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View Full Version : DM Help Neverending dungeon campaign setting



lytokk
2018-05-08, 08:49 PM
Hey playground, been a while since I've been able to be around. I come seeking opinions and a little bit of guidance.

So, recently I was approached with the idea of creating a game that people can just pick up and join in at any time or just drop out when they wanted to. Throughout a bit of thought, I decided to come up with a dungeon that really just doesn't have an end. Let me break it down

1) 400 designed rooms that each have the same general footprint in terms of square by square (thinking something like 15x20). Each one would have at least 2 doors, one on each wall corresponding to the cardinal directions (north south east or west). Only 2 rooms would be able to be active at a time, so the room you are in and the room you came from. Once the characters open another door, the room you came from disappears and the room you are going into re-appears. I would handle room to room travel by means of a percentile roll based upon the door which is being opened. Open the door on the west side of the room and I consult the west entrance book. That's how I arrived at 400 rooms.
2) I would randomly populate each room ahead of time with monsters, traps or other types of encounters
3) All characters would be pre-generated to ensure a type of balance, also so that people would be able to pick up and drop out at any time. Level 6 really seems to be the balancing point I'm going for. There would be no advancement beyond but there would be the possibility of growth depending on factors. Growth being like additional feats, abilities or limited increases in magic abilities. I intend to make a large variety of characters for people to play, as this encourages many different play-styles. Also having a lot of characters means that if one dies the player can just pick up a new one on the spot and get back in if they're so inclined.

These are the simple rules I have been going by, but I've run into a few little problems.

a) I'm a 3.5 player and DM. I have been playing some 5th edition games recently and really enjoy how much simpler it is to pick up and play. My gut feeling would be to make the whole dungeon in 3.5 as that is where the bulk of my experience (both as a DM and player) lies as well as my financial investment in source books. But, with 5th edition being so much simpler, maybe I need to bite the bullet and pick up some of the 5th edition books and go that route. Thoughts?

b) Since the characters will never leave the dungeon, I feel there needs to be shops/magic marts of some kind inside the dungeon. Since the characters will never level up, I feel its best to reward players with the opportunity to make their gear better over time, so long as the play the same character and keep that character alive from room to room. This part does make the whole dungeon design feel a lot more video gamey, which is part of the concept, as a player can jump in or out whenever they would feel the need.
The question is, how often should one of these rooms come up? My initial plan was to have 5 unique shop rooms per each entrance. For example a roll of 85 would get you to the same shop room regardless of whatever door you opened to get there. This also brings in things that some players enjoy having like re-occurring NPCs if they want to haggle/banter with the shop owner. Sometimes this would end up being a full fledged magic mart and sometimes it would just be a tavern. Initially I felt that it happening 5% of the time would be enough, but the more I think about it, the more I feel that one of these rooms should come up more often than a natural 20.

c) Resting. Every once in a while the players are going to need to have their characters rest in order to recover spells, hitpoints or daily abilities. How often should they be in a safe room? I've always liked encouraging players to enforce a watch schedule with midnight attacks, but how often should there be a mid-rest attack in this sort of dungeon. Would having 1/3rd of the rooms be safe work? Numbers wise that means the players would be able to get an uninterrupted rest every 3rd room they cleared. I would also determine which rooms are safe at the planning and populating stage, so that there's no bias in terms of if they are running a gauntlet or walking down easy street.

d) How many of the rooms should be child's play verse how many should be a nearly deadly encounter? Some part of me thought 25% would be simple walk in the park rooms, 50% moderate challenge or CR +/- 1, and 25% of CR + 2-4. Would this be an even spread do you think? I was also planning on having a 100 percentile roll being a straight up boss battle which would be in the deadly territory, basically one that you would almost need to run away from, unless the characters were geared out of their minds and/or had very good tactical skills. In relation to this, how often should it be a combat encounter verse how often should a non-violent option be a possible result?

e) How often should one of the 400 rooms have a secret? Like a little doorway that you may not have normally found with some extra treasure in it? How often should that secret be an easily avoidable but not always detectable trap? like a translucent gelatinous ooze at the bottom of a pit?

f) I'm normally one of the encumbrance enforcing DMs, so my gut feeling is to keep things like that and rations enforced. If I make sure enough of the encounters are edible non-humanoid creatures with plenty of water running through the dungeon, I don't think this would be too much of an issue, right?

That's about where I'm at. the plan to use the same size for each room stems from the idea to keep things moving so I don't have to re-draw the whole thing every time. Also, just because I say a single room does not mean that its always going to be a single room. Sometimes the room could function more like a single floor of a building with multiple rooms, or sometimes the sun could be shining down in a box canyon with no way out except for through the next door. There would be a bit of the honor system involved with players not attempting to climb to the top of the canyon to escape the dungeon, as that breaks with the theme of what I'm planning on going for.

Also, there is no story to the dungeon. It really is what it is.

Based on that does anyone have any feedback they'd be wanting to give? Has anyone who designed something like this have any pointers? Whether this gets played or not is immaterial, its more the act of building the whole thing I'm looking forward to/needing. Thanks.

Thrudd
2018-05-08, 09:40 PM
I'm not sure you understand what a dungeon is. All you are doing is making the players fight battle after battle for no reason. They have no choices, nowhere they can go, no goal they are trying to reach, no strategy to form, and barely even any space in which to move. How would you even do wandering monsters? They will never gain XP or level up, they aren't even using characters they've created.

I'd suggest rethinking this. You can absolutely have a campaign take place in an infinite dungeon, but it actually needs to be a dungeon. It should be an environment or series of environments. The characters should be after something - gaining treasure, finding the way out, finding an artifact.
They should have different routes to take, secret areas to find, ways to retreat, choices.
You don't preplan when there will be rests or when their rests will be interrupted or when they have a chance to buy equipment. They choose if and when and where they will try to rest, and you roll dice for wandering monsters at regular intervals. If there are shops or merchants inside the dungeon, decide where they are and let the players find them.

The simplest format for a drop-in dungeon crawl game is a large dungeon (you can always add new areas, deeper levels, secret doors that reveal unexplored places so that it is never ending), next to or beneath a town or city. The characters equip themselves and rest in town, new characters join. Each session the players pick characters and prepare an expedition into the dungeon. You can let them skip over areas that are already cleared out and quickly reach the unexplored region if you want. They explore, fight things, find treasure, and carry out as much as they can - you should make them at least reach the place where they started exploring by the end of the session before they have safe travel back to the town.

Usually the difficulty of the dungeon is determined by the depth - the area closest to town is the easiest (CR 1-3). The next level down or farther out is a little harder (CR 2-4), and so forth. You can follow the advice in the DMG for what percentage of encounters are easy, moderate, hard. When they meet something that is too hard for them, they need to be given a chance to escape. Otherwise it's just an automatic game over.

If you really want to do away with XP and gaining levels, then there needs to be some other goal - getting gear, rescuing people, hunting a certain kind of monster, or change it up each session.

Pelle
2018-05-09, 03:48 AM
Agreed with the above. I will just like to add that random dungeon layouts are boring. There's no function, so you can't make any informed guesses on where you can go, or should go if you are looking for something particular.

Glorthindel
2018-05-09, 04:29 AM
Maybe I am misunderstanding, but I am not seeing the point of having multiple routes - if the route behind vanishes as you advance, and you will randomise the contents of the next room when they enter it, then it doesn't appear to matter which direction they choose, since technically whatever gets randomised will have been behind whatever door they open.

To my mind, a better way would be to have clear themes or flavours to sections of the dungeon, and have it clear whether their direction is going "deeper" into a theme, or departing towards a different theme. So for example, say they enter a "zombie room" which is the "top tier" of the undead-themed areas, they can decide when completing it to head deeper into the undead areas, or take a side route which might head towards, say constructs (since they could be seen to be a related theme to undead). This wouldn't require any major change to your design, except to split the encounters into themes (and maybe create a completely random wild-card category to randomise what theme appears next).

Knaight
2018-05-09, 04:59 AM
The closest functional analogy I can think of for this is arcade games, where you're trying to get a high score based on how long you survive, measured here in dungeon rooms. Other than that there's basically no hook here, just treading water while repetitive nothing happens around you. It's a profoundly boring concept, and while it could hypothetically work for the right kind of player there aren't likely to be many of them.

That said, if you push the arcade game side hard I could see it working for at least somebody. Sort rooms by thematic regions, set up a generation algorithm that weighs location (further north increases some room types, further south increases others, same with east/west and up/down) to make path matter at least a little, and have every fight be incredibly brutal. You're basically making a series of small wargames here, because at least that's interesting.

As is, there's no way I'd give this game a second glance. Worse, nobody I know would give this game a second glance. It's just too dull.

Firest Kathon
2018-05-09, 05:11 AM
I started to write that I would find such a dungeon quite boring, but thinking about it I may actually enjoy such a game. Sometimes I just want my character to smash in some goblin heads. It might work especially well if you manage to run frequent, shorter gaming sessions (like 3-4h max). However you should be very clear about this to your players so that they do not go into the game with incorrect expectations.

An option would be to run this as an ascendency-style game, i.e. after X rooms/boss fights/artifacts found/sessions played/etc. the character will ascend out of the dungeon and you start again with a new/different character.



b) Since the characters will never leave the dungeon, I feel there needs to be shops/magic marts of some kind inside the dungeon.


Rod of Summon Shop, usable 1/day. Shop will not appear when monsters are nearby (in the same room).


c) Resting. Every once in a while the players are going to need to have their characters rest in order to recover spells, hitpoints or daily abilities. How often should they be in a safe room? I've always liked encouraging players to enforce a watch schedule with midnight attacks, but how often should there be a mid-rest attack in this sort of dungeon. [...]

The easiest way here is that after clearing a dungeon room it is "safe", so characters can choose to rest after each encounter instead of directly proceeding to the next room.
If you want to enforce that they do not rest after each room, I suggest the following: The rooms themselves are unstable and will disappear after 3 hours, causing any creature still left in the room to die/vanish. To keep rooms stable for a longer time, you need "monster energy" (no (?) relation to the drink :smallwink:). So monsters in the room keep it stable (that's why they have not disappeared yet). To rest, PCs must collect the monster energy from three rooms to keep it existing for 9 hours total (enough to get 8h sleep). If they manage to clear more than three rooms without rest, they can store the remaining energy to sometimes afford a rest after less rooms (in case of bad rolls/hard encounters/...).


d) How many of the rooms should be child's play verse how many should be a nearly deadly encounter? Some part of me thought 25% would be simple walk in the park rooms, 50% moderate challenge or CR +/- 1, and 25% of CR + 2-4. Would this be an even spread do you think? I was also planning on having a 100 percentile roll being a straight up boss battle which would be in the deadly territory, basically one that you would almost need to run away from, unless the characters were geared out of their minds and/or had very good tactical skills. In relation to this, how often should it be a combat encounter verse how often should a non-violent option be a possible result?

When doing this, you should ensure that there is no chance of two boss encounters after each other, to reduce chance of a TPK.


f) I'm normally one of the encumbrance enforcing DMs, so my gut feeling is to keep things like that and rations enforced. If I make sure enough of the encounters are edible non-humanoid creatures with plenty of water running through the dungeon, I don't think this would be too much of an issue, right?

Don't do this. It simply does not fit into this style of game. Enforcing encumbrance and rations is about a choice the players make: take the loot or be fast, risk going hungry or spend some time to collect food, ... . In this dungeon of yours the players have no choice at all. They cannot choose to look for food - either they find a room with food or they don't. Punishing players because your random room rolls came up without food rooms will likely get you negative player reaction. Have food and encumbrance be a non-issue, either because each room contains ample food or because the characters simply have no need to eat ("It's magic!").

Glorthindel
2018-05-09, 05:26 AM
Sort rooms by thematic regions, set up a generation algorithm that weighs location (further north increases some room types, further south increases others, same with east/west and up/down) to make path matter at least a little, and have every fight be incredibly brutal. You're basically making a series of small wargames here, because at least that's interesting

This reminds me a little of Warhammer Quest - the benefit this has is that with only a little additional work (and some system for rotating control of the monsters), that after the initial set-up, you could dispose of the DM role all together, and have everyone run a character. As a beer and pizza party-game version of D&D, this might have some mileage.

Knaight
2018-05-09, 05:34 AM
Don't do this. It simply does not fit into this style of game. Enforcing encumbrance and rations is about a choice the players make: take the loot or be fast, risk going hungry or spend some time to collect food, ... . In this dungeon of yours the players have no choice at all. They cannot choose to look for food - either they find a room with food or they don't. Punishing players because your random room rolls came up without food rooms will likely get you negative player reaction. Have food and encumbrance be a non-issue, either because each room contains ample food or because the characters simply have no need to eat ("It's magic!").

I'd actually suggest going the other way on this. There's so little going on that stuff like encumbrance is more valuable, and whenever you have access to more stuff than you can carry there's a choice to be made about what to leave behind. The choice is just now about what you choose to keep given the random rooms.

Grod_The_Giant
2018-05-09, 06:49 AM
I'm not sure you understand what a dungeon is. All you are doing is making the players fight battle after battle for no reason. They have no choices, nowhere they can go, no goal they are trying to reach, no strategy to form, and barely even any space in which to move. How would you even do wandering monsters? They will never gain XP or level up, they aren't even using characters they've created.
...

The simplest format for a drop-in dungeon crawl game is a large dungeon (you can always add new areas, deeper levels, secret doors that reveal unexplored places so that it is never ending), next to or beneath a town or city. The characters equip themselves and rest in town, new characters join. Each session the players pick characters and prepare an expedition into the dungeon.
Very, very much this. Remember, you're not going to have players popping in and out mid-session (presumably, at least)-- you're going to have changes between sessions, so you just need each single session to be a self-contained adventure. This blog post (http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/) has some good ideas about how to structure such a game.

EDIT: As for some of your specific questions...
a) I'd stick with 3.5, both because that's what you know, and because the combat (aka "100% of this game") is more complicated and engaging.
b) Periodically stumbling across a lost trader, fellow adventurer, or even a full-fledged town ought to work. I'd also suggest an E6 style structure-- for every n sessions a character (either pre-gen or homemade) completes, they get a new feat. That gives advancement without leaving anyone too far behind.
c) Wouldn't the party be able to just barricade the doors and stay in whatever room they just cleared?

Scripten
2018-05-09, 07:29 AM
This sounds very similar to the setup of the game Rogue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)), except that you're going room-by-room rather than by floor. Have you considered making a randomized generation system that creates whole floors of the dungeon at a time? That may solve some of the issues that have been brought up in this thread.

Also, this article (http://ctrl500.com/tech/handcrafted-feel-dungeon-generation-unexplored-explores-cyclic-dungeon-generation/) has some useful information that might help your rooms fit together in more exciting ways.

Incorrect
2018-05-09, 07:48 AM
It sounds like you actually want to play a board game.
I have spend many beer and pretzel hours with Descent for example.

redwizard007
2018-05-09, 08:47 AM
Unconquorable/unescapable dungeon. No level progression. Repetitive scenarios. How long into the dungeon before you tell the players that they are now lords of a new domain in Ravenloft?

I see this being entertaining for a night. Maybe as an occasional fill in when the DM doesn't have time to plan a real adventure. As a campaign it would get old quick. It would translate to a decent board game if you are so inclined. A board with the properly sized room, minis for foes and heroes, and a deck of encounters (including shops and rest areas,) and another deck for treasure. You could even sell deck expansions.

Knaight
2018-05-09, 09:22 AM
Very, very much this. Remember, you're not going to have players popping in and out mid-session (presumably, at least)-- you're going to have changes between sessions, so you just need each single session to be a self-contained adventure. This blog post (http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/) has some good ideas about how to structure such a game.

This. That said, that structure is very much one of an overarching campaign where each session is also a self contained adventure. The overarching campaign is totally unnecessary - you can just run a different self contained adventure every game session for whoever shows up.

Conveniently enough this is actually exactly what I'm currently doing (I call it One Shot Club, because we happen to be using a game shop as a meeting place right now and theoretically someone else might GM something at some point, but GMing a one shot weekly is pretty much how it actually works so far). Players can drop in and drop out whenever, pregens are provided (though I will give notice ahead of time if people want to make characters), and it basically fills the same niche as the neverending dungeon, without a lot of the issues.

lytokk
2018-05-09, 07:00 PM
Its actually funny that someone mentioned arcade games. I didn't want to get in too much detail about how the whole idea came about but located near me is an arcade/microbrewery and I was talking with the owners one night and he mentioned it would be neat to get a D&D night up at the store. As the people playing would have varied if any experience I was looking to create a system that would make it as simple as possible for someone to pick up and play. Hence the pre-generated characters. I was never much worried about storyline for this concept as there really wouldn't be one. Just people moving from room to room fighting bad guys learning the system and deciding if they feel like playing more. An area outside of the dungeon was not a concern of mine as something like that would slow down the sort of pacing I was going for.

There have been good points made, some people understood my explanation of the concept and some didn't which is fine. I had been awake for about 50 hours by the time I typed this up last night. I do admit there really isn't a lot of depth to this plan. When I typically worldbuild I go a lot more in depth than this and most of the time I hate doing long multi-session dungeons; I never liked them as a player and as a DM I just want people to move on to the next part. A very big part of this is that planning something like this is relaxing to me, and that's been something I've been needing more and more recently. If this never sees the light of day no big loss in the grand scheme of things. I had just hit some roadblocks and I used to come here a lot when I was hitting these impasses to get advice and I thought I may as well do it again.

For the people that have given their pieces of advice thank you, and for the ones who said this was a bad idea I hope this further explained my motivations behind it.

Mr Beer
2018-05-09, 09:24 PM
A friend on mine ran an endless dungeon game for a while, it worked fine. Premise was as follows:

- Gods exist and they like to have adventurers as followers
- They created a dungeon with multiple levels
- Would-be adventurers come to down and sign on at a temple allied to a particular god
- They go into the dungeon and adventure, gain XP and then return
- The god levels them up, levels and classes are explicitly real in game
- Levels are tougher as you descend
- Levels are randomly generated maps
- Levels are randomly populated but thematic
- Everything resets once a week on Reset Day, don't be in the dungeon on Reset Day

There were some other tweaks, like an extra dungeon level a decent way down that operated as a town substitute for high level adventurers, an ascending gem system that you cut out of dead monsters and some town adventure hooks.