The core of Dongas and Drivers (DND) is living a safari 4×4 adventure in the form of a story. You and your friends tell a story together, guiding your crawlers through dongas, trenches and mountainous terrain completing quests for resources, battling tricky situations, daring rescues, and much more.
How to play
The Dongas and Drivers roleplaying game is about storytelling in worlds of safari, deserts and bushveld. Like games of make-believe, DND is driven by imagination. It’s about picturing a crumbling mountain above the roadway at the edge of the forest and imagining how you the adventurer might react to the challenges that that scene presents.
In this make believe world, the possibilities are endless.
Unlike a game of make-believe, DND gives structure to the adventures – a structured way of determining the consequences of the adventurers’ actions. Drivers roll dice to determine which tyre got blown out, which drivers engine seized, who is going to carry the water found to ensure survival of the driver or fuel for the crawler, abandoned fuel from an adventurer who succumbed to the harsh terrain which proves to be your saving grace. Anything is possible, but the dice make some things more probable than others.
Role of the Drive Master
One of the drivers takes on the role of the Drive Master (DM), the adventures lead storyteller and referee. The DM is in charge of the adventure, which appears on the pre worked out adventure guide, while the drivers navigate the adventure’s hazards and decide where to explore, drive or stay put.
The DM might describe the scene of the mountainous terrain you are about to enter with warnings of loose ground, deep rivers and high trenches and dongas that could be the end of a crawler or driver.
The DM determines the results of the drivers actions and narrates what the drivers experience. Because the DM can improvise to react to anything the players attempt, DND is infinitely flexible, and each adventure can be exciting and unexpected.
Role of the Drivers
When you play DND, you take on the role of an adventurer: a skilled driver, a devout 4×4 enthusiast, a survivor in the wild.
Your first step is to imagine and create a driver of your own. Your driver is a combination of your crawler skills, roleplaying hooks, and your imagination. You choose a name, you invent the personality, appearance, and backstory of your driver. Once completed, your driver serves as your representative in the adventure.
With some friends and a little imagination, you strike out on safari type quests and daring adventures of an expedition, testing yourself against an array of challenges and unexpected terrain.
The Adventure Types
The game can be a short pre determined adventure with certain goals to be achieved, or…
have no real end; when one story or adventure wraps up, another one can begin, creating an ongoing story called a campaign.
Many drivers who play the game keep their campaigns going for months or years, meeting with their friends every week or so to pick up the story where they left off.
The crawlers grow in capability and resources as the adventure continues. Each obstacle defeated, each quest completed, and each resource recovered not only adds to the continuing story, but also earns the crawler and driver new capabilities.
There’s no winning or losing in the DND game – at least, not the way those terms are usually understood. Together, the DM and drivers create an exciting story of bold adventurers who confront rigorous perils. The group might fail to complete an adventure successfully, but if everyone had a good time and created a memorable story, they all win.