The Dungeons and Dragons YouTuber XP To Level 3 created a Skyrim TTRPG that tried to be as faithful to the video game as possible. That meant creating a rather cobbled-together system that was not exactly easy to play or to run, as the video shows.
XP To Level 3… actually let’s switch to real names. Jacob sprung the session on his friends in a video called “I made a game. My friends have no idea it’s Skyrim”. Of course, since everyone and their dog has played Skyrim about five times by now, the party realizes what’s going on in moments, as soon as the adventure opens on a wagon, and a voice says: “Hey you, you’re finally awake”.
Jacob’s stated goal was to create a tabletop RPG that was “as close and accurate to Skyrim as possible”. He used minis from Modiphius’ skirmish wargame Elder Scrolls: Call to Arms to make it more immersive, and rather than just porting the world of Skyrim to D&D 5e, invented his own system that played just like the Bethesda title.
That means no ability scores. Your stats are Magicka, Health, and Stamina. And everyone has an absolute boatload of skills. As the DM explains, one of the challenges in creating a facsimile of Skyrim in a TTRPG is how character progression works. In the game you get XP in your skills for performing pretty much any task, from attacking to sneaking around. There’s even XP in light and heavy armor that goes up each time you take a hit.
So, no matter how tricky it is to track, that’s how it works in the homemade Skyrim RPG too – we only get a glimpse of it – but it looks like Jacob put together a system with a bunch of different XP values all assigned to different actions.
As for how to run things like the action economy, it appears he took inspiration from Bethesda’s older games, using an action point system.
The Youtuber’s dedication goes beyond just recreating rules, though. He also memorized voice lines and NPCs, and set things up so the party faced the same combat encounters you would have in the game. He quickly realizes that Skyrim has a lot of combat, and in a TTRPG, “It takes forever.”
The only big difference is that it’s now a five-player game, but only one of them can be the Dovahkiin Dragonborn, and it’s a secret.
The video above is worth checking out. It’s particularly hilarious how his party, who don’t exactly seem like the sort not to try and derail a campaign, are suddenly determined to keep on the straight and narrow, basically playing through the opening act of Skyrim as though they were in a railroaded video game instead of enjoying the freedom of an RPG.
I’m not sure it made for a great game, but it did produce some great entertainment. The only thing I felt was missing was a lot of questionable Nord accents.
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