D&D General Taking the "Dungeons" out of D&D

[aco175]

I heard about, but not run a more freeform traveling adventure day. I tend to have a player roll for a random encounter or have a few set encounters for travel, but sometimes you want to just get to the dungeon or having only 1 encounter makes for player knowledge taking over the PC knowledge in thinking that they can nova and if there is another encounter the next day, they can just nova again. Nothing wrong with this and I tend to play like this, but have heard of another just roleplay encounter.

The travel to a place is not the main point of the adventure, so just spend through that and get to the dungeon. To make things more realistic, add a encounter, but have the players tell you what happened and how they overcome it. There is not initiative and dice rolling for the random encounter to the real adventure. You just tell the players; "You have been traveling for three days and finally reach the dungeon." "Along the way, you had an encounter with goblins- tell me about what your PC did."

Go around the table and each player tells about something cool their PC did and spells let off or cool smites or such. The Players can tell cooler stuff sometimes than dice and the rules can allow, and it does not really affect how the encounter was going to go.

I do not think I would do this for all the encounters, just the glossing over ones where the players know they can steamroll over the goblins. I like to roll dice and have the element of danger in the game and will not do away with it for the main parts, but may try this next overland travel.

 

[Asisreo]

The very fact they put that piece in there at all is a clobber-upside-the-head hint saying 'these are the assumptions the game's been designed around'.

The problem is this claim has no support to it. Trying to read in-between the lines to form your own conclusions is not the same as the system or designers saying it.

I claim that it isn't that the game is designed around this tight 6-8 assumption, my claim is that it's telling you the upper limit of expecting balance to remain in the game. Past that point, it's up in the air and a TPK is getting likelier. Before that point, balance is can be expected, within a tolerable degree (it's not like the designers are omnipotent or anything, they can't have asymetrically designed classes be precisely balanced).

 

[Charlaquin]

The travel to a place is not the main point of the adventure, so just spend through that and get to the dungeon.

Depends on the adventure. Certainly if the point of the adventure is the dungeon and travel is just a speed bump in the way of getting to the good stuff, just narrating over the travel is a smart move. Personally, I prefer to design adventures such that travel is as much a part of the adventure as the dungeon is.

 

[Charlaquin]

The problem is this claim has no support to it. Trying to read in-between the lines to form your own conclusions is not the same as the system or designers saying it.

I claim that it isn't that the game is designed around this tight 6-8 assumption, my claim is that it's telling you the upper limit of expecting balance to remain in the game. Past that point, it's up in the air and a TPK is getting likelier. Before that point, balance is can be expected, within a tolerable degree (it's not like the designers are omnipotent or anything, they can't have asymetrically designed classes be precisely balanced).

No reading between the lines necessary, experience shows that balance cannot be expected to a tolerable degree if you significantly undershoot the 6-8 encounter with 2-3 short rests benchmark. YMMV if you have a lot tolerance for imbalance, I suppose.

 

[Asisreo]

No reading between the lines necessary, experience shows that balance cannot be expected to a tolerable degree if you significantly undershoot the 6-8 encounter with 2-3 short rests benchmark. YMMV if you have a lot tolerance for imbalance, I suppose.

I can't say your experience is wrong but I can say my experience have run contrary to yours in multiple cases.

I'm not saying that balance can always be guaranteed when not going 6-8, that's impossible. Even going the 6-8 route, balance isn't guaranteed. I'm saying that balance is possible, perhaps with the same likelihood that the 6-8 encounter model shows.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I claim that it isn't that the game is designed around this tight 6-8 assumption, my claim is that it's telling you the upper limit of expecting balance to remain in the game. Past that point, it's up in the air and a TPK is getting likelier. Before that point, balance is can be expected, within a tolerable degree (it's not like the designers are omnipotent or anything, they can't have asymetrically designed classes be precisely balanced).

Alright, that's certainly a claim you can hold. To support that claim, you should now present an argument for how a warlock with two fireballs per short rest is balanced against a wizard with five fireballs per long rest, over the course of a single large encounter. If you can't, then that's pretty strong evidence that your claim isn't true.

 

[Reynard]

Simply ruling that you must be in a safe location to gain the benefits of a long rest accomplishes this goal without having to make rests a meta-game resource.

Rests already are a metagame resource. They don't represent anything in the fiction beyond time spent on a clock that is likely completely irrelevant.

 

[Azzy]

I don't understand why there's this assumption that a balanced day requires at least 6 encounters. Not only is that untrue, but it permeates a sense that a DM takes away from classes like warlocks or monks if they do not have the 6-8 encounters.

What I don't get is why everyone insists that it's 6-8 encounters. According to the DMG (pp. 84-85), it's specifically 6-8 medium or hard encounter per adventuring day. If there are easier encounters, there should be more encounters. Inversely, if there are deadly encounters, there should be less encounters. The adjusted adventuring day XP shapes how many encounters the characters should face in an adventuring depending on the creatures in the encounter (which means tougher encounters will result in less encounters). It's also worth nothing that character can only gain the benefit of a long rest once every 24 hours. The adventuring day also assumes that there will be, on average, two short rests per day. This is achievable if there is at least 3 encounters in the day.

It's also worth noting that the encounters don't have to be strictly combat encounters, either.

 

[Greg Benage]

Why?

Because I'm happy to let politics and interpersonal relationships be resolved through roleplay? I understand why my preferences aren't universal, and that's just fine, but I strongly suspect some of this apparent puzzlement is performative.

 

[Ancalagon]

I think something missing from dungeon crawls (and the rest of the game) is a good method for tracking time in way that the players can respond to. It's amazing that 5e provides no mechanism for tracking game world time apart from some vague advice on how long things might take.

There used to be very precise knowledge of how dungeon "procedure" was made, but as several bloggers have pointed out, this knowledge was slowly lost and not included in the books anymore.

I recently discovered that the new edition of the GLOG contains an excellent dungeoneering procedure. Although it ws written for an OSR-type game, the advice give is very usable in 5e. I particularly liked his comments about trapfinding.

OSR: GLOG-based Homebrew v.2: Many Rats on Sticks Edition

I've finally finished updated the original Rat on a Stick GLOG hack. Feedback and notes from playtesting was incorporated. Notable changes...

coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com

Specifically, check page 6 (or 7, depending on how numbering works on your PDF reader) - that single page is a great tool!