The students at the School D&D Club have been giving Dungeon Fantasy RPG (powered by GURPS) a go and they took to it like ducks to water. We played today and the general feedback was it’s fast, lots of fun, and the characters are far more interesting than they were in Basic D&D.

DFRPG quantifies characters in a much more detailed and granular fashion. Their 1st Level D&D characters were transferred over as 62 points in GURPS, with 8 points of “experience” because they have played for about 12 weeks previously.

One example: the Wizard’s player loved having a dozen spells including “Fireball”, being able to cast whenever and just paying with Fatigue Points. Another: the player of the Elf enjoyed having a good mix of spells, skills, and interesting advantages.

They fought Giant Rats and it was scary! They also beat the Giant Rats, blasting one with the Fireball, slicing up two more, and making the rest run. But they also got a beating – they learned to give ground by using Retreat when defending; a couple of them got bitten badly.

Most of all, everyone was highly engaged at the table. Yes, we used a battlemap and the paper miniatures but the kids loved this! They could move their character around, see the action, and the one second turn kept everyone’s attention.

All in all, they want to keep playing with DFRPG – one of the lads was talking about how much more quickly combat ran… which is odd to me because the fight took longer in terms of clock-time. What I think he meant was that the turn around the table was faster.

Glad they enjoyed it!

Game on!