backwards d&d anyone tried it?

[bjoern]

Last session another player was talking about trying out a player-ran dungeon. I think he read about it somewhere.
Pretty much all the players would work together to build a dungeon full of traps , rooms, bad guys, etc. And the DM would make a band of heroes to attack the dungeon. This would presumably be much harder on the good guys than normal because the players would be able to micromanage the baddies better and use better tactics than a single DM trying to do it all himself would be able to.
Before we put a bunch of time into doing this I thought I would see if anyone else has tried it before. And how did it go?

[Flickerdart]

That sounds like a train wreck waiting to happen. You have two problems working against the players - they would have to overcome the inherent issues of design by committee, while the "DM" has the opportunity to synchronize an entire party full of PCs.

[Extra Anchovies]

That sounds like a train wreck waiting to happen. You have two problems working against the players - they would have to overcome the inherent issues of design by committee, while the "DM" has the opportunity to synchronize an entire party full of PCs.

Agreed. Instead, if you want the players to have a chance at placing their own guardian monsters, traps, and treasure, give them a pile of cash and a nice place to build a stronghold. And then the DM can have monsters attack it occasionally, and then the PCs get to see their defenses in action, augmented by their characters' abilities.

Also, playing "reverse D&D" would only create confusion. It would, after all, have the same name :smalltongue:

[Arbane]

There's an old (1st or 2nd edition) D&D module with this premise - "Reverse Dungeon", I think it was called. IIRC, there were three phases. In the first one, the players played a bunch of goblins, in the second, they played a diverse bunch of higher-level monsters (including a troll, a mimic, and a boardgame-obsessed 'Minor Death'), and I can't remember what was in the last phase.

Looked entertaining, but I never got to try it.

[Elana]

The big question for such a campaign is, do they just want to play a game of towerdungeon defense or do they actually have some goals?

The game has a different tone depending if you are just a bunch of nice goblins who get pestered by adventurers every so often.

Or if you play a bunch of warlords amassing an army, planning to eventually swarm out and take over the surrounding land(and so actually give heroes a reason to try and stop you)