Megadungeon Sandbox and 4E

[timbannock]

RE: Resource Management & Random Encounters

This is something I picked up on and put into effect far more in PARANOIA than D&D, but maybe it applies to the point of Random Encounters:

Instead of having random encounters be totally separate -- i.e., having them happen in-between other fights -- add them to already planned encounters. Not always, but sometimes.

A couple examples:

- just as a pre-planned fight is winding down, toss in a random encounter that is investigating the noise. It still counts as the same encounter...hope the PCs have resources left!

- add in just 1 or 2 monsters from a random encounter into an alread existing encounter. Especially if the monsters are very different from the established encounter, forcing the players to rethink all of their tactics when these monsters show up.

- make some random encounters non-combat things, but that might effect a combat. Maybe an earthquake rolls through, dropping dust and making the terrain difficult while it goes on, or forcing Acrobatics rolls to keep moving. This changes up the tactics for both sides of the fight.

- String 2 or 3 encounters, one right after the other, as soon as the PCs make camp. Sure they (might) have their encounter powers recharged each time, but their dailies are gone, and their healing surges are dwindling...

- if the dungeon setting is dangerous in its own right, force skill challenges for survival things like finding food and water and upkeep of gear. Excessive moisture, heat from lava, steam from vents in the earth, extreme cold, extreme dryness...all of this could affect the players and their gear. Failured rolls on the challenges cost healing surges, and may mean that extended rest is not possible in some areas or doesn't fully recharge everything each time (you recharge only X% of your healing surges; you don't get your action point for the day until you hit that milestone). Maybe the environment breaks down the groups equipment, requiring them to leave and requip...but as they're leaving with less equipment, badguys attack!

- magic dead zones and the like could cancel out magic item resources.

- I can't think of anything else at the moment.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Raven: It's my belief that, while the PCs are smart enough to choose the challenge level that works best for them, going too far above or below item progression can create strange effects. Absolutely you can deviate a good deal, you're deviating every time you don't give out a parcel in one encounter and give out 3 the next. It's just possible that you risk trivializing encounters, and trivial encounters can destroy the illusion of meaningful challenge/danger, which is the key to the fun "tension" that makes a delve exciting. That being said, I'm willing to bet you can get away with a LOT of deviation. Heck, I usually end up giving away an extra parcel in gold every level by all the small things my PCs do (haggling, pick-pocketing, etc.)

Tension in an Old School Megadungeon, IME, comes from the players trying to push as far as they can (to get greater rewards). The minute you allow sandbox play, you risk that players will engage only in trivial encounters. However, since trivial encounters tend to grant trivial rewards, it is my experience that players almost universally find their way out of this trap with little or no input from the DM being required. YMMV, of course.

4e, like 3e before it, isn't realy designed for sandbox play, and it shows. The concern with grinding away at encounters which should have been easily resolved is a real problem in both systems. The biggest problem in both systems, IMHO. This is very much (again, IMHO) an artifact of grid-reliant combat systems, which in turn (again, IMHO) is the direct result of WotC market research when 3e was being developed, that showed that gamers who buy minis spend many more times the amount that gamers who do not buy minis spend.

If you could speed up combat resolution, it wouldn't matter if the PCs engaged in some trivial encounters. They would be over quickly. How you fix this in 4e, without rewriting the whole system, is beyond me. I could fix it in 3e. I have recently begun to create RCFG, intended to bridge some of the complexity of 2e/3e with the fast play and sandbox style of OD&D/1e, so needless to say this is the aspect of WotC-D&D that I am least enchanted with.

That said, running a sandbox means that, if the players wish to do nothing, then they do nothing while the world moves around them. A good world -- or a good megadungeon -- should offer sufficient "hooks" to make the players ever hungry to try their hands at challenges beyond their current means.


RC

 

[Badwe]

I think you somewhat confuse good market practice: using customer feedback to generate products players will want to buy, with greed: finding ways to force people to buy as much as possible. It should be clear at this point that people uninterested in new, grid-heavy editions would reject the books even if they came free with enough miniatures to plan out basic combat.

Further, I'm personally a fan of tactical grid-based battles. The alternative is the old Final Fantasy style of one party standing on either side of the screen and simply casting whatever they want. Grids give manifest to ideas like searching for cover, sneaking around, setting up flanks, and abusing chokepoints. Opinions will differ, of course, but I am a major fan of grid based combat.

People often ask "why not just play a wargame like WH40K?" but to me it's just not the same. When two or more people sit down to create an adversarial match, they generate armies with equal points and then only generate terrain that is accepted as neutral. With a DM creating tactical situations, he has the opportunity to scale up or down the advantage for one side or the other, as well as allow things leading up to the combat to manifest as advantage. This is far more appealing to me, and even if I am a relatively light roleplayer (out of combat, at least) when I am a PC, to me playing a series of combats in that fashion is more appealing than just playing wargames.

 

[crash_beedo]

Tension in an Old School Megadungeon, IME, comes from the players trying to push as far as they can (to get greater rewards). The minute you allow sandbox play, you risk that players will engage only in trivial encounters. However, since trivial encounters tend to grant trivial rewards, it is my experience that players almost universally find their way out of this trap with little or no input from the DM being required. YMMV, of course.

RC

Yes, I was struggling with this issue a little bit too, with the thought of making the dungeon levels too horizontal - extending the number of encounters and parcels past the 8-10 would encourage "grinding".

I think there are lots of different ways I can handle it... first, there will be plot hooks / story reasons for the players to keep going deeper when they've hit the appropriate level of XP.

I can ensure that past a certain point, the parcels just aren't that attractive... ie, I can keep giving out magic +1 daggers all day (or the equivalents for that level item). But if you want a shot at a +2 Flaming Maul, you'll need to take on appropriate challenges.

And the Deus Ex is to have (dangerous) rival NPC groups or whatnot also operating in the same area, or dangerous wandering monsters or some other heavy-handed way to steer the group away from too much horizontal grinding; it needs to be their sandbox too but the dungeon environment is dynamic and other forces will be at work.

I like all of the suggestions around using wandering monsters as ways to string along multiple encounters, or have some guys jump in for the dog pile.

I'd love a situation like this to be able to unfold... as the PC's arrive at the dungeon, they see one of the rival groups they met in town (the Black Hats) also dropping ropes to descend the shaft into the great hall. Assume a fight doesn't break out, they agree to go separate ways... our Heroes know there are kobolds in the south wing and have decided to take on the kobold "delve".

The Black Hats circle back and attack the group as they're either finishing the kobolds, or at some other opportune time. It seems like a wandering monster, but it's been planned all along. (And depending on how the encounter with them went top-side, maybe there are no Black Hats left, or they're too intimidated, or whatever). It's going to be fun to pull together.

 

[Badwe]

One would wonder the best way to stat out a rival party. It may be too dangerous to actually roll up 5 PCs, but it should be obvious by now that even a group 3 or 4 levels higher can't really hope to match the PCs perfectly. I guess if you're planning on using them as a pile-on that's ok, but if you want them to be a persistent threat they need to be tough.

The initial guess at how to build a party would be to take the HP values of a party and try to find the monster level that roughly matches that, but don't forget that the PCs have healing surges to take advantage of. Perhaps a group of 5 elite "monsters" or 5 regular monsters with templates applied would give a good indication of what a party could be.

Imagine a band of shadar-kai against a level 5-7 party, and each shadar-kai has templates like bodyguard, champion, demagogue, or master of frost applied. This might be interesting. A fellow DM proposed this idea to me a while ago and I was somewhat washed by the idea that a party of adventurer's was common enough for them to bump into each other, but this is turning my gears.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I think you somewhat confuse good market practice: using customer feedback to generate products players will want to buy, with greed: finding ways to force people to buy as much as possible.

If you remove the word "force" I think that you have 3e on the bare bodkin. The game was designed to encourage minis use, and the 3.5 version of the game encourages minis use even more. 4e, of course, beats both versions of 3.x in terms of mini-focus. Not only that, but the focus of WotC adventures changed to an encounter-based setup that is essentially map/mini placement/tactics for the DM to use with minis.

Do you need minis to play any of these games? No, but if you want to have fun with them, then (once you have invested in the system) minis are strongly encouraged by the system itself. However, at the same time, you will be hard pressed to find anything from WotC suggesting that 4e is a "grid-heavy edition". You might, OTOH, be able to find some suggestions that it is not.

It doesn't take a genius to realize that WotC wants to make a profit, or that selling minis is the route to the largest potential profit. I want to make the most money I can at work, too. You might call that greed, but I call that normal.

But there is little doubt that WotC did the market survey. There is little doubt that the market survey showed that those who buy minis spend many more times on rpg material what those who do not buy minis spend. And there is little doubt that each successive edition of WotC-D&D is more minicentric than the last. I don't think that the math is so hard to do here, regardless of whether one personally prefers a grid or not.

Yes, I was struggling with this issue a little bit too, with the thought of making the dungeon levels too horizontal - extending the number of encounters and parcels past the 8-10 would encourage "grinding".

Your idea with the Black Hats sounds good, and truly Old School.

Not knowing if an encounter will be extended (with more monsters) when it begins helps remove some of the tedious nature of 4e combat as well (use best encounter powers first, then grind, grind, grind for 20 more minutes....or, if there is no reason not to rest, use dailies, followed by best encounter powers first, then grind, grind, grind for 15 more minutes....).


RC

 

[King Nate]

My first game experience was with Keep on the Borderlands and its “sandbox” style. I ran that game like crazy, I can’t remember how many times my players were remaking new characters and playing the “same” game all over again getting a different experience each time.

When I discovered other modules and adventures I couldn’t conform to the strict rules set by them. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would waste time playing the game any other way than the sandbox version. (I might still have this problem today, but it’s nowhere near as bad, oh and it I didn’t have the fancy sandbox name at that time or I might have realized why I was having this problem).

I’m currently working on converting KotB to 4e for my homebrewed campaign. Some of these issues I had encountered while doing so. This is what I have done.

FIRST: The original adventure was set for 6-9 players levels 1-3. My idea was to recreate every encounter as a first level encounter then label them, easy, standard, hard, and Irontooth. The plan is to allow players to go to any “level” of the caves. When the players level up, I modify the encounter for a level 2 party sticking with my easy, standard, etc.

One of my (minor) quibbles with 4e is the idea that challenges will always scale... when you go into the woods at level 1, you fight level 1 orcs. 4E philosophy says , suddenly the woods are full of level 10 threats when the guys are level 10! My approach would be to have two sets of woods, and they pick where to go...

4e isn’t the first to come up with scaling encounters to the players, here’s a couple pages from the 1977 Basic game. HERE The second paragraph tells us to keep the dangers appropriate to level. Then the third paragraph says to make sure that knight talk in flowery phrases like “thou” instead of “you” and that characters should swear to Zeus, Crom, or Cthulhu!

SECOND: Forget the parcel thing. I still keep the balance but I’m not tied to parcels. Level one treasure parcel for five characters gives you 4 magic items and a Total Monetary Treasure worth 720gp. In a sandbox game you don’t know where your players are going so instead of throwing 10 parcels out there you don’t use parcels. If the characters pick-pocket someone and gains 20gp, I subtract that from their Total Monetary Treasure. If they kill a goblin and he has 3 cp, I subtract that as well. When building encounters I indicate the places I would like to have magic items. When the players reaches one of those spots I mark off a magic item. If they don’t have any magic items or gold left in their Total Monetary Treasure then they get nothing, but part of my job is to make sure I spread the TMT evenly and realistically throughout their level. By the end of their level they should be getting the last pieces of gold and magic items from their TMT.

Using the Total Monetary Treasure number instead of parcels. Potion of healing cost 50gp, potion of vitality cost 1000gp, a potion of recovery cost 250pp, and a potion of life cost 1250pp. Just like it is in the player’s handbook, you could also use other consumable items by subtracting their cost from the TMT.

THIRD: Experience Points: While I still use actual numbers on page 121 of the DMG gives an alternative to handing out experience points. Simpler Experience Points says that you tell the players that they gain a level after they complete eight to ten encounters. Don’t count really easy encounters, count really hard encounters as two, and don’t worry about precise XP totals. If you use this method and the players continue to stay on a weaker level, just lower the difficulty of the encounter a notch (standard becomes easy) in addition on page 123 of the DMG says you are well within your right to tell a player that an encounter doesn’t count towards a milestone. Very easy encounters shouldn’t contribute towards a milestone. These two things could help motivate players to change levels.

FINALLY: Wandering Monsters: I use two different types of Wandering Monsters. The first is the randomly determined kind. These are either standard or hard premade generic (in some cases not so generic) encounters. You still gain XP and Treasure from them just subtract it from the TMT. The other kind are penalty wandering monsters, characters are not being careful, making bunch of noise, etc. These are easy premade generic encounters that do not count towards milestones, have no treasure, and if you are using the experience suggestion above they won’t count towards gaining levels either. Player’s shouldn’t want these type of encounters and should take steps to avoid them. They just get in the way and use up resources.

 

[Badwe]

your TMT is somewhat similar to something I was proposing earlier, although I recommended still counting by parcel than by individual GP. It's true that if you have a good handle on how much you want each encounter to be worth then you can simple subtract gold as the PCs gain it. Similarly, once they increase in level you could add the gold and items from the next level into your pool. I still think parcels are a time saving device, but your method is easily the best alternative I've heard yet. Kudos!

 

[King Nate]

your TMT is somewhat similar to something I was proposing earlier, although I recommended still counting by parcel than by individual GP. It's true that if you have a good handle on how much you want each encounter to be worth then you can simple subtract gold as the PCs gain it. Similarly, once they increase in level you could add the gold and items from the next level into your pool. I still think parcels are a time saving device, but your method is easily the best alternative I've heard yet. Kudos!

Thanks. I just want to point out that if you do the TMT correctly you won't have any pool left to add to at the next level. You need to keep an eye on the character's experience to make sure you just don't dump everything on them in their last encounter before gaining a level. I can see it now from an inexperienced DM...That swarm of rats (wandering monster) that you just killed gave you three magic items and 400gp...more than everything you have found in this dungeon so far!

 

[King Nate]

Sorry for double posting but, there's one other thing I forgot to mention.

If you play player's level = floor level, smart players will realize that after the 10th parcel that there isn't any more treasure on that floor. Too unrealistic for me.

I also don't like the idea that players will kill something and find nothing, kill something and find nothing, then kill something and find 200 gp, or two 100 gp gems, or two potions of healing + 100 gp. In dungeon design you can use parcels to place items easily but in a sandbox game you don't know exactly who your players will choose to fight and then you find suddenly you must give the players parcels before they level up. This could lead to unrealistic placement of treasure. Using TMT you can slowly hand out teasure without it seeming unrealistic that the last few kobolds you killed didn't carry anything on them yet the next one was loaded with treasure!