What went right in DF Whiterock

It's bittersweet that the DF Whiterock campaign ended before the PCs quite reached the bottom of the dungeon, but we kept the game going for over two years, so most things went mostly right.  Peter asked for a post about things that went well in the comments, so here goes:

Converting a D&D 3.5 megadungeon to DFRPG (with a few other GURPS things thrown in) was work, but mostly went pretty smoothly.  GUPRS is a very flexible system that can emulate most other games.  Probably the hardest part was converting enemy spellcasters, because there are so many differences in the magic systems.  The easiest part was converting DCs to GURPS skill penalties and monetary treasure in gold pieces to GURPS $; I did both of those purely mechanically.  And thanks to all the people who put conversions of D&D monsters to GURPS on the Internet.

The house rules for building a DFRPG character with 125 points and no templates worked pretty well.  Players seemed to have fun making characters, and the first few sessions were pretty challenging.

The rules for improving characters, where points spent on skills could be traded back when attributes based on those skills were raised, were pretty popular.  (It seems that anytime you let players do more than the official rules allow, they're happy.  So this was not surprising.)  Not limiting characters to templates provided a different challenge than most GUPRS Dungeon Fantasy or DFRPG games.

Five players played in a majority of the sessions, and four played in a vast majority.  I had only played with one of the players before, so this showed that it is possible to assemble a reasonably cohesive group from random people on the Internet.  Of course it's not quite as easy to do it this way as to use a group of people who already get along: we had a few players who dropped out due to intra-party conflict or because it just wasn't the right campaign for them.

Making "Sense of Duty: Adventuring Companions" not count against the disadvantage limit had the intended result that everyone took it, and then the intended result that PCs who didn't get along kept it at the level of verbal sniping (and occasional Levitation), rather than violence.

Having a dedicated Discord for the campaign seemed to keep everyone in the loop.  We mostly knew if we were playing on Friday and who was showing up, and everyone mostly had their characters ready to go.

Roll20 mostly worked okay.  The fact that it's web-based is nice because people can play with their phone or tablet when away from a real computer.  On the other hand, it doesn't work nearly as well with a phone or tablet as with a real PC.  And it doesn't support large maps very well, so some of the larger levels ended up being many maps rather than one map, which was annoying.

We got a surprising amount of roleplaying for a dungeon crawl.  The PCs made both allies and enemies.  (Of course the allies tended to survive longer than the enemies.)  And they each had enough of a personality that when a player was out and someone else ran their character, we got fairly accurate mockeries.

The game featured a lot of combat, and the players got pretty good at combat tactics against various enemies.  Outflanking enemies to hit them in the back happened a lot, especially once everyone had Flight all the time.  Sacrificial Parry was used a ton.  And the players were constantly trying to balance Deceptive Attack, Rapid Strike, and hit location penalties.  There were also a lot of stunning attacks, via Rapier Wit, the Stun or Death Vision spells, or Kiai.

This player group had more of a hive mind than most I've seen: everyone shared their character sheets with each other and gave each other advice on how to improve their characters, and the group mostly functioned as a collective with respect to equipment.  This was pretty effective.