Roguelike dungeon crawl?

[Dialect Army]

The idea of creating and DMing a NetHack-style dungeon spelunk in tabletop format suddenly struck me last night as I was playing Rogue. I've been dreaming about it since. I would just make a highly divergent D&D campaign, but I don't have any of the books and I can't afford them anyway, so I'm thinking of adapting OSRIC, M&M or BF to my needs, and deriving my monsters, NPCs, items, etc. from NetHack itself.

Any thoughts? Things I should look out for? Tips? Tricks? Warnings? Anyone have any cool ideas they'd like me to implement?

[Willow]

Hey Dialect-

What appeals to you most about Nethack that you want to adapt to your tabletop gaming?  I'm a huge fan of Nethack too, but it's very much a question of where you want to go here.

Is it the random dungeons?  The potential deadliness?  Certain in-game concepts?

If you refine what you're trying to capture a little bit, maybe we can help you go from there.

[Dialect Army]

Hey Dialect-

What appeals to you most about Nethack that you want to adapt to your tabletop gaming?  I'm a huge fan of Nethack too, but it's very much a question of where you want to go here.

Is it the random dungeons?  The potential deadliness?  Certain in-game concepts?

If you refine what you're trying to capture a little bit, maybe we can help you go from there.

All three. For example, I dig NetHack's role system; the actual locations in the game, like Minetown, the Gnomish Mines, etc.; the picking up of random, unidentified items that may help or hurt you; the skill system; etc. etc. But I want to restructure it to be more like a classic tabletop RPG in some ways: using Spot and Search checks; interacting with NPCs non-violently in surface towns and forests before actually plunging into the dungeons; using aura perception to tell a little bit about an item, fountain, etc. before you use it.

I actually started writing the book last night. I basically copied over the ability score bonus tables from OSRIC, modified the numbers (very) slightly, and added some bonuses to make it more playable as a dungeon crawl. For example, I'm creating a spontaneous Sixth Sense d% check, determined by WIS with some bonuses for Archaelogists. The idea of this is that NetHack is designed to be played hundreds of times before you actually figure much of it out. Since I don't expect to drag my play-testing group through hundreds of YASDs, Sixth Sense will (partially) be like an Oracle that follows the players wherever they go. When the players see something new (first fountain, first scroll, first potion, first foray into the Gnomish Mines, first store, etc.) or have an important new experience, they can make Sixth Sense checks. If successful, the DM will basically give them a Wikihack-style spoiler to some extent. For example, if a player sees a fountain for the first time and makes a successful Sixth Sense check, the DM might then tell her: "The fountain is a randomly-generated magical fixture. You can drink from it to experience one of a number of randomly chosen results, some good, some bad, some neutral. You can also dip some items in it to get even more interesting (but fixed) results, but keep in mind that most items will get wet this way." Sixth Sense may also tell a player whether or not a monster has noticed him (although I'm considering using DEX for that instead), and I'm toying with the idea of having it hint at whether the results of drinking from a fountain, kicking a sink, etc. will be good or bad at a particular time. (The fun part comes when they roll a false Sixth Sense success, and the DM gets to tell them the wrong thing. Obviously, this would involve a secret roll at some point.) Archaeologists would have inherent Sixth Sense bonuses because of their historical and scientific knowledge of the dungeons. I'm toying with giving dwarves and maybe even gnomes a smaller inherent Sixth Sense bonus because of their long history of mining in the dungeons. (Table Hack will have Dwarvish Mines, not Gnomish Mines. In my playtest game, at least.) Oh yeah, it's called Table Hack

My hope is that dungeons will be randomly generated. This can be done with Web-based random dungeon generation tools in real-time, or the DM can play out a game of NetHack (or any roguelike, really) in Explore mode and just write down what she sees. Of course, even with a premade dungeon map, the DM will need to leave herself some room for lots of random item and monster generation on top of that, and tougher monsters (and perhaps tougher items), given that there will be multiple adventurers who will have leveled up a few times before actually descending into the dungeons.

My idea for the playtest campaign is having a Level 5 Tourist NPC gather the party together in the nearby town of Yendoria, buy starting supplies for everyone based on their class, and then lead them through the mildly challenging but not incredibly dangerous Forest of Yendor, which conveniently lies between Yendoria and the Caverns of Calamity (not the Mazes of Menace ). The Tourist NPC will then have a YASD right before the party enters the dungeon, because obviously I don't want to hold the party's hand through the Caverns themselves--I just want to have someone introduce them to a world they may not be familiar with. All of my playtesters are going to have some amount of tabletop RPG experience, but I don't think any of them have played roguelikes much, other than Toejam & Earl, and some of them haven't even played D&D. (More of a World of Darkness group.) I assume this will be true of a lot of tabletop groups, which is why I've built in a way for the party to gain experience and learn some things about their mission before actually jumping in to the NetHack world.

I'm also curious about adding SLASH'EM type stuff, like guns, elementalists, Undead Slayers, etc. to it once I have a decent working system.

Thoughts?

[lighthouse]

I'd go with Labyrinth Lords which also has a somehow permissive license and is much simpler, modeled after the original D&D. Then I'd add cards, maybe one or two card decks, better than random tables, otherwise you will get thousands of tables. Each card could have like 5 sections, one for monsters, another for treasures, another one for traps and so on...

Just my 2 cents.

[Callan S.]

The Tourist NPC will then have a YASD right before the party enters...

This sticks out to me, as YASD's (Yet Another Stupid Death, for non players of nethack) aren't orchestrated or contrived in the game - they are stories (of dying stupidly) that are generated from play. If your making up a YASD (rather than it occuring from play) and then inserting that as part of the play experience, I'm wondering whether most of play will consist of inventing notable events and inserting them into play.

[Dialect Army]

I'd go with Labyrinth Lords which also has a somehow permissive license and is much simpler, modeled after the original D&D. Then I'd add cards, maybe one or two card decks, better than random tables, otherwise you will get thousands of tables. Each card could have like 5 sections, one for monsters, another for treasures, another one for traps and so on...

Just my 2 cents.

Thanks. I'll check into Labyrinth Lords. In the meantime, can you tell me some more details on this card thing? I'm having a little trouble picturing it, but it sounds interesting.

If "thousands of tables" is referring to the actual generation of dungeons, I'm not really trying to do that, per se. At first, anyway. By the time I playtest it, what I hope to do is draw a dungeon map based on a game of NH in explore mode, and then use that as a base for the tabletop campaign--with more monsters, items, etc. that I randomly generate using simple algorithms.

This sticks out to me, as YASD's (Yet Another Stupid Death, for non players of nethack) aren't orchestrated or contrived in the game - they are stories (of dying stupidly) that are generated from play. If your making up a YASD (rather than it occuring from play) and then inserting that as part of the play experience, I'm wondering whether most of play will consist of inventing notable events and inserting them into play.

No. Just this one thing, for reasons I noted in my last post.