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Message: <blockquote data-quote="doctorbadwolf" data-source="post: 8982990" data-attributes="member: 6704184">I will run and enjoy a 1-2 session dungeon, max. Anything beyond that is spending too much time on what isn’t the reason we are there. For a dungeon crawl, I’ll just play HeroQuest. I love that game. But if I’m playing Kid the Artificer, I want to be engaging with the City of Waterdeep, or with the Netherese refugee community, or with other inventors and revolutionaries, or a thousand other things than spending a week in a hole killing oversized rats to get treasure. Even stuff like Castle Ravenloft is more than I need to have fun with a location, while Death House is mostly just a bit too…empty, in places, but otherwise moves along, has an unfolding mystery and horror, two spirits you can try to help, and the creeping dread of knowing the only way out is through. If every dungeon crawl was like that, and not any longer than it needed to be to tell the story as I despise filler, I’d use them more often. So, to try to organize my ranting: <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">No longer than demanded by the story of the place</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">No entire rooms with nothing even vaguely interesting</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">No filler fights to draw out the crawl (basically don’t make it a crawl)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The whole “delve into a dank hole full of monsters to kill them for loot” thing. Anything that makes me feel like Columbus or Cortez is a bad time, for me. I want there to be a point. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Ideally it should always be able to tie into, reveal things about, provide tools for, or otherwise has soemthing interesting to do with one or more ongoing story threads outside the location</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">For some reason, most crawls I’ve tried has really bad encounter design? Like, groups with no archers of mobile skirmishers or even a climber, stuff like that. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Often doing them well requires far more prep than other types of adventures, and I’m much better at improvisation</li> </ul>Now, what I have enjoyed and in some cases even written myself: <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Death House</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">An island tower I wrote with a central mechanism in the basement that controls the moving parts of the tower, that could also be controlled from the top observation dome room, if they set up the machine to operate while in the basement. Then there were 6 levels of aberrant creatures between the bottom and top, that they were able to reduce to only fighting 3 groups through good strategy and rolls with the mechanism and a clever use of a familiar and an unseen servant, and when they got the top there was stuff relating to 2 PCs personal stories, more puzzle type stuff to figure, and then a big horde fight where a “Chuul-drake matriarch” that could call waves of chuul-drakes and dolgrims and such, with armored windows that couldn’t be closed in just one round (many actions to close, interfered with). </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A Claus for Concern 3pp adventure. I heavily modified the content and history and did a whole “Santa and each of you used to be darkling things of the deep winter, be Santa offered you the chance to make something new alongside him” thing with the 3 PCs. Good pacing, lots of oddities, lots of opportunities for me to inject the sort of b-story about memory and deciding again, and again, every day, who you’re going to be. </li> </ul></blockquote>

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