Deck of Cards Dungeon

[hymer]

I intend to make a dungeon with random layout (the final work of a priestess of a god of luck or the like). The idea is that you get three doors to choose from. When you pick one and enter a room, you can go back out the door you came (which sends you back outside the dungeon) or solve the encounter, which will cause three new doors to appear you can choose from. I’m thinking of having the doors be drawn from a deck of cards, and looking like the card drawn. The players may pick up on what sort of thing is behind each kind of door. The final reward is based on how many rooms they took in a row without going back out.

Club: Fairly straightforward combat encounter
Diamond: Physical and/or magical puzzle
Heart: Dilemma and/or riddle
Spade: Combat encounter with unusual circumstances

My question to you guys is: What should the jokers represent?
Any and all thoughts, ideas, comments, etc. on the whole concept are welcome.

[nedz]

There are normally two jokers.

Joker 1 — reshuffle the pack, re-introducing the discards.
Joker 2 — final encounter.

[Regissoma]

How about Joker 1 be a special boss battle and Joker 2 be a small treasure room full of nice random goodies?

[Swaoeaeieu]

if the next room is decided by the card they draw. why give each room 3 doors?

But i love the concept. But it might be a lot of work to make a list of what every card creates and the treasure per completed room...

1 joker gives random goodies. other joker gives cursed items. Always fun to see players panic over cursed/possibly cursed items.

[Friv]

if the next room is decided by the card they draw. why give each room 3 doors?

They draw three cards before opening any door, and choose which card they want, so figuring out what the cards mean is a puzzle in and of itself.

I like the treasure room / boss room dichotomy.

[Kioras]

The jokers means the next room has a deck of cards, one of the 2 varients of the deck of many things, sitting on the table

Players often can't resist, no matter how much they know they should not touch them.

[Person_Man]

Seems a bit complex to manage.

It might be worth considering buying one of WotC's many board games, like Castle Ravenloft, Wrath of Ashardalon, or Legend of Drizzt.

Each of them comes with a stack of interlocking dungeon tiles, encounter cards, and treasure cards, which are specifically designed to be drawn and played at random. They also each include 40 something (low quality) plastic miniatures, and a booklet of some pre-set scenarios.

The games are moderately fun on their own merits, and it's fairly easy to use any of them as a random dungeon and/or encounter and/or treasure generator for any other version of D&D. If you're patient and take the time to troll around the internet for a while, you can usually buy them used for around $30-$40 a pop.

[Perturbulent]

I might use the individual squares as geomorphs for that sort of thing. just give it to them 1 square at a time. Then they could still go back as much as they like, until they exit, at which point the deck reshuffles and the dungeon undoes itself.

http://rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/maps/geomorph-mapping-project/

[hymer]

Many good ideas so far, thanks guys! Don't hesitate to add to them, though. :smallbiggrin: