Tone whip-lash
 

Obligatory positive comment: I really like the barbarian, everything about it. I'm suspicious of the lack of breadth of weapon skills, but that's easily fixable with Quirk points and experience, if you also feel a little uneasy about that.

Anyway, I've finished chewing through the bundle I purchased. Overall, the game has a strong central conceit and works well for that purpose. For instance, I like that virtually anything bad can simply be handled at The Temple for cash. As it should be! Just like in Pool of Radiance (OG).

However, I find myself a little thrown off by the tone. There seems to be several distinct voices in DF, jumbled together.

• The Playing it Straight Voice: The main voice is just a practical GM voice, telling you how much everything costs, how to modify templates and races, and so forth. Characters are given reasonable, albeit stereotypical roles in society, adventure premises and norms are laid out, and you have all the usual things you would expect, like special materials, Hollywood werewolves, classic fantasy tropes and a few winky things that make it work, like the Common tongue. The helmet lamp is presented as a bit of everyday equipment you might invest in. The upsides of invisible helmets are mentioned. There is a bit of a Hackmaster vibe here.
• The Snide and Cynical Voice: But sometimes the textual awareness and slides into the realm of hyper-awareness. The description of halflings sounds more like kender and the less savory members of the Sackville-Baggins family, and strongly recalls Bored of the Rings, with its parodic halflings having clever fingers of the sort often found in other people's pockets and around the necks of small animals. Drawing attention to the explicit anachronisms like gender parity and the cash economy, while perhaps necessary, are done early on and in a blunt fashion that detracts from the magic a bit. Other times things veer into....
• Munchkin Voice: The text really drills down on the idea of optimization and rinse-repeat dungeoneering. The odd and meta-aware becomes wacky and off-beat, like a monk raised by kung fu orcs. The vocabulary devolves in places into goofy, simplistic phrases like "totally evil" and "The King." It's hard for me to imagine an ongoing campaign where the characters are, foremost, vehicles for oddness, weird puns, and illogical behavior. These sections hit me somewhere between the most regrettable sections of the old Mystara Gazetteers and the Munchkin board game (and its OGL ancestor). A little, you know, as a spice, and all that. I'm just not sure what to think about my monk wanting a dwarven-made nunchaku so he can emulate Bruce Lee. And then at times, I get hit with...
• Heavy Metal Fantasy: Gleefully improbable armor. Elder Things. Curses. Fifteen types of zombies. Humongous clubs. Grim elves and dwarves. Obviously Warhammer is an influence here, which is all well and good. But there's already a lot going on here. Which makes it all the odder when we get large swaths of
• GURPS Voice: Somewhat realistic armor layering. Weapons with two or three attack lines, sometimes with different unbalanced ratings. Skills, lots of skills, like Hazardous Materials, which would normally be done matter-of-course in other games without a specific character focus. Odd lectures about how orcs are basically people, too, despite being presented mainly as monsters. Realistic armor restrictions, with no class-based armor restrictions. Oddly specific polearms, which harkens back a little to AD&D, but is kind of its own thing, with realistic historical examples of weapons being slid right in there alongside high fantasy grins and giggles. We have both a halberd and a dueling halberd, but also a bastard sword presented as being longer than a longsword, without explanation? Weird.

In keeping with the GURPS ethos of being a toolkit, I guess it makes a certain level of sense. You can obviously bend the tone in one way or another, depending on your campaign. But I found the lack of tonal focus a little strange for a pre-packaged setting, even one without explicit world-building. Overall, I don't think it detracts much from playability (I can make my own halflings, and nunchaku could be "Temple-crafted" I suppose), but I'm kind of at a loss at who this is aimed it. It has kind of the unsteady feel of Gen X writing trying to aim at a Millennial audience. There are parts where I wish it was either more earnest, or more meta-aware. So. That's just one reaction I got from these books.

Re: Tone whip-lash
 

Personally, I love the humor. I loved Knights of the Dinner Table and loved Hackmaster when it was a parody. For me, it doesn't detract from the game itself. It is true that there are a lot of genre conceits embedded in the humor; i.e. "The King" and "The Devil" etc., and I can take or leave the genre conceits without interfering too much with how the game works when actually played. I find the base mechanics of the game lend themselves to genre tinkering quite well. YMMV.

Re: Tone whip-lash
 

A couple of fixes:

I allow all melee weapons to default to any melee skill-5 and buy them up for 5 points.

IME, vanilla, you need a Cleric or to the D&D 5 minute work day, DF says hold my beer. I allow Bards and Druids to pick up some minor healing spells. That and potions can extend the work day a bit.

I agree with your comments on tone. I think DF is doing itself a disservice by implying/stating that it's just a 'kick down door, kill monsters, take their stuff' kinda game. IME, it's been years/decades since this described a typical D&D game. Personally, I use DF as a core ruleset for anything vaguely fantasy/low tech - Deadlands, Victorian Monster hunting, renaissance musketeers, etc.

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It's all my voice. To me, "snide and cynical" and "heavy metal" are exactly the same take on fantasy here – exaggerated to match how fantasy is exaggerated in modern sources, which often isn't consistent in any way beyond being just a tad try-hard – while the "munchkin voice" is how that same exaggeration sounds when discussing abilities and gear rather than mood, tropes, and conventions. "Playing it straight" is there to help people who haven't fully absorbed the exaggeration understand the exaggeration, with little winks as you say to keep the interest of those who have fully absorbed it, and what you call the "GURPS voice" is how that sounds when discussing abilities and gear rather than mood, tropes, and conventions. It's what writers call "nuance."

Re: Tone whip-lash
 

At the risk of sounding all gushy, it's my favorite thing Sean Punch has written, tonally. I like that it reels from earnest explanation to self parody, and clearly likes the genre while seeing the silliness. It's almost camp rpg writing, I love it. I suppose I might have liked more of a setting, but Kromm has said a lot of times that he doesn't feel he's good at writing that kind of thing, so, I mean, fine. There's a good chance I'd have chucked it and used my own setting anyhow.

Re: Tone whip-lash
 

https://papermenplasticmonster.blogs...n-fantasy.html
My thoughts about this, at least for GURPS DF, but I think it applies to DFRPG too.

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For what it's worth, Pawsplay, you're not completely alone. On first reading the early GURPS:Dungeon Fantasy books, I felt rather as if the authors were insulting my taste for choosing to use their products. Later books have bothered me less- I'm not sure if the authors have toned it down, or if I've just grown a thicker skin.

Re: Tone whip-lash
 

One must remember to distinguish between the tone of the rules and the tone of your own game. You don't have to make munchkinly jokes and speeches all the time; you can take your own game as seriously as you like. Rule books are just things you read when you're not playing.

Re: Tone whip-lash
 

Oh, quite. Even when I was feeling most annoyed with them, I still found the books full of useful material. Still, in an ideal world, reading the rules should be pleasant, or at least non-unpleasant, and I sometimes found the tone grating enough that this wasn't the case. (I don't mind a joke, but some of the munchkiny jocularity gave the impression of contempt rather than mere amusement. This was a false impression, I'm sure, but it came across strongly enough as to negatively impact my interaction with some of the earlier books.)

Re: Tone whip-lash
 

True, but it can make it more difficult to bring in new players who are used to a more serious tone. DF can be a bit of a challenge already, using GURPS.

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The tone of DFRPG may not be to everyone's taste, but it strikes me as a basically consistent tone—I would broadly describe it as "tongue-in-cheek", though when explaining the rules it does necessarily have to shift to something a bit straighter. But "the snide and cynical voice", "munchkin voice", and "heavy metal fantasy" all strike me as basically facets of the same thing. I guess I can see being caught off-guard by the mix of overall tongue-in-cheek tone with the relatively realistic GURPS ruleset.

I do think the tone is fairly accurate advertising for both the ruleset and the included dungeon. The rules handle everything in "town" abstractly, while the dungeon doesn't include maps of the above-ground part of the inn, nor stats for its proprietor (Kromm did write some, but they didn't make it into the finished product for space reasons). And while it's not what everyone does, I don't think this approach to TTRPGs is as dead as some people think—right now I'm running a D&D 5e megadungeon campaign where the players have barely bothered interacting with the trading post outside the dungeon (even though I do have stats for all the trading post's inhabitants, if it becomes relevant).

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I just wanted to say I second these points, for whatever that's worth.

Re: Tone whip-lash
 

Something I find odd is that the attitude of "everything outside the dungeon is elided over as briefly as possible", which the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy line seems to consider a central premise, is not an impression I have ever really gotten when I have read the early DnD books. The Temple of Elemental Evil begins with a tediously detailed depiction of the village the PCs will be operating from; the 1e rulebooks state outright that a high-level fighter will receive a castle and lands to rule over, and devote substantial page-space to the warfare and politics he will be engaging in between dungeon expeditions (his GURPS counterpart the knight, interestingly, invests a substantial portion of his points in skills related to this, even as the rules and gameplay advice conspire to keep him as far as possible from any chance of using those skills).

I am told that "dungeon-only games" were and are commonly played, and I am willing to believe it. Still, it is strange that the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy authors often seem to write as if this is the only way to play if dungeons are to be involved at all, and it is grating that, having made that assumption, they write as if they will only condescend to play such games if they can simultaneously mock them. (I am forcefully reminded of hipsters partaking of entertainment while making it clear they are only doing so ironically.)

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But, first of all, DFRPG isn't based on D&D entirely, it's also influenced by dungeon-delving CRPG's. More importantly, GURPS is modular. If you want to bring in that old D&D fighter nonsense of having a stronghold, simply add GURPS Mass Combat. It's not hard.

Re: Tone whip-lash
 

Back in 2007, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy: Adventurers spent it's first column of body text explaining why it would not be useful to me.

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Or even mostly!

It's true that people often describe it that way. However, those are not my words as the developer and lead writer. My top influences were probably Tunnels & Trolls First Edition (1975), the venerable Rogue (1980) and NetHack (1987) computer games, and the more recent Diablo series of computer games (1997-2023), any one of which got more hours of my time than all editions of D&D put together.

Up until 1979, T&T had no explicit setting, and most development in that direction came decades after my time playing it. Rogue and NetHack were essentially procedurally generated, and while they had lore, they didn't have any world outside the dungeon. The Diablo games had even more lore, and some towns where you could shop, but were still procedurally generated dungeon crawls.

The closest D&D-related influences would be the rules for rolling up random dungeons in Appendix A of the Dungeon Master's Guide, First Edition (1979) and the Neverwinter Nights: Infinite Dungeons video game (2006).

Those examples illustrate the feel I was aiming for.

Re: Tone whip-lash
 

Thanks for that!

Saying that the tone is inconsistent is essentially saying that I'm a bad writer who cannot carry a tone. While an individual reader certainly has the right to believe that, I know that I made a conscious effort to deliver a specific tone. The fact that my tone has several shadings was intended as a feature, not a bug – much as a good singer has a broad vocal range or a good actor doesn't always play to a single type.

Also, if you read my previous post you'll see that most of my influences – Rogue, NetHack, Diablo, Infinite Dungeons – were not TTPRGs. The entire mission was to bring procedurally generated digital dungeon crawls to the tabletop. There are endless hints in the text, for those who know where to look; the most on-the-nose hint might be, "Gamers familiar with the computerized adventures of @ will find this comforting." The exercise was never about mocking fans of TTRPGs, and I have no idea where people get that impression.

Re: Tone whip-lash
 

Oh huh, I caught that "@" was a reference to old ASCII roguelikes, but it has not remotely occurred to me in years of being a DF fan that it was meant to "bring procedurally generated digital dungeon crawls to the tabletop". IMHO the only really clear thing that points in that direction is Dungeon Fantasy Encounters 2: The Room—and it's a relatively recent addition to the line, a pandemic-era one in fact (I checked, and kind of can't believe it—it feels older). If capturing procedurally generated dungeons was the point, it feels like The Room should've been a core offering, one that would be expanded on in later supplements. (The lack of random encounter tables is also odd, though I understand wanting to keep the PDF short.)

FWIW, I never read the jokes in the Dungeon Fantasy line as making fun of players, so much as making fun of genre conventions, not in "jock mocking the nerds" way but in a "haha we've all played in campaigns with flimsy world-building haven't we?" way. Though maybe it's not even doing that and the use of words like "munchkin" are intended in a non-pejorative sense.

Re: Tone whip-lash
 

All I can say is that as someone who has played countless hours of hack 'n' slash games – both digital and tabletop – and who very definitely builds his PCs toward specific power-gaming goals when playing said games, I was smirking as and not at that style of gamer. I don't consider gaming that way a thing to be ashamed of. If people feel that I was mocking them or that style of game, that's their own insecurity showing.

Then again, I'm also someone who describes himself as a "shameless cocktail freak" and "Argentine tango addict," and laugh at the size and expense of my home bar, and the fact that there are weeks where I spend more hours on the dancefloor than at work. I prefer to own my predilections. When I wink at them, it's a wink that says, "If this is you, too, then I needn't say more. If this isn't you, please humor me." It's inclusive, not exclusive, and directed inward, not outward.

Re: Tone whip-lash
 

Wait, is there a Dungeon Fantasy procedurally generated dungeon product I'm missing? And if not why not? And what would it look like? How would it work?

Colour me intrigued.

I think a deck of cards would probably be a little too limited. The capacity to generate some internal plot loops would be interesting. A series of tables that reference to other tables would probably work and fill out a book well. A set of map tiles with a key booklet with monster stats might also work. My Warhammer Quest experience says fixed size squares work better because you never get weird overlaps. I think custom dice are probably too costly and limited in information density. A set of d20's with monster type, room shape, treasure, and trap icons might have value outside the Dungeon Fantasy market.

Re: Tone whip-lash
 

Dungeon Fantasy Encounters 2 is very obviously inspired by procedurally generated dungeons though it's a very short supplement (selling for just $4 on Warehouse23!) and it's missing some stuff I'd expect in a full-length treatment of the "proc gen for your tabletop" concept.

Re: Tone whip-lash
 

The GURPS DF / DFRPG Random Dungeon Generator thread at https://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=158217 includes links to a dungeon generator.

Re: Tone whip-lash
 

Ah but is it a GURPS dungeon generator with GURPS stats for things? I'm asking for a friend :D

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I did not glean the concept from the blurbs written for this game that it was intended to emulate a procedurally-generated dungeon game. I took it as more of a general take on hack-and-slash, tactical, mostly underground fantasy. It's an interesting choice.

Re: Tone whip-lash
 

For what it's worth, I like the tone of DF and DFRPG.

Also, FWIW, games of D&D that treated the nearest settlement or friendly fort like DF treats 'Town' were pretty common back in the day. Likewise games of Aftermath!, for that matter.

Then there were the early CRPGs that had friendly towns that were just (nested) menus of services and their prices.

I assumed that was the sort of game DF was emulating, albeit without the initial 'zero to would-be hero' stage most of those inherited from D&D.

I'm all for a game with Elven Clotheslines, Balanced Fine Elven Composite Bow-Harps, Dwarven Rations, and Monster Drool.

Re: Tone whip-lash
 

Unfortunately that tone kept me from giving DF more than a cursory glance until someone pointed out DF 16 Wilderness Adventures had rules solving an issue I was digging into yet again (my ever present quest to refine travel time), and it's tone rather walked in the opposite direction of DF 1 (DF 16 feels more 'over-the-top' action cinematicy rather than munchkiny to me, which os more of my preferred genre)..

I then gave the first three books a longer look and decided they weren't 100% per munchkin nonsense and I could just add proper social rules back in... also I'd spent the last almost decade slowly becoming less and less enamored with free-form chargen... so templates no longer felt like a curse word in my mouth.

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As a player of Nethack (I can't speak to the other games mentioned), I would point out that, while it has no above-ground town, it does have settlements in the dungeon, and interaction with the people therein. On the Nethack wiki (an obsessively detailed wiki for an obsessively detailed game), the page for Shop mechanics alone has a greater word count than the entire town section in Exploits, and that's without considering the discussions of Temples, Minetown, and so on. Just because you're playing a procedurally generated dungeon crawl doesn't mean you have to ignore the social side of things.

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I want to come in as a vote in favor of the tone. In fact, it was one of the things that drew me into the product, and into rediscovering GURPS. As others have pointed out, this is a product about the big, and let’s be honest, sometimes cartoonish, tropes of the genre. I think it is a wonderfully mature authorial voice that is self-aware that this is what we are talking about, but in a way that embraces the tropes, warts and all, and doesn’t fall into sarcasm or self-inflating dismissal.

That is not always an easy thing to do. Loving a subject but being aware of its inherent limitations is a very adult perspective that is not always present in the role-playing milieu. I think it comes across here but also in most GURPS products in a way that speaks to the market segment they serve, a bit more mature audience that probably has a different relationship to the game than many 5E players, for example….

It would not be appropriate for all products, but it isn’t all products, it is this one.

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I'd be interested too. From my perspective a glaring omission from the Dungeon Fantasy boxed set is that there aren't any random tables for generating dungeons, or treasure in dungeons, or monsters in dungeons. There are online resources of varying quality to generate these things, and an experienced GM can just make up their own, but a procedurally generated dungeoneering product needs procedures in order to onboard new players.

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However, unfortunately, 90%+ of CRPG games, which are mostly dungeon crawls, are also based on D&D. So, I genuinely feel it is 100% natural to compare DFRPG to D&D. It's obviously going to happen, no matter how little you want it to happen. :shrugs: