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2011-06-15, 11:23 PM
So I've run into a problem, as we all tend to do at some point or another. I've been designing a dungeon, and it is going quite well despite that I have little idea what I'm doing. However, I need some serious help with the thematic elements and ideas I'm playing around with.

Be prepared for a long read.

Here is the basic idea:
History: A powerful psion was intent on conquering the world with armies both mundane and supernatural, etc. etc. On the other end of the spectrum is one of the most powerful cities in the world, a mageocratic city-state of awesome magical power. Epic battle, all that. Suddenly, in the middle of everything, both sides fall silent. Search parties are sent from the other countries as civil wars erupt in the lands the psion has previously conquered.

None of the search parties return, and because of the power imbalance, no one can bear to send extra resources to try to find out what happened. Over time, the city is forgotten and becomes a legend. Still, rumors abide about the city, and the lost knowledge and wealth draw speculation still.

What happened was that during a duel with a circle of mages, the psion lost focus and ended up causing a giant... doom... thing. It sealed him away and killed everyone else within a 3 mile radius, as doom...things tend to do. It also fractured his consciousness into three parts, driving him quite insane.

The present: Now, in come the players. They're eager little buggers, and want to get their hands on the treasure, knowledge, or even just answers about what happened to mom and dad 20 years ago. They'll explore the city for a while, but not find much. It's completely abandoned, apparently in the middle of the siege. They catch shadows out of the corners of their eyes, all that. After the players have looted their way through the city, they'll set their eyes on the real prize: the still-mostly-whole archmage's tower. Naturally, after climbing up the tower's 673 steps they'll reach THE DUNGEON.

A large, unusually placed and evil-looking door leads apparently into the wall, but as soon as anyone touches it the PCs and the entire contents of the room will be warped into a strange and foreign dimension inside(inside of the psion's head!).

The problem: Now, here's where I'm running into problems. I plan for there to be a series of challenges and encounters, each under interesting and novel conditions as they try to escape an abberation themed nightmare world combining the pleasant charm of the dreams of an insane psion with the refreshing comfort of an abandoned victorian urban wasteland. However, it seems that it will get boring quickly with encounter after encounter. I'm throwing in all the interesting ideas that I can, including, but not limited to:

Snakes
Randomly Changing Gravity... with scythes!
Octopuses with the Dark Template
Fighting Giant Snakes in Zero Gravity
Running through the city during the middle of the siege
A good number of encounter traps(Dungeonscape)
A maze populated by hostile Will O' Wisps.
And so on.

Probably seven separate challenges or so in all, with 1-3 encounter type things per challenge. The city will be the final level.

The basic format I'm considering is that the PCs must travel through seven doorways, one for each challenge, and retrieve a magical sphere from each. There will be nine in all, one gained through the opening scenes in the dungeon, seven through finding them during challenges, and one from the final level mentioned above. Along the way they'll meet the three denizens of the dungeon(and the three components of the psion's shattered mind):

"Id": An insane young girl who writes on the walls with chalk, keeping out of sight and never speaking
"Ego": A cryptic middle-aged man who designs inventions and creates clocks all day. Speaks, but only in strange phrases that range from prophetic to nonsense.
"Superego": An aged janitor figure who simply follows the PCs around, locking and unlocking doors for them. He also does not speak.

All three are only projections of the psion's will, none existing in the dungeon except as illusions. They occasionally manipulate reality with a modified mage hand effect. Of course, they don't have real names, but rather have working names so I can actually refer to them as something.

At the very end of the dungeon, the players would find themselves back at the top of the tower, which is now collapsing due to the destruction they've wrought. They'll find their treasure(it was hidden beneath the tower! Sneaky!) and whatnot, ending the adventure and leaving everyone satisfied and happy. Or so I hope.
So my question is, how do I keep this all exciting and interesting? Seven to twenty-one straight encounters will become monotonous, no matter how many interesting diversions exist. I'd also like the dungeon to have some feeling of meaning to it, not just trying to escape in order to become rich. A life lesson, if you will.
I'd also like opinions on some of my dungeon design ideas: does the system where a door leads to a challenge seem too linear and dull? Is gathering items overrated?
Any suggestions, playground? Any help is much appreciated!

TL;DR: How do you keep a group of players motivated through a combat-heavy dungeon while also making the dungeon interesting?

Info about the group and my inspiration:
The dungeon isn't part of any overarching plot for a reason. Our group is rather flighty and tends to not stay working on a campaign for more than a few sessions before skipping off to try another one. I'm also a VERY new DM and I'm not sure I want to get too deep into anything on my first real try at DMing. I'm looking at only having this last for 3-4 sessions in order to keep with the circumstances. The dungeon lacks meaningful NPCs because, to be quite frank, I'm really bad at dealing with them. As it is, our group also tends to be severely lacking in roleplaying skills, including while dealing with NPCs. In keeping with our playing style, I've decided to focus on combat and traps and let the party determine how much roleplaying they want to do on their own.

chaotoroboto
2011-06-16, 03:38 AM
As a DM, I love running my PCs through large, complex dungeons.

Here's a thread with a few posts I've made on this subject before:

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=9168028#post9168028

When I run an extended encounter, I try to have the following elements:



Measurable Story Progression - Players should know they are making progress within the context of the dungeon.
Character Advancement - Players should see their characters improving through the course of the dungeon.
Steady Escalation - There should be a predictable increase in the threat level of the dungeon.
Steady Relief - There should be a predictable decrease in the number or types of threats of the dungeon, or a predictable measure for recouping strength.
Dramatic Escalation - There should be at least one unpredictable (by the players) and significant increase in the threat level of the dungeon.
Dramatic De-escalation - There should be at least one player-driven action that resets the threat level of the dungeon to some baseline level for a period of time.
Imposed Urgency - There should be a system in place to encourage progress through the dungeon through negative reinforcement. Punish people for sitting for too long.


So here's how I'd handle yours. Some of this is in 4E, I realize now that I've written it, but the basic advice applies.


1) Create a staging area that allows for a safe rest, healing, and eating. Have your seven tunnels branching off of this, and make the choices clear. "There are seven large doors. The first is covered in a mosaic of watery stones in the pattern of snake scales...."
Goal Covered: Steady Relief

2) Treat each of the seven stages as a self-contained encounter that has to be completed in one go, even if it consists of 2 or 3 "encounters". Since you're looking at 3 or 4 games, that means 2 stages a game. Spend roughly twice your XP budget for one hard encounter, then spread it across 3 "encounters". Don't give the opportunity to take rests within a stage. Instead, place two or three waypoints that allow people to regain a healing surge or an encounter power, and have an opportunity to gain an action point in the middle of each stage. The thread I posted has one example of a way that I've done that in the past, and another good way that I've done it is to have a well with 3 or 4 drinks of fresh water, forcing the party to choose who to give the hitpoints/spells/whatever back to. Treat the entire encounter area as breathing - if the players make a large noise, then all of the monsters in the whole stage should come checking it out (or setting up defenses or whatever their appropriate response would be).
Goals Covered: Imposed Urgency, Measurable Story Progression, Steady Relief

3) Include a UNIVERSAL environmental effect related to each of the stages. Type these in a list and print it out for the players to reference. The snake one might be that all creatures in the whole dungeon have vulnerability 3 poison and a +2 bonus to stealth. When the snake stage is completed, mark through that one and cancel the effect. Make the remaining effects stronger as the various stages are completed. After the first stage, players will decide which stage to go after next based on which effects they want to end and which ones they want to become stronger. Don't tell them which doors correlate to which effects, however, without them learning within the context of the dungeon.
Goals Covered: Measurable Story Progression, Steady Escalation, Steady Relief

4) Put timers in each stage and in the game as a whole. Me personally? For the whole dungeon, I'd have the various mental fragments start out assisting the players in various ways and then turn into bossfights, and after defeat they rejoin the psion's mind; making it whole over time (but no one is unlocking doors for the players any more). I'd have each "fragment fight" after every other stage is completed; it's okay for players to expect things to happen. At the end of the fifth dungeon, they'll say "Okay, now we're going to take out the snake one, we'll lose our poison and stealth bonuses and afterwards we'll probably have to fight the superego." Then within each stage, also try to have a timer. You don't have a volcano stage, but rising lava (making more and more tiles inaccessible) is a great one. For the trap stage, you could have all the traps that have been activated reset and go off at the top of every round, unless they've been deactivated.
Goals Covered: Imposed Urgency, Dramatic Escalation

5) Have a clear objective to complete each stage. In the trap one, this might mean disabling the steam engine powering all of the traps; in the will-o-the wisp one it might be sliding the maze panels into a position where no new will-o-the wisps can enter the maze. For the snake one it might be stealing the Jade Serpent Idol and escaping the dungeon with it even as it poisons whoever holds it. Once the stage is completed, determine how the characters return to the staging area.
Goals Covered: Measurable Story Progression, Dramatic De-escalation, Dramatic Escalation

6) Make combats faster since there's more of it - increase monster damage and decrease their hitpoints so the players can kill them as they run by, since the lava is pooling up near their feet and really that's more important than a couple of goblins anyways. Feel free to use 1-hit minions that respawn in a controlled fashion.
Goals Covered: Imposed Urgency

7) Give your characters levels and magic items while they are in the dungeon. Make sure that not only are they advancing through the dungeon, they are also advancing as characters. Award XP each time players return to the staging area.
Goals Covered: Character Advancement

8) Super Awesome Boss Fight with the Psion. Make a special room with all kinds of awesome stuff going on where the players fight the Psion, and have it contain all kinds of threats that the Psion can play off of, that the players have to deal with to effectively handle the boss. Make sure the Psion appropriately reflects the different mind fragments that he is reconstituted from.


I think that those set-ups cover all of my original stated goals, some more-so than others. I like this dungeon-in-a-brain concept a lot, especially because you can create environments that don't make any logical sense in a realistic world. Running extended dungeons can be tough, but done right it is the pinnacle of the boardgame side of DnD, and clearly that's how you're thinking.

One last thing - run this on a battlemat if at all possible, and seriously consider 4E, as it is the easiest system to run this kind of dungeon. It also sounds like the system that most closely matches your group's playstyle.

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2011-06-16, 02:19 PM
Thanks a lot! I've never quite a few of those elements before, and I really appreciate outlining how they could be implemented. I'm having a bit of difficulty coming up with an element of urgency in a few of the stages, but I think that by the time I've got everything put together it'll fall into place.

Once again... thanks. That's magnificent.