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Talakeal
2016-03-03, 02:39 PM
I am planning on running an old school dungeon crawl. This is for a group of new players who just want to kill stuff and loot treasure, so I am trying to avoid having a sandbox or narrative heavy game.

My plan is to have a large dungeon with many floors. Each week we will have one four hour session, during which the players will explore a single floor and kill as many monsters and loot as much treasure as they can before the session is over or their in character resources are depleted. Once the session ends the players will return to town and rest and resupply and then try a lower floor the next week.

This works fine from a game perspective, but it isn't terribly realistic.

How can I justify stopping the players from going back to finish clearing a previous floor at a later time or, even worse, going back to town to rest multiple times over the course of a single session turning it into a cakewalk?

I need help coming up with ideas for possible rationales for why the game would operate in this manner in character.

The only ideas I have had so far involve monsters escaping from the dungeon as soon as night falls once the seal to that section of the dungeon has been broken, or maybe other groups of NPC adventurer's (or even a local militia) will come in and clear the half empty floors to prevent the monsters from escaping. This seems semi plausible, but makes the PCs seem less than heroic, and doesn't really make sense for the big monsters that live deeper in the dungeon.

So anyone got any ideas to lob at me? Anyone ever run a similar scenario?

CovertCobalt
2016-03-03, 02:44 PM
For pointers on running a Dungeon Crawl campaign, I would definitely recommend reading through kaveman's Cattle-Driving Necromancers Campaign here on the gitp forums.

It's equal parts entertaining and informative, and the vast detail the DM (along with many helpful commenters!) puts into just how such a strange ecosystem would function should provide some great ideas on how to add verisimilitude to your idea as well.

Keltest
2016-03-03, 02:48 PM
Make it the dungeon of a mad wizard, designed specifically for such challenges. You use teleports to get from level to level. You can go down a level or you can go out, but you cant go back to a level you have already exited until you finish the whole thing.

awa
2016-03-03, 03:04 PM
a star gate style portal could also work its not a new level in the dungeon but a different dungeon entirely

Xuc Xac
2016-03-03, 03:09 PM
The dungeon itself is a sort of pseudo-living creature. The monsters and traps are effectively its immune system trying to eliminate the invading foreign organisms, the adventurers. As they penetrate deeper and deeper into the bowels of the dungeon, the creatures and areas behind them are reabsorbed into the dungeon's structure. Monsters melt away and rooms collapse.

If the dungeon can seal rooms, why doesn't it just collapse everything and crush the adventurers? For the same reason you don't use your teeth to crush bacteria that infect your body or collapse your lungs to avoid irritants like dust and pollen. It just doesn't work that way.

There is no going back. The only way out now is to continue to the heart of the dungeon and kill the load-bearing boss monster which will kill the dungeon itself. With luck, the dead dungeon will relax and passages will open so the adventurers can return to the surface before rigor mortis sets in and everything locks up tightly.

johnbragg
2016-03-03, 03:17 PM
How can I justify stopping the players from going back to finish clearing a previous floor at a later time or,

Are you sure that's a problem? They avoided, say, the bound fire elemental, and then come back to it when they've equipped themselves with a bunch of resist fire spells? I wouldn't have any problem with that in my game.


even worse, going back to town to rest multiple times over the course of a single session turning it into a cakewalk?

So they poke a hornet's nest of a dungeon level, leave most of it alive and head home, returning the next day?

Now your players learn the difference between monsters guarding because they were placed as guardian beasts, and monsters cooperating and using tactics because their lives are on the line.

They enter the dungeon, kill some dudes, take some stuff, avoid some other dudes. At that point, the usually-antagonistic or usually-too-lazy-to-bother monsters are facing a common threat, and a deadly serious one. Now, rather than waiting in their designated areas for adventurers to show up, or patrolling in small numbers, they make a crude plan to lure the adventurers into the middle part of the dungeon, cut off their escape and pound them into stew for the goblin's pots.

Maybe you could be nice, and have a retired adventurer who escaped tell the Lone Survivor story.



I need help coming up with ideas for possible rationales for why the game would operate in this manner in character.

The only ideas I have had so far involve monsters escaping from the dungeon as soon as night falls once the seal to that section of the dungeon has been broken, or maybe other groups of NPC adventurer's (or even a local militia) will come in and clear the half empty floors to prevent the monsters from escaping. This seems semi plausible, but makes the PCs seem less than heroic, and doesn't really make sense for the big monsters that live deeper in the dungeon.

So anyone got any ideas to lob at me? Anyone ever run a similar scenario?

AMFV
2016-03-03, 03:28 PM
Maybe there are nicer things at the bottom, as far as the monsters are concerned. So the more powerful monsters claim territory in those regions. The closer you get to the bottom, the more powerful monsters are likely to be there. Conversely near the top there isn't a lot of resources, and there are a lot of adventurers and what-not, so the big tough monsters don't really feel like taking the risk of coming up there without a good reason, particularly since they never have to. The lower weaker monsters have to, because they don't get any option to go lower (because the big uns won't let them). That's a pretty realistic thing. There's a reason that bears don't live in our cities, but rats do.

Edit: I missed the question actually, sorry my eyes are pretty strained. I would lock the players in there. Old School Rogue-like. Then resources matter, they can't get out directly without getting to the end, now pacing is significant. Any place where they can safely rest, may not remain safe for long.

VoxRationis
2016-03-03, 03:36 PM
I am planning on running an old school dungeon crawl. This is for a group of new players who just want to kill stuff and loot treasure, so I am trying to avoid having a sandbox or narrative heavy game.

My plan is to have a large dungeon with many floors. Each week we will have one four hour session, during which the players will explore a single floor and kill as many monsters and loot as much treasure as they can before the session is over or their in character resources are depleted. Once the session ends the players will return to town and rest and resupply and then try a lower floor the next week.

This works fine from a game perspective, but it isn't terribly realistic.

How can I justify stopping the players from going back to finish clearing a previous floor at a later time or, even worse, going back to town to rest multiple times over the course of a single session turning it into a cakewalk?

I need help coming up with ideas for possible rationales for why the game would operate in this manner in character.

The only ideas I have had so far involve monsters escaping from the dungeon as soon as night falls once the seal to that section of the dungeon has been broken, or maybe other groups of NPC adventurer's (or even a local militia) will come in and clear the half empty floors to prevent the monsters from escaping. This seems semi plausible, but makes the PCs seem less than heroic, and doesn't really make sense for the big monsters that live deeper in the dungeon.

So anyone got any ideas to lob at me? Anyone ever run a similar scenario?

Unless the dungeon is entirely composed of unintelligent undead, with some guard animals in the vestibule, there are intelligent creatures capable of organizing inside the dungeon. Make it clear to them that enemy tactics get better, patrol routes more organized, etc., the more downtime they're given. Consolidate encounters that would have been separate before, as the dungeon inhabitants realize they have to group up for mutual protection. Have them adapt to tactics used by the PCs—NPC spell selections become tailored to fight those commonly used by the PCs, people start fighting in formations intended to foil the party rogue, etc.
Finally, if the party keeps making headway, but keeps taking their time about it, have the monsters leave, taking treasure with them. (Not necessarily all of it, depending on weight and other factors, but a significant portion of it, including magical items, as those are usually quite portable.) That, more than anything else, will teach them not to dally. (I speak from experience—it happened to me one time.)

TheIronGolem
2016-03-03, 03:55 PM
How can I justify stopping the players from going back to finish clearing a previous floor at a later time or, even worse, going back to town to rest multiple times over the course of a single session turning it into a cakewalk?

I'm not sure that going back to clear previous floors should be seen as something to prevent. That said, you could always connect the floors with one-way portals instead of stairways. That would even give you the advantage of more easily justifying wildly different terrain types between floors (i.e. "ice dungeon", "fire dungeon", etc), because each "floor" is really a distinct structure located anywhere in the multiverse.

As for the "going back to town" issue, you could simply balance the dungeons against the assumption that the party will come to each encounter fresh and rested. Alternately, you could exert a degree of control over when they rest by placing one-use "town portals" here and there that stop working when the party returns through them.

Really, if this is a beer-and-preztels dungeon crawl without a narrative, you don't need to worry so much about "justifying" gameplay tropes, because everyone's just there to stab kobolds anyway. It doesn't need to bear close scrutiny. If I were you, I'd start by asking the players if they even care about how realistic the setting is.

Yora
2016-03-03, 03:55 PM
Maybe there are nicer things at the bottom, as far as the monsters are concerned. So the more powerful monsters claim territory in those regions. The closer you get to the bottom, the more powerful monsters are likely to be there. Conversely near the top there isn't a lot of resources, and there are a lot of adventurers and what-not, so the big tough monsters don't really feel like taking the risk of coming up there without a good reason, particularly since they never have to. The lower weaker monsters have to, because they don't get any option to go lower (because the big uns won't let them). That's a pretty realistic thing. There's a reason that bears don't live in our cities, but rats do.

Edit: I missed the question actually, sorry my eyes are pretty strained. I would lock the players in there. Old School Rogue-like. Then resources matter, they can't get out directly without getting to the end, now pacing is significant. Any place where they can safely rest, may not remain safe for long.

I still think this is the optimal starting point to approach creating this dungeon.

You might handle the enemies by saying that after the players carved their path of destruction through an area, the creatures fled either into the wilderness or into deeper parts of the dungeons when the players were back in town, so now those areas they were in before are deserted.

Before you're bending over backward to come up with a flimsy explanation, simply tell the players that this campaign will be about one different area each session and ask them to just get along with it. No need to create a complicated illusion that the player probably will see through anyway.

AMFV
2016-03-03, 04:00 PM
Well instead of having it be multiple floors you could make it be multiple dungeons. Have them be scheduled for demolition by the wizard's guild. The players are getting what they can before the dungeons are caved in and the monsters thusly exterminated. Ergo, no going back, since the wizards will have blown it up. No going to rest a bunch (since the wizards will blow it up on schedule, regardless of the players). So now there's all the things you want. Maybe the loot inside isn't enough to merit the wizards concern (or alternatively they don't have rights to just go in there and loot, they're only paid for demo work).

Yora
2016-03-03, 04:11 PM
How about this: There are four dungeons and the party is send to scout them out and deliver as much information as they can before a proper army arrives to clear the place out fully. And while they are already there they can grab as much valuables as they can carry.

TheYell
2016-03-03, 04:18 PM
Your party meets for the first time in town and is met by a wizard. "I have to leave town on a quest and I would like you obviously trustworthy people to keep raccoons out of my workshop while I'm gone. You can take a gold piece a day from my chest of gold pieces as payment. Please don't play with the orrery in the observatory, it's connected to Other Places by a Gate spell."

...yeah.

So they fiddle with the orrery and the observatory dome and when the sunlight is just right on it, POOF it opens to a gate. The thing is the setting that worked this morning at 10:00 a.m. doesn't open the Gate at 4:00 p.m. And yesterday's setting doesn't work today. Getting back is alright, you just flip a giant hourglass on the other side, but you can't go back to the level you visited yesterday, and you can't leave and come back during the same day.

This also opens the prospect of something other than a dungeon to ransack. Like a huge pirate ship. Or a goblin city.

JeenLeen
2016-03-03, 04:37 PM
Some of these ideas give good reasons for the players not to repeat a floor, but they don't prevent the player from repeating a floor.

Therefore, I agree with this idea:

Make it the dungeon of a mad wizard, designed specifically for such challenges. You use teleports to get from level to level. You can go down a level or you can go out, but you cant go back to a level you have already exited until you finish the whole thing.

The dungeon could be a famous site that adventurers flock to, or something odd the players find, whatever, but it's magic. The entrance leads to, or teleports them to, a given floor. Each day, a given person or team can enter once (and only once), so once they leave (having fully cleared the dungeon or after resources are exhausted), they are done for the day.

The dungeon is 'smart' and remembers who has been there before, and does not send people to a level they already explored. The entrance leads to a different spot (because, magic) or teleports them to a new dungeon. You could have something like a final boss who owns the dungeon and watches weaklings fight weak monsters he captured, until they get to him and become a real challenge, or something like that if you want; the players could be heroes who want to end the tyrant's rule of this realm or just some dudes looking to grab treasure and xp from a neat dungeon.

This reminds me a little of the 'Maze of Many' from Goblins (http://www.goblinscomic.org/02012011/), though the idea is different. But you could use something like that as why the dungeon exists or what it's known for.

Darth Ultron
2016-03-03, 04:49 PM
How can I justify stopping the players from going back to finish clearing a previous floor at a later time or, even worse, going back to town to rest multiple times over the course of a single session turning it into a cakewalk?

So anyone got any ideas to lob at me? Anyone ever run a similar scenario?

Yes, all the time.

First, you want the dungeon to be far away from town. And if you can throw in some sort of dangerous barrier, even better. You don't want the dungeon right next to the town. You want to make it a trek to get back to town. It works even better if the dungeon is in the Haunted Forest or something like that. So that makes getting out of the dungeon not so safe.

If you want the real...real...Old School feel, the group does not leave the dungeon. When they get ''too beat up'' or want to ''rest'', they have to find a hole somewhere. They need to find a spot to hide, in the dungeon. A classic dungeon is full of secret places, and most make good rest spots....after you kill the owners. A ranger/druid type is good here as they can befriend a dungeon ''animal'' monster and have the group rest in it's lair. And magic is really useful here too....

It's always good to make the local town a nightmare too.....avoid making it an adventurers paradise. There are lots of ways to 'spin' a town, like ''a bunch of hardworking folks that don't like strangers''.

Though I'm not sure why your worried that they might go back to levels? So what? Let them.

And, once again, for the Old School feel......well, nothing is a cakewalk. The monsters are always more powerful. And don't forget about traps, and other things like environmental effects. And best of all...weird magic effects.

nedz
2016-03-03, 05:24 PM
Really Old School dungeons didn't worry about the ecology, or have any rationale, etc. The Dungeon is a world in and of itself with no external logic. So you don't need to justify anything - it is just what it is.

AMFV
2016-03-03, 05:27 PM
Really Old School dungeons didn't worry about the ecology, or have any rationale, etc. The Dungeon is a world in and of itself with no external logic. So you don't need to justify anything - it is just what it is.

Actually they usually have lengthy sections discussing ecology and living habits of the creatures within.

johnbragg
2016-03-03, 05:52 PM
Actually they usually have lengthy sections discussing ecology and living habits of the creatures within.

Yup. Old School 1st edition modules had text about what room the monsters on the wandering monster table were from, and to remove hobgoblins from Room 37 if they were encountered randomly and killed (patrolling the dungeon.)

The ecology didn't necessarily make a whole lot of sense, but a lot of things didn't make a lot of sense (why exactly IS the dungeon floor plan shaped like a demon skull? Who's spending a ton of time looking at the floor plan?)

OldTrees1
2016-03-03, 07:19 PM
I am planning on running an old school dungeon crawl. This is for a group of new players who just want to kill stuff and loot treasure, so I am trying to avoid having a sandbox or narrative heavy game.

My plan is to have a large dungeon with many floors. Each week we will have one four hour session, during which the players will explore a single floor and kill as many monsters and loot as much treasure as they can before the session is over or their in character resources are depleted. Once the session ends the players will return to town and rest and resupply and then try a lower floor the next week.

This works fine from a game perspective, but it isn't terribly realistic.

How can I justify stopping the players from going back to finish clearing a previous floor at a later time or, even worse, going back to town to rest multiple times over the course of a single session turning it into a cakewalk?

I need help coming up with ideas for possible rationales for why the game would operate in this manner in character.

The only ideas I have had so far involve monsters escaping from the dungeon as soon as night falls once the seal to that section of the dungeon has been broken, or maybe other groups of NPC adventurer's (or even a local militia) will come in and clear the half empty floors to prevent the monsters from escaping. This seems semi plausible, but makes the PCs seem less than heroic, and doesn't really make sense for the big monsters that live deeper in the dungeon.

So anyone got any ideas to lob at me? Anyone ever run a similar scenario?


The adventurers have 1 month to reach the BBEG at the 30th floor. If they go too fast they will get eviscerated by the enemies they leave at their rear. If they go too slow then they will fail and the BBEG succeeds. The adventures came up with a brilliant idea: They will spend one day on each level trying to carve as large a safe space as possible (bonus points for blocking unexplored areas at days close), this way there is less risk from behind as they delve deeper.

For added verisimilitude, have a random encounters table for rear attacks that takes into account the number of previous floors and how cleared the previous floors are.

nedz
2016-03-04, 05:09 AM
Actually they usually have lengthy sections discussing ecology and living habits of the creatures within.

Sorry, that's not really old school :smallamused:

Storm_Of_Snow
2016-03-04, 05:47 AM
So they poke a hornet's nest of a dungeon level, leave most of it alive and head home, returning the next day?

Now your players learn the difference between monsters guarding because they were placed as guardian beasts, and monsters cooperating and using tactics because their lives are on the line.

They enter the dungeon, kill some dudes, take some stuff, avoid some other dudes. At that point, the usually-antagonistic or usually-too-lazy-to-bother monsters are facing a common threat, and a deadly serious one. Now, rather than waiting in their designated areas for adventurers to show up, or patrolling in small numbers, they make a crude plan to lure the adventurers into the middle part of the dungeon, cut off their escape and pound them into stew for the goblin's pots.

Exactly - in most cases, the dungeon has living, breathing creatures in it, who'll react to changes in the environment. Only automata, the simple undead and unintelligent creatures won't react.

Say the PCs plough through a small group of Goblins before heading for home. Well, next time they come back, the Orcs who were in the area next door have taken advantage, expanded their territory and set up a couple of sentries on the edge of their new territory until they can fortify the area. Or maybe that'll mean they're overstretched, which allows the Bugbears on the other side to push them across, and the PCs will run into the Bugbears a lot sooner than they would have done.

Maybe some of the denizens follow the PCs back to the town and launch a few burning arrows at it before running away, and, while there's no injuries, the townsfolk demand the PCs pay for the damage they've brought upon the town. Or if the PCs take a day to go back to the town, rest up for three days, then take a day to come back, and do that every time, sooner or later someone will establish the pattern and set up an ambush.

I actually did something similar very recently - a semi-traditional "go and clear out this area" against Goblins with an abandoned village for the PCs to rest in, where I'd planned that after a certain number of Goblins had been killed, a war party would come looking for whoever's doing it. As it happened, one Goblin managed to escape from the party, so I reasoned they'd go back to their lair and say what had happened, which meant I brought that attack forward.

Another thing to consider is the PCs will need to pay for food and lodging while they're resting, plus any healing - that may mean they can't afford to go back to town that often and may have to go without certain items, or fight on through injuries. And as they clear out levels, it'll take them longer and longer to get to and from the town, so it may be worth their while setting up camps that they can retreat to - a base camp close to the entrance, then advance camps as and when.

Maybe they have an old retainer or someone similar who can run errands for the PCs, taking some of their treasure and bringing them supplies (food, water, arrows etc) as and when they're running low.

Lacco
2016-03-04, 06:20 AM
Dunno if the idea was already there, but:

Dungeon's starting room has only one thing inside - a portal. You need to do a certain ritual at certain time for it to open - and it stays open only for specific amount of time. After that it closes down, forever (each dungeon level is "created" with the ritual and ends after closing?).

They get the first ritual (e.g. old man in tavern sells it to them?) and are told/it is written that each dungeon has the next ritual written somewhere (usually within first 3 rooms?).

This gives you also a time limit they can spend on each level - just come up with good rituals...

E.g. cast "ray of frost" at the statuette of raven and rub blood on the cat's paw.

Jay R
2016-03-04, 10:02 AM
Once the session ends the players will return to town and rest and resupply and then try a lower floor the next week.


How can I justify stopping the players from going back to finish clearing a previous floor at a later time or, even worse, going back to town to rest multiple times over the course of a single session turning it into a cakewalk?

Why should their trips back to town be based on the OOC ending of the four-hour session, rather than the IC need to rest?

Having asked that, if they start abusing it - leaving after each encounter - I'd introduce a rival party that starts collecting all the XP and treasure while the PCs are resting up.

Or possibly a rival party that doesn't know where the dungeon is, and the more times the PCs go there, the more likely it is that the others (maybe a group of kids) will eventually succeed in following them.

Possibly there's a MacGuffin at the bottom of the dungeon. Only the PCs know it's there now, but if they take hundreds of trips to it, instead of less than a dozen, eventually the nearby Duke will take an interest.

A large enemy force is outside between the dungeon and town. The PCs are after the item that will defeat them. When they get tired, they have to hole up somewhere in the dungeon for a night.

Alternatively, the doors only open on the way back if you are carrying a one-use magic key, of which there are several in the dungeon. You don't leave until you find one - about four hours of playtime after you start.

Perhaps there's a trap on the way out, and 10,000 gp disappear from your bags of holding each trip. A single trip for 100,000 gp nets you 90,000. But ten trips for 10,000 gp each get you nothing.

But the one I would use is this: Once a single monster is found dead, all the others on that level will flee - with their treasure. That way, you only get one shot at any level.

JAL_1138
2016-03-04, 10:57 AM
The dungeon is underground, and the tunnels/caverns connecting the levels have caved in. There are other entrances and exits to each level, sure, deep in the Underdark or hidden in the wilds, which is how the monsters get in there (aside from the ones that could have survived for ages in an isolated cavern, like lurkers, trappers, piercers, slimes, and other Gygaxian-naturalism type dungeon critters), but if you want to do a proper excavation (to get the loot out) and properly clear it, then once a level is cleared of monsters, the miners will have to dig out the collapsed passages, which will take time. The miners will flee the site if there are monsters left when they're called in to mine, and they'll go on strike or quit if some of them get hurt or killed because of it. Because they've hired a mining company, everybody in town knows this dig is going on, so there's a high chance of looters going in and taking stuff if they leave to go rest mid-level, and of course monsters could get out and kill their miners or at least wreck the mining equipment.

Slipperychicken
2016-03-04, 11:47 AM
How about the dungeon isn't a closed system. It has connections to other caverns, the surface, dungeon-areas, and also Hell at the very bottom). If the players take too much time, monsters will come in to repopulate the floor (and worse, harden the dungeon's defenses and scramble the traps), and the players will have to clear it again.

Necroticplague
2016-03-04, 11:54 AM
I once justified the "you have to keep moving forward" by having the dungeon being an absolutely massive creature. If they lingered too long, the creature's immune system would start to locate them and track them down. And were they to try and exit and return, it's immune system would have developed antibodies against them, making it much more difficult. So there only way to stop them getting swamped by over-CRd oozes was to keep moving forward to places it's immune response hadn't activated yet.

Telok
2016-03-04, 09:34 PM
You can use some of the dungeonomics stuff from here (http://www.critical-hits.com/blog/2015/09/14/dungeon-hazards-and-wage-differentials/) for this. It's pretty fun reading. But in short just use other adventurers.

So the dungeon entrance is in the middle of town, there's a magic shop, the usual tavern, etc. etc. etc. And there are about fifteen other adventuring groups too, all ready to go in and loot the place. But you've got an edge, your party is slightly higher level. You've got that next +1 on your weapons, that next spell level in your book.

You've got dibs on the good loot.

So this is how it plays out: The PCs can go in and hit a new level, the first few levels are cleared and mapped but the stuff your guys are going for is one level deeper than the rest of the adventurers can handle. But once you've killed a few things on that level you've upset the dungeon ecology on the level, the monsters will start moving around, jockeying for the best lairs, getting curious about what happened to the guys on the level above. The monsters start wandering, thinning out, and killing each other. This gives the other, lower level, adventurers an opening.

Once your PCs come out of the dungeon everyone knows that they broke the balance of power on that level. They can ambush monsters, play them off against each other. They can take that level now. And they do.

As soon as the PCs leave the dungeon all beat up, needing healing, heading to the market to swap loot for gold, everyone else rushes in. By the time the PCs have rested enough to go back in the previous level is swarming with other adventurers and dying monsters.

Time to take this to the next level.

LibraryOgre
2016-03-05, 09:17 AM
Slave raids. The monsters have taken people; if you stop now, then those people spend more time being tortured.