D&D 5E Megadungeon delving as a campaign’s core; is it compatible with modern play?

[el-remmen]

I'm pretty sure in 3e we had one CLW wand in every character and NPCs pack, and the clerics had 4-5 of them in theirs. The CLW creating cleric was an absolute must.

I ran and played in two 3E campaigns that totaled about 10 years. Not only did we never see a CLW wand. No one ever made even one magical item!

 

[billd91]

I ran and played in two 3E campaigns that totaled about 10 years. Not only did we never see a CLW wand. No one ever made even one magical item!

There’s a lot of style of play issues that appear here with this topic. You could have created/bought tons of CLW wands, but, at your table culture, making magic items wasn’t embraced. And 3e was enough of a toolkit to handle it.

 

[Sabathius42]

I ran and played in two 3E campaigns that totaled about 10 years. Not only did we never see a CLW wand. No one ever made even one magical item!

I'd say CLW wands accounted for 95+% of all the items ever crafted....they are just so low bar to make in terms of level, gold, and XP requirements they they were a huge loophole in the system.

But each table has their own meta....at my 5e table a counterspell from a PC is ultra rare, no one has ever once cast Tiny Hut that I recall, and we have had a fair share of PCs KIA including a TPK.

To go back to the OG topic....I don't feel like anything needs to be done to make a mega dungeon compatible with modern play ruleswise...but I feel like mega dungeons don't offer all the things modern players might want to explore.

Note: I'm talking about "you're stuck here find a way out" mega dungeons like World's Largest Dungeon not just a location in a world players can visit or leave behind as they see fit.

 

[Brotton Goodfellow]

I am currently running Barrowmaze with some homebrew rules. The biggest change I believe I made to make the game about the dungeon and exploring it worth while, was gold for xp. Without that change I don’t think my players interest would be sustained. But I do think using RAW, you can have a good dungeon crawl campaign.

 

[Stormonu]

I'm pretty sure in 3e we had one CLW wand in every character and NPCs pack, and the clerics had 4-5 of them in theirs. The CLW creating cleric was an absolute must.

Eh, I banned cure wands in my game - well, any sort of wand with clerical spells actually. Likewise, I wasn't fond of healing surges in 4E.

I guess I've mellowed since then, because I like the HD healing of 5E as it allows cleric-less parties to exist without being shafted or watching all their gold disappear to healing potions.

I'm not quite fond of the "long rest and good as new", but it beats the old 1E-2E having to skip weeks as you heal 1 hp a day or have the cleric dump his spells into healing each night to get you back in action in a hurry.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Eh, I banned cure wands in my game - well, any sort of wand with clerical spells actually. Likewise, I wasn't fond of healing surges in 4E.

I guess I've mellowed since then, because I like the HD healing of 5E as it allows cleric-less parties to exist without being shafted or watching all their gold disappear to healing potions.

I'm not quite fond of the "long rest and good as new", but it beats the old 1E-2E having to skip weeks as you heal 1 hp a day or have the cleric dump his spells into healing each night to get you back in action in a hurry.

One advantage of the old slow healing rate was it allowed for built-in downtime.

 

[Lanefan]

@Lanefan With the longest-living/participating character lasting only 17 sessions of a 950-session campaign,

Not the longest-living or longest-participating by any means! He's way, way down the list of longest-serving. I have pretty accurate sessions-played counts for every character that's appeared in the game.

He's just the most memorable, despite his short career.

Though, I realize other people use the word campaign differently. When I read articles about say the record for the longest-running campaign, it seems to be used to mean running regular games in the same setting with various links to prior PCs (their actions changing the world, PCs being the descendants of past PCs, etc.). Is that how you are using "campaign"?

Yes, onbly without the descendants piece; the game just hasn't gone through enough in-setting time yet. Every PC could in theory (and often, in practice) connect and-or interact with any other PC in the setting should such be desired, assuming both are alive at the time. The actions of one party often have downstream impacts on another. And so on.

 

[Lanefan]

I ran and played in two 3E campaigns that totaled about 10 years. Not only did we never see a CLW wand. No one ever made even one magical item!

I think one - if memory serves - item was ever made while I was in our 3e game, not including minor potions and scrolls. A new spell was designed and researched also (my PC did that), and that's about it.

 

[LordEntrails]

Gimme SOMETHING I can use to tie your character into this setting and campaign. Anything. I don't care what it is. You give me the tiniest little corner of your character sheet to add to and I will bend over backwards to make your character the star of the setting

Depending upon the players I use different methods during session 0 (or before). What I do like to do is have each PC give me 3 relationships. Names of people they know, friend or enemy etc. I find it is very flexible, and doesn't run into problems with character death etc. The king's bastard dies while adventuring? Oh well. The prophesized child dies? Guess it was a false prophecy. etc.

The CLW creating cleric was an absolute must.

I ran and played in two 3E campaigns that totaled about 10 years. Not only did we never see a CLW wand. No one ever made even one magical item!

I'm with the experience here that we didn't use CLW wands. Had lots of characters craft lots of stuff, but never CLW wands.

 

[Hussar]

Again this is an issue where goals and play style run into the realities at a given table.

The point of random encounters is to make healing a logistical resource. You drop encounters from time to time to interrupt rest or shave off some HP.

But then the practicalities of the table step up. Combat takes about 39 minutes to resolve. Give or take. For me, six random encounters eats an entire session of time. (And honestly it would probably only take 4 encounters)

That’s a huge chunk of time spent on something that no one at my table actually cares about. The encounters aren’t really dangerous. They don’t forward events or move towards any campaign or player goals. They are just there to make HP important.

I could get exactly the same result with a 1 in 6 chance every hour of everyone taking 2d10 damage. I just saved hours of gameplay that I can now use to do stuff that the players actually want to do.

If a campaign is thousands of hours long, then fair enough. You’ve got all the time in the world to do random encounters and whatnot.

I do not have that. I have 80-100 sessions max. And very, very likely closer to 50 before real life ends the campaign.

I’ve done the first two thirds of a campaign a thousand times. I no longer care about it. Get me to that last third as fast as possible because at least it won’t be doing the same stuff over and over again.

 

[Vaalingrade]

The important thing is that none of us is offering suggestions for marrying the megadungeon setting with modern playstyles like the OP is asking for and just rehashing all our old talking points in a new battleground.

OP: to go a little further than what I said earlier, take an old megadungeon, such as the World's Largest Dungeon and go over it. The map can be the starting point, and since it uses EVERY MM1 monster from 3e, there are pre-existing groups of intelligent humanoids already there for you to flesh out into intra dungeon societies.

The other monsters and features you can go over on a case-by case basis. WLD in particular tries to create ecologies, but for some monsters (outsiders and aberrations in particular) just gives up and has spawner rooms because they HAD to have every monster. You can keep or kill these. Maybe the appearance of spawners is the key to the main plot you're driving; upsetting the ecology and society inside the dungeon.

 

[Sabathius42]

The important thing is that none of us is offering suggestions for marrying the megadungeon setting with modern playstyles like the OP is asking for and just rehashing all our old talking points in a new battleground.

OP: to go a little further than what I said earlier, take an old megadungeon, such as the World's Largest Dungeon and go over it. The map can be the starting point, and since it uses EVERY MM1 monster from 3e, there are pre-existing groups of intelligent humanoids already there for you to flesh out into intra dungeon societies.

The other monsters and features you can go over on a case-by case basis. WLD in particular tries to create ecologies, but for some monsters (outsiders and aberrations in particular) just gives up and has spawner rooms because they HAD to have every monster. You can keep or kill these. Maybe the appearance of spawners is the key to the main plot you're driving; upsetting the ecology and society inside the dungeon.

The biggest issue with running World's Largest Dungeon as written is that there isn't an ability to "go back to town" even with magic at higher levels. I introduced a "Pocket Town" in a portable hole (similar to the Army In A Bag from Knights of the Dinner Table) almost at the entrance to allow the PCs to do trading, loot sales, buying spells, etc...

It was VERY VERY artificial in feel, but in a way it also was a bit more interesting than an actual by the books small town.

 

[CreamCloud0]

The biggest issue with running World's Largest Dungeon as written is that there isn't an ability to "go back to town" even with magic at higher levels.

As someone who’s never seen WLD, is there some inherent factor of the dungeon that prevent safe civilisations forming within or is it just that the dungeon as written lacks a town location to retreat to?

Personally I think alot of modern players(although I can’t really say I’m basing this off much) might really enjoy a townbuilding aspect where they build up a secure location, rescuing and directing survivors or lost adventurers to their budding town and adding new professions and stores that way.

 

[Micah Sweet]

As someone who’s never seen WLD, is there some inherent factor of the dungeon that prevent safe civilisations forming within or is it just that the dungeon as written lacks a town location to retreat to?

Personally I think alot of modern players(although I can’t really say I’m basing this off much) might really enjoy a townbuilding aspect where they build up a secure location, rescuing and directing survivors or lost adventurers to their budding town and adding new professions and stores that way.

That is a wonderful idea! I may need to finally crack open my copy of WLD and see where such a town could be founded...

 

[Thomas Shey]

There’s a lot of style of play issues that appear here with this topic. You could have created/bought tons of CLW wands, but, at your table culture, making magic items wasn’t embraced. And 3e was enough of a toolkit to handle it.

You can make a pretty good argument with what's known now that the tendency to buy and make CLW wands universally was kind of a failure state in how the people designing 3e expected it to be played, but its very clear that the emergent common play of 3e era D&D was vastly divergent from those expectations in all kinds of places. Its one of the signs there was some serious problems with however they conducted playtesting during its lead up.

 

[Maxperson]

I ran and played in two 3E campaigns that totaled about 10 years. Not only did we never see a CLW wand. No one ever made even one magical item!

Same here. Initially some players tried, but when I kept playing with the others wandering through town while their character was stuck back at the inn working magic all day, they gave up on it so that they didn't lose out on play time. The world doesn't stop just because your character wants to create an item.

 

[Maxperson]

As someone who’s never seen WLD, is there some inherent factor of the dungeon that prevent safe civilisations forming within or is it just that the dungeon as written lacks a town location to retreat to?

There are a number of factions that the party can become allies with on the various levels. Most, if not all levels had multiple factions on them.

 

[Sabathius42]

Same here. Initially some players tried, but when I kept playing with the others wandering through town while their character was stuck back at the inn working magic all day, they gave up on it so that they didn't lose out on play time. The world doesn't stop just because your character wants to create an item.

We would all party in the town and then fast forward the creation bit. I doubt anyone would have much PC item creation in a campaign that punished the player by making them sit out the game to use that function if their powers.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

We would all party in the town and then fast forward the creation bit. I doubt anyone would have much PC item creation in a campaign that punished the player by making them sit out the game to use that function if their powers.

yeah, we would all agree to down time and just quickly (5-10 mins) say what we did for X time. I can't think of a reason why a DM would make players sit out playing.

 

[Thomas Shey]

yeah, we would all agree to down time and just quickly (5-10 mins) say what we did for X time. I can't think of a reason why a DM would make players sit out playing.

Passive-aggressive discouragement of using the enchanting mechanics or a desire to reflect "realistic" time taken in a game that isn't realistic in any other way to a noticeable degree.