D&D General Sneak Peak at the Dire Maul dungeon in the upcoming D&D x WoW book

[Crit Hit The Giant]

Here's a sneak peak at one of the dungeons in the upcoming D&D x World Of Warcraft book, Dire Maul.

As mentioned in the video, I have very little to no knowledge of the World of Warcraft so would love to hear people who are fans of the game to fill in anything I may have missed here. Thank you!

 

[TravDoc42]

Very cool! My WoW knowledge is very limited, but this seems neat to me!!

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Blackfathom's final area seems a tad small

 

[Dessert Nomad]

The Dire Maul map is oriented with North to the left so it will all fit on the page - in the MMORPG, the Eldreth Row and Maul are both ourdoor areas, and the 3 wings are instanced dungeons that are usually referred to as Dire Maul North, East, and West. They wouldn't want to reorient the dungeon because WOW players know it by those directions. It's neat to see the dungeons made into a D&D map, will be interesting to see what they do with the trash mob zones in these since they would be weird to convert directly. (In the MMO, you often fight one group of enemies while another stands within eyesight not responding to you killing their friends).

 

[sevenbastard]

(In the MMO, you often fight one group of enemies while another stands within eyesight not responding to you killing their friends).

To be fair ive played in some poorly run D&D games where you kill 15 orcs in one room and go 10 feet down a hall and 10 more orcs are just hanging out rolling dice like nothing happened.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

As someone who played WoW during my formative years FIRST and then got into D&D as a young adult, WoW set my expectations for what a dungeon is structured and paced like and it always took me a little readjustment to one in D&D. In WoW, with the exception of some early dungeons which were deliberately designed more like a tabletop map (I really hope the Dark Iron Dwarf city of Darkforge makes it into the book as a dungeon- basically consider them WoW's Duergar and it the equivalent of Gracklestugh), dungeons are linear, have little to no puzzle or exploration and enemies are set out in specific configurations at relatively equal intervals. Players are expected to have memorized the dungeon (unless it's like the first few weeks since it came out) and speed-run through it, often by deliberately crowd controlling certain enemies and whittling down the "packs" of "trash mobs" in a prescribed order.

Part of my wonders how the difference will be squared at all. I think an interesting mechanic to replicate the Mythic+ system from the game might be to tally up how many combat turns you used in the entire dungeon and base the rewards from the loot pile at the end on that.

 

[Dessert Nomad]

I don't get the impression they're trying to make 'Play D&D like an MMO' the draw of the WOW crossover, I think they're going for 'play D&D in the WOW setting', so they aren't going to include the MMO specific stuff. Players in an MMO are expected to have memorized a dungeon because you run the same dungeon over and over, but there's no 'reset an instance' in tabletop. There's no exploration because a handful of people ran the dungeon early (often on the test servers) and figured out all of the tricks and boss mechanics. If they do include mechanics for resetting an instance and running it multiple times I'd find it amusing, but more as a novelty than a serious campaign setting.

 

[Dessert Nomad]

[Duplicate, YAY BOTS]

 

[Marc17]

It would be interesting if they carried over some of the boss fight mechanics (not necessarily this dungeon's exactly). I keep seeing people complain about how boss fights are uninteresting and never last long enough. Still, for reasons mentioned previously, they'd have to be pretty easy to figure out or otherwise find out before hand.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It would be interesting if they carried over some of the boss fight mechanics (not necessarily this dungeon's exactly). I keep seeing people complain about how boss fights are uninteresting and never last long enough. Still, for reasons mentioned previously, they'd have to be pretty easy to figure out or otherwise find out before hand.

I'm not a big fan of Dire Maul in WoW -- I put in a lot of time in each of the wings in vanilla and the bloom is well off the rose for me -- but it does have the advantage of having interesting boss mechanics.

I like that they're adding one or two special abilities to otherwise standard (or WoW book standard) monsters to model this.

For someone like Onyxia, that'll obviously necessitate a lot more of these special abilities if they're building her atop a standard Azerothian black dragon template. (Given how many dragons are running around WoW, I do hope they have standard ones built, so that players have to be wary of standing behind a dragon, as they do in WoW.)

No offense against the D&D artists, but I do think the Dire Maul map in the book is less exciting than the WoW versions of the same. I would have preferred an effort to retain more of that look and feel, including the fake parchment, etc.