Day 28th: Joe Rottweiler, Realms of Pugmire

 Welcome back to day 28, so close to the end of the month and the challenge! I was planning to do another Fabula Ultima character today, but I've already used that system earlier this month and last week. So instead, I went into my pile of kickstarter game for a game I didn't realized was out for a little while, oops! The system this time is all about good boys, it's Onyx Path's Realms of Pugmire, the somewhat confusingly named second edition of the Pugmire RPG. I've never played it, but the idea of a D&D style fantasy RPG with dogs and cats instead of human was endearing! The basics of the setting is that human disappeared a long time ago and uplifted dogs and cats (and a few other I think, including Badgers as orcs stand-in) eventually recreated civilization, reaching a level similar to Medieval as seen through D&D style Fantasy. Instead of checking if I have art of dogs as adventurers or using Heroforge or going random, I just decided to base the character on Joe, a sadly passed-away family pet, the last one we've had.

 Character creation is pretty straight forward, you can either take a pre-gen, create your own from scratch or go the middle-road by taking and customizing templates. I barely skimmed the templates section and I didn't look at the pre-gen, but character creation is already very easy and has very few choice, so I'm not sure what the points of the templates are? I guess they have random tables, so if you don't really know what kind of pup you're making, then you have that to fall back on. I'm doing a specific dog, though, so let's get started.  The first step is choosing our upbringing and family. Family has no actual mechanical trait that I can see, it's basically your breed, Upbringing gives you a +2 bonus to an attribute and a trick, what would be a feat in a d20 game. Joe was a Rottweiler, a big strong and very chill dog, so I select the Worker upbringing, giving him a +2 to Might and advantage, called a boon here, on Might check to lift or pull. Then we pick one of the 8 backgrounds, which gives us two skills, a few items, our money given as an adjective instead of an amount and another trick. I pick Soldier, giving my Intimidate and Traverse for my skill, an insignia of rank and a set of common clothes, a few coins and an ability to be friendly with guards and soldiers.

 We're now on step three, choosing our calling, essentially our class. I pick the guardian, essentially the fighter of the game, giving me a 1d10 hit dice, Might and Presence as my primary attribute, another pick of two skills, the rest of my starting gear. They also give a bunch of tricks, but it's basically weapon and armor proficiency. I do get a choice of another trick, I pick Fighting Style, which is exactly word for word the D&D 5e Fighter feature of the same name. I think Pugmire was a D20, OGL game, so I guess it make sense that the follow-up is mostly D&D 5e. On that note, we're moving to step 4, generating our attribute. No random rolling, no point buy, we have a +2 +1 +1 +0 +0 -1 to assign to the six attribute with a note that the primary attribute of our calling means we have advantage when we roll using them. Since it's like D&D 5e where having 6000 sources of advantage is still cancelled out by one source of disadvantage, picking the strong upbringing for the strong class is fully wasting a trick! Oh well, it's worth the +4 Might anyway. Might is what I roll for attack, I'm unclear if that means I get advantage on every attack? It seems really strong, but maybe the assumption of the game is that fight should be rare? Or there's some specific language that Attack Roll don't count as those kind of check because of whatever, I'll find out if I ever decide to play the game.

 We're now done with four steps out of eleven, but... we're actually more or less done. Almost all the remaining steps boil down to "write down what you picked", I do get to choose what weapon and armor I want, I pick heavy armor, a warhammer and a shield. Look at this dog above and tell me he wouldn't look great in a full plate with a big old hammer and a shield, holding the line for his friend! I actually tried to do a crude photo montage in Gimp of Joe in armor, but I couldn't find a decent enough image of heavy armor with transparency to slap over a picture of Joe, so you'll have to imagine it. We do have one final step of writing three personality statement answering why we're a good boy, what inspires us and what's our weakness, it's basically the background traits in D&D 5e. Joe was a friendly but protective dog, so he takes pride in keeping monsters at bay, he's truly loyal and motivated by his bond to his comrades, but he was a bit lazy, only my dad or I could take him on a walk, he would refuse to go with anyone else, so I write that he can't give it more than the minimum effort necessary.

This game is very cute, but I was a bit let down by how much it's just a simplified D&D 5e. In theory that should be good, as I think that game has cruft and complexity in all the wrong place, but I'm not sure Realms of Pugmire simplifies in the right place. In any case, I miss my dogs, I miss having a dog, so I'm going to call it there.