A Return to the Dungeon

ajanders said:
An encounter is over in less than an hour. I always think of a dungeon as being at least a day's worth of exploration.
An encounter takes place in no more than three or four rooms: a dungeon may be the size of a mountain.

Something to think about with regards to pacing:

In 4e, ten or so encounters gives you a level.

In a dungeon-based design maybe one dungeon gives you a level.

So each dungeon includes about 10 individual encounters.

Bigger dungeons are made up of smaller dungeons joined together (dungeon level becomes equal to character level -- you could go from 1-30 in Undermountain, maybe).

Smaller dungeons may only be a few individual encounters (a delve is about 3 encounters, so 3-4 of those equals one normal "dungeon").

You could think of the encounters like rooms in the dungeon. Room 1 might have a pit trap in it. Room 2 could be full of monstrous spiders. Room 7 has a dragon. Whatever.

This is also how dungeon and adventure get linked together: each encounter in an adventure is just one part of the overall adventure, linked together by narrative options rather than literal hallways.

So one PC level might be "A delve into a small dungeon, 3 encounters on the road to the king's mansion, and 4 skill challenges against the fey creatures." At the end, the PC's gain a level, and maybe find a "staircase" into the next adventure/dungeon level.

So for pacing, think about how long it takes your characters to complete about 10 encounters (or gain a level). That's about how long a given "dungeon"/"adventure" should last. And you can always link them together to make them bigger, or split them up and make them smaller.
 

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What I do, for a "Lair" of level x, is give it an XP budget in monsters/NPCs equal to 10 encounters of level x.

The players may do what they wish.
 

The central problem: In what ways do you think D&D would change if it was designed to make the central challenge the dungeon (or the Adventure, or the Story, or whatever) instead of the encounter? What kind of rules might emerge?

Some dungeon-centric impacts/thoughts, in terms of how a dungeon or megadungeon acts as an active or a passive "threat" in the game:

- passively, the dungeon level may be difficult to map, or its environs may be inimical to PCs (too hot/cold, no light, only stale air, non-euclidean, etc., etc.); the level might feature a lot of teleporters or secret doors, or it may be a vertically-aligned level vs. a horizontally-flowing one, or it may be an area of evil where turning is more difficult or where all undead regenerate or where non-evil magic is weaker; it may be a higher-level challenge, and therefore inherently more dangerous regardless of other factors like those above (or, the factors above may be more exacerbated in a more-difficult level: instead of the level's heat simply causing a point of damage a turn, it may be in an active volcano with poisonous gasses or pyroclastic flows running through the corridors at random....); and dungeon dressing should abound, to liven up otherwise drab corridors with something interesting! so, I see a lot of options in terms of how the "background noise" or the "baseline givens" of a dungeon can drastically alter the playing field for its explorers

- on the active side of things, the dungeon may be a very dynamic environment: the level design itself may shift and change due to shifting walls, moving rooms, falling blocks, and such; the use of teleporters is one thing, but dropping PCs into tesseracts or non-euclidean geometries is quite another; or, it may have intelligent inhabitants who reset traps, repair damage, excavate and build new areas, blockade old ones; or some of the inhabitants may be at war (literally, a la Leiber's "Lords of Quarmall"), perhaps; and there's always the possibility that the dungeon (or parts of it) are living, breathing (ingesting!) creatures, too (a la Moorcock's Agak and Gagak from Elric/Corum/Quest for Tanelorn, or from Leiber's "Jewels in the Forest"); or the dungeon may have a caretaker (Zagig/Zagyg, Halaster, etc.) who sticks his nose into things from time to time; my first "From Kuroth's Quill" column in Knockspell #1 featured the concept of variable stairs (and other dungeon features), to provide just this kind of more active-engagement with mapping and with the features of a dungeon

In a dungeon-based game, I see choosing Door A or Door B being more key than choosing to be a dwarf fighter or a gnome wizard. If Door A leads to fabulous treasure, and Door B leads to a deathtrap, choosing Door B is probably the wrong choice, but being a fighter or a wizard shouldn't matter either way. If you're a defender, you might have a different way of dealing with the deathtrap, but ultimately, you still made the wrong choice in play (and now your party is closer to being killed before the dungeon is "beaten").

The dungeon should absolutely feature the element of random luck, but choices should matter, somewhere along the line too: the death trap may only target magic-users vs. fighters, or it may only target Neutrals vs. Lawfuls or Chaotics. Not all traps/features/etc. need to be tied to character creation choices, but there should always be reasons to reward or challenge all PC classes, races, alignments, etc. in the game---otherwise everyone would always play the same class.

what matters is the player's choice during play, not what tools you bring to the show. Your preparation only goes so far.

I think that goes a bit too far: PCs are different for a reason, and each brings different resources and abilities to the table for the player to leverage as part of the in-game choices they make from their options palette. I.e., elves detect secret doors well, and dwarves are good for finding depth and moving walls and such. Also: being prepared in the dungeon can mean many different things in different groups, whether that's having multiple mappers in case one is kidnapped or fails his fireball save vs. doing military "mission" style exploration (reconnaissance then attack the weak points or entering the dungeon to tackle specific objectives) vs. just carrying an extra week of food and 200' of rope.

I think making The Dungeon the central focus of an adventure can be accomplished by design. It should not be uncommon for Dungeons (and natural underground caves/formations as well) to be a hazard unto themselves. For example, various traps and hazards can be more memorable than the monster encounters if setup carefully.

Agreed completely.

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.

And that's interesting on a number of levels:

- time management: searching for secret doors or traps, listening for noise, and searching every inch of a room all take quite awhile, which means more wandering monsters will be met; AD&D is still set up on the round/turn, though, so I'm not sure how that might change when thinking of the dungeon as a whole, or as a "length of dungeon" time unit (it could apply to some spells/powers/skills/etc. being usable just once per adventure vs. 1/day, etc.)

- encumbrance: everyone hates it, but if PCs are limited in their capacity to carry big things around, it makes them choosy in what treasure they scoop up vs. what they use to distract monsters while running away vs. what they leave on the table/in the chest/on the floor, etc. (jewelry over gems over pp over gp, etc.)

- a well-balanced party in terms of races and classes and spell selections and equipment types, etc. allows the PCs more versatility to deal with various types of threats in the dungeon, including the loss of PCs too (so having redundancy built into the PC group is quite desirable)

Some of my thoughts above are definitely considering the idea of a mega-dungeon vs. a single dungeon level/adventure, with the distinction (in my head anyway) that you can't really beat/win a mega-dungeon vs. a standard dungeon (well, Robilar did, but that was way back at the beginning of the history of the game ;) ).
 

Dungeons of the sort we remember are more difficult to bring about because of Knowledge skills (at least in 3e and 4e). Players are often unwilling to take action to discover something when a skill check is often safer. It then becomes a question of which skill will be used to overcome obstacles. (sometimes to the exclusion of other "old school ideas") In earlier editions there were few skills of this investigative nature and players often had to blunder about to get anything done.
 
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Great suggestions about structuring the dungeon/adventure and DM side of things B-)

My thinking is more focused on how to facilitate a dungeon-focused play style from the player side...

Grounding recharge in the narrative
One thing that's always been a sticking point for me about spells/powers in D&D is the arbitrariness of per encounter/day recharge. And a per adventure recharge mechanic seems like an even greater level of abstraction.

What I'd like to see is grounding the recharge mechanic to some kind of narrative explanation... For example, divine classes recharge when they pray at a shrine to their deity or fulfill their deity's tenets despite personal sacrifice. Fighters recharge when they defeat a boss, gain a new magic weapon, or pledge themselves to a liege.

Players choose risk vs. reward
I'd like to see some reward system for the PCs choosing to face a greater challenge vs. an easier one within the adventure. Scenarios where extreme acts of heroism advance their quest faster, garner them greater XP in the process, and/or provide them certain perks (e.g. setting up their own ambush). It's the carrot for pushing on in the dungeon or facing overwhelming odds (not necessarily just in combat), versus the stick of the dungeon recharging.

This could be hard-wired in the system, like 4e's action points restoring during milestones.

Or it could be part of the adventure, with each adventure having a "condition track" where if the PCs complete a certain # of encounters or accomplish certain goals, they gain some advantage.

Alternately, it could embedded in the character classes. For example, rangers/rogues might have a scouting feature which allows them to aim for increasing amounts of reconnaissance, but with escalating fallout for failure. Or warlocks might draw on extra power from their patron but have to pay for it later in the adventure.

Character creation
How much resource management should D&D have? Do combat and non-combat abilities need to be siloed? Is it best that all PCs can contribute in all types of encounters? Why not let each player choose?

[sblock]
Say the party's wizard is a diviner who specializes in scouting via rituals and provides support/countermagic magic. He leans more toward the RM side of things but has support magic he can rely on consistently. It's outside of combat that his character shines, he can swing a battle before it begins.

The ranger/rogue, on the other hand, is a halfling psychopath who wields knives like a blade cuisinart. His talents are at-will and hyper-focused on combat. Outside of combat he's a pain in the arse.

The fighter always has the right tool for the job (ten foot poles and caltrops galore) and the player is into resource management. His talents are RM/recharge heavy and mostly about combat. However, he has some kingdom-building and survival talents as well.

The cleric is a technical pacifist who packs healing magic and some trick/trap magic. Since the player is newer, she has no RM to worry about, and can use her talents at-will. Besides healing and setting traps, outside combat she also has prestige/contacts in the temple.[/sblock]
 


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