Trollish Delver

In a relatively short time TTRPGs have evolved and blossomed from a dungeon and wilderness procedural coin-nicking game to, well, almost anything really. So I was thinking: what would happen if, rather than evolving, every TTRPG was just a variation of OD&D? I’ve conjured some answers from my sick mind for three of the biggies.

Vampire: The Masquerade

Storyteller system? Blech. This wouldn’t be about the melodramatics that goes with being a hot vampire. No, this is a game of territorial warfare, with the city as a megadungeon. Various clans would be represented as classes: Brujah for fighter, Tremere for wizard, and maybe Nosferatu as a thief type thing.

Rather than torches burning down you’d have blood points. Gotta keep feeding otherwise you save vs frenzy. But feeding on the gen pop increases the chance of being discovered. Save vs masquerade.

It’s blood for xp and influence instead of gold. The more influence, the more territory you can get.

Cyberpunk Red

Like Vampire Night City is a megadungeon or hexcrawl. This is gritty corpo espionage, baby! Rather than wandering monsters you’d have patrol alerts based on how you’re approaching the heist. Going in guns blazing is upping those patrol chances considerably.

Obviously the netrunner would be a wizard type, with programs instead of spells. The solo would be a fighter and techie the thief.

Torches would be swapped for battery power and signal range, the latter to keep the techie in the dungeon crawl.

No minigame for netrunning. Just a save vs brain getting fried up. And rather than rolling abilities success is based on your upgrades and tech.

Call of Cthulhu

So now we have an investigation crawl where sanity is impacted by the place you’re investigating and the wandering monsters. Roll vs sanity of reduce it like HP.

Classes are soldier (fighter), occultist (wizard), and investigator (thief). Only an occultist can read from magic tomes without losing sanity, or perhaps losing less.

Rather than looking for clues and solving a mystery this would be more about finding ancient secrets and getting them to a safe place (e.g. Miskatonic). The more mythos relics gained the more xp.

Torches would simply be flashlights and eldritch terrors would be like ten times as strong as a red dragon.