Dungeon Fantasy needs a bare-bones setting

[tg_ambro]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

What will promot an inexperienced GM to realize that he needs to think about languages before gamestart?

Wikipedia doesn't tell him to. No DF supplment tells him to.

I don't need help as a GM. I'm not an inexperienced GM. I'm just pointing to the fact that inexperienced GMs exist, and that a subset of these will try out DF, and that a subset of this subset will make disastrous decisions, due to the lack of official guidance, if one of their players opts for a Scholar template character and/or a character with the Language Talent Advantage.

"Take chances, make mistakes, get messy." I wise women once said that. When I was a newbie GM, and my players were also green, we made all kinds of horrible decisions, and that's awesome! Making those mistakes became part of the lore we developed as players; part of our story.

My players still fondly recall how I assumed Super Jump would just allow someone to jump wherever they pleased, or how I let someone take a Force Sword into my Fantasy game, or how I suggested to the drow player that it would be cool if her boyfriend/co-pilot would be a complete bipolar wreck, or how I grounded the sky captain drow gunslingers airship (effectively taking away 50 points of her character) for the entirety of the game.

These mistakes (which I won't make again, because ther are too simple. I now make sophisticated mistakes!) proved to not be that horrible after all, we either fixed them after they came to light, or let them slide and figured we'd get it right next time. I think that like children, GMs and players need a lot of room to play and mess up, but in the end, they'll figure it out.

[CousinX]

Originally Posted by nondescript handle

That is quite reasonable, but I personally would prefer if the setting elements in these books would at least represent at one contradiction-free and interconnected "implied setting." I.e. if the Elder Things in "Mirror of the Fire Demon" hail from the ice planet Zorg, they're also from Zorg in the hypothetical location book "Tentacled Fortress of the Elder Things."

A lot of the old school settings started that way too, but needed annoying ret-conning because nobody thought about that in the beginning.

That's a really good point, the early D&D settings were all grown organically, so to speak, through the course of various published adventures that shared writers, and therefor, basic setting assumptions. I think it'd be good to provide "generic" adventures as well, or at least enough deliberate leeway to adapt an adventure to another setting, or play it without paying attention to a larger setting.

[b-dog]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Rules are all of an RPG. By the definition of "game," that's what an RPG is! Settings are their own thing, theoretically useful for any RPG . . . and also for non-RPG applications like TV shows, video games, fanfics, and rock videos. Some designers bundle RPGs with settings, but it's unwise to conflate the two. Storyteller (the RPG) and the World of Darkness (the setting) weren't synonymous, for instance, and neither were D&D and Greyhawk.

I don't agree with that. The World of Darkness was a setting first and then they made rules to fit the setting. The idea was to have an internal struggle with the monstrous impulses of being a vampire so that is why they made the Humanity level so that when your character does evil things he becomes more monstrous and more difficult to control until finally he/she becomes an unplayable monster. The setting decides what rules are important and what ones to ignore. And besides people played D&D for a very long time because there was a cool setting and many cool adventures that spawned cool settings. The D&D rules were not that good but the creativity of the setting is what made people want to play it. I don't think that many people would want to play a level 1 magic-user with only one spell a d4 hit points if the setting was not very interesting. But the setting had cool stuff like the wand of Orcus, the eye of Vecna, drow, mind flayers, Demogorgon, beholders etc. which is why people kept playing it. My 2 cents...

[Corlock Striker]

Originally Posted by b-dog

I don't think that many people would want to play a level 1 magic-user with only one spell a d4 hit points if the setting was not very interesting.

Actually, there's a whole type of gamer who would be willing to play that, so long as the rules provide a way for them to get better, ie get to level 2 and beyond. So, yeah, there are players who would find that wizard interesting to play simply for the growth of his abilities and not care one lick about the setting at all.

[RyanW]

I think releasing a DF setting would be unfair to both DF and the setting. Like I said before, I could get behind a new fantasy setting that was set up to allow DF games, but saying "This is the DF setting" means it will be expected to comply fully with DF and that future DF releases are going to be expected to comply with it.

For example, the DF templates specifically leave out traits that just don't come up in a dungeon crawl campaign. Do DFWorld's elves have Unaging or not? If they do, they aren't really compatible with DF. If not, elves are missing a feature they are normally expected to have that can be quite important for other types of games.

On the other hand, if SJG decided they wanted to create a new fantasy setting with all the classic fantasy trappings, I could support it. And if it had a text box or appendix with advice on converting it to a DF game, more power to it.

[Xplo]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

Not really. There are vague descriptions of some kinds of places, organizations, and other things the game world might have (Elder Things come from some sort of bad "beyond" place; ninja belong to clans), but it never touches on specific names (Elder Things have an interstellar empire governed from an ice planet named Zorg; ninja belong to the Maki, Nigiri, Oshi, and Chirashi clans).

I think there's a middle ground between "providing almost no detail at all" and "forcing canon on the GM".. though, admittedly, the boundaries are a bit fuzzy.

How many times have you heard that GURPS is "boring" or "flavorless"? It's (partly, at least) because the rulebooks don't imply any kind of setting or background. And that's great for most of GURPS, because GURPS isn't supposed to have any kind of implied setting; it's supposed to be generic.

But DF isn't really very generic. Presuming you're following the genre, right off the bat you're assuming a setting (pseudo-medieval fantasy, vaguely eurocentric with cosmopolitan additions such as ninjas; the land is full of caves, ruins, and other indoor areas filled with monsters and treasure) and a play style (heavy focus on combat and resource management, bigger-than-life heroic adventurer PCs, slightly corny attitude). It seems silly to cling as tightly as possible to genericism as a guiding principle when you've already defined so much for the GM.

And I'm happy to see it stay that way, at least in the "core" DF books. Adventures, locations, and other books whose job it is to get specific can and should do so, but that sort of thing should always be optional and completely segregated from rules options available to players and GMs.

Again, if we were talking about GURPS as a whole, I would heartily agree. We're not. We're talking about a GURPS-derived game that uses GURPS mechanics to enable playing in a narrowly-defined style and setting.

[simply Nathan]

Originally Posted by RyanW

For example, the DF templates specifically leave out traits that just don't come up in a dungeon crawl campaign. Do DFWorld's elves have Unaging or not? If they do, they aren't really compatible with DF. If not, elves are missing a feature they are normally expected to have that can be quite important for other types of games.

I say a setting that contains all the races from DF3, a culture with huge varieties of different TL0-4 weapons, and nobody caring about whether you walk around town in full plate armor would be good. Having a world built assuming all the DF supplement books are canonical to the physics and metaphysics of the game world would be great; it would be a DF setting without being the DF setting.

Also, what kind of game is Unaging remotely important in? You need the game to go on for like, three decades before a typical PC is going to make his first aging roll, and aging attacks in DF specifically target your effective age. Immunity to Aging Attacks might be worth as many as five points, but that would be being extremely generous. If anything, I think the non-DF elf templates are just kinda lame.

[tg_ambro]

Originally Posted by Kenneth Latrans

Also, what kind of game is Unaging remotely important in? You need the game to go on for like, three decades before a typical PC is going to make his first aging roll, and aging attacks in DF specifically target your effective age. Immunity to Aging Attacks might be worth as many as five points, but that would be being extremely generous. If anything, I think the non-DF elf templates are just kinda lame.

Well, it can act as an unusual background for a character in some settings, allowing a PC to have traits that aren't normal to have anymore. "Say, if all the mages were killed in the great Mage War, and the gods prohibited new ones, how come you can cast spells, eh bob?" Bob replies "I was born before all that, waaay before all that."

[b-dog]

I think DF 12 Ninjas highlights the need for a DF setting. All of the templates are Eurocentric and the races are as well excluding the beastmen which could be from anywhere. But ninjas are sort of the odball and it would be nice to have some sort of setting to fit them in and integratethem with maybe some other Asian style templates and races to use. Maybe even some discussion on Japanese gods and chi power. I personally think that having a load of real world deities and the mythical creatures are perfect for DF. There are so many cool myths that would be easy to plunder and would set up endless ideas. I mean it would be cool to have your DF gang go to places like mythic Africa, Polynesia, America or Asia and there is so much texture and style that there would rarely be boredom. I would love to have a setting for DF but I really would hope that it would include real world gods and DF versions of their culture just to add ambiance to the game.

[nondescript handle]

Originally Posted by RyanW

[...] For example, the DF templates specifically leave out traits that just don't come up in a dungeon crawl campaign. Do DFWorld's elves have Unaging or not? If they do, they aren't really compatible with DF. If not, elves are missing a feature they are normally expected to have that can be quite important for other types of games. [...]

Isn't that actually an argument for a purpose build DF setting/sandbox?

Originally Posted by RyanW

[...] And if it had a text box or appendix with advice on converting it to a DF game, more power to it.

DF offers convenience for players: they don't have to sit over the Basic Set (...and Powers, ...and Magic) for hours and laboriously hand craft a character for a cheesy one-night hack-and-slash game, they can just pick a template or two, and maybe a lens, choose between a few options, and they're good to go.

A purpose-build setting/sandbox which would give the GM the option *) to skip this "homework" of converting a setting specifically for DF would be nice, no?

"Will nobody think of the chil.., err, GMs?" :-)

*) And I explicitly mean "as an option": it should be clear that every GM is of course free to set his/her game in a vacuum, or convert Hârn, Transhuman Space, Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears, or whatever for his/her DF game without "breaking" canon.