I am a Gurps fan, and I like how I can dial it to the genre/setting I am using it for.  But it does take some work.  I saw the Box set at my local store and picked it up (it was only 60 bucks) and I have to say I was very surprised at how much I liked it.   I do not love everything for Gurps 4th edition,  I do find myself buying just about anything they print.  

    Anyway, I decided to pick it up after reading this guy's blog for the past couple years http://dungeonfantastic.blogspot.com/p/my-df-campaign.html.   The characters do start out pretty powerful for "beginners" but this does allow a GM to have a bit more flexibility to offer challenges.   I just wish they had more modules/adventures, but I have a pretty easy time of eyeballing old school modules to the game and am about to start the players on G1-3.   Anyway, anyone else playing this?

I snapped up Dungeon Fantasy as a kickstarter. I've played GURPS since its first book, TFT before that, and most of my GURPS campaigns and play have been in fantasy/ancient/medieval settings with lots of action and a healthy share of dungeons and powerful stuffs.

Like you, I half-like 4e, but I do like the increased detail and quality that seems to go into the 4e supplements I've seen. I play with a mix of 3e, 4e, and rules from supplements and house rules.

I haven't thoroughly studied Dungeon Fantasy yet. I like that it makes a concise all-fantasy more-accessible version of GURPS with some nice components. One of my main gripes with the 4e Basic Set is that it tosses in nearly everything from all genres (most of which I will never use so it's mainly noise to me), and how it elaborates on assessing the point costs of various advantages (which I don't really care much about nor use, so is also noise to me), and Dungeon Fantasy nicely has none of that. However what it does have is cliche` D&D-like stuff such as what amounts to classes (that don't make sense), niche protection, generic dungeoneering settings, and other things which I don't like any better in GURPS than I do in D&D. There are also a few more dumbed-down or tweaked-for-newbies rules details which I also don't like. At most, I will use the maps and maybe use some specific content such as monster ideas, but that's about it.

I do sometimes toy with running certain dungeon settings from other game systems, but part of my interest is just to see how they play out using GURPS, because the way things work is so different that it seems like an interesting experiment in both directions. That is, it's interesting to see what happens to gonzo dungeons when combat and magic work differently and you play them out as situations rather that compartmentalized rooms, and it's also interesting to see how GURPS plays out when it has gonzo content such as extremely deadly/powerful magic items and traps and monsters. It's also mercifully short-lived, because the PCs tend to get defeated or routed pretty quickly the times I've tried it.

I've run it a bit, it's fun.  A fair bit heavier than I'd have gone for an introductory set but since it links to the pdf series it's understandable.

Quote from: oggsmash;1021518http://dungeonfantastic.blogspot.com/p/my-df-campaign.html

MOTHER OF PEARL!

This blog is friggin epic in it's scope and documentation of this guys campaign, colour me impressed.

Thanks for sharing the link oggsmash.

Quote from: Gwarh;1021856MOTHER OF PEARL!

This blog is friggin epic in it's scope and documentation of this guys campaign, colour me impressed.

Thanks for sharing the link oggsmash.

heh, reading it finally made me break down and get the box set.  It is pretty awesome.

I kickstarted it. Haven't played it and am still quite satisfied.

Nope. You can use GURPS really well for some types of fantasy (generally the grittier type), but for dungeoneering? Why not just stick with D&D, which was originally made for that?

Dungeon Fantasy characters start at 250 points so they perform more like seventh or eighth level D&D characters.  I generally feel GURPS is best at short campaigns.  Character creation is too slow for a one off and, because the character springs full grown from the player's head, there's not so much of a sense of character growth and development.  It's not just about the levels, though that concrete sense of progression keeps people's interest, but D&D characters start out very minimalist and grow into their depth through their careers, they build their background as they go and their depth grows organically.

Dungeon Fantasy characters are also fairly cinematic.  The Scout template has the Heroic Archer and Telescopic Vision advantages so they can ignore some range penalties (GURPS range penalties are brutal) and get their weapon's Accuracy bonus without aiming, and move and shoot without taking their bulk penalty.

Another feature of GURPS is its detail level, piecemeal armour, called shots to the neck, and so forth.  It makes visualization easier for some of us but it also creates some uniformity.  GURPS does tactical combat very well and Dungeon Fantasy is the game they should have had out when D&D 4e was cancelled.  

Dungeon Fantasy is full of sillier monsters.  It's not quite GURPS Disc World but there's a definite sense of old school gotcha monsters and weird tricks and traps.  It's not a full on parody like Munchkin but if you're attacked by carnivorous flying squirrels or a Triger (three headed tiger) don't be too surprised.  Game of Thrones this ain't.

I received this as a Christmas gift.  I'm impressed with the quality of the books and the boxed set.  That blog that was shared earlier is fantastic.  Reading it is getting me geeked up to play it!

Quote from: RPGPundit;1022217Nope. You can use GURPS really well for some types of fantasy (generally the grittier type), but for dungeoneering? Why not just stick with D&D, which was originally made for that?

Because I started playing with TFT, whose ITL campaign book also has dungeoneering in mind and has quite a few detailed rules for various situations with doors and traps and tunneling and how far noise travels and so on, and those rules seemed to make sense in a way that I relate to for non-mythic-underworld dungeons. To me, GURPS is just a more detailed and scalable version of TFT, and also works fine for dungeons.

Meanwhile I've never related positively to much of how D&D works/thinks in many ways that prevent me from enjoying it, and in comparison to TFT or GURPS there's very little I prefer about D&D. Now, I tend to give up when I try to read much D&D, so I may have missed something I'd want related to dungeoneering, but all that comes to mind that I do know about are:

* The game is designed to allow PCs to possibly survive long adventures in massive deadly dungeons with all kinds of wild stuff (unfortunately, I really don't like the way that balance works - high abstract hitpoints, levels, immunities, lots of powerful magic, healing magic, etc.).

* There's massive amounts of published dungeon content for D&D - skads of monsters and magics and dungeons - some of these sometimes tempt me to experiment, but I'd want to run them with TFT or GURPS, and then their balance is going to be wacky/deadly and I find them all a bit overwhelming and not in ways I like (so much magic and steep power curves to levels, monsters that are invulnerable to non-magic weapons, good/evil/neutral alignments, powerful magic, etc).

* The mythic underworld thing ... which I find ok as a concept but don't like the mechanics of much - it seems like a rationalization for the first game mechanics which always just seemed illogical to me - doors that are never locked for "monsters", darkness that all "monsters" can see through, PC races with "infravision" measures in short distances in feet, peculiar 1d6 mechanics for opening and spiking doors, monsters that don't need any kind of history of how they get where they are, dungeon levels that get predictably more dangerous in the same way the further you go down, eventually leading to "hell" levels, etc. (I eventually felt self-embarrassed enough by the number of rationalized little-explained dungeons in the wilderness I put in my first game world, even though they had almost none of those sorts of qualities.)

Quote from: David Johansen;1022233Dungeon Fantasy characters start at 250 points so they perform more like seventh or eighth level D&D characters.  I generally feel GURPS is best at short campaigns.  Character creation is too slow for a one off and, because the character springs full grown from the player's head, there's not so much of a sense of character growth and development.  It's not just about the levels, though that concrete sense of progression keeps people's interest, but D&D characters start out very minimalist and grow into their depth through their careers, they build their background as they go and their depth grows organically.

I wonder what it is that has you feel GURPS is best at short campaigns. I know what you mean about characters getting more into their characters, and character improvement during play helping that out, but I think that works great in GURPS especially because you can have PCs develop whatever skills they're learning during play, without character classes limiting how characters develop. That's one reason I prefer to start GURPS characters off at lower point totals without piles of adventuring skills, as I've often seen that kind of difference in how players relate to their own characters and their abilities (and how much they get into it and seem to enjoy it, too).

QuoteDungeon Fantasy characters are also fairly cinematic.  The Scout template has the Heroic Archer and Telescopic Vision advantages so they can ignore some range penalties (GURPS range penalties are brutal) and get their weapon's Accuracy bonus without aiming, and move and shoot without taking their bulk penalty.

Yeah, I don't much care for that aspect.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1022217Nope. You can use GURPS really well for some types of fantasy (generally the grittier type), but for dungeoneering? Why not just stick with D&D, which was originally made for that?

   I like GURPS, I played 1st edition AD&D, and I did like it alot.  Now older, I felt I wanted a few more things from it (DCC comes close to giving what I wanted from it).  I have several game systems (the only D&D 1 book I still have is the DMG, that is what I get for allowing my brother to be caretaker of my books when I left for boot camp 28 years ago) and the fast answer is, my players are enthusiastic, but not the biggest on getting different game systems down pat in a timely fashion.  GURPS makes it easy to go from fantasy to Post Apoc to Zombie Hordes to monster hunters.   I agree I thought GURPS a bit gritty for D&D type dungeon crawls....DF addresses a few of these in ready made advantages and templates.   I would LOVE to run a DCC campaign with my players, and I may, but GURPS is the one they know and it makes different genre campaigns easy.  

    I think system wise, DF Gurps can handle the genre no problem, what they really, really lack is published adventures.  They also lack monster books.   First RPG book I ever owned was the Monster Manual I got in 1981.  That book spoiled me, alot.  If Steve Jackson came out with a book with a few hundred fantasy monsters in it I would pay 60+ for it.

Yeah, there are a lot of good creature books for GURPS, but there isn't anything like a good Monster Manual fourth edition.  Even the 3rd edition Fantasy Bestiary lacked such a plentiful offering.

I thought I was going to like it more than I did; it is basically GURPS with a super high starting power level. I like GURPS and have played lots of it, but I don't think it is well suited to this genre, and it gets less manageable and less interesting as character point totals rise. Basically, I bought it, read it, and then kept playing TFT.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1022890I thought I was going to like it more than I did; it is basically GURPS with a super high starting power level. I like GURPS and have played lots of it, but I don't think it is well suited to this genre, and it gets less manageable and less interesting as character point totals rise. Basically, I bought it, read it, and then kept playing TFT.

  I thought this too regarding the manageable part.   After playing a session, I think I might have been hasty thinking that, but I think I will need 6-10 more to see where I fall on how "good" it really is.   The linked blog makes it seem as if a decent GM can manage it pretty easily, but I dont have much experience "driving the car" so to speak at this point.