Refining the concept

"So, Zarlazz, what have you got the bugbear compression rate down to?"

"I can't seem to get it below 1.2 cubic feet."

"HA, I've got mine down to 1 cubic foot per bugbear. The trick is to take out all the blood first, store it separately."

"But where do you keep it?"

"Vampire feeding bay. Mix it in with 1/3 human blood and the coffindwellers don't know the difference."

 Refining the concept:

We're still a little ways away from go time on the encounter generator (it was putting very silly numbers of bugbear in rooms they don't fit in for a while there), but I've gotten to chat with my players a bit and we're going to run this with a nod to the old West Marches style of campaign.  This means we'll do the following:

• Play whenever at least 2 and at most 5 players get together and schedule for a predetermined amount of time.  When we get to the end of the night, players will have to make the call on if they want to call it there and return to town with whatever they've accomplished or if they want to continue the session another (scheduled) time.
• Allow players to have a stable of characters who earn points and cash independently of their players.  A player who decided to leave a character in the dungeon with a group can't bring him to another dungeon until the previous one is complete.
• If we ever get the generator capable of doing themes, I'll allow players to announce the type of dungeon they'd like to go to.  So you may see more specialized adventuring parties, like a crew of Half-Orcs who love to delve in swamps (due to poison resistance).
• Players should be able to bring whatever rules compliant character they want.  For now, we won't be working with "custom professions" as seen on DFRPG: Adventurers 14. I may be persuaded to change that some time in the future.

What do you think? Do you anticipate any real problems with this setup? Is this something you would want to play in?

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!