The strongest indicators for Basic DSA being a rip off from Basic D&D is that it had the same conflation of class and race, was using d20 as the main mechanics roll for attacks and checks, and had the same split into a basic game and expanded game. It also used the levels and experience points.
The basic box came with an introduction booklet with a choose your own adventure style scenario in an old sea dog's house in a port town, similar to the Basic D&D red box approach, a rules booklet, and a games master booklet with a first adventure that played in the basement beneath the aforementioned house.
Several rules deviated from D&D, and were more similar to the basic role playing system from Chaosium, expressed on a d20 base. These changes may have served to avoid litigation or aimed to improve the system.
Character Creation
You could play an adventurer, fighter, magician, dwarf or elf. Notably absent are clerics, who were introduced with a pantheon of gods in the expanded game. The adventurer was not a thief, he had no special skills at all and was strictly worse than the fighter. I think the purpose was that it needs less explanation about abilities to get started -- the character you play in the self-play intro is an adventurer. The elf, like in Basic D&D was a mixture of magician and fighter. The dwarf was essentially a fighter. Like in D&D, magicians could only use simple weapons like quarterstaff or dagger, and no armor, while fighters could use all weapons and armor.
Basic DSA had only 5 attributes Mut (courage), Stärke (strength), Geschicklichkeit (dexterity), Intelligenz (intelligence), and Charisma (charisma). It dropped constitution and wisdom and added courage instead. Courage was a kind of will-power, and determined your initiative -- the more courage, the earlier you went. All attributes gave meaty boni for high value and penalties for low values. If I recall right, each point above 12 would give you a +1 bonus, each point below 8 a -1 malus. Strength gave bonuses to melee attacks, Dexterity to ranged attacks.
When you gained levels, you got to increase one of your ability scores by one point, and you got to increase your hit points or astral points (see below), and your attack or parry (more on that later too). This was a simple and elegant way to increase the power of the characters. Mages would focus on their astral points, instead of their hit points.
One key difference were hit points, which were called life points: you started out with 20 for a magician to 35 for a dwarf. A sword dealt d6+4 damage, so you were a lot more robust than a first edition D&D character. These high, fixed hit points were unique to DSA.
Instead of separate saving throws, you made checks against your attributes, like you do in D&D 5e.
Each character had an attack (to hit) and parry value, starting with 10 and 8.
Magic
The magic system was very different: it was a point based system, were you spent astral points to power your spells. A mage started out with 30 astral points. You could cast any spell as often as you liked (as you can now in 5e with memorized spells) and had points left. Some spells scaled in effect depending on how many points you put into them. There were no spells to learn - as a magician you knew them all, Elves knew a subset.
Originally only few spells were available. These were takes on light, charm person, mage armor, knock, arcane lock, hold person, polymorph, detect thoughts, cure wounds, invisibility, single target fear and a single target damage spell that directly converted invested astral points into damage. Notably absent are battlefield control or area damage spells like fireball. You also had to recite a silly name and rhyme from memory to cast the spell successfully. I retrospect I am a bit baffled about arcane lock and the absence of detect magic on this super short list.
Core Mechanic
To hit an opponent, or to succeed in an ability check, you had to roll d20 under or equal to your value - either your attack value, or your ability score. Modifiers would add to your roll (to make the test harder), or subtract from it (to make it easier). A hard dexterity check could say "dexterity check +4". To roll a saving throw, you likewise would make the appropriate ability check, dexterity to evade a trap or dodge a spell, courage to resist a fear effect, etc.
There were no skills in the basic game. For skill checks, you figured what ability was appropriate, like intelligence for all the knowledge skills, dexterity or strength for athletics related things, and rolled an ability check. We tended to overload courage for things that you would use constitution for in D&D, as it had relatively little other benefits.
The advantage to this mechanic is that it is super quick, there are no calculations unless there are modifiers: you just compare your roll to your value and are done. The disadvantage is that the method is capped at 20. The system also had critical hits (natural 1) that on attacks always hit and ignored armor, and critical failure (natural 20) that always failed.
This mechanic is essentially the core mechanic of Chaosium's basic role playing system using d20, so there is no need to multiply the ability scores by five. However, the lack of skills in the basic rules is a large difference. The advanced rules then introduced skills, but attack and parry still remained special skills not integrated into the overall framework.
Combat
The system only used two kinds of die, d20 and d6. All weapons caused d6 damage plus or minus a modifier (and some double handed weapons caused multiple d6).
Armor did not make you harder to hit, it subtracted from weapon damage. Full plate would subtract 6 points. A small shield would subtract an extra point. Heavy armor would lower your dexterity and make you easier to hit. We felt this was superior to AC systems, as it gave another dimension to play and felt more realistic. Subtracting small numbers was easy enough. Absent critical hits a heavily armored fighter could be essentially invulnerable to a weak opponent like a goblin with a short sword, just like a character with a very high AC can be in D&D 5e.
One peculiarity was the parry. If an opponent hit you, and you had not yet parried, you could roll to see if you successfully parried. You did not need to roll over the attack value, just under your parry value. If you parried, the attack was deflected. This was a bad mechanic. At higher levels it lead to long back an forth slogging where nothing happened as attacks were parried all the time. Better would have been if there would not have been a parry at all, or if the rule at least would have been you need to contest the attack.
Monsters
Compared to D&D, there were crazy few monsters in the basic rules: kobold, goblin, orc, ogre, troll and at the high end, Tatzelwurm, a kind of drake. That's it. The troll was like a huge Norse warrior with a battleaxe and human level intelligence who liked candy, no warts or regeneration. The kobold was very interesting, a magical, evil gnome, who had crappy combat values but could create illusions and turn invisible, instead of just a weaker goblin. One of them who could teleport featured in the introductory adventure alongside orcs and bandits. This was a useful precedent, as it showed you could modify the monsters to make them different or more interesting.
What I do not understand in retrospect is why they used serveral similar humanoid monsters when they only gave six to begin with. The goblin was essentially a slightly weaker version of the orc. Ogre and troll were similar big brutes. Why not provide variety with skeletons, wolves or harpies?
The monsters did not get a full attribute template, they had just 7 values: courage, hit points, armor, attack value, parry value, damage per attack, and experience points. (Implicit in the damage was number of attacks, as the drake for example had several attacks that did different damage).
Adventures introduced a few more monsters, like the krakonier (similar to a bullywug), the maru (a croc man with a huge maw, similar to lizard men), the demon (looked like a nazgûl in black robes, and was not really to defeat in combat), the giant amoeba (a mix of gelatineous cube and ochre jelly), skeletons, zombies and wolves.
The game and atmosphere overall was more like medieval Europe, not the garishly colored fantasy of D&D with its bizarre monsters, and worked well with human opponents, and he occasional ogre or orc.
Expanded Game
The expanded game introduced a skill system and more character classes, in particular a rogue who was good in skills, priests, who used karma points instead of astral points, along with new spells and a pantheon of gods, modeled loosely after the Greek pantheon. It added additional features to the magician, who now could enchant his staff.
It also added more weapons equipment, and monsters, among them a variety of dragons, from the cave dragon (a tough drake without flight), to the tree dragon (a smaller, flying dragon), to great wyrms with thee heads, flight and firebreathing.
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