The Darkest House - What it Tells Us About the Core of TTRPGs
By Jason Campbell
It uses it’s own system with conversion rules. It uses the levels of each system to convert, implying that this is the core differentiation between ttrpgs
The Darkest House is a combination mega adventure and rpg game system from Monte Cook Games. It’s available as a book or an app for Mac and Windows. The adventure is a huge haunted house. The house hates you - the objective of the characters is usually just to escape alive. The adventure contains 200 pages of rooms to explore, complete with downloadable artwork for each room and sound effects.
The Game System
Some people describe The Darkest House as system agnostic, but it’s really the opposite. It is its own game system. It’s simple so that the adventure focuses on story, and it’s built with ever increasing tension to evoke the horror of the house. The premise of the game is that players could play any character created in any other ttrpg system. The GM can insert the house into any existing campaign, or even run it as its own adventure, inviting players to bring characters from different game systems, whichever ones they prefer. The game covers conversion of PCs from other systems based on the level range covered by the system, so in a 5e based system the PCs will be a certain Darkest House level based on the 1-20 level system while a PC from Numenera would be a different level based on its 1-6 level system.
Why Levels?
Here’s the interesting part - if you’re converting characters from one system to another, why is it based on the character’s level? It could have used health, hit points, number of abilities or something else. This choice tells us that the designers of the game decided that levels or tiers within a game - essentially the power progression of characters compared to other characters - is the core of player characters.
Conclusion
The Darkest House’s conversion system leads to some obvious issues, for instance what about bringing in characters from systems that don’t have level advancement? There’s a note in the book that characters from Call of Cthulhu are unlikely to survive, but it could lead to interesting stories. It would be difficult to bring in characters from games like EZd6 and Index Card RPG.
What do you think? Are character levels the core of player characters? Let us know in the comments!
