The Future of the DFRPG

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Yes, I know it's a little premature, seeing as the DFRPG won't even come out for a few more months, but something mentioned in another thread got me thinking. Let's say that the box set hits the streets and sells well. Not Munchkin levels of selling well, but at or pleasantly above expectations. SJ Games isn't just going to leave it there. So what's next?

I'm seeing a few directions things can go:

• Customers are pointed in the direction of existing GURPS DF products. It's low cost to the publisher and minimizes system confusion, but it requires significant new investment by the customer in the Basic Set and learning a very slightly different system. Treating a successful DFRPG purely as a gateway product seems unlikely.
• Crunch-heavy. New "character class" templates, new spells, new monsters, new items, etc. GURPS has always been very good at crunch, so this seems a likely direction, but this would also seem to be moving towards what people complain about when they complain about GURPS (too many rules!), and I'm not sure "having good rules for X" is the road to new success. GURPS has had brilliant rules for X since forever, so perhaps we've already seen the limits of that strategy.
• Fluff-heavy. Adventures and, dare I say, a setting or settings. With a lot of the mechanical details locked down, this makes much more sense for the DFRPG than for GURPS in general, and in these days of building brands, this would seem to be an attractive way to go. You don't get t-shirts and figurines of "3d6, roll low" the way you do with "the land of X" and "I belong to the Y faction." However, SJ Games has not, alas, proved nearly as good at creating compelling settings as they have at creating good rules, and I can see some tensions--albeit not insurmountable ones--between DF's minimalist vision and the existence of concrete settings beyond the dungeon.
• All of the above. Most likely, but given the likelihood of a narrow pipeline, may, in the process of trying to be all things to all people (or, at least, many things to many people), end up not being quite enough for anyone.

I'll further propose that licensed products are a complete non-starter as the way forward. They might work as part of a wider product line, but they can't build the success of the DFRPG on somebody else's IP. Far too risky.

So what would people want to see down the line for the DFRPG? Let the irresponsible speculation and unreasonable demands begin!

[Bruno]

Regarding crunch books - historically, D&D splatbooks filled with crunchy stuff sell quite well. In addition DFRPG splatbooks aren't going to suffer from a drifting power curve, because they're anchored to the GURPS foundations under the hood which means good consistent rules for making up new crunchy stuff. That means quality can remain stable, unlike some periods of D&D and other RPGs where the temptation to make the new book full of more powerful things made players (and GMs) suspicious.

I'm seeing the Denizens line being done for the DFRPG, possibly with a little appendix for the full GURPS rules. This would require a revision of the Denizens: Barbarians book (And Ninjas, which is basically a Denizens book), but that's safer than leaving it out, IMO.

The Denizens line in particular seems like an attractive target as it's "More stuff about my character", which means it will sell well to players as much as the GMs. These lines are crunchy, for certain - the Barbarians book is very crunchy - but there's room for less crunchy content in these books as well. It's also a largely unexplored product line, which means it's easier to sell to existing GURPS DF players in parallel with your DFRPG players.

Products that can be sold to players have a four to six times larger market than products that can only be sold to GMs, so you can afford somewhat more specialized items.

A related line would be "racial" Denizens lines, which would be good places to introduce racial character templates, like the dwarf from Pyramid. This would probably be more effective if done with batches of races per book - unless the idea is small 16-24 page PDFs each. The Big Book Of Elves, with a whole bunch of variant elf lenses, seems like a particularly attractive target.

On the GM side of things: monsters, treasure, more monsters, more treasure - while GMs are a fraction of the market, you'll probably get good saturation of your GM population with these standby products that have a lot of repeat utility.


EDIT: I want to point out that "crunch" does not need to mean "New rules for X". Big lists of monsters with information about their battle tactics and preferred environment/treasure aren't, IMO, "new rules", even if they tend to a high crunch content (you can squeeze fluff into the descriptions though!). DFM 2: Icky Goo is a bit of an outlier in that it's a serious build-your-own-monster kit, but it's also damned funny.
I'm not sure monster statblocks or treasure count as "rules" at all - they're data that are fed into the rules to produce a result (game sessions). I'm a programmer though, so I'm pretty picky about separating the two concepts.

[Nymdok]

Well.....

I'd love to see folks led back to GURPS most of all, but lets not discount the potential value to leading those folks FROM DFRPG to mabe....Action!RPG:PBG or SpaceRPG:PBG, or the chum in the water that boxed sets like that might provide.

As to whether or not DFRPG needs more 'crunch' Its very difficult to say with out actually seeing the finished product, Im going to guess that its probably a reliably stand alone product and may be fairly well fleshed out.

I've been thinking about what you describe as 'FLuff' and I too have been wondering about an Established setting and perhaps even a long adventure arc (in the spirit of Operation Endgame).

One of the problems that we seen experience some success, but maybe not HUGE success, is in balancing individual adventures for specific parties which would of course lower the bar for entry. Even using N notation, CER ratings etc, its still challenging to write adventures because you dont know whos at the table and which way their Characters 'grew' between sessions.

Now, perhaps, a long adventure chain that included some guidlines for the GM as to how many points should be issued at the end of an adventure might Narrow that envelope a bit, making the envelope of posibilities for growth a more manageable sub-space.

A different but potential idea, something Zombies Day One - ish that will provide basic frameworks for 'shake and bake' type adventuers taht are complete enough to be done quickly but not so complete that GM's cant tweak them a bit. DFRPG : Kicking in Doors or somthing liek that? This would help GMs who have built a world, but are looking for neat things to do in it.

As to settings, Im certainly wiling to hear arguments, but that is going to be a massive creative endeavour and if I could offer one bit of advice it would be to do it from 'high level' or Top Down view.

Im willing to guess that most GMs can cobble together a Town, or a dungeon for quick play, and those that cant can buy an adventure, but the challenge of buildign a planet can be daunting for some. A setting book that has a map and says 'This is the Colepteran Homeland' and this is the where the Barbarians roam the tundra etc might be useful. A book like this could help GMs who KNOW how to build an an adventure to have a frame work for where to put what.

Nymdok

[mehrkat]

I know it wouldn't be zero effort but I wonder what would be involved in translation guides for existing DF products or new versions of existing DF products to new DF.

[philreed]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

So what would people want to see down the line for the DFRPG?

A thread like this somewhere else on the internet where gamers chat. This is _exactly_ the kind of discussion that should be happening on various forums and groups to get a wide number of responses _and_ get in front of people who don't play GURPS.

[Kalzazz]

GURPS setting books trend either to 'things I'm not interested in' like Banestorm to 'things that are really cool, but so thinly described I do better rolling my own' like Roma Arcana

I'd like to see Roma Arcana get expanded to a 'stops bullets' type setting like Ptolus

Pretty shiny books of character options, races, lenses, items and monsters all seem things to try to convince game stores to carry

'How to be a DF GM' would be helpful to, I'd pay good money for that

[Ulairi]

I like the idea of the Powered by GURPS being separate lines that make it easier for folks to jump in, learn the system, and then move from a product to a product pretty easily. As in I play DF and jump to Scifi RPG or Supers RPG. Because GURPS is a toolkit that makes it easier for the mass market to get in and play and as they play a couple maybe they'd jump into the core system at some point.

I wouldn't mind an "intro" box for just GURPS at some point that could be the next stepping stone for the Powered By players.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

[*]Adventures

This.

Paizo stays in business because of selling adventures, More of their revenue might come from other books but people play Pathfinder because of the adventures and particularly the long adventure paths. If I had something even sort of similar I could get my group that's mostly Pathfinder to play it.

No adventures equals no game.

[dbm]

I'll see your adventure and raise you 'campaign in a box'! I would very happily pay £100+ for something that offers 15-20 sessions of engaging play in a mini sandbox format.

Example NPCs, new monsters, new magic items would all be re-usable, too.

Dungeon Fantasy offers the possibility of building a customer base playing a similar enough game that would hopefully make this possible for the first time with GURPS.

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

So what would people want to see down the line for the DFRPG? Let the irresponsible speculation and unreasonable demands begin!

The best goal for this and similar lines is to borrow from the idea of Rapid Application Development in the computer world. Rapid Adventure Development. The idea is that we should be able to grab the DFRPG and a supplement or three and quickly make an adventure that's interesting.

Obviously, you need crunchy bits for this. The holy trinity of crunchy bits: monsters, treasure, traps. NPC archetypes (say, a generic Evil Overlord or Fell Necromancer, as well as mooks). Maps; many of us are not artistically inclined. Adventuring environs in general, like dungeons, wilderness, town, air, or hell. Wizards of the Coast has an excellent article on downtime this week, which is another area for crunch.

But as well as all this, new GMs will need guidance for putting it all together. A guide that says, "Pick one monster each from lists X, Y, Q, and put them on the dungeon map. Those are your big boss monsters. Roll a d6 for each room to see if it's occupied. Pick mook monsters for all bosses on lists X and Q; put them in rooms occupied near their boss. Put a stair in two of the open spots on the map, and a third stair if it's below the first level. Put two entrances on the edges of or the open spots in the middle of the map if it's the first level, and make one hidden with table R." Something like the dungeon stocking tables in the Red Box, but with more direction.

EDIT: The more and more I think about this, I think the DFRPG needs to be focused on the most basic tasks: going to some foreign environment, killing the bad guys in there (and protecting any good guys), and taking their stuff. The power level needs to be 250-point characters, and those characters bought up from 250 points. Lower-point delvers? See GURPS Dungeon Fantasy for that. New magic system? See GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. The wilderness beyond a place where you go somewhere, kill some bad things, and take their stuff? See GURPS Dungeon Fantasy.

More than anything, DFRPG needs to be predictable on a certain level. We have a default scenario, a default power level, a default environment. We don't stray too much from that.