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Krimm_Blackleaf
2007-01-16, 10:59 AM
I havn't exactly had enough time to search around the forums for an answer so I'll make the answer come to me.

The Worlds Largest Dungeon. Has anyone played this all the way through before? It caught my attention when I stumbled upon it on Amazon.com and it intrigued me so much I had to know more about it. I heard it's supposed to take a group of about 4 PC's from level 1 to 20 and includes every monster in the SRD, is supposed to take 2 years to complete ooc and 1 year of game time. This is however all I know.

MrNexx
2007-01-16, 11:00 AM
I have heard (no personal experience) that there's a lot of problems with it; another "GenCon Rush"

Krimm_Blackleaf
2007-01-16, 11:01 AM
I have heard (no personal experience) that there's a lot of problems with it; another "GenCon Rush"
Oh I see...

Renegade Paladin
2007-01-16, 11:07 AM
My group is playing through it now. The project was a long time in the making, long enough that they started it while 3.0 was still the standard and converted midway through. They did a fairly thorough job, but there are a few 3.0 quirks that they missed.

And it's much better played with 6-8 players if your DM can handle it. A four-character party will get killed. Period. Our mortality rate in there has been insane.

Hoggmaster
2007-01-16, 12:38 PM
It is very DM intensive... the first section (all that I am familiar with) was tough (our DM was using it as written), we found little in the way of treasure, items (even mundane). With the restrictions imposed on us by the DM (starting class = racial paragon L1) with no starting equipment facing the critter was nigh impossible. It would make a good basis for an adventure

Roethke
2007-01-16, 12:46 PM
It is very DM intensive... the first section (all that I am familiar with) was tough (our DM was using it as written), we found little in the way of treasure, items (even mundane). With the restrictions imposed on us by the DM (starting class = racial paragon L1) with no starting equipment facing the critter was nigh impossible. It would make a good basis for an adventure


As a victim, er.. PC in of at least the first level of WLD, I'd second Hoggmaster's notion that it's a good basis for an enormous adventure.

First of all, keep in mind it's a Dungeon Crawl primarily. There's some plot, but not so much as to get in the way of hacking and slashing. This isn't a criticism, but know what you're getting into.

There thing that eventually annoyed our group to the point where we moved on, was that there were a lot of 'gotchas'. Encounters that were rigged to be sort of unique twists of regular monsters to make them more difficult. In general this is good, keep the players on their toes and all that, but after the Nth such encounter they begin to feel like cheap shots. This can be worse if you happen to stumble into encounters before you're properly equipped, so a DM should have some idea of the encounter order, or subtly nudging PCs (maybe with fluff clues as to why they're in the dungeon), in one direction or another.

Anyhow that's my $.02. The work that went into it is awesome, and for tactics-heavy group it could be a real blast, even as written.

~Roethke

fireinthedust
2007-01-16, 01:39 PM
I played a lot fo the 1st level until the DM got bored of "ok, you meet another monster", and we played a pirate-based campaign.

I liked it, tho. I didn't know how to optimize a PC that well at the time, however, and apparently having a 2nd level drow wizard (I wanted to, even tho the module says "sorcerers only") charge shadows is not a good idea! (live and learn? Perish and learn, these days!)

I had fun. There wasn't much treasure, tho, and that can be silly. Also nowhere to spend said treasure on the 1st level. I'd love to play through it, tho, as I'm sure the other levels have some cool stuff; and now I'm SLIGHTLY better at making PCs, so that's a comfort.

You need a regular group for this, and people ho enjoy strategy and combat. Bring a battlemap and figurines. Tell the PCs to bring graph paper (we taped about ten sheets together while I mapped it; I thought that was cool).

potatocubed
2007-01-16, 06:57 PM
Just as a side point, the way it's written allows you to split it into fifteen smaller dungeons that you can drop into other adventures - each 'section' has its own plot (or plot seed). It's a bit much to plough through end-to-end, but as smaller dungeons I think it could work better.

But my regular group is on a 7th Sea kick at the mo, so I haven't had a chance to try it out.

Thorodin
2007-01-17, 01:47 AM
I got the WLD on sale for $9.99 last year. Started my group off on it. We were very excited at first, but the concept of going from level 1 to 20 in a big long dungeon crawl didnt really hold its appeal for long with my group. It was cool for a while, but at least with my group we needed some city intrigue, a little more roleplaying and other such things to break up the monotony. I would reccomend using the several smaller dungeons idea.

oriong
2007-01-17, 02:09 AM
I've looked through it, own, and even began to play through the first segment of the WLD.

It has quite a bit of cool stuff, but ultimately there's also a lot of problems with it too.

Most of my experiences with the first segment were very disapointing. First and foremost it was extremely repetitive, with minimal creativity in enemy encounters. There are a grand total of maybe 7-8 different creatures in the massive first area, and many just get repeated over and over (especially if you use the random encounter stuff to flesh out the monster density).

The plot makes very little sense and is riddled with holes, disapointing even for a Dungeon Crawl game. It isn't that the plot is simple (it's actually fairly convoluted and probably quite confusing to the PCs at first) it's just not made well. You often end up with pointless or confusing areas of the dungeon. For instance there's a trapped and locked secret door which leads only to a room full of garbage. Fun. It doesn't help that each segment had it's own writers and I often doubt how much they interacted.

The encounters are often far too lethal, like a fireball trap for PCs of only 1st or 2nd level, or a fiendish owlbear (CR 5) and a CR 10 BBEG (admittedly his spells are so weak he should be considered something like ECL 7 or 8, but the highest level for this dungeon segment is 3).

That said, it can be quite useful as a core bit of material if you want to do something between a pre-generated adventure and a self-made one, or for a high-challenge, high-lethality, low-plot dungeon crawl that never ends.