I know a lot of people use GURPS Dungeon Fantasy as the basis for a larger, broader fantasy game. Or use pieces of Dungeon Fantasy supplements to fill out such games - providing monsters, specific rules on travel and camping and dungeoneering, and so on.
Yet DF is written on the basic assumption that you're playing a hack-and-slash game with a minimized outside world and a focus on killing and looting.
Using Dungeon Fantasy as the basis for larger fantasy games with more details outside the dungeon and a generic Town is totally fine with me. It just flat-out works once you put on all of the extras you want. It's a great basis for a larger game.
But GURPS Dungeon Fantasy supplements work for the more simple game, too - monsters, loot, dungeons, and ready-to-play templates centered on dealing with those issues.
In order to work for both, I think it needs to stay simple at its core. It needs to stay hack-and-slash.
It's easier to add on to a simple and functioning base than to have a larger functioning base and pare it down to the simple.
It's quite easy to run "DF as written" or "DF, plus all this extra stuff to make it a larger game." It's a lot harder to say, "Expanded DF with the following bits cut out because we're not going there." It's less fun, too, as a GM, to sit around subtracting than it is adding to a versatile and effective base.
In other words, if you write GURPS Dungeon Fantasy as "GURPS Basis for A Highly Developed Fantasy World That Happens to Have Some Dungeons" then it's not really going to be a good basic tool for Dungeon Fantasy. You'd have to take that bigger, more expansive DF and carve it back down to DF Lite in order to play, basically, Diablo meets Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.
That's generally why I support a very focused, very simple, quite non-serious, very town-and-dungeon, beer-and-pretzels, hack-and-slash basis for GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. GURPS comes with all of the tools to make it a world-and-politics, exploration-and-combat, social interactions-and-story, serious game. It's stripping it down to just the essentials for the lighter core that DF is all about.
Short version? It's easy to expand a hack-and-slash DF with the other GURPS books. Cutting down an expanded DF into hack-and-slash would be harder. I'm happy that the DF line sticks with the approach that is useful to the most people. Hack-and-slash DF does that.
Yes, this. A thousand times this. I love deep, nuanced fantasy, but you don't get there with Dungeon Fantasy. All gameplay in DF, all of it, centers on killing monsters and taking their stuff. As it should! If you wanted to run Game of Thrones, you'd need 100% different templates, 100% different rules. Characters like a Master of Whispers is just useless in a dungeon fight, and every last character in DF is only good in Game of Thrones when we finally get around to fighting.
ReplyDeleteThey superficially resemble each other, but that doesn't mean they're remotely the same. DF has more in common with Doom than it has with Game of Thrones.
"...every last character in DF is only good in Game of Thrones when we finally get around to fighting."
DeleteI disagree with this. Scholars would work fine in GoT for all things. Except maybe the fighting. Thieves would also work 'okay' in GoT.
Thanks Daniel.
DeleteAnd, oh, I don't know. They aren't that dissimilar, DOOM and GoT. I gave up on the GoT books when I realized I couldn't even keep track of the characters anymore, and that I just assumed they'd die horribly eventually so why keep track? That's DOOM, except that at least in DOOM there is one person you have to root for. :)
I think that you are right that GURPS DF should focus on hack and slash but I personally would like some books that deal with how to make a society for DF PCs to interact in. I don't feel it is as easy as you say to add things to templates and boom your PC is ready to adventure in town.
ReplyDeleteGURPS Fantasy, GURPS Low Tech, GURPS Social Engineering have your back :)
DeleteThe problem is you probably don't need/want *all* of Fantasy or Low Tech or the like. i.e., taking DF and putting in the extras you want quickly returns you to the 'drowning in extras' problem that the GURPS genre lines exist to alleviate in the first place.
DeleteI agree that keeping the series focused is good, but it'd also be good to see a... Common Trope Solutions book. (Possibly a series of Pyramid articles, as evileeyore suggests?)
And I'd so buy GURPS Basis For a Highly Developed Fantasy World That Happens to Have Some Dungeons. :D
The point is, it's easier to add on the extra you want than it is to strip back down to the simpler basis. Hack-and-slash DF can be raided for parts or built up to a larger, deeper game given a myriad of tools already available. Stripping it down to hack-and-slash is harder because you have to know where to draw the line and adjust the game rules around it (see: Wealth, social skills as outlined in DF2, DF17 Guilds, Town Traits, the way non-functional traits like Unaging are handled, etc.)
DeleteIt's not trivial to bolt stuff on, although it would be trivial to just generate entirely new from-scratch broad characters with a given point base and just deploy the rules from DF2 and DF16, the monsters from DFM1-3, etc. alongside Low-Tech and/or Fantasy to play it out.
Given that some of the monsters in DF come from my game, which was that kind of game, I know this is true. I've done that before, just without as much pre-published material to draw on.
Shouldn't be that hard to come up with 25-50 point lenses for adding back in some "townie" skills.
DeleteI'm with DF focusing on D&Desque type games. GURPS Fantasy is there for those who want something different, plus things like Low Tech, Historical Folks, and myriad other supplements.
ReplyDeleteI'll admit your talk of DF makes me want to reconnect with my old GURPShammer player...maybe I should get around to clearing out some of the stuff in my GM binder and get them hosted up on my blog.
I'd read those posts.
DeleteCheers! I'll get to it before long - it'll be a hodgepodge of "notes to self", setting design brick-a-brack, and the session info (which I intentionally kept to one printed page max).
DeleteI agree that DF is best for "Orc and Pie"... btu I'd love to see a supplement or even long Pyramid focusing on "breaking DF out of the dungeon", so to speak.
ReplyDeleteWhere did "orc and pie" come from anyway. I never heard that until I heard people complaining about the label a few years back when I started my blog. Before, I'd never come across it. It sounds pejorative in intent, but I don't get the meaning.
DeleteAn article like that would be good, sure. It's exactly what I mean about how it's easy to add to, harder to subtract from.
Back in ye olde 3e/3.5e D&D days Monte Cook came up with the Only Dungeon You Ever Need called "Orc and Pie". It featured an Orc in an undescribed 10'x10' room guarding a Pie. The goal: Get the Pie anyway you can. There was nothing else.
DeleteIt gained 'meme' status on the message board ENWorld and other related boards.
Amongst some (me included), "Orc and Pie" tends to be derogatory slang for "bad" Old School Dungeon gaming*.
In this case having run DF 'not as it was intended', I find it can work pretty well... you just have to use an Old School mindset (making things like Rep and Status become 'off-the-books' flavor adds by the GM for example).
* Bad = Any game where the /only goal/ is killing things and taking their stuff. I tend to not enjoy those games... though I've enjoyed reading about yours.
GURPS Fantasy's a good place to start that, as would be "Wilderness Adventures" - a DF supplement.
DeleteThat makes sense. It seems like a mockery of the worst possibilities of old D&D games. Much like how story telling games are reduced to "who has more angst" and saying "I run a story-based game" is ready as "I run a linear railroad with the NPCs more important than the PCs."
DeleteI'm glad, in any case, that you enjoy reading about my games. They're all about killing things to take those thing's stuff. It's entertaining in person; it's very gratifying that it's entertaining to read as well.
I agree, and would note that the things that support DF styles can also be useful for more "depth" styles. For instance, the first book in the DF line that I've bought is Wilderness Adventures, because many of the guidelines expand on the Basic rules regarding the wilderness in useful ways.
ReplyDeleteYa, in all honesty I'm not sure why that one ended up as a pure DF item. I see how it would apply, but there's one specifically about underground adventuring that both isn't part of DF, and is even closer related to DF than woodland stuff.
DeleteThat's because DF16 is still wedded to the underlying assumptions of the skills, spells, and situations of hack-and-slash DF. Underground Adventures is not. They could have been developed more broadly (DF16) or more narrowly (UA), but it just so happens they aren't.
Delete"...the first book in the DF line that I've bought is Wilderness Adventures..."
ReplyDeleteI've said it before and I'll say it again, Wilderness Adventures is what brought me to read the rest of the DF line and to decide to run a DF game (with some extras to 'break it out of the Dungeon").
DF16: Wilderness Adventures also added quite a bit of interaction with the physical world that was lacking in GURPS. You could roll your own rules to handle it (and I did, as surely did others without posting the results), but things like rules for weather is something that one would think would be in a game that has the word "generic" in its title. D&D 3.5e, from which I steal often (as do others owing to its liberal licensing having it posted online), has plenty of rules dealing with the outdoor environment and doesn't pretend to be generic at all. As After the End 2 showed, those rules can be quite handy in other genres too.
DeleteThe DF game I run is based on a modded Fantasy game I ran years before 4e. Town is a place where action happens, although most of the killing goes on underground. I also run it as pbp, which makes extended combat more tedious, so the exploration/ interaction part features larger. Ymmv.
ReplyDeleteI think that goes to show what I mean - you can use DF to play a broader, lower-combat game. It works as an excellent base for that. It's just that it also works well as a more combat-heavy simple game.
DeleteYeah, DF is a worked example of how to customise GURPS for a specific genre. Some of the content is useful elsewhere, certainly. But if it gets too broad, it loses its utility as a worked example.
ReplyDeleteThis is why, when I write reviews of DF books, I say how useful they'll be in my non-DF games - as opposed to what I'd like to add to them to make them generic GURPS supplements.
That's a good point. And a specific, fairly narrow, worked example is probably more immediately useful than a more general, broader, worked example. The D&D that I started with could have been more broad, but narrow as it was, we knew just what to do - roll up guys, go into dungeons, try to level up, repeat repeatedly.
DeleteI do also like to point out the broader utility of a narrow tool, and I agree that's a good thing if it's there. But as long as it works in its narrow case, it's good enough.
About the problem I have is that Dungeon Fantasy is centered around 250 point character. I think the 125 or 150 point level needs to be just as important. I realize that heirlings partially addresses the issue. And I under that Sean Punch felt you could only properly emulate dungeon crawling at the 250 point level. I disagree with his reasons.
ReplyDeletePlaying a 125 point character in a 125 point game DF game... I agree with Sean Punch if you amend that statement to "DF can't emulate heroic dungeon crawling for less than 250 points".
Delete125 certainly emulates old school 1st level dungeon crawling, where goblins are a hazard for the party.
Kromm said he had the idea of Diablo II, among other things, in mind for DF. Diablo is a 250-point game, minimum. However, the other sources I recall, like NetHack, Tunnels & Trolls, and of course old-school D&D, start out at a much lower power level.
DeleteDF does work at a lower point total, at least in play, though you have to tread carefully around the monsters and have some rules handy for when players want to flee (Action 2 has them). There hasn't been much in the way of giving foes a baseline expectation of deadliness, which leaves the point total more up in the air, though it's easier to scale up weak foes than to scale down strong foes.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that I'm on record in multiple places saying that it needs more support for the 100-150 point level. There was a time when even action movies were more human-scaled, and (almost) no one would say that The Magnificent Seven* or Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels is boring.
Delete*Arguably, a couple of the characters might be above 150 points, but I would argue for a lower, though still in the 100-150 range, value.
I think a bonus of aiming the game at 250 points initially is that you know it can handle higher-powered play. Dialed back to 125, sure, it's rough - what used to be a boss is now fatal, worthies are bosses, and fodder are worthy, to use the scale of foes in DF2. But it works well at higher powered play - even the 400+ point guys in my game are under a real threat and feel like they have room to grow and challenges to face. So I'm very much okay with that decision.
DeletePlus, having played so often where Skill-20 to 24 was the top 1% of the world and difficult to attain for PCs, it's been fun having guys start with skill 20+. So I'm doubly glad of the decision to start PCs at a high power level. I know it works, and it has been very enjoyable to be challenged at a high level of power.
There's a downside to a high point level: it's harder for GURPS newbies to get a handle on their character's powers and skills because there's so many. Having a lower point total would make GURPS more newbie-friendly, even with templates.
DeleteThat is true, but it's a choice of downsides. Plus, there is support for lower point PCs if you generally have new players and want to give them less power and options. It's DF15.
DeleteAnother issue is the same one you bring up with regard to DF's focus on kill-and-take-stuff: it's easier to boost characters up to 250 points than it is to drop them back to 100. I mean that both in terms of the templates and in terms of player expectations. Yeah, as you say, DF15 gives some support (and so do some of the templates in Fantasy), but considering that the genre began in "zero to hero", that seems rather light support to me.
DeleteI put up a post asking more specifically what kind of support:
DeleteBut even so, I can't really imagine why the genre starting at zero-to-hero and a book that gives you those zeroes is "light support." It's based on a higher power level, sure, but lower power levels are given explicit support both as sidekicks and as main PCs. So there shouldn't be any drop back necessary, IMO.
Forgot the link:
DeleteWhat kind of low-point DF support?
I am running one game with 125pt characters, and have been working on how to run at 75 points as being equivalent to level 1 characters over on my blog. I feel that the 250 point baseline is roughly equivalent to levels 6 to 8.
ReplyDeleteAs someone in that 125 point game... I have to say my character feels like a 1st D&D character.
Delete75 points? We'd be commoners versus housecats! ;)
Considering the opposition I have planned (50 point goblins, vermin and a few 125pt bosses, it can work. If you have 14 skill and the highest dodge your 12 skill opponent can muster is a 9, you can get things done.
DeleteThe 62-point hirelings in my games are basically fodder level. You can start there, but in my game so do the orcs, hobgoblins, etc. So you need numbers, tactics, and luck to win against them.
DeleteI don't think in DnD levels anymore, so I cannot help with equivalencies.
Part of the problem with figuring level equivalents for point values is that it largely depends on the D&D DM and her philosophy. Some DMs give the PCs with classes and levels the benefit of the doubt and allow them a broad competency, while others figure that first levels are the same as an average human and so tend to be more strict in what they are allowed to accomplish. My feeling on the matter is that leveled characters should be given the benefit of the doubt and so a first level character should be roughly a hundred-point GURPS character, but arguments could be made for anything down to 50 points, I think. Certainly, a first level fighter is a "Veteran", which could be seen as a 75 point character according to some versions of relative point levels, and I think that it certainly argues that a GURPS character should therefore be higher than 50 points at least.
DeleteAnyway, my current thinking is that a character with a class, as it were, should start at 75 points plus 25 points for each level - thus a first level character would be 100 points, second level has 125 points, and so on, but that is based on my intuition of how effective a D&D character should be compared with my intuition of how effective a GURPS character would be.
As for monsters, an orc in D&D has one hit die. That is slightly less effective than a first level fighter, and they focus on fighting skill (as opposed to magic, miracles, or non-combat skills). Therefore, they should have somewhere south of 100 points, and the 60-75 point region seems about right (because the orc template in Fantasy is negative points, I'd probably tend toward the low end or even down to 50 points, since most of the disadvantages are not combat-related; in fact, I think that's probably just about ideal, since 50 points is more or less your average, reasonably competent person, and orcs, as one hit die monsters, should probably fit into the same range).
I'm now second-guessing myself on orcs, so don't take that last paragraph too seriously.
DeleteHeh. I won't. Besides, the orc template in Fantasy is the wrong one to look at for DF - there is an orc template in DF3. That's the appropriate one for DF, IMO, because it's built to the expectations of DF. Once you start mixing all of the book's various choices together, you get further and further away from a consistent base. And I know from experience you can use that one with DF15 to make fodder, because that's what I do.
DeleteIf you want worked-out orcs, too, there is DFA1.
I admit, if we are wishing for stuff, I'd like to see it redone with Low-Tech as the core gear book
ReplyDelete