Worlds Largest Dungeon

[Cpt Lozan]

So, this January, me and some friends are going to travel 3 hours to our childhood friend's apartment and (literary) lock ourselfs in a room for a week and do nothing but play D&D, eat, "excrete wastes", bathe, and sleep.

2 Main questions:

1) How long before we kill each other IRL

2) How much will we HATE this game by day 4

All kidding aside, as anyone attempted the WLD? If so, any pointers, or comments, or really REALLY cool stories?

[Hybban]

I tried, we didn't go past 5 sessions of gaming (about 20~25 hours) before the sheer amount of stupidity in this thing just bored us. It's not very well designed and the ecology of the dungeon is not well defined.

Castle Whiterock (Goodman Games DCC#51) was much more fun, we actually did almost half of the levels of that Dungeon before our group disbanded for real life reasons.

[pasko77]

So, this January, me and some friends are going to travel 3 hours to our childhood friend's apartment and (literary) lock ourselfs in a room for a week and do nothing but play D&D, eat, "excrete wastes", bathe, and sleep.

2 Main questions:

1) How long before we kill each other IRL

2) How much will we HATE this game by day 4


1) early enough to make question 2 moot.

[Hybban]

pasko77 has a very fine way to give a clean and brief summary of the reality of what will surely happen... :smallbiggrin:

[yougi]

Well, here is my experience with a somehow similar event we've tried. Me and a few other colleagues got to my friend's summer house for Canada Day (July 1st) and spent the 5 days we had off (Saturday-Wednesday) playing board games. There were 7 of us, and there were other people coming by and leaving later, especially in the evening, and at some point we went up to 21 people, which gave us 4 or 5 tables going at the same time.

It was GREAT. Attempted murders were not related to staying together for too long.

However, we had other people, we could switch tables to play with different people, we could go in the pool for a short break, we could play different games, we could sleep on our own schedules without keeping others from playing. We also had our spouses with us, and even if they did not always participate in the gaming, they were still close and therefore not calling us non-stop.

In your case, it's always the same people, the same game, the same adventure even. You all have to go to sleep at the same time, wake up at the same time, and can't go out for a break without keeping others from playing.

All in all, I'd say go ahead and try it, but with the possibility that it may not work and you may have to leave.

[Tyndmyr]

It holds the Guinness world's record for most expensive RPG adventure.

Interesting trivia, anyway. I've not played through it yet, but I'd suggest ignoring all the advice it gives you at the start. Yes, your players will level/go through the dungeon a bit faster. This is not a problem.

[Gavinfoxx]

WLD really kinda sucks... I have a big series of questions to ask GMs / For players to ask GMs / For groups to figure out and agree on, whenever someone says 'I am playing / GMing a WLD game!'


Which houserules does the GM enforce or not for WLD? Everyone should be on the same page regarding these things, and it should all be out in the open!

1.) For characters that can invest resources in 'burrowing', 'earthgliding', and 'burrowing through stone' (there are several ways to do this, including Wild Shaping into a Thoqqua, for example, which specifically also leaves a usable tunnnel...), are the use of their abilities nerfed? Are inner room walls impervious as *well as* the obviously impervious outer walls? IE, will player characters sometimes be able to scout or bypass rooms in this way?

2.) For characters who invest in being able to do things with crafting materials, will the DM be using the standard lack of crafting supplies in this dungeon? Or will supplies be found, or will you be able to convert GP value in items to generic crafting supplies at a particular ratio with a particular amount of time?

3.) For characters who can replace animal companions or such things via summoning them, either a few times a day or via a 24 hour ritual, will those abilities work as advertised? What if characters want to release your existing animal companion and summon a new one? What about the magical paladin pokeball-mounts? Do those work normally?

4.) For characters that invest in short range teleports, or becoming etherial or intangible, or things like that, do those work as advertised? At least for interior areas?

5.) For characters that expect to be able to Take 10 or Take 20 on skills, do those work as in the PHB? Or is that nerfed, as the dungeon suggests? If you can't search things reliably, after all, you don't end up at the more interesting rooms...

6.) For characters that invest in having access to, say, an Extended Rope Trick at level 5, does that work as advertised, to get access to a safe space? What are your rulings on Extradimensional or nondimensional spaces working in the dungeon? What if a Wizard wants to actually scribe scrolls, will the DM be hand-waving the exotic inks necessary to do so? Maybe just subtract a GP worth of value of loot to do this? What if an Easy Bake Wizard (it's a named build using a few combinations of techniques) wants to spend some time scribing scrolls to his brain by burning incenses, will those be placed as treasure?

7.) Will the DM be making intelligent adjustments to the 'security' of rooms or wandering monster based issues based on intelligent barricading techniques? Will the DM be enforcing the 'most locations are very dangerous and have hourly wandering monster rolls' rule? What if the party attempts to barricade themselves in one of the rooms that is NOT specifically marked as an obvious saferoom?

8.) Will the DM be changing the treasure of the module? Most of the treasure of the module is supposedly completely useless -- ie, 'art', or 'not equipment' sorts of things, or things that doesn't actually HELP, or things too large to be taken, and thus doesn't actually help the party. Alternately, is the DM relaxing the restrictions on the feat 'Ancestral Relic', ie, it's the only real way to appropriately sacrifice the crappy treasure (like a huge amount of material you can't change to useful gear because it's too big) to make useful equipment, maybe give it out as a bonus feat or not make it 'good aligned only'? Is this feat suggested or appropriate for this particular campaign of World's Largest Dungeon? For example, have everyone start out with an Ancestral Relic of an item that takes up one of their item slots, and let them upgrade that item as a custom wondrous item, including the ability to combine with other like-slotted wondrous items and to cast spells as a custom wondrous item?

9.) The module suggests completely banning the entire category of 'battlefield control' spells from the game, and mentions that they will not be placed in the game. Typically, a few pages later, a Web scroll is given out as treasure. Are there any house rules on battlefield control spells?

10.) For characters that want to do summons in general, with 'summoning' spells not actually acting like calling spells (ie, summoning spells don't summon an actual creature from somewhere, they instead summon a mystical 'genericized' example of the creature type in question), will those summoning spells work as normal, or will they be nerfed as the module says?

[Sampi]

Played it. Yes, all of it.


We did a session every two weeks, woth different DM's doing different regions of the dungeon. It took us a bit over three years. The early regions we went through rather thoroughly, the later ones took less time.

Do not try to play it completely "by the book" - it's filled with stupidity.

If you're DM'ing, try to liven up the written stuff with personality (goes without saying really, but some of the encounter are too boring).

In the later regions, add challenge.

And do not overdo the darkmantles, please. They get boring. (We decided that their eyes were a delicacy, and hunted them to extinction.)

Good luck!

[IdleMuse]

I have to agree, based on what little of it I've run, the designers must have a fetish for darkmantles or something...

[Mordokai]

Sampi has the right idea. Ever since I've read WLD I've liked, but at the same time, I figured it requires heavy investement on DM's part to make it more fun. Designers seems to took everything too seriously. We tried playing it once on these very forums and we had a DM who introduced some much fun NPC's(that weren't there in original adventure) and one of the players played as half insane whisper(I believe) gnome factotum. It was a blast while it lasted.

So my advice would be, don't take it as seriously as written. Hell, abuse the potential for fun that is there and make it as silly as possible. It's bounds to make an average modul a great one instead.

[Vizzerdrix]

One of my groups went through the first section before we called it quits.
Bring lots of rations, shapesand (in fact my primary loadout was mostly shapesand) and a mule ( I used ours to kill the wererat sorcerer. A cleric with some tricks to pump out healing will help, and Ancestral Relic should be taken by most players.


Anyways.

1- Not at all if you play at the same level of Op-fu, take breaks, and get enough sleep. Go see a movie together or something.

2-With the WLD the way it is written, you'll get tired of it fast. Take a look through it, cut out any interesting bits and insert them into a better adventure.