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Old 11-10-2013, 05:01 AM   #11
Dammann
 
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Default Re: Building a Fantasy setting: DF or Regular?

True; all the more reason for a GURPS RPM Grimoire.
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Old 11-10-2013, 10:49 AM   #12
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Default Re: Building a Fantasy setting: DF or Regular?

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Originally Posted by Dammann View Post
True; all the more reason for a GURPS RPM Grimoire.
Or a GURPS DF: RPM! :) someone take my money please

I'm an uncontrollable tinkerer. Basically by definition I can't run DF because I'm allergic to "out of the box"; this doesn't stop me from saying I run and play DF though.

Writing a personality and background for my character in D&D, Hackmaster, or DF doesn't invalidate the rest of the character sheet. Neither does spending an entire DF game session in the tavern yakking in character amongst ourselves, even though it was pure roleplay with naery a bar brawl, mysterious old man, or treasure in sight. GMs and DMs and whatever have decorated their hack-and-slay environments with lovingly rendered NPCs and histories for decades; GMs and Storytellers and whatever have indulged in moments of gratuitous light-hearted violence in their dramatic epics for nearly as long.

It's really more a semantic difference - where you draw the line on the gradient doesn't remove the gradient. You don't even need to stay in one mode all the time. Just make sure you and your players all know where you'll be spending most of the time so one guy doesn't make a pure combat-wombat and the other a soap opera character, and then confusion ensues.

GURPS is (of course) very good for going all over the gradient; going off template just means going back to the basic set, not completely reinventing things, and the library of support for the GM is great. Because of that, I like DF if only as a place to start ripping DF stuff out and going back to Basic :)

For an action-oriented-but-not-so-DF game, I might start with Henchmen 125 pt templates and 25-75 pt less-martial lenses (and/or races). But I like to tinker.
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Old 11-10-2013, 05:24 PM   #13
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Default Re: Building a Fantasy setting: DF or Regular?

Personally, I've mashed DF and Action together into a single Fantasy Action ruleset, though I generally let my players make their own characters (I lack specific templates). Also, I prefer RPM to standard spell magic. This mix gives me a nice cinematic approach to fantasy that lets players do the social stuff, the fighting stuff, and generally do awesome stuff. I find that adding in the social traits generally lowers the combat capacity of PCs and generally decreases the murder-hoboing.
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Old 11-10-2013, 07:45 PM   #14
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Default Re: Building a Fantasy setting: DF or Regular?

My fantasy setting document specifically states that there are no murder-hobos, and that "adventurer" is shorthand for "bored nobleman" or "hired mercenary". I even go so far as to say that "dungeon-delving" does not happen.

And yet some of my players I cannot get out of the D&D mindset where "adventurer" means "go into an underground ruin, kill what's there, take the loot". The political intrigue of the spread of gunpowder (the magic guilds want it stopped, the more hostile nations want the secret for their armies), the unexplored lands farther west and south, and the hostile environments of the arctic north or scorching desert to the east don't catch their interest ... unless there's things to kill and loot to be taken.
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Old 11-10-2013, 07:54 PM   #15
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Default Re: Building a Fantasy setting: DF or Regular?

It depends on your vision, I think. For a lot of fantasy tropes, DF provides an excellent worked example -- and one which lends itself to tweaking up or down. In my fantasy game, in which starting characters are 150 - 200 points, DF provides useful NPCs, items, etc. Henchmen has proven to be amazingly useful for "good" and "quick" NPC hirelings or bad-guys. Take a 62-point template and add (back) in some logical social skills.

But for a fleshed out NPC of more "mundane" proportions, I'm much more likely to use Historical Folks. They work just fine together, really. It's just a matter of why I need a NPC with an actual sheet (rather than something on the fly), or I create on the fly. Case in point -- a scout who was hired gained a need for a sheet just last night (i.e., he became important enough that I wanted to define him beyond a name and a couple of scribbled notes). I looked at the Archer template; it wasn't what I wanted as it simply didn't fit, so I created the character from whole cloth.

Some DF conventions don't work at all -- I use LT for armor and weapons, so that's off the table. But treasure tables are still useful. It's a great quick fill in aid, and makes an excellent GM resource at the very least even in my non-DF setting.
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Old 11-10-2013, 08:21 PM   #16
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Default Re: Building a Fantasy setting: DF or Regular?

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My fantasy setting document specifically states that there are no murder-hobos, and that "adventurer" is shorthand for "bored nobleman" or "hired mercenary". I even go so far as to say that "dungeon-delving" does not happen.
I go basically the opposite way with mine, where dungeon delving is a basic part of civilization's defense against the evil forces of the wilderness and providing equipment or services for such is the actual backbone of the world economy. They aren't murder-hobos, they're travelling champions of goodness. The same mechanics can be given many different interpretations.
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Old 11-10-2013, 08:49 PM   #17
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Default Re: Building a Fantasy setting: DF or Regular?

In my Shielded-Land fantasy setting, the group of kingdoms of the Shield-Lands
"adventure" or "monster-hunter" is noted social group aside for the Knight of The Quest, it might be a task taken up by younger noble offspring who don't expect to enherit, or commoner who see it as a path of advancement.

They do dungeon delve, but they not so much murder-hobos they socially the seen as free-swords who will risk monster of the paranormal kind. Nobals might hire them as trouble shooters

The Royal Guard mostly deals with the Orks, Kolbolds and Goblins the 'evil kin' not what they would call monsters in they can be faced normal men.
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Old 11-10-2013, 09:01 PM   #18
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Default Re: Building a Fantasy setting: DF or Regular?

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The Royal Guard mostly deals with the Orks, Kolbolds and Goblins the 'evil kin' not what they would call monsters in they can be faced normal men.
In my setting, the goblins have been fully integrated into human society, orcs are prized as shock troop mercenaries, hobgoblins while militaristic are dependable and hold the breadbasket, and the kobolds have one of the two bastions of civilization on the edges of the southern jungles. It's accepted that "no one race is inherently evil."
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Old 11-11-2013, 07:14 AM   #19
Peter V. Dell'Orto
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Default Re: Building a Fantasy setting: DF or Regular?

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Originally Posted by tbrock1031 View Post
And yet some of my players I cannot get out of the D&D mindset where "adventurer" means "go into an underground ruin, kill what's there, take the loot". The political intrigue of the spread of gunpowder (the magic guilds want it stopped, the more hostile nations want the secret for their armies), the unexplored lands farther west and south, and the hostile environments of the arctic north or scorching desert to the east don't catch their interest ... unless there's things to kill and loot to be taken.
Sounds like a player-game mismatch. They want dungeons, monsters, and loot, and you want intrigue, scheming, and exploration. You might want to considering just giving them what they want in a game, and find a different group for the second game. In my experience either it ends up being what the players want or the game ends in disappointment for all after a while.

The second sounds like a lot of fun to me (although, so does the first), but I know most of my players have zero interest in that. So for example we're playing DF right now because it hits the sweet spot of "where all of our interests overlap." We all like it, and we all want the same thing out of the game. If only I wanted it, well, we'd have moved on by now.
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Old 11-11-2013, 07:19 AM   #20
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Default Re: Building a Fantasy setting: DF or Regular?

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The political intrigue of the spread of gunpowder (the magic guilds want it stopped, the more hostile nations want the secret for their armies), the unexplored lands farther west and south, and the hostile environments of the arctic north or scorching desert to the east don't catch their interest ... unless there's things to kill and loot to be taken.
<shrug> You appear to be out of step with your players and it's not obvious that it's their fault. I wouldn't set off to an extremely hostile environment without an obvious (and better than average) reason either.

I'd need reason to believe that there was something interesting in the unexplored lands too.
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