Playing Your Own Dungeon

[Scott Christian]

(Hey, at least it doesn't say "with.")

Are there any GMs out there who
A) wish they could play in their own adventures/dungeons,
B) get someone else to run their dungeons for them,
C) automate their own dungeons so they can try them out?

I know I'd like to play in my creations, but I haven't met the GM who said "hi, would you happen to have some quests I could run for you?"

Unless you're running something published (and one hopes, playtested) you're basically submitting PCs to prototypes every time. What do you do for quality assurance?

I had a friend run an entire campaign that I wrote. He added a few twists, and it was super fun to see what NPCs and parts he highlighted versus what I might have. It was also so wonderful to see it from a player's perspective. There were definitely parts I changed because the mechanics didn't sit well with me. Overall, it was a great experience.

 

[Lanessar]

I personally cannot write particularly well. I'll make 10 pages of faction notes about a dungeon's inhabitants, not use most of it. But I run things at the table that aren't written.

Even when I run something published, I'll make minor changes. Didn't like that door with the riddles, so replaced it with a talking door. Had a hard time figuring out how to make the rooms work, deleted four and replaced them with one room, all contents.

The biggest problem I have is that I run things for players. I make the adventure engaging, change things up, make things more exciting somehow if they are slow and slow things down if they are running too fast.

But I can't write that in an adventure; so I try to document what I did run, and then I just lose interest in the whole exercise because it doesn't live up to what's in my mind.

So, I'm like, a great at-the-table DM and entertaining, but not a great writer/creator DM.

 

[Scott Christian]

Even when I run something published, I'll make minor changes. Didn't like that door with the riddles, so replaced it with a talking door. Had a hard time figuring out how to make the rooms work, deleted four and replaced them with one room, all contents.

The biggest problem I have is that I run things for players. I make the adventure engaging, change things up, make things more exciting somehow if they are slow and slow things down if they are running too fast.

I know you are reading your table when making these decisions, but how do you know that they wouldn't work as presented? Or more importantly, how do you know they wouldn't work if you put more work into them?

 

[Lanessar]

I know you are reading your table when making these decisions, but how do you know that they wouldn't work as presented? Or more importantly, how do you know they wouldn't work if you put more work into them?

For adventures written by others, it's reading it. If I feel stupid reading out about a stone door that requires you call out the word "Axe" in dwarven or the players cannot start the adventure in the tomb, then I just know it won't work.

This example is easier - most riddle-doors are just poorly written and don't work at a table. You either have to hit them over the head with the answer like a Beetlejuice neon sign, or they sit there and puzzle out the answer like The Fellowship at the gates of Moria, which the movie skipped over an entire day while Gandalf sat there. Let me tell you how fun that is at an actual table. In this case, I subvert the expectations and change the event. "Talking door asks random questions the adventurers thinks are riddles. Turns out the door is just curious about the world outside the tomb and isn't blocking the entry at all."

It sort of works the same with room contents - if I'm losing thread of the difference between these rooms, and they don't serve an actual purpose to the flow of the adventure, I make changes. I read in my head and if it starts sounding similar, or if I am bored by it, I am nearly positive my players will be disillusioned.

Granted, I've been DMing for this group for six years, four years for the newest. If I ran conventions I'd probably have to change up until I learned to "read" what the players had interest in.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

I personally cannot write particularly well. I'll make 10 pages of faction notes about a dungeon's inhabitants, not use most of it. But I run things at the table that aren't written.

So, I'm like, a great at-the-table DM and entertaining, but not a great writer/creator DM.

Andrew Finch wrote the following advice in the 4e DMG:

"The DM’s job is to entertain, not to be original."

 

[Lanessar]

I think the article I work off of is from Dragon Magazine, but yeah - same energy.

I mean, my current campaign is a blatant rip-off of Dragonlance, Warhammer Fantasy and Mistbourne, with a little Dark Sun thrown in. Nothing my players would even recognize, because none of them have read books that are 30-40+ years old.

I pitched the campaign as "Indiana Jones meets Call of Cthuluhu" to my players. "Great DMs steal everything not nailed to the table" or something like that.

 

[Clint_L]

I routinely play in my own games, often because the party could use one more member, or just because there's a character I want to play. To me, playing a PC is not much different from playing an NPC. Since I have all the inside knowledge, the key is to make sure my character is not the one making the decisions, so usually I make them someone who is not very bright, or is just very action-oriented, or whatever. The only thing I don't like is occasionally when my character has to interact with an NPC, which is then me talking to myself. So I make sure my character is not the face of the party, as well as not being a decision maker.

In my current home game, I also find it useful to have a party member (mine) that can get into trouble and need to be bailed out by the rest of the party. So there are good chunks of time when they are out of the action and working more as a plot device.

I enjoy playing in my own scenarios. I run very sandbox-style games, so a lot of the story is emergent, and getting to experience it along with the other players is great fun. And I create very elaborate sets using all of my hand-painted terrain and miniatures, accumulated over many, many years, so it is extra fun to feel like I am right in there.

 

[GMMichael]

But I can't write that in an adventure; so I try to document what I did run, and then I just lose interest in the whole exercise because it doesn't live up to what's in my mind.

So, I'm like, a great at-the-table DM and entertaining, but not a great writer/creator DM.

That's an interesting take: just assume the written adventure is bad, so revise it on the fly?

I'm sure you could submit the whole adventure to an LLM to get an opinion on it. I'd rather play through it, though.

routinely play in my own games, often because the party could use one more member, or just because there's a character I want to play. To me, playing a PC is not much different from playing an NPC.

I was going to say, "aren't you just playing an NPC?" I do a lot of visualizing as a GM, but what I imagine has to be conveyed to the players, so there's a process that the players go through that you, as GM, don't.

 

[Special Unicorn]

C. I tried to automate one encounter of my dungeon in Foundry, but it didn't work.

So, I manually went through combat with the monsters and my players' characters 6 times to see if it was truly imbalanced.

 

[aramis erak]

(Hey, at least it doesn't say "with.")

Are there any GMs out there who
A) wish they could play in their own adventures/dungeons,
B) get someone else to run their dungeons for them,
C) automate their own dungeons so they can try them out?

I know I'd like to play in my creations, but I haven't met the GM who said "hi, would you happen to have some quests I could run for you?"

Unless you're running something published (and one hopes, playtested) you're basically submitting PCs to prototypes every time. What do you do for quality assurance?

I've solo-played a few of my T&T GM'd dungeons... but I found that didn't translate to a better experience for my players; if anything, it hurt the group play.

I've solo played a small truck stop map for Car Wars - was too tight for maneuvering the rigs, which is what I was testing.