Low-point Dungeon Fantasy RPG Option 1: DF On The Cheap

For the Castle Whiterock campaign, I'm pretty sure I want to run a Dungeon Fantasy RPG game at 150 points plus 25 disadvantage points plus 5 quirk points, as opposed to the 250 points plus 50 disadvantage points plus 5 quirks default.  (It's a "zero-to-hero" game, and the lower starting point totals are the "zero" part of that.)  That means the default templates won't work as-is.  I think there are four reasonable options to consider, and I'll run through all of them.

The first option I want to look at is an 2010 article by Eric B. Smith called Dungeon Fantasy on the Cheap.  Note that this is for GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, not DFRPG, but the two are very similar and the idea still works.  What Eric noted was that most of the DF templates have a lot of points in attributes, and it's easy enough to mostly just reduce attributes and keep the rest of the templates mostly intact.  The advantage of doing it that way is that the PCs are still using basic DFRPG templates, just modified ones, so the game's flavor is pretty much the same, except for power level.  Another advantage is that the article is online for free (thanks Eric!) so we don't have to worry about any players not having access to it.

The only problem is that Eric's article has modifications for 100-, 150-, and 200-point PCs.  We really want a 125-point version.  (I know, I said 150 above, but note that I'm cutting the disadvantage limit by 25 points, compared to stock DF.  When figuring the power level of a campaign, you can pretty much just add the disadvantage and quirk points available to the positive points.  125 + 50 + 5 is 180, and 150 + 25 + 5 is also 180.)

Let's use the Knight template as an example.  The 100-point Knight has ST 12 [20], DX 11 [20], IQ 10, HT 11 [10], Born War Leader 1 [5], no High Pain Threshold, and 20 points of other advantages.  The 150-point Knight has ST 12 [20], DX 12 [40], IQ 10, HT 11 [10], Born War Leader 2 [10], High Pain Threshold [10], and 35 points of other advantages.  (There is also some messing around with subtracting from Basic Speed, but I'm going to ignore that because that counts against the disadvantage limit, and I'd really like to leave disadvantage choices up to the players.)  So the 50-point difference is 20 points of DX, 5 points of Born War Leader, 10 points of High Pain Threshold, and 15 points of other advantages.  So, to make a template halfway in between, we use the 100-point version and give 25 extra points that can be spent on any of those.  (I'd personally choose the DX, but I think it's probably better to leave it up to the player.)

So, if we go with Eric's templates as a solution, I think using his 100-point templates, only giving -25 points of disadvantages, and then awarding another 25 points to be spent on anything on the full version of the template works pretty well, to end up with 150 point + 25 disad points + 5 quirk point templates.

I kind of like this option, because it preserves the flavor of the DFRPG game, doesn't require buying more books, and is pretty easy for new players because of templates.  But the need to triangulate between the 100- and 150-point templates might be a bit tricky, so if we go this way, I probably need to formally write up the in-between templates.  But before doing that work, I'll run through three other options for low-point DFRPG: the 125-point templates from Dungeon Fantasy 15: Henchmen, the modules from Pyramid #3/113 article Five Easy Pieces, and old-school-GURPS-style freeform character design without templates.  Stay tuned.