Thinking about options for a new Dungeon Fantasy Castle Whiterock campaign

General spoiler warning: Please don't post spoilers about Castle Whiterock in the comments.  If you think there's any chance you might want to play in this campaign, please avoid reading Castle Whiterock, or the preview PDF for Castle Whiterock, or reviews of Castle Whiterock, etc.  Reading this blog is fine though; anything I post here is considered to be common knowledge in the campaign.

I ran a GURPS Dungeon Fantasy game for my family a few years ago.  It was based on Castle Whiterock, a megadungeon adventure for D&D 3.5 published by Goodman Games back in 2007.  They made it almost halfway through before the campaign petered out.  Not bad for a <spoiler>-level megadungeon.

I'd like to run that adventure again, because it was fun, and because I already did a lot of work to convert it.  I don't currently have a local RPG group, so it'll have to be online.  It's a huge adventure, which means it will take a long time to finish, which means there will probably be some player turnover, so I need to make the campaign work with a changing cast of players and characters.  It also means I'll need to commit to running it long-term, as long as I have interested players.

That still leaves a whole lot of choices.  I will list a bunch of them here, and answer some of them now and some in future posts.  This is mostly me thinking aloud about this particular campaign, but maybe some of the ideas will be useful to other GMs in their own campaigns, as the kind of things that you need to think about before you start a game.

- What rules set should we use?  The older bigger GURPS Dungeon Fantasy series, or the newer slimmer Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game box set?  I think I'd rather go with DFRPG for fewer base rules, adding a few (not too many) things from other GURPS books when it makes sense.  For starters I'm thinking High Elves from Dungeon Fantasy 3, languages from GURPS Basic Set, and the Committed Attack and Defensive Attack combat maneuvers from Martial Arts.  I'd like to keep optional rules to the point where players only need to own DFRPG, and I can quickly summarize any other rules they need.  (But also see what the players think; if there's a rule that everyone wants that doesn't slow things down much and isn't too complicated, why not?)

- How powerful should starting PCs be?  The default for DFRPG is very competent starting characters, at 250 points plus 50 points of disadvantages and 5 points of quirks.  And that assumption is a bit hard to change, because the game comes with a bunch of 250-point character templates.  Castle Whiterock is more of a zero-to-hero campaign, with the top level intended for brand-new first-level D&D characters and the levels slowly ramping up in difficulty, with the deepest levels needing very powerful PCs to stand a chance.  Do I want to start with 250-point characters and flatten out the challenge level of the dungeon, or start with lower-point characters but give out more than the normal number of character points per session, so that the PCs ramp up quickly?  I really prefer starting with fewer points.  Maybe 125 as a starting point.

- Are templates required, or optional?  If we want to use templates, there are a couple of obvious sources.  Dungeon Fantasy 15: Henchmen comes with some nice 125-point templates.  There's also Eric's B. Smith's article Dungeon Fantasy on the Cheap , which scales down a bunch of Dungeon Fantasy templates to 100, 150, and 200 points, mostly by lowering attributes.  If they're optional, do we give some incentive to use templates?  I'm leaning toward not requiring templates, giving players more freedom on how they want to spend their points, since they have fewer points to play with.  If they want to look the DFRPG templates or the DF15 templates or the DF on the Cheap templates as a starting point, great.  If they want to design their characters from the ground up, that's fine too.  As long as they fit in the point limits, anything goes

- What should the disadvantage limit be?  The DFRPG templates have -50 points.  I feel that's a bit much.  So I'd be more likely to go with 150 points + 25 points of disads + 5 quirks than 125 points + 50 points of disads + 5 quirks.  Almost the same power level, but the characters are easier to play and more memorable, since they have fewer disads to think about and the players can concentrate on playing them better.

- What PC races are in play?  The setting has the traditional D&D PC races: humans and elves (wood and high) and half-elves and dwarves and gnomes and halflings and half-orcs.  I think that's probably enough.

- Do languages matter?  Castle Whiterock was written with the assumption that various denizens of the dungeon speak languages other than common, and it's good for PCs to be able to talk to them.  DFRPG was written with the assumption that almost everyone and everything speaks Common, and other languages are just for Eldritch Tomes and such.  I want to go with the setting assumption rather than the DFRPG assumption.  Unfortunately the DFRPG languages rules are a bit simplistic, with only full fluency for full cost available.  That's probably more points than PCs will want to spend, especially PCs with limited points.  So I probably have enable the full GURPS language rules so PCs can buy the cheaper Broken and Accented levels of fluency for languages.  And maybe give each PC a free second language at Accented, in addition to their free Native language.  (This also patches what I consider to be a problem in the DFRPG rules, where Elves and Dwarves don't speak Elvish and Dwarven by default.)

- How do I get players to coordinate their PCs so we get a reasonably balanced party?  I hope the players want to play different kinds of characters so it mostly works itself out.  And I hope at least some of the players have some experience and will help the other players with advice about their characters.  But, just in case, I should probably make a list of Things A Party Needs.  If we don't require templates, those will be more lists of abilities rather than just names of templates.  Also, it would be nice if people coordinate their backstories.  Maybe I should say "each of you has to know and be reasonably friendly with at least two of the others before the game; figure it out."  It would be good to get enough PCs, and varied enough PCs, that they don't need NPCs playing major roles in the party.

- Any mandatory or semi-mandatory disadvantages in the interest of party harmony?  Mandatory disadvantages take away some player freedom, which tends to rub players the wrong way, so maybe I'll just say Sense of Duty: Friends and Companions doesn't count against the disadvantage limit.

- Any mandatory campaign advantages in the interest of survival?  I don't think so.  I think pretty much everyone who has the points should buy Luck, and Combat Reflexes, and Stealth, and Swimming, and Traps, and some armor, and...  But you never have enough points to defend against everything.  But maybe a Recommended Traits list so new players don't miss something obvious.  There might be mandatory earned advantages later, like if the PCs do something great for the town they might be awarded some free Reputation, but if it doesn't cost points, probably nobody will mind.

- If we're not requiring templates, do we need any skill caps or other hard house rules about character construction, to keep someone from putting all their points in one skill and being the guy with Broadsword-30 or Dehydrate-30 and nothing else?  Meh, I guess it's not essential to write down rules for everything; a Rule Zero GM can just review the character sheets and say "no, that's not fun, spread it out a bit."

- What do we use for character sheets?  I really like GCS, because it's free, and cross-platform (GCA, the other contender, is Windows-only), and there are good data files for DFRPG, and I know how to hack on those files if I want to make custom ones for the campaign.

- Does every player need to make a character, or should I have some pre-generated characters ready for players who just want to play with minimal prep?  I guess it can't hurt to make them, and if they never get used as PCs, they're available for use as NPCs.  So more of a to-do item than a question.

- Background exposition.  There's a megadungeon and a town in a kingdom in a world.  There are gods and legends and current political leaders.  But I really don't want to subject the players to a gigantic info dump up front.  So I'm planning to give them the bare minimum at first.  (If someone wants to play a cleric, I'll tell them the available gods so they can pick one to serve.  If people go looking for information, I'll have some introductory rumors for them.)  See if someone is willing to spend a point in Area Knowledge: Cillamar or Area Knowledge: Kingdom of Morrain.  If so, we have volunteer conduit for any small info dumps that may be needed.  If not, we have a party full of ignorant foreigners, and they're going to have to ask NPCs where everything is for a while.

- Logistics.  How often do we play, which day and time do we play, do we do a Session Zero the first week to review characters and go over rules decisions, do we have fixed breaks during the session, etc.  Boring but important.

- On a broader scale, Rules As Written versus Rule Zero.  (Rule Zero: The GM makes the rules.  The written rules are just guidelines.)  I'm more of a Rule Zero GM, because looking up rules isn't fun, and arguing about them is even less fun, so if it's clear that the GM has the final word, then everyone can move on and spend less time arguing and more time having fun.  But some players don't like that -- they'd rather know exactly what their PCs can do and not have to worry so much about GM decisions they might not like.  So it's important to nail this down before recruiting players, to avoid style mismatches that lead to conflict.  And it's important for the GM to be fair, to earn the trust of the players, since they can't appeal over his head to the rulebooks or the game designer or the GM's mom.

That covers the options for initial character generation.  Next time I'll think about things that will probably matter in early play sessions, as the PCs meet in town then (I hope) decide to explore the first level of the dungeon.