A Return to the Dungeon

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

When resources exist (are consumed and generated) on a "dungeon" level instead of an encounter or day level, these resources might become more abstract. It can't be about stuff like potions (you could leave the dungeon and buy a new one) or about encounter powers (they recover even if you don't finish the dungeon or leave it for good).

A possible "realistic" resource might be time. So you can still leave the dungeon to buy you a potion in the nearest city, but if it takes too long, you might have lost in some way.

The standard scenario for time being relevant is typically "The ritual to end the world/unleash hell on [campaign world] finishes at midnight" or something like that.

But there could be other ways to track this - for example the "alert state" of the dungeon. If you keep killing monsters and heading back to town to recover hit points and consumables (or to haul off loot), someone in the dungeon is bound to notice the threat by the PCs and start preparing counter-measures. On an abstract level (and still in a D&D 4 context), this could be reflected by increasing the encounter budget, for example. Ultimately, you create a death spiral - the encounters get tougher, and as they get tougher, the party has to retreat earlier. The trick is to also have a mechanic to "reset" the clock or create a safe pacing that the players can figure out.

For example, a "stealthy" approach - you avoid traps, you don't kill monsters, maybe you even bribe some of the more mercenary types - could give you extra time - the alert level drops, the encounter budgets are smaller again, things get easier again. Of course, stealth on the other hand might mean you take longer time in-game. If there is an actual ticking clock, you have to find an equilibrium. If there is not, you might want to put up other incentives to keep it challenging - maybe you have a "patience" resource - the longer the dungeon takes, the more difficult stuff requiring patience get. This "simulates" the player characters getting sloppy after too many successes, or getting bored and frustrated by the pace.

We could kinda narrow things down to two approaches:
Aggressive vs Conservative and the "timers": "Alert Level" vs "Patience"
Dungeons might be classsifed with these too.
Undeads are very dangerous - so aggressive is difficult. But - there is no alert level to speak of when most undeads are mindless. They don't care what happens to their neighbors. Stealth, Bribery or Diplomacy can be difficult with ghosts and mindless skeletons.
A trap-infested dungeon is dangerous to wade through aggressively. Traps might also trigger enemy reactions. Conservative seems easier, but - it makes the dungeon a very slow, frustrating experience, causing people to get more twitchy, so that the Patience-Meter might drop more quickly.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Two words: Resource Management.

If you want to make the dungeon the basic unit of play, you must have resources that are used/managed within the context of that unit of play.


RC

 

[jmucchiello]

I don't know where to start.....

If dungeons are your main adventure unit, why detail the rooms at all? Why not run the whole thing as a (big) skill challenge?

----

Different line of thought.....

How do overlapping plots work in a dungeon-centric game? Suppose there's a court intrigue element to my campaign involving some long term goal. Meanwhile the party still needs to handle the reports of undead in the village of X. So are the resource expenditures for the court intrigue somehow separate from the village "dungeon"?

 

[theRogueRooster]

On the subject of character classes, since we are setting the Dungeon/Adventure as the basic element of gameplay, it makes sense to me to balance the classes by the same criteria, meaning not all classes need be combat oriented, as long as they can take the lead in other types of encounters (assumed to also be present in the Dungeon). I personally would not be happy with a system that allows me to plug in Frodo for Gandalf at the Bridge of Khazad-dum with an equivalent chance of success. In the Kamikaze System (has a nice ring to it, yes?), should a group be lacking an important class for the Adventure at hand, let's give them the option to hire on followers to fill in the gaps.

All this comes with a caveat so big that I just went back and underlined it, and that is: classes balanced-by-Dungeon is only feasible if the encounters contained within can each be resolved in a relatively small amount of time. For example, if an encounter, combat or otherwise, can be resolved in around 15 minutes, it's no big deal if not all the players are participants (or main participants). But it's not reasonable to ask players to sit on the sidelines for hours at a time.

So my vote would be for a shorter combat system that would necessarily be abstracted to a larger degree than it is now. Something that would involve more than one roll and less than, say, half a dozen rolls for the entire group to resolve the combat. I'd prefer to keep some aspect of tactical maneuvering in the system, even if it doesn't involve a grid and miniatures, so that it feels like combat. In the same vein, other types of encounters would also have their own mechanics or mini-games which may or may not work like combat.

How do overlapping plots work in a dungeon-centric game? Suppose there's a court intrigue element to my campaign involving some long term goal. Meanwhile the party still needs to handle the reports of undead in the village of X. So are the resource expenditures for the court intrigue somehow separate from the village "dungeon"?

Good question! My guess is that there would need to be some sort of criteria on what actually constitutes a Dungeon/Adventure. For example, does the court intrigue plot require action by the players right now? If so, it's probably a Dungeon. If not, then can elements of it be integrated into the current Dungeon? I think it would be perfectly acceptable to slip in a number of encounters into one Dungeon that would affect the setup of another Dungeon.

Or moving in a different direction, maybe there would be a way to nest Dungeons within a Dungeon. A long term Dungeon (like the court intrigue) made up of a collection of short term Dungeons (like the undead problem).

The answer may also partially depend on how one designs the Dungeon. If the Dungeon is "Travel from the Shire to Mount Doom and Destroy the Ring of Power" then, yeah, you'd have a problem with handling multiple concurrent plots, because the Dungeon is much too large in scope. It would need to be broken down into several smaller Dungeons, like:

• Travel from the Shire to Bree to meet Gandalf, avoiding the Ringwraiths
• Travel from Bree to Rivendell, still avoiding the Ringwraiths
• Determine what to do with the Ring and get all the Free Peoples on board with the plan
• Find a way past Mount Caradhras
• Etc.

Then at the conclusion of each Dungeon (and where appropriate) the players can choose to pursue another plot's Dungeon or continue to follow along the current plot.

I've got many other potentially dumb ideas, but they'll have to wait.
-tRR

 

[pemerton]

classes balanced-by-Dungeon is only feasible if the encounters contained within can each be resolved in a relatively small amount of time. For example, if an encounter, combat or otherwise, can be resolved in around 15 minutes, it's no big deal if not all the players are participants (or main participants). But it's not reasonable to ask players to sit on the sidelines for hours at a time.

There's another issue also.

In 4e, combat encounters have an inherent dramatic pacing - initially the monsters seem to be winning, but then the PCs come back from behind, as their conditional resources (second wind, encounter/daily powers, etc) kick in.

So all the PCs participating all the time doesn't only serve the (negative) goal of avoiding player boredom - it also serves the (positive) goal of having all the players participate in the drama of the game.

This might be a feature that you would want to preserve in the move to a dungeon-based game. I assume that it's not impossible to do it in a "spotlight sharing" model of balancing PCs, but it might be hard. For example, if the dungeon is designed so that initially the PCs face adversity but then triumph at the end (spreading 4e's dramatic pacing over the adventure rather than the encounter) then you might want to think about the posssibility that one PC's spotlight time occurs only at the point of maximum adversity (and hence they're having a hard time of it), while another PC's spotlight time occurs only at the ponit of triump (and hence they get a disproportionate share of the glory).

One way to handle this would be to vary the sequence of challenges from adventure to adventure, so it's never the same PC stuck at the same point of the dramatic sequence. But then, as far as dramatic sequencing is concerned, you're balancing your game not over the adventure but over the campaign.

 

[Lanefan]

Can I raise a practical question (or two) at this point?

What if the party doesn't do things as planned, but instead does a bit of one adventure, segues right into nibbling at the edges of the next, waves at a third on its way by after doing some unrelated stuff, and eventually wanders back to town having started three adventures and finished none? In other words, the party kinda takes the modular adventure structure and blows it up as they go along. At what point(s) do their resources reset?

I ask because that's *exactly* what one of my groups just finished doing.

In a broader sense, how can a model like this support non-modular adventuring; or adventuring where the adventure structure (by design or - in my case - accident) is so disorganized that you can't tell where one ends and the next begins because there just isn't enough coherence?

A corollary question: how does this handle the relatively common situation where the party are facing a straightforward adventure module but don't do it all in one go? Do their resources reset each time they go back to town? Or, do they reset only when the whole adventure is completed?

I've run adventures where the party have retreated back to town (and I don't just mean an overnight trip; town in some cases was a week away) half a dozen times or more during the same adventure. My 1e version of Keep on the Shadowfell was one such: it took them about a third of a game-time year to finish because during the adventure they made half a dozen three-week round-trips back to town for various reasons. Would their resources have reset on these trips, or only once they had defeated Kalarel?

Lan-"daily may still end up being the most realistic option"-efan

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Can I raise a practical question (or two) at this point?

What if the party doesn't do things as planned, but instead does a bit of one adventure, segues right into nibbling at the edges of the next, waves at a third on its way by after doing some unrelated stuff, and eventually wanders back to town having started three adventures and finished none? In other words, the party kinda takes the modular adventure structure and blows it up as they go along. At what point(s) do their resources reset?

I ask because that's *exactly* what one of my groups just finished doing.

In a broader sense, how can a model like this support non-modular adventuring; or adventuring where the adventure structure (by design or - in my case - accident) is so disorganized that you can't tell where one ends and the next begins because there just isn't enough coherence?

A corollary question: how does this handle the relatively common situation where the party are facing a straightforward adventure module but don't do it all in one go? Do their resources reset each time they go back to town? Or, do they reset only when the whole adventure is completed?

I've run adventures where the party have retreated back to town (and I don't just mean an overnight trip; town in some cases was a week away) half a dozen times or more during the same adventure. My 1e version of Keep on the Shadowfell was one such: it took them about a third of a game-time year to finish because during the adventure they made half a dozen three-week round-trips back to town for various reasons. Would their resources have reset on these trips, or only once they had defeated Kalarel?

Lan-"daily may still end up being the most realistic option"-efan

That's a good question.

I never actually had to do this in game, but D&D has similar issues with encounter powers - if there is a skill-boosting encounter power around and the players are part of a skill challenge, and use it there, but this skill challenge is extended and also includes combat encounters, when does this power reset?

By "RAW", it's simple 5 minutes of rest always get you your power back. But I find this kinda unsatisfying, since it could theoretically mean you could use such a power for every check in an skill challenge. So my preference is to say: If you get into another encounter/dungeon, you can use your limited resource there again. But that doesn't recover it for the other encounter/dungeon you were or are in.

Unfortunately, this could increase the amount of book-keeping (did I use my Diplomacy reroll in this Dungeon already?), and if the players never "finish" a dungeon, it might also seem useless. Also, it does work fine for abstract resources like encounter powers or daily powers, but it's a little harder to swallow for physical resources like healing potions and money.

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

If people go the route of "dungeon"-spaced resources the timing of recharge is going to have to fall on arbitrary DM judgment.

For comparison the arbitrary method is how it mostly works in FantasyCraft: resources are generally based on "scene", game session, and adventure, with scene being the main unit. There is some advice on what constitutes a scene change, but it's still left up to the Game Controller and no excuses are given.

 

[LostSoul]

If people go the route of "dungeon"-spaced resources the timing of recharge is going to have to fall on arbitrary DM judgment.

DM judgement doesn't always have to be arbitrary! You could say principled DM judgement or something similar.

 

[KidSnide]

I've run adventures where the party have retreated back to town (and I don't just mean an overnight trip; town in some cases was a week away) half a dozen times or more during the same adventure. My 1e version of Keep on the Shadowfell was one such: it took them about a third of a game-time year to finish because during the adventure they made half a dozen three-week round-trips back to town for various reasons. Would their resources have reset on these trips, or only once they had defeated Kalarel?

The strength and weakness of daily renewal is that it is predictable. In a traditional dungeon delve, the PCs can decide whether they need to withdraw or continue on. The problem is mostly in non-dungeon adventures when the adventure takes place over many weeks of sparsely spaced encounters (turning "daily" resources into effectively "encounter" resources).

Maybe the right answer (in 4e terms) is to make an extended rest more subjective? Sure, in a dungeon context, you can get an extended rest by holing up or going back to town. But, in a wilderness setting*, maybe a real "extended rest" is only available when you hit a town? That may be a little too gamist, but it comes closer to the right pacing.

-KS

* OK, maybe not every wilderness setting... Maybe just in an "arduous journey?"