Just Roll 3d6

This review has covered the five books in the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game boxed set, as well as the maps for the included dungeon adventure. The boxed set also includes a set of dice and cardboard printouts of adventurers and monsters to use on the hex grid; I haven’t reviewed these because I only have received the PDFs as of this writing.

Ultimately, the goal of the Dungeon Fantasy set is to get new players into GURPS with a ready-to-run game. How well does DFRPG accomplish that goal?

First, DFPRG is clearly one of the best best entry points to GURPS that SJ Games has produced yet. The challenges of character creation have been dramatically reduced through the use of professional templates in Adventurers, and the overwhelming rules options in Basic Set have been successfully reduced down to a manageable set. This is a game that new players can jump into and new GMs can feel comfortable running.

The included adventure is an important part of the starter set roleplaying box, and “I Smell a Rat” is a good introduction. There are some details that need polish, but the adventure makes sense for the genre, has a reasonable hook and plot line, shows off the diversity of skills and character options in GURPS, and walks the players through a difficulty learning curve that starts in an appropriate place before ramping up the challenge.

Dungeon Fantasy exceeds other box sets in providing a full gamut of character options and monsters so the excitement doesn’t end after the first adventure. Gaming groups have enough material to support full campaign arcs that can run for months or even years before they need to purchase additional materials (whether that be the Basic Set, DF supplements, or other GURPS books).

However, the boxed set also has some flaws. While GURPS is a great roleplaying system, and DFRPG is a much-improved entry point, it is still not a great RPG book. There are serious issues with organization and layout that impede the usability of the books, especially from the GM’s perspective. Graphically, the covers are wonderful, but the interior imagery feels cheap and perfunctory. Monster formatting is still a challenge, and for a genre that is so combat-centric, the lack of a combat rating system or concrete advice on constructing encounters is a gaping hole.

There’s two ways to compare the strengths and weaknesses of Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game, and both are fair. For people who are entirely unfamiliar with roleplaying games, this set is acceptable but not great. It’s a leap beyond the Basic Set, but compared to other giants of the industry it’s not as polished or immersive. On the other hand, it combines the benefits of a starter set (easy to build characters and an introduction adventure) with a full gaming product that can continue for campaigns to come, and the content of that gaming product lends itself to more flexible and richer gameplay experience than competing games. That’s a lot of value in a single box.

The suggested retail price for DFPRG is $59.95. With a retail price of $100-150 for the core rulebooks of the hack-and-slash genre, that’s a big cost savings—especially since this set also includes an adventure, which would cost another $20 in competing systems.

Bottom line: if you’ve been curious about GURPS or wanted to try but were afraid that it was too complex, Dungeon Fantasy RPG is the introduction point you needed to get over the hump. If you are an experienced roleplayer and love the hack-and-slash genre, DFRPG will excite you with a level of character detail and creativity that is hard to replicate in other systems. If you are brand new to roleplaying, it’s harder to make a recommendation. If you like the GURPS approach, this set will be a great value. Unfortunately, if it turns out that GURPS is not your cup of tea, then you’ll have spent more than you would on a test drive with a starter set from other games.

Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game demonstrates that GURPS is still a great choice for tabletop gamers. While there are still low-hanging fruit for improvement, this approach is a huge improvement in making GURPS accessible and relevant to a new generation of players.

We’re finally at the last volume of the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game boxed set. This post reviews the Dungeon book, which contains the “I Smell a Rat” adventure. It is a 26 page PDF written by Sean Punch.

The boxed set also includes two double-sided maps for this adventure. In the PDF version, one of the map pages is 30″ x 30″, while the other is 20″ x 30″.

For those who are worried about spoilers, this review will be mostly spoiler-free. I will mention some mechanics that show up in the game, but when they show up or how to use them will be left a secret.

Covers and Front Matter

The front cover depicts a party of adventurers underground, surrounded  by a pack of rats. The art again contributes to the world-building; throughout this boxed set, the covers have communicated a consistent tone of excitement, danger, and uncertainty.

The back cover is a blank 9 by 10 hex grid. The grid is a nice GM aid, but on its own the grid has too few squares for combat that involves much movement. It will suffice for quick sketches or close quarters fights, but most GMs will outgrow this space quickly. In future games, it may be worth considering putting adventure quick references on this cover: plot hooks, key stats for NPCs, or a brief flowchart of the adventure. The obvious disadvantage to this suggestion is that the back cover is exposed, so having spoilers in that material may not work. But, the advantages of a quick GM reference may outweigh the consequences for players with wandering eyeballs.

The Introduction notes that this book is for GMs only—players who read this book risk spoiling the adventure! There is a sidebar with two chunks of helpful advice: suggestions on how to encourage players to take the narrative hook for the adventure, and some guidelines for scaling encounters in the adventure.

Setting the Scene

The first chapter takes two pages to get the adventure started. It provides some background information on the nameless town where the adventure occurs, explains how the adventurers can learn of the quest, and provides an initial hook for the adventure. The hook works for drawing in characters that are looking to make money through adventuring (i.e., Dungeon Fantasy PCs), and there are some good suggestions for the skills to use in order to kick off the quest.

The biggest criticism I have for the Dungeons volume is that it reads like a novel, rather than a GM guide. Instead of starting with a high-level overview of the adventure so the GM has a framework in which to interpret the details they read, the presentation starts from the premise of the adventure (hunt rats for money) and then walks through each room of the dungeon in order. This chapter would have been the perfect place to step back and share the big picture with the GM. For a relatively linear dungeon like this, a flowchart would have been a great way to provide a visual structure to organize the GM’s thinking, but a written overview would also work well.

The Dungeon

The meat of this volume is the 15 page chapter on the dungeon itself. The last page of the chapter is a full-page map of the dungeon. This map reproduces most of the content in the standalone maps; there are a couple of areas in the standalone maps that are designed for the stretch goal adventure, and so do not appear in this book.

The adventure itself is well written. There’s plenty of detail for GMs to describe what’s happening and respond to the players’ actions. The adventure plays to a variety of PC skills throughout the scenario, showcasing GURPS’ skill system as well as the unique characteristics of the party members. The challenges are combat-heavy, but not exclusively combat-related, and the diversity in the combat opponents makes the game feel dynamic. There’s also an interesting twist that the PCs discover during the adventure, which gives an in-game justification for the more unusual opponents that the heroes face and creates potential plot hooks for follow-on adventures.

There are a couple of ways that this chapter could have been organized more effectively. In keeping with the goal of giving the GM a high-level overview before diving into the details, the map should have been at the front of the chapter instead of the back. There are a lot of details in the paragraphs describing each area; it would be easier to scan for the details by putting mechanical notes in bullet form.

The standalone maps are a great addition to the set, but unfortunately they are not designed for player use. There are letters that mark areas of interest on the maps, cueing the players to investigate those spots, and the maps give away a few secret doors because those doors are marked on the map. It would have been better to leave those indications off the full-size maps and only put that information in the Dungeons book.

I haven’t run the adventure yet, so I can’t speak from playtested experience. It looks like the adventure will follow the plot easily and there certainly is an escalating difficulty curve to the adventure. I worry that the final confrontation may be too unforgiving of a challenge, but again I haven’t playtested it and may be worried over nothing.

Rewards

After surviving the dungeon, the adventures deserve a nice profit, and this three page chapter describes what they can salvage from underground and how much they can get for it. It also includes guidelines for character progression, with suggested values for earned character points based on what the PCs accomplished in the dungeon.

There’s not a lot to say about this chapter. There’s plenty of loot to be found if the PCs are thorough, so exploring the dungeon is definitely worth the risk!

The Adventure Continues

The last page of Dungeon lists a handful of suggestions for expanding the adventure by adding secret rooms, encounters, or a side quest. Although the idea of extending the adventure is nice, the actual suggestions feel tacked-on. The side quest is the most novel idea, but it boils down to a single skill roll; there should have been more heft to the suggestion.

Overall Thoughts

Dungeon is a solid starting adventure for new or new-to-GURPS players, as well as roleplaying veterans. There is a solid hook with a straightforward plot, and the adventure showcases the depth of GURPS characters and rules.

The presentation could be improved in a couple of areas: providing a high-level overview for the GM to get their bearings and having player-facing maps are the two biggest opportunities. There also could be greater depth in the side quests, extra hooks, or follow-on adventure suggestions. Overall, though, this volume accomplishes its goal of getting players playing as soon as possible.

This post dives into the second book included with the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game (DFRPG), produced by Steve Jackson Games through a Kickstarter campaign. If you missed the review of Adventurers, the first volume, you can find a link in the sidebar.

As a brief reminder: DFRPG is a standalone GURPS product for roleplaying hack-and-slash dungeon delving. It is fully compatible with other GURPS publications but does not require anything beyond the boxed set. The goal of this product is to give new-to-GURPS players an accessible starting point for one of the most popular genres of tabletop roleplaying games.

The focus of Adventurers was player characters, and especially character creation. Exploits covers what those characters do and how to run the game they are in. It is also written by Sean Punch.

The Covers & Front Matter

Like with the Adventurers volume, the front cover of Exploits features a beautiful, thematic image of the kinds of scenes players can expect to confront while dungeon delving. The back cover has likewise been converted into a reference page with an assortment of GM rules: light and vision penalties, wounding modifiers, falling damage, and throwing distance/damage.

Using the back cover as a reference is a good idea, but the selected rules definitely suggest a crunchy version of the game. In particular, the wounding modifiers take up half the page because they are broken down by type of damage, hit location, and living/unliving/homogenous status. Whether that’s too much detail for gaming groups or a helpful reference for a frequently used mechanic will depend on how quickly the GM can become comfortable with the rules options chosen for Dungeon Fantasy.

The introduction for this volume is a single page that summarizes what is in the book. Exploits is explicitly not pitched as a gamemaster guide: it is intended for use by both GMs and players so they each can discover what they can do during the game.

Rolling the Dice

The first chapter uses only eight pages to explain everything dice-related except for damage rolls. There are a lot of improvements in this chapter compared to the Basic Set.

The chapter opens with success rolls. Generic task difficulty modifiers are featured more prominently than in Basic Set, although there isn’t explicit permission for GMs to use task difficulty modifiers to ballpark whenever they don’t want to reach for the full rules. Team-based skill use is highlighted in a prominent sidebar.

One of the bigger changes from the Basic Set is how fright checks are handled. Failed fright checks used to require rolling on a lengthy table to determine the consequence. Now, the GM instead gets to pick a disadvantage for the PC, with the point cost of the disadvantage determined by how badly he or she failed the fright check. This approach greatly simplifies fright checks.

Influence skills are also simplified, although the result is mixed. Sex appeal no longer has better or worse results than other influence skills, which is a nice decision to eliminate a rules exception. But, there is no discussion about how influence skills are about the approach taken rather than the content, which may make influence skills seem more limited. There’s also a weird organizational choice here: the rules on fright checks are sandwiched between influence skills and reaction rolls, and the reaction roll section still has a paragraph on influence skills that feels repetitive. It seems like the influence skill rules should have just been put inside the reaction roll section.

With the exception of that odd organization detail, this chapter reads well. The explanations are concise and omit details that aren’t relevant to the hack-and-slash genre.

Dungeon Delving

The second chapter, which is 13 pages long, sets up the basic dynamic of a dungeon adventure: beginning in town, traveling to the dungeon, exploring and surviving, returning, and recovering for the next round.

This chapter is rich in ideas for what PCs can do during the game, and both players and the GM should read it for inspiration. The suggestions also showcase how GURPS’ lengthier skill lists can be used to make the game interesting. The one negative to this approach is that there aren’t explicit statements that the players or GM shouldn’t be limited by these suggestions, and newer participants may feel like the ideas are prescriptive rather than suggestions.

The rules for physical feats seem more relevant than in Basic Set; the volume does a good job of using the dungeon dive context to motivate the feats discussed. However, the level of detail is inconsistent. For instance, the Basic Set rules for how quickly PCs can climb have been eliminated, but there is still a table to look up how far an object can be thrown based on its weight and the PC strength. There are some oddly specific feats discussed in detail, such as how two PCs can lift each other up a ledge or how to jump and kick off one obstacle to get to a higher one. This section may have benefited from a change of voice—by working through how to estimate a task difficulty modifier using these feats as examples, a new GM would be more able to choose relevant penalties during a game for all kinds of unusual situations.

While the ideas in this chapter are thought-provoking, there is very little flavor beyond the text. There is only one half-page image and a couple of pull quotes to build atmosphere. Compared to other major RPGs, the text-heavy approach feels unpolished.

Fighting

At 33 pages, the combat chapter is more than twice as long as any of the other chapters in this book. It’s clear that combat is expected to be a major part of dungeon fantasy games, and there is a lot of crunch packed into this chapter.

In some ways, dungeon fantasy combat is required to be crunchier than the standard combat system in the Basic Set. Movement points are used instead throughout the chapter, hex maps are assumed, and there’s no discussion of turning off options like knockback, hit locations, or damage to objects. There’s a lot to absorb here, and new-to-GURPS players will probably need to read through a couple of times to get it all.

There are some nice touches in this chapter. There is a short discussion of how the GM can set the scene for the combat. The evaluate maneuver has been eliminated as underpowered. The last two pages are dedicated to ideas for using noncombat skills in battle, such as giving an inspiring speech to your allies or taunting animals to take their attention off weaker party members.

This chapter straddles the line between providing a combat system that is rich enough to keep dungeon fantasy interesting and describing a combat system that is simple enough for players to jump in. It doesn’t strike a bad balance, but it could have been improved by using examples for some of the more complicated rules or flagging some rules as optional or advanced variants.

Bad Things

The fourth chapter covers all the rules for injury, fatigue loss, and other afflictions and ailments. The presentation is well-written and there is nothing here than is foreign to the Basic Set.

Like the combat chapter, many of the rules that are optional in the Basic Set are assumed to be on for Dungeon Fantasy. For instance, major wounds and crippling injuries are required rules for injury, and the starvation rules for fatigue loss are also mandatory. It’s clear that this decision was guided by the genre considerations, but it does impose an additional burden on new GMs.

The biggest complaint about this chapter is that the Other Pain and Suffering section is weirdly organized. Traps are included in a list with other damage sources like acid, flame, and poison instead of being their own section of things that can cause various types of injury, and the rules for detecting and disarming traps feel out of place in this listing. The afflictions category is also a catchall for a wide variety of conditions. While that’s consistent with how afflictions function in GURPS, it’s not obvious to a new player what that list contains or where within the affliction subcategories they should look to find a specific kind of suffering.

Treasure

The entire point of dungeon exploration in the Dungeon Fantasy game is loot, so chapter 5 is dedicated to treasure. This is a short and functional chapter; it’s only eight pages long and the focus is on the basics of what can be in a dungeon. There are the standard coins, precious metals and jewels, but also unique items like art, maps, and spellbooks.

Towards the start of the chapter, there is some helpful GM advice to err on the side of more treasure rather than less, with some suggestions on how to handle when the players accidentally get too much.

This chapter also includes magic items, but the treatment is fairly abbreviated. There are no examples except for magic items with a specific mechanical function, like an enhanced shield that gives a +1 bonus. The most exotic item is the loyal weapon, which flies back to the owner if it is dropped or thrown.

While this chapter is functional, there’s not a lot of depth to inspire GMs. It’s a good thing that one of the supplement books produced during the Kickstarter focused on magic items.

Game Mastering

The final chapter is a 15-page smorgasbord of topics for GMs to consider as they plan and run the game. The topic selection is good, especially for new GMs, but beginners may need more depth than this chapter provides. There are also some organizational challenges in this chapter; it reads as a list of thoughts rather than a logical sequence.

The chapter begins with a brief description of the GM’s duties. This section helpfully clarifies that, although the GM is running the opposition to the players, the GM’s role is to provide challenges rather than be an adversary, and that the goal is for everyone to have fun.

The next section of the chapter covers dungeon design and preparation. This section has some good worldbuilding questions to guide the GM’s thinking. There are very detailed statistics for game world stuff (e.g., the DR for various door materials); the depth of mechanics feels out of place in this chapter, but the information can certainly be useful during a campaign.

The risk of the way information is presented is that it creates the impression that gamemastering must be a prep-heavy activity. New GMs won’t find much advice for how to estimate or make decisions on-the-fly. The implication is that gamemasters have to know all the answers to what their dungeon looks like and how it functions in order for the players to have fun.

This section also contains a page or so of advice for balancing encounters. Some of the advice is concrete and actionable, e.g., make sure at least one enemy can hurt your best protected PC, but can’t outright kill the weakest one. Other advice tells what to consider but doesn’t follow through with what to do about it. For instance, the text suggests incorporating monsters that have a high Dodge ability, but doesn’t tell what changes to make in order to compensate (such as having those creatures deal less damage). This section is a step in the right direction for GURPS, but there’s still room for improvement in the thoroughness of the advice.

There is a helpful sidebar for extending the game beyond the dungeon into the wilderness or parallel planes. As I noted in the Adventurers review, Dungeon Fantasy is explicitly positioning itself as a “quest for loot” game, which is a narrower focus than other fantasy RPGs on the market today, and this sidebar sticks to that focus. There are good reasons for the narrower scope, as well as reasonable objections; it will be interesting to see how the market reacts to that choice.

The second section of the chapter segues from preparing the dungeon to GM advice for running the game. There’s a variety of topics in this section, ranging from how to structure a session, adventure, and campaign to dealing with players.

There’s a couple of highlights in this section. For new GMs in particular, the advice about how to structure sessions and adventures is welcome. The suggestions for how to make each profession useful are good ideas to keep each PC relevant. Because GURPS games can result in PC death or dismemberment, there are a couple of pages of advice for keeping the PCs alive and adapting when things go wrong (although some of the suggestions could use more detail on how to implement them).

However, there is a particularly heavy-handed way for dealing with table talk: impose the “if you say it, your character says it” rule. This approach can be used successfully, but it can also be antagonistic—especially if the GM isn’t reflecting on why the players are engaged in table talk.

The final section of the chapter discusses character advancement. It’s a very mechanical process of counting worthy monsters, found bonus areas, and the like; it would have been nice to see a bigger-picture framework for character advancement before getting the laundry list of calculations. There’s a list of rules for what players can spend character points on; one of the nice touches is a list of how each profession can exceed the general limit on trait levels in specific areas.

Back Matter

The back matter begins with eight pages of reference tables: attack and defense modifiers, maneuvers and postures, critical hit and miss effects, etc. The format is similar to the Basic Set. For some reason, the explanation of the size and speed/range table is separated by a page break from the table itself.

There’s a two page example of play. This imagined dialogue among the GM and players is a great addition. It illustrates lots of the game mechanics and concretely demonstrates what a GURPS session sounds like. Any future book that has beginners in its intended audience should have a segment like this (and ideally towards the front of the book!).

The example of play is followed by an index, a one page ad, and four pages of GM sheets for recording character and adventure info.

Overall Thoughts

Exploits is a solid volume. It covers the mechanics of the game well and gives enough advice for gamemasters to start running sessions. There’s a clear awareness of the issues that new players and GMs struggle with and a conscious effort to address those concerns. The execution on those efforts is not perfect, but it’s moving in the right direction.

It’s not a great volume, though: it still implies that GURPS is a rules-heavy game that is prescriptive and requires lots of session prep. Tighter organization, more high-level summaries before diving into rules minutiae, and better indications of what is optional would make this a stronger book. It’s a definite improvement over the Basic Set, but it’s not outstanding work like Adventurers.

Exploits also feels at times like a perfunctory, mechanical work. The lack of thematically rich items or other sources of flavor is apparent. The sparse artwork and text-heavy layout contributes to this feeling. Exploring for gold may be a rational economic choice for adventurers, but this book doesn’t showcase the excitement, mystery, and wonder that such explorations can provide.