Tone whip-lash

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by namada

But, first of all, DFRPG isn't based on D&D entirely

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.