[DF Idea] Diabolization

[Bruno]

There's actually quite a bit of support for the necromancer archetype kicking around, due to Kromm liking Diablo II and liking the undead in general. From the necromantic build for the Wizard to the Necromancer summoner (I played one of those, it was fun) to the horrible arm grafts and rods and staves with skulls on the end from Pyramid, it's pretty well traveled territory.

Since Diablo necromancers create generic undead rather than upgraded undead versions of whatever corpse they pull the skeleton out of, you avoid a lot of complications too if you want an advantages based build. You'll have a hard limit in the number of allies you can have at any given time, but that's actually pretty consistent with the game so :)

A Sorcerer(ess) seems an Elementalist, or a wizard built along those lines, depending if you want to focus on summons or do things more yourself. And it sounds like WhsWhs chinese elemental magic book (which I would NOT expect before next year, so don't nag him) will let you put a spin on your sorcerer/ess that Diablo wouldn't ;)

Non-"caster" characters in a Diablo-verse have lots of excuses to pick up borderline-supernatural or outright supernatural powers, and even spells although they're not as good at them. So a Powers based approach and a fairly lenient attitude towards Power Ups would be a good core approach.

I'd go with generally asking players to ID what Diablo class/concept they're inspired by; presumably if the idea is to have a Diablo game players are onboard for this and will have one they like. This will help give ideas for powerups and the templates and lenses you want to mix and match.

Amazon seems to be basically a lightly armored Mystic Knight focusing on ranged weapons (bows or thrown weapons). Rogue could be a Scout-Theif or Swashbuckler-Theif or possibly Theif-Wizard or Wizard-Theif.

And etc etc.

I suspect any class could justify lensing into Mystic Knight.

[Humabout]

If I had to pick DF templates for diablo classes, I'd have a tough time chosing between Assassin or Ninja for the Assassin. Demon Hunter could be a Demonologist or Demonologist lensed into Scout and D3 Monks look like Holy Warriors with some Martial Arttist or vice versa. Witch Doctors seem like Shaman straight up. D3 Wizards look more like DF Wizards to me, than Elementalists, but D1/D2 ones are pretty elementalish. Guess it could go either way. The rest seem pretty straight forward.

I'd still advocate a mix of powers and imbuements for capturing the feel of diablo, personally. That would require scrapping or redesigning a lot of the DF templates, but it'd be worth it in the end.

[JMD]

How to make your game like Diablo:
Promise your players you'll play Saturday at 6pm. When they show up, have them keep rolling dice every 60 seconds to log in. Don't let them in until one of them rolls three 18's in a row.

No, but seriously, the main concern is suspension of disbelief. There are a lot of very weird "quirks" diablo has that really don't make sense. So what you do is what I'm doing for my game right now, every player controls a character that is actually in a VR suit playing the video game itself. So each player has 2 sets of characters, one in the "Real world" and one in the game. It works wonders, because if they die...poof, deduct a CP and they are back in town. Oh, this dialog is boring? skip skip skip, give them the talking points.

It's very liberating. You can throw some real serious stuff at them and if they die, who cares?

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by JMD

So what you do is what I'm doing for my game right now, every player controls a character that is actually in a VR suit playing the video game itself. So each player has 2 sets of characters, one in the "Real world" and one in the game. It works wonders, because if they die...poof, deduct a CP and they are back in town. Oh, this dialog is boring? skip skip skip, give them the talking points.

And then the video game characters find a set of carved figurines and dice in a dungeon chest, and start rolling up characters... *GURPS-ception*

[Joe]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

And then the video game characters find a set of carved figurines and dice in a dungeon chest, and start rolling up characters... *GURPS-ception*

This is really very funny :)

[JMD]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

And then the video game characters find a set of carved figurines and dice in a dungeon chest, and start rolling up characters... *GURPS-ception*

We have to go deeper! Diablo is on the 5th level of gurpception.

[Humabout]

I think making a fun and effective GURPS: Diablo boils down to the same fundamentals as any conversion: convert the spirit of the game.

I'd pick a very cinematic rule set and ignore a lot of record keeping. I'd make liberal use of swarms and hordes with invidual monsters being the powerful badies. PCs would probably use a mix of Powers and Imbuements and largely be approached as supers rather than DF characters.

Frex, a Fallen horde would have a bunch of HP to represent a rediculous number of fallen, damage equal to a typical fallen's attack with a 1-handed weapon (you could roll 1d to determine damage type, if you wanted; 1-2: cr, 3-4: cut, 5-6: imp), and it'd need Regeneration (Fast+) to represent the shaman ressing all of the minions. You might make the shaman seperately and have it heal the horde instead, that way you can target the shaman directly from the outstart of the battle.

Alternatively, steal the setting and make a cinematic fantasy game in it, and let the feel fall wherever it may.

That's my $0.02.

[Rasputin]

Something that strikes me as being in the spirit of Diablo is having a random dungeon generator supplement, but I'd put that well down the list of Dungeon Fantasy supplements. I'd want more monsters (especially the classics; not having an entry for a dragon would bug me) and more traps first so there's a reference for those in the dungeon generator and a common base for altering them. It would be a cross between the one in Dragon Magazine #1 (which was in the 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide) and the Mythic GM Emulator: making a dungeon on-the-fly for a GM with no prep or players with no GM.