System for a zero-combat dungeon crawl?

[Trekkin]

I've had this idea for a while now -- and I cannot be the only one -- to run a dungeon crawl with no combat whatsoever. Just traps, puzzles, and a mystery story told through the architecture and maybe the notes scrawled on the walls. A fractal puzzle, if you will. Maybe some survival elements when the doors lock behind the party.

I'd turn to D&D for a dungeon crawl out of pure reflex, but D&D has so much material for combat that I can't help but wonder if there's another system with less dead weight. Conversely, I could use, say, FATE for this, but I'm specifically looking for alternatives to story-centric rules-light systems, not out of any aversion to them but because I'm wondering what my options are.

Are there any systems out there that are rules-moderate but aren't built around combat? I'd ideally like something with an encumbrance system and more thought given to environmental hazards than a blanket "the GM may apply penalties as appropriate".

[Knaight]

Torchbearer works beautifully for this. It does dungeon crawling, it covers a bunch of non-combat stuff, and while combat is by default a significant portion of it it's a much smaller portion than in D&D.

[Beneath]

I don't know if I'd recommend torchbearer for it, as much as I like it; it's low-combat but the resting check system makes combat, or at least conflicts against some kind of animate opponent, a necessary part of the game.

I'd say figure out what you want to do and go from there. If it's pure puzzles and mystery you don't even really need a system; if you want to have logistics where it wears you down and sometimes you roll dice for how much it wears you down, that's where a system comes in.

[NichG]

This sounds like a really interesting design challenge. I think I'd look at Dread or even Call of Cthulhu for inspiration, with maybe a dash of Apocalypse World.

Basically the things to answer are:

- What are the sources of tension? What form does success/failure take at the micro level, and how do those chain together to create coherent player reasoning at the macro level. For example, in a system with combat a micro consequence is taking damage, and many instances of damage accumulate into dying, so the tension associated with damage has to do with the anticipation of what damage means in the long run. Without combat, you need some other kind of chainable consequences, and it's best if they feel very natural so it doesn't force the players to spend a lot of time adapting to the idea.

- What are the affordances granted by virtue of having a specific character? This is basically, what are the mechanical interactions you want to give players above and beyond their personal cleverness. This leads into how to make characters feel different, etc.

[Grod_The_Giant]

I don't know that you really need a system, honestly. None of those things really fit with character-based mechanics, like, at all-- or at least, not in any particularly interesting way I've seen. Solving puzzles and dealing with traps is really only fun when it's you, the player, figuring them out. I'd probably go with something near-totally freeform. "Characters" would just be a list of gear they're carrying, and maybe a special power or two. ("Joe is incredibly strong; Amy has exceptionally nimble fingers," that sort of thing). The players/party get a hero point every time they disarm a trap, solve a puzzle, find a clue, etc, and spend them to get hints, produce plausible-but-unlisted items, and-- most importantly-- not die when they screw up and a trap goes off.

[Trekkin]

Having bought and read Torchbearer, I can see how its engine needs at least some conflict to drive it. It's certainly going on my list, though.

As far as what I want out of the system on the micro- and macro- levels: On the macro scale, I'd like an essentially economic motivation. The party either extracts enough loot to buy food and supplies, or they starve. See, my group likes coming up with creative solutions to short-circuit puzzles, and I'd like to tacitly encourage that in some cases while making it impractical to blow through all the walls and bridge over the all gaps and never engage with the actual puzzles.

The other half of that is limiting how long they can stay in the dungeon on any given trip. Limiting the food and water they can carry could work for that, as could putting the dungeon underwater or in vacuum. The point is to limit the amount of time they can spend inside, and thus the number of tries they have to solve the puzzles.

Thus, the basic source of tension is the knowledge that every shot at opening more of the dungeon costs them consumables, so if they fail too consistently they're going to lose the ability to keep trying (and, you know, die.) Further, it's possible that not all the doors they open stay open forever, so if they take too many risks, one relocking door could mean they're all going to die of thirst. Of course, if they don't take enough risks, they can't afford water in the first place, and if they fail the wrong puzzle they might just die outright.

So, using that to inform my choice of system:

1. I don't really need a model for physical trauma more detailed than "fine", "not fine", and "dead", although I could make good use of disease rules.
2. Some easy way of tracking consumables would be nice. I probably don't need anything more than a line of boxes for food and water though.
3. Characters can just be sets of skills, gear lists, and statuses.

I don't need skills to pertinent to the individual challenges, since yes, the players will get more fun out of solving them themselves. I could see some role for languages and an equivalent to Knowledge skills, though, for doing things like reading the warning labels on doors and recognizing esoteric cultural references.

Having actually typed that, it occurs to me that I could just track time (in and out of the dungeon) spent amassing knowledge bases and use that for skills. The more you, say, decipher ancient Precursor runes, the more quickly and thoroughly you can do so -- which, of course, biases the party towards some doors more than others and emphasizes specific understandings of what happened to the dungeon.

[NichG]

Having been playing the Numenera CRPG, I'm actually struck by the fact that the pool system would actually be a good fit for this kind of thing. The idea being that you have pools of points that can be used to increase your chances on a roll or retry a failed roll once. There are all sorts of non-combat challenges, and if you roll and succeed things go one way, but if you roll and fail then things go a different way such that you can't 'try again' (e.g. rolls are always only for things which you couldn't logically try until you get it). Deciding how many points a given intermediate objective is worth actually works pretty well for non-combat gameplay with a mechanical touch. An important point of this is that your base success chance doesn't really increase much over the course of the game, so in the end being more powerful = having more points and being able to spend more points at once.

For some reason though, when I played the Numenera system in person, all the players forgot they should be spending points to increase their success chances on rolls. Also, I have the feeling that players tend not to propose actions they don't have a skill on their sheet, even if having the skill is a minor buff compared to what could be achieved by spending points (whereas in the CRPG, you're presented with skill check choices even for skills you don't have or are bad at). So that's something you'd need to address - maybe by being a bit more explicit about check opportunities in a given scene? I feel like the CRPG communicates 'if you try this, something good might happen' whereas the tabletop ends up being more 'even though you came up with this course of action and it makes sense, you could still end up failing'.

[Fri]

There's a game in development by Penguin King Games (developer of costume fairy adventure) titled "Love and Labyrinth" that might be close to your idea, but once again, still in development. You could google it if you're interested, but there's nothing up yet, just QA thread in rpgnet and previews and whatnot.

The basic idea is that the game is separated into two phase, the out of dungeon phase and in dungeon phase. In out of dungeon phase you gather resources for your dungeon delving phase, and the resource can vary ranging from physical resources or non physical resources like morale or good karma.

The resources are to be used in the dungeon delve, and the most interesting part is that all obstacles including monsters can be solved as same type of challenges, but you can "zoom in" to say, boss monster fights to have a more detailed and nitty gritty fights. Also there are various goals and dangers for you to dungeon delve, so you might want to dungeon delve for money, or renown, and whatnot, and you if you fail defaultly you're assumed to manage to exit or got rescued out but you got physical or mental trauma and you have to "burn" your treasures. But there apparently will be rules about permanent deaths.

[Beneath]

Numenera might work, though I haven't played it. Writing your own system might be better.

In addition to food and water, you should also track light; dungeons are dark and light sources are a common consumable (and the tension from running out of them can be fun).

In positive recs for video game inspiration, there's the Storynexus game Below and the Steam game Out There (which is space, but relevant because it's an exploration game about managing your supplies. In particular there's the thing where to restore any of the three main stats (hull, fuel, oxygen) you have to burn some off the other two (you need to expend fuel and oxygen to go anywhere to mine metal to fix your hull, landing on a world that can restore your oxygen or orbiting a place where you can extract fuel causes hull damage)

While I wouldn't recommend running torchbearer plain since AFAICT running it without conflict opponents puts you into a condition death spiral where you pile on status conditions and never accumulate enough checks to remove them, it's definitely worth looking into especially for the inventory system; strictly limiting inventory space and making you have to choose between tools, food, water, light, and treasure is definitely a plus for this kind of play. Also the torchbearer thing where food and water fill a similar role but water takes more space but can often be replenished during a dungeon but food cannot is clever, though I'm not sure I'd go with it if I can find another way to distinguish between food and water supplies. The various supplies you have should feel different when they drop low and you have to ration.

[Trekkin]

Actually, Out There is hugely relevant; I'm partial to mid-hard science fiction over fantasy anyway, and had originally planned on having a bunch of astronauts exploring/jury-rigging a derelict generation ship. I just figured, what with the general fear of science fiction, that there'd be some fantasy game I could reskin.

Numenera is an option, although I'd have to remove Glaives.

And yeah, at this point I'm probably just going to DIY a system.

[JAL_1138]

You could take WEG D6 Star Wars, strip out the Force powers, and just don't use combat encounters. I might go with Revised (or "Revised and Expanded," or whatever it was called, I forget) for this since it has a larger selection of skills. There's also a generic version called D6 Space (I think), that's based on the same system.

[JBPuffin]

Brent Dedeaux over at RPG.net actually talks about this some; not sure how much of it you'd find useful, but it's there.

[Knaight]

Actually, Out There is hugely relevant; I'm partial to mid-hard science fiction over fantasy anyway, and had originally planned on having a bunch of astronauts exploring/jury-rigging a derelict generation ship. I just figured, what with the general fear of science fiction, that there'd be some fantasy game I could reskin.

That changes the parameters of the search a bit - there are absolutely science fiction RPGs. Sci-fi dungeoncrawling is a bit of a harder case, largely because dungeon crawling at all usually means following the D&D tradition and sci-fi games tend to jump ship from D&D traditions*. There's nothing to run straight, and I do suspect you'll have to homebrew, but that doesn't mean there's nothing useful to steal mechanics or setting stuff from. Take Torchbearer's inventory system, hit up Eclipse Phase, Traveler, ICAR, and/or Shadowrun for equipment lists (ICAR is also free, so there's that), take a look at GURPS Space for all sorts of stuff.

*I also dislike D&D, so it's entirely possible I just never noticed the ones that fit better in the first place due to disinterest.

[Trekkin]

I haven't found that to be the case, I'm afraid. Space opera and science fantasy RPGs, sure; we have Star Wars/Trek variants for days, and of course there's Shadowrun and Eclipse Phase like you've said. I haven't seen nearly as many harder-than-rubber sci-fi RPGs, though, which is a shame when I'm trying to build a game about luckless folks in leaky space suits concussing themselves against module walls while trying to find the airlock codes before their suit power runs out.

That said, I can probably cobble together a gear list out of ICAR, Traveller, Jovian Chronicles, the less magical parts of Shadowrun and maybe some of Eclipse Phase's cheaper gear. Thanks for the recommendations!

[kyoryu]

Old school D&D! It's got all the rules you'd need for resource consumption, traps, and all the other nasty stuff you'd find in a dungeon.

And GP for XP means that fighting monsters is unnecessary, just stock the dungeon with treasure and you're good to go. Fighters might feel a bit useless, but everyone else would have a role.

The only wonky thing would be some of the negative pressures in the game revolving around wandering monsters as a reason to not just keep trying things over and over, but that's about it.

[Algeh]

I'd use GURPS. Sure, it has an overly-detailed combat system that you won't be using, but you and your players can skip reading those chapters and spend all of your time pouring over the skill list instead.

I haven't played or GM'd since their 3rd edition (I bought the 4th ed books but haven't been able to set aside the time to find a group, and I have been completely unable to find a GURPS game at the local SF con), but I once ran a GURPS game that lasted for over 2 years real-time with no combat (except for the time some of the players decided to run a pillow fight using the advanced combat rules to see what would happen, which really doesn't count).

It has a really detailed skill system, so it could be useful for having different characters know different things. The only thing I don't like about it is that it only has one mental stat (IQ), which can lead to some weirdness with generically "smart" characters being good at a really broad base of things that don't usually all go together. This is mostly a problem at higher point levels when someone chooses to spend a solid chunk of their character points raising IQ to a really high level. (I also had problems with the way they used the skill system to model learning foreign languages, but the prominence of that issue was probably specific to the group I was playing with and the specific game we were playing.)

[daniel_ream]

The players/party get a hero point every time they disarm a trap, solve a puzzle, find a clue, etc, and spend them to get hints, produce plausible-but-unlisted items, and-- most importantly-- not die when they screw up and a trap goes off.

This almost makes me think of GUMSHOE.

[kyoryu]

it only has one mental stat (IQ)

GURPS is a weird mix of incredibly fine detail and painting with very broad strokes.

[daniel_ream]

GURPS is a weird mix of incredibly fine detail and painting with very broad strokes.

It's The Fantasy Trip (a rules-light dungeon crawling game) with thirty years of accumulated house rules.

[thedanster7000]

Yeah GURPS is excellent for survival and detailed injury but a tad-rules heavy for what it sounds like you want.

[Knaight]

It's The Fantasy Trip (a rules-light dungeon crawling game) with thirty years of accumulated house rules.

The Fantasy Trip wasn't exactly light to begin with, and it also shows a lot of Steve Jackson's design - minimal attributes, convoluted grid combat system, and while it doesn't have skills per se it has a long list of traits instead.

[Trekkin]

Yeah GURPS is excellent for survival and detailed injury but a tad-rules heavy for what it sounds like you want.

That is one of the things vexing me, yes. I can make some use of systemic illness rules, but not so much physical trauma; I'd rather not have the players track which of their ankles got twisted and so forth. Besides, I was the players to feel small and vulnerable, and multiple injury locations can interfere with that.

[kyoryu]

It's The Fantasy Trip (a rules-light dungeon crawling game) with thirty years of accumulated house rules.

Heh, the most old-school game I've played in was TFT heavily house-ruled and with a bunch of 1e AD&D stuff bolted on.

It was glorious.

[CharonsHelper]

I haven't found that to be the case, I'm afraid. Space opera and science fantasy RPGs, sure; we have Star Wars/Trek variants for days, and of course there's Shadowrun and Eclipse Phase like you've said. I haven't seen nearly as many harder-than-rubber sci-fi RPGs, though, which is a shame when I'm trying to build a game about luckless folks in leaky space suits concussing themselves against module walls while trying to find the airlock codes before their suit power runs out.

That said, I can probably cobble together a gear list out of ICAR, Traveller, Jovian Chronicles, the less magical parts of Shadowrun and maybe some of Eclipse Phase's cheaper gear. Thanks for the recommendations!

How hard of sci-fi are you going for - on a spectrum from Star Wars (total future fantasy) to Asimov? (though much of Asimov feels goofy now, especially what he wrote in the 50's like Foundation, it was a decent extrapolation at the time)

I'd say that there are some decent RPGs in the middle of the spectrum - though I'll agree that there are no truly hard sci-fi games. Where would you say a game like Mass Effect is on the spectrum? I'd argue that while it's not as far over as Asimov, it's solidly on the hard sci-fi end. (Sure there's a lot of guesswork - but that's true of any sci-fi where the tech is more than a few decades ahead.)

[Trekkin]

How hard of sci-fi are you going for - on a spectrum from Star Wars (total future fantasy) to Asimov? (though much of Asimov feels goofy now, especially what he wrote in the 50's like Foundation, it was a decent extrapolation at the time)

I'd say that there are some decent RPGs in the middle of the spectrum - though I'll agree that there are no truly hard sci-fi games. Where would you say a game like Mass Effect is on the spectrum? I'd argue that while it's not as far over as Asimov, it's solidly on the hard sci-fi end. (Sure there's a lot of guesswork - but that's true of any sci-fi where the tech is more than a few decades ahead.)

Somewhere beyond Asimov, I think, toward the hopelessly optimistic white paper end of the science fiction spectrum. In general, I can grit my teeth and wave my hands and add portal FTL that doesn't violate any of the presumptions about wormholes that the PCs can get close enough to test, build a causality-respecting portal dag, and call that "how you all got all the way out to the Big Interesting Object, please don't poke it too hard, here's a map". I can also gloss over some of the myriad complexities involved in actual space flight operations and just assume the PCs have their tank stirrers and so forth on automatic. I want them all dead, sure, but not by boredom.

I will not, however, waltz merrily past all the science either I or my audience might fail to understand, scribble in whatever magic makes my story easier to tell, and relentlessly bray "Clarke's Third Law! Sufficiently advanced!" at anyone who happens to notice, and I'm not going to include magic rocks that make the setting do whatever I want.

Mass Effect is not hard science fiction. The entire setting runs on magic rocks. Magic rocks power the wizards with their purple fuzzy crackling. Magic rocks make the improbably shaped spaceships fly and have gravity. They can't even build a handgun without needing some magic rocks. I'd say it's just one big pervasive departure from reality, but the magic rocks do all these things by different mechanisms.

Mass Effect is a standard sci-fi space battle setting about space dogfights and spacemen firing spaceguns at space aliens on distant worlds while Sufficiently Advanced Precursors get on with facilitating explosions and one-liners. It just vomits frankly awful technobabble at the player in the hope that complicated nonsense sounds enough like science to suspend your disbelief between exploding aliens. Space fantasy doesn't really work for my purposes here, sadly.

Mostly, I just want a setting hard enough not to conform to what "everyone knows." Everyone knows hydrogen is the best propellant, full stop, so if you use anything other than hydrogen anywhere it must be wrong -- but in reality, propellant has to be stored before it's used and hydrogen is bad at that. Similarly, everyone knows you can smash diamonds with a hammer, but tetrahedral carbon compounds can be very tough. When I have a setting where aphorisms like that will get a PC killed, I will be happy.

[Frozen_Feet]

I use Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Neither the system nor my games are designed as zero-combat, but individual sessions do end up like that frequently.

LotFP has the benefits of having a nifty encumberance system and being rules light. It has quick, easy to resolve rules for common activities like searching, checking architechture, digging, forcing open doors, figuring out dead languages etc. and supplies such as food, water and lamps are easy to track.

[CharonsHelper]

Mass Effect is not hard science fiction. The entire setting runs on magic rocks. Magic rocks power the wizards with their purple fuzzy crackling. Magic rocks make the improbably shaped spaceships fly and have gravity. They can't even build a handgun without needing some magic rocks. I'd say it's just one big pervasive departure from reality, but the magic rocks do all these things by different mechanisms.

No - it's not hard - but it's not as soft as Star Wars or Final Fantasy. It's middling.

Once it has it's crazy future techs & and added the future fuel etc. - it stays pretty internally consistent.

[daniel_ream]

though I'll agree that there are no truly hard sci-fi games.

There are a couple of supplements for Mongoose Traveller - Orbital and Outpost Mars. c. 2100 solar system freighting/colonization. 2300 AD was close but still had FTL. Diaspora tries to stay reasonably close to cutting edge hard SF but that still means wormholes for interstellar travel.

[Cluedrew]

I will not, however, waltz merrily past all the science either I or my audience might fail to understand, scribble in whatever magic makes my story easier to tell, and relentlessly bray "Clarke's Third Law! Sufficiently advanced!" at anyone who happens to notice, and I'm not going to include magic rocks that make the setting do whatever I want.

Man, now I want to read that again. But yes I understand your general approach to science. From what I can see, I would say grab a generic systems and put your own setting down on top of it. I'm not sure what generic system I would recommend though.

Hey if your really desperate, rip out your favourite skill, encumbrance and health systems and go free-form outside of that. Your game seems (correct me if I'm wrong) to be about in-world interaction and exploration than system mastery. I don't think you actually need a system for that.

[CharonsHelper]

There are a couple of supplements for Mongoose Traveller - Orbital and Outpost Mars. c. 2100 solar system freighting/colonization. 2300 AD was close but still had FTL. Diaspora tries to stay reasonably close to cutting edge hard SF but that still means wormholes for interstellar travel.

Actually - warp travel is theoretically possible - and doesn't even take the crazy amount of energy that initial calculations implied. http://www.space.com/17628-warp-driv...aceflight.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startsw.../#754004dc5410