Bay 12 Games Forum

In other words: it's toads all the way down.

As soon as the bug that prevents toad men from being encountered in-game gets fixed, they should universally form cults around a cryptic being they call "The Great Toad". They describe Him as a deistic entity from a higher plane of existence, outranking even Armok himself, for He laid down the foundation of all worlds ere even Armok first forged his Anvil.

I can see the logic of this, my only (admittedly biased) concern with delaying the Steam release any further would be the corresponding delays of Myth & Magic and the rest of the Villains arc, both of which have already been pushed back enough if you ask me (remember that we were initially predicted to already be 3-4 years into Myth & Magic development by now, yet here we are still waiting).

However, I'd have absolutely no problem with waiting for Steam if Toady could begin developments of aforementioned delayed DF Classic arcs while he's still putting the finishing polishes on Steam release (as long as he doesn't feel too overworked by the multitask).

The name sliders IMO, if they're to allow for the "call a smeerp a rabbit trope" as suggested by OP, should also allow for the opposite: worlds where visually-recognizable fantasy creatures go by something other than their standard names. Eg. the occasional world where elves are called "avathi" or dwarves are called "durgrums". This might even be extended to mundane fauna: maybe dwarves in a particular world happen to call cats "mistems" and dogs "bomreks".

Better yet: have Toady cause alterations to the timestream that will ensure the Steam version of DF is the only one that's ever existed, so that there's no DF Classic to compare it to in the first place.

He can only accomplish this by taking a copy of The Hobbit's first edition to the late Cretaceous and throwing it at the head of a very specific Velociraptor.

Remove moddable raws from the Steam release and replace them with Spore-style customization features for new creatures and objects, which work by just mix-and-matching options from a predetermined set of vanilla sprite parts. Want to mod in a creature from your favourite video game RPG? Too bad! But here, you can go right ahead and create a cat with a goblin's head and siege engine parts mounted to its shoulders. That's close enough, right?

Adventure mode board seemed like as good a place as any for this question.
To the point, I've heard stories from some bay12 forumites who have adapted their DF worlds to their own tabletop RPG campaigns, and thought it seemed like something I might want to try myself at some point. And so I'm curious, what are some opinions on the best TTRPG system to emulate a vanilla DF world (as in a somewhat more fleshed-out, cohesive, and actualized version of the game DF is right now, putting aside mythgen and other major future overhauls)?

I know D&D 5e and Pathfinder are popular choices...but while I have nothing against these systems on their own merits, I personally don't think they're the best at simulating vanilla DF in its current iteration (at least not without extensive homebrewing and house rules). I'm eager to find out whether anyone has used alternative systems to better effect?

I do already have a system in mind, but I'm always curious about alternative opinions.