D&D 5E (2024) How do you run an open table game in D&D '24?

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

That's sort of an interesting approach because the old school style specifically wanted a mega dungeon, well, just a dungeon in those days, precisely because it wasn't something you could complete.

So the gameplay loop was that A group would explore a part of the dungeon and then have to leave, And the next group could either pick up where they left off or explore a completely different part. Hence why time tracking was so important (if group a doesn't explore a room and group B explores at the next day then when group a gets around to exploring it, they're going to find the treasure has been taken already)

That's said though I'm not completely married to the idea of the mega dungeon, especially because I would have to design one...

I'm an old school gamer myself (started with 1E back in 1979), but I think that the old school system worked as well as it did because A) it was mostly adults doing the new cool thing, B) many of them soon had a financial stake in the game doing well and were more likely to show up regularly and C) they weren't competing with videogames and the internet, which tend to steal away more casual players.

For a non-store game, having an open table game chip away at a megadungeon (Temple of Elemental Evil, rather than the moathouse dungeon, for instance) is fine. But if you can't guarantee that even a single person will show up more than once, unless you really love that dungeon, I don't think the continuity buys you much other than extra bookkeeping. In contrast, I find that smaller Five Room Dungeon adventures have much lower cognitive load as a DM.

But there's also no wrong answer here. If what would be the most fun for you would be to have your players chip away at the dungeons below Castle Nobleshield each week, like Gygax and Arneson had their players doing, that's great, too, and I'm sure players will enjoy it.

 

[kermit4karate]

I'm an old school gamer myself (started with 1E back in 1979), but I think that the old school system worked as well as it did because A) it was mostly adults doing the new cool thing, B) many of them soon had a financial stake in the game doing well and were more likely to show up regularly and C) they weren't competing with videogames and the internet, which tend to steal away more casual players.

For a non-store game, having an open table game chip away at a megadungeon (Temple of Elemental Evil, rather than the moathouse dungeon, for instance) is fine. But if you can't guarantee that even a single person will show up more than once, unless you really love that dungeon, I don't think the continuity buys you much other than extra bookkeeping. In contrast, I find that smaller Five Room Dungeon adventures have much lower cognitive load as a DM.

But there's also no wrong answer here. If what would be the most fun for you would be to have your players chip away at the dungeons below Castle Nobleshield each week, like Gygax and Arneson had their players doing, that's great, too, and I'm sure players will enjoy it.

Thanks for posting that Five Room Dungeon thing. I've heard of it many times before, heard people casually refer to it, but no one ever did the description justice before. I'd never seen that awesome link before either. I think the framework is right up my alley.

 

[haakon1]

Don’t worry about the “must be the same level” complaints online.

If your players are having fun, it’s fine.

For what it’s worth, in running my three recent or current 3.5e games, I’ve rarely had everyone at the same level.

The higher level group over email, which began in AD&D 1e in 1998, they’re currently 6th to 9th level, with one at 10th level. Lower level PC’s joined at 4th in around 2021; the highest level characters started at 1st and are 27 years in. Seems fair to everyone.

For the newer lower level group on email, which began this year, they’re 1st to 5th - a 4th and 5th level character came over from other campaigns.

The other campaign which ran 2018-2024 live and live online, everyone started at 1st level, and some folks joined when others were 2-3rd level. Again, no objections to others earned levels.

 

[DrJawaPhD]

Most of my 5e DnD experience has been this type of "open table" FLGS environment, with single DMs running long (multiple year) campaigns with rotating players. I have seen great success with this model. My advice on what I think works well / doesn't work well is below

• We've always used Milestone leveling of the party itself, not individual characters. I would highly HIGHLY recommend keeping all PCs at the same level. It makes things so much easier to remember when helping new players, it reduces complication of tracking XP, it reduces jealousy between players, it makes new players more likely to come back, etc. Once you let go of the old school mentality that leveling up has to be "earned" or that the only reason people show up is for their character to gain XP, there's just no reason for split-level parties. People will still show up for the carrrots of a) having fun, b) keeping up with the story, c) gaining magic items, even if you eliminate the stick of penalizing XP when they don't show up.
• Beginning/Ending all sessions in a safe spot sounds great (on paper I love it!) but I'm skeptical how that would work in practice. Most FLGS sessions have fairly strict end times, and I can't really see this idea working if you have any combat encounters at all. I've never seen anyone plan around this restriction though so it may work better than I think. If you can pull it off it does help with the drop in / drop out aspect.
• For characters dropping in / dropping out, we've generally used the approach of considering all PCs to be nearby the action but safely in the background and not contributing any meaningful contribution. For new players and replacements for PCs that died, I've seen a mix of "oh yeah that guy was here the whole time but never spoke up til now" to incorporating them into the story the next time the party travels to a new location.
• I would very strongly encourage running an ongoing campaign versus breaking it up into one shots or small adventures. Becoming invested in the story and wanting to find out (and influence) what comes next is what brings people back to the table. Don't worry about new players being "lost", they don't need to know the entire backstory, just what's going on at the moment. For a new player there's no difference between a self-contained one shot with no backstory versus an individual quest chain in a long running campaign whose backstory they don't know. But for returning players, the difference is massive.
• People above talked about homebrew rules being an issue but I've always seen every DM bring their own set of homebrew rules with no issue. Yeah, don't go overboard with needlessly complex homebrew rules, but that's true for all DnD groups.
• #1 advice though would be that if you have strong preferences on anything above, then just set the ground rules to whatever will make it fun for you to DM. You're the one putting in most of the work, and if you aren't enjoying yourself then the whole thing falls apart.

 

[Nobleshield]

Most of my 5e DnD experience has been this type of "open table" FLGS environment, with single DMs running long (multiple year) campaigns with rotating players. I have seen great success with this model. My advice on what I think works well / doesn't work well is below

• We've always used Milestone leveling of the party itself, not individual characters. I would highly HIGHLY recommend keeping all PCs at the same level. It makes things so much easier to remember when helping new players, it reduces complication of tracking XP, it reduces jealousy between players, it makes new players more likely to come back, etc. Once you let go of the old school mentality that leveling up has to be "earned" or that the only reason people show up is for their character to gain XP, there's just no reason for split-level parties. People will still show up for the carrrots of a) having fun, b) keeping up with the story, c) gaining magic items, even if you eliminate the stick of penalizing XP when they don't show up.
• Beginning/Ending all sessions in a safe spot sounds great (on paper I love it!) but I'm skeptical how that would work in practice. Most FLGS sessions have fairly strict end times, and I can't really see this idea working if you have any combat encounters at all. I've never seen anyone plan around this restriction though so it may work better than I think. If you can pull it off it does help with the drop in / drop out aspect.
• For characters dropping in / dropping out, we've generally used the approach of considering all PCs to be nearby the action but safely in the background and not contributing any meaningful contribution. For new players and replacements for PCs that died, I've seen a mix of "oh yeah that guy was here the whole time but never spoke up til now" to incorporating them into the story the next time the party travels to a new location.
• I would very strongly encourage running an ongoing campaign versus breaking it up into one shots or small adventures. Becoming invested in the story and wanting to find out (and influence) what comes next is what brings people back to the table. Don't worry about new players being "lost", they don't need to know the entire backstory, just what's going on at the moment. For a new player there's no difference between a self-contained one shot with no backstory versus an individual quest chain in a long running campaign whose backstory they don't know. But for returning players, the difference is massive.
• People above talked about homebrew rules being an issue but I've always seen every DM bring their own set of homebrew rules with no issue. Yeah, don't go overboard with needlessly complex homebrew rules, but that's true for all DnD groups.
• #1 advice though would be that if you have strong preferences on anything above, then just set the ground rules to whatever will make it fun for you to DM. You're the one putting in most of the work, and if you aren't enjoying yourself then the whole thing falls apart.

Thank you for the detailed response. I guess the only thing I don't get is wouldn't the point of having people drop in and out require you to start and end in a safe area? Otherwise if you and in the middle of something and the next session half the group isn't there and two people are brand new, The session no longer makes sense

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

We've always used Milestone leveling of the party itself, not individual characters. I would highly HIGHLY recommend keeping all PCs at the same level. It makes things so much easier to remember when helping new players, it reduces complication of tracking XP, it reduces jealousy between players, it makes new players more likely to come back, etc. Once you let go of the old school mentality that leveling up has to be "earned" or that the only reason people show up is for their character to gain XP, there's just no reason for split-level parties. People will still show up for the carrrots of a) having fun, b) keeping up with the story, c) gaining magic items, even if you eliminate the stick of penalizing XP when they don't show up.

Yeah, I've been doing milestone leveling for my Radiant Citadel campaign, with everyone leveling up to the level of each adventure, whether or not they'd played in the campaign before. (Everyone is a member of the Shieldbearers and they were presumably having off-screen adventures.)

It's definitely made life easier, not having to worry about either characters grossly outshining the others or being super-fragile. (Some of the adventures are pretty hairy.)

 

[Distracted DM]

That's sort of an interesting approach because the old school style specifically wanted a mega dungeon, well, just a dungeon in those days, precisely because it wasn't something you could complete.

So the gameplay loop was that A group would explore a part of the dungeon and then have to leave, And the next group could either pick up where they left off or explore a completely different part. Hence why time tracking was so important (if group a doesn't explore a room and group B explores at the next day then when group a gets around to exploring it, they're going to find the treasure has been taken already)

That's said though I'm not completely married to the idea of the mega dungeon, especially because I would have to design one...

I did a bunch of adventure locations (check out Michael Prescotts Trilemma Adventures, he has all of them free on his blog), it works very well.

 

[aco175]

Given that you cannot expect everyone to come back every week, even the diehards, since life happens, I would actually focus on small, bite-sized adventures, rather than a megadungeon or hex exploration, each of which can end up with player characters stranded in the middle of nowhere or, worse yet, halfway through an encounter they will never get to finish with the same group of players.

I wonder if a megadungeon would be better. A bit like what Gary did with Castle Grayhawk. You can still have random groups play and check out a few/several rooms each time and always just return to the safe place at the end of the night. You could have different levels of the dungeon for different levels of PCs. There can always be new secret places that open to unexplored areas for new players and such. I think there is a lot of old stories on how Gary did this.

 

[Nobleshield]

I wonder if a megadungeon would be better. A bit like what Gary did with Castle Grayhawk. You can still have random groups play and check out a few/several rooms each time and always just return to the safe place at the end of the night. You could have different levels of the dungeon for different levels of PCs. There can always be new secret places that open to unexplored areas for new players and such. I think there is a lot of old stories on how Gary did this.

That's pretty much how the old school approach would work. It relies on having a mega dungeon for exactly that reason. With the aforementioned you always have to return to town, which in those days would also facilitate a possible random encounter check.

Returning to a safe spot I would think would have to be crucial since the next time you play you could have different characters which would mean the PCs who aren't there are engaged in something else in the area and are busy when The adventure takes place.

The idea is different groups go into different parts, not even counting the different levels. So while there might be other things that they can do, that's always the default.

 

[haakon1]

I've DMed in the 90s just not 5e

I jumped into my first real 5e campaign with a 7th level character. I would actually have preferred to start lower - it’s a better way to learn a new edition/new to D&D as a player or DM.