Intended to be fully readable both spoiler-free and with the hidden spoilers to add detail.
Although I have played boardgames a lot and love doing so (heck, I even work at a board game shop), first and foremost I consider myself a roleplayer. I have several years of experience in both live action and table-top roleplaying and am the proud creator of two completely original settings and rules systems (although yet to be published). As everyone I started with D&D but soon moved to much rules lighter systems cause I value story and immersion into one's character much more than the complex rules covering every single detail.
Legacy of Dragonholt promised to be just that. And without a gamemaster. GMless systems are the new hip and cool of the European roleplaying scene and although I am rather sceptical of them I can't deny the excitement of the idea of being completely on your own as players. I immediately decided to go solo because with already two people I could just gamemaster my own games but as a busy adult of modern times me and my friends often barely have any time to meet up.
As mentioned in several other reviews you start with creating your character first choosing race and class. Since I have always been drawn to the mage/sorcerer archeotype not exactly available in the choices I settled for human apothecary with a secret magical gift. Next you are told to describe your character's backround and values and this before choosing your skills. I was immediately delighted because this is exactly my roleplaying philosophy: skills need to be chosen not to be the most efficient set but to be what this particular character would be able to do. My character, <PERSON>, was a daughter of a noble father and apothecary mother from the Free Cities. Her father was murdered in some unknown infighting of nobles and three years before the game so was her mother. She escaped and needed to choose the life of an adventurer to avoid being caught by never staying in one place for long. <PERSON> hated violence and despised (feared) nobles but was always there for the weak. (Spoiler but okay if you have played through the game: Little did I know how well it resonated with the actual story of the game and gave her some difficult choices to make.)
Since playing alone I got to choose a lot of skills since the penalty to stamina (an abstract sense of hit points) of choosing any extra skill was reduced significantly. I was already aware that having a skill means more choices in the game because you can only do some things if you have the skill of x. 504
I settled in for the good story regardless of whether I 'win' or 'lose' the game.
Although it's a prewritten GMless system always giving you a limited selection of what to do as opposed to the complete freedom of roleplaying games the choices seemed logical. I had feared a lot worse conflict between "I wanna do that" but "these are your options". I knowingly failed pretty bad in the first combat cause my character deeply hesitated to fight and use her rare magical gift.
A thing sort of bothering me as the player was the fact that the rules don't give you a possibility to actually die in combat. When your stamina is reduced to zero you just disable a skill and continue with one stamina. When all the skills are disabled then well, there simply is no rule for that. I searched the forums for answers. Some said they just houseruled their characters dead after disabling x amount of skills. Someone who most likely had already played through gave me another sort of so-to-say comfort in the issue. (Small spoiler: Namely saying that if you disable too many skills you will end up to a bad ending where you die.)
Classically in the roleplaying games you have the main quest and several side quests. Like I mentioned before I didn't intend to 'win' as such but quite unexpectedly failed miserably on the first important part of the main quest. Everything was going just fine and I wasted no time and all of a sudden - it all failed. Still thinking had I chosen differently on that very same short numbered entry it had maybe changed the whole outcome of the campaign. (Big spoiler, read only if you have played and are ready to know the alternative options: little <PERSON> died just because I decided to try to push him away from the shot by <PERSON> instead of jumping in front of the bolt! You can't blame <PERSON> for being human and not wanting to sacrifice her life for someone she barely knew!.) I never felt like writing down the read entries so I will only know if replaying the game one day. I found out that losing on the grounds of not knowing how... Wasn't so fun.
Meanwhile I had spontaneously started to write an in-game diary although never mentioned in the rules. It deepened the roleplaying experience quite significantly and now I have something to remember and/or share. 884