How long did your World's Largest Dungeon campaign last?

[Vague Jayhawk]

I did not vote because I would skew the results a little. I am a player in a WLD campaign right now.

We have had 4 sessions of about 4 hours apiece. We are still in section A and it is already getting rather tedious. Section A needs more orcs and kobolds and less rats, darkmantles and especially empty rooms and hallways. I have found myself asking the DM for random encounters.

I am a little bit old school, so I don't mind doing the mapping for the party. The mapping keeps me more entertained than my companions during the long periods of empty hallways and rooms.

I hope it gets more entertaining soon. I like my character and the people I am gaming with.

 

[Monkey Boy]

Our group played 4 sessions with an in-experienced DM. She took the environmental factors for rooms rules to heart which caused some seriusly screwy combats. The darkmantles were painfully repetitive, whenever we tried to rest there would be an earth quake and more combat. We all got diseased from fighting rats. We had 2 TPK's and several other deaths in 4 sessions.

Could be the DM but I place more blame on the first section of the dungeon which as others have pointed out is pretty uninspired.

We were willing to give it a go but in the end the game broke up unable to commit to a year or so trudging underground.

And yeah Crothian mentioned you can play a unite the tribes sort of game but we were in there to kill monsters not play friendly... I had issues camping with Orcs and Ogres.

 

[Nyeshet]

I'm not sure this is a fairly accurate poll. Some groups meet once a week. Some meet two-three times a week. Others might only meet once every month or two. So if one group finished in two months and another took two weeks, and yet another took six months, it is entirely possible that they all experienced the same number of sessions. (And, yes, I understand that even how many hours a group meets various from group to group.)

I didn't vote, as I have not yet had the chance to play WLD.

Actually, I'm a little surprised this poll did not have an option for that - especially as it did have an option for "What is WLD?"

 

[hawkwing2k5]

WLD campaingn

I think most will agree that running this as a complete dungeon is a BAD idear. However if you read the prefix or the introduction the authors point blank say you can run its as is However we expect that most DMs will tweek it or better yet use the sections as they like. Which is what I did to my group... the little ba@@@ anyhow. I picked and chose that way its not the same dungeon over and over and Im EVIL enough to change up monsters on them as well. So you could say its a mega source book for me. If all else fails you can use it as a blunt object for unruly players or siblings.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

If I were to be gifted with WLD (Ptolus is it for mega-purchases for me, thanks), I'd tweak it by not making it an inescapable prison, but rather, I'd use it as The Dungeon beneath Ptolus (beneath the sewers and adjacent to the dungeons described in other Ptolus adventures), which would allow the players to return to the surface, restock, have different sorts of adventures and so on.

The one way trip is the biggest issue with WLD, IMO. If one could come and go (like, say, with Rappan Athuk Reloaded), it wouldn't seem so overwhelming.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

I'm surprised by the amount of short campaigns in the WLD. Then again I don't own the product. It may also just be that a lot of D&D campaigns don't run for very long before ending and that the WLD campaigns are no exception.

I was even more surprised though by the amount of people that haven't heard of the product before. Then again if you had heard of the WLD but not played or ran it you couldn't really answer the poll so that may have skewed the results there.

Olaf the Stout

 

[BlueBlackRed]

16 months for me and my group.
Finished with a TPK on session #48 back in January of this year (on a Friday the 13th).

I made some minor changes, but nothing drastic.

 

[jdrakeh]

If I were to be gifted with WLD (Ptolus is it for mega-purchases for me, thanks), I'd tweak it by not making it an inescapable prison, but rather, I'd use it as The Dungeon beneath Ptolus (beneath the sewers and adjacent to the dungeons described in other Ptolus adventures), which would allow the players to return to the surface, restock, have different sorts of adventures and so on.

The one way trip is the biggest issue with WLD, IMO. If one could come and go (like, say, with Rappan Athuk Reloaded), it wouldn't seem so overwhelming.

Fortunately, I already addressed this prior to my purchase of the WLD, based on past posts here. I ended up buying Sharn: City of Towers (see my "Sharn as a self-contained setting" thread) specifically to plop on top of the WLD (I almost nabbed Freeport, but Sharn seemed sufficiently detailed to stand alone and it came with a CD soundtrack).

The physical geography of Sharn even makes having the WLD located beneath it sensible -- assuming that the WLD is the last remnant of a long forgotten culture, the ruins of which numerous cities have been built upon, culminating in modern Sharn. I think that this will shortcircuit the "Gauntlet" mentality of WLD's default design nicely.

And when the players aren't in the WLD, it's denizens will no doubt be seeping into the bowels of the city -- somebody will have to stop them!

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

We had somebody try to run it. We got about four sessions in and pretty much everybody involved got tired of it. Every game session the GM would come in lugging that giant freakin' tome ... and then open it to the very very front ... and I, at least, could feel the weight of all of those dungeon rooms weighing me down.

Everybody else could too, apparently.

--fje

 

[anhar]

The group I played in lasted about 6 sessions, a little over a month. I DM'ed section A with another group, and it was pretty much godawful. maybe it was just the route they took, but they didn't run into any humanoids (except the orcs in the beginning) in three sessions. after that much time spent killing rats and rat swarms and darkmantles we all just gave up, I showed them where rat guy was, they went and killed him, and I let the portal he gated in all the creatures from take them out of the dungeon. much happier party.

as individual dungeons, most of the sections could work out fine. Not sections A or B though. the constant traps in B are just really boring to play through. after one session of section B the party just ignored every room that had something interesting in it, cause it was clearly a trap.

reading through it, I really liked section I and section F. be interesting to play those.