A Dwarf Fortress tabletop RPG (long)

[Abkajud]

So, a couple of months ago I became obsessed with the Dwarf Fortress strategy/world-building game for a few weeks, and part of my obsession involved the very basics of an RPG based around it.
I've been messing around with these ideas again this week, and I wanted to post my thoughts here for consideration. For the unfamiliar, the point of this RPG idea is to explore the Dream of dwarves building a fortress, interacting with elves, humans, and goblins, going to war, scouring for resources, and so on.

DF is a bit of a tall order, in that it's incredibly detailed, single-player only, possessed of an almost inscrutable interface... did I mention how detailed it was? My initial concept centers around a few simple stats that get a lot of mileage and multiple, layered uses:

Beard - social standing among dwarves, a measure of how much clout you have; this extends to interactions with non-dwarves as needed (may be able to declare discovery of other settlements/civilizations, be they elves, goblins, humans, or other dwarves)
Metal - skill at crafts in general, and the creation of finished products, including complex mechanisms for traps and bridges and the like
Wood - exploration of the surface world, speed of movement in the wilderness, harvesting plant life in general (can declare discovery of natural features on the surface world, such as rivers, copses of trees, and so on)
Meat - hunting, fishing, and butchery
Stone - mining/digging, architecture, alcohol tolerance, movement speed underground, and exploration of the underground world (can declare discovery of natural features underground, such as rivers, veins of gems or metals, magma flows, etc.)

Those are the civilian uses of stats. There is also a "battle mode" into which any dwarf can enter, at which point all stats take on different meanings:

Beard - combat leadership, and how intimidating you are to your foes (since goblin invaders often run away when outmatched, I think Beard should be useful to scare away enemies, if you desire; also useful to rally and command dwarves)
Metal - a measure of how well-armed you are (probably relates to damage-dealing and damage-prevention; a dwarf going into Battle Mode must stop by the fortress armory to gather weaponry, or his Metal will be at 0 in combat; this is not always a bad thing)
Wood - ranged combat capability, dodging, and speed (out of Battle Mode, speed is mainly at issue to see how quickly unarmed dwarves can make it back to base, either to arm themselves or just to get to safety. In Battle Mode, Wood is your overall speed, both above and below ground)
Meat - your ability to get through/around an opponent's defenses; also a general measure of the fury of your attacks. Also, measures your capacity for the infamous Wrestling skill, which allows you to pin, disarm, and then torture enemies
Stone - your resistance to wounds, and possibly a measure of your defenses

In combat, you generally select two stats to roll together for each action (probably going to to a dice pool thing, since I like that, but it's up in the air for right now), and that reflects what you're up to: Metal+Meat is a standard attack, Stone+Metal is a standard defensive maneuver, etc. I am all about determining different combinations and figuring out what they would mean for the fight.

Greatness - in the original computer game, the sum total of all your material wealth, furnishings, etc., is collected into a rating of how awesome your fortress is. I want to have something like that here, but with a lot less granularity than a computer could support. This will hinge on two things: resources and fortress-building. Whenever a dwarf uses Wood or Stone to exploit a source of lumber, minerals, etc., it's assumed that those materials are added to the coffers of the fortress for a "base level" amount of Greatness points.
You'll need to break out a sheet of graph paper at this point - the players put their heads together and work on their fortress. I want to encourage actually drawing what it looks like, probably from a pure-vertical perspective; on another sheet of paper entirely, record the distance to various "discovered" resources and natural features. As the fortress grows and gets filled up with details (decoration, finished goods, a well-stocked armory, etc.), the dwarves essentially turn the base-level Greatness points of your acquired resources into high-Greatness weapons, trinkets, goods, and so on.
At this point, I have some vague ideas about a turn-based, "seasonal" time system, which would make the distance between resources and the fortress meaningful even during times of peace (in terms of how much you could collect, I suppose), and that, in turn, would give some structure to how quickly a fortress could accumulate Greatness.
Greatness isn't just-because; it's actually going to be used to determine how much attention your fortress gets from immigrant dwarfs, merchants of other races, and screaming hordes of goblin invaders. For now, I think a d100 system would make some sense, as far as establishing when these events happen (migration, trade, invasion) - you roll d100+Greatness and consult a chart to see whether you're hosting merchants, being attacked, or home to new immigrants. As in the original game, merchant visits occur in specific seasons, based on the race of the merchant (elves in spring, humans in summer, dwarves in autumn). Invasions can happen in any season, as can immigration; each season, then, you'd roll three times on the chart, to see if you get trade, migrants, or invaders. The exception is winter - no one comes to trade with you in winter!
I have absolutely no idea how trade should work, or even if some level of granularity even makes sense, here. It's probably sufficient just to have general resource pools with a rating attached to them; in that case, you could trade 1-for-1 of a useless or excess resource for something you do need.

Specific Resources - presumably, the exploration ability covered by Wood and Stone would be two-fold: successes would determine whether or not you find the thing at all, and some other way of reading the dice would determine how far away it is/how hard it is to get to. That second part is something I haven't quite figured out yet; maybe the number of dice that come up as failures could dictate how accessible the resource is, and yes, this means that the more skilled you are, the more likely you are to locate a resource that's far away. That makes sense to me - I want to limit the number of "nodes" for a particular resource you can find at a single time, giving more skilled dwarves greater access, but also limiting resources to one "node" per distance-rating. Common resources require a single success to find; more rarefied goods require more, while omnipresent goods require no successes at all (the distance is the only relevant factor, in that case). That being said...
Choice of "Map" - since selecting where to plant your fortress is so important to the original game, I figure a quick discussion of what's rare, what's common, and what's omnipresent is important before the game begins. A list of resources (wood, gems, ore, farmland, hunting grounds, etc.) and natural features (rivers, magma flows, hills, etc.) will be hashed out, in terms of modifiers to things - gems and ore are less common than stone and wood in general, but in drier or more mountainous climates, wood might be harder to find, and in flatter or sandier climes, stone and ore and gems will be harder to find. I imagine trade will become more relevant when certain resources are more precious, or even non-existent.
Of course, what DF adaptation would be complete without ... Strange Moods?
Haven't worked this out at all yet, but the basic idea is that a dwarf PC stands a chance of becoming an utter master at either Stone, Metal, or Wood, but could very well go insane/die/go on a killing spree if the requirements aren't met. The other upshot is that a treasure of great worth is created as a result of the Strange Mood, which would add a tidy sum of Greatness points to things. Those requirements could be easily met (materially) if the right kind of merchant were visiting that season, but if not, the Stone and Wood specialists would need to hurry up and find what the moody dwarf needs to ensure success. I think striking a balance between Greatness points consumed on the project vs. the difficulty of the dice challenge is important; if you can buy what you need from a merchant, it should really cost you, but the alternative is a roll of the dice. Something like that.
I realize that there's a certain board-game quality to all this, a certain lack of RP-style Exploration; at least it feels that way to me. I figure that the other half of the game, the part not directly covered by the rules, is the interaction of all the dwarves in the fortress a) with each other b) with the Royal Court that commissioned the expedition, and c) with other races.
Romance, jockeying for position, squabbling over the priorities of the fortress, not to mention good old fashioned grudges and bar-fights, are all important things to actually "do" as a dwarf - as much as I've outlined a bunch of mechanical thingies, but those are intended to be co-central or background elements, sharing or giving spotlight with/to the actual interactions between dwarves. Dwarf NPCs should be needy little bastards who take credit for others' discoveries, pick fights over imagined insults, cower and flee at the approach of invaders, and so on. I think the GM's role is to introduce complications whenever possible/enjoyable, holding the power to cause cave-ins, floods, breakups, etc. There should be space for stories or plots within the game - stuff that goes deeper and more detailed than the rules themselves would do alone - stuff like weird discoveries in the mines, agents of the Crown showing up with hidden agendas, things like that.

Thoughts?

[Abkajud]

Hey, gang...
I realize I didn't really say what I was hoping to get from y'all on this topic. From those of you who've played Dwarf Fortress before, I'd like to know your thoughts - does this capture the essence, in your opinion? Does it sound like fun? Anything you'd do differently?

[JoyWriter]

As a bit of a twist, have you considered actually playing dwarf fortress as you rp? It seems a little like you want to reinvent it just so you can roleplay taverns and things, whereas it seems like a better solution is to use it as inspiration for your own roleplay, and get the GM to cheat the game in response to how well you do! I mean the best way to capture the systems mechanical structure is with the system itself, and if it has a lot of stats you can translate those into conditions for your roleplay sessions, such as working out the mood of the fortress, etc.

[Abkajud]

Hey, JW!
Hmmmmm well, I suppose my question to you would be "How do the players have an impact?" I'm envisioning a bunch of faithful gamers crowded around a computer screen, essentially ... playing Dwarf Fortress together.
Also - what's that about the GM cheating the game? You mean, hacking it in some way to reflect the players' decisions?

[JoyWriter]

Exactly! Or using existing cheat codes if they exist, but through an interface rule system that makes the cheats a reaction to what the players have been doing. I suppose the question might be what you are trying to add to the game; perhaps you could pick up some modding skills and clean up the user interface (if that is appropriate), and add in the cheats/fiction activators at the same time, or perhaps you could create rules for how the DM plays the game with player input, or some other variant, and do it with a laptop with good viewing angles, so you can put the screen flat like a sort of board.

I'm quite a fan of trying to mix the best of both worlds; the flexibility, speed and imagination of a group of people working it out, and the rigour and raw detail handling power of computers, when that adds something. I wouldn't ignore the poor computer for the sake of it.

[Abkajud]

Okay, J, how about this
Do you have any thoughts or suggestions specifically related to making a tabletop RPG for Dwarf Fortress? I want to share the love with typical RPers, without having to fret over whether anyone in my area plays the computer version.
Those hybrid ideas of yours are pretty interesting, for sure, but I dunno if that's really my thing.

[Callan S.]

Well, taking JoyWriters idea further, I would think you would have the GM at the computer and players around. I don't think dwarf fortress has cheat codes? But instead of that you could work out a system that players decide where and what certain rooms are all about, and how they are set up - they sort of own those rooms. The whole fortress would become a mix of all players ideas - but not just giving ideas in the raw, but some sort of roleplaying out the dwarves then that affects what they can do with new rooms, somehow in some yet to be determined way.

And...I don't want to be a bummer, but making a dwarf fortress RPG sounds kind of like making a D&D exalted game or a shadowrun D&D game - as in they wouldn't be an exalted or D&D game, really. Part of the feeling of it is in how the mechanics feel upon contact in play - and sadly in dwarf fortress, that's forever trapped in the computer version.

[Abkajud]

I suppose I could call it Moria: Before the Fall, then ^_^ with a note on the first page that says "An homage to the Roguelike-style game Dwarf Fortress."
Ooh, given that the slogan of DF is "Losing is fun!", and the dwarf-hold at Moria is eventually overrun by goblins, maybe it could be a LotR cousin of Polaris - "tragedy at the utmost depths". Okay, I like this! Thoughts?
If it seems like I'm not interested in what you guys have to say, that's not true at all - when it relates to tabletop RPG design, at any rate. I usually feel pretty isolated after a while, playing computer games; I have some baggage related to video games and feeling like they're a waste of time. Not that I don't enjoy them; clearly I'm a big fan of at least one of them.
Anyway, I find tabletop roleplaying to be far more satisfying emotionally.

[JoyWriter]

I'll let you in on a little secret: I've never actually played dwarf fortress! So while I am interested in creating low handling time high detail systems (almost as much as appropriately converging computer and tabletop), I can't compare to the portion you'd be emulating. But as to the portion you'd be creating new, I can get behind that.

If loosing is part of the fun, then the game must obviously be very loss tolerant; you'd have to be able to go through all kinds of things and still have tools to play with. Have you considered having families or clans as what you play as instead of single characters? You could always play as the head of the family and switch to other characters as that one gets killed. That's one form of loss tolerance, another is being able to retreat reliably.

And if you want to be able to keep it emotionally substantial, even during the building parts, then you could try covering the emotional side of architecture. That is something you my have to research, but it is of course a human perspective. If you can decide how dwarfs think about their living spaces (I guess natural light is not as much of a priority!), then you could stick that in with a lot less research.

[Abkajud]

I appreciate you letting me in on the secret, JW
Yeah, there's actually an intense amount of programming in DF dedicated to what makes dwarves happy: drinking a lot of alcohol, making friends, eating good food, admiring decorations and well-designed objects, making legendary-quality items, getting married, having a kid, and so on. Interestingly, "[taking] joy in slaughter" is something that makes dwarves happy.
On the subject of sunlight, dwarves can get sunlight-sickness if they stay way too long inside. It's a bit unclear as to how long this takes, but if a dwarf stays indoors for weeks at a time, upon going out he will get a migraine so bad that he throws up. Yes, this is what actually happens in the game. I haven't seen it myself, though.
Things that make them unhappy: talking to someone they don't like, losing a spouse, child, or romantic interest, sleeping in substandard accommodations (for dwarf nobles, the bar is a good deal higher), smelling something that's rotted, getting injured, not getting enough to drink or eat, and so on.
There really is quite the emotional side to constructing a Fortress; the problem, I suppose, is that there's a very clear-cut way to go about that, and it's only if you do it "wrong" (there's wiggle room) that you'll have to worry about fussy dwarves.
Actually, I suppose the presence of nobility (which starts up the monetary system for your Fortress, meaning that the nobles get to take whatever they like, and commoners have to pay for things), a chief architect who wants a rush job or is tight-fisted, or something like that could mean that meaningful moral choices affect the Fortress as a whole: if you don't care about your dwarves enough, they'll kill each other and burn the place down, or try to, at any rate. Dwarves like to be pampered - they like having their own rooms (they share with immediate family without complaints, tho), they like drinking all the time (about twice as often as they eat...), they absolutely love decorations, finely wrought items, and good food. If you expand your Fortress too quickly to give every new dwarf all of that, you could have a riot on your hands. Seriously: one despondent dwarf who starts a fight could actually start a chain reaction of extreme unhappiness, as dwarves are pretty fragile emotionally and violently express their discontent. Gods forbid if you run out of alcohol, too...
The nobility thing is really neat: before you hit a certain population level, dwarves all sleep wherever, eat together, use whatever tools and weapons they need for a job, and so on. If you have "economy mode" on, however, once you hit 50 dwarves and get your first noble, you'll need to start minting coins, and dwarves will start earning wages from their tasks. This also means they have to pay rent, and the market for housing is strange: if you have dwarves that don't like to work very hard (or just party a lot, which isn't an all-bad trait to have [it makes dwarves happy and builds friendships! Yay!]), then they won't be able to afford sleeping arrangements that make them happy, even if all bottom-tier rooms are of good quality. There's a fixed rent cost for each tier of housing quality (keeping in mind this is a monarchy, after all...), and so, oddly, lazier dwarves require you to build crappy little hovels so they can afford the rent there, even though they'd rather live somewhere else. It's like San Francisco, I suppose.
I'm one player among many who turns off "economy mode", meaning that noble dwarves still arrive when you meet certain conditions, but your Fortress will never have any use for minted coins (oddly, they aren't useful as trade currency!). I really like having a "socialist" Fortress, where everyone works and plays as they see fit, and everyone is allowed to eat and drink what they please. Given that the only truly unproductive activity in the game is Taking A Break (which is necessary, unavoidable, and does not change stats at all), it's actually not so bad if, like me, you have a Fortress that's half party animals (who keep everyone happy) and half work-dwarves (who cook the food and decorate the rooms and craft trade goods and so on). I love it - partying is absolutely a productive, useful activity! Thank gods that dwarves are all such prima donnas!

I suppose what all these things do is create excuses for conflict: if something doesn't happen, the GM says it doesn't happen, or if you run out of a needed supply (the brewery blows up?), then yay! Conflict! Things like flooding, cave-ins, fires, rotting trash, and so on are all pretty manageable if you have an alert and careful chief architect (i.e. the computer-game's player), but sometimes, if given a little too much freedom in how to go about a task, dwarves will knock down the wrong wall and get swept away in water or magma (or both, creating lethal steam!). I've lost a couple of times because an irrigation trench was dug improperly, and then a couple of diggers fell in and drowned. Rather than deal with the Fortress-wide emotional fallout of their deaths, I forfeited.

Did I mention dwarves have pets? And that, should they die, dwarves go into mourning? Honestly, given how needy the hairy little buggers are, it's a wonder anyone gets any work accomplished!

[AJ_Flowers]

The real essence of the storytelling in Dwarf Fortress is that all the content is procedurally generated.  Everything on the map is 'random' within a certain set of parameters pre-set by other parameters such as the area's climate and local communities.  It seems like in order to capture the essence of that system, you'd have to develop a dice system that also generates everything procedurally via the system itself. Having an author or GM that creates anything for that Fortress that is not created by the system itself seems entirely counter to the point of the thing. Stories that happen around Fortresses happen only because they were emergent from the sim of the thing.

I would say that any system you create would have to capture this.  Lots of charts and diagrams. A dwarf can't carve something on to an artifact bracelet unless he's actually seen it. Until then he's stuck carving things he's already seen - clouds, jewels, abstract shapes and runes.  The GM's biggest job at the start of the game would be to create the nearby world (or, pull it from the DF map himself) and develop the diagrams that would drive the encounters in the game. I could see it being really time consuming to prepare the first session, but then basically everything is randomly rolled from there on out.

[Abkajud]

That doesn't sound fun to me Well, there's one way it could be interesting: if you managed to randomly configure a world in which the game takes place, and for the rest of the game, you don't have to consult thick, annoyingly wordy tomes for anything.
I can't stress this enough: the point of making this a tabletop RPG is not to recreate the experience of Dwarf Fortress on the computer; the point is to envision what it might have looked like had it been made for tabletop in the first place. 

[AJ_Flowers]

That doesn't sound fun to me Well, there's one way it could be interesting: if you managed to randomly configure a world in which the game takes place, and for the rest of the game, you don't have to consult thick, annoyingly wordy tomes for anything.
I can't stress this enough: the point of making this a tabletop RPG is not to recreate the experience of Dwarf Fortress on the computer; the point is to envision what it might have looked like had it been made for tabletop in the first place. 

It might not sound like fun, but for one thing, it's the essence of the game. The reason it's more fun with the computer is because the computer does all that procedural generation for you and allows you to just play.  The creators of DF are trying to do a "simulate everything" approach and each release of DF is a more complicated sim than the next.  If it had been made for tabletop in the first place I cannot see where that particular aspect of the approach would change. It's very highly sim.  Without that aspect, it's not really Dwarf Fortress; it would have a really different systems feel even if it were sharing the setting.

What I'm trying to get at here is, if you, as the GM, come up with something like a story you'd like to do, and drive the players in to that, it's not really how Dwarf Fortress operates at a systems level.  Everything in DF is "randomly" generated from the available words/functions/objects available in the local set at any given time, even things which are about story like the lore from past ages.

That being said, I don't see why you would continue to have to consult a lot of charts past the world generation stage; the world generation would give you a simplified grid to work from, and you'd probably roll to see "what happens today" on that particular grid.  So say you've generated an area that has humans, cougars, and elephants. You would still be rolling to see if humans wanted to trade today or if elephants attacked that day but you wouldn't have to roll from the chart of every available possibility at any given time since the initial sim world you develop eliminates the infinite options.

[AJ_Flowers]

Oh, I might also add, since I can't edit, that reading through the original thread it's fairly clear that your initial approach isn't all THAT GM-driven; I'm just arguing it probably should be even less consensus driven and rely more on randomness.

To use an example from the top of the thread, the players decide what's common in the area, etc, but to really capture the essence of DF it feels like you actually would have to generate a chart of exactly what ores were there and where they were so that a player could know if they were mining them. Which would make mining something rare a bigger deal since nobody consentually decided there was gold in thar hills, but, on the other hand, would also make world generation about as tedious as DF world generation is.

[Abkajud]

I suppose, AJ, the dilemma is that it has to be fun, or there's no point; and yet, it is fun to watch the computer program come up with all that stuff.

If you look at my "Exploration" skill, the point was to let a fairly specific, directed PC decision contain a lot of randomness, and fit in stuff about the seasons and the more sweeping, big-scale feel of the original game, as well. I want to take the bits about the game that create tension and require decision-making and plug those in, albeit in a much more player-directed way.
Example: I have a dwarf who's gone into a Strange Mood, demanding some kind of gem and some wood. Since any given copse of trees will have several kinds of wood, lumber isn't really going to be more than a 1-success item; as such, it doesn't matter the skill of the dwarf who goes out to get it. Dwarves with greater skill will only be able to impress us with how far away they found the copse (each success counts towards "buying" the item, based on its rarity, while the total number of "failed" dice dictates how far away the thing is, so a common item is something that you let the low-skill dwarves gofer). For the gemstone, you'll want your dwarf with highest Stone to go a-digging for it. Each failure to locate an item will result in inching closer to the end of the season (especially if it's far away), and one full season is the longest a Strange (or any kind of) Mood is going to last (in the compy game, it seems to vary, but I don't recall a dwarf lasting more than 3 months holed up in his little workshop, muttering to himself).

Given the stakes here (a dwarf whose Mood isn't satiated will go berserk or just starve himself to death), I think this mechanic, even in its rough-draft stage, captures something of the capriciousness of the DF universe. That's what I'm going for - simple, bold strokes (the stats), a classic-fantasy feel (comes with the territory), and a sense of randomness (you can always find a place to start digging, but does it have what you need?). I think this approach matches with the strengths of the tabletop medium, while letting the computer-game version do what it does best on its own.

Another thing I want to do is create a random-relationship system for, at the very least, new immigrants arriving. I want a game where you roll to see if there's new immigrants this season, and then the players all huddle around to see what kind of dynamic the new guys bring to the Fortress. Drama!!

And, for non-DFers, the kinds of Moods are: Fey (basic: demands certain resources, locks himself in a workshop, starves to death if demands are not met, and maxes out in that craft skill once the masterwork item is complete), Secretive (draws a picture instead of telling you his demands, otherwise the same), Possessed (demands are made in vague language, and no skill-up upon item creation), Fell (kills a dwarf and makes a masterwork item from the dwarf's bones, ick), and Macabre (uses dwarf-bones, but will not kill anyone to get them [yes, he'll go crazy if you refuse to dig up the cemetery]).