D&D (2024) What could One D&D do to bring the game back to the dungeon?

[Reynard]

It doesn't seem prudent to make this sort of claim from a place of ignorance.

I was explicitly talking about a game than changed not just in scale but in form and function and it was pretty clear from the descriptions that this was not the case in 4E.

 

[pemerton]

Rule nations not so much

The Legendary Sovereign epic destiny involves ruling a nation.

But the game did not actually change, sounds like.

This might depend on which table you were playing at.

For instance, 1st level PCs are relatively unlikely to recruit squads of soldiers to support them. Paragon or Epic tier PCs are far more likely to do this. Mechanically, a squad of soldiers might be a bonus on a check in a skill challenge (out of combat) or a particular sort of ability or resource to deploy (in combat) - for instance, when one of the PCs in my game had a squad of drow hand crossbowmen in their service, in mechanical terms that was a minor action AoE attack (as they gave the command to shoot).

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I was explicitly talking about a game than changed not just in scale but in form and function and it was pretty clear from the descriptions that this was not the case in 4E.

There was nothing about the game mechanically that would prevent a DM from running a political "Rule the nation" game, though. In fact, with Skill Challenges and the Swarm rules, you had some mechanical tools to deal with politics and mass combats that would have worked well, under a DM that knew what they were doing and wanted to run that sort of thing.

 

[Incenjucar]

The game did not become Mario Kart after level 11, no... unless the players decided to get a bunch of mounts and race them around.

4E isn't really about railroading you into new mini-games unless that's where the campaign is going.
In my 4E campaign, for example, we went from "You are crew on a pirate ship after being sold by the big bads" at heroic, "You run the pirate ship and go after the big bads" at paragon, and "Your pirate ship is a planejammer and you are stopping the big bad behind the big bads from annihilating multiple upper planes by slamming them together."

 

[pemerton]

I was explicitly talking about a game than changed not just in scale but in form and function and it was pretty clear from the descriptions that this was not the case in 4E.

There was nothing about the game mechanically that would prevent a DM from running a political "Rule the nation" game, though. In fact, with Skill Challenges and the Swarm rules, you had some mechanical tools to deal with politics and mass combats that would have worked well, under a DM that knew what they were doing and wanted to run that sort of thing.

I used plenty of swarms to represent massed forces (hobgoblin phalanxes, flying squads of vrock demons, etc). 4e makes this sort of thing very straightforward.

Because of the way levelling works on the PC side, the most natural way for the players to have their characters confront a hobgoblin phalanx is not to lead a force of soldiers against it, but to wade in and destroy it themselves. As per my post just upthread, in the context of combat resolution soldiers in the service of the PCs are more likely to be an assist rather than the main game.

Political skill challenges are easy to set up and resolve. At paragon tier the PCs in my 1st to 30th level game became the dominant actors in the city that had become the focus of our play. At epic tier they shaped the politics of the Abyss and the Elemental Chaos, freed the drow from Lolth so they could return to the surface world, and turned the duergar from servants of Admodeus to servants of Levistus (that last one was not necessarily an unalloyed success).

My observation, based on comparing my own play experience with 4e to a lot of what I saw others talk about, is that a fair number of 4e GMs were very reluctant to let the course of play - especially skill challenges - change the underlying fiction to any significant degree. These GMs seemed to use skill challenges essentially as a form of complex skill check for adjudicating how the players had their PCs step through a series of hoops to resolve a GM pre-conceived puzzle. (Literally disarming a trap, say; or something with different fiction but the same basic play structure.) At those GMs' tables, it did not seem - at least to this external observer - that the scope or character of play changed with the tiers of play.

 

[Reynard]

There was nothing about the game mechanically that would prevent a DM from running a political "Rule the nation" game, though. In fact, with Skill Challenges and the Swarm rules, you had some mechanical tools to deal with politics and mass combats that would have worked well, under a DM that knew what they were doing and wanted to run that sort of thing.

Again, I was talking about the explicit change of game in BECMI -- mostly wistfully, with an air of sad nostalgia. I don't expect than any other edition or version really leaned in the way BECMI did -- although 2E had a few sourcebooks bending that way and even 3E (or 3.5?) tried with the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Abstracting a unit of NPCs into a single action isn't really what I want, but I can see it working mechanically.

The Legendary Sovereign epic destiny involves ruling a nation.

This might depend on which table you were playing at.

For instance, 1st level PCs are relatively unlikely to recruit squads of soldiers to support them. Paragon or Epic tier PCs are far more likely to do this. Mechanically, a squad of soldiers might be a bonus on a check in a skill challenge (out of combat) or a particular sort of ability or resource to deploy (in combat) - for instance, when one of the PCs in my game had a squad of drow hand crossbowmen in their service, in mechanical terms that was a minor action AoE attack (as they gave the command to shoot).

 

[Maxperson]

That kinda is the point though. It is not the same as having a light.

The comment I replied to seemed to imply that due to the massive amounts of darkvision, light isn't an issue because everyone can already see just fine. That's incorrect. Light is better to have whether you have darkvision or not, because darkvision in 5e stinks.

 

[Reynard]

I'm trying to decide if explicit procedures are a thing that would be worth incorporating. I know a lot of OSR folks swear by them but I don't actually recall using them so religiously back in the day. But, it might be harder to keep track of time -- which i do consider a major element of successful dungeon based play -- without them.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I'm trying to decide if explicit procedures are a thing that would be worth incorporating. I know a lot of OSR folks swear by them but I don't actually recall using them so religiously back in the day. But, it might be harder to keep track of time -- which i do consider a major element of successful dungeon based play -- without them.

Just my opinion, I may be an outlier, but for old school I think you can never go wrong with more tools, and those could be optional procedures, but I like having different procedures to invoke as needed rather than ones you are to follow all the time (and the easier these are to shape into adjustable dials, the better). It does depend on the specifics of what we are talking about though. I have run into he same thing with modern settings. Procedures are great but they can be confining. I'd rather I decide what procedures to invoke based on what the players are trying to do, rather than have procedures that guide what players are doing if that makes sense. In a modern RPG context I ran into this when I developed a pretty solid rackets and operations table and procedure. It worked until I had a player who starting pushing into greater specifics, then it didn't. Since then I learned you kind of have to go by how the players are approaching it in a way. At least I did, for me I needed to be able to respond with procedures that made sense for the moment, rather than front load procedures to manage the flow. Hopefully that makes sense.