Lea Plath
2018-07-19, 08:24 AM
So I'm going to be running a lot of XCrawl variant Dungeons and Dragons one shots over the next few months, and part of the conceit of XCrawl is that dungeons are designed to be run by adventures so it can be filmed and put on TV as a pay-per-view extravaganza. This means I can go kinda deep on theme and concept dungeons that I might not otherwise get to run, such as a factory where how the players do in each room determines what type of golem chimera they face at the end.
So one of my ideas is a 4 Level dungeon consisting of 4 rooms. The general idea being this dungeon was designed by someone a bit up themselves (so what does that say about me), so they gave it a silly high concept. The end result is you have four levels, from top to bottom called The Heavens, Nature, Civilization and Monsters. And every time you go up or down a level, you "advance" time from Morning to Noon to Evening to Dusk to Midnight to Twilight and back to morning. And on each level, depending on the "time of day" it is, something different will happen inspired by what is going on and how each part of the world reacts to different times of day. So if the players reach the top floor during the "Midnight" stage, they have to fight the boss of the dungeon, where as if they are wandering around "Nature" at dusk or twilight they have a high chance of running into say, a group of wolves or a bear.
So my question is, should I expect players to think to back track at all, or use it to their advantage? Say something they can't sneak past during the day, they could try advancing it to night to see if that is more favorable? Or does that go against the way a lot of DnD is set up, where there is space to explore but not really backtracking in the way a zelda dungeon might? Or if the idea is salvageable, what sort of things would I need to do to set up fair player expectations?
So one of my ideas is a 4 Level dungeon consisting of 4 rooms. The general idea being this dungeon was designed by someone a bit up themselves (so what does that say about me), so they gave it a silly high concept. The end result is you have four levels, from top to bottom called The Heavens, Nature, Civilization and Monsters. And every time you go up or down a level, you "advance" time from Morning to Noon to Evening to Dusk to Midnight to Twilight and back to morning. And on each level, depending on the "time of day" it is, something different will happen inspired by what is going on and how each part of the world reacts to different times of day. So if the players reach the top floor during the "Midnight" stage, they have to fight the boss of the dungeon, where as if they are wandering around "Nature" at dusk or twilight they have a high chance of running into say, a group of wolves or a bear.
So my question is, should I expect players to think to back track at all, or use it to their advantage? Say something they can't sneak past during the day, they could try advancing it to night to see if that is more favorable? Or does that go against the way a lot of DnD is set up, where there is space to explore but not really backtracking in the way a zelda dungeon might? Or if the idea is salvageable, what sort of things would I need to do to set up fair player expectations?