[DF] Advice for first-time Dungeon Fantasy GM

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Peter V. Dell'Orto

Murderhoboes? No, stole that from somewhere else. I do love the term for DF, though.

It's been floating around on the RPG.net forums for a few years, at least. I have no idea who coined it.

[robertsconley]

Originally Posted by b-dog

It is disappointing to hear DF as a silly genre. I feel it can be silly if you want it to be silly but you can play seriously if you want to.

Certainly and I don't think anybody will argue. I been running dungeons crawls using GURPS since the late 80s using my Majestic Wilderlands. In those campaigns there is intrigue, slice of life adventures, etc alongside the crawls.

[robertsconley]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

You're totally right, man. There's this gaping hole in the GURPS line. We really need a book about fantasy games with a deep, rich discussion of what makes fantasy games work, how best to build your own, the themes found therein. Perhaps we could touch on monsters and alternate magics, the cycle of history, and put in some racial and occupational templates so you can hit the ground running, and maybe even have a pre-gen setting or two. Would it be so hard? Not sure what to call it, but I bet we can get Bill Stoddard to write it up. He's pretty good at thoughtful setting material.

I second this.

My Majestic Wilderlands supplement is a polished version of my GURPS notes with the GURPS mechanics replaced by classic D&D mechanics. And my Scourge adventure was originally run using GURPS. And Blackmarsh reflects more my experience running GURPS Fantasy from the late 80s onward than it does my AD&D experience in the late 70s/early 80s.

I would not call my stuff a "hit" but it been well received. And based on the feedback there is a least a niche market for this kind of fantasy especially with a system with an excellent design and the mechanical details to back it up like GURPS.

[apoc527]

There is some great advice in this thread. I wish I had been able to read this when I ran Mirror of the Fire Demon. I was caught off guard by a number of things that the advice in here would have prepared me for.

IME, the most important thing is to realize the sheer power level of DF PCs. They are, in some ways, "over the top." However, being over the top is a relative thing--you just need to create challenges that fit.

[Peter V. Dell'Orto]

Originally Posted by robertsconley

I second this.

So did SJG.

GURPS Fantasy

It's not a finished, worked example - but IMO you can't get both a finished, worked example and one that will suit all people's needs in all cases. It's like saying you want a generic specific setting. This is why DF succeeds, though - it's deliberately focusing on the lowest common denominator of dungeon fantasy - the dungeon bashing part. Banestorm is a more serious look at the same subject, but I wonder if has as much widespread fandom and attraction as DF. And it's been around since Orcslayer for Man-to-Man.

[Peter V. Dell'Orto]

Originally Posted by apoc527

There is some great advice in this thread. I wish I had been able to read this when I ran Mirror of the Fire Demon. I was caught off guard by a number of things that the advice in here would have prepared me for.

Playtesting MOTFD worked well as a shakedown for DF for us. We learned:

- clerics are murder on undead, but no matter how tough they look, they're still not front rankers. Our Axe/Mace-15, 2d+3 or 4 doing cleric got mauled by an ogre in short order when he stepped up, thinking that was pretty good combat power.

- just how nasty the Knight can be. The current knight in my DF game is run by the guy who played a 90% identical PC in MOTFD. He tweaked him after that, but having someone do 3d+7 cutting twice a second let us know just how high the baseline was.

- just how much magic you can get with 250 points. The wizard's spell list was limited compared to our last game, but he was able to do much, much more than we expecting from a "starting" wizard. Power Items were a pleasant surprise, too.

- that combat was like our older GURPS games, but even more so. With the damage being done by PC and NPC alike, it was parry-parry-parry-dead in a lot of combat. We went in with more of a "focus on one guy, cripple the legs, aim for the eyes" and ended with a lot more "don't waste any damage with blowthrough, and attack as much fodder per turn as possible" than we'd had before.

Then again, our first games in this campaign teetered between "total massacre of NPCs" and "Oops, missed that parry, make a new guy" a few times. It's still GURPS, and fights are still deadly. It's just that what used to be a worthy fight (say, ranked orcs with polearms and supporting missile fire) became, with careful fighting, a fairly easy win even without the main damage-dealers in attendance.

[b-dog]

GURPS Fantasy is a good book but it really just an overview of the fantasy genre. I would hope for a more supported series that deals with high fantasy but is geared more towards the serious end of the spectrum. I use the DF series now for rules, monsters and treasure but I play in a gameworld set in Mythic Earth which is similar to Ars Magica with real gods and cultures as the back drop for dungeon delving.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by b-dog

GURPS Fantasy is a good book but it really just an overview of the fantasy genre.

DF is just an "overview" of then Dungeon Fantasy genre. You use DF for rules, monsters and treasures. GURPS has rules, monsters and treasures for more "serious" games, and Fantasy is your starting point.

[apoc527]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

DF is just an "overview" of then Dungeon Fantasy genre. You use DF for rules, monsters and treasures. GURPS has rules, monsters and treasures for more "serious" games, and Fantasy is your starting point.

Moreover, there's Banestorm if you want a much larger worked example. Many might consider Banestorm to be "low fantasy," but that's a matter of attitude and point totals. You could TOTALLY set a party of DF-style templates loose in Yrth and have a whale of a good time.

[Kromm]

First, I'd like to single out a few words that I actually wrote:

Originally Posted by Kromm

Small-d, small-f "dungeon fantasy" doesn't have to be a silly genre [...]

Dungeon Fantasy™ [...] isn't explicitly silly [...]

Nobody has ever said that dungeon fantasy has to be played silly [...]

GURPS [...] isn't a silly game [but it is] a poor fit to the sillier, murderhobo kind of dungeon fantasy.

For those keeping score, I outright stated that neither GURPS nor dungeon fantasy is silly, and that GURPS Dungeon Fantasy isn't explicitly silly. I simply styled the "murderhobo kind of dungeon fantasy" as sillier than other kinds, which wasn't a statment that it's silly; "sillier" is a comparative term. My point was to get people to look at the premise:

The world is nigh-overrun by terrible creatures, entities so dire that they can kill ordinary folks and defy armies, and that control limitless stores of valuables. Despite this, the world still has enough trade and agriculture to support feudal empires dotted with towns that are home to temples and a healthy guild system. The fiscal support for this society ultimately rests on pillagers who bring valuables back to civilization, and who are so powerful that they can accomplish what feudal lords and town-sized settlements cannot. Part of that power includes astonishing abilities apparently learned from even more capable masters in towns and monasteries . . . yet these masters' only visible contribution to society is to send out thugs (dungeon delvers).

I dunno – I can't take that too seriously.

Originally Posted by Rupert

It's been floating around on the RPG.net forums for a few years, at least. I have no idea who coined it.

I first saw "murderhobo" on rpg.net in 2010 or 2011. I heard it uttered at gaming conventions before that, though. It isn't a new term at all, though it's newer than "munchkin."

Originally Posted by apoc527

IME, the most important thing is to realize the sheer power level of DF PCs. They are, in some ways, "over the top."

Yes. And lest anybody think that "over the top" is the only style that GURPS Dungeon Fantasy supports (because boy, did "silly" get misread!), take note that Dungeon Fantasy 15: Henchmen covers lower-level starts. In principle, you could even start at 62 points . . .

Originally Posted by Peter V. Dell'Orto

Banestorm is a more serious look at the same subject, but I wonder if has as much widespread fandom and attraction as DF.

GURPS Banestorm certainly illustrates the problem with "serious" worked examples. To be serious – rather than seat-of-the-pants things that hand-wave economics, politics, and technology, and take a kitchen-sink approach to religion and the supernatural – a worked example requires a setting.

The catch with settings is that they're specific. If you remove the specifics, you return to the vagueness that tends to get "silly" (or "not serious enough," or whatever term you prefer).

And the tricky thing about being specific is that if the choices aren't to the liking of the audience, the product doesn't do well. For instance, the specific setting of Yrth isn't a hot seller, because it isn't the worked example for everyone.

Since it's prohibitively expensive to publish alternative worked examples until one catches on with the crowd, or so that there is something for everybody, the alternative is to publish instructions on how to roll your own. We did that, too: GURPS Fantasy.

Basically, SJ Games has published both a genre guide and a serious worked example. It seems only fair that there's also a less-serious worked example for other tastes. It doesn't seem fair to criticize the latter product for not being one of the first two. It actually seems obtuse to ignore the first two and demand that the last one cover the ground they already covered.