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View Full Version : Best system for a megadungeon campaign?



CandyLaser
2016-12-20, 09:15 PM
My latest meatspace campaign (a game of Shadow of the Demon Lord) is going to be coming to a close in a couple of months. That means it's time for a new game. My players are very interested in an old-school, classic megadungeon crawl, something along the lines of Undermountain, Dwimmermount, or the various Temple of Elemental Evil modules (or the original Diablo and Torchlight, for computer game examples). I'm interested in running that sort of campaign as well.

However, I'm not settled on what system to use. Here's what I'm looking for. First, I want planning and preparation to be important. I'll be tracking encumbrance, light source availability, and the like, so games that hand-wave that away won't work. (Note that games that track these things abstractly could be fine - so for instance, if instead of tracking exactly what food the PCs have, we just used 4e's survival days, that would suffice). Second, I want combat to be quick. Battlemaps and minis are fine, but we shouldn't need hours to do every battle (high level D&D 3.5, I'm looking at you). Third, I'd like to include some nods to old-school D&D. Race-as-class would be great, for example. Fourth, prep and dungeon stocking should be easy. Finally, I want characters to be customizable. It shouldn't be the case that any two fighters are essentially interchangeable, for example, mechanically speaking.

I'm looking for suggestions for what I should run or of things I've overlooked. Here's what I've been considering, along with the pros and cons that I see.


GURPS Dungeon Fantasy: It's designed for just this sort of play. Characters are incredibly customizable, but templates give archetypal "classes," and adding race-as-class is just a matter of having a "dwarf" template. It supports very detailed gear tracking and interesting combat. Downsides: I'm worried that it goes too far in terms of tracking detail. Finally, and this is the main problem, my players and I don't know the system, and there are tons and tons of rules. I know you don't need to use them all, but just using the various templates in the main Dungeon Fantasy sourcebook requires you to know what plenty of different advantages do, and don't even get me started on the various different magic systems.
D&D 4e: Some level of resource management is baked in. Using survival days (and a similar concept I'm calling light hours) I can track resources at an acceptable level of granularity. Dungeon stocking is easy as pie. Plenty of character customization and interesting fights. But fights can be slow, and it's about as far from old-school flavor as you can get.
D&D 5e: My last game before SotDL was 5e, and while I like 5e it doesn't do quite what I want for this game. I'd do 4e over 5e, any day of the week.
D&D 3.5/Pathfinder: Nope, not doing it, but included for completeness. I've run campaigns from 1 to epic and I don't want to do it again; prep work is just way too involved.
Adventurer, Conqueror, King (or some other OSR game): gets the old-school feel with some modern innovations. Character customization is limited, though, and I'd have to do some work examining spell and magic item lists to get rid of things that break the conceit of the megadungeon setting. They might be too old-school, as well - games like Dungeon Crawl Classics have way too much randomness for my tastes.
d6 Fantasy: This is an outlier. I'm familiar with d6 Space in the form of the old WEG Star Wars game, and the fantasy setup is interesting. But I have no experience with it directly, and I can't find much discussion of it online. Plus, its spell lists and bestiaries are a bit anemic, which means more prep work for me.
Torchbearer: I love the theme, and it's designed to handle deep dungeon delves. But it's a bit too grim for what I have in mind, and I don't like how it handles conflicts. I may steal its encumbrance system, though.


D&D systems other that 4e are the only ones I'm dead set against. Thoughts?

thirdkingdom
2016-12-20, 09:20 PM
ACKS. It's got the simple B/X engine with customization of classes thrown in, especially of you have the Player's Companion. Dwimmermount is truly fantasic -- IMHO the next best OSR megadungeon is Stonehenge -- and Dwimmermount is written with ACKS in mind.

Koo Rehtorb
2016-12-20, 09:23 PM
Why not play 1e D&D? It's the game that invented the whole megadungeon crawl in the first place and it's what it's really good at.

CandyLaser
2016-12-20, 09:31 PM
ACKS. It's got the simple B/X engine with customization of classes thrown in, especially of you have the Player's Companion. Dwimmermount is truly fantasic -- IMHO the next best OSR megadungeon is Stonehenge -- and Dwimmermount is written with ACKS in mind.

ACKS is one of the front-runners, along with GURPS. I'd basically be ignoring the CK part of it, but it otherwise hits quite a few of the targets. I have some issues, such as its THAC0-by-any-other-name combat system, and one of the main issues is whether or not I can get over them.


Why not play 1e D&D? It's the game that invented the whole megadungeon crawl in the first place and it's what it's really good at.

Too old-school. I cut my teeth on AD&D (1e and 2e) and I love it to pieces, but most of my players started in 3.5 or 4e and will find its weird idiosyncracies obnoxious.

Koo Rehtorb
2016-12-20, 10:41 PM
If you're willing to try something a little different, Torchbearer. It's a game specifically designed as a tribute to 1e D&D, but with a different sort of mechanics, tuned for dungeon crawling.

Inventory management, hunger/thirst, and light are all central mechanics to the game. Characters will take conditions from hungry/thirsty, angry, afraid, exhausted, injured, and sick, all of which have distinct mechanical penalties. Slowly grind your characters down until they're ready to crawl into the nearest hole to die.

Divusmors
2016-12-20, 11:20 PM
Palladium isn't too bad, although I've never experienced it with a mega dungeon. It's fairly adaptable so you should be able to implement survival from another system if you want to change it up a little. Maybe make a quick cheat-sheet for how much skills drop from a bad situation (hunger, thirst, etc). It's not heavily magic based, a lot of the conflict is usually done with the melee system, but the fact that you counter-roll to dodge or parry gets people a little more involved than just sitting and waiting to go.

Thrudd
2016-12-20, 11:43 PM
Definately ACKS, or another B/X retro clone. Dungeon Crawl Classics is a great one, too. Otherwise the original Basic/Expert rules or Rules Cyclopedia.

CandyLaser
2016-12-20, 11:57 PM
Thanks for all the suggestions so far. Nothing is quite perfect, but I don't expect to find a single game that does exactly what I want with no downsides.


If you're willing to try something a little different, Torchbearer. It's a game specifically designed as a tribute to 1e D&D, but with a different sort of mechanics, tuned for dungeon crawling.

Inventory management, hunger/thirst, and light are all central mechanics to the game. Characters will take conditions from hungry/thirsty, angry, afraid, exhausted, injured, and sick, all of which have distinct mechanical penalties. Slowly grind your characters down until they're ready to crawl into the nearest hole to die.

Yeah, Torchbearer's on my shortlist as well. I'm thinking that I want to adopt the inventory system, at a minimum, to whatever I end up using.


Palladium isn't too bad, although I've never experienced it with a mega dungeon. It's fairly adaptable so you should be able to implement survival from another system if you want to change it up a little. Maybe make a quick cheat-sheet for how much skills drop from a bad situation (hunger, thirst, etc). It's not heavily magic based, a lot of the conflict is usually done with the melee system, but the fact that you counter-roll to dodge or parry gets people a little more involved than just sitting and waiting to go.

Palladium is something of a non-starter for me. My experiences with that system come from Rifts, Nightbane, and Beyond the Supernatural (oh, and a single excursion into TMNT), not Palladium Fantasy. I'm told that Palladium Fantasy is better than its descendant systems. But I just can't force myself to try to puzzle through Siembieda's writing, editing, and layout, much less to inflict that on my players.


Definately ACKS, or another B/X retro clone. Dungeon Crawl Classics is a great one, too. Otherwise the original Basic/Expert rules or Rules Cyclopedia.

How does DCC work for sustained campaigns? I've only ever played it at conventions and in one-shots, and the high randomness and variance (in particular for spells) seems counterproductive to me. I hadn't considered running with the Rules Cyclopedia; I'll have to give that another look. That reminds me to look into Symbaroum and The Dark Eye as well.

Knaight
2016-12-21, 03:16 AM
I'm throwing my recommendation in with everyone who's mentioned Torchbearer. This is what it is for, and it will do better at it than just about anything else. GURPS is a good second choice for a number of reasons, but sadly the new dungeon fantasy set (where it's recompiled to make it easier to learn) isn't out yet.