Dungeon Fantasy and Sword&Sorcery

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by johndallman

IMHO, DF is a subset of S&S, which is a (rather large) subset of "Fantasy" as a genre within RPGs.

You know, I've been thinking a lot about this, and I think I'm onto something. I think it applies to both Sword and Sorcery and Swashbuckling, which are related genres.

Thinking of them as DF misses what they're really about. DF is ultimately a tactical challenge of killing monsters and taking their stuff. DF is very built around the dungeon as rooms. A room is a self-contained encounter and designed to allow each tactical puzzle (or literal puzzle) to be solved in isolation. This is the core of its gameplay.

S&S and Swashbuckling have more in common with Action. Action is more about approaching the entire challenge as a cohesive thing. In Action, you don't go from room to room of a villain's headquarters, encountering distinct tactical challenges. No, you recon the site. You investigate the villain. You blow up one side of the building and open fire on it so they never realize that your cat-thief is breaking in on the other side, while the hacker sends ghosts through the system to further confuse the situation. The scenario itself is often tied to a much larger world, one piece of a greater puzzle.

This sort of approach seems very common in sword and sorcery as well. A thief who slips past all of those tactical challenges isn't breaking the flow of the encounters or "twinking," he's doing what's intended. A good S&S game involves detailed stories of the villain, sweeping, flowing battles that can (and should!) be avoided with clever solutions, and everything is often tied into a larger narrative.

Now, maybe I'm wrong and that's not really what S&S is about. Maybe it's just D&D without a shirt on, I don't know. Genre definitions are fuzzy. But I do think there's certainly room in GURPS for this sort of thing and it's highly distinct from Dungeon Fantasy. An S&S design could certainly cheat off of DF's notes, but in the end, it needs to borrow liberally from (a TL2-4 take on) Action and go off in its own direction as well.

I've been trying to see what I can put together, but it's turned out to be altogether more complicated than I expected, and I have some other, more pressing projects.