Dynamic dungeons?

[HidesHisEyes]

I’ve come up with a simple little system for making dungeons feel more alive and dynamic in terms of combat encounters. It’s untested for now but I’m prepping it and will be running it in game soon. What do you think of this system and do you have any systems or tools you use for this?

So you make a list of all the types of creatures that live in the dungeon and note their DCs. Then you go on Kobold Fight Club or some other encounter-building site or app, and you just play around with the creatures on your list for a while, combining them to form the basis of various different encounters. Pay attention to the combat difficulty tags of “easy”, “medium”, “hard” and “deadly”. Look at the adventuring day xp budget for the number and level of PCs as well. Most importantly, decide on a “budget” of combined CR values to shoot for when you make encounters. Eg if your budget was 5 you could have two CR 2 monsters and one CR1. (I know CR and action economy are complicated but I think this does seem to work, if you’re using something like KFC because it knows how many PCs are in the party and does all the action economy multiplier equations).

Once you’ve got a budget, a sense of some level-appropriate encounters, and a sense of how many encounters the players should have, decide how many individual monsters of each type are in the dungeon. (In the one I’ve prepped I used some squads of four much weaker monsters, counting them as one each). You could also think of a CR budget for the whole dungeon and choose monsters to add up to that budget.

Then you make cards, one for each individual monster (or squad of weak monsters). On each card put the CR very prominently in the corner - that’s the cost of that monster towards your budget. I also put each monster’s attack, damage, AC and hit points with space to track them. But I have an app where I’ve got all the full stat blocks together.

At any point where it seems likely the players will run into hostiles, or if you like on random encounter rolls, you flip through your deck of monsters and choose a hand of monsters. They should be logical for the situation, not exceed your Encounter budget in combined CR, and ideally should be a mix of different types. Play out the encounter using the cards to track Initiative and hit points. When a monster gets killed its card goes face down in a “slain pile” for the rest of the adventure. Or if runs away you put it in a separate pile, face up and ready to come back.

That’s the basic idea. You don’t know exactly where each monster is and what it’s doing, but you know what monsters are here and how many. As I said I haven’t tested it yet, but I’m hoping it will make it easier to make the dungeon feel interconnected.

Some extra things I think you could do with it:

Track the dungeon’s “alert level”. It goes up by 1 or 2 when the players make noise, when a monster escapes a combat encounter and goes to warn the others, and so on. At alert level 0-3 you use an encounter budget that gives easy or medium fights, at alert 4-6 it’s medium or hard, at alert level 7+ it’s hard or deadly fights. At alert level 10 you could have something special happen like they wake up the demon that slumbers here, or the main villain the PCs are after escapes out the back door, so it doubles as an overall countdown clock. This approach turns the system into more of a stealthy infiltration thing, potentially.

I also think this could be helpful beyond combat. Each card represents a creature somewhere in the dungeon, and there’s no reason you can’t put a name, personality trait and motivation on some of the cards. Or add them during play if the PCs try parleying with creatures first. I have a plan for a little love triangle between three drow, which the PCs old potentially exploit in some way.

[JellyPooga]

The direction I'd go with this is that there's definitely something to be said for setting up a "rogue-like" random dungeon using cards. Rather than choosing encounters from the deck, there's no reason you couldn't deal encounter randomly based on your idea about activity and alert levels (e.g. alert level 2? Next random encounter deals two cards). It could create some unbalanced or nonsense encounters, but with a little imagination and some prudence on the part of the PC's (i.e. knowing when to run) you can make it work. e.g. if the cards say the next monster encounter is a Shadow and a small group of Goblins, you could easily create a "goblins being chased by a shadow bump into the PC's" kind of encounter, which could easily turn south very quickly for the PC's should the Shadow start "recruiting" allies from the physically weak goblins.

If you wanted to take it a step further, you could use cards as your dungeon layout too; drawing or printing dungeon tiles to randomly draw and piece together in a haphazard labyrinth is just as valid as drawing a random dungeon map yourself. You could even grant a degree of manipulation to the PC's with successful "navigation" or "intuition" checks, allowing them to position rooms or corridors to their liking/advantage or being able to choose which tiles come up next from the deck from a small selection (i.e. choice of two or three).

You might also want to consider environmental encounters too; expanding on your idea of personality traits etc. you could include furniture and features, traps, lighting and more to embellish encounters. If you draw a random and it doesn't fit or you can't make it make sense, then either discard it or redraw until something does.

[Unoriginal]

IMO there is no such thing as "how many encounters the players should have".

What makes a dungeon dynamic is the fact it is set up independently of PCs, and that the inhabitants react to the situations organically (including if the PCs make their presence known or not).

If the PCs' actions manage to raise the alarm for every inhabitant in the dungeon, and said inhabitants are the kind to react to that by showing where the intruders are and dealing with them, then the PCs have to deal with the whole dungeon at once. If there are several factions in the dungeon, then one may decide to use the opportunity to accomplish their goals. If the dungeon's second-in-command is ambitious but doesn't want to get their hand dirty, they may be encouraging their boss to fight in the frontline hoping the adventurers will kill the boss. ETC.

[HidesHisEyes]

IMO there is no such thing as "how many encounters the players should have".

What makes a dungeon dynamic is the fact it is set up independently of PCs, and that the inhabitants react to the situations organically (including if the PCs make their presence known or not).

If the PCs' actions manage to raise the alarm for every inhabitant in the dungeon, and said inhabitants are the kind to react to that by showing where the intruders are and dealing with them, then the PCs have to deal with the whole dungeon at once. If there are several factions in the dungeon, then one may decide to use the opportunity to accomplish their goals. If the dungeon's second-in-command is ambitious but doesn't want to get their hand dirty, they may be encouraging their boss to fight in the frontline hoping the adventurers will kill the boss. ETC.

Definitely like the ideas in your second paragraph and I’m planning to use my system that way.

However when I play a game like D&D 5E, personally, I like to take the “encounter balance” aspect of the game pretty seriously. In my system I think it would be possible for the entire dungeon to hunt down and surround the players, and they might need to either find a non-combat way out of that situation or end up captured. But I still plan to run it as a series of more or less balanced combat encounters if the players make some effort to avoid alerting the whole dungeon. That’s what the alert levels are for. By alert level 7 the whole dungeon is looking for the PCs and if they stay still for too long they’ll get a deadly encounter (and they may be down on hp, spell slots etc by this point). But if they use stealth early on and don’t let monsters escape from encounters, they might never reach alert level 7.

If I were to run a more gritty, “combat as war” game, like an OSR game, I’d probably be thinking much more the way you describe, ie not thinking in terms of encounter balance at all.

[MrStabby]

XP budgets are a bit dangerous.

Sometimes it makes a DM feel obligated to throw more or fewer encounters at the players. If the players play smart and sidestep half oy the encounters then enemies Just Happen to hear them and converge on their location and the result gets up to budget... or there just happens to be an assassin at the inn that night... Or whatever. Its a case of knowing your players - if they want to use their ablities and resources to bypass encounters and if that is the style of game they like to play as a group, then look to support it.

Better to have a way overbudget dungeon and let the players navigate their way through. The problem with dynamically generating content is that it kind of sucks when players are scouting or scrying or whatever and things are in odd places. I mean it isn't the end of the world if that happens but generally some layouts/positionings are better than others for either narrative or mechanical reasons - if this is the case why let it come down to chance rather than just selecting the best option from the start?

[HidesHisEyes]

XP budgets are a bit dangerous.

Sometimes it makes a DM feel obligated to throw more or fewer encounters at the players. If the players play smart and sidestep half oy the encounters then enemies Just Happen to hear them and converge on their location and the result gets up to budget... or there just happens to be an assassin at the inn that night... Or whatever. Its a case of knowing your players - if they want to use their ablities and resources to bypass encounters and if that is the style of game they like to play as a group, then look to support it.

Better to have a way overbudget dungeon and let the players navigate their way through. The problem with dynamically generating content is that it kind of sucks when players are scouting or scrying or whatever and things are in odd places. I mean it isn't the end of the world if that happens but generally some layouts/positionings are better than others for either narrative or mechanical reasons - if this is the case why let it come down to chance rather than just selecting the best option from the start?

I don’t see why it would need to come down to chance. If they scry or otherwise spy on the location I’ll just tell them what they see, making a logical and interesting decision there and then.

And my intent is they would be able to avoid encounters under the system I described. It’s a *maximum* budget for the entire dungeon and per combat encounter. It’s not set in stone that the players have to fight all those enemies. Fiction first always: if they get in, accomplish their objective and get out without fighting more than 1/10 (or even any) of the enemies in there, good for them.