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Yora
2017-05-15, 10:44 AM
After having scoffed at them for most of my time as GM and player, i've come to really appreciate the open-ended nature of location-based adventures. The idea here is that the GM does not prepare any kind of sequence of events but only a map for an area (from small huts to big hex maps) that is filled with things and inhabitants. The players decide where to go (on that map), in what order to go, and how to react to the things they find. They decide who to talk to, who to attack, who to leave alone, and who to spy on. The big advantage of this approach is that with nothing being required to work out in a certain pre-specified way, you can confront the players with real challenges which they might fail to beat. If they can't beat an obstacle or would rather not confront it, there is no plot-sequence that would be broken and make the rest of the adventure impossible. They can just continue their way in a different direction.

Not only gives this the players more agency, the ability to make real decisions that make real differences, it also makes them having to work for reaching their goals and they can't be confident that success will be made to happen regardless of what they do. It makes them have real accomplishments that they made happen themselves, not simply observing progress that was pre-determined by the plot. In a scripted adventure you often have only two possible outcomes of success and total party kill because the players will keep trying to push forward in the only direction they can see. Going back and telling the duke they couldn't rescue his daughter is not something that anyone in a scripted adventure would even consider being an option until rescue becomes proven to be impossible. Either by her death or their own. It's a very different kind of excitement when you can fail and when you also have to chose for yourself how much risk for your character's survival is acceptable to accomplish the goal.

But there's also a disadvantage to location-based adventures, and it's a pretty big one. The one that made be completely uninterested in such adventures for a very long time. If your location-based adventure only consists of opening a door and being immediately attacked by a monster that drops some treasure you're not going to experience any great stories. It's fun when you play Diablo, but gets stale much quicker if you have to roll dice for everything, especially if your fighters, thieves, and clerics have almost no special abilities to use in combat.

One of the nice things about location-based adventures is that you don't require all the PCs to be knights in shining armor who go on insanely dangerous assaults against overwhelming numbers because someone asked them nicely. But if your adventures are only about killing things and/or taking their stuff then you kind of require the PCs to be obsessed with gold/XP and not being swayed from this goal by anything. Not really an improvement in my mind.

The big topic I want to open to discussion here is how to prepare locations and run games in ways that gives the players full freedom in how they chose to interact with the environment but also actively support the creation of an exciting adventure story from those interactions. Much has been writen about the logistics and mechanics of hexcrawls and megadungeons but seemingly very little about what players are actually doing when they are in a room.

I think location-based adventures are much more interesting when the players are not simply picking doors by random and dealing with whatever is behind them one at a time, but they have things to actively look for. When you know a few facts about a thing you'd like to find you are able to make assumptions where it might be and come up with a strategy to reach it that is more advanced that simply checking every single door in the whole place until you find it. It does not have to be a quest where the party travels to the place for the sole purpose of doing one specific thing on behalf of someone else and the whole adventure can still be mostly looking around to see what you might find. It can simply be knowledge that there is a particular valuable or magical treasure somwhere in the place or that it is inhabited by one particularly nasty or interesting monster that would get the party a reward if they take care of it.
Searching a dungeon for treasure and suddenly being attacked by a dragon as a low level party is not going to be fun. Searching a dungeon for treasure while actively trying to avoid being attacked by a dragon that probably lives somewhere in the area can be a huge excitement. If you make it out with whatever it is you wanted without having been attacked by the dragon is awesome because you accomplished a challenging goal with high potential risk. Barely escaping the dungeon while being chased by a dragon also makes for a great story to tell. And always there's that nagging thought if perhaps there might be a way to kill the dragon, get its treasure, and get a reward, even as a low-level party.
My point here being that a location-based exploration is probably a lot more fun if you don't stumble around blindly and open random doors, but adjust your strategy and actions based on what you suspect to lie ahead and what you learned during your exploration so far.

Grod_The_Giant
2017-05-15, 11:34 AM
So by "location-based" you mean "sandbox?" That's what it sounds like to me, at least-- that sort of very old-school hex crawl type of game. When I hear "location-based adventure," I think more of a... not Open- world exactly, but a big open stage. "Here's the castle; it's up to you to get in and free the beautiful dragon from the evil princess" type of thing, where there's a clear goal and a pre-defined environment, but no pre-defined path.

RazorChain
2017-05-15, 11:39 AM
I actually find location based adventures work best when I populate the location with interesting NPC's and factions that have plots and agendas independent of the PC's. This I always do in spite of what the focus of the campaign is or who drives the campaign.

As for how the PC's interact the room or knock on random doors has to do with focus. The PC's focus and goals/plans dictate how they interact with the location, if they can't come up with anything to do by themselves then they clearly need a gentle prodding.


When I plan a location I start macro and do things in broad strokes. Then I plan things in more detail as needed. I usually don't plan things like cities down to a house and usually have inaccurate maps of locations...the dank cave is beyond the broken willow that was hit by lighting last year, close to the waterfall.

In the city I plan major players and smaller locations alike. The PC's always shop at the same alchemy shop so they know what to expect of the shop owner Bonifacus, their favorite watering hole has become the Silver Stallion run by Sylvestro. In this way I will expand upon the minor NPC's that the PC's interact frequently with, give them backgrounds and goals that the PC's can be a part of if they want.

RazorChain
2017-05-15, 11:46 AM
So by "location-based" you mean "sandbox?" That's what it sounds like to me, at least-- that sort of very old-school hex crawl type of game. When I hear "location-based adventure," I think more of a... not Open- world exactly, but a big open stage. "Here's the castle; it's up to you to get in and free the beautiful dragon from the evil princess" type of thing, where there's a clear goal and a pre-defined environment, but no pre-defined path.


I would rather say that it focuses on a location where the location might be almost be an NPC's. This doesn't have to be a hexcrawl...I never run those but often have a location based adventures.

It might be as big as a country or as small as a village, you might exit the stage a couple of times but the location is central to the adventure. I have run a game that happened only in a city and even a village and the near vicinity.

Yora
2017-05-15, 12:07 PM
Sandbox campaigns are certainly location-based, having a map to explore and no script of what happens. But I am thinking right now of a much smaller scale with just looking at a single dungeon that can be exhaustively "played out" in one to six sessions of play. Of couse you also have many of these inside a big sandbox, but all the macro-scale "world map" stuff of sandbox campaigns has a lot of material to read about already, and it's not going to be of much help when working on a single dungeon.

Open stage is another way to describe the concept accurately, I believe. I think location-based/site-based are the terms used in D&D books from 3rd to 5th edition.

I wouldn't even say that you have to have a clear goal. Having the players decide when they think they are done instead of sweeping up after having accomplished their goal seems very attractive to me. Being able to decide what you want to accomplish while you go gives more meaning to risks and rewards. If you send the players to a dungeon to do a specific thing, then it creates the expectation that you will make sure that they will accomplish that thing. And if the players fail to do it it can seem like they still have not found the correct solution to the problem in their way or that you made the obstacle unfairly hard.

Which is why I would really like to have some kind of generic open-ended goal for PCs and also some additional bonus goals that will get them extra rewards if they can beat them. If you want to present challenges for which success is truly uncertain, then I think you can't give the players the order to beat it. It's probably better to inform them that a challenge exists and leave it at that. (Which of course means no gloating or taunting if the players don't succeed or decide not to take the risk.)

My main problem is how to get the PCs into the dungeon in the first place in a way that feels consistent and makes sense. "We fight evil!" and "We want gold!" do that, but they seem too banal to me. I'd like to be able to offer the players a few more options for what might motivate the charactes they creating to explore deadly dungeons again and again.

Grod_The_Giant
2017-05-15, 02:18 PM
My main problem is how to get the PCs into the dungeon in the first place in a way that feels consistent and makes sense. "We fight evil!" and "We want gold!" do that, but they seem too banal to me. I'd like to be able to offer the players a few more options for what might motivate the charactes they creating to explore deadly dungeons again and again.
Which, I guess, is where the appeal of the clear goal comes in-- it neatly handles the "get players there" bit without precluding expanded goals once on-site. It doesn't have to be a classic DM imposed plot hook; any rumor the players choose to investigate will do. It just has to be one that ties enough to their goals to be compelling. Maybe they hear that the assassin who killed their mentor once holed up in the Tower of Suns, or that the Caves of Uroth contain silver deposits that could make their town rich. That sort of thing-- something to draw their attention and provoke exploration, rather than making a beeline to the treasure. Once there, you can sprinkle in complications and side-quests.

Frozen_Feet
2017-05-15, 02:47 PM
My convention campaigns are primarily location-based. Of course, I get more mileage out of a location than usual simply because the players change between sessions and have to work with whatever hints, events and trouble the previous player groups have created. As a campaign progresses, the whole geography of a location can change - furniture can be rearranged, walls can be painted full of mad ravings, windows can be broken, valuables looted, livestock slaughtered, barns burned down, boats stolen, carts abandoned by the wayside, horses killed and scavenged by forest animals etc. The actions of one player group can create several small mystery plots for following groups to investigate.

And then there's the trolling. Oh god the trolling. Making fake treasure maps, anyone? Hiding hydra eggs in the river bank and then leaving instructions in spontaneously invented dwarven cypher? Putting all the suspicuous loot for sale in a harbor city? Filling a map with warnings of imaginary monsters? Homo homini lupus est.

You might not be able to run the same location to different groups in sequence, but you can simulate it. Create a location. Even a simple "open door, kill monster behind it" endeavor will work. Then run an NPC party through it, consisting of the most chaotic, belligerent, insane, drunken murderhobos you can imagine. Then if there are any survivors, filter all the information about the location that you're going to hand to the players through them.

Yora
2017-05-15, 03:33 PM
Which, I guess, is where the appeal of the clear goal comes in-- it neatly handles the "get players there" bit without precluding expanded goals once on-site. It doesn't have to be a classic DM imposed plot hook; any rumor the players choose to investigate will do. It just has to be one that ties enough to their goals to be compelling. Maybe they hear that the assassin who killed their mentor once holed up in the Tower of Suns, or that the Caves of Uroth contain silver deposits that could make their town rich. That sort of thing-- something to draw their attention and provoke exploration, rather than making a beeline to the treasure. Once there, you can sprinkle in complications and side-quests.
I think that this might actually become a lot easier as the campaign progresses and the PCs build up some personal history and the players form opinions about certain NPCs they've met. For an all new party of blank slate characters, getting them going because there's gold in them thar hills. I wouldn't want to run a whole campaign based on that, but once they have made some friends and enemies on their early explorations you can lure them to new locations through personal connections. If they have a favorite enemy who managed to slip away from them, then just having one character hear a rumor about someone matching the description being seen going to a site can make the players want to go there, seemingly on their own initiative.

Of course, this requires that the players encounter memorable NPCs during their adventures with whom they can form relationships and who survive the end of the adventure. I think NPCs might actually be a really big factor in making the visit of a site into a memorable adventure.
But even more important is that when early D&D invented the dungeon crawl, it was conceptualized as an exploration game, not a combat game. Combat was meant to be the exception when things went bad, not the default activity. And that's the really big difference to something like Diablo, where combat is really the only way to interact with anything in the dungeon. It probably was only a matter of weeks before some kids drew single corridor maps with nothing but combat at every turn, but that wasn't the original concept that became the initial sales pitch. I think it can be said that confidence that any room that has a monster attacking as soon as the door opens is bad design. Monsters that attack as soon as they become aware of the party can be interesting, but only if the players can spot them in advance and make plans to deal with the situation. Very much like traps, actually. Having a character take 2d6 damage at a random point in the dungeon because the party did not take 10 minutes to check every 3 meters of floor for traps is not fun. Traps are fun if you know or expect them being nearby and trying to outsmart them without taking damage.
And when it comes to NPCs, and also to monsters, I think attack on sight should not be the default reaction to the party. And of course when a fight does break out it shouldn't simply continue until one side has every individual run out of all hit points. NPCs become memorable and fun when they have conversations with the party (not monologing to the party) and when they appear more than once. They can also be made more interesting if other NPCs are talking about them before and after the players meet them in person. Black Armor Dude from area #42 isn't going to be memorable.

And another nice thing about letting NPCs get away is that they can appear again in the very same adventure. They don't just exit stage left. Most likely they will still be around somewhere in the dungeon. And now they know about the presence of the party and pershaps some things about their capabilities and goals. Having such people running around in the dungeon, especially when they turned out to be hostile, is just the same kind of situation as knowing that some really dangerous monster is living somewhere in the dungeon.


As a campaign progresses, the whole geography of a location can change - furniture can be rearranged, walls can be painted full of mad ravings, windows can be broken, valuables looted, livestock slaughtered, barns burned down, boats stolen, carts abandoned by the wayside, horses killed and scavenged by forest animals etc. The actions of one player group can create several small mystery plots for following groups to investigate.

And then there's the trolling. Oh god the trolling. Making fake treasure maps, anyone? Hiding hydra eggs in the river bank and then leaving instructions in spontaneously invented dwarven cypher? Putting all the suspicuous loot for sale in a harbor city? Filling a map with warnings of imaginary monsters? Homo homini lupus est.

If you make a location sufficiently big, then the party probably will not be able to explore all of it in a single go. They may return to their camp outside the dungeon or even set up camp inside the dungeon, but while they are taking a break for 8 hours or so the other creatures in the dungeon won't be waiting in place until they are ready to resume the exploration. It might even be that the party returns to the next village and comes back days or weeks later with new supplies and possibly assistants. Any group of enemies that has not been wiped out entirely will take some kind of action to rearrange their defenses based on what thr survivors have left to work with. And the next time the players return they might be expecting them. Or they pack whatever they can and flee the area.

It adds a nice additional element of time pressure. In addition to supplies and wandering monsters, players have also to take into account for how much longers their actions will remain undetected. While resting and resupplying might make them much stronger for upcoming fights, giving the enemy time to prepare a response may make the opposition even tougher. Pressing ahead while low on hit points and torches might sometimes seem like the smart course of action.

RazorChain
2017-05-15, 08:28 PM
I think that this might actually become a lot easier as the campaign progresses and the PCs build up some personal history and the players form opinions about certain NPCs they've met. For an all new party of blank slate characters, getting them going because there's gold in them thar hills. I wouldn't want to run a whole campaign based on that, but once they have made some friends and enemies on their early explorations you can lure them to new locations through personal connections. If they have a favorite enemy who managed to slip away from them, then just having one character hear a rumor about someone matching the description being seen going to a site can make the players want to go there, seemingly on their own initiative.


How do you start an adventure/campaign? Usually you pitch an idea or premise of the game "I want to run a sandboxy dungeon crawling/exploration game". Once the idea is sold to the player they should be smart enough to make characters that fit that kind of game and motivated to go dungeon crawling/exploring.

I often cut right to the meat of the game in the first session and start it with an action scene or an interesting scenario. The PC's might start in front of the tomb of the last templar or being assaulted by goblins while they are sheltering from a snow storm in a cave on their way to the tomb of the last templar.

I use session zero to make characters, find out why they are traveling together and what their goal is! Which in this case to find the Tomb of the last templar.

In the golden olden glory days of D&D everybody knew what the game was about....exploring, dungeon crawling and getting loot. The premise of the game was already set because that was what the game was about. If your character just wanted to stay home it would be the same as playing a pacifistic nation in a game of RISK....you wouldn't be partaking properly in the game.

It seems like you are worried more about railroading the PC at the start. It is fine to have a mission or a goal, nothing wrong with it. I don't see the problem if it's external or internal motive that drives the PC's as long as they have some reason to go out adventuring. I often start with a short "railroady" scene to get the game going and then the PC's can do what they want...heck they can even walk away from that railroady start if they have a good idea of their own.

Yora
2017-05-16, 12:33 AM
I think making some restrictions on what the players can do, particularly at the beginning, is a good idea. In practice, RPGs don't let you play anything you could imagine. The kind of game you play significantly limits what is possible. And there is also the question of what is practical. Nothing wrong with making the decision as GM where the adventure of the day is taking place. What the players are then doing during their time at that place can be left completely open to them.

I think much more important than the PCs, which are the players' thing, is designing and structuring the location so that it makes exploring it fun. Filling it with content that makes the players want to keep exploring this place specifically and not just go to any other generic loation instead, where they also have doors with loot behind them.

Yora
2017-05-16, 01:20 PM
Does anyone have suggestions for making dungeon maps that make exploration more exciting and magical? When you first think of dungeons you think of masonry corridors with lots of 10x10 feet rooms. Or a mine, or perhaps a "natural cave" that somehow ended up having the same corridor and room layout. It's servicable when you populate it with interesting stuff, but in itself it doesn't really add anything to the fun of the exploration. It's what can quickly lead to the "open random door and get attacked by a monster" pattern I mentioned above.

What I consider to be the first crucial element is the often badmouthed wandering monster, or random encounter. But wandering monsters are not truly random. There is a chance to run into them when a given amount of time spend in the dungeon passes, but also any time the party does something noisy. This leads to two important complications: Make your stay in the dungeon quick and make it quiet. This are both things that aren't usually compatible with keeping things safe. Destroying stuff in the dungeon can make sure you don't get nasty surprises, but it's almost always going to be really loud.
A problem with many RPGs of later generations is that they reward fighting monsters. A wandering monster becomes xp that come to you instead of needing to be hunted down. Wandering monsters should be a risk that offers barely any reward that would make them worth it. So whatever you use to have characters advance in power, the less it is dependent on winning fights the better it is for exploration adventures.

Probably the best known thing that has been written about optimizing dungeons for exploration adventures is Jaquaying the Dungeon (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/13085/roleplaying-games/jaquaying-the-dungeon) by Justin Alexander based on earlier work by Melan.
The simple message to be taken from it is that corridors that branch and meet again allow players to chose from multiple different paths through the dungeon and makes it possible for them to search for alternative routes to get past obstacles they consider too dangerous to risk. And that is important. If you only have the two options of going forward and going back home it creates the obvious expectations in players that every obstacle they encounter on the path forward will be 100% beatable. Otherwise the GM would not have put it there. When you have alternative routes you can take then the adventure does not have to end if an obstacle can't be beaten by the party. And this means they can no longer be sure that every obstacle is guaranteed to be beaten. By providing the players with alternative routes to keep exploring, the GM becomes able to populate the dungeon with obstacles that the players might fail to beat. And if there is an actual risk of failure it makes success a real accomplishment.

Another article I really like is this part of The Angry Guide to Kickass Combats ("http://theangrygm.com/the-angry-guide-to-kicka-combats-part-2-battlefields-and-battlefeels/) by the Angry GM. The idea here is that fights, if they break out, become much more interesting when they don't play out in a flat empty field but in areas that are full of obstacles that can be used to either sides advantage. Towards the bottom he shows some really simple examples for making such areas and I think you can immediately see how even these small additions to the ground make the prospect of having a fight in them really exciting.

Two other things I discovered I really like in dungeons is working with height and with water. Well over 99% of all dungeon maps I've ever seen are strictly 2D affairs where someone took a sheet of paper and doodled rooms and corridors on it until it is full. But having encounters or environmental obstacles that take place on multiple levels is a really cool thing. Think of the Stairs in Moria in the LotR movie or Blight Town in Dark Souls, And think of having such rooms in your dungeons. It's very different and opens the door to new possibilities. And of course there's having fights on the top of tall towers or bypassing an obstacle on the stairs by scaling the outside walls to a window above.
Water has the cool effect that it greatly reduces visibility, allows characters to float, and limits the time characters can stay in an area. I think I've sometime seen dungeons that have a big pool of water into which characters can dive down to get a treasure lying at the bottom. But there's so much more you can do with it. You can flood whole sections of a dungeon to the knees or hips with water and exploring it will become a very different experience. But you can also have whole sections of dungeons that require characters to dive for a short distance to reach them. You can make it obvious by having light from the other side be visible in the water. Or you can simple have stairs that disappear beneath the surface going who knows where. If the dungeon has multiple possible paths then the players won't know if it is a dead end, a poorly hidden but easy to use shortcut, or a deadly passage to a complete hidden area. Both the risk of diving into the unknown is uncertain, as is the reward for doing so. Uncertainty is exciting.

Frozen_Feet
2017-05-16, 02:29 PM
My strategy is to focus on details in rooms which are, otherwise, empty. For example, waxing poetic about religious reliefs in some alcove which do absolutely jack squat other than get the players thinking. Piles of bones belonging to builders of the place, the freakier the better. Machines which obviously do something, but it's not obvious what, such as pumps moving water from place to place. Prominently placed statues which must've been of great import to the makers of the place, but which are mysteries for the player characters.

Basically: anything which would give an archeologist a boner in real life but has zero utility to your average murder hobo.

If I want to up the feel of magic and mystery, I will make interacting with these things invoke spirits or curses lingering in the place. But not in the immediately obvious way of "there's a ghost in your face". I start with little things, like statues crying blood, lightsources fading suddenly, gusts of wind, sudden drops in temperature, sounds without sources, shadows without bodies to cast them etc.

This obviously works best for abandoned, artificial areas - tombs, temples, ruins etc. For these, all normal archeological dangers apply as well - unstable structures, failing mechanisms, lack of breathable air, food offerings etc. which have long ago dried into toxic dust etc..

For more wilderness-based locations, I go the nature documentary way. Let's say there's a cave with self-illuminating moss. It has giant beetles eating the moss. But since all the moss isn't gone, something must be regulating the number of beetles. True to form, there is a giant lizard or giant spider eating the beetles. Since it's unlikely to be the only one of its kind, it's safe to presume the cave is connected to some larger system, implying multiple ways out. So paying attention to the wildlife can reveal additional paths through the location or details about its surroundings. Wolves are my favorites of normal animals. If you find sign of wolves in a dungeon, you can be positive there is an exit to outside air nearby. Same goes for most other ordinary burrowing animals.

On the other hand, if all the animals encountered are deathly pale and eyeless and blind...

Darth Ultron
2017-05-16, 05:58 PM
The big topic I want to open to discussion here is how to prepare locations and run games in ways that gives the players full freedom in how they chose to interact with the environment but also actively support the creation of an exciting adventure story from those interactions.


For an exciting adventure story you would need to do:

1.Rairoading or
2.Keep it Simple or
3.Quantum Oger everything.

There is simply no way to have any type of complex exciting adventure story without the ''players loosing agency'' or ''being forced to do things''.

And sure, many will say they ''somehow'' do it...and then are vague with the details. Because they know the details will give away they are forcing things to happen in the game.

Some will jump on the wagon of ''well, I do it but I call it something else to make everyone feel better'' . And this type of word play does work. If it's a one way awesome path, it's not a railroad, right...wink,wink.

Though, the most common is to do the very odd ''sentient game'' idea. This is where the DM, oddly, pretends like the game is ''alive'' and ''does things'', while they just sit back and watch ( and are amazed). So the DM can just say ''oh, the drow set a trap for you...I the Dm had nothing to do with it..it made sense (to me) in the game reality(that I control) for this to happen so it did(when I did it)". The idea that the DM can defend himself on trial by the hostile players is very popular, and it does work just fine if you have reasonable players.

I'm a fan of Railroading myself....it always works.

Psikerlord
2017-05-16, 08:04 PM
Sandbox campaigns are certainly location-based, having a map to explore and no script of what happens. But I am thinking right now of a much smaller scale with just looking at a single dungeon that can be exhaustively "played out" in one to six sessions of play. Of couse you also have many of these inside a big sandbox, but all the macro-scale "world map" stuff of sandbox campaigns has a lot of material to read about already, and it's not going to be of much help when working on a single dungeon.

Open stage is another way to describe the concept accurately, I believe. I think location-based/site-based are the terms used in D&D books from 3rd to 5th edition.

I wouldn't even say that you have to have a clear goal. Having the players decide when they think they are done instead of sweeping up after having accomplished their goal seems very attractive to me. Being able to decide what you want to accomplish while you go gives more meaning to risks and rewards. If you send the players to a dungeon to do a specific thing, then it creates the expectation that you will make sure that they will accomplish that thing. And if the players fail to do it it can seem like they still have not found the correct solution to the problem in their way or that you made the obstacle unfairly hard.

Which is why I would really like to have some kind of generic open-ended goal for PCs and also some additional bonus goals that will get them extra rewards if they can beat them. If you want to present challenges for which success is truly uncertain, then I think you can't give the players the order to beat it. It's probably better to inform them that a challenge exists and leave it at that. (Which of course means no gloating or taunting if the players don't succeed or decide not to take the risk.)

My main problem is how to get the PCs into the dungeon in the first place in a way that feels consistent and makes sense. "We fight evil!" and "We want gold!" do that, but they seem too banal to me. I'd like to be able to offer the players a few more options for what might motivate the charactes they creating to explore deadly dungeons again and again.

You hit upon the answer in your OP. The party gets wind of a certain item, or monster type, or whatever it is that might interest them (tavern rumour, their own research, a scroll in a bookcase, dream prophecy, whatever). They then travel to the dungeon to check it out. Maybe the item is there and they pursue it, maybe they do other things, maybe they get side tracked completely into something else. It all works out. And the big story is... whatever happens. Welcome to the sandbox fold. Also remember that sandbox doesnt exclude sprinkling in some mini adventure paths if you wish, for times when the players prefer a more scripted ride along for a change. It's kind of a spectrum and a mix works best ime.

Psikerlord
2017-05-16, 08:19 PM
What I consider to be the first crucial element is the often badmouthed wandering monster, or random encounter. But wandering monsters are not truly random. There is a chance to run into them when a given amount of time spend in the dungeon passes, but also any time the party does something noisy. This leads to two important complications: Make your stay in the dungeon quick and make it quiet. This are both things that aren't usually compatible with keeping things safe. Destroying stuff in the dungeon can make sure you don't get nasty surprises, but it's almost always going to be really loud.


A custom wandering monster list, fleshed out with some interesting scenarios, goes a long way to making your adventure (i) more interesting (ii) more unpredictable (iii) more dangerous and (iv) supports meaningful resource management decisions. All good things. Indeed, an adventure can mostly be random encounters if the list is sufficiently interesting, and the system built to allow for "unbalanced" encounters (eg those with a formal party retreat rule, like LFG (sig below! ;) ).

RazorChain
2017-05-16, 08:56 PM
Does anyone have suggestions for making dungeon maps that make exploration more exciting and magical? When you first think of dungeons you think of masonry corridors with lots of 10x10 feet rooms. Or a mine, or perhaps a "natural cave" that somehow ended up having the same corridor and room layout. It's servicable when you populate it with interesting stuff, but in itself it doesn't really add anything to the fun of the exploration. It's what can quickly lead to the "open random door and get attacked by a monster" pattern I mentioned above.

What I consider to be the first crucial element is the often badmouthed wandering monster, or random encounter. But wandering monsters are not truly random. There is a chance to run into them when a given amount of time spend in the dungeon passes, but also any time the party does something noisy. This leads to two important complications: Make your stay in the dungeon quick and make it quiet. This are both things that aren't usually compatible with keeping things safe. Destroying stuff in the dungeon can make sure you don't get nasty surprises, but it's almost always going to be really loud.
A problem with many RPGs of later generations is that they reward fighting monsters. A wandering monster becomes xp that come to you instead of needing to be hunted down. Wandering monsters should be a risk that offers barely any reward that would make them worth it. So whatever you use to have characters advance in power, the less it is dependent on winning fights the better it is for exploration adventures.

I'm going to start with that I am no fan of dungeons, I've done of lot of dungeon delving in both home made and official modules. Today my "dungeons" are scenes that support a plot, not an end in themselves. That said my new group wanted a dungeon and I gave one to them and now they have spent 2 sessions exploring it.

The system we play gives no xp for monsters so the players want to avoid fights. The monsters are horrible ghoul like creatures that sneak about in the darkness and ambush them so the players were always on edge. The place is dank, with tight winding corridors that feeds into their claustrophobia. They were really happy when they came into a large cavern with knee deep water....and then they saw the ghouls dangling from spiderwebs in the ceiling. After being jumped by a giant spider that bowled them down, sprayed them with poison that blinded some of them and gave them a really rough time they decided they didn't want to meet more spiders as they were in really bad shape. They were really happy when they found the Tomb entrance in the large cavern only to discover a the tomb door could only by opened by a puzzle. Then they heard the chittering in the dark and frantic puzzle solving ensued before the spiders got them. They managed to solve the puzzle and lock themselves in the tomb on purpose....so the spiders couldn't get them. Now this long, long corridors awaits....with carvings on the walls of the judgement of lost souls who get burnt or impaled on spikes.....but that waits the next session.

The players loved it...but then again they aren't jaded dungeoncrawlers who a long desensitized to the experience. Also they just can't take a long rest and be fine and dandy, the system doesn't work that way so they know they have limited resources from the get go. Combat is deadly and brutal and that helps in that they don't want to have more fights than they absolutely have to. They don't have any darkvision so they're sight range is limited to torches and lanterns.

For me making this experience interesting is conveying the feeling of danger, darkness and claustrophobia

Yora
2017-05-17, 12:19 AM
My strategy is to focus on details in rooms which are, otherwise, empty. For example, waxing poetic about religious reliefs in some alcove which do absolutely jack squat other than get the players thinking. Piles of bones belonging to builders of the place, the freakier the better. Machines which obviously do something, but it's not obvious what, such as pumps moving water from place to place.
I like the idea of players being able to figure out what a thing does, but not why it is there. Even without understanding its original purpose they can still make use of on of the side effects of arivating it.


I'm going to start with that I am no fan of dungeons, I've done of lot of dungeon delving in both home made and official modules. Today my "dungeons" are scenes that support a plot, not an end in themselves. That said my new group wanted a dungeon and I gave one to them
I think there is actually an important difference between the occasional location-based adventure and a full locations-based campaign. If there is already a campaign going that has the players pursue a goal then it's very easy to give them a motivation to search the place.
For a pure exploration campaign I am thinking about placing the limitation on characters that they all have to have a desire to see supernatural things, places, and creatures, for whatever reason. Which can be found in old ruins and legendary caves.

RazorChain
2017-05-17, 01:29 AM
I think there is actually an important difference between the occasional location-based adventure and a full locations-based campaign. If there is already a campaign going that has the players pursue a goal then it's very easy to give them a motivation to search the place.
For a pure exploration campaign I am thinking about placing the limitation on characters that they all have to have a desire to see supernatural things, places, and creatures, for whatever reason. Which can be found in old ruins and legendary caves.

But what do your players want? What is their expectations?

When I started playing D&D 30 years ago we didn't question why we were exploring, fighting and looting because that was what the game was about. Today this is different, the game has evolved and players have different expectations. I usually just start the players off with an adventure then we find out what they want to focus on, if everybody wants to do dungeoncrawling then that's what happens. If they want to get embroiled in the local politics and run errands for the local leaders, climb the social ladder and build a keep in the wild, then that's what happens.

Of course it's bad etiquette if you and the players have a social agreement about you running a exploration game and they just want to run an inn and seduce the local farmers daughters/sons. Largely this is something that should be adressed OOC before the campaign starts.

In a week I fly off to my home country to spend a long weekend with my old group playing. The GM has set the stage that all the PC's know each other and are connected to a gentelmans club in Londond the year 1925. We all know that that the avdventure is pulp/supernatural/horror and we probably will be investigating something supernatural. So we create characters that fit the setting and follow the breadcrumbs or else it will be a boring game. This is our social agreement.

Darth Ultron
2017-05-17, 07:01 AM
For a pure exploration campaign I am thinking about placing the limitation on characters that they all have to have a desire to see supernatural things, places, and creatures, for whatever reason. Which can be found in old ruins and legendary caves.

This can work, with the player buy in: that is if the players want to do this. As a creator DM I like to create things...really, really complex and detailed things. But for most ''normal'' games this will just get lost as players just want to ''stick to the story/quest/single thing they are doing''. So having players that want to explore is the way to go, if you can find players like that.

And while more modern D&D has moved away from such things, a great way to motivate players is special treasures. Classic D&D was full of such things, like pools of healing or wishing trees. They make a great thing for players to find, and gives them a reason to explore.

My own Homebrew magic item creation is a nice twist that works out to get players to ''explore more''. First making a magic item is a group effort, not just a lone spellcaster. And they need both material items, like the claw of a basilisk, but also need things like ''the bravery of a warrior''. And they get more complex as the items power goes up. Crafty players make a note of all things encountered, just incase it might be useful later.

Also, if you play older style D&D you can have the characters be effected by all sorts of curses and afflictions....that can't just be ''cured'' like in more modern D&D. This also can give players a reason to explore and ''hope to find something to cure the characters.''

Yora
2017-05-17, 12:24 PM
As RazorChain said, the best thing to do when you're a GM and want to do a specific kind of campaign is to say "I will run a campaig in which the PCs do X. Who wants to play?"
In my own experience players are not very particular about what they will be playing and will go along with pretty much everything they are invited to, unless they have opportunities to play in more campaigns than they can fit in their schedule. I never had any bad experiences with that or players going off to do other things in the game, as long as you say clearly in advance what the purpose of the campaign is going to be. It really is the same thing with players in a scripted story campaign going along with the plot without really questioning it.

When I see reviews of old modules or new oldschool adventures, the presence of good rumor tables is often getting praised highly. And I think I am now starting to see why. Rumors give players the options to actively search for something and not just randomly walk around until they bump into something. I had mentioned special monsters living somewhere in the adventure site, the presence of a special magic item is another good thing.
D&D magic item creation systems all have the big flaw of requiring only time and money. So it's something that wizards and clerics do while everyone else is sitting around in town doing nothing. Making it dependant on things you have to find in a dungeon and can not buy at a regular store (or might find in an exotic magic store but will only get for performing a service and not just money) makes item components a new type of treasure. And when it's monster parts you get a new incentive to seek fights with dangerous beings.
In my own setting, the only magical items are alchemical potions and body parts of supernatural creatures that retain some of their magical powers.

I saw this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6w_DRHRDDM) yesterday that deals with player activities in a game. Not quite sure how to apply it to this situation, though.

FreddyNoNose
2017-05-17, 03:31 PM
D&D magic item creation systems all have the big flaw of requiring only time and money.
Which dnd version are you talking about? Have you read the first edition dmg about item creation? How about the first edition players handbook on enchant an item?

Darth Ultron
2017-05-18, 06:47 AM
D&D magic item creation systems all have the big flaw of requiring only time and money. So it's something that wizards and clerics do while everyone else is sitting around in town doing nothing. Making it dependant on things you have to find in a dungeon and can not buy at a regular store (or might find in an exotic magic store but will only get for performing a service and not just money) makes item components a new type of treasure. And when it's monster parts you get a new incentive to seek fights with dangerous beings.


The ''only time and money'' thing for magic item creation is only from 3X and up. Older editions of D&D did not have the ''easy bake '' rules.

Note that my way is not just finding monster parts. It also must be a group effort, and you must ''find'' things that are not monster parts like ''the joyous feeling of hearing an elven song sung'' or ''the bravery of a young guard'' or ''the anger of an orc barbarian''. The more powerful the item, the more unique the things are, and rarer and harder to get.

And once past the weak items, the characters will often have to really, really, really make things happen....just to get what they need. Like to make the Ring of Domination the group needed ''the tear of an elven princess on her wedding day''. So the players had to do a grand plan to first crown an elven king so there would be a princess and then find her a husband. So, months of game play where they had to explore and do things.

Yora
2017-05-18, 12:41 PM
Could we perhaps also do this the other way round? Having the players acquire unique objects and finding a practical use for them?

Or we could take this question even broader and not just apply it to the creation of magic items. One thing that is always possible is to make use of things lying around in the environment to create a trap for hostile creatures and NPCs. Barrels with flamable stuff are probably the most classic. Old armories full of rusty spears should also have a seemingly endless number of uses.
Having stuff that is easily portable but not qualifying for treasure and with potential uses for the players' advantage looks like something that could help the players seeing the whole dungeon as a system of locations and not just individual puzzle/combat rooms. "Find the key card" is a bit bland, but in an RPG you can also have "build a ladder" or "topple the giant statue". But what you need for this is first prominent room features that are easily identifiable as being possible to interact with, and second plenty of things that could be used as "tools" scattered around the environment. I find that the hardest part is to make it so that players can see that an object is interesting and it would be rewarding to fiddle around with it, but without making it too obvious that it is a puzzle they are supposed to solve and without having an obvious solution.

Yora
2017-05-20, 06:38 AM
I've been reading around some more for environmental puzzles and found a couple of interesting ideas:


Areas of exreme cold that require the players to find some kind of protective equipment to survive in it.
Areas filled with toxic smoke or gas. The players either have to find a way to negate its effect on them, or to somehow vent it from the area.
Areas filled with toxic gas up to a height of 2m, with ceilings that are 4m or higher.
Patches of fungus or moss that release toxic spores when touched but which have something valuable or useful lying on the other side.
Flooded areas of a dungeon that need to be drained to be explorable. And/or other areas where flooding them makes previously unreachable spots now reachable by swimming or boat.
Exits taking the form of a big hole high up on the ceiling. Good luck getting up there.
Doors high up on walls with no obvious way to reach them.
And to make it even worse, with a very deep chasm in front of them, making it impossible to just use a long ladder.
Or a door sitting flush on a wall on the other side of a creepy looking pool of water. No way to break it without solid floor to stand on, or for a thief to reach the lock while swimming.
Areas where all vision is blocked.
Areas where all hearing is blocked.
Areas with 1m high ceilings. Most characters have to crawl while small creatures can run around and fight normally.
Areas with 40cm high ceilings. Have fun fighting to the death in that.
A door blocked by a massive fallen pillar.
A door that has been securely blocked. From the outside. Do you want to open it?

The great thing when running a purely site based adventure where the players have not been given a specific goal and all areas are fully optional is that you can set up these environmental obstacles without having a solution how to beat them yourself. It's not "find the key card" or "find the gas masks" that are hidden in one specific room somewhere in the dungeon. This lets players take a look at what the obstacle is, what resources they have with them, what resources can be found elsewhere in the dungeon, and what resources they could go and buy back in the town.
And they are not obvious mini-game puzzles but rather simply situations that could exist in a cave or ruin.

Any more ideas for obstacles like these?

Darth Ultron
2017-05-20, 08:49 AM
Could we perhaps also do this the other way round? Having the players acquire unique objects and finding a practical use for them?

Or we could take this question even broader and not just apply it to the creation of magic items. .

This will really depend on your game style, the game rules and your players. It's a lot of hurdles.

The game rules are the worst as many games like D&D are vague...you make a ''spiked pit trap out of stuff''. What ''stuff''? Um, just roll on. So there is no point in carrying around a bunch of stuff. Sure, fluff wise you can say ''I take the X, we found in Y and use it'', but it is just fluff. And a lot of games ''Mcgyver'' stuff does not work....like a rolling barrel does 1d6 damage, er wow, maybe just go hit it with your sword...

The play style will also be tricky as the best way (almost the only way) is to railroad. And if you don't want to railroad, you will never ever get a pay off for anything. This is a great example of good railroading: give the players three items and force them over to a spot where they can use them...and sit back and watch the players have fun ''amazingly thinking'' of some ''crazy idea'' that they can do in that one spot with the three items. And the players will be happy for weeks as they are so smart and clever and just ''thought up of everything from nothing''. And as DM, you just sit back and say ''yup''.

Of course, if you have super Mcgyver type players you just need to sit back and relax. They will be making a laser out of some bits of metal, some gum, a stick and a ruby in no time (Mcguyvrism 230).

Yora
2017-05-21, 06:26 AM
The play style will also be tricky as the best way (almost the only way) is to railroad. And if you don't want to railroad, you will never ever get a pay off for anything.

This depends on what you mean by railroad, but I think this really is the completely opposite of it. The idea here is that you add things to the dungeon that do something, but which don't have any specific application. There is no door that they unlock and no magic traps that they deactivate. Instead they are tools for which the players have to find an application to get any use out of them.
This makes grabbing everything that is mentioned by the GM and putting it in your inventory like in a Point and Click adventure a rather pointless task. Because it's most likely that you won't come across any obstacle that requires you to have and use that item on it. But in an RPG you almost always have the option to get back to a room you've been through earlier and grab things you can use to put a plan into action to deal with an obstacle you encounter later. Like using long benches as planks to cross a pit in the floor, use barrels with tar to make a flimsy wall of flame that keeps monsters scared by fire away while the party concentrates on something else, or things like that.
It's stuff that doesn't need any rules or mechanics.

Today I also found this interesting post on the use of empty rooms in dungeons (http://initiativeone.blogspot.de/2016/01/the-tao-of-empty-room.html). I really like the idea of having rooms that don't have an encounter, trap, or treasure in them but hold some clues about what else is going on in the dungeon. You could also have such clues in rooms that are otherwise occupied by something, but when you have a big trap or a group of monsters in a room, players are probably not going to pay much attention to seemingly purely cosmetical features of the room. If the room seems "empty", players are more likely to take a closer look at the minor things that are mentioned as lying around.

Orcus The Vile
2017-05-21, 04:30 PM
-Interesting and consistent NPCS.
-Colorful and interesting locations
-Internal struggling factions.

These things are enough to make any sort of place interesting.

Darth Ultron
2017-05-21, 05:01 PM
This depends on what you mean by railroad, but I think this really is the completely opposite of it. The idea here is that you add things to the dungeon that do something, but which don't have any specific application. There is no door that they unlock and no magic traps that they deactivate. Instead they are tools for which the players have to find an application to get any use out of them.

The thing is that making and using stuff is a huge life skill, and not many have it. Even just in a game. It requires a lot of ''hands on'' knowledge of the world. Few people, if trapped in the wild could mix together saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal into black powder, load them into a bamboo tube, and, using diamonds as ammunition shoot and kill a monster.

So, for this to work in a game...the DM needs to railroad. The players find items A to D and can use them to do X. But it all has to be set up ahead of time. Like the bad guys are playing cards directly on top of a room filled with explosives. Then the players can go ''hey lets use that peice of flint we found over in the old house and that piece of steel we found over in the riverbed to make a spark and blow all the bad guys up!'' Note how the players did not ''just'' make it up out of the blue...the DM had them ride the rails the whole way.



It's stuff that doesn't need any rules or mechanics.

It does if your playing a game.

To have the players ''make stuff'' is like saying the characters can make a wish at will...except the DM must ''agree'' with the wish. And this is a huge problem...and why games have rules.

You say a couple burning tar barrels make a ''wall of fire'' and can distract and delay foes. Few players will think so, as they would just say ''my character ignores it and walks around''. It does not ''sound good'' to a player. Now the players might do something like ''light then on fire and roll them into the woods''. They think every guard in the castle will abandon their post and run out in to the woods to see what is burning. You, as DM, don't 'agree' that will happen.

This is why there are rules. But few games even have any ''improvised stuff'' type rules. And even when they do, they are no where near as good as the regular rules. And stuff that is not a weapon often does very little, by the game rules. A burning barrel does 1d6 damage, a paint can swinging on a rope does 1d2, or a pie to the face is a -1 to spot for one round.

In the end it is all about the player buy in. A lot of players like to just play ''by the book'': they use the spell knock to open a door. They don't even want to try ''thinking'' about anything else.

And a lot of players are ''creative'' only at bending, exploiting or breaking the rules. So they will want to shoot a frost fingers cantrip at a pillar to collapse a ceiling and want the DM to ignore the fact that a weak cantrip..of frost...would not obliterate a pillar.

Form experience, I can say one way to make players use stuff and be creative is: not give them any other choice. It's a bit of a ''hard'' lessen for players to learn...but it can be worth it. Like when the spell knock fails to open a door, the players need to find another way. If you can break the players of the bad habit of ''picking up the rule book to look for something they need'', you can set them on the right path. This will need lots of ''aggressive leading'' (if you don't want to say railroading), but eventually (some) players will catch on and do it.




Today I also found this interesting post on the use of empty rooms in dungeons (http://initiativeone.blogspot.de/2016/01/the-tao-of-empty-room.html). I really like the idea of having rooms that don't have an encounter, trap, or treasure in them but hold some clues about what else is going on in the dungeon. You could also have such clues in rooms that are otherwise occupied by something, but when you have a big trap or a group of monsters in a room, players are probably not going to pay much attention to seemingly purely cosmetical features of the room. If the room seems "empty", players are more likely to take a closer look at the minor things that are mentioned as lying around.

This was very, very, very common in 0E, 1E and 2E, but fell out of use starting with 3E. This is too much of ''light railroading'' for most modern gamers.

I love to do this, all the time. Clever players know to pay attention in my games. But I never do the narrow focus of ''you only encounter what you will use soon''. Like when the bard is singing the ''song of the caves of chaos'' JUST as the characters walk by on their way to the caves of chaos. In my game you will hear like 25 songs, and have to pick and choose...or remember them all. Of course, cleaver players can ask the bard for a Caves of Chaos song.

Though, again, this requires a lot of player buy-in. The players need to want to explore and pay attention. Not just kill, loot and repeat.

And again, this is ''light railroading''....

Yora
2017-05-22, 03:49 AM
The thing is that making and using stuff is a huge life skill, and not many have it. Even just in a game. It requires a lot of ''hands on'' knowledge of the world. Few people, if trapped in the wild could mix together saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal into black powder, load them into a bamboo tube, and, using diamonds as ammunition shoot and kill a monster.

So, for this to work in a game...the DM needs to railroad. The players find items A to D and can use them to do X. But it all has to be set up ahead of time. Like the bad guys are playing cards directly on top of a room filled with explosives. Then the players can go ''hey lets use that peice of flint we found over in the old house and that piece of steel we found over in the riverbed to make a spark and blow all the bad guys up!'' Note how the players did not ''just'' make it up out of the blue...the DM had them ride the rails the whole way.

It's a pen and paper game, it does not matter. There is not just a single solution to problems, but an infinite number. Players don't have to figure out one specific thing but can creatively come up with one thing out of many. And if they don't come up with anything, so be it. If you make your adventure location-based instead of event-based, then the game can simply continue even if the players don't manage to gain access to an area.


To have the players ''make stuff'' is like saying the characters can make a wish at will...except the DM must ''agree'' with the wish. And this is a huge problem

It's not a problem. It's the main distinguishing feature of pen and paper games that makes it unique compared to videogames, and in some sense superior, even though you have to do all the number-stuff with dice and calculate it in your head and don't have any of the cool looking visuals of a pretty graphics engine. Pen and Paper games have a GM who can make reasonable judgements on the spot, based simultaneously on what would be realistically expected and what would be dramatically the most fun. Is it mushy and inconsistent? Of course it is. But it's also flexible and that's the whole point of why RPGs with gamemasters exist in the first place. Because it's something that videogames, no matter how well written, scripted, and designed they are, can never emulate.

If you think GMs making judgements and reacting to the players is railroading, than railroading is the greatest thing ever and the whole reason why RPGs are awesome. It doesn't make sense, because there are no rails that negate player decisions, but this is the whole point of pen and paper games.

GameMaster_Phil
2017-05-22, 06:13 AM
The empty room is of supreme importance to having a half-way believable dungeon layout. OSR blogs and the old stocking rules give the recommended number of empty rooms of over 50% up to 66%. It goes a long way of avoiding the funhouse problem (orcs neighboring a minotaur neighboring a deathtrap treasure chamber etc.). Modern published dungeons no longer do this, sadly.

I think having helpful objects in the dungeon is a nice addition, but as a DM you should not be invested in the use-case you envisioned. And I recommend the items be randomly distributed instead of important item in room 1 and use-case in the adjacent room 2.

Darth Ultron
2017-05-22, 06:31 AM
It's a pen and paper game, it does not matter. There is not just a single solution to problems, but an infinite number. Players don't have to figure out one specific thing but can creatively come up with one thing out of many. And if they don't come up with anything, so be it. If you make your adventure location-based instead of event-based, then the game can simply continue even if the players don't manage to gain access to an area.

It does matter a bit, and I'm just pointing out the common pit falls.

It is very, very, very hard for gamers to understand the ''they can do anything'', even for just normal things in the game.

And while it does sound good to say ''well you guys don't come up with anything'' for the 30th time, it quickly can ruin the game as ''nothing happens''.




It's not a problem. It's the main distinguishing feature of pen and paper games that makes it unique compared to videogames, and in some sense superior, even though you have to do all the number-stuff with dice and calculate it in your head and don't have any of the cool looking visuals of a pretty graphics engine. Pen and Paper games have a GM who can make reasonable judgements on the spot, based simultaneously on what would be realistically expected and what would be dramatically the most fun. Is it mushy and inconsistent? Of course it is. But it's also flexible and that's the whole point of why RPGs with gamemasters exist in the first place. Because it's something that videogames, no matter how well written, scripted, and designed they are, can never emulate.

My point is more the GM ruling. The vast majority of GM's operate in a reality based view point. The vast majority of players operate on a Hollywood (or worse anime) silly viewpoint. Like a couple games ago I had a player ''toss a lit torch in the dirt floor of a barn'' and then they waited for the barn to explode (you, know like in a movie). I did not have that happen, and the torch just sat on the dirt floor and burned away.

And you will always have this disconnect and it's hard to get everyone on the same page.




If you think GMs making judgements and reacting to the players is railroading, than railroading is the greatest thing ever and the whole reason why RPGs are awesome. It doesn't make sense, because there are no rails that negate player decisions, but this is the whole point of pen and paper games.

If you put the Flames of Doom at spot K and the Waters of Existence at spot L...and that water can put out the flames.... you have to ''lead'' the PC's to both spots....and many consider that railroading.

The DM all most has to make prepared things if you want to use random items and have players make stuff. Otherwise the players will quickly have a huge pile of stuff and not know what to do with it.

Yora
2017-05-22, 06:35 AM
Empty rooms also open a greater possibility of moving battles. Having empty rooms allows enemies to fall back without running into something else that was meant as a separate encounter. And if you have the areas arranged as a web instead of a row both PCs and NPCs can run around the main combat area to get behind the other group.

I've never done this in any of my games, but now I think I'll watch out for such an opportunity in any future encounters with multiple opponents. :smallbiggrin:

Frozen_Feet
2017-05-22, 08:39 AM
*blinks*

You... haven't done it before?

Here I was thinking that it isn't a proper dungeon if you can't somehow run circles inside it.

Yora
2017-05-25, 11:15 AM
I was doing some research on running campaigns with a more pulpy feel Conan, Barsoom, Star Wars, Indiana Jones and noticed that these all have a very different approaching than what one might probably assume when thinking of a dungeon crawl and particularly megadungeons. In these stories and movies, sneaking around in dangerous halls usually has very high tension and an immediate threat to the heroes, which makes them relatively short in general. It's not at all a slow and meticulous sweep of the whole place with much time spend on searching through chests and shelves, cheking for traps, and certainly not making cartographical surveys.

To have dungeon crawls with a similar feel, I think the dungeons probably have to have relatively small number of areas. Empty rooms are important, as are puzzle rooms, but I now feel hesitant to include what are basically storerooms or living spaces that can be searched for valuable and useful items. There is no action and excitement in that. Not everything in an adventure has to be action, but scenes that are not are probably better spend on character interaction. If there are no creatures or NPCs nearby, then the room itself has to be exciting. Which perhaps is most easily achived by making the room dangerous. Anything with lava or obviously filled with traps should be working. The first and third Indiana Jones movies have lots of dungeon rooms in which it's very clear that there most likely is something in them that could kill you.

Yet at the same time, navigating a dungeon is always more exciting and adventerous when the place has a grand and magnificent look, which you most often get when the place is huge. Yet there is a way to have adventure locations with a grand appearance and a limited number of areas, which is basically making it a pointcrawl (http://hillcantons.blogspot.de/2014/11/pointcrawl-series-index.html). You only take the most interesting areas of the site and leave out most of the padding where little of interest can be happening. I would actually do a pointcrawl in which each area is actually a multi-room mini-dungeon. That way you can still have your useful empty rooms and multi-room battles.

Darth Ultron
2017-05-25, 12:22 PM
I was doing some research on running campaigns with a more pulpy feel Conan, Barsoom, Star Wars, Indiana Jones and noticed that these all have a very different approaching than what one might probably assume when thinking of a dungeon crawl and particularly megadungeons. In these stories and movies, sneaking around in dangerous halls usually has very high tension and an immediate threat to the heroes, which makes them relatively short in general. It's not at all a slow and meticulous sweep of the whole place with much time spend on searching through chests and shelves, cheking for traps, and certainly not making cartographical surveys.

To have dungeon crawls with a similar feel, I think the dungeons probably have to have relatively small number of areas..

I get the feeling you have not played through many old D&D adventure ''modules''. You might want to try and find some. They should not be so hard to find online. Plus a couple companies do make ''first edition feel'' sort of books too. Everything your saying is very typical of a ''Old School'' adventure.

Roughly you get three types of rooms: An encounter, something else interesting, or nothing. Though note only sometimes was nothing a empty room, more often it was something like ''this rooms floor is covered with broken clay bottles and dinnerware. A single wooden chair rests against the north wall. And drawn in faded white paint on the south wall is a large circle with two ''x'' is the middle.''

With both wandering encounters(rolled on a table) and encounters that wander (''the troll is often found in location 17A, but does wander through 17b-17e clockwise several times a day) the group might have an encounter anywhere in the dungeon. And that is where the lay out matters and all that ''empty space''. Some classics are luring monsters into small rooms to trap them (for monsters with out the ability or power to open a door), luring a monster over to a known trap, or even ''tossing'' one monster at another.

Using a system with high lethality nicely fits the pulp idea (though not the whitewashed for kids pulp, of course) and keeps the players ''on edge''. Even during quite times ''something might happen''. Also a system where the players don't get very many ''rules options'' works very well too. D&D 1E and related games, for example.

Yora
2017-05-25, 01:40 PM
Generally true. But in AD&D you also had maps like this (http://i.imgur.com/bIAHJ0j.jpg) from The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, which is 50 areas of nothing but caves. Hal of the Fire Giant King even reaches over 60 areas. I think such dungeons should be seen as the exception rather than a default average. At least if you want to go with faster paced assaults or infiltrations instead of meticulous room clearing.

Yora
2017-05-27, 11:44 AM
There's an interesting concept of dungeons having pacing. Even if there is no plot, no single specified route, and the GM does not take any actions to set the speed at which the players progress; the arrangement of the rooms and their content automatically lead to a form of pacing.
Pacing isn't the speed at which things happen, or maintaining constant action. It really is about establishing a rythm of fast and slow, tense and quiet, or action and talking scenes that feels right. I don't think anybody would make a web-structured dungeon for free exploration that has a big epic boss fight and in the room next door there's another big epic boss fight. Before a big conclusive battle against a major opponent, we expect some kind of continous buildup. If a really strong opponent appears from nowhere and attacks, it's generally a minion of the real main villain who is expected to be encountered much later and to be even much more dangerous.

A useful terminology I've come across is "fast scenes" and "slow scenes", which I think for the purpose of making a dungeon could be repurposed as "tense areas" and "quiet areas". Tense areas evoke an atmosphere that tells the players that any mistake could mean the death of the characters. In quiet areas it's pretty clear that there is no immediate threat or pressure and the players can lean back and take their time. By which I don't mean combat and puzzle rooms. The room with the gold idol at the start of Raiders of the Lost Arc does not have any enemies in it but it does have a puzzle in the form of an obvious trap. And it's a deadly trap, so Indy has only a single shot at it or he will die. It's a tense room, not a quiet room.
In addition to those, you can also have Foreshadowing Areas, as we've already discussed. Both tense and quite areas can be foreshadowed.

However, I think a regular pattern of alternating tense and quite rooms would end up being too predictable. And the whole thing gets a lot more complicated by having a layout that allows players to largely pick their own paths through the dungeon, visting only areas that they want, in whatever order they want. Not really sure how to deal with that.

Another element of narrative structure that I think could be really useful are story beats. Moments that introduce new situations that force the characters to react to them. I think these are usually either new complications, or the introductions of new things that can help with the long term goal and allow the character to press forward with their efforts. In a tense area, the beat would be discovering a threatening obstacle. It forces the players to come up with a plan and get active. In a quiet area the beat would more likely be the discovery of a useful item or information after solving the obstacle. Players now have new options and can use them to tackle obstacles they've encountered earlier but couldn't beat.