In my quest to find a #ttrpg to run next year, I bought the Dungeon Fantasy (GURPS) and Mongoose Traveller 2E Bundles of Holding -- both very good deals.
Some initial reactions:
DUNGEON FANTASY
The initial adventure, I Smell a Rat, seems pretty good. While no plan survives contact with the players, it tries to enumerate various things that might happen. It's set in one location that will be easy to translate to any standard fantasy world built before or after running it.
The rules, though ... maybe crunchier than I wanted. The general rule is "roll <= the appropriate skill on 3d6", but there are a STAGGERING number of modifiers in the 114-page "exploits" book. There are also some very weird corner cases, like:
"If a supernatural attack permits a resistance roll and the subject is living or has IQ 6+, there's a cap on the attacker's effective skill: 16 or the defender's actual resistance score, whichever is greater."
Normally rolling low is good and modifiers are applied to the target number (rather than the dice), but for reaction rolls both of these things are reversed. Why?!
Maybe with time one internalizes the 33-page combat section, but I'd be reluctant to spring this on an audience that didn't have experience with RPGs.
MONGOOSE TRAVELLER
I went with the deluxe version of this bundle, which is huge: 15 books!
The campaign that comes with this bundle (part of the Starter Set), The Fall of Tinath, is set in a new subsector half a galaxy away from charted space. I can see that they did this so that new players wouldn't feel intimidated by the lore, but on the other hand it means that the vast majority of setting books published by Mongoose and its predecessors are irrelevant. That complaint aside, it seems (on a light skimming) to not simply hand all the work to the GM as often as other Traveller adventures.
It all still feels a bit dry in a straight-to-VHS-80s-movie way.
@jonharmon What do you like for medium crunchy?
@jonharmon I ran Numenera before Fate. The books are *gorgeous* and the artwork is imaginative, but a bit too much is left up to the GM. Having a monster represented by one number wasn't crunchy enough, and I didn't like constantly multiplying or dividing by 3 because the designer wanted to keep the number of levels low but also wanted to use a d20.
I don't know BRP, but it's now on my radar!
We used GURPS for low-crunchy story-telling 30 years ago(*), so medium-crunchy should also be possible. The meta-rule of GURPS is the rules are all optional; one can use the crunchy rules (only) when the Story calls for crunchy.
(*)(We= my wife handled plot & most NPCs, i handled mapping and what mechanics were called for.)
For low-crunchy today, I'd probably be looking at FATE? (I liked the look of FUDGE years ago, and FATE is the evolution.)
Medium crunchy, IDK.
