism in my fantasy games, this one seems to push the envelope a little too far for my taste. Yes, there shouldn’t be too much realism, but when it comes to combat, to me that’s taking something from the real world and including in one’s fantasy world, which means (to my way of thinking) there should at least be a little realism to it.

Also, others might not appreciate the amateur aspects to Challenger. Personally, I loved it, but I grew up playing D&D back in the early ’80s when things were still a bit wild. Those who grew up playing RPGs in the last 20 or so years might frown upon the clunkiness and the lack of cohesiveness of a game not put together by a whole team under a corporate banner. But maybe not.

https://youtu.be/BYNCkTWRKSg

One good thing is that the core rules for Challenger are currently free for the Kindle, and with all the free Kindle apps available from Amazon, one can read the rules on just about any electronic device. For those who prefer not to go through Amazon, maybe because you want a digital copy in another format, the rules are also free over at RPGNow, DriveThruRPG and Smashwords. If you insist upon a paper edition, you can purchase a copy for $16.99.

I would like to add that there is also a lot of advice in Challenger for beginning players and game masters, and while most of it is old hat to those who are experienced role players, much of it would be good for those starting out to learn. Sometimes it’s good to get back to the basics.

Is Challenger for everyone? No. But what game is? For those who can look past its flaws, it might be worth giving a try.

And while you’re giving it a try, remember to Stay Nerdy!

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Ty Johnston

A former newspaper editor for two decades in Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky, Ty now earns his lunch money as a fiction writer, mostly in the fantasy and horror genres. He is vice president of Rogue Blades Foundation, a non-profit focused upon publishing heroic literature. In his free time he enjoys tabletop and video gaming, long swording, target shooting, reading, and bourbon. Find City of Rogues and other books and e-books by Ty Johnston at Amazon.

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