Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
You may need to see a doctor, FYI.opinions are bursting off of all of us like boils
You may need to see a doctor, FYI.opinions are bursting off of all of us like boils
I'm a fan of including XP for exploration and social encounters. If the party runs across a trap or hazard for the first time, they get some XP; disarming/avoiding the trap/hazard via ability checks or abilities is the equivalent to combat. Denizens of megadungeons don't always require combat, and offering xp for resolving encounters with social skills rewards this. Additionally, you can offer up special quest XP for accomplishing specific goals, such as unlocking certain areas.
I agree with goal achievement. Something Mad Mage did was have some goal for every level. Now, our DM was running it with milestone advancement, so our only goal was to solve that goal. I think it would have been more interesting to do like you suggest - XP for resolving encounters; and XP for solving goalsMegadungeon XP should be for
(a) defeating monsters - 5e BTB works fine for this, especially if most encounters at higher level are with groups of low CR monsters
(b) Goal achievement, in particular getting treasure. Ideally I'd like to see each treasure cache have its own XP award.
This is exactly the perspective I'd take for a megadungeon. It's a setting; not an adventure. Actually a failing of Mad Mage - it wants to be an adventure but really would have been a better product if it a) behaved like a setting and b) gave DMs ways to make a mega dungeon come alive - faction play; creature migration and changes between pc ventures; handling CR / PC level disparity encounters; and moreMegadungeons should not be designed to be cleared, they should support multiple PC groups, over long term to indefinite play. They are campaign environments in which adventures take place, they are not themselves adventures per se.
That sounds very cool.My idea is to present an overview of the dungeon, with 10 'highlight dungeons' that are more fleshed out, each with an associated mini-adventure. You can use as many or as few as you want, separately or together, but if you would like to string together a campaign, here are 10 objectives take take the party through 10 interesting parts of the megadungeon and lead toward a satisfying climax.
Assume gritty rest rules. Or, to be more accurate, assume you can only rest at certain safe points.
Have limited numbers of short-rest shrines within the dungeon. Each such shrine is one-use; once used for a short-rest, you can't use it again.
Resting in the dungeon otherwise is impossible.
Block most kinds of extra dimensional travel within the dungeon. Have force magic decay in the environment, so you can't use the hut.
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Why do I say this?
Because once you have done that, you can now make the dungeon more dangerous with less monsters. So the total XP earned is less, but the total fights required is more.
Fighting 2-3 encounters, taking a short rest, 2-3 encounters, short rest, 2-3 encounters and then long rest becomes far more standard. Beating those 2-3 encounters to reach a shrine becomes key; and some shrines are 4 encounters deep.
At less XP per encounter, more encounters and more content before you level.
And with gritty rests, it becomes 10 days per baseline adventuring day. So instead of 45 days from 1 to 20, it is 450 days from 1 to 20, more than a calendar year.
If we add in any kind of serious travel of downtime it stretches out further. Imagine if different parts of the dungeon can be a week's travel apart, and many areas are 2 weeks from a place to have a safe long rest (how mega is your mega dungeon?). Now an expedition enters the mega dungeon, travels 2 weeks (attempting to avoid fights; maybe gets in 1 or 2) to the goal adventuring zone, does 6-9 fights with 2 short rests (taking 3 days) to defeat that zone, travels 2 weeks back to the nearest place of safety, and then takes a week for a long rest.
That is 14+14+7+3 = 38 days for 1 "adventuring day". At that rate, it is almost 5 years to reach level 20.
While those long periods of rest/travel don't have to take up table time (you can have mechanics for it), they do take up calendar time. And they explain why a partly cleared area recovers and becomes dangerous again if the PCs retreat for a long rest; because it has been a month.
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Have a higher-level danger economy going on.
Areas of a dungeon are impacted by the player's actions more than just "did they kill creatures here". Some areas will repopulate. Some with change in response to being attacked. Others will clear out even though the PCs never went there.
Most areas repopulate or otherwise become dangerous again after a long rest if you don't clear/finish the entire area. Other areas, the monsters move out if a significant attack happens and refortify somewhere else, taking their treasure with them.
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Don't make the mega dungeon too crowded. There should be long travel times within it, and areas with multiple routes. Cave complexes, mushroom groves, etc; not just corridors.
I've written a fair number of story-driven adventures, but I've also had fun with games where the focus is on good tactics and problem solving over characterization and narrative. Like, I can enjoy The Witcher 3 (highly character driven, with narrative quests and an overarching plot) and Dark Souls (challenge-driven, with exploration and environmental storytelling).
To give myself a change of pace in game design, I've got an idea for a megadungeon that I want to playtest with my friends and then maybe write up and publish. But when it comes to leveling and XP, I could go a couple ways.
Metroidvania vs Milestone?
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Not my map.
One of the appeals of Metroidvania style games is that you can explore and try different paths, and then you get new abilities that let you double back and unlock previously-unavailable areas. In D&D, it's a bit harder to forcibly gate off different areas, because players can be tenacious, but you can still have different 'levels' of a dungeon that are harder than the party is ready for. But if the PCs go that way, while they might get their butts kicked, I think it's fun if they can earn a good reward should they survive. So I don't want to just do milestone leveling (e.g., you beat level 1 of the dungeon, so you go up a level; you beat level 2 of the dungeon, so you go up another level), because I want it to be fine for the party to go 'out of order' and to make incremental progress in multiple places.
On the other than, the default rules of D&D kinda limit how 'mega' a dungeon can be. You might have seen where another poster did the math and found that if an adventuring party uses its resources at the expected rate, they can go from 1st to 20th level in 45 days. Level Up (A5E) - How to reach 20th Level in 45 days — An analysis of "adventuring day" per character level
The Emerald Spire Style?
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Much emerald. Very spire. Wow.
A few years ago I played a campaign that used Pathfinder's Emerald Spire 'Superdungeon'. Its design mentality, to my recollection, was that each level's map had to fit on a poster-sized sheet, and have enough XP to have the party go up a level. A different person wrote each level of the dungeon.
It was neat to have a bunch of dungeons with different themes, but I'm pretty sure we managed to see every room in the place, kill every monster, and get the 100% completion achievement unlocked trophy, plus hit 13th or 14th level, all in the span of a couple in-world months. It kept us busy for maybe 5 months of real-world play time, and I certainly had fun, but nothing in it especially stuck with me (other than an abiding hatred of how Pathfinder 1e handles 'precision damage' characters like swashbucklers, making them pretty moot against undead, elementals, swarms, oozes, constructs, and probably other stuff I'm forgetting; but I digress!).
Is a dungeon that you can potentially beat 100% sufficiently 'mega'? Is it just a 'superdungeon'? Is that good enough?
Or should I go for a bigger scale, and just tamp down on the XP value of encounters? Have more enemies than you can possibly actually defeat, but perhaps have 'keystone' boss fights that, once you win, causes an area to clear out?
I know megadungeons aren't for everyone, but for those of you who might be interested, how big would you want a published one to be? Do you want a megadungeon where you can wipe out the last boss monster right as you ding to 20th level? Do you want something more like a city that's bigger than you can possibly tackle, for you as GM or player to use as a backdrop for your own stories? Do you want a tightly-scripted adventure where, oh no, the BBEG is your long-lost twin cousin?!