I’m going to do something non-standard for me and read things out of order here. We just covered Chapter 1 of the book, but I’m going to skip Chapters 2 and 3 for now to talk about the three chapters that come after them: Advantages, Disadvantages, and Skills.

I’m doing this because I feel knowing a bit about how these traits work will help understand the contents of Chapter 2 and 3, which are the real “meat” of the book as far as this Let’s Read is concerned. What I’m not doing is describing every trait in these chapters in detail. I’ll describe their general workings here, and talk about specific examples when they become relevant in the templates.

Advantages

Advantages have fairly straightforward basic mechanics. You pay character points equal to an advantage’s cost and you get the capabilities described in its text. Some advantages have levels, and those will list a cost per level and provide increasing benefits.

Generally speaking, most advantages give you bonuses in certain narrow situations (on tests against fear, for example), or give you capabilities you can’t get in other ways (like a photographic memory, a danger sense, or good luck). Many of them also give bonuses to Reaction Rolls, and take the place of the generic Charisma attribute from D&D.

Dungeon Fantasy is by default pretty strict about niche protection in templates, much more so than core GURPS. When spending earned character points to improve your character, you can buy any advantage listed on their template directly, even if it’s not yet on your sheet. If you want to get something that’s not listed there, you and the GM need to make sure you won’t be stepping on anyone’s toes.

The list in this chapter is mainly for stuff that could be acquired by any character. The templates themselves also have mini-lists of exclusive advantages that cannot be acquired by delvers of other professions.

Disadvantages

Disadvantages have negative point costs, so they give you more points to spend elsewhere. For Dungeon Fantasy, the default disadvantage limit is -50. That’s the maximum amount of problems your PC can start with. Attributes lower than 10, and secondary characteristics lowered from their default calculated value both count against this limit.

Many disadvantages can be “bought off” in play with earned character points. They can also be acquired in play, usually due to the kind of misfortune that can befall dungeon delvers. In this case, the disadvantage merely reduces your point total instead of giving you more points to spend.

I like disadvantages because they’re great for defining a character’s personality. Some of them are even considered positive traits in real life, like Honesty and Selflessness, but are classed as disadvantages because they constrain the PC’s behavior.

Many disadvantages are personality traits that have an attached Self-Control Number, which you choose when you acquire the trait. They’re usually the kind of trait that compels you to behave in a certain way that can be detrimental to you, like being Curious, Greedy, or Gullible. When you want to resist their pull, you can make a success roll against that self control number.

The default is self-control number is 12. You can choose 15 instead and only get half the listed points for the disadvantage (since it’s less severe), or you can choose 9 or 6 to get more (and then you have to live with the consequences). Nothing else modifies this number. It doesn’t matter what your Will score is, or how many other mental defenses you have. And of course, you can always choose to succumb to your disadvantage without rolling, if you think it’d be fun or make for a good roleplaying scene.

The book offers a neat solution for those cases where it isn’t clear or desirable to engage in the behavior implied by the disadvantage: when it comes into play, it gives you a -1 penalty per -5 points of its cost for whatever it is you’re trying to do. So the player of your typical horny bard isn’t forced to make a sleazy pass at every attractive person they meet, but they might occasionally need to weather a -3 penalty to their actions because they got distracted by that attractiveness.

Finally, we have some disadvantages here that aren’t recommended for any starting character, but were included because they might be acquired in play. These are things like missing limbs, missing eyes, hearing impairment, and so on. There are ways to fix them with magic, but you will suffer their effects until that happens.

Skills

Advantages and disadvantages get a lot of attention, but skills are just as important a part of the system’s core. Most actions you perform regularly in an adventure are covered by skills.

Skills have an associated level, which has no upper limit but is usually between 8 and 13 for your typical civilian. A skill level of 8 or 9 represents a hobby or a sideline, and a level of 12 or 13 probably applies to the skills a person uses to earn a living. As we mentioned in the introduction to Adventurers, that +4 modifier for routine tasks ensures a professional with a skill level of 12 will rarely fail to do their job.

Delvers (and some monsters!) tend to have lots of skills at high levels. Our templates are usually calibrated to have their main skills at around a level of 16-20, several secondary ones at the 13-14 mark, and a few minor background skills at 9-10.

A skill of 16 means you almost never fail under pressure, though any extra penalties that might apply for difficult tasks will reduce your chances. After 16 your basic chance of success stops increasing, since rolls of 17 or 18 are always failures - but you get better and better at absorbing those extra penalties.

Each skill has a controlling attribute, which is either DX or IQ for 95% of them, and might be HT, Perception, or Will for the remainder. The skill’s level is always relative to that controlling attribute. If an attribute goes up, so does every skill associated with it.

Skills also have a difficulty, which determines what their starting level is when you spend your first point in them. It can be one of Easy, Average, Hard, and Very Hard. The costs are always the same: 1 point for the starting level, 2 for the next one, and 4 points for every level thereafter. The different “starting positions” for the various difficulties ensure that a harder skill ends up costing more for the same skill level.

Skills also have defaults, which are the numbers you roll against when you have no training in a skill. It’s always a much worse number than the one you’d get with even a point in the skill, and the harder the skill is, the worse its default. Really complicated skills might not have a default at all, and cannot be attempted without training.

Some skills might have additional pre-requisites. The most common of those are spells, which can only be learned and used by someone with the appropriate magical aptitude advantages.

Active Defenses

These get their own entry because they’re a little special. They’re a big part of a character’s ability to survive combat, and might be more important than HP. We’ll likely get into more detail about combat rules when we look at them in the Exploits book, but here’s a preview so you can understand how defenses work.

When someone attacks in combat, they make a success roll against the relevant weapon skill (plus modifiers). If they succeed, they threaten a hit, and the target must do something to avoid that. A target who is completely unaware of the attack or otherwise helpless has no choice but to get hit and take damage. Everyone else gets the chance to make an active defense roll.

There are three possible defenses: you can Parry with your melee weapon or hands, you can Block with a shield, or you can Dodge. Parries are based on your skill with the parried weapon, and can handle most melee attacks. Blocks are based on the Shield skill and can stop ranged attacks as well, but obviously require a shield. These defenses have scores equal to (Skill/2) + 3. Dodging is good against everything and can be done multiple times in a turn without penalty, but it’s going to have a smaller score than the others because it’s equal to your Basic Speed + 3 and penalized by your encumbrance.

Succeeding at your defense roll means you completely avoid the attack! This is not a contest - simple success is enough to protect you. This means anyone with defenses of 11 or higher due to high skill or specialized advantages is very annoying to fight. There are also several strategies attackers can adopt to try to reduce or nullify an opponent’s defense score, but we’ll get to them when we get to them.

Differences from GURPS

If you’re familiar with GURPS, then you’ll notice several differences in this more specialized version of it. It’s not trying to be fully generic, for starters: this means that every advantage, disadvantage, and skill that didn’t apply directly to the dungeon fantasy genre was removed.

For skills, that mostly means anything that was too “high-tech” or out of genre. Your typical fantasy delver will never drive a truck or do a scientifically-accurate spacewalk.

Advantages and disadvantages got the same treatment. Also gone are those traits you only see in monsters (like extra limbs and eyes) and all the social traits that could mess too much with the basic Dungeon/Town mechanic or otherwise interfere with your delving. You and your GM probably aren’t interested in all the mechanic and story complications that Rank and Status and Allies and Patrons and Enemies and Dependents can bring to a game.

You can still have those things in the story, but the specific structure enforced by those traits doesn’t bind you. If you find that you really need that structure in your games, or that you really want to run the full Iron Gods adventure path, then GURPS might be of help.