Pacing a megadungeon

[Talakeal]

My next campaign is going to be an old school mega-dungeon.

In short, I am wondering how to incentivize the characters to actually push themselves in exploring it rather than falling back on the old 15 minute adventuring day routine.

I have never had much success with this in the past. The last time I tried to run a hex-crawl game everything I did, from wandering encounters to non-lethal death just made the problem worse.

The dungeon is directly under the town, Diablo style, so long journeys and expensive supplies are going to be tough to justify.

Likewise, tying resting to a RL clock is annoying and honestly more of a punishment for me as the DM than it is for the players.

Any ideas?

Maybe tweaking XP based on time since a rest? Random encounters getting more lethal over time?

Here is a link to the campaign log, updated every four weeks.

[Mastikator]

Give them a time restraint.

Consider how many long rests they actually need to deal with all the monsters. That's how many days they have until something really bad happens, if they beeline for the end-boss, let them. Reward them for catching the final bad guy with his pants down.

[stoutstien]

What system? Some are definitely more able to turnkey hex Crawling thn others

[Vahnavoi]

If you've played Diablo, or Angband, or most other games of the genre, whether on computer or tabletop, you ought to have realized that "15 minute workday" is the normal and expected tactic.

As in: the basic loop is, you go as deep as you can as quickly as you can, fill your pockets with loot, then retreat as quickly as you can back to safety, rinse and repeat. Abilities to make this easy (Town Portal, World of Recal, etc.) are staples of the genre.

If a single trip takes more than 15 minutes of real time to process, your system is slow for this kind of play. 30 to 45 minutes is still acceptable, allowing for several trips per 4-hour session

If you want to push exploration as an angle, you need to do away with basic conceits that allow this to happen. To give you some ground rules:

1) No safe retreat. Every time player characters want to rest, they have to establish a camp in detail, they have to set up watches, build traps and fortifications, etc.. It's part of gameplay and consequences follow from how they do it.

2) The goal is on the other side, AKA motive to keep moving. Give players hints for targets deep in the dungeon.

3) Rewards tied to exploring terrain, not some tangential thing. For example, the player characters could literally be paid for finding and mapping new rooms.

4) Most rooms are empty and most encounters aren't combat. This goes together with:

5) Time is a resource and is in fact the most common resource used. "15 minute workday" happens because characters have all kinds of other resource limits, but unlimited time. Turn that paradigm around. Wandering through empty hallways, clearing collapsed tunnels, disassembling traps, going around a pit, these don't consume spells or hitpoints or even equipment, but they do consume time. Put this together with 2) and 3), and efficient use of time becomes the key to progress.

6) Keep a calendar. Things inside and outside the dungeon change as days go by. Events in time will work as distant targets to encourage exploring just as well as distant targets in space. Put this together with 3) and 5) to create tasks such as "I want X pieces of ore by date Y".

[kyoryu]

Historically:

Megadungeons were not "cleared". A single adventure was one trip into, and back out of, the dungeon.

The dungeon was a campaign setting, not a single thing to conquer.

The dungeon would restock between visits. This didn't necessarily mean "revert exactly to what it was", but to refill and be a challenge. If you wipe out the kobolds, they might stay wiped out.

Remember that in old D&D, treasure was 80% of your xp. You leveled from getting treasure, not from fighting. It was more heist than genocide.

There were usually ways to get out of danger if you got in it, but these usually cost in some way - treasure or supplies.

So the real challenge was - knowing what you do of hte dungeon (which may have changed), plot a likely path to the best treasure, avoiding as much of the denizens as possible, get the biggest score you could, and get back out safely.

So the 15 minute day didn't work. Any "progress" would effectively be undone, and you'd have lost any chance for the better treasure. I mean, sure, you could do it, but that would be generally a terrible idea beyond the first couple character levels.

If you've played Diablo, or Angband, or most other games of the genre, whether on computer or tabletop, you ought to have realized that "15 minute workday" is the normal and expected tactic.

It's useful to go back to NetHack on this one. In NetHack, murdering everything on a given level is, in general, a terrible tactic. The pressures of food and time will destroy you. You need to be efficient in what you're doing if you want to achieve anything.

[KorvinStarmast]

The dungeon is directly under the town, Diablo style, so long journeys and expensive supplies are going to be tough to justify.

Did you ever try to do a 3@30 Diablo run?

Did you ever play the Iron Man variant?
One of the groups I played that variant with had the following custom rule: once you entered the cathedral, you could not return to town until you found that way up and out of the Catacombs at 5th level. Once you re-entered the Cats, you could not come up until you found the way up and out of the caves. Once you entered the caves, you could not come out until you found the path to the fissure behind the healer's hut (Perrin?} And once you went back down you could not come up until you had taken out Diablo or been beaten.

Exploration became a thing.

In our old school dungeons, treasure maps were one of the pieces of treasure that you could find.
Make treasure maps. They can be incomplete, or not have certain things marked on them.
Add to that rumors or old legends like "under the well in the depths of Fang Caverns lies the golden mallet of Kamakemilion, scourge of the undead. Once past the hall of Eversparkle, the well can be found - {and here the markings on the map end}"

Recovering that mallet becomes a quest, and the very finding of the Well and the hall of Eversparkle become objectives.
And they need to find that mallet because "in nine days the zombie hordes will erupt from the Fissure of Fandango, just north of town ..."

[J-H]

Enforce one long rest per 24 hours. If they start coming down and going up repeatedly with a predictable route, enemies will find and trap that route. This does require pacing encounters on your part so that they can get in a solid 8 hour adventuring day without being out of resources after the first two encounters.

One thing the Angry GM did in his Megadungeon series was have the party get trapped in it due to a collapsing tunnel for a couple of levels. You could pull that one or two times in different ways.

[Vahnavoi]

@kyoryu: it's never possible to kill everything in classic Angband: every level keeps generating wandering monsters while a player stays there and every level is replaced by a whole new one upon exiting and re-entering. A non-savvy player could theoretically go back and forth between Town and Level 1, grinding low-level threats for increasingly diminishing returns, forever.

It's a game of infinite resources over time, both ways. What isn't infinite is how much stuff a player has at hand at a given moment, which is what creates the "15 minute workday" dynamic. Escaping to safety once you've blown your load is just basic tactics in such an environment.

NetHack is different because it follows many of the rules I already mentioned. Notably, it lacks a safe Town level, fullfilling Rule 1).

[King of Nowhere]

The thing is, lacking time pressure or other issues, the 15 minutes adventuring day is the smart, sensible thing to do. The adventurer who risks his life because he can't be patient for anorher day is not a hero nor a champion, but a moron.
So, while people may want to play a risky exploration, they are also savy enough to recognize when a behavior is dumb, and they don't want to feel dumb.

Therefore, it is your task as dm to come up with ways to pressure them.
There are many ways, but i can group them in two categories:
1) give them a time limit. Something bad will happen if they dither. Options vary from "doomsday happens" to "somebody else will arrive first and take the treasure in your place".
2) block the party inside, and make resting dangerous. At low level a cave-in can work. At high level you need to put teleport blockers and a bunch of other conditions.

Notice that the time/travel limit need not be true. Your players being uncertain on whether bad things will happen will generally work.

So, it's up to you to pick a reasonable excuse that would fit the setting.
One final piece of advice. If your players go out of their way to bypass your restrictions and get a rest, let them. They earned it. Some players like to be smart heroes and find creative solutions instead of just smashing door after door.
Putting a sensible obstacle to keep them from resupplying is fine, but if your players find a workaround and you just deny it you become an oppressive railroading dm.

[ciopo]

step 1: all encounters "resets/respawns" on long rest
step 2: only "new" encounters give loot/wealth/experience/progress
step 3: calibrate "fast travel"/"encounter bypassing milestones" at around the amount of progress you feel is appropriate for 1 day of adventuring

so, if they nova hard and spend all resource to nuke one encounter... they gained whatever that encounter was worth... and they will have to face it again the day after, but gain nothing from it, thus they must defeat it with less resource expenditure, so they have resources for the next encounter. Mix and match how many eno****ers and how hard they should be in a day to taste

[Talakeal]

Give them a time restraint.

Consider how many long rests they actually need to deal with all the monsters. That's how many days they have until something really bad happens, if they beeline for the end-boss, let them. Reward them for catching the final bad guy with his pants down.

Is there any way I can communicate this pressure to them?

They also aren't going to know how big the dungeon is or where the "last boss" is without having already explored it.

What system? Some are definitely more able to turnkey hex Crawling thn others

I haven't decided yet. Maybe D&D (any edition but 4), maybe something OSR, maybe one of my homebrew systems.

Some simulationist fantasy adventure game.

If you've played Diablo, or Angband, or most other games of the genre, whether on computer or tabletop, you ought to have realized that "15 minute workday" is the normal and expected tactic.

As in: the basic loop is, you go as deep as you can as quickly as you can, fill your pockets with loot, then retreat as quickly as you can back to safety, rinse and repeat. Abilities to make this easy (Town Portal, World of Recal, etc.) are staples of the genre.

If a single trip takes more than 15 minutes of real time to process, your system is slow for this kind of play. 30 to 45 minutes is still acceptable, allowing for several trips per 4-hour session

Ok, when you say "as deep as you can" that's the key issue. If players went "as deep as they could" there would be no issue. The problem is that the optimal move is instead to turn around and head back to town the first time a resource is depleted in any way.

Not quite sure what tabletop RPG could do an entire expedition in 15 minutes; heck most rounds of combat last longer than that at tables I have been at regardless of the system.

Historically:

Megadungeons were not "cleared". A single adventure was one trip into, and back out of, the dungeon.

The dungeon was a campaign setting, not a single thing to conquer.

The dungeon would restock between visits. This didn't necessarily mean "revert exactly to what it was", but to refill and be a challenge. If you wipe out the kobolds, they might stay wiped out.

Remember that in old D&D, treasure was 80% of your xp. You leveled from getting treasure, not from fighting. It was more heist than genocide.

There were usually ways to get out of danger if you got in it, but these usually cost in some way - treasure or supplies.

So the real challenge was - knowing what you do of hte dungeon (which may have changed), plot a likely path to the best treasure, avoiding as much of the denizens as possible, get the biggest score you could, and get back out safely.

So the 15 minute day didn't work. Any "progress" would effectively be undone, and you'd have lost any chance for the better treasure. I mean, sure, you could do it, but that would be generally a terrible idea beyond the first couple character levels.

Most of this I am already doing.

Are you implying that I should restock the entire dungeon with monsters every visit, but not the treasure?

That would work, but doesn't that also mean that we are going to be spending the first few hours of the every session fighting monsters in the same few rooms without major reward? That sounds horribly tedious.

Enforce one long rest per 24 hours. If they start coming down and going up repeatedly with a predictable route, enemies will find and trap that route. This does require pacing encounters on your part so that they can get in a solid 8 hour adventuring day without being out of resources after the first two encounters.

One thing the Angry GM did in his Megadungeon series was have the party get trapped in it due to a collapsing tunnel for a couple of levels. You could pull that one or two times in different ways.

Knowing my players they would just go back to town they after springing each trap until they miraculously got through without ever springing a single one.

Trapping players in the dungeon might work once or twice, but making it a regular thing strains plausibility and also cuts off the players to interact with the whole town side of the game (buying and selling, talking to NPCs, crafting or other downtime projects, etc.)

Enforce one long rest per 24 hours. If they start coming down and going up repeatedly with a predictable route, enemies will find and trap that route. This does require pacing encounters on your part so that they can get in a solid 8 hour adventuring day without being out of resources after the first two encounters.

One thing the Angry GM did in his Megadungeon series was have the party get trapped in it due to a collapsing tunnel for a couple of levels. You could pull that one or two times in different ways.

Knowing my players they would just go back to town they after springing each trap until they miraculously got through without ever springing a single one.

Trapping players in the dungeon might work once or twice, but making it a regular thing strains plausibility and also cuts off the players to interact with the whole town side of the game (buying and selling, talking to NPCs, crafting or other downtime projects, etc.)

@kyoryu: it's never possible to kill everything in classic Angband: every level keeps generating wandering monsters while a player stays there and every level is replaced by a whole new one upon exiting and re-entering. A non-savvy player could theoretically go back and forth between Town and Level 1, grinding low-level threats for increasingly diminishing returns, forever.

Why is that non-savvy? That sounds like a pretty optimal strategy to me.

@kyoryu: it's never possible to kill everything in classic Angband: every level keeps generating wandering monsters while a player stays there and every level is replaced by a whole new one upon exiting and re-entering. A non-savvy player could theoretically go back and forth between Town and Level 1, grinding low-level threats for increasingly diminishing returns, forever.

Why is that non-savvy? That sounds like a pretty optimal strategy to me.

1) No safe retreat. Every time player characters want to rest, they have to establish a camp in detail, they have to set up watches, build traps and fortifications, etc.. It's part of gameplay and consequences

If the players can rest in the dungeon, doesn't that just make the problem worse?

AFAICT trying to sleep in the dungeon in old school D&D was basically Russian roulette, it was a great tactic until you rolled a bad random encounter while already out of resources and then it was game over.

It seems like it would turn the game into "Can you find a safe place to rest? If so, infinite resources you win. If not, random TPK in the night, you lose."

step 1: all encounters "resets/respawns" on long rest
step 2: only "new" encounters give loot/wealth/experience/progress
step 3: calibrate "fast travel"/"encounter bypassing milestones" at around the amount of progress you feel is appropriate for 1 day of adventuring

so, if they nova hard and spend all resource to nuke one encounter... they gained whatever that encounter was worth... and they will have to face it again the day after, but gain nothing from it, thus they must defeat it with less resource expenditure, so they have resources for the next encounter. Mix and match how many eno****ers and how hard they should be in a day to taste

Hmmm. I guess this could work if there are a LOT of shortcuts.

Otherwise it seems like we are just going to be doing the same few fights over and over and over until everyone, including the GM, is bored to tears and hates that game.

The thing is, lacking time pressure or other issues, the 15 minutes adventuring day is the smart, sensible thing to do. The adventurer who risks his life because he can't be patient for anorher day is not a hero nor a champion, but a moron.
So, while people may want to play a risky exploration, they are also savy enough to recognize when a behavior is dumb, and they don't want to feel dumb.

Agreed.

Sort of.

In real life, you don't want unnecessary encounters. In the fiction, a wandering monster or a trap can easily inflict a fatal wound on a person. While by the rules of most games, resources are more ablative, you aren't in any threat until you are worn down.

Add spell slots into the equation, and it gets even worse.

[J-H]

Is there any way I can communicate this pressure to them?

They also aren't going to know how big the dungeon is or where the "last boss" is without having already explored it.

Why do they need to do the dungeon at all? What is the external pressure?

Examples:
When I ran Castle Dracula (Castlevania), it was "Dracula's army is besieging Vienna and Constantinople. If you take too long, cities will die." There was also no easy way out (it took several level-ups of encounters to get to the castle proper), and they got one free long rest every time they leveled. When they got near the final tower, a basically endless horde of skeletons started chasing them. They blocked the skeletons off with a heavy door, but they knew the skeletons would climb up and find a way to them if they kept going.

With Kaveman26's Cattle-Driving Necromancers campaign log, I think there was a big camp of opportunists to navigate outside, including dragons, and some deadlines related to a BBEG.


The external pressure or time factors are up to you and your campaign, but you need to have them. Ideas:

Maybe someone's summoning Mephistopheles (NWN Underdark xpack).
Maybe vampires are lairing in the bottom and raiding the city every third night, using their gaseous form to bypass all the traps and other inhabitants, so the only way you can reach them is by fighting your way down.
Maybe someone's charging up a giant doom machine and scholars say you only have 30+3d6 days to find the shutdown button.
The McGuffin might be destabilizing the area around it, with anyone within 10 miles having to make a Charisma save every 7 days to avoid getting turned into a Gibbering Mouther or Chaos Beast or something else bad. The DC starts at 1 but increases by 1 every week. If the players mess around, NPCs start dying, and they risk dying as well.

Just find something, or preferably two factors, that means "We need to hurry and push on."

[Quertus]

First things first: Let your players play the game however they want to. Part of the point of a megadungeon is that the players can approach it however they want, it doesn’t inherently have arbitrary time pressures. Like, “world’s largest dungeon”, kinda a case study in doing things wrong, has a whopping 2 “must do” encounters, one of which has (iirc) a 100-day timer. That’s right, the PCs have 100 long rests as one of two timers on the whole dungeon. (Of course, failure means the world ends. No pressure.)

That said… if I had your players… hmmm…

1) the dungeon repopulates. Every X amount of time, the dungeon is “reborn” (albeit not necessarily identically). If you didn’t make it to the end, you have to start over.

2) the PCs aren’t the only ones going after this dungeon. Whatever you don’t clear, the next group going in might.

2b) I’d have at least one other actual group playing at the same time; ie, another group of PCs is taking turns with this megadungeon. This means that, to stay in sync, 1 gaming session = 1 specific period of time (presumably, 1 long rest).

3) the town manages the dungeon, and the PCs have to buy timed “rights” to certain levels.

4) different entrances / paths lead to different areas of different difficulty, length, theme, and reward.

5) death not only does nothing, it’s the only way out of the dungeon. This way, your players get experience knowing exactly how far they can push themselves, and can use that knowledge in later adventures. For bonus points, have the players state when they think they’ve reached their limits, to test how good they are (or aren’t) at making that determination.

Mix and match to taste.

So, if the party starts out as 1st level scrubs, they start clearing out the 1st level (or pick up where the previous scrubs left off, depending on what turn order they purchased), and retreat. Once the group leaves (or if the timer runs out - perhaps they’re dead), the next group goes in and continues their efforts. Once all the groups are done, they can choose to go in again, or wait until they are more rested and/or wait until the dungeon restocks.

——- sample ——-

So, in 3e D&D, I might have a dungeon that randomly resets every 2d3+1 days. Entry into the main path costs 1 gold per party, plus 1 silver per character, plus 1 copper per minion/pet/mount/familiar/etc (pocket change, really, but it pays for the town guards); if you come out with monsters in hot pursuit, expect additional fines.

When the dungeon resets, it doesn’t just repopulate monsters and traps and treasures, but what monsters and treasures and traps are there may change, and even the entire layout may change. Certain layers change every time; certain other layers have never changed. However, there’s certain features that are always true; for example, there’s always a trap on level 3 that is a huge slide down to level 40. The monsters on level 40&41 are always low-loot for their threat. But very rarely level 42 will grant a “dungeon Wish”. One of the early explorers (who later went on to become a legendary hero) was the first to be granted a dungeon wish, and used it to open up a second entrance to the dungeon.

Since then, 3 more entrances to the dungeon have been created, allowing higher level parties to more easily farm better loot without having to wait for others to clear the path (or having to slog through everything themselves).

These entrances are important for another reason. When the dungeon resets, there are complex rules that amount to, “if the population of a section has not been sufficiently depleted, add a stack to the count for that section. When the count reaches the max for that section (often 1), disgorge monsters of a corresponding type.” In short, it has been discovered that certain sections need to be hit periodically to prevent the dungeon from sending monsters out into the town.

Occasionally, the dungeon will “glitch”, spawning a being seemingly working against the dungeon. They offer timed quests (usually “before the next reset”) to shut down a section of the dungeon. Once a certain number of sections are shut down (fewer than the number of sections that are known to disgorge monsters, sadly), the next reset will restore all sections to default… but with an additional glitch of doubling treasure drops during that reset. Needless to say, everyone is encouraged to complete these quests.

This dungeon is considered a national treasure; adventures from other nations are generally not welcome.

The guild manages turn order; those with higher rank in the guild (ie, more success) have higher priority to choose their order. Usually, higher level parties will get lower level parties to work the easier levels of a section. Sometimes, two higher level teams work together and alternate, either who goes after the scrubs, or dispensing with the scrubs entirely.

The guild must have some Secret, because beings not registered with the guild cannot enter the dungeon.

The dungeon doesn’t exist in real space - digging into the side of the dungeon just reveals more dirt/rock.

The different sections aren’t actually all vertical; the “level” numbers are more like page numbers, with the book written in the order the sections were found. Level 60-69 form a section that sees the party moving up, for example, while sometimes “levels” in a section are all actually at the same height.

[kyoryu]

They also aren't going to know how big the dungeon is or where the "last boss" is without having already explored it.

There isn't a "last boss" in an old school megadungeon. Keep in mind they were intended to be used as a campaign setting that lasted for years, for large groups of people that would fluctuate over time.

Are you implying that I should restock the entire dungeon with monsters every visit, but not the treasure?

Treasure can regen too. The point is, it's going to be low value treasure.

That would work, but doesn't that also mean that we are going to be spending the first few hours of the every session fighting monsters in the same few rooms without major reward? That sounds horribly tedious.

So if they're not getting reward, why would they keep doing that? Also, not every room should be stocked, so getting from Point A to Point B shouldn't require fighting all of the monsters every time. Cleverly avoiding them is the winning move.

AFAICT trying to sleep in the dungeon in old school D&D was basically Russian roulette, it was a great tactic until you rolled a bad random encounter while already out of resources and then it was game over.

The ideal move is to get out of the dungeon under your own steam without resting. Everything else is suboptimal, but sometimes might be the best move you have available.

It seems like it would turn the game into "Can you find a safe place to rest? If so, infinite resources you win. If not, random TPK in the night, you lose."

There's no safe places. Just places that are less risky.

Otherwise it seems like we are just going to be doing the same few fights over and over and over until everyone, including the GM, is bored to tears and hates that game.

The game should be very non-linear and have major passages that aren't just full of creatures, etc. I'd really like to find a good example of a megadungeon to give you an idea. But it's not in any way linear.

Also, megadungeons aren't dense in the way that others dungeons are. They're not a series of combat encounters with minimal spacing.

As a third point, that was all based on systems where combat is comparatively quick, not something that takes an hour. Especially for trivial ones (and monsters can also run away).

So, no, you shouldn't have a huge list of encounters to run through. The actual encounters to get through, when you know where you're going, should be much smaller, and this style was designed presuming that combat was faster. A lot of the game is learning how to avoid/minimize encounters, as well... yes, you're leaving the encounter XP on the table, but you're doing that to get to the bigger rewards down the line.

In real life, you don't want unnecessary encounters. In the fiction, a wandering monster or a trap can easily inflict a fatal wound on a person. While by the rules of most games, resources are more ablative, you aren't in any threat until you are worn down.

Add spell slots into the equation, and it gets even worse.

Random monsters are, fundamentally, time pressure.

[stoutstien]

Grab a copy of worlds without numbers. Free PDF.

Lot of tools to help frame any game regardless of system as far as this goes.

Narrative tools should be your primary focus. Mechanics will follow suit once you have that frame in place.

[ciopo]

step 1: all encounters "resets/respawns" on long rest
step 2: only "new" encounters give loot/wealth/experience/progress
step 3: calibrate "fast travel"/"encounter bypassing milestones" at around the amount of progress you feel is appropriate for 1 day of adventuring

so, if they nova hard and spend all resource to nuke one encounter... they gained whatever that encounter was worth... and they will have to face it again the day after, but gain nothing from it, thus they must defeat it with less resource expenditure, so they have resources for the next encounter. Mix and match how many eno****ers and how hard they should be in a day to taste

Is there any way I can communicate this pressure to them?
Hmmm. I guess this could work if there are a LOT of shortcuts.

Otherwise it seems like we are just going to be doing the same few fights over and over and over until everyone, including the GM, is bored to tears and hates that game.

I don't know what your preferred pacing would be, but let's say each time they defeat a miniboss, guarding the stairs going down a level, they get a teleportation token that let them teleport to those stairs going down.

So, if they don't want to repeat the same content with no progression ad nauseam, they "must" reach and defeat a new miniboss. Calibrate the amount of rooms/encounters along the way accordingly to how difficult you want a floor to be, and it becomes very puzzlelike, like they nuke a first encounter to learn its in and outs, next time they can spend less resources on it to have more resources for the next step toward the miniboss

kinda timeloop feel actually, you could wrap it around to be a timeloop story fairly easily, just put some "your consciousness is sent back in time but your body is not, boss creatures drop "save points" for permanent progress"

very gamified tho

[King of Nowhere]

Agreed.

Sort of.

In real life, you don't want unnecessary encounters. In the fiction, a wandering monster or a trap can easily inflict a fatal wound on a person. While by the rules of most games, resources are more ablative, you aren't in any threat until you are worn down.

Add spell slots into the equation, and it gets even worse.

Depends on the risk/reward.

in real life, an invading barbarian horde would risk death every time they sacked a village; a paesant could easily kill somebody with a hunting bow or a pitchfork. but they took the risk every time to loot the village.
if those monsters - for some inexplicable reason - have treasure, then it is normal that adventurers will go out of their way to hunt them

[ahyangyi]

Daily spell limit is one way to run the resource management game.

Food is also the traditional roguelike resource. I guess you want to get rid of certain spells if you go this route. And encourages eating and even processing the corpses of monsters, which isn't good for all tables.

Impeding doom is another.

And another resource management idea inspired by roguelike games is powerful consumables as both part of the loot and the main resource to manage. Combat would be brutal and you'd really need to use your consumables well to win them. Then avoiding combat becomes valuable because it saves your consumables.

So you don't have to rely on one way to do resource management, you can use another. Alternatively, you can also just decide that resource management is dumb. You are playing an RPG, not a management game, after all.

[Talakeal]

So you don't have to rely on one way to do resource management, you can use another. Alternatively, you can also just decide that resource management is dumb. You are playing an RPG, not a management game, after all.

Unfortunately, all RPGs I am familiar with use resource management as the primary, and to an extent the only, form of mechanical challenge.

Depends on the risk/reward.

in real life, an invading barbarian horde would risk death every time they sacked a village; a peasant could easily kill somebody with a hunting bow or a pitchfork. but they took the risk every time to loot the village.
if those monsters - for some inexplicable reason - have treasure, then it is normal that adventurers will go out of their way to hunt them

Right.

What I am more talking about is traps and wandering monsters; these are non-issues for PCs because the risk of death is practically nil in any combat that the PCs have not been beaten down in first.

The last hex-crawl I ran suffered from this problem; the PCs would go back to town after the first fight of every dungeon, and if they actually suffered any noticeable resource expenditure on the way to the dungeon, they would abort the journey entirely. More random encounters made the problem worse, not better.

In real life / narrative, you are not significantly less likely to die if you take an arrow to the chest in the first fight or the last fight, so the goal should be minimizing the number of fights total.

I don't know what your preferred pacing would be, but let's say each time they defeat a miniboss, guarding the stairs going down a level, they get a teleportation token that let them teleport to those stairs going down.

Preferably something that requires the players to put some thought into the game and where actions can potentially have consequences.

I can't really get much more specific than that.

[Vahnavoi]

Is there any way I can communicate this pressure to them?

Yes. Keep a calendar and make your players keep a calendar. Even better, have a clock, with some things happening in actual real time. Character dialogue is the easy example: how long it takes your players to say a thing is how long saying the thing actually takes. No more "talking is a free action".

Ok, when you say "as deep as you can" that's the key issue. If players went "as deep as they could" there would be no issue. The problem is that the optimal move is instead to turn around and head back to town the first time a resource is depleted in any way.

You grossly misunderstand. Depletion of resources is what decides how deep you can go. This is based on actual consumption, not hypothetical rationing. Used up a vital resource, like all your ammo, in the first room? Welp, that's as far as you could go. Time to head back. This isn't "optimal". It is basic. Good players can get farther with the same resources, while maintaining the same level of risk, because they can ration better. That way, they begin to approach optimality. Actual optimality is something else.

Not quite sure what tabletop RPG could do an entire expedition in 15 minutes; heck most rounds of combat last longer than that at tables I have been at regardless of the system.

Systems build for speed. You are used to stupid crunchy games where even wiping your ass takes a die roll and a table look-up. I can't give you names because most of my examples aren't commercial, they're unnamed custom engines made by convention game masters like me to teach new players how to play roleplaying games as quickly as we can manage.

Why is that non-savvy? That sounds like a pretty optimal strategy to me.

You must've missed "forever". The lack of savviness is the idea of trying to clear a dungeon level that cannot be cleared, like trying to kill all the monsters when new ones will always wander to the area, or trying to make a complete map of a structure that changes when you aren't looking at it. The task can literally never be finished, because the attempt is based on false assumption.

If we move past that misconception, the question you're asking is effectively "why would a player move from level 1 to level 2?" The answer is what was already said: diminishing returns. In Angband, each character level takes more experience points than the last, and each monster gives less experience point for each kill. Put together, staying at dungeon level 1 killing level 1 enemies means you hit a plateau in progression. It also means you ever level 1 treasure that sells for pennies. On the equipment side, there's a limited selection in town. Put together, this means very slowly working towards a hard cap.

It might be possible to become effectively invulnerable to level 1 enemies this way, but before that point, it means taking the same risks over and over again for ever decreasing gains. This is not "optimal" in any shape or form. At most, it's "optimal" for making sure a character doesn't die. But on a higher level, playing this risk-averse means that Morgoth wins. He has infinite resources too and maintains control of 99 levels out of 100 while the player grinds away.

Actual optimal play moves down to dungeon level 2 when player hits diminishing returns, then repeats and moves to 3, then 4, so on and so forth. The strategy breaks down late in the dungeon because character level and effective equipment hit functional gaps before dungeon level 100. Grinding in the lower levels cannot actually decrease even the risks of playing at those levels. At that point, the player will have to be actually good at tactics and start to beeline for stairs to beat the game. They can return to earlier dungeon levels to be invincible there, but, again, this means Morgoth wins.

If the players can rest in the dungeon, doesn't that just make the problem worse?

[. . .]

It seems like it would turn the game into "Can you find a safe place to rest? If so, infinite resources you win. If not, random TPK in the night, you lose."

Wrong. Games in the style of Angband have infinite resources, because retreating to safety and restocking is always an option.

In the alternative suggested, infinite resources are neither here nor there. Finding and upholding camp takes time and work. In short, it costs resources, not just replenishes them. This means a camp is unlikely to be safe in perpetuity - if the players want to maintain a level of risk, they have to move on.

Random TPKs can be a thing in both or neither. They are very much a thing in Angband. A player character does regenerate health and spellpoints while in the dungeon. However, monsters regenerate too, and new wandering monsters arrive out of sight. Resting in the wrong spot means no ground is gained, or worse. Infinite resources cut both ways.

[WrittenInBlood]

Make monster respawn dependent on their "nests", scattered around - spawning pools, summoning chambers, portals or something like this, flavor it to taste. Players should be aware of how it works, or else they will think everything just resets to the starting state. Pressure to find and eliminate "nests" first will encourage exploration, eliminating them will clearly mark party progress, turning back without getting at least one "nest" will be intended fail state.

[Talakeal]

Grab a copy of worlds without numbers. Free PDF.

Lot of tools to help frame any game regardless of system as far as this goes.

Narrative tools should be your primary focus. Mechanics will follow suit once you have that frame in place.

Downloaded and skimmed the entire book.

From what I could tell, it was just a slightly stripped-down AD&D with tons of tables for things that I find unnecessary, and my players won't give two craps about.

The only rule I noticed that I could tell had any bearing to this was the spell slots; fewer castings per day but not broken up by level, which seems like it would make the appeal of going nova so much worse.

Could you please direct me toward what sections I of the book I should read in more detail?

Yes. Keep a calendar and make your players keep a calendar. Even better, have a clock, with some things happening in actual real time. Character dialogue is the easy example: how long it takes your players to say a thing is how long saying the thing actually takes. No more "talking is a free action".

A calendar only helps if the players already know everything about the scenario; how big the dungeon is, how much time they have to explore it, and what is the optimal path to whatever they need to stop to avert the clock.

I don't follow. What does keeping a clock or making players talk in real time have to do with pacing dungeon exploration?

You grossly misunderstand. Depletion of resources is what decides how deep you can go. This is based on actual consumption, not hypothetical rationing. Used up a vital resource, like all your ammo, in the first room? Welp, that's as far as you could go. Time to head back. This isn't "optimal". It is basic. Good players can get farther with the same resources, while maintaining the same level of risk, because they can ration better. That way, they begin to approach optimality. Actual optimality is something else.

But what is the pressure to make the characters actually try and engage with the game?

Why not just blow all of your ammo (and other resources) in the first room and go back to town? Why ration at all? Why go deeper?

Systems build for speed. You are used to stupid crunchy games where even wiping your ass takes a die roll and a table look-up. I can't give you names because most of my examples aren't commercial, they're unnamed custom engines made by convention game masters like me to teach new players how to play roleplaying games as quickly as we can manage.

I am going to guess by "stupid" you mean "requires thought", which is almost the opposite.

IMO, it isn't "crunchiness" that slows down the game until the high end of player skill; for most people its an inability to remember the rules, focus, do mental math, etc.

At higher player skill, it is abut weighing options and making plans, which is imo a good thing.

Both ends of the spectrum, of course, suffer from decision paralysis, but I don't think the system has any influence over that.


Also, its really weird that you like old school dungeon crawling but hate crunchy games. That seems like such a contradiction.

You must've missed "forever". The lack of savviness is the idea of trying to clear a dungeon level that cannot be cleared, like trying to kill all the monsters when new ones will always wander to the area, or trying to make a complete map of a structure that changes when you aren't looking at it. The task can literally never be finished, because the attempt is based on false assumption.

If we move past that misconception, the question you're asking is effectively "why would a player move from level 1 to level 2?" The answer is what was already said: diminishing returns. In Angband, each character level takes more experience points than the last, and each monster gives less experience point for each kill. Put together, staying at dungeon level 1 killing level 1 enemies means you hit a plateau in progression. It also means you ever level 1 treasure that sells for pennies. On the equipment side, there's a limited selection in town. Put together, this means very slowly working towards a hard cap.

It might be possible to become effectively invulnerable to level 1 enemies this way, but before that point, it means taking the same risks over and over again for ever decreasing gains. This is not "optimal" in any shape or form. At most, it's "optimal" for making sure a character doesn't die. But on a higher level, playing this risk-averse means that Morgoth wins. He has infinite resources too and maintains control of 99 levels out of 100 while the player grinds away.

Actual optimal play moves down to dungeon level 2 when player hits diminishing returns, then repeats and moves to 3, then 4, so on and so forth. The strategy breaks down late in the dungeon because character level and effective equipment hit functional gaps before dungeon level 100. Grinding in the lower levels cannot actually decrease even the risks of playing at those levels. At that point, the player will have to be actually good at tactics and start to beeline for stairs to beat the game. They can return to earlier dungeon levels to be invincible there, but, again, this means Morgoth wins.

I have never played Angband. I have played a lot of Diablo.

Is there a timer you are fighting against? What does it mean for Morgoth to win?

In virtually every RPG I have ever played, Diablo included, the optimum strategy is to grind the easy area until you cannot progress there anymore, then repeat in the next easiest area.

The only way to prevent this that I can find is random cheap death. In Diablo, this just means you load your save. In a game with actual stakes, it means the game is over and everyone is pissed off, especially if the random cheap death occurred as a consequence of natural play.

Wrong. Games in the style of Angband have infinite resources, because retreating to safety and restocking is always an option.

That's great, but for a game with unlimited resources to have any challenge at all, it requires a level of skill far higher than most players are capable of.

In the alternative suggested, infinite resources are neither here nor there. Finding and upholding camp takes time and work. In short, it costs resources, not just replenishes them. This means a camp is unlikely to be safe in perpetuity - if the players want to maintain a level of risk, they have to move on.

What does a camp costing resources look like in practice?

[Quertus]

Sample #2 - grey hawk meets Diablo

2e D&D, random loot tables (that orc might be carrying a vorpal blade, or a Staff of the Magi, whereas a Dragon might have a potion or Cursed item).

Set encounters do not repopulate; random encounters also get depleted, but do replenish over time (representing monsters crawling up from below or something).

Adventure deep enough, and you might find another entrance, hidden from the outside. This allows new “start/spawn points”, so the PCs don’t have to start from scratch every time.

Still would be nice to have at least 1 other PC party Exploring the dungeon in tandem. Optimal would be to write scripts for a number of other parties Exploring the dungeon

[Mastikator]

Is there any way I can communicate this pressure to them?

They also aren't going to know how big the dungeon is or where the "last boss" is without having already explored it.

Why are they exploring it at all? They must have some kind of incentive, a quest or the promise of treasure. You can use that to inform them that the treasure will be used against them, or that the last boss (which is unknown) will do something bad.

A decent way to ensure they care about the last boss doing something bad is to first establish a status quo that works in the players favor, then inform them that the last boss intends on destroying it. It can be something like "they live happily in a nice village where everything is nice and peaceful, then the evil creatures arrived and started killing, they come from the mega dungeon and work for the mysterious evil overlord that they've heard about in folk lore".

Make sure the details conform to whatever setting you're planning on running. Players are spurred into action either because they wish to protect a status quo that benefit them, or because they wish to disrupt a status quo that disadvantage them. Work with your players when making characters, and secretly plot against create incentives for them to spur them into going into the mega dungeon.

[Talakeal]

Why are they exploring it at all? They must have some kind of incentive, a quest or the promise of treasure. You can use that to inform them that the treasure will be used against them, or that the last boss (which is unknown) will do something bad.

A decent way to ensure they care about the last boss doing something bad is to first establish a status quo that works in the players favor, then inform them that the last boss intends on destroying it. It can be something like "they live happily in a nice village where everything is nice and peaceful, then the evil creatures arrived and started killing, they come from the mega dungeon and work for the mysterious evil overlord that they've heard about in folk lore".

Make sure the details conform to whatever setting you're planning on running. Players are spurred into action either because they wish to protect a status quo that benefit them, or because they wish to disrupt a status quo that disadvantage them. Work with your players when making characters, and secretly plot against create incentives for them to spur them into going into the mega dungeon.

That's pretty close to what I am going for.

They just aren't going to learn about the "evil overlord" until well into the dungeon, at first its just "figure out where these monsters are coming from and wipe them out at the source!"

[kyoryu]

I mean, really, the first question of order is "what does a megadungeon mean to you?" I can tell you what it means in a 1eAD&D kind of way, and what that implies about campaign structure. But without that, we can't give whys. And without the whys, the whats are kinda hard.

[gbaji]

Ok, when you say "as deep as you can" that's the key issue. If players went "as deep as they could" there would be no issue. The problem is that the optimal move is instead to turn around and head back to town the first time a resource is depleted in any way.

Knowing my players they would just go back to town they after springing each trap until they miraculously got through without ever springing a single one.

Trapping players in the dungeon might work once or twice, but making it a regular thing strains plausibility and also cuts off the players to interact with the whole town side of the game (buying and selling, talking to NPCs, crafting or other downtime projects, etc.)

And there's your problem. You need to decide what kind of dungeon this is. On the one hand, you seem to not want your PCs to just hoof it back to town after every encounter to rest safely, resupply, sell loot, buy new stuff, and then head back in. But on the other hand, you seem to want them to do exactly that. But you want to somehow force them to travel a specific distance into the dungeon in each trip from/to town that suits your view of "enough dungeoneering for one trip", but it's not the same as what they think is "enough dungeoneering for one trip".

Is this megadungeon something to be "won/defeated/whatever"? Or is it a massive setting with tons of dungeon crawl stuff to go explore? The former maybe doesn't fit well into the "megadungeon" model. You should instead have some specific threat in the dungeon, and a specific time frame it needs to be defeated, and then send them off to deal with it.

An actual megadungeon is it's own thing. It's the sprawling underworld with a cave leading to it near town, that draws adventurers from all over to risk their lives exploring. If you actually want do do a megadungeon, here are the suggestions I would make:

1. Make travelling into/outof the dungeon something significant that they must commit to. Either make it a very long distance away from town or require that some significant "chunk" of the dungeon must be completed before one can quickly/easily return. Otherwise, they must slog through the same terraign again each time.

2. As mentioned above, instead of it being a single multi-leveled dungeon, make multiple themed areas, which can be accessed independently. So the initial cave has a half dozen portals in it. Each transports you somewhere deep into the dungeon complex, and requires that you locate the exit portal/key/whatever to leave.

3. Have additional/deeper dungeon areas be "keyed". The first tier of areas can be accessed openly from the starting cave. Within can be found keys that will open up access to additional areas. Perhaps the chamber you are transported to also has additional portals which you can't use initially. Finding the keys to them will allow for quick travel to "new/deeper" areas (travel through first portal to entry chamber of a dungeon area, then can use any portals there that you have the keys for in order to travel to new/deeper/tougher areas).

4. Rinse and repeat. Note that you can make some areas themed and linear (you find the keys to portals in an areas starting chamber within that area), or non-linear (keys to portals may be scattered around, forcing you to explore multiple starting areas before you can find keys. Also, until you have found the exit area, you have no way to actually leave, so you can't just find a key in area1, to a portal in area3 and hop on over and bypass that area entirely (just step into the entry portal and use a key to a portal there to go to another dungeon). You can, but you will also have to spend time exploring area3 to find the exit (or maybe the exit key? just to make return trips faster/easier).

5. You can also require multiple key "pieces" in order to open some portals. Makes for even less linear dungeoneering. If you scatter key pieces all over the place, you can basically require your characters to have to do a whole lot of dungeon delving before getting very "deep" into the megadungeon. Again, this is about presenting the players with specific sized "chunks" of dungeon they must explore to make progress in the larger megadungeon. So they must manage resources for each chunk, but over time are slowly progressing deeper into the whole.

6. It goes without saying that as you progress into deeper tiers, the difficulty goes up (as to the rewards). Again, this is aimed at still requiring them to really push themselves to get through each area. Failure to do so will require them to try again and have to slog through the same area again. If you really want to push them, make the key pieces only remain outside the dungeon if they complete a set. So you can find and use the exit key each time, but you must find 3 or 4 specific key pieces within the area before you can come back and just use a portal to bypass this area in the future. So each key piece is like an emphermal thing that fades away if you leave the dungeon, but if you put all of a set together it becomes a solid key that can be used on return trips.

Lots of different ways to manage this.


Requiring some sort of "waypont" be reached before one can physically leave forces the players to actually explore an entire area/section on each trip. The difficulty of each area will determine what power level they should probably achieve before attempting it. And yeah. No teleporting in/out of the dungeon (it's an ancient complex, woven with powerful magics that none can penetrate, right?).


You could literally run an entire massive campaign just with that sort of thing. And hey. Some of the portals don't have to take you to underground "dungeons", right? You could literally rationalize any combination of adventure types with this sort of thing if you really wanted to. This kind of setup presents "chunks" of adventuring that must be completed before leaving (resource manage is required). But also allows for relatively quick travel back to the next unexplored area. And yeah, you can have previous areas respawn over time as well if you want. They can re-explore them, but (hopefully) should not want to. They should prefer to explore new/challenging areas, for new/better loot/exp/rewards.


You can also do something like this with a traditional (but very very large) leveled dungeon. It's just a lot harder to both rationalize how to get them in and out of the dungeon, and progress very deep into said dungeon, while also requiring management of resources. Unless the dungeon itself contains occasional very clear "safe zones", it just wont work. Also, you have to put method to get back to town (if your assumption is that they should be able to do this at all). So you're already talking about some sort of shortcut/portals/something to facilitate them getting from "x levels into the dungeon" back to town and then back to where they finished up exploring last time. If you're already rationlizing that, why not just go all the way with the concept and actually structure the dungeon itself that way.

Again. If you're actually setting a campaign around "exploring a megadungeon", then you can absolutely justify this sort of thing. If it's just "a big dungeon", then you can't and have to accept that the players are going to use any/all of their abilities to make things as easy as possible on themselves. I've done "big dungeons". But those really are different animals than what it sounds like you are wanting to run.

If this sounds a lot like some MMORPG dungeons, yeah, it kinda is. But this method actually "works".

I actually ran something similar to this not too long ago (well, introduced it). The players found a means to travel to a limited number of additional planes. One of them was sort of a mashup of the EQ "plane of war"+"bastion of thunder" zones. They had a need to explore the plane sufficiently (needed to get some info for planar travel research), but stuck it out long enough to complete the "war" part outside the giant bastion thingie, to gain a key to the tower in the center. Inside will be a ton of different levels and wings, with different elemental themed areas, and keys required to progress up the massive tower/bastion. They've left it for the time being, but plan to come back sometime with a powerful group and continue exploring.

So yeah. This sort of thing can also be introduced as just a side element in a larger campaign setting if you want. Kinda of a "hey. If you guys are tired of dealing with kingdom politics, and world spanning threats, you can always just hop over to that plane and we can do a few months of dungeon crawling". It's a fun diversion from more story driven adventures.

[tyckspoon]

But what is the pressure to make the characters actually try and engage with the game?

Why not just blow all of your ammo (and other resources) in the first room and go back to town? Why ration at all? Why go deeper?

In virtually every RPG I have ever played, Diablo included, the optimum strategy is to grind the easy area until you cannot progress there anymore, then repeat in the next easiest area.

The only way to prevent this that I can find is random cheap death. In Diablo, this just means you load your save. In a game with actual stakes, it means the game is over and everyone is pissed off, especially if the random cheap death occurred as a consequence of natural play.

So, standard caveat that no standard of 'rational play' or common play patterns appears to apply to the unruly collection of neuroses that makes up your players.. but generally the reason for why this doesn't happen is it's simply not fun. There is a quote from the developers of.. IIRC, Dungeon Stone Soup? Maybe ADOM? One of the classic style roguelikes which says "We have already implemented a penalty for slime-farming. It's slime-farming." (Context: slimes are a reproducing enemy, and each instance has the usual chance to drop items. Farming them involves deliberately allowing them to reproduce and then killing them for potentially hours. This is a fairly risk free way to farm anything the slime can drop, which can upset the balance of risk to reward that most of the game's challenge is based around. It's also ludicrously tedious, and involves hours and hours of performing repetitive tasks instead of.. actually playing the game, and so the devs see no particular reason to disable it or further penalize the activity.)

Now, that is in a video game, where if you want to do that you personally get to suffer through all the slog. Trying to set up a roguelike dungeon for a tabletop RPG may result in your players just declaring that they do this and expecting to fast-forward to the loot summary, similar to the 'we stay in town crafting and selling stuff until we have X00% more money than the game expects, and only then we start adventuring' 'hack' you mentioned in the economy thread. If you seriously have to build in a mechanic to defeat that, I think what you have to do is configure the rewards such that purely what you get from killing foes is at least slightly negative compared to expected costs. Set up two portions of expected rewards per [discrete dungeon segment]; one block is a one-time only reward for accessing or clearing a particular section. Retrieve a particular unique item, bounty for slaying a special non-respawning monster, special payment for discovering a new entry path to a deeper realm of the dungeon, bringing back new information about a monster type that was not previously well documented, whatever. If you consistently push forward, these benefits will mean your rewards grow more than your expected costs.

Then the other section is what you can harvest from the regenerating/respawning part of the dungeon. Monster drops/loot from the enemies. The income from this should be less than the expected cost of acquiring it - if every time you raid Floor 1 you spend 10 GP of arrows, 30 GP of healing potions, and a 4 GP 'entering the dungeon' tax, then the monsters on Floor 1 should give back maybe 30 GP worth of stuff. You can re-run this floor if you want, but each time you do it it will dig into your actual reward budget, and sooner or later you have to move on to bigger challenges if you don't want to wind up being known as those guys who sweep Floor 1 so more important adventurers don't have to waste their time and dirty their boots pushing through the Abnormally Runty Goblin Nest every time they go down the dungeon.

(But really I think the bigger thing there is you are convinced that your players will always seek to destroy the game as a mechanical system instead of engaging with the premise and actually playing the intended game, which is not something you can fix on a design level, and I think games that try to do so rather suffer as games because it means they're always worried about 'is there an exploitable way to approach this rule' instead of 'is this rule any fun.')

[stoutstien]

Downloaded and skimmed the entire book.

From what I could tell, it was just a slightly stripped-down AD&D with tons of tables for things that I find unnecessary, and my players won't give two craps about.

If your players don't give a crap about the world then NOTHING you do will matter because, without fail trying to maintain pacing purely via mechanical leverage will hit a point where the logic or the game collapses. And not in a good way
There are entire sites who's sole reason to exist is to be dedicated to circumventing anything you do on that level.

Honestly don't waste time and just play kill sector or Mork borg. Save a ton of headache.

If you want resources to matter don't give them any and time is the biggest resource of them all

[Talakeal]

(But really I think the bigger thing there is you are convinced that your players will always seek to destroy the game as a mechanical system instead of engaging with the premise and actually playing the intended game, which is not something you can fix on a design level, and I think games that try to do so rather suffer as games because it means they're always worried about 'is there an exploitable way to approach this rule' instead of 'is this rule any fun.')

Its more that I expect players to play smart.

As long as challenge is linked to resource attrition, then any challenge in the game is wholly illusory as long as the players can recover resources at their own pace.