Well, I'm gonna make a hex grid based campaign with dungeons and such, and my player and I dislike D&D, Pathfinder and the likes for the over the top complexity. We've been using Savage Worlds for a while, however it doesn't feel like a system made for Dungeon Crawls.
I'd like to ask if there is a system that lets a single player stand on his own and that fits the dungeon crawler/exploration style.
I recently ran into Super-Console and Dungeonslayers. I am loving Console for its simplicity and wackiness, but the fact it tries to emulate a Console RPG makes things such as disabling traps and non linear dungeons quite hard to think about. And though we're loving Dungeonslayers, my player likes to Control a party, and I don't know how it would turn out if I give him control over 4 DS players, plus it doesn't have a Monster Creation rules system.
So I'm still debating which system would be best. Some points I want to let you know about:
- I'm looking for a system that rewards my player experience for defeating foes, the problem with Savage Worlds is that Experience Gaining is way too fast, and players get experience regardless of what the face.
- Something simple, that lets my player control a party, but without making the characters feel like "the same"
- A game that let us play a long term campaign, we're not running to a one-shot or short campaign.
- A system focused on combat, dungeon crawling and that works well for hexgrinding.
The reasons why I DON'T think Console, Savage Worlds and Dungeonslayers are good to go.
Console is a very simple, colorful, fun to run game, but it's WAY too focused in combat. Though this will be the main focus of the adventure (we HATE talking dragons and magic animals...), there are no skill systems, nor trap detection/disabling ones, plus stats grow to 99 and the only checks are for attacks/spell-casting and opposed checks.
Tough Savage Worlds is our favored system, I just feels NOT good for dungeon crawls, the Magic Items are too uninteresting and very little flexible, there are no real reasons to motivate my player into the fray of battle or exploring, since SW is a brutal system and giving a false step away from the rad means he can go down in a single round, and it's way too anti climatic for "boss" encounters, as they can die in a single action as well.
Dungeonslayers would work or seems to work for single, but it's not simple enough to make him run a party without having to track many things, and there's not any sort of monster creation rules system.
D&D, Pathfinder, 3.5 and the likes aren't games we enjoy because a single action can take forever to resolve, and to tell you the truth I didn't felt like the beginner box of Pathfinder helped me understand the rules once they leveled up, it's too much of a hassle for something we want to be fun.