Honor + Intrigue vs Pendragon

Compare Honor + Intrigue and Pendragon side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.

	Honor + Intrigue	Pendragon
Genre	Historical	Fantasy, Historical
Play Style	Career-Based, Cinematic, Social Combat, Social Intrigue, Heroic, Fast-Paced, Martial Arts, Ship-Based, Pirates, Theater of the Mind	Character-Driven, Domain Management, Lore-Heavy, Deadly, Simulation, Crunchy, Social Intrigue
Core Mechanic	Roll 2d6 + Quality (Might, Daring, Savvy, or Flair) + Career rank vs. 9 to succeed. In combat, Combat Abilities (Brawl, Melee, Ranged, Defense) replace Careers. Bonus Dice roll 3d6 and keep the best two; Penalty Dice keep the worst two. Fortune Points let heroes escape death, add bonus dice, invoke dramatic license, or press the Advantage in duels. Advantage tracks momentum in melee: characters start at 3 and lose Advantage when hit, becoming Defeated at 0. Nine Dueling Styles (Spanish, Italian, French, and more) each grant unique maneuvers and a Final Secret at mastery. Social Combat uses the same framework, targeting Composure instead of Lifeblood.	Roll d20 against the relevant skill or attribute: a result equal to or under its value succeeds, a roll exactly equal to the value is a critical success, and a natural 20 is a fumble. Opposed actions have both sides roll under their value, with the higher success winning and a beaten-but-successful roll scoring a partial success. Personality traits and passions use the same numeric scale and are rolled the same way when a knight's character is put to the test.
Dice	2d6	d20
Complexity	Medium	High
Accessibility	Medium	Medium
Runnability	Very High	High
License	Proprietary	Proprietary
Cost	$$	$$
Publisher	Basic Action Games	Arthaus
Year	2012	2005
Best For	Groups who want cinematic swashbuckling in the style of The Three Musketeers and Captain Blood: dashing swordplay, court intrigue, and sea battles with a fast, career-based system.	Long-running Arthurian campaigns where a knight's aging, death, and dynastic succession are part of the genre, and where playing out a character's traits, loyalties, and passions matters as much as winning fights.
Highlights	Nine Dueling Styles with distinct maneuvers and masterable Final Secrets provide deep fencing differentiation. Social Combat and Repartee use the same mechanical framework as physical combat, targeting Composure. Over 30 period-specific Careers from Musketeer to Temptress replace skill lists. Includes ship-to-ship combat, battlefield rules, and a 17th-century gazetteer covering Europe, the Americas, and beyond.	Thirteen opposed pairs of personality traits and a set of named passions are rated numerically and rolled like skills, and a passion roll can leave a knight inspired to heroics, disheartened, or maddened beyond the player's control: the heightened behavior that drives Arthurian drama. Every chivalric act (combat, generosity, romance, piety, holding a title) feeds a single lifelong Glory total that sets social rank and rewards embodying knightly ideals over simply winning fights. A yearly Winter Phase resolves aging, estate income, and family events between sessions and passes the line to an heir on death, so a campaign can span generations from Uther's court to the fall of the Round Table.
Considerations	No free quickstart or SRD available. Advantage tracking adds a subsystem on top of basic BoL resolution. The gazetteer and setting material assume 17th-century Europe as the default, limiting out-of-the-box use for other periods.	Core rules restrict player characters to knights, with no mechanics for playing magicians, priests, or commoners, which narrows the cast to the warrior aristocracy. The Winter Phase's multi-step annual procedure adds meaningful between-session bookkeeping to every campaign year. High-damage attacks such as a couched lance or great sword can end a fight in a single exchange, making disadvantaged or improvised fights disproportionately dangerous.