Bits and Pieces on Adventure Design

[grodog]

At present, it seems very likely that when my 4E HPE campaign finishes at the end of this year, it will be replaced by a AD&D campaign in the lands of the Frost Barbarians. So, I've been poring over the old D&D modules I have, and finding some rather interesting advice, particularly in some very old supplements I've only recently acquired.

Ah, you're hooked now, Merric

Consider this text from the Monster & Treasure Assortment:
It should be noted that just as a dungeon level should have monsters in only 20% or so of the available rooms and chambers, about 20% of the monsters should have no treasure whatsoever.

Where does this 20% figure come from? In oD&D and both early Basic D&D sets, it's a 2 in 6 chance that a monster is in each room, and a 3 in 6 chance that the monster has treasure. AD&D doesn't muck about with a lot of "basic" rules for stocking dungeons, but the random dungeon generator gives a 25% chance for a room having a monster in it... perhaps the 20% comes from there. It is a lot of "empty" space to wander through. (It should be noted that the random generator actually was first given in The Strategic Review in 1975, with the same probabilities).

Trent Foster has some great distilled info about distribution of monsters, treasure, traps, etc., in a post on Dragonsfoot @ Dragonsfoot • View topic - So-Cal Min-Con Adventures It's well-worth the time to read through.

Edit: the random dungeon generation system was first published in SR#1 as "Solo Dungeon Adventures" and IIRC the tables differ a bit from the revised/updated version published in the DMG.

 

[MerricB]

Trent Foster has some great distilled info about distribution of monsters, treasure, traps, etc., in a post on Dragonsfoot @ Dragonsfoot • View topic - So-Cal Min-Con Adventures It's well-worth the time to read through.

Thanks - I'll have a look.

Edit: the random dungeon generation system was first published in SR#1 as "Solo Dungeon Adventures" and IIRC the tables differ a bit from the revised/updated version published in the DMG.

They do, but the monster/treasure distribution in rooms isn't different between the two. (I looked!)

Cheers!

 

[grodog]

Ah, good to know: I didn't go back to look yet, so you've saved me some time!

 

[S'mon]

Gygax always adapted the difficulty of his game to the skill of his players - he talked about making Greyhawk dungeon traps more and more vicious as the players came up with ways of outsmarting them. That seems unnecessarily adversarial to me.

Contrariwise I think it's fine to start newbie players out in 'newbie zone', with the difficulty level set to what the DM thinks is a reasonable expected level of playing skill. But I dislike the idea of changing things on the fly - the dungeon changes so that good players face a harder time than unskilled players would. I'd rather have good players clear out newbiedungeon faster, level up faster, then they can face greater challenges quicker.

One thing I will do though is have monsters react realistically to the perceived threat from the PCs. If the PCs are very good at killing monsters the survivors may band together, set new traps etc; whereas unskilled players who can only kill a goblin or 2 may be ignored. But skilled, aggressive play may also result in the demoralised monsters fleeing the area, taking their treasure with them.

 

[nedjer]

However, for better or worse they do have precursors; and quite naturally those precursors set a series of expectations that the later versions are being held to.

Lanefan

Yeah, but where do you draw a line. Technically, D&D's Chainmail roots make D&D a Napoleonic wargame gone off the rails. That's clearly not the case as they're very different gameplay experiences. The same could be said of the distance between 1e and 4e.

So expectations haven't been held to very tightly in the past. In effect a 5e that was 'old school' would seem truer to the bulk of the precursors than a 5e that only moved back towards 3.5?

 

[Jhaelen]

Frex, to understand how the early authors intended concepts like 'balancing adventures to characters' to be taken, it's useful to look at how they were implemented in both products and actual play reports.

I'm not so sure about that. The first line of official 4e adventure modules also don't seem to be written under consideration of the recommendations in the 4e DMG.
I see two potential reasons for this: different authors and a significant difference in time between the writing of the modules and the DMG.

Wasn't the AD&D DMG also written (or at least released) several years after the 'classical' adventure modules?

The times they are a changin' and a person's idea about how adventures should be balanced might as well.

A lot of water's passed under many bridges between then and now - putting quotations like the one cited in the original post in context require a bit of forensic textual analysis or one can draw errant conclusions.

Sure! Pretty much everyone is prone to interpret data in the way best fitting to one's (pet) theories and dismissing data that isn't supportive of it. Even the most careful scientists often fall into this trap.

It might even happen to shamans from time to time