Saturday, April 2, 2011

The Origins of DtD

    I've been asked a few times about how I came up with the idea for Dungeons The Dragoning. Well, the base idea is something I've joked about before, a tolkeinesque fantasy game done by White Wolf. Considering Mage, Hunter, and Exalted, it's not hard to think they might try their hand at Dungeonpunk stuff. Exalted turned down a few notches and set in a generic fantasy world.
    It wasn't something I really took seriously. I mean, I put some thought into it, but I never really wrote any of it down. The problem with putting Dungeons and Dragons into a White Wolf game is that, well, WoD by default has pretty awful combat. New World of Darkness is a little better, but 3.5 and 4e were really crunch heavy.
    The unfinished ideas went on the back burner. I put together a game that I have yet to even playtest to this day (Section 27) and got involved with the Adeptus Evangelion devteam. I contributed a bit to V2, and I've been helping with the next release.
    I was playing AdEva and our characters got into roleplaying. You can see where this is going. See, the backstory was that after Second Impact, some of the major gaming companies - White Wolf, Wizards of the Coast, and Games Workshop - ended up merging into White Wizard's Workshop. And their product lines merged as well, into Dungeons The Dragoning 40k.
    Our characters started playing DtD, and I started designing the system for it. I got some test documents done, and we planned on doing a kind of special session to roleplay our characters roleplaying. We did a bit, never really going into the rules, and that game eventually ended (probably the best game I was ever in).
    After the game ended, I continued work on DtD. Partly because I'm stubborn and partly as a kind of tribute. I rewrote almost everything from the ground up. What I had in those test documents is quite far from what you see in Version 1.1. And that's pretty much where it all came from.
    We've still never done that special session. I still have hope.

2 comments:

  1. Because you can't help yourself, Blast.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is brilliant. Seriously. Ignoring the text story. Ignoring the rules. (Oh god, the skills alone, that's glorious.) The art choices are brilliant. Promethian is my favorite, but the tau is almost as good. And is that an Infernal Exalted as a Daemonhost? It's just all so subtly wrong, wrong, wrong.

    And yet...

    ReplyDelete