Megadungeon Sandbox and 4E

[Croesus]

My goal here is not to rehash megadungeon design but discuss how to modify the theories to work with 4E adventure building models.

I understand you want to focus on 4E impacts to this method of play, but I can't resist making one suggestion that should greatly simplify your work - don't map out the dungeon.

By this I don't mean that you don't have encounter areas mapped out, as needed. I mean don't try to map out the entire Undermountain, 5' square by 5' square. Instead, use a flow chart to show how things connect. The flow chart is easier, less time-consuming, and much more flexible.

Take a 5-room dungeon and piece of paper.
Draw a circle - that's the entrance.
Draw a line from circle 1 to circle 2 - add whatever description you want to explain how the two connect (a well, a pit, a hallway, stairs, teleporter, genie grants a wish, etc).
Draw a line from circle 2 to circle 3.
Draw a line from circle 3 to 4.
Draw a line from circle 4 to 5.

Maybe you also want a line from 3 to 5 - if the party avoids the trick or setback, they can slip past the guards directly to the treasure, or rescue the princess while the guards are distracted.

The point is that it's extremely easy to add (or subtract) connections this way. You don't have redraw your intricate map, you simply redefine the connections between the individual areas. Just remember that connections show options the players have, once they've overcome the challenge - they're not encounters themselves. If a the hallway connecting two rooms is a trap, it's not a connection, it's a circle. In a way, you can think of connections as cut scenes.

I believe there's at least one good thread (from a couple years ago?) on using flow charts instead of maps - if anyone can find it, a link would be great.

Hope this helps. Good luck with your project.

 

[S'mon]

I used a flow chart for the Ruins of Old El-Lay in a Mutant Future PBEM I ran, but I don't see much benefit with a dungeon. It would work well for Underdark 'wilderness' though.

 

[crash_beedo]

By this I don't mean that you don't have encounter areas mapped out, as needed. I mean don't try to map out the entire Undermountain, 5' square by 5' square. Instead, use a flow chart to show how things connect. The flow chart is easier, less time-consuming, and much more flexible.

I see what you're saying Croesus - and I was thinking of taking that approach. Here is an old thread on Dragonsfoot (I'm highlighting Melan's post) - Megadungeon Mapping - where he analyzes certain dungeon layouts as flowcharts. I think it's a valuable technique to make sure you've provided enough access points and avoided a railroaded experience. Plus - you can set up some "pinch points" for those areas that are crucial.

But taking it a step further, I'm considering the scope of the place large enough to use the flowchart as part of the actual map - much like the current H2 Thunderspire Labyrinth map. So we agree!

It seems much less daunting creating a flowchart approach and then spending the time building the interesting delves/lairs.

 

[Grimstaff]

The Five Room Dungeon
A modern theory I like is the five-room dungeon - it's a compartmentalized approach to design (like the 'Delve') - here's a typical 5-Room Dungeon style:

• Room One: Entrance And Guardian
• Room Two: Puzzle Or Roleplaying Challenge
• Room Three: Trick or Setback
• Room Four: Climax, Big Battle or Conflict
• Room Five: Reward, Revelation, Plot Twist

Okay, so what's a 5-Room Dungeon doing in my Megadungeon?! Keep on the Borderlands is a good example of how a dozen independent lairs, loosely connected in a sandbox, can be assembled to form something larger. I'm keeping the 5-Room dungeon option open as a design model, assembling the megadungeon from a series of lairs or delves. It means you don't sit down and design 20 rooms... you sit down and design a handful of loosely connected delves or lairs.

You may note that assembling a larger dungeon from a series of delves or lairs appears to be the model for the 4E published adventures - it's present in H1 where you see the dungeon level 1 broken into areas like 'Goblin Encampment', 'The Tombs', and 'The Caves'; level 2 has 'Hobgoblin Borough' and 'Dungeon Chambers'. H2 and H3 are similar.

Good stuff, keep it coming~

 

[Tav_Behemoth]

I think y'all are on to some important issues here. If your group is willing, my inclination would be to approach them by houseruling 4E to bring it more in line with the old-school rules that gave rise to the megadungeon style of play. In particular:

- Experience points are awarded primarily for finding treasure and surviving long enough to bring it out of the dungeon.

- Wandering monsters are a constant hazard with a fixed and more-or-less known to the players rate of occurence, so that the decision to search every cranny is balanced against the risk of an unplanned encounter.

- Magic items are mysterious (there's no easy recourse to the identify spell) and as likely to be a bane as a boon (e.g. cursed items, intelligent swords with conflicting agendas, etc.).

The reason that these are important to the megadungeon is that the dungeon is supposed to be an intrinsically dangerous environment, at best a constant impersonal hazard and at worst an enemy in itself. Mapping is essential because nothing is worse than losing your way back to the surface. Your initial focus isn't clearing out every room for experience like in a CRPG (although that may happen over time); the megadungeon should be about going in, exploring, and making strategic choices (do we open the door with the spooky noises, or push on further; at what point will the depletion of our resources, from HP to torches, force us to turn back given that we're likely to face a number of wandering monsters just trying to return to safety) balanced against the certain knowledge that the megadungeon is full of things that will eat you for lunch if you're not both careful and lucky.

If killing monsters is the main source of experience as per the 4E RAW, there's going to be a strong incentive for the players to treat each encounter as the next step towards leveling up - not a potentially much-more-lethal-than-expected hazard that's better negotiated using brains rather than brawn. I'd eliminate or sharply reduce the XP award from monsters, replacing it with XP from treasure awarded (or quests if you want to be a little less old-school).

This ties into the wandering monster issue - if the PCs are noisily bashing down doors, you want the resultant increased risk of a wandering monster to be a punishment, not a gift of XP. This is especially true because the random factor might make the gift a trivial gimme - fire beetles! - or a Trojan horse - trolls! - so again it's important for the players not to have a system-reinforced expectation that monsters are there to be killed. The other 4E problem with wandering monsters is that combat takes so much longer than in the old-school. You want the fire beetle encounter to be a punishment for foolhardy play in that it dings the PCs by a few hit points, not in that it forces the players to wade through an hour of dull (because ultimately unchallenging) melee. Mike Mearls has a blog post about using skill challenges to handle wandering monsters - I think at his Keep on the Gaming Lands blog, although there's also a related idea in his discussion of converting the G series at the Wizards site.

Finally, magic items are a problem, as you've noted, because one virtue of the megadungeon is that it's entirely up to the players which direction to head, making it hard for the DM to parcel out the items 4E expects. And that expectation is counter to the old-school feel; a cursed item should be like "well, I invaded someone's house and caught athlete's foot from the shoes I stole, I guess that's what I deserve" instead of "these shoes I got for my birthday have a fungus?!?" What I'd do is to abstract out magic item enhancement bonuses, similar to how it's done for NPCs. When you hit second level, choose one item (armor, weapon, implement, etc) to receive a +1 enchantment bonus, which is conceptualized as just another benefit of increased experience; it's that you're better with your sword, not that your sword started to glow. At third through fifth levels, choose another item; at sixth level, one item gets bumped to +2; and so on. The wondrous items you find in the dungeon will contribute the other aspects of 4E items (e.g. item powers), and since players are reassured that the PCs will keep up with the expectations built into the system, they ought to be a lot more open to items that have unknowable / undesirable / unreliable "special" effects.

 

[Badwe]

You can only house-rule out so many concept of 4e before it becomes you essentially only using the combat system. Then again, that alone would be a good reason, but there's plenty more technology to take advantage of.

Regarding the incentive to mindlessly charge into any encounter for XP: this has always been problematic for RPGs, at least as far back as I know. My solution has always been that if you overcome or effectively neutralize the encounter, you get the XP. If you talk your way out of a fight, sneak by them, or even manage to run past ambushers on your way to your main goal, you get the XP. Of course, if later you encounter that same group... you get to kill them for no bonus.

I think the treasure parcel system is too integral to balance to throw out. Weather you get it perfectly delineated over a single level is probably not as important as assuring that they eventually make it to the PCs. To give you an example, in my non-megadungeon adventure, I handed out treasure parcels from both level 5 and level 6 at the same time, until by the end of 6 I had exhausted both lists.

If you are adamant about cursed items, don't count them in the treasure parcels. Traps & Hazards, "disease" tracks if flavor modified, or some of the more malicious artifacts (think eye/hand of vecna) can fulfill the duty of cursed items. Perhaps as a reward for overcoming the curse somehow, the player is THEN rewarded with a magic item.

4th edition is not designed for inter-combat attrition. The fact that, given only a few minutes to rest, the party can reheal to full, you can't plink away at HP totals as easily as in earlier editions. This is to say nothing of the fact that a night's rest will restore all resources to the party, standing in stark contrast to older editions where a night's rest would provide, at best, a few hitpoints and of course the spells to heal some more of it back. The only resources that can be reliably drained over the course of a day are daily powers and healing surges, and those only force a rest. Of course, getting caught while trying to rest for the night when you pushed yourself to the limit could put the fear of death back into your party, but doesn't quite attain the feel you mentioned of being a penalty for wandering around.

Think of it this way: in old CRPGs you had the choice to wander around aimlessly and just kill easy fights until you were stronger and could take on the final challenges more easily, or you could rush to the end and, being at a lower level, experience a very harrowing fight. Why not let the players choose? Let them decide weather they want to stomp low level monsters or dig deep and bite off more than they can chew. Either can be fun, and like another poster pointed out, if things get out of control you can have two encounters crunch together to make something very scary.

 

[Umbran]

Sandbox Theory and Dungeons
I guess I consider Sandbox theory the opposite of railroading.

An aside:

I finally figured out what my problem with the term "sandbox" for this is. In software development, and several other more experimental professional realms, a "sandbox" is the place you go to play with stuff that's segregated off from other things, so you can't break anything important. You go off to the sandbox rather than playing with all the other kids.

This is rather different from how folks use the term for RPGs - the sadbox is still a place for play, but nobody is saying it is for safety of anything. There's no risk of breakage.

Every time "sandbox" gets used int eh RPG sense like this, I get cognitive dissonance, as I understood the software development version first.

 

[Lacyon]

I think the treasure parcel system is too integral to balance to throw out..

In a game environment where the PCs have power to choose (directly or indirectly) the level of threat they face, it's simply not true.

To put it another way: the balance point that WotC suggests and endorses is not the only possible balance point. If the players are aloud to do so, they will over time naturally gravitate towards a balance point that suits them. This may mean "overlevelled" and "undertreasured", the reverse, or something in between, but that doesn't matter, because they'll learn to gauge their actual strength (and that of their foes) and adjust accordingly.

4th edition is not designed for inter-combat attrition. The fact that, given only a few minutes to rest, the party can reheal to full, you can't plink away at HP totals as easily as in earlier editions. This is to say nothing of the fact that a night's rest will restore all resources to the party, standing in stark contrast to older editions where a night's rest would provide, at best, a few hitpoints and of course the spells to heal some more of it back. The only resources that can be reliably drained over the course of a day are daily powers and healing surges, and those only force a rest. Of course, getting caught while trying to rest for the night when you pushed yourself to the limit could put the fear of death back into your party, but doesn't quite attain the feel you mentioned of being a penalty for wandering around.

In general, this shouldn't be terribly hard to deal with - it's part of the game to locate and secure safe rest areas (starting with "outside the dungeon" at first). You just have to make sure the "safe" areas are far enough apart (and sometimes not as safe as they initially appear), so that
the party has some encouragement to try to avoid less rewarding encounters (or at least avoid spending limited resources on them) on their way to and from safe areas so they can push further before having to turn back.

Someone above mentioned that Wandering Monsters have very little treasure - if you go that route, you might consider having them also be worth very little XP (that would have happened automatically under the old XP for GP systems, now you'll have to adjust it yourself).

 

[crash_beedo]

Regarding the incentive to mindlessly charge into any encounter for XP: this has always been problematic for RPGs, at least as far back as I know. My solution has always been that if you overcome or effectively neutralize the encounter, you get the XP. If you talk your way out of a fight, sneak by them, or even manage to run past ambushers on your way to your main goal, you get the XP. Of course, if later you encounter that same group... you get to kill them for no bonus...

<snip>

...4th edition is not designed for inter-combat attrition...

I agree that redefining the term "defeating an encounter" goes a long way to rewarding styles of play beyond just combat... AND it means the players can do those actions, like steal, trick, form alliances, etc and still gain experience points for it, without reverting to the 1gp = 1xp model of OD&D. The XP budget system and encounter system is too integral.

Regarding the other point, Wandering Monsters... wow, I had a bit of an epiphany after reading your bit. If you consider Wandering Monsters primarily as sources of attrition, they're not too useful in 4E. (Haha, who remembers 'Wandering Damage' from an old Dragon April Fool's Article?) I like the idea of wandering monsters helping to simulate a dynamic environment, but I'm also rethinking they need to be accounted for in both the XP budget, parcel system, and design goals of the area - I think I'm going to have to track down that bit about Wandering Monsters as Skill Challenges, too. Good stuff man!

 

[Tav_Behemoth]

4th edition is not designed for inter-combat attrition.

Excellent point. One of the defining moments of megadungeon play IMO is the fear of not being able to make it out (often because you fell down a one-way shaft / teleporter trap / elevator room / whatever). The importance of this factor is what underlies the necessity of mapping and drives some of the scariness of finding that your map doesn't match the territory any more. Having a single night of rest bring you back to full resources means that "camping out" in the dungeon can be a valid option, undercutting this fear of getting trapped.

Unlike the other things I mentioned, I think that houseruling healing surges and extended rests is more trouble than it's worth. (Magic items are explicitly designed to allow stripping out the way I describe; Mearls has described the ease of doing so as one of the advantages of 4E over 3.)

I think that adventure design can address this instead. I've thought about a "solar labyrinth" dungeon that becomes exponentially more deadly when the sun sets, to recreate those moments of racing back to the surface. You don't even need anything special; if the frequency of wandering monster checks is OD&D standard (1 in 6 every 10 minutes), it becomes very unlikely you'll get eight hours' worth uninterrupted rest.

You can also emphasize attrition of other resources. Running out of arrows or torches can make the prospect of getting stuck a scary one, and wandering monsters could threaten these resources (e.g. giant moths attracted to flame putting out your torches) as well as HP.