Has anyone ever made a large dungeon/adventure using mostly minions?

[jshaft37]

I have a group that does mostly RP/Exploration, but I can tell they are itching for some serious combat. I was thinking about creating a good sized dungeon crawl in a B1 kind of way. However, I don't want it to be a long grind, I want them to explore 20-30 rooms in one session. I was thinking about using the old rounds/turns rules, wandering monsters, etc. I was considering placing 3 major encounters with standard monsters, but for everything else use 1 or 2 hit minions. I figure this will wear them down, but keep the game moving. Any thoughts? Will the new Into the Unknown handbook have any guidance on this sort of thing?

What about traps? I was thinking about greatly increasing their levels to make them effective stand alone encounters.

 

[The Red King]

Sounds like fun. If they chew through your larger encounters quickly, have the random group of minions drop in on the fight and make it better!

 

[jshaft37]

Sounds like fun. If they chew through your larger encounters quickly, have the random group of minions drop in on the fight and make it better!

Yeah, I'm going to make a Thematic Encounter Template minion/hazard as prescribed in the 4e dungeon crawl over at loremaster.

 

[the Jester]

Hmm, sounds very cool. I haven't gone as far as you're thinking of, but I have made dungeons where several encounters were all minions and they worked all right- very quick, too.

Please let us know how it goes!

 

[Quickleaf]

Yeah, I'm going to make a Thematic Encounter Template minion/hazard as prescribed in the 4e dungeon crawl over at loremaster.

It's a great article: Loremaster - How to Build a Dungeon Crawl for Heroic and Paragon Tiers.

I do notice some things which could change game play in a way that annoys some players. For example, giving monsters +10 initiative hurts rogues or any PC invested in alpha striking.

Likewise upping the DC of perceiving traps to Hard +5 makes it impossible for all but trained PCs with extra modifiers or high Wisdom to notice. And it limits scenarios where the PCs get to make a choice between the trapped passageway and the hall filled with sounds of sleeping monsters.

Overall I like it, but take some of the changes with a grain of salt.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I have used small, all-minion encounters, generally as part of a larger Exploration or infiltration skill challenge. If you get a failure in the challenge, you face some minions, if you kill them all fast enough, they don't raise the alarm, and the challenge continues, other failures may trigger a trap or require getting past a hazzard that might otherwise have been avoided. Final success on the challenge gets you to the important fight on your terms or to the important goal without a big fight. Failure brings you the fight(s) you were trying to avoid.

As a matter of course, I wouldn't allow a rest during the challenge. You could discourage or simply disallow rests between the minor minion fights, effectively making them part of a single, larger battle.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I have a group that does mostly RP/Exploration, but I can tell they are itching for some serious combat. I was thinking about creating a good sized dungeon crawl in a B1 kind of way. However, I don't want it to be a long grind, I want them to explore 20-30 rooms in one session. I was thinking about using the old rounds/turns rules, wandering monsters, etc. I was considering placing 3 major encounters with standard monsters, but for everything else use 1 or 2 hit minions. I figure this will wear them down, but keep the game moving. Any thoughts? Will the new Into the Unknown handbook have any guidance on this sort of thing?

What about traps? I was thinking about greatly increasing their levels to make them effective stand alone encounters.

I don't know what you're doing with the old rounds/turns rules. Are you making rounds a minute long?

I like bringing back wandering monsters, and I like that you call them wandering and not "random". That one word seems to have shot down the whole concept in modern gaming.

Encounters can't really grind PCs down that way. Even if they lose healing surges, it takes a lot of heavy battles to make PCs run out of surges. They tend to run out of dailies faster

Be very careful with traps. IMO, traps should never be used by themselves, as that tends to be boring. They're immobile, and players can often bypass them. This is true regardless of their level. In a dungeon with a lot of minions, there's no excuse to use just a trap. People use an alarm without a guard because it's cheaper and manpower is limited. This is not an issue here.

Furthermore, the role of the trap has changed, and WotC was talking about this before even announcing 4e. In older editions, traps just inflicted "pain" at the cost of "lack of paranoia". Being paranoid about traps (searching every 10 foot square, using ten foot poles, etc) reduced the number of hit points lost and spells expended. In late 3.x and 4e, traps are designed to make an encounter different, but they're now a resource used by the intelligent minions.

I like the above suggestion of not allowing rests with minion encounters. Although there'll need to be an explanation; minions blowing whistles to call on the "real" encounters should do the trick.

 

[jshaft37]

Well I play B/X (via labyrinth lord) and 4E so I wanted to inject some of that style into 4E. I was hoping to be able to use traps in both ways, as tools used to monsters during encounters, but also as hazards of the dungeon, as they were used in the old adventures.

I'm not sure about rests yet, I'm really going to throw a lot of challeneges at them, so I guess I'll play them by ear. If they rest more then they need, that's when I'll start fudging those wandering monster checks.

Traps are only immobile if you choose not to move them

 

[D'karr]

Yeah, I'm going to make a Thematic Encounter Template minion/hazard as prescribed in the 4e dungeon crawl over at loremaster.

I was part of [MENTION=38140]Frylock[/MENTION]'s test group as he was developing the system. The thematic encounter was one of the great things to come out of this. It really helps give the DM another "tool" in their pocket.

It's a great article: Loremaster - How to Build a Dungeon Crawl for Heroic and Paragon Tiers.

I do notice some things which could change game play in a way that annoys some players. For example, giving monsters +10 initiative hurts rogues or any PC invested in alpha striking.

Likewise upping the DC of perceiving traps to Hard +5 makes it impossible for all but trained PCs with extra modifiers or high Wisdom to notice. And it limits scenarios where the PCs get to make a choice between the trapped passageway and the hall filled with sounds of sleeping monsters.

Overall I like it, but take some of the changes with a grain of salt.

The monster initiative was an "issue" but it really gave the monsters an opportunity to act. It's important for the monsters to get to do their thing at least once in the encounter or the rest of the system really handicaps them. The idea is to have "quicker" significant combats that play to the "feel" of the dungeon crawl.

Traps were a pain in the ass, but discovering them is routinely trivial at high levels. So they are too easily "avoided". If you want to keep the trap "discoverable", one "fix" might be to NOT describe the trap in game terms at all. The PCs will discover something, but have to spend time actually investigating it to discover how to disable/avoid it. In that period of time the DM can still spring the encounter.

Traps should probably not be a lone encounter situation. That way is simply too easy. They should be mixed in with an occurring encounter.

[MENTION=38140]Frylock[/MENTION] does frequent these boards on occassion. I hope he drops by and comments on it. He did spend an inordinate amount of time trying to kill our characters with his system, and it was quite fun.

 

[pippenainteasy]

Just make sure no one has Kartan's Void Ring