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[Badwe]

These stories remind me of a humorous, gamist campaign that an old acquantance of mine had planned for his group. As he described it, the PCs were locked inside a dungeon with 20 floors (3.5e). At the locked entrance sat a "dungeon master" who could answer basic questions as well as sell them adventuring gear or an inn. Each floor would be equivalent to a level of the PCs, and would follow the 3.5 DMG exactly in what range of encounters would exist (including a single encounter that was ostensibly impossible for a party of that level). To add tension, the players only had one in-game month to reach the bottom and rescue the princess or some such.

Certainly a very contrived and surreal (even by D&D standards) setting, but interesting in that with everything laid on the table, the PCs have to use every advantage to make good time.


Re: balance. You can _always_ throw out balance as it suits you, and of course should. However, don't have any illusions: when you throw out the balance as written in the book, you are creating MORE work for yourself, not less. What is written in the DMG, especially by modern design standards, is intended to enable DMing as much as possible. After all, more DMs means more players and more sales! You can break from it to suit your need, but then it's up to you to calculate what is, in fact, balanced.

I've run keep on the shadowfell and cooked up adventuring from levels 4-7 following that. The only problem I ran into, doing things effectively "by the book" is that my PCs are far too crafty and created a very synergistic team, so I have to throw encounters a minimum of 1 level higher than them to have a hope of giving them a real challenge.

My long term goals, somewhere around mid-paragon tier, are a series of elemental temples that are effectively mega-dungeons, where the PCs can delve as deep as they want, even after they've gotten what they quested for, or move on to a different element.