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[Deathbane]

So, im currently at university studying to become a programmer. During the downtime, when i dont have work or projects to complete, ive found myself playing lots of roleplaying games such as traveller, dungeons and dragons, dark millenium etc with other people.

It then grasped me that of the fantasy equivalents, none of them i found were satisfying - they lacked the cool factors that i wanted. DnD was far too high fantasy, and for some reason GURPS has never, ever appealed to me.

It is then i remembered dwarf fortress. The works of threetoe and the amazing breadth of the things that can happen in adventure and fortress mode made me realise that DF would be ideal for
such a system. Since im also designed a sci fi rpg to code that is inspired by dwarf fortress's design ethic, i also see use in any devised system that could also inspire me to produce a better game system for that particular project.

Anyhows, to cut the waffle, the idea for Adventurer was born.

However, im looking for input on such a project, in key areas. Some of them are listed below.

How much should be written in rules?
What dice system would be most appropriate?
How will character creation occur? Will the stats and skills be the same as DF?
How will the combat system work? It will obviously need to be abstracted in some way.
How will monsters be handled?
Will the game be purely through dice rolls and imagination/other supplements or also be partly miniatures like DND, or should both be catered for?
Will there be deadly carp?
How should magic be implemented?

The list goes on...

Currently im hoping to keep the DF feel as much as possible, as a faithful creation would be cool. I want to take inspiration from threetoes stories and the powergoals where the main game fails to inspire.

At the moment im thinking of a d100 system as its one i favour after playing inquisitor, and will allow for the bonuses of dwarf fortress's default stats to be taken into effect.

What do you guys think?

Im very open to help and ideas!

Thanks!

[Armok]

Not saying this is a bad idea, but one of the REASONS DF combat system is so good is that it BREAKS with pen and paper RPGs and utilizes the suff that  computers can do better than humans, such as keeping track of a bazilion things abaut a huge amount of bodyparts, so trying to make it back to pen and paper will enougnter some obvius problems, and if you simplyfy it enought to be playable it wont feel like DF any more.

[Deathbane]

Yes that is what i was thinking. However, i had an idea for a simple compromise that makes the damage system more realistic, but gets away from the traveller and dnd HP system which fails utterly. I was thinking something that works more like inquisitor, where in 12 to 14 character battles a system that models limb damage and locational damage exists which is actually quite good. Also, if we can alleviate the 'magic potion, im healed' syndrome, that would also keep the dark fantasy feeling DF has going. If the players are scared of having too much FUN in the dwarf fortress sense, im sure we can get that adventurer feeling going.

Large battles, or for unimportant npcs, we could have a much more abstract system that only the gamesmaster has to see and use. He can then illustrate it how he likes to the other players, and make it exciting be how he portrays the combat itself.

Hope that answered some of your points, but i agree that that IS a problem to be solved.

[Googolplexed]

For the more complex stuff have the GM use a laptop

[Deathbane]

Haha yes! Dwarf fortress's world generation would be perfect to use to set up campaigns. The imagination of the gamesmaster coupled with the events in the legends makes for almost endless plot possibilities.

One of the questions is how involved should dwarf fortress be? Ideally it should encourage the players to check dwarf fortress out, and promote its use with adventurer, but it should also not REQUIRE dwarf fortress to be playable.

Since i have an active player group who is willing to try whatever we come up with, that includes people from both camps, we have an ideal set of test subjects fellow forumites.

[Googolplexed]

DFs world gen would be great for use in an RPG

I was also thinking about combat though. As Armok said, its too difficult to have the players/GM to calculate all this stuff about how deep the wound into their big toe is. You could have a computer do alot of the major calculations and then have the GM explain them to the players. The GM wouldn't have to say that their arm is down to 3hp, they could just say they are loosing blood or something. Limit the players infomation to what a person could reasonably know in battle. It would lead to gaming the mechanics less and make the players more aware that they don't know whats going on, simultaneously making them more cautious.
You would need a custom program though.

Also if the system was going to be anything like DF, then you would want to make the starting charectors a bit tougher, I can't imagine anything to be worse then a dwarf sustaining a non-lethal but otherwise crippling wound in the first battle, just because ONE dice roll went wrong.

PS: I haven't ever played a table-top RPG yet, I want to though. If this sounds like crap feel free to disregard it.

[Deathbane]

naw it doesnt sound crap at all, you have some valid points.

The oh crap, one dice roll and my head has been lost is a situation that is solved in many rpgs by giving the player grace points (usually called something thematic, in vampires masquerades its called willpower, in the battletech rpg edge). Everybody starts with 4, and each one allows the player to reroll any dodgy dice that has led to something lame happening. These are replenished by the gamesmaster when the player does something epic, or as each stage ends.

Also, the gamesmaster himself being the final arbitrator can override the dice rolls.

About the combat, i was thinking of an abstraction. Each creature could have a hit location table to it, which details the main parts of its body (Head, arms, torso, legs, hands and feet). Each of these locations would have a condition, not a hitpoint count. Something like bruised, cut, mangled, broken/useless and decapitated. Critical wonds could be simulated by simply having that on a particular roll a critical hit occurs, and that induces somekind of organ damage/knockout as we see in the game. We dont need particular descriptions for every injury as that can be played out by the gamesmaster. The overall condition of a character could be a bloodpoint system - being struck critical hits not only damage the condition of limbs but lower this - bleeding etc could be a lingering effect on these points, and when they reach a certain level toughness tests would be needed to be taken or unconciousness.

This system would be workable with appropriate tables for small numbers of combatants. For many npcs and non essential enemies, a basic Good, Fine, INjured and incapacitated system could be implemented that doesnt bother with individual wounds, instead relying on gamemaster narration.

This would make combat about the hits being deadly - rather than the you hit for 20 hp damage system we are trying to avoid.

In summary to make it clearer

For important characters:

Limb specific condition, that also counts critical hits using a table specific to its main body type (quadruped etc). these critical hits would simulate anything from mortal wounds to loss of a hand, and would be a permanant or lingering wound on the character sheet.

Bloodpoints - the condition of the character, can only be reduced by bleeding or critical hits. Limb specifics track everything else.

This also gives that legendary named giant cave spider even more deadly features - it would be harder to hit the same limb repeadtedly, just like in Dwarf Fortress, thus making it a harder opponent.

For minions:

4 level system thats further abstract, and more akin to something dnd but still striving for a df flavour. That means unconciousness and bleeding etc, but no specific lingering limb damage system, left to the gamesmaster to visualise and direct the npcs. This will be needed if say, 20 goblins jump the player.

While a program would be good to simulate this, needed to bring a laptop to every session would not really be feasible for many. However, this system is a good compromise. People have played sessions of battletech which has a much more complicated system using many more units than this

Anyhows one is off to bed, its 1:30 am christmas morning haha.

Ill check back soon! Hopefully have a brainstorm on this when the food kicks in tomorrow.

[Binamrad]

The limb damage thing reminds me of the Swedish RPG Dragons & Demons that has a system where you need to see where each hit hits.
When you hit someone you roll a d20 to see where you hit, and the damage is subtracted from each body parts individual hitpoints as well as the total hitpoints from what you are trying to hit. When the bodypart is damaged more than it has hitpoints you roll a d10 and add the amount of damage that can't be absorbed by the bodypart. The number you would get from that is then compared against a list that describes, very colourfully, what happens with the limb.
If it was 10-20+ or something the limb was cut off to a varying degree, more or less killing the creature/adventurer instantly.

The system has a few flaws, like the critical/open hits rules making infinite damage (theoretically) possible, which means every adventurer sooner or later gets killed by an insanely lucky hit by a small dog or something, but the hitpoint system is quite good I think.

[Deathbane]

Something like that would be cool. I dont know how im going to do combat yet, but i have settled on using a d100 system as a base. I it allows me to more easily compare how DF records things to the rpg system, without making it too complicated.

At the moment, rolls are set as the following.

All tasks have a difficulty, from very easy (50) to almost impossible (200)

A standard difficulty roll would be around 80.

Now the resolution is rather quite simple. It is your attributes + skills (sometimes modified by personality traits), in addition to a d100 roll. If this beats the difficulty threshold set by the gm, it suceeds. If it rolls under within a bracket of 10, its a near failure. Any lower and the action fails. A roll > 90 on the d100 indicates a brilliant success regardless of the attributes, and a score lower than 10 indicates an automatic critical failure - even if the test could be passed by attributes alone. Im working on a failure margin table to help the gm decide how well or badly an action has suceeded. 

This is a preliminary system and im going to test it out, but it should be reasonably fair. Its more if its rememberable and doesnt give out silly numbers.

I also have a few ideas worked out about opposed checks. Ill try and get this written up and tested soon.


A idea for the magic system would be awesome. Something linked to gods, power batering, long rituals under a red moon. That kind of stuff, rather than the cast magic missile variety.


EDIT: If you read the thread please comment, having your input on the project would be very helpful, for any sections you might want to add, see or are worried about. I hope to have a proper pdf manual done for adventurer sometime in the future after its been playtested i can release to you all!.

[Eagleon]

My suggestion for magic in something like this would be to mostly leave it up to the GM on a case-by-case basis, but give him some help. If you're going with what vanilla DF has now, there's not really much to go off of besides the sphere system, and the artifact system. More, there are countless ideas about how magic should function when it is put in the game, so that kind of shows how GMs for something like this might react to having one single set system in place.

In general it seems like systems can be broken into

• Rules about what you can and can't do (are there certain things, like mind control, that are just too complex or otherwise off-limits? Does it only apply to one thing (i.e, making magic items)?)
• What sort of scale in difficulty it has (is it something you can pick up in a single risky afternoon tracking down the mystical Vanishheat combination in Knifeslaughter the Cave of Rape, or something you have to devote your life to)
• Where, how, and if you learn to use it (reading ancient tomes, focusing hard enough in the right way, one-time fey inspiration)
• What sort of things you need to do to use it (incantations, inscription, telling secrets to demonic spirits, praying, etc. etc.)

If you break a lot of different systems down and analyze them this way, and encapsulate them in little modules that can be fitted together and altered easily by the GM, it would be a sort of loose reminder about things to look out for in any particular system the GM decides upon, along with a few helpful formulas for skill progression, combat rolls, etc if applicable and desirable.

The idea is to make things that aren't completely abstract (which would upset the player and potentially cause fighting over dice rolls), available for the players to look at instead of a ton of tables or spell definitions, and easy enough to remember that it works like a book - the author knows what's possible, and knows the situations where important characters might be too powerful for a situation, so he can write around it. Of course there's still the problem of players arguing with the GM, but that'll happen with hard mechanics too, and a good GM will make power limited to the challenges at hand anyway.

[lemonpieman]

Dwarf fortress needs a roleplaying game!

 no

[PandarenLord]

Dwarf fortress needs a roleplaying game!

 no

It doesn't need one, but that doesn't mean it lacks potential.

[Cruxador]

I'd use GURPS to get the right feel. If you don't like it, I'm sure there's something indy that would work. With folks I play with, DF stuff is sort of default now. Settings aren't DF, but if somebody wants to make a new setting and doesn't want to screw with a particular race or whatever, that thing is as per DF.

[HatfieldCW]

So much of DF's value coes from the simulation, the math would be dizzying for a tabletop game.  Tracking rates of blood loss, dozens of wounds, pages of equipment stats and a ton of wrestling moves would be a total nightmare.  On the other hand, the lack of special moves, support roles and non-combat character development would make the end result a little dry for the players.  No healing, no buffing, no synergy, the gameplay is about as deep as Halo without grenades.  It would have fanboy potential if you want to kill a guy by throwing a sock through his face or auto-dodge into a river and drown, but I just don't think DF is a good model for that kind of game.

DF doesn't even have much of a setting, since the procedural worldgen makes consistency impossible.

On the other hand, I love to make characters based on DF models, like my hammerdwarf in Dragon Age that doesn't do anything but smash and go berserk.  I'd suggest that you make a nice game, maybe through GURPS, as Cruxador suggested, and then build scenarios based on noteworth fort stories, like Tholtig Cryptbrain's lonely vigil or Boatmurdered or Cacame's empire, and then use DF stereotypes for racial attributes and use ThreeToe's stories as atmospheric inspiration.  Could be a lot of fun, particularly for DF players.

[Deathbane]

thanks eagleon for the suggestion - something along those lines would be a great idea. I REALLY like ideas of magical artifacts, rituals etc that people would have to earn, find or kill for within a campaign rather than simply having 'daily' spells etc like in dungeons and dragons. Most of the magic will be god based, either relying on blessings, curses, artifacts or powers of the lands.

I see where you are going Hatfield, and i can see your points. However, nobody is saying we are going to recreate DF to the tee. Infact, adventurer is more for creating adventures similar to threetoes stories - which are hardly dry! Of course there will be support classes - healers are important to all rpgs. This doesnt mean there will be healing potions or cure light wounds, just that it will be more involved. Infact, if you look at the skills within dwarf fortress, there is plenty of scope for support characters, and of course characters will be able to heal. Not magically repair mortal wounds. If people are thinking in classes, they shouldnt be playing adventurer, as theyd probably prefer DnD. You dont play a 'paladin' or a 'wizard', you play a well crafted character and take them into almost impossible situations - the stuff that good roleplays are made from!

The dryness of dwarf fortress is that it isnt specific on what the civilisations arnt like - perfect backdrop for a gamesmaster that wants to add his own touch. The gamesmaster isnt limited to a stock world like dungeons and dragons, but is able to create his own take on the kind of worlds that threetoes stories take place within.

Adventurer is an inspired attempt to create an environment within which that can take place, not a direct translation of dwarf fortress onto the tabletop.

Im about finished with a section and i can get cracking on the main systems and test them out to see if they work.

Also, when i get around to doing the bestiary (when ive set out ther rule set governing creatures) you guys are more than welcome to add an entry for inclusion. Entries for the mundane creatures wont be long, while stuff like the giant cave spiders will need something cool writing especially for them. My friend whos a good artist has agreed to do some work drawing some of the creatures for that section, shes quite good but she likes to draw relatively dark things if you know what i mean. So perfect! haha

PS: Am i the only person who thinks 'holy s**t at the amount of stickies in DF general discussion? heh