[Dungeon Fantasy] Quickest Way To Start Playing?

[OldSam]

Originally Posted by Mulsiphix

[LIST=1]
This is our goal and we would like to start playing DF ASAP. What do we need to do? What do we need to read?

As I said in the other thread ( http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread...00#post1394800 ) IMHO the best way for you to start (fastest and easiest) heading towards DF is to first play your GURPS Lite session in a fantasy style! :) Lite is the core and all the rules from there are essential for DF and other general GURPS games.

While you are already having fun with your few first sessions, parallel you can start to read the first Chapter of the Basic Set and a few important chapters like Combat Lite etc. - then you can start reading Dungeon Fantasy 1,2,3! ;)
That is the fastest way as DF is an expansion...
Note that you absolutely don't need to read everything in the Basic Set, it's a reference! But make sure to understand what they are saying in Chapter 1 about the organisation of the book, so you know where to look if you'r searching something ;)

[Athanbeli]

DF Adventure: Mirror of the Fire Demon, being the only pre-made adventure should be on top of your list.
The adventure itself is short, but its layout takes you by the hand for quite a few aspects of gmastering.
Mind you: I havenìt played it myself!

[Mateus]

Originally Posted by Athanbeli

DF Adventure: Mirror of the Fire Demon, being the only pre-made adventure should be on top of your list.
The adventure itself is short, but its layout takes you by the hand for quite a few aspects of gmastering.
Mind you: I havenìt played it myself!

I am current gming it. We are in the session 6 and my players are only close to the half of it. One big problem that I am having with it is that the heroes npcs are not in a sheet form... So I am having to put them in a pdf character sheet for use them. And I also think that their equip is crap, so I have tunned it up a bit and have made some modifications in many of the shhets (why the Denomologist dont have a demon???).

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Mulsiphix

1. I will be playing with only 1 player who is happy to control multiple PC's

He may be happy to play multiple characters, but is he skilled enough to do that yet? Are you skilled enough to GM for multiple characters played by the same one player?

I think it's a bad idea. The best thing to do is to get a 2nd player, because a ot of the dynamic of roleplaying gaming comes from having several (as in more than 1) player play characters who are different from each other.

The next best thing you can do is have the one player play only one character. Third best is let him play two characters.

[Graham]

Here's what I'd suggest to get started:

Both read through GURPS Lite.

Think of a fantasy situation that doesn't involve magic. A thief trying to break into a house; a peasant caught out alone in the woods after nightfall; a soldier left trying to hold the wall against the vanguard of the orcs; a princess determined to slip out of the castle on a moonless night to meet her lover.

Note this is just a set up - a situation or encounter - you don't have to sit down and write an adventure.

Create the player character together, on 100 points.

GM the situation on the fly, making up stats if you need them without worrying at all about whether they are right. You can use a rule of thumb that ordinary people have all key stats and skills at 10, while competent foes have them at 12. It really doesn't matter at this stage. It'll work for the odd bestial foe as well. If you can get weapon damage from Lite, use that, if not just make attacks or bites do 1d6.

Advising you to "GM the situation on the fly" may seem mad when you've had no GMing experience, but it's no different from saying "just make the story up as you go along". You'll find it easy, as long as you view the world through the eyes of your player character. At this stage you don't have to GM "right", you don't have to get the rules "right". You'll get enough of it right to have fun and to give you a better understanding as you dig deeper into the rulebooks.

Graham

[Jeffr0]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

The best thing to do is to get a 2nd player, because a ot of the dynamic of roleplaying gaming comes from having several (as in more than 1) player play characters who are different from each other.

With two players, even just dividing up the potions and figuring out what they do becomes infinitely more amusing.

[Jeffr0]

These two posts describe game sessions with just one or two players. The first is more rules oriented and the second has the rules fading into the background:

Party of Nine for the Mound of the Lizard Men

Playing D&D with Six Year Olds

There might be something in them that is relevant to a novice Game Master, but I couldn't tell you exactly what.

[Whyte]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

The best thing to do is to get a 2nd player, because a ot of the dynamic of roleplaying gaming comes from having several (as in more than 1) player play characters who are different from each other.

One of the reasons I prefer to have at least 3 players in my campaigns.
1 Player: no player-player interaction
2 Players: A-B interaction
3 Players: A-B, A-C, B-C (three times more potential interactions than with 2!)
4 Players: A-B, A-C, A-D, B-C, B-D, C-D (6, so again doubled from 3 players)

Much more than 4 players and I find it starts to become cluttered. 6 is my absolute max in any Campaign, and I tend to prefer 4-5. With three players, there is the risk of being the 'odd-man-out', whereas with four it more naturally divides into two pairs.

Anyway, to answer to the original question, the suggestions here have been good so far. Keep it short and simple. One character per player with a potential NPC sidekick would be my suggestion as well.

Tabletop RPGs are not at their best for wading through hordes of enemies like in a videogame, in my opinion, but if you want to do that in GURPS, here are a few suggestions:

1) Have hordes of weak, semi-skilled enemies. The idea here is that they are poor at hitting and defending and do not do much damage to the hero even if they hit. For instance, a goblin warband, with 1d-1 spear attacks at skill 11, dodging at 9 and no DR to speak of.

2) Have a big, well-armored hero who can cut his way through the enemies with relative ease, and can shrug off the odd hit. Given the above goblin example, even DR 4 would render the hero next to invulnerable, allowing him to take two attacks per turn using allout attack option and not defending at all.

3) Have a boss fight with a bigger, meaner enemy who is still a bit worse than the PC. This is the climax of the adventure.

4) String together with a piece of a story: 'The nearby forest houses a goblin warband that is attacking the local merchants using the road through the forest. Locate their lair and kill them for X gold.' Then sprinkle the goblins into a few different 'rooms' in the cavern complex and have fun.

And you can do this all with just the Basic Set or indeed only with GURPSlite to try it out. I wouldn't worry about magic at this early stage, nor even with the DF books. Sure, they will become very helpful, I am sure, when you decide to really get into it, but for a quick game to try it out, GURPSlite is enough IMHO.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Whyte

One of the reasons I prefer to have at least 3 players in my campaigns.
1 Player: no player-player interaction
2 Players: A-B interaction
3 Players: A-B, A-C, B-C (three times more potential interactions than with 2!)
4 Players: A-B, A-C, A-D, B-C, B-D, C-D (6, so again doubled from 3 players)

Much more than 4 players and I find it starts to become cluttered. 6 is my absolute max in any Campaign, and I tend to prefer 4-5. With three players, there is the risk of being the 'odd-man-out', whereas with four it more naturally divides into two pairs.

My preference for a minimum of 2 players is, as I said, because then it becomes potentially apparent to both players that the stuff in their character sheets matter. That it makes a difference, in a great many situations. That if the stuff on your character sheet had been something other than what it actually is, in-world events would have turned out very differently. That your character is what he can (and can't) do.

With a single player and a single character, it's easy for the player to end up assuming everything just happens because of GM fiat, and that the character sheet is a piece of fluff, never taken into account.

My ideal number of player is 3, which no doubt has a lot to do with my preference for rules systems that are light on the fudge, and which describe and define the abilities and potentials of the characters thoroughly. And my lack of ability to assume the players have prior familairity with the rules system used, unlike e.g. if you play anything similar to AD&D, or even D&D3/d20/OGL. That adds a certain teaching burden.

More players also makes for a more autonomously capable PC adventuring party, in campaigns that are party-based. You get some of the same effect with fewer players built on more points, but at a certain level (one that is far beyond the comfort point of the average GURPS GM, who hyperventilate in frustrated angst when confronted with something as twee as the 250 CP templates in GURPS DF) it becomes silly.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Whyte

1) Have hordes of weak, semi-skilled enemies. The idea here is that they are poor at hitting and defending and do not do much damage to the hero even if they hit. For instance, a goblin warband, with 1d-1 spear attacks at skill 11, dodging at 9 and no DR to speak of.

You can use some kind of "mook" rule.

The default solution of incompetent designers, though, is to say that being a mook means you die as soon as you take 1 hp of damage. The problem with this, which is obvious to anybody competent, is that it ends up massively disrespecting the weapon choices made by characters. In AC-based systems, it makes no difference at all what kind of weapon you use, while in DR-based systems like GURPS, all that matters is armour penetration, so you optimize your weapon loadout for that.

A more sophisticated solution is to give some kind of bonus when fighting mooks, without disrespecting weapon choice. In GURPS terms it can be something like Extra Attack -40% Only Usable on Unnamed Characters and a few levels of Striking ST with a similar Limitation (I think -40% is safe; -60% may be appropriate). That way, players can choose, if they so desire, to create characters who are optimized for combat-vs-mooks, or for boss fights.

Note, though, that in the Conan stories I remember having read, he doesn't do a whole lot of mook-slaying. He is a very skilled fighter, but not cinematically so. I'd say Conan, as Howard originally wrote him, is perfectly simulatable without using any kind of "mook" rules. (He also wore mail whenever he could, rather than having a preference for fighting bare-chested.)