D&D General What D&D Would You Use For A Dungeon Focused Campaign?

[Parmandur]

Is it? How so?

The "Adventure Day" is a Dungeon: build and stock a Dungeon with the DMG guidelines, put a little plot pressure on clearing the obstacle in a timely manner and...the system sings. The character power attrition Dungeon of 5E is a bit different from the classic feel of an OD&D logistical challenge, in the same way that Star Wars is a different sort of action movie than The Dirty Dozen, but the 5E Dungeon experience when run RAW really sings.

 

[THEMNGMNT]

I think the argument being made is that 8 medium encounters per long rest (the 5E "adventuring day") is a natural fit for dungeon exploration and may have even been designed with that in mind.

 

[Parmandur]

I think the argument being made is that 8 medium encounters per long rest (the 5E "adventuring day") is a natural fit for dungeon exploration and may have even been designed with that in mind.

Oh, there is no maybe about that, it was pretty explicit during the Next tests that the design structure if Encounters was about Dungeon raids: the part of the "Adventure Day" that people find tortured is that it is an attempt to apply the standard of a Dungeon to a more abstract set of possibilities, that may or may not be in a Dungeon. But build a 12-20 room Dungeon, have 5-8 combat wncoutners per DMG guidelines...that's cooking with oil.

 

[Reynard]

I think the argument being made is that 8 medium encounters per long rest (the 5E "adventuring day") is a natural fit for dungeon exploration and may have even been designed with that in mind.

Oh, there is no maybe about that, it was pretty explicit during the Next tests that the design structure if Encounters was about Dungeon raids: the part of the "Adventure Day" that people find tortured is that it is an attempt to apply the standard of a Dungeon to a more abstract set of possibilities, that may or may not be in a Dungeon. But build a 12-20 room Dungeon, have 5-8 combat wncoutners per DMG guidelines...that's cooking with oil.

I would argue that 8 medium encounters does not "sing" in 5E. It is likely to be tedious. I suppose there may be some specific combination of 8 medium encounters that one could make "sing" but it would have to be highly curated, which means it is a lot of work. This is to say that whatever the math says, actual fun at the table does not jive with the encounter calculator.

And that is not even to ask "why do these encounters have to be in a dungeon?"

 

[Parmandur]

I would argue that 8 medium encounters does not "sing" in 5E. It is likely to be tedious. I suppose there may be some specific combination of 8 medium encounters that one could make "sing" but it would have to be highly curated, which means it is a lot of work. This is to say that whatever the math says, actual fun at the table does not jive with the encounter calculator.

And that is not even to ask "why do these encounters have to be in a dungeon?"

They don't, but a "Dungeon" is a likely place to encounter that many opponents in a timely manner, and it is what AotC Adventure looks are full of: Dungeons that follow the DMG Encounter building guidelines.

And...the game is about fighting stuff in Dungeona, the fights are fun, not tedious. Best if they are handled quick and deadly, too, you can get all 8 in a single session and have a blast.

 

[Reynard]

They don't, but a "Dungeon" is a likely place to encounter that many opponents in a timely manner, and it is what AotC Adventure looks are full of: Dungeons that follow the DMG Encounter building guidelines.

And...the game is about fighting stuff in Dungeona, the fights are fun, not tedious. Best if they are handled quick and deadly, too, you can get all 8 in a single session and have a blast.

I would LOVE to see someone run a 20 room (8 filled) engaging, fast, furious dungeon romp that can be completed in a session.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm not sure I see how 5E is especially dungeon focused. It is certainly heroic fantasy focused, and you can do that in a dungeon, but what rules in 5E make it hardcoded for dungeon play?

I wouldn’t say it’s hard coded for dungeon play. It’s flexible enough to work for other modes of play. But dungeon play is very much what the underlying math is built to facilitate. See, for example, the recent thread about boss monsters not working because the math assumes 20ish rounds of combat between long rests, and most groups aren’t doing that. The whole 6-8 encounter adventuring day structure 5e is built around only really makes sense in a dungeon context.

 

[Charlaquin]

I think the argument being made is that 8 medium encounters per long rest (the 5E "adventuring day") is a natural fit for dungeon exploration and may have even been designed with that in mind.

It was undoubtedly designed with that in mind. The system was built around feedback from open playtests using Keep on the Borderlands’ Caves of Chaos, the dungeoniest dungeon to ever dungeon.

 

[Charlaquin]

I would argue that 8 medium encounters does not "sing" in 5E. It is likely to be tedious.

Have you ever tried running a super simple bunch-of-rooms-with-monsters, maybe a handful of locked doors and some pit traps capital-D Dungeon using straight RAW 2014 core 3 rulebooks? If you haven’t, let me tell you from experience, a lot of the design choices of 5e that seem strange or nonsensical suddenly start to make perfect sense in that context.

I suppose there may be some specific combination of 8 medium encounters that one could make "sing" but it would have to be highly curated, which means it is a lot of work.

Nah, not a lot of work. Use straight out of the book “bag of hit points with a claw and a bite attack” 2014 Monster Manual monsters, using RAW 2014 DMG encounter building guidelines. Put about 2 Easy, 4 Medium, and 2 Hard of such encounters in a dungeon with like 16 rooms, roll up a treasure hoard using the 2014 DMG rules, sprinkle about a third of that treasure across maybe 6 or 7 of those rooms, making sure most but not all of the treasure rooms have monsters or a trap in them, and put the other two thirds in a big pile in the least accessible room along with one of the Hard encounters. That design, in the words of Todd Howard, just works.

This is to say that whatever the math says, actual fun at the table does not jive with the encounter calculator.

Fun is subjective of course. But, I can tell you from my experience, the type of dungeon I described above feels excellent in actual gameplay, despite sounding like a snooze fest on paper.

And that is not even to ask "why do these encounters have to be in a dungeon?"

Mainly because a dungeon makes the physical structure of the fictional environment match up 1:1 with the design structure of the intended play pattern. You could reproduce that play structure in a fictional environment that didn’t have the same physical structure, but there would be a higher risk of it feeling forced, because there wouldn’t be literal walls keeping the players within the intended structure.

 

[Charlaquin]

I would LOVE to see someone run a 20 room (8 filled) engaging, fast, furious dungeon romp that can be completed in a session.

Give the original Caves of Chaos a try, using the 2014 monster manual stat blocks instead of the AD&D ones. It is quite literally what the system was built for.