After countless hours over the last two weeks, the wait is finally over.  Drums of War is complete!

Drums of War is a tabletop roleplaying game designed to allow players to explore the world of Azeroth at their own pace and whim.  It was created out of a desire to create my own stories and adventures in the Warcraft universe, coupled with a dissatisfaction with the amount of justice both WoW and the tabletop did to it's roleplaying potential.

This is a bit of a rough draft, officially an Alpha version, but should be complete enough to play with a creative GM and flexible players.  All of the basic rules are covered, as well as all races and classes up to Lich King.  

Comments and contributions are welcome.  While this was largely a single person project in its initial stages, I suspect it will not see continued life without open contribution.  There is still much room to improve and add here, and I welcome any ideas or bits anyone cares to contribute.  

I'll have a full website up very soon on Google Sites or Wikia, but in the meantime, here's the PDF, hosted from Google Docs:

Drums of War, Alpha Version (251 Kb)

How are saving throws implemented?

There are no saving throws per se, but similar situations do come up, and are generally handled as attribute checks.  Magical attacks in particular are resisted by an opposed roll between the caster's Int and the target's Spi (or RV for monsters).  I can't recall off the top of my head exactly how Hunter traps worked, I think it was an opposed Agi vs. Agi check.

Master of the Ghouls needs a cap on how many ghouls you can have in your service permanently at a time, otherwise Death Knights are going to have storehouses of ghouls.

Is it correct to assume that Paladin's Holy Hammer does require an successful attack roll, right? Can it be activated after a successful attack or is Holy Hammer it's own attack action?

What's the duration on the armor bonus provided by the Light Armor Kit? Can several of these stack?

Master of Ghouls should be a "once per combat" ability.  

Hammer of Justice is a bit vague.  I think I intended it to be an automatic effect, but at that mana cost that's a little bit over powering.  Making it a Magical attack is probably for the best.  

Light Armor Kits are meant to be permanent, like in the game, but can only be used once on a suit of armor.  This should probably be clarified.

Between this, and the missing "resource box" and non-weapon/armor gear sections on the char sheet, looks like it's going to be time to start keeping track of changes somewhere.

I had a look, though generally its hard to comment in that I'm entirely unfamiliar with WoW and many of the design features could be there to match it's setup.
On attributes, some googling suggested 3d6-drop-lowest gives an average of about 8.4, which would be a yield of 42 points (compared to 40 for the non-random method).

There's some initial benefit for characters using nonrandom generation since (as with D&D 3-4), you can avoid the odd numbers that don't given extra bonuses, but since levelling up adds points directly to scores, this benefit vanishes reasonably fast.

Much of the character abilities are written to emulate their WoW equivalents in a hopefully more tabletop friendly form.  If you go over to like WoWWiki or the like and look them up, they're usually pretty close in spirit, if not in actual numbers.

And the slight disparity in the average between random and point buy is quite deliberate.  I've used a similar design in the past.  I like that trade off between having the chance to do better with the dice, in exchange for not knowing what you'll get.  It's that kind of slight risk/reward thing I like in chargen, it's what makes Traveller so fun, for instance.  

Since I'm more often a player than a GM, I tend to focus on the character systems.  Everything else is just figuring out how those characters interact.

i like that random/point buy trade-off you've got going.  good design philosophy IMO.

downloaded a copy to read later.  looks good so far.  thanks for sharing!

Quote from: J Arcane;397205Master of Ghouls should be a "once per combat" ability.

So, Master of Ghouls lasts the duration of a combat and then the ghouls sod off? That sounds okay.

Quote from: DeadUematsu;397310So, Master of Ghouls lasts the duration of a combat and then the ghouls sod off? That sounds okay.

The description indicates that the duration is 8 rounds.  I think I considered bumping it to 10 originally, as that's how long it lasts in WoW, but decided to lessen it to keep it from being overpowering.

Quote from: J Arcane;397317The description indicates that the duration is 8 rounds.  I think I considered bumping it to 10 originally, as that's how long it lasts in WoW, but decided to lessen it to keep it from being overpowering.

You're talking about Army of the Dead. Master of the Ghouls is the talent which allows enemy corpses that are raised to be permanently in your control until released or destroyed.

Quote from: DeadUematsu;397323You're talking about Army of the Dead. Master of the Ghouls is the talent which allows enemy corpses that are raised to be permanently in your control until released or destroyed.

Oh, right.  Yeah, sorry, I'm a bit burnt on all this stuff right now.  I should know that, I play a damn death knight.

You're meant to only have one NPC Ghoul under your control at once.  I think it got a bit confused because I also merged it with the Raise Ally effect.

Intended effect is Master of Ghouls should allow you to have one NPC Ghoul permanently in your employ, in a manner similar to a Warlock pet.  If it dies you'll have to make another one.

Raised Allies should be independent, and thus not count towards the limit, but they can't be made permanent lwith MoG.

I'm gonna have to rewrite both abilities to make this clearer.  Dropping the Raise Ally effect would help too, but I hate to let it go.  I really like the spell, and you never really get any use out of it in WoW.

Cool. Still reading, but what does being stunned entail? (I searched for the word "stun" and didn't find anything describing what exactly the status condition does).

Quote from: DeadUematsu;397339Cool. Still reading, but what does being stunned entail? (I searched for the word "stun" and didn't find anything describing what exactly the status condition does).

Most of the abilities do describe specifically what being "stunned" entails, but some of them seem to have slipped through.

I suspect this is something that would be better served with it's own mention in the combat rules, rather than relying on individual descriptions.  Specific universal rules for stuns and immobilizes and such like, to make it clear what effect it has and have it be standard across spells.  

Part of the issue was so many spells do seem to work just a touch differently.

To answer the question though, "stunned" should mean the target can't act until the stun wears off.

Drums of War now has a wiki, which you can find here: http://drumsofwar.wikia.com/wiki/Drums_of_War_Wiki