Shadowdark is Easy to Explain

I was chatting with a few folks familiar with 5E but only a little else. They're not hardcore gamers, just casual players who enjoy a good game of D&D now and then.

When I introduce Shadowdark to them, they quickly grasp its concept and mechanics, demonstrating the game's simplicity and ease of understanding. Knowing it's simple enough this should make you feel at ease and comfortable with the game.

• It has a torch timer!
• No ancestry can see in the dark!
• The darkness is very dangerous! Disadvantage! Double encounter chances!
• You take zero-level characters through a gauntlet!
• You get random rewards as you level!
• It is a one-book game!
• Stitch bound, heavy paper, and a bookmark!
• High-quality book! Easy to read and understand!
• It uses 5E rules!

That's it; five or six points out of the above sell them the game. Especially the one-book game part is a relief for many who are tired of spending a fortune on D&D books. With Shadowdark, you get a high-quality game with a single-book buy-in, making you feel financially secure and smart for choosing this cost-effective option.

I can't describe Old School Essentials or Dungeon Crawl Classics similarly. Shadowdark is a straightforward sell to 5E players, and you have to step outside your "gamer shoes" and look at this from a mass-market perspective. Shadowdark is as easy to sell to people as Monopoly.

• Easy to play.
• Compelling bullet-point rules.
• Single book buy-in.
• High-quality product.
• Familiar system.

DCC: I can explain it, but it is not as easy since I am trying to convey "Appendix N" concepts. It is easier to explain DCC in terms of Shadowdark, like an "Advanced Shadowdark," if that makes sense. DCC is also a harder sell since it uses dice people don't typically have, and those are a bit pricy, too. DCC is the "old school style on crack." Selling DCC is like trying to sell a feeling, idea, way of life, or lost ancient art. When people "get it," things are amazing.

But DCC is too big for most people and has far too many charts for everything. I could not "sell" people on this; it's not as easy to communicate the "why" as Shadowdark.

I still love my DCC books, though. The DCC adventures have replaced all my classic TSR modules as my "new classics." These inspire me. DCC and Shadowdark are more fun to read than D&D books, which is another plus for both of them.

OSE is "like the old ways of playing," but again, you need a frame of reference to the old game to understand it. If you ask most people, "What was it like to play in the old days?" You will get blank stares or a million random answers.

If people played 5E, they would know all the basic rules of Shadowdark. They have the dice. They have a frame of reference. They also know what a challenging game is like, like Dark Souls or Elden Ring. They are likely hardcore players tired of the weight of 5E or new players who bounced off the complexity and buy-in. Also, character creation is fast, without flipping through books or using a premium website.

When I said, "uses a simple version of the 5E rules," they were sold.

The game is also comfortable and familiar. Where D&D needs to overdo it on the art and ship a thousand pages with far too many rules and options, Shadowdark can get the same thing done in a single book, and the player-facing parts of the game are mostly what is on the character sheets. Most of Shadowdark are tables with which to create adventures and GM-focused material. Even then, there is little to running Shadowdark that a player couldn't pick up in one session. I saw one YouTube video where a family's nine-year-old was refereeing the game quite successfully.

Shadowdark succeeds because explaining the game to people who played 5E once or twice is effortless. One or two of those bullet points, and they are like, "I am interested in this." Also, the awards it won make it even more compelling since people in the mainstream tend to avoid uncertain and unrecognized things. When I said, "Won awards at Gen Con," suddenly, it wasn't just my word that they were taking. They knew Gen Con. They could go verify the awards and see the excitement.

Awards matter.

In other games, I have more difficulty explaining "what this is." When you have to "sell" a game to get someone interested, Shadowdark has many features that make it easy.