open-ended or premade dungeons in an open-ended setting?

[SpiderMonkey]

I'm getting ready to run my first epic (not epic level ) game. I'm hoping mainly to base it around a homebrew city that's based (i.e. ripped off) heavily on Waterdeep and Monte Cook's Ptolus. It has an "undercity" section, as well as a cemetary district with oodles of potential dungeoneering.

I have a meta-plot, and I hope to seed it with lots of smaller plots leaving room for some PC self-determination. My question is, with the dungeons, do you dms have them premade so that the players can venture there at anytime (and potentially be slaughtered if of an insufficient level), or do you try to guage their intentions first and prep the dungeon before you go there.

The only thing i can think of is to:

a) use premade maps and have general room descriptions, just place in monsters of the appropriate CR and theme for the adventure, or...

b) use jamis buck's dungeon generator, and replace some of the monsters with FF and MM2 monsters that might be more appropriate to the setting I'm using?

What do you guys do, and what have your experiences been with this?

Thanks!

 

[Halivar]

I devised my own method for randomly determining dungeons. Once I have the dungeon, I can tweak monsters/things to taste.

It basically goes like this:

Start a room, the entry point. Roll 2 d10's to determine the length/width of the room in 5 foot squares. Roll a 1d4 to determine the number of exits.

For each exit, I roll 1d6. 1= north, 2 = south, 3 = west, 4 = east, 5 = upstairs, 6 = downstairs. I use the DMG to determine what door it is. Then roll a d6. Even number, it leads to a corridor that is 1d10 5 ft. squares long. Od number, it leads to another room. I roll for corridors as if they were rooms.

If an exit leads in the same direction as the exit that led to it, I rearrange the room so that it has two doors on the same wall. For each room, I roll on the feature/monster/trap/treasure table in the DMG.

I find that this algorithm tends to produce very cool maps that my players enjoy playing. The tables in the DMG are fairly well balanced, though I often find myself bumping up the magic items. I go ahead and place rolled random features (a la DMG) in the rooms, and then try to design the rest of the room to indicate why such an eclectic mix of things is together (i.e. why are a bread oven and an iron maiden in the same room?). It's very fun.

Anyhow, this method also lends itself well to fly-by-night dungeon creation, though your players may hate the constant table look ups.

Alternative: Perhaps a premade list of rooms, and another list of encounters? Keep the list forever and just reroll every dungeon on the fly. I'll have to try that.