Darkest Dungeon and Dnd

[Marywn]

I've had this idea also floating in my head ever since playing darkest dungeon.
How would someone go about darkest dungeon dnd? I know there are custom pdfs but how would you guys personally do it?
I like to flush out ideas, just incase I want to use them later.

[saucerhead]

The big thing that D&D doesn't cover, as far as I know, is stress and madness. You need to find or make some decent rules for applying stress and getting rid of it. Then you will probably have a bunch of downtime for the players, so you need to discuss the prospect of having at least one alternate character while the other is in the sanitarium.

I don't know if you would make stress WIS or INT based. What successes in combat reduce stress? What skills reduce stress in camp? Medicine or persuasion? It is interesting, but just like in the game, things can go bad quickly.

I am interested in the topic too.

[Eldan]

I'd run it in some other game that has a built in stress or insanity mechanic. And a good one too, not just a numeric score. I think that's a bit too major to Darkest Dungeons to just bolt it onto a system that doesn't support it well.

[Marywn]

There is a madness feature in dnd, but the Darkest dungeon stress system is very different.
I would like virtues and there is a custom pdf specificly for the stress, virtue and afflictions, though I haven't used it myself.

[Sexyshoeless]

Biggest question for you OP is what aspects of Darkest Dungeon are you trying to emulate?

As many folks have brought up, DnD does not have a robust method for tracking sanity or stress - a core mechanic of the game.
you would have to homebrew or steal from another RPG (call of Cthulu, Fate for a few examples) a mechanic.

That being said, the most compelling part of darkest dungeon for me is the story, the atmosphere, the monsters and the tragic story of this family's downfall. That can easily be the basis for a super cool megadungeon campaign. You can enforce the feel with narrative devices, enforcing encumberance and supply tracking and making sure the players are forced to make hard choices as they delve deeper into the Dungeon. The monsters are easy enough to emulate.

[mephnick]

Darkest Dungeon is basically just an old school dungeon crawl, using a stable of characters instead of a single PC. I used to play this way all the time when I was a kid. The only difference was madness and stress mechanics, but we had custom injury tables that put characters out for X sessions. It was probably woefully balanced and terribly designed at the time, but I bet you could throw together something like that pretty simply and change it to "stress".

[Foxhound438]

I once did a short series of dungeons based on DD and it worked well enough. Basically I just made sure everything was extremely dangerous with no guarantee of safe rest or survival, and the stress aspect was fairly well taken care of by the players themselves. Just make sure to throw a bunch of pig monster re-skinned enemies and the aesthetic is complete.

[ToastyTobasco]

There are madness traits in the DMG and Into the Abyss has many moments of inflicting characters with maladies and madness. Curse of Strahd has players come back from death but with Madness traits every time they come back.