UNDERDEEP borrows the tabletop vocabulary without playing the tabletop game. The Underdeep DND comparison is honest about both halves: it has a stat block of ten attributes, job classes that award fixed stat pairs, skills bought with a currency, and a good/evil axis in place of alignment - and none of the party, the dice or the dungeon master that make those systems matter at a table.

What Underdeep DND keeps from the tabletop

  • A stat block. The character is built from ten attributes: POW, SPD, MAG, SPI, TGH, SEN, DEX, INT, NEG and CHA.
  • Classes. Jobs behave like classes. Each stage of the Job panel holds exactly two jobs, every job awards a fixed pair of stats, each job caps at level 10, and any job can be reset if you pick it badly.
  • Separate skills. Skills are not part of levelling. They are bought individually from the Skill tab with Orbs, and each one occupies a slot.
  • Alignment. Karma replaces it. It starts at Neutral (+0) and moves toward Good (+1) as your character behaves well, and two behaviour policies on the map - F for evil and G for good - decide how it acts.

That is a complete tabletop vocabulary, and it is why the game reads as a role-playing game at a glance.

The UNDERDEEP character creation screen: four engraved black-and-white character portraits in a two-by-two grid, two armoured knights and two sword-and-shield fighters, each above a Select button, under the Select Your Appearance label.
The game draws its classes as engraved plates you pick from before a run.

Where the tabletop rules stop

Everything that would need a group or a chance roll to work is gone:

  • No party and no dungeon master. You play one character alone, and no other player can join your run.
  • No dice. Every check is a deterministic comparison rather than a roll. Block and dodge are percentages capped at 15%, doors and traps resolve against a combined Dexterity plus Sense threshold, and damage is simply your stat pair added up - POW plus SPD for a single-target hit, half of MAG plus SPI for an area hit.
  • Randomness moved to the world, not the rules. The dice equivalent in this game is the spawn roll on each tile and the drop roll on each kill.
  • Nothing happens at a table. You set a route and let the character play it out, so the "session" is a set of unattended runs rather than a conversation.

The comparisons players actually make

Because of those differences, the comparison that fits UNDERDEEP is not Dungeons & Dragons but the classic roguelikes: ADOM, Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol, Demise, NetHack, and the Rogue, Angband and DCSS lineage, along with the early MUDs.

The ADOM comparison comes up most often, because ADOM had the same idea of auto-searching a dungeon with a single key while the character plays itself. UNDERDEEP's idle loop is that feature with modern art: you drop behaviour markers on tiles, the character walks them, and the runs stack up while you are away. The marker system behind that loop is in the route settings guide.

Karma takes the place of alignment

Karma is the one place the tabletop shape survives in full, and it is worth knowing what it is worth before you plan around it: it shifts with behaviour, and the events let you spend it, but in the current build it grants no stat, no drop and no unlock. Treat it as a roleplaying axis attached to your route rather than as a build pillar. The karma guide has the details.