For the King is a very middle-of-the-road take on Dungeons & Dragons gameplay, because it is designed for small-scale campaigns and iterative replayability. Unfortunately, what these bite-sized game sessions offer is lackluster; and for less experienced players, likely frustration.

It doesn't do or say anything unique, with a completely threadbare narrative. Instead it hinges its focus on co-operative multiplayer, aiming to recreate the highly social atmosphere of traditional tabletop gaming. Yet, with offerings like Divinity Original Sin II that offer such an experience without compromising on other gameplay elements, For the King can't help but draw unflattering comparisons.

Through its dice-roll combat system, For the King evokes the spirit of Gary Gygax more as a mathematician than a storyteller. In Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Dungeon Masters Guide, Gygax extolled the die's potential for gameplay variance. In For the King, probability management is the epic tale you're telling. The combat boils down to a struggle against random number generation, due to the roguelike permadeath system and high costs of unit death.

Despite a large selection of gear and various combat mechanics, the depth is but an illusion when you realize the best way to overcome the difficulty curve is to simply remove the odds altogether. Once the player is aware the brunt of the game's difficulty comes from crippling status effects, curses and debuffs; it just becomes a matter of searching through the map for gear that nullifies as many of these things as possible. The end result is a very shallow combat system with very little depth outside of building certain stats to ensure good dice rolls.

This criticism on its own is not going to make or break a game for me, but For the King is roughly 80 percent combat for the runtime of its campaigns. The map events are simple stat checks that might grant an item or some gold. Towns just serve to heal you or sell you gear. Side quests are just more combat. DOS2, combat system notwithstanding, had plenty of other things to do within its world. For the King just treats exploration as a means to fight more enemies and roll more dice.

While For the King does not fail as a tabletop RPG, but it misses the mark of what makes a lot of them so entertaining to people. The assumption seems to be that all it takes to enthrall the player is to subject them to the odds of the dice rolls- reinforcing its "difficulty" in the roguelike sense (ignoring that the optimal way to play this game is just stacking as many nulls as possible, thereby trivializing most fights).

Yet, this strict adherence to the punishing law of probability isn't some ironclad law of Dungeons & Dragons, bringing me back once again to Gygax; and an oft-repeated (yet unsourced) quote of his, where he implies that a DM is never bound by such results:

"A DM only rolls the dice because of the noise they make." - Gary Gygax, unknown

This Giants in the Playground forum post from 2007 discusses the quote in detail; in which various people chime in on their stance of "fudging" rolls as a Dungeon Master. There are points for and against fudging, with solid points made by both parties. Two quotes stood out to me:

"What I think he means here is that while the dice may fall on a given number, they have no authority over the Story."

"I'm all about fudging. I've run entire adventures on nothing more than the clackety-clack of random dice and my sense of dramatic timing. Part of this comes from the fact that when I started DM'ing, I had no idea what the rules were. So I made it all up as I went along. No one noticed."

What For the King is missing is the opportunity to create experiences outside of random number generation- be it organic combat difficulty or player immersion. My hope is that the sequel addresses these flaws, allowing the basis for the game to develop into a more satisfying overall experience.