D&D 4E 4e Dungeon Design - New Article

[Doug McCrae]

With the fight mearls described, facing multiple rooms' monsters at once, approaching from all sides, came about *entirely* from a player decision. They went past a door without checking it. In D&D you can't do blitzkriegs, bypassing pockets of enemy resistance, until high level. It's a city fight, clearing it out house by house, room by room.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Something else : 10 or even 5 foot wide corridors are somewhat silly for a defensive position. If, in4e, kobolds and goblins lives in multiple interconnected caves with 10 foot corridors between the, I don't understand how they could survive in a world populated by humans or trolls. 2.5 ft high, 1 ft wide tunnels, with slit arrows, trapped dead end, and escape routes if all is lost.

I've considered doing that with a kobold dungeon myself but never have. For one thing PCs would probably never enter such an obvious death trap, and rightly so. If they do, having only one PC at the front might be too unfun. Corridors really need to be 10 foot wide for the typical party of four, so you can have two frontline fighters.

 

[Jhaelen]

Try removing doors in your dungeons. If that doesn't work, remove walls.

Excellent advice! Get rid of the dungeons, already

I don't particularly agree with the article, btw.:
Yes, it's an improvement to use dynamic encounters in a dungeon rather than static, isolated ones; it's significantly better, though, to get rid of that terrible dungeon map altogether!

For tactically interesting encounters you want wide open areas with some opportunities for cover, higher ground, concealment, etc. What you don't want are tiny rooms connected by 5' corridors.

 

[Jhaelen]

Instead of giving the monsters more room why not go the other way and give the PCs less room to move? Small creatures can play to their strengths to move through small holes and passages while PCs have to squeeze through.

Makes sense, yes. But it's not fun. Fun >>> Realism.

Additionally, if players are discouraged from doing something by adverse circumstances they 'sometimes' decide to simply take the hint and don't do it. I can't be the only DM who ever had his players flat-out refuse to go somewhere or do something?

I also remember quite clearly how my players once solved a kobold dungeon problem by changing the course of a river to flood the whole thing...

 

[TerraDave]

Most excellent - this has been the way I've been designing encounters in my 3.5 games for a while now,

Yes, I can say I have been playing 4ed all along.








Well, at least in this sense.

 

[Varianor Abroad]

Dragon articles require that you sign-in to D&D Insider to view the content.

Feh.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Ditto!

This preview was really interesting, but I have to say, that lizardman has a serious case of overbite!

And really, does a lizardman need a loin cloth?

 

[Klaus]

Instead of giving the monsters more room why not go the other way and give the PCs less room to move? Small creatures can play to their strengths to move through small holes and passages while PCs have to squeeze through.

Why not do both?

 

[BryonD]

I hope no one start saying 4E is becoming Diablo 2.

Of course not. Obviously it is Diablo 3!!!!!!






Seriously, I liked everything he said about 4E. So that is great. period.

However, I did find myself getting a bit defensive about 3E while reading.

 

[Henry]

I may be misreading the article, but I'm not seeing anything different here from what I've seen DMs do for literally decades. What am I missing? (no cheap shots at Mearls, please)

As for the minion rules, I could be wrong but these MAY refer to something similar to the nonheroic character class from Star Wars Saga. The comments about "much less difference between level X and level X + 1" makes me think this is the case - the nonheroic levels are built to basically give a being more skill ranks and BAB, and that's about it (d4's for hit points, no feats or talents other than by level, etc.)