Mediocre DM Needs a Little Guidence

[XianTheCoder]

Hi Everyone! Long time visitor/reader to the boards, and yesterday I finally actually registered.

Here's my scenario... As time has progressed our massive circle of DnD players has been whiddled down to around 5-6, 2 of which are unreliable. We all moved to different states, so one of our members set up a forum that we use almost exclusively for play by post games. Our 2 traditional DMs haven't really had time to run much the last couple years, so I have attempted to step in a few times and run a couple games. I tend to be very granular in my designs, I try and setup an entire world as detailed as I can make them, I design the entire plot from start to finish... right down to every interaction, every piece of loot, every option available. Nothing is there by accident, and nothing happens without a purpose. The time it takes is immense. I don't think I have to really tell any of you what usually happens though.... yes... players happen... when they aren't plot dodging, they are finding ways of destroying all my carefully planned events and interactions. As a result I tend to fall apart, hastily making decisions to keep the game moving without really thinking them through (I'm a planner not a "seat of the pants" type guy... if I do something that appears quick witted it's because I already had a list of reactions in my head to that potential possibility occuring).

So realizing that I have these deficiencies I was thinking about a new approach to my games. First, I am going to design a SMALL section of the world (in this case a single major city and its immediate surrounding land area). Next I am going to design smaller almost one-off adventures. Rather than trying to make these massive overarching plots I am going to simplify the plot.

My Basic Plot Idea: Party is a low level group of adventurers that are hired by a local lord of a mining village to inspect a set of recently uncovered ruins found while mining. Since being uncovered people have gone missing including the lords daughter (and then his son went looking for his sister and hasn't yet returned). The mine will lead into an underground city long destroyed. First they will fight some wandering monsters, eventually reaching a boss monster. Then they will find some tracks of the lords son that leads them into some kind of humanoid cult/organization compound in the heart of the city. From there they will further follow the tracks into a newly excavated area that leads into even deeper remains of the city where they encounter denizens of the original city (very deevolved from their past glories), which are relevatively friendly but are plagued by a minotuar and captured the lords son when he came wandering in and sacrificed him to the minotaur. So now the party has to go and help the denizens and rescue the lords son from the minatoar labaryinth (I'm working into the plot that the creature was originally the pet of the king of the city and after the cities destruction and submergence the prison was no longer sealed.

So here are my problems:

1. Without telling them it's a massive dungeon with traps and all these different challenges how do I get them to prepare adaquately for what they are going to face, without giving too much away upfront?

2. In the past we have tried doing dungeon/cave settings, but I find that I struggle to slow the players down from passing through... usually they say, "I walk and walk until something happens, I ignore anything that doesn't gets directly in my way" So how do I engage them in a manner where they won't just run straight through and ignore the greater scope? I have traps and pitfalls along the way, but at some point I need them to want to deviate a little, I want them to be curious about the city, and go explore some of the buildings and sounds. How do I do that?

3. I'm saying that they had 1 member of their adventuring party that had personal business in the city and is going to be arriving in the village a few days late so that in the event one player dies I have a means of easily incorporating a new character without too many issues. Do you think that this makes the players more likely to fear death or less likely? I'm thinking they realize I am willing to kill their characters since I am planning on having a floater ready. Ideally, I would like them to fear death, but not to the point where they won't explore because they are afraid that if they die they have to sit out until they get out of these ruins.


Any advice is greatly appreciated... including advice that doesn't directly touch on the 3 questions but you think might help a DM like me. Thanks!

[Etrivar]

2. In the past we have tried doing dungeon/cave settings, but I find that I struggle to slow the players down from passing through... usually they say, "I walk and walk until something happens, I ignore anything that doesn't gets directly in my way" So how do I engage them in a manner where they won't just run straight through and ignore the greater scope? I have traps and pitfalls along the way, but at some point I need them to want to deviate a little, I want them to be curious about the city, and go explore some of the buildings and sounds. How do I do that?

If that is how your players behave, then you need to give them a serious wake up call. Have the dungeon littered with creatures that they could have been killing the entire time, but when they get to the boss, he calls them all in. If they had been paying attention to their surrounding and interacting with them (ie: killing the monsters) then the boss would have no back up. But now the boss is going to have swarms of reinforcement.

They need to be jerked out of their complacency. If I had some players that were behaving like that, I would throw every trap in the DMG and ever monster in the MM at them until they started behaving like real adventurers. In short: you need to whip their ASSES.

[subject42]

"I walk and walk until something happens, I ignore anything that doesn't gets directly in my way" So how do I engage them in a manner where they won't just run straight through and ignore the greater scope?

Sounds like they need a stiff dose of Tomb of Horrors.

Sphere of Annihilation: It's just what the Doctor Ordered.

[under_score]

If that is how your players behave, then you need to give them a serious wake up call. Have the dungeon littered with creatures that they could have been killing the entire time, but when they get to the boss, he calls them all in.

For this, you might try the Dungeon Lord PrC from Dungeonscape. It might have some prereqs that require your big bad to be higher level than you otherwise want, but you could certainly just choose to waive those. The class is short and not super powerful, but adds a few nice abilities that make minions within the dungeon serve the Dungeon Lord more effectively.


1. Without telling them it's a massive dungeon with traps and all these different challenges how do I get them to prepare adaquately for what they are going to face, without giving too much away upfront?

Personally, I would expect them to be prepared like the seasoned adventurers they (hopefully) are. However, if you think they will jump in without any cure potions, utility scrolls, back-up weapons, etc, I make you two suggestions.

If there are specific gear elements you think they will need but not think to bring, you could have them available as loot (but perhaps a little out of the way so they have to explore the dungeon more -- "I go until something stops me" "There's a cliff face and you have no rope...but there was a side passage a half mile back you weren't interested in before..."). If you go with this, don't give them all the gear they could possibly need, but enough to see the things they are lacking and should have for preparation. If you'll have monsters and traps that turn them to stone, offer perhaps one scroll of stone to flesh, not enough for the entire party, forcing them to be more careful.

Secondly, and more generally, give them enough time that if they realize as they start to delve into the first part of the dungeon that they are insufficiently prepared, that they can go back to town to buy a few things and prepare different spells.

Hope some of that helps. Good luck.

[Vladislav]

1. Without telling them it's a massive dungeon with traps and all these different challenges how do I get them to prepare adaquately for what they are going to face, without giving too much away upfront?Have NPCs relay to them stories and legends about the dungeon. Have some stories be obsolete, contradictory, or simply false. Because, well, the NPCs are relaying stuff from their own memory, that someone else relayed to them, etc. The PCs have to figure out what's what and separate fact from fiction.


2. In the past we have tried doing dungeon/cave settings, but I find that I struggle to slow the players down from passing through... usually they say, "I walk and walk until something happens, I ignore anything that doesn't gets directly in my way"Then get in their way. They open a door to a room, see a monster, decide to ignore it, close the door and move on? Well, tough luck, the monster decides to give chase. Why shouldn't he? He's been sitting in this dungeon for quite a while, and gotten very hungry :smallbiggrin:


3. I'm saying that they had 1 member of their adventuring party that had personal business in the city and is going to be arriving in the village a few days late so that in the event one player dies I have a means of easily incorporating a new character without too many issues. Do you think that this makes the players more likely to fear death or less likely? I'm thinking they realize I am willing to kill their characters since I am planning on having a floater ready. Ideally, I would like them to fear death, but not to the point where they won't explore because they are afraid that if they die they have to sit out until they get out of these ruins.I don't think that's a good idea. Instead, sprinkle a small number of prisoners being held in locked cells throughout the dungeon. Give them class levels. If a PC dies, the player can control one of the prisoners the party releases, to avoid boredom. (this was done in Sunless Citadel, one of the best low-level modules evar)

[McSmack]

Use rooms without obvious exits, or other features that will require interaction to proceed.

Have loot that is visible but unaccessable. Players love loot and will go through hell to get it. Example - They see a with with a golden idol through a hole in the cavern wall, but the hole is too small for any of them to fit through. They'll have to either find a way to expand the hole (causing a ruckus that attracts monsters) or explore until they find an entrance.

Have someone else show up using some of the loot they missed because they didn't feel like checking things out.

Have monsters they didn't see ambush them from behind.
Use a few well placed traps.

As stated you are a planner, not a seat-of-your-pants-type. And that can be challenging since good DM's need to be skilled at both.
Resist the urge to overplan, especially with NPC interactions. Players like to feel that the NPC's are having a conversation with them not reading a script. Instead of focusing on the outcomes of the interactions work on figuring out what the NPC's know, what their motivations are and what their opinion of the PC's are.
In reality people don't know how they're going to respond ahead of time.

You have to plan in contingencies for when your PC's move away from the plot you've developed. I helps to have a few random encounters ready to go to throw at them.

One thing I like to do when my PC's are stuck and aren't picking up on the clues I'm dropping is to have someone kick in the door and attack them. Usually it's someone who's trying to stop them from their quest or someone who's after the same thing and is looking to get rid of competition.

In your example if the PC's seem bored you could have them run into a cultist patrol. Or perhaps they stumble on some of the friendly NPC's fighting a local monster and they help out.

Killing a PC now and again makes them sit up and pay attention now and again as well. Or have them get robbed. You need to get them motivated and involved, and they can't do that if they feel like they're just acting out your script. The DM and the PC's supposed to create the story together.

[Gamer Girl]

1.Don't. I'm a big fan of not doing this ever. One way to make D&D boring is to reduce it to a cheep game:

DM--"Ok, for adventure six we will be going to the Volcano of Doom''
Players--"Ok, we stock up on fire protection stuff and anti fire stuff and such''
Later, during game play"\:
Players--"We ignore the fire elementals as we all have fire immunity and then we dismiss the Hell hounds with one of the 110 dismissals we have, and then we blast the fire giant with six cones of cold(yawn)''
DM--"Ok, you cleared room six and got all the loot''
Players--"cool(yawn)"

Some people like to play this way, but for me it's like using an infinite lives function of a video game.


2.You just need to slow down the characters, and make everything get in their way. You need to set up things that will make them stop. In general, players are looking for interesting things to do(it's why they play the game). All you need do is give them interesting things.

Elaborate Traps with Loot--A classic. "The room floor, walls and ceiling are covered with skull carvings. The remains of four skeletons litter the floor, plus bits of equipment. In the center of the room is a raised pedestal with a glowing diamond floating in the air.'' So, obviously the room is dangerous, yet the gem is tempting. A floating gem, what might it's powers be? How to safely get it out of the room?

Trapped Monsters--Another classic. Have anything trapped in a glowing bubble or a cage or such. And offer the characters a reward to set it free.

Hard to get Loot--An easy one...put some loot high up on a ledge or across a pit or such. With lots of stuff in the way, enough that they will need to stop and come up with a plan.

Helpful Monsters--Have a monster approach peacefully, and offer to trade or help.

Simple Bait--You just need to set up character bait. ''Somewhere in the city is the Lost Treasure of Lord Oud''. But where? They have to look around the city to find it.

The Moths to the Flame--If your city is just 'normal buildings' then your players are sure to glance over them. But if they are not normal...

Just down the street you see a dark stone building that is covered with bright blue lighting bolts. Most people on the street avoid getting to close, but then you see a halfling take a step to close and a blot of lighting fries him.

Off to the right you see a tavern floating in the air...

The building to the left has a huge pillar of flame coming from the center of it


3.They should fear character death, that is part of the fun. Again infinite lives is boring.

[Gecks]

1. Without telling them it's a massive dungeon with traps and all these different challenges how do I get them to prepare adaquately for what they are going to face, without giving too much away upfront?

In addition to underscore's good advice on this, I would like to add that I am a big fan of the lone survivor, either maddened from his experience or weakened from injury/lack of food and water/whatever, so that he can only whisper a few cryptic remarks highlighting the needed supplies ("I didn't have a rope, so I had to try to climb up the cliff with my bare hands- I fell, broke my leg, and just managed to crawl back to the mine before before passing out from the pain... no, I am too weak to draw you a map, or to describe the passages in detail. I have only enough strength left to say something cryptic about minotaurs, then expire dramatically"). You could also maybe focus some minds in regards to paying attention to their surroundings by having the survivor mention being bushwacked during a moment of inattention ("If only we had been paying more attention, we would have seen the goblins hiding behind the rocks. But alas, we insisted on walking straight forward until something stopped us, so we walked right into their cross-fire...") A total cliche, of course, but I find it usually works well.

EDIT: triple swordsaged!

[jmelesky]

2. In the past we have tried doing dungeon/cave settings, but I find that I struggle to slow the players down from passing through... usually they say, "I walk and walk until something happens, I ignore anything that doesn't gets directly in my way" So how do I engage them in a manner where they won't just run straight through and ignore the greater scope? I have traps and pitfalls along the way, but at some point I need them to want to deviate a little, I want them to be curious about the city, and go explore some of the buildings and sounds. How do I do that?


It sounds like they want to play a different game than the one you want to run. Either they're not interested in anything that doesn't further the plot (if it furthers the plot, it will get in their way), or they're not interested in anything but the next fight (because fights are the fun part). Given the rest of your post, i suspect the latter.

At any rate, you can either try and convince them to play the game the way you like it (and there's plenty of advice to that end in other replies), or you can give the players what they want, which may mean linear dungeons with encounters in each room, or arena combat, or any of a dozen different combat-focused campaign templates.

If you do give them an encounter-heavy campaign, they may even end up surprising you when their hunger for combat is sated and they start paying attention to all the other little details that you've been tossing out.

[Doc Roc]

Sounds like they need a stiff dose of Tomb of Horrors.

Sphere of Annihilation: It's just what the Doctor Ordered.

You have a terrible doctor.


1.Don't. I'm a big fan of not doing this ever. One way to make D&D boring is to reduce it to a cheep game:

DM--"Ok, for adventure six we will be going to the Volcano of Doom''
Players--"Ok, we stock up on fire protection stuff and anti fire stuff and such''
Later, during game play"\:
Players--"We ignore the fire elementals as we all have fire immunity and then we dismiss the Hell hounds with one of the 110 dismissals we have, and then we blast the fire giant with six cones of cold(yawn)''
DM--"Ok, you cleared room six and got all the loot''
Players--"cool(yawn)"

Some people like to play this way, but for me it's like using an infinite lives function of a video game.


So you probably don't let people use divinations, knowledge local, or gather information, huh? Do they like this? What about going on quests for information about that fricking huge volcano that's spraying fire elementals everywhere? Has common sense recently become illegal in your game-world?


More to the topic: If you do want to run encounter heavy games which is what your players want, there are tons of ways to spice this up. I'll happily help you with encounter design, or you can step into ToS chat. I will tell you right now that generating too much content, and making it too dense, is just as deadly as having too little content. It turns into what I call a Lore-Slog.

[XianTheCoder]

Thanks everyone, you've given me some really good ideas. I especially like the visible yet unaccessible loot, that should interest enough (not all) of the players where they'll take some time to explore. Also, I like the more colorful building descriptions (the 1 player that never seems interested in loot will be drooling to check the strange building out). That should slow them down. I think what I struggle with is that if I make a map and I measure out the distance, and it takes 2 days to walk across, how do I keep them in the dungeon for 2-3 weeks. I am starting to think that I am looking at it the wrong way, the goal really is to get them to stop and engage in an activity that drains their resources or set up challenges that takes days to resolve, so that they are forced to stop and rest/heal/plan. Being able to walk across quickly is only relevant if they do so continuously without stopping. They may have only walked forward for 2 days, but they were forced to make 10 day long stops during the processs.

It's not so much that they won't be prepared, they are all experienced gamers, it's more that I am making an indepth dungeon crawl with lots of traps/obstacles/challenges, and I'm probably going to start them lower level so they won't have a ton of cash to spend on equipment. This means if they are not thoughtful with their selections they may not be able to complete all the challenges. One thing I did intend on doing (because I wanted to link the 3 overarching challenges) was to make the loot at the finale of each challenge include something that will be needed/beneficial in completing the next challenge. I guess there is no reason why I can't do the same thing on a smaller scale and have looted scattered around that contains things they may have forgotten or didn't take becasue it was too costly at the time.

So my next question.... non-magical TRAPS! The stuff my wandering monsters (which I haven't settled on creatures yet, but they will be relatively intelligent and ultimately run by a central "boss") would rig up.

Pits
Arrow/Flame/Poison Dart/etc
Snares

What else is out there? The cult will have some magic traps, but the minotaur and the wandering monsters will probably just have mostly non-magical traps. I'd like to make some more creative ones then the standard out of the box ones that are in every dungeon.

[McSmack]

You can never go wrong with a giant rolling boulder.

IIRC the DMG II had some nice traps. Drowning is a nice way to freak players out. Have a pit that leads to an underground river with a strong current.

Have places with slippery rocks, cliffs, rope bridges, and narrow ledges. Adding in things that test their skills are a good way to keep things interesting without just throwing another monster at them.

Throw the unfamiliar at them. One of my personal favorite DM tactics is to take a creature normally found in a different environment and throw it into a dungeon. You can then change the appearence to something different. Experienced adventurers know most of the monsters in the monster manual by heart. Throw something new a them and they'll set up and pay attention. Example - take a winterwolf and make it gaunt and hairless (or even change it to a reptile). Describe it's eyes glowing with green fire. Change the cold damage to fire and make the flames green. Now you've got something new and different that the players haven't seen before.

[Bang!]

One thing I did intend on doing (because I wanted to link the 3 overarching challenges) was to make the loot at the finale of each challenge include something that will be needed/beneficial in completing the next challenge. I guess there is no reason why I can't do the same thing on a smaller scale and have looted scattered around that contains things they may have forgotten or didn't take becasue it was too costly at the time.I don't know how you're planning on doing this, but it's putting up some serious red flags.

Have you ever played one of those videogames where there's a locked door, and you need to get through that locked door, but you can't because you missed the key on your way through. You're sure the key's just in a box out in the open somewhere, no problem, but to find it, you're going to have to scour every inch of the damned level for that one thing you overlooked.

Don't do that. It's really annoying.

It's better to let the PCs make up a solution than to leave a necessary item hidden somewhere in your dungeon and to wait for one of them to try shoving an arm up the chimney in Undistinguished Cottage #46 to find the key.

[That might not be what you're doing; I only say this on the off-chance that it is.]

I think you're underestimating your players (of course, I don't know them, so it might be deserved). Sometimes it's better to avoid even coming up with a solution to an obstacle ahead of time, and to expect the players improvise. If they aren't getting a kick out of experimenting with new solutions, the puzzle wasn't fun in the first place. And if it's not fun, it's not really worth adding.

Regarding your first question, the players know they're playing D&D, right? I'm sure they won't spend all their money on sheep and a shepherd's crook, unless it's somehow making them kill monsters better. And if they do, let the character go watch sheep somewhere and ask the player to reroll an adventurer. Because that's kind of what the game's about.

As for the replacement guy, I don't think that's a bad idea, but I think worrying about character death is. It's D&D. Characters are supposed to be eaten by floors, maimed by sewage and disintegrated by statues' mouths. If the players don't get a kick out of weird traps and unflattering character deaths, you might want to play something else.

[under_score]

Sometimes it's better to avoid even coming up with a solution to an obstacle ahead of time, and to expect the players improvise.

I'm definitely at a point now in my game that I often come up with challenges that don't have solutions until my players come up with something reasonable (and also generally interesting and unique). Granted, they are all very well built characters, very high level (averaging 19th), and have access to almost every kind of magic.

One source I'd recommend for traps and other such things is the Book of Challenges, a handy little 3.0 book I've had the pleasure of perusing. I won't mention any specifics inside for the obvious legal difficulties, but it has some interesting and inspiring encounters that go beyond monsters in a room with a treasure chest in the corner.

As for magic traps, I'd be careful. If your players are wise to the regular occurrence of traps in the dungeon crawl, good old detect magic can almost eliminate the need to scout out those traps (which I think is just plain silly, but oh well). To combat this, you can make handling the traps essential to completing a major task. For example, I once had my players trapped in a seemingly abandoned mansion that was full of illusory walls and floors and traps and other fun things. Detect magic foiled the illusions, once they were keen to them, but they had to operate a specific number of (occasionally) trapped levers scattered throughout the building in order to open the door back to the outside world. Being the clever players they are, they began using rope to pull the levers from a distance, which saved them a fair bit of pain. All said and done, this provided an interesting challenge they couldn't completely ignore.

Also, Nystull's Magic Aura is a wonderful spell.

[Gamer Girl]

So you probably don't let people use divinations, knowledge local, or gather information, huh? Do they like this? What about going on quests for information about that fricking huge volcano that's spraying fire elementals everywhere? Has common sense recently become illegal in your game-world?

Oh, no, I love for them to be smart and know what is coming. My problem is with the super buff vs what is coming.

When the game degenerates to:
Step one-players figure out what is next
Step two-players buy/get exactly what they need to counter or protect against what next
Step three-players wipe out the next thing in a couple minutes and yawn.


See I'm an old school gamer(before 3E). And in old school, you did not do the whole 'lets win the fight and make the game pointless and no fun before the fight even starts'.

In old school, a group would hear about a dragon attacking an area and immediately head over with whatever they had on their backs and help.

New school is where characters immune to the dragons attacks(both energy immunity and stone skin to say the least) walk over with weapons of slaying that dragon color and kill the dragon in less then three rounds.

In other words the players win every fight, and it quickly can get boring. When the players walk into a fight all uber god-like, there is simply no point in even playing. (And no you can't just up the power of the monsters, because remember they can just counter everything).

Of course, this world also has to have the magic mart where the characters can buy anything in every single town. Or something like an artificer with some homebrewed rules like 'magic item creation only takes 1 round per 1,000 gp, not a week.