Advice Monster Game 3.pf

[nysisobli]

I was looking to run a game, where the pc's are monsters with their own dungeons. Over time they can make it larger add traps, among other things, and was planning fun things like caravan raids, looting other people's dungeons or forming alliances. I was also looking to place a fairly large city near the dungeons, so adventurers would attempt to clear them out. I was wondering how the best way to do this would be without the other players getting bored.

1) The only idea I had was letting the other pc's play the random adventurers that were trying to raid the dungeon.

[nysisobli]

Any help? I see plenty of views but no advice.

[Dr. Yes]

There are two ways that spring to mind as far as handling what you're talking about. The first would be to do it like regular base-building, with most of the players' time in-session spent questing and acquiring resources to fortify their strongholds. You could make up a table to see what kind of adventurers might have stopped by in the down-time, how much havoc they wreaked, and how much loot they left when they (invariably) died.

If you were focusing on the actual dungeon runs, I'm not sure how you'd do that. Running the players as throwaway PCs would be an option, but it'd be hard not to metagame in that scenario. It could be fun though---you'd set up a rotating DM schedule and basically everybody runs killer one-shots. When it's your week, the Society of Evil Overlords could get together and do the raiding and pillaging thing.

What you're describing actually sounds more like a board game than anything else; you might find a useful rules framework from those.

[Cookiemobsta]

This would be incredibly difficult to set up since you are essentially designing an entirely new game. Rules for resources, building stuff, the effects of encounters, etc--you would have to develop all of that yourself. And even though you might be able to develop all of that on your own, balancing it would be another story. Real strategy games are playtested endlessly to find out exactly how much gold that spike trap should cost or how much damage that acid pit should do to avoid overpowering or underpowering. You probably wouldn't have that luxury, which means that your players would probably find lots of flaws with the system that you set up.

However, the idea of "Monster party" would be doable, if you just keep it within the framework of whatever role-playing system you're already using. Have them go on adventures and etc, just frame the adventures in the context of what a party of monsters would care about. Maybe they are raiding a village to steal their sheep, or burning down a tavern to keep adventurers from gathering there, or fighting to protect their dungeon from adventurers. Take the focus away from the strategy rules, and you can still have a fun monster experience without needing to worry about developing a new ruleset.

[Diskhotep]

I would look at some of the various party vs. GM board games out there (Descent especially comes to mind) and either use them for inspiration or just play the board game, rotating who plays the role of the evil overlord.