So it begins

"Look, Kovath, you can't just do this sort of thing at random. There's an art to it. Nobody is going to die in a dungeon that's just put together by random chance."

"I'm telling you, Zarlazz, procedural generation is the future. We'll be able to murder adventurers in job lots. Just as soon as I figure out how to fit three dozen crocodile-riding trolls into the kitchen..."

Dungeon on Automatic (DoA) is my new blog dedicated to trying out 2 new things and a few old things.  The first is the new Dungeon Fantasy Role Playing Game released by Steve Jackson Games.  I intend to keep to the rules as written in said books as closely as possible while also integrating the second thing I intend to try out:  A GURPSified version of this. We (Emily Smirle and myself) are still in the alpha stages, but work is progressing on the encounter generator.  Once the encounter generator makes results that more sense, We'll be running randomly generated dungeons to hopefully demonstrate a few things:

• That Christopher R. Rice's Combat Effectiveness Rating (CER) system works as intended for this kind of project and to vet it as an authoritative way to balance combat encounters in GURPS.
• The DFRPG rules as written.  We'll be running DFRPG rules as close to rules as written as humanly possible.  This should provide great examples of how to run encounters in the system.  If you notice we did something in a way that doesn't exactly line up with DFRPG, flag it in the comments please so we can point it out for other readers!
• That our map generator (with encounters by myself and Emily and treasure generously provided by Brian Thomas) can create interesting (if a bit zany) places for players to visit and loot to gather.

I intend to share battle maps from our sessions, and ask for my players to give me impressions on things that went well or poorly, and work with Emily to adjust the machine (who's doing all my prep for me) to make for better adventures.  So come along on this journey with us and lets see what weird maps and groups of monsters we can face together!