Pacing a megadungeon

[Pauly]

My notes for the room:

"The Vertex Stash:

20' x 20'. A medical supply room that has long since been looted. The floor has collapsed into a giant muddy sinkhole. 8 ghasts lair in the room, and 1 more will dig itself out of the mud each turn that they detect the presence of prey. There are an effectively unlimited number of them, and if the room is not secured somehow they will wander about randomly; add a pack of ghasts to the random encounter table for the first floor."



The sinkhole was not the only known path to the lower level, honestly, its not really a path at all as it is a huge pit of mud the PCs would have to dig through.

I haven't drawn the second floor in detail yet, but I am pretty sure when I do the room with the ghasts in it is going to be entirely blocked off as part of a larger cave in, I don't think the PCs will have to face their full numbers, although if they do they will be much stronger at that point and better equipped to do so.



This is always a weird phenomenon to me.

If you put an unusual obstacle in the player's path, they think of it as a puzzle with a single solution.

My shards of hate encounter that splits like a hydra when killed was a classic example of this; its a standard fight where beating him to death doesn't work, but suddenly all of the dozens of ways one would bypass an encounter without beating it to death within the games normal rules (stealth, trickery, crowd control magic, trapped it, diplomacy, etc.) suddenly disappear from the players mind and instead they fixate on finding that one magical "puzzle" solution that they think the GM wants from them. I have had similar situations where the PCs failed to pick a lock and assume its a puzzle rather than simply trying to break the door down, magic their way past, find an alternate route, find a key, ask to be let in, etc.



Reinforcements are a fairly abstract mechanic, but I don't see them as simulating a "video game" so much as any situation where the enemies have a large pool to draw on but lack the mobility to deploy them all at once.

Previously in the thread you mentioned that there is a range on the ghast’s detect prey ability, but it isn’t mentioned in your GM notes what is. Since the ghasts only start coming out once the party enter the room, the reasonable assumption is that it can’t be much more than 20 feet.
Anyway, what is the purpose of this room?
It isn’t the path to downstairs.
It isn’t to give the party a chance to thin out or eliminate the ghasts.
It can’t be cleared [i.e. kill all the monsters in it]
It doesn’t appear to be a barrier to forward progress to the next room, since collapsing the ceiling would presumably block the room with rubble, and your GM notes indicate that the room needs to be locked off or bad things will happen.
There doesn’t appear to be any cool treasure they can loot or important lore to be found. And collapsing the ceiling carries the risk that if the spellcaster messes up their aim the ceiling will collapse on the stuff they’re meant to find.
It seems that failure to adopt a GM approved solution [collapse the ceiling/lock the door] will punish the players with more and more ghasts until they adopt the GM approved solution.
So why does this room exist? What does the party gain by solving this puzzle? NB since the room can’t be cleared and the ghasts can’t be negotiated with it is a puzzle not an encounter.

Another question. Hoe strong are these ghasts - STR 25 or something similar? Because mud is heavy, and it needs to be displaced somewhere so the ghast can get out. In mine collapses and earthquakes, people buried under more than a foot or so of soil/dust/gravel are unable to dig themselves out.

Re Shard of Hate. My experience is that once the tactical map is layed out players will assume the situation is a tactical problem with a tactical solution. My advice is that if there is no tactical solution available to not lay out the tactical map.
Re locked door treated as a puzzle. One lesson I learned as a young player was when our party had a similar situation. The GM had us role a perception check, and to the player who rolled the highest he passed a note saying that there are no levers, no clues and absolutely no indications of anything else similar and your character realizes that this is not a puzzle. Since then I’ve used that method when the players are barking up the wrong tree in the wrong forest.

On the reinforcements issue. I have read what your intention is. However, as a player if I encountered the ghast room it would feel to me exactly like a video game mechanic to me.

[DrMartin]

Problem at my table is weak egos. They take hints as calling them stupid or trying to trick them.

In said ghoul encounter, at one point Brian killed the last ghoul standing between him and the door, and I thought it the perfect time to move up, claim the chokepoint, and end the encounter.

He killed it, I said "and then what?" he said "nothing, my turn is over," I said "are you sure?" and he said "Why?" and I said "Because its a great chance to move up and make progress rather than just treading water and being surrounded" to which he got mad and said I was trying to trick him into leaving the safety of the group.

I assume that, leaving aside all the troubles that come out in this sort of forum-therapy, you guys still have fun playing. So I think you could consider channelling that into something constructive, and start broadcasting your sessions, with the final goal of acquiring a loyal fanbase that would go to the lengths of drawing and animating scenes like these and putting them on youtube for everyone's enjoyment.

[gbaji]

The situation as described reminds me of the infamous 'puzzle with one solution'. Which is, as far as I know, a thing to be avoided in play.

Also: it's easy to see all the possible solution from GM's seat of perfect vision and understanding.

It's hard to see all the possible solutions when you are boots-deep in ghast guts, thinking 'this might be the last one!'.

That's why I avoid general tropes associated with PC games (e.g. endless stream of enemies, locking progress behind upgrades/single item).

Sure. Maybe. In this case though (although the description of the sinkhole seems to have changed), my understanding is that the PCs were able to see down into the chamber below the sinkhole and saw a "horde" of ghasts. That right there screams "this is not something you are supposed to straight up fight". They also knew that this "wasn't the last one", nor was the next one, nor the next.

And ironically, they did hit on the "correct" (and honestly obvious) solution of "seal the sinkhole". It just faiiled and then they paniced when their first plan didn't work. But again, this was not a "puzzle with one solution" issue, where you try something and it's not the right solution. They tried something and failed at execution. They had every expecation that "preventing more ghasts from coming up and overwhelming us" was the objective here.

At this point the sinkhole is the only known path to the lower levels. So dropping the ceiling in on it wouldn’t be high on my list of options as a player. Also the ghasts are a foe that are going to have to be defeated eventually anyway and are available to be defeated now, and there is no sign of a push-this-magic-red-button to kill all the ghasts device.

I don’t agree that sealing off the entrance is necessarily the clear objective.

Yeah. Maybe dropping the ceiliing on it was a bit much. I would have gone with something a bit less "final". I don't know what ablities the players had access to though. Again though "clear the current ghasts, figure out that as long as we're in the room, more will keep cominng up, then close and bar/seal the ghasts route to us" seems like a pretty reasonable sequence of events to go through here. For most players. And again, this seems to be what they figured out as well.

They also don't know (and can't assume) that this is the only way "down to the lower levels", nor do they know that the ghast horde is something the must defeat at any point at all. Not everything in a dungeon complex is there to be "cleared out". Somethings, just "are". So perhaps, long ago, some ancient evil whatsit opened up a hole to some nether plane, and a horde of ghasts flowed though, and the only solution was to seal them off (in the lower level of the dungeon). Some time later, a sinkhole apepared, which gave the ghasts access to this level, but without many lives to sense there, only a few have wandered up, and haven't wandered out of the room they found themselves in (was the door previously closed and barred before the players arrived? Perhaps the goblins locked up this room for exactly this reason). So until the party comes along, everything is fine and has been for ages.

The presumption here is that "physically fight and kill all the ghasts" is a pretty unlikely/poor scenario objective. Perhaps there's some means of reversing whatever happend that brought them here and *then* that section of the lower level could be explored (and perhaps great ancient treasures lost for ages, recovered). If it was just "kill them all until they are dead", then why are they still there? If there's any reason to do this anyway. Unless they're like pets of someone maybe, but then they'd be more intelligently directed.

Eh. I would just never assume that blocking this off would cause a problem. As a player, I would assume this is a "warning of something down below", seal it off, and move on. If we never find a way to go "down", then maybe we revisit the ghast room, but that's somewhat a last resort.

[Pauly]

Problem at my table is weak egos. They take hints as calling them stupid or trying to trick them.

In said ghoul encounter, at one point Brian killed the last ghoul standing between him and the door, and I thought it the perfect time to move up, claim the chokepoint, and end the encounter.

He killed it, I said "and then what?" he said "nothing, my turn is over," I said "are you sure?" and he said "Why?" and I said "Because its a great chance to move up and make progress rather than just treading water and being surrounded" to which he got mad and said I was trying to trick him into leaving the safety of the group.

Perhaps if you said “After you kill the ghast you look around and see that it was the last ghast in the room and the door to the room is open and unlocked. You can see the next ghast [x] feet away down the corridor beyond the door. What do you want to do with the rest of your turn?” Brian would have responded better.
Saying “it’s a great chance to move up and make progress rather than just treading water and being surrounded” carries a pretty heavy implication that the player is doing something wrong.

[Lacco]

Re Shard of Hate. My experience is that once the tactical map is layed out players will assume the situation is a tactical problem with a tactical solution. My advice is that if there is no tactical solution available to not lay out the tactical map.
Re locked door treated as a puzzle. One lesson I learned as a young player was when our party had a similar situation. The GM had us role a perception check, and to the player who rolled the highest he passed a note saying that there are no levers, no clues and absolutely no indications of anything else similar and your character realizes that this is not a puzzle. Since then I’ve used that method when the players are barking up the wrong tree in the wrong forest.

On the reinforcements issue. I have read what your intention is. However, as a player if I encountered the ghast room it would feel to me exactly like a video game mechanic to me.

Similar view here.

I may steal the method using the note. I normally do it openly, or just enjoy the fun distraction (depending on what the time is and if the players are enjoying themselves).

And in one case, when they were actually really doing serious preparations for certain event that would not normally transpire (they were expecting a group of enemies behind a door based on some really unsuccessful intel gathering and evaluation), I actually moved the encounter there. It made it much more satisfying.

I assume that, leaving aside all the troubles that come out in this sort of forum-therapy, you guys still have fun playing. So I think you could consider channelling that into something constructive, and start broadcasting your sessions, with the final goal of acquiring a loyal fanbase that would go to the lengths of drawing and animating scenes like these and putting them on youtube for everyone's enjoyment.

I'd watch it.

Also: forum-therapy is actually a nice term for what's happening in these threads. Did the opening post get an actual answer?

This is always a weird phenomenon to me.

If you put an unusual obstacle in the player's path, they think of it as a puzzle with a single solution.

My shards of hate encounter that splits like a hydra when killed was a classic example of this; its a standard fight where beating him to death doesn't work, but suddenly all of the dozens of ways one would bypass an encounter without beating it to death within the games normal rules (stealth, trickery, crowd control magic, trapped it, diplomacy, etc.) suddenly disappear from the players mind and instead they fixate on finding that one magical "puzzle" solution that they think the GM wants from them. I have had similar situations where the PCs failed to pick a lock and assume its a puzzle rather than simply trying to break the door down, magic their way past, find an alternate route, find a key, ask to be let in, etc.

Reinforcements are a fairly abstract mechanic, but I don't see them as simulating a "video game" so much as any situation where the enemies have a large pool to draw on but lack the mobility to deploy them all at once.

BRC explained the 'puzzle vs combat' better than I could, so no further comment to that.

The 'video game' part was mainly focused on the general approach 'if PCs are detected, an endless stream of NPC enemies starts to appear'. Feels videogamey for me. But that's dungeon design: in some cases, you just want the cool room and don't care how it interacts with the rest of the stuff.

Example: if ghasts have the 'sense living' power on, how come the ones lairing inside were not already on their way to the PCs? They should have detected them already if they are able to do so from below.

Were the PCs the only living thing to come around?

Sure. Maybe. In this case though (although the description of the sinkhole seems to have changed), my understanding is that the PCs were able to see down into the chamber below the sinkhole and saw a "horde" of ghasts. That right there screams "this is not something you are supposed to straight up fight". They also knew that this "wasn't the last one", nor was the next one, nor the next.

And ironically, they did hit on the "correct" (and honestly obvious) solution of "seal the sinkhole". It just faiiled and then they paniced when their first plan didn't work. But again, this was not a "puzzle with one solution" issue, where you try something and it's not the right solution. They tried something and failed at execution. They had every expecation that "preventing more ghasts from coming up and overwhelming us" was the objective here.

I was basing my estimation on the assumption they did not know this fact and they did not see down the chamber based on following:

Basically, you have a sinkhole in the center of a 20' x 20' room. Unbeknownst to the players, there was an undead army stored below, and when they detect living creatures they dig themselves out of the sinkhole at a rate of one per turn, and a half dozen are already in the room.

Emphasis mine.

For me, in D&D, this would scream "puzzle time!" - and while I know the OP does not use D&D, the game is set in megadungeon and the opening post stated it was about old-school megadungeon.

Old-school megadungeons - in my mind, based on the assortment of articles I read about those - had specific encounters that were 'puzzle encounters' and this would definitely look like one from players' point of view - fighting does not work as solution, so it's a puzzle, a trick or a trap. There were no 'endless streams' of enemies (that would be the 'puzzle' or 'trick' entry), there were just stated random amounts: overwhelming amounts of enemies are normal, endless stream means there is a puzzle/trap/trick encounter and you need to figure it out.

Let's say the players saw the 'horde of ghasts'. In that case, plugging the hole becomes a matter of survival and pushing forward makes sense. If they did not see it, just a room with x ghasts and some additional ones digging out... there are two possible views (from my side): endless stream or final number. Final number of ghasts is just a matter of time. We slowly whittle them down, at this relatively comfortable defensive position. Endless stream? We need to plug it. They tried, they failed.

Now the problem with failure in this case is communication: depending on communication between the GM and players, players may take it as 'you failed so this is not the correct way' or 'this attempt failed, but yes, this is the correct idea'. It's also a matter of mechanics: in this case, failing forward principle is something that solves a lot of these issues ('yes, you plugged it but you also made something fall from above and that something is not happy' or 'yes, you plugged it but you also blocked this door on the other side, so you'll have to spend time and resources to dig through that'). Mechanically speaking, solving a 'puzzle' like this, could be handled just by expending resources (e.g. spell slots, mana, fatigue) if you provide a sound solution. I personally prefer systems that have a reroll mechanic exactly for these reasons (metacurrencies are sometimes a good idea).

From my point of view, in this specific case, players did not perform the appropriate scouting to find out if this was a combat encounter, or a puzzle/trap/trick. The fun thing is, it solved the 15 minute adventuring day issue...

[gbaji]

Previously in the thread you mentioned that there is a range on the ghast’s detect prey ability, but it isn’t mentioned in your GM notes what is. Since the ghasts only start coming out once the party enter the room, the reasonable assumption is that it can’t be much more than 20 feet.
Anyway, what is the purpose of this room?
It isn’t the path to downstairs.
It isn’t to give the party a chance to thin out or eliminate the ghasts.
It can’t be cleared [i.e. kill all the monsters in it]
It doesn’t appear to be a barrier to forward progress to the next room, since collapsing the ceiling would presumably block the room with rubble, and your GM notes indicate that the room needs to be locked off or bad things will happen.
There doesn’t appear to be any cool treasure they can loot or important lore to be found. And collapsing the ceiling carries the risk that if the spellcaster messes up their aim the ceiling will collapse on the stuff they’re meant to find.
It seems that failure to adopt a GM approved solution [collapse the ceiling/lock the door] will punish the players with more and more ghasts until they adopt the GM approved solution.
So why does this room exist? What does the party gain by solving this puzzle? NB since the room can’t be cleared and the ghasts can’t be negotiated with it is a puzzle not an encounter.

I think the flaw here is assuming that every room in a dungeon must have a "purpose" from the pov of the adventuring party exploring it. This is a mistake for GMs to fall into IMO, and results in poor and unrealistic dungeon design. Worse, it actually leads players into assuming that this is the case and are then "looking for the purpose" of each and every room.

The room is just what is there. It does not have an innate "purpose". It just is. In this case, it used to be a store room, and long ago the floor collapsed, opening up access to a lower level where a large horde of ghasts are, so it was closed off and has been left alone since then. This is just environmental. There's no "puzzle" to figure out here. No treasure to be gained. At most, it's environment building. It shows you that there are lower levels, and that this place is old, and that parts of it are falling apart/collapsing. It also does kinda serve the "purpose" of giving the players some clue about one of the hazards that lies in a lower level that they may need to look out for. And if, upon later exploring that level, they run into some other denizens who warn them not to go in a given direction because of "hordes of ghasts", the lightbulb will go off that this is what was below that room they ran into. It creates a sense of continuitiy within the dungeon itself.

Example: if ghasts have the 'sense living' power on, how come the ones lairing inside were not already on their way to the PCs? They should have detected them already if they are able to do so from below.

Were the PCs the only living thing to come around?

Details are lacking, but my assumption is that the door from the T intersection into the room was closed and barred/blocked and that they opened it up, thus running into the ghasts. Again, I'm speculating this, but it's how I would have set this sort of thing up. It serves two purposes:

1. It keeps the ghasts in the room until the party enters and explains why the ghasts aren't roaming around the dungeon floor.

2. It also provides a hint to the players that the ghasts are incapable of opening the door if sufficiently barred/blocked again, so they can bottle this thing right back up if desired.

I was basing my estimation on the assumption they did not know this fact and they did not see down the chamber based on following:

Been a lot of posts, and don't feel like looking back through them all, but I thought one of the descriptions included them looking down through a hole/fissure and seeing the horde of ghasts below, slowly making their way up towards them. This would also be consistent with the description of a "sinkhole", which usually is a section of ground/floor that has collapsed, revealing a larger chamber below. There's usually an actual hole in the ground that opens directly into whatever is below.

The latter description of them digging themselves up through mud is confusing though. Where is the mud coming from? Is there water here? Lots of dirt? This sinkhole should be dry. Just maybe a section of the floor that slants downward steeply to a hole that opens into the ceiling of the chamber below. The ghasts should be climbing up and into the room, not digging up through mud. Which, btw, suggests a much larger radius on their detect living ability, but again with no ability to open the door (don't know how ghasts work in this game, but perhaps they are solid in that they can't go through walls, but maybe not terribly strong in terms of moving physical objects? Dunno), they'd still be trapped in the room and unable to proceed.

If we further assume something in the chamber below that keeps the ghasts normally in that area (maybe the macguffin that drew them from their nether realm to that location in the first place), we can explain why only a handful are in the room initially (they detected the party some distance away, and some climbed up to meet/eat them, and are waiting in the room in case they open the door, but the bulk are still down below). Once the party is in the room, more of the ghasts realize that some living beings are nearby which they can actually get to physically, and are now all heading up to "get them".

And yeah. I'm adding in my own speculations here, and a lot of this is how *I* would run such a thing if I were putting it into a dungeon I was running. Again, the key point here is that this serves more as an "terrain feature" in a dungeon, not an encounter to be overcome in one step. It makes the whole thing feel like it's an actual living breathing environment where various things exist and have existed for some time, until recent events somewhat upset things and now here we are.

For me, in D&D, this would scream "puzzle time!" - and while I know the OP does not use D&D, the game is set in megadungeon and the opening post stated it was about old-school megadungeon.

Again though, I think that GMs should design dungeons based not on "what puzzles can I get my players to solve", but "what would realistically be here?". The best puzzles are not to have them in the first place. The characters should not be looking for some special "trick" to solve something, but rather thinking a)"what is this?", B)"how does this intereact with the NPCs in the area", and C)"how do those NPCs manage this?". If your players are trying to figure out what *you* the GM put in front of them and how to "solve" it, you've really failed at dungeon design IMO. Everything in the game world was created by the NPCs within it (or exists naturally within it). That's what should motivate the design.

And in this case, it's:

A) A sinkhole that clearly opened this room up to something nasty below
B) it collapsed long ago, leading to nasty things, but those nasty things are only in this one room
C) The denizens of the dungeon closed/barred the door and just leave it alone now.

That's how this entire thing "fits" into the dungeon. It needs nothing more. There is such a thing as massively overthinking things.

From my point of view, in this specific case, players did not perform the appropriate scouting to find out if this was a combat encounter, or a puzzle/trap/trick. The fun thing is, it solved the 15 minute adventuring day issue...

Well. This player group apparently doesn't understand the value of scouting and/or gaining intelligence about... anything.

Again though, I question the idea that something is either a combat encounter or a puzzle/trap/trick. A room can just be a room. I think the players looking for a puzzle/trap/trick is what causes confusion in cases like tihs. There's nothing tricky here at all. It's very straightfoward. Just deal with what is right in front of you. It's a hole in the ground that leads to something nasty, and if you hang around, some of those nasty things will come up and try to eat you.

When you run into a few bees, you might investigate to see where they are coming from. And upon seeing a hive "over there" (let's say up high in a tree where you can't get to it), with bees coming out of it, do you think 'Welp. We clearly need to figure out the puzzle to these bees". Nope. You just acknowledge that there's a hive of bees, and if you get too close, the bees will come after you and go from there, right? This is literally a "Hive of ghasts" (so bigger and more problematic than bees). Um... But the "solution" is the same. Stay away until you decide what to do about it, right? What you don't do is stand around near enough to the hive for bees to keep coming over and stinging you and then complaining about it.

[Talakeal]

snip.

This is all more or less correct.

I will post a bit more in depth later, but I wanted to say:

1: The ability to sense living creatures is line of sight. It ignores darkness, but not solid obstructions. This doesn't mean they don't have other senses though.

2: As to where all the mud came from, that's a good question that I didn't think much about. I suppose logically another wall or the ceiling above would have also collapsed, and maybe there was some mud between the floors. I didn't answer much about this specific mud as there is mud everywhere.

Basically, the dungeon is the ruins of a city that was buried in a flood of mud during an earthquake a century ago, and recently opened up (and further damaged) by another earthquake a few weeks ago. The region is very swampy and rainy, and I have described most rooms of the dungeon as having ankle deep mud, algae, and standing water all over the floor with some areas being deeper.

[gbaji]

1: The ability to sense living creatures is line of sight. It ignores darkness, but not solid obstructions. This doesn't mean they don't have other senses though.

2: As to where all the mud came from, that's a good question that I didn't think much about. I suppose logically another wall or the ceiling above would have also collapsed, and maybe there was some mud between the floors. I didn't answer much about this specific mud as there is mud everywhere.

Basically, the dungeon is the ruins of a city that was buried in a flood of mud during an earthquake a century ago, and recently opened up (and further damaged) by another earthquake a few weeks ago. The region is very swampy and rainy, and I have described most rooms of the dungeon as having ankle deep mud, algae, and standing water all over the floor with some areas being deeper.

Ok. That can make sense. If there's a lot of water seepage in the dungeon, it could certainly cause a floor to collapse and open up to a chamber below. Continued seepage would cause the slope and hole in the floor to be slick with mud. But it's not that the ghasts are "digging up" through mud, but climbing their way up to the hole, and then climbing up the slippery mud covered slope up from the hole to the more flat floor portions in the room itself. The way you described it earlier made it seem like there was a big pool of mud covering the floor and ghasts would just pop up out of it at regular intervals. Which seems... wrong. If there's a sinkhole in the floor, everything (including mud) should slide down the sides and down into the hole. This should make it difficult to climb up (or down for that matter), but also provide a hole one could look through and see the ghasts below, trying to find various ways to get up and into the room (to attack the party), but it's a difficult climb, and narrow entrance, and only one ghast maybe can actually get into the room at a time.

Which works. I guess the real point here is that this is basically a terrain feature, which serves the purpose of informing the party a bit about another portion of the dungeon, but is not necessarily an encounter to be defeated, nor a trap/puzzle to "solve". It's exactly what it appears to be. An opening to another part of the dungeon with a vast number of "bad things", that you probably don't want to mess with right now, and what appears to be a (relatively) simple way to deal with (close the freaking door). I mean. The door was closed before, and the ghasts never wandered up and overran the level of the dungeon they are on before, right? Why assume this magically has changed now?

The irony is that this party does seem to have this "We can just walk away after encountering someone and assume they will not do anything in response" methodology that they use, but the one time it's actually the obvious and appropriate response? They fail to do so. Weird.

[Lacco]

I think the flaw here is assuming that every room in a dungeon must have a "purpose" from the pov of the adventuring party exploring it. This is a mistake for GMs to fall into IMO, and results in poor and unrealistic dungeon design. Worse, it actually leads players into assuming that this is the case and are then "looking for the purpose" of each and every room.

There are several different approaches to dungeon design - I will play the devil's advocate a bit, as my approach is much closer to your than the others, but it's worth noting that the 'realistic environment' approach is not the only one. To simplify it - as the approaches can be anywhere on the scale between each other - I usually tend to just talk about three 'extremes':

The 'old school' megadungeon approach with a labyrinth of corridors that leads players through relatively random rooms containing semi-contained encounters and random encounters usually ignores the logistics/logic/environmental needs of denizens, but has its own 'game' logic that it follows. And it usually tends to be the 'rule of cool' dungeon design, leading to cool strange stuff piled onto even cooler stranger stuff.

Then there was the 'environment above all' approach: you plan what the denizens eat, you plan where they sleep, you check if they have somewhere to place their waste... so you can't place the orcish tribe next to pixies (one of them would get wiped out) but you can place the waste-eating demon below the orcish toilets. So the internal logic is there: you choose what the building used to be originally, apply the passage of time, migrating denizens, monsters, and lead it to the logical conclusion of a dungeon.

And lastly, storytelling approach. The GM has a specific vision of the dungeon and things the players need to see in it and plans it like a simple flowchart. Skyrim did this with most of their dungeons: relatively linear experiences with tidbits of story which the player can observe, collect and enjoy. It does not focus on the environment or the individual encounters, but it follows specific line of narrative.

Of course, most people tend to use a mixture of these three approaches, but prefer one of them. I'd say each has its own merits for specific game: neither is just 'wrong', but it could be used wrong or can be viewed as wrong for specific group/game/gameplay style.

From what I read, you prefer the realistic approach to dungeons; so do I.

Details are lacking, but my assumption is that the door from the T intersection into the room was closed and barred/blocked and that they opened it up, thus running into the ghasts. Again, I'm speculating this, but it's how I would have set this sort of thing up. It serves two purposes:

1. It keeps the ghasts in the room until the party enters and explains why the ghasts aren't roaming around the dungeon floor.

2. It also provides a hint to the players that the ghasts are incapable of opening the door if sufficiently barred/blocked again, so they can bottle this thing right back up if desired.

I'd have set it a bit differently: there would be a 'ramp' - the part of the collapsed room would be on the farther side, with a slope down, giving the players a good view of the masses below. Since there would be an 'army' of ghasts stationed, waiting for orders from their long-dead master down there... there are two options:
1. I'd assume nobody ever came this way. That means the door is closed, part of the ghasts lies destroyed under the mud & rocks, there is still 250+ of them in the large room below. They are stationary until they see an intruder and will follow the lead of the first ones. They will pursue, but most of them will stop if they lose sight of the intruder and return back, some (25% chance) will follow the intruder until the last point they saw them and possibly continue pursuit if they see them again; otherwise return to their original position. Some (10% chance) will start roaming, so I'd add a random encounter with them.

2. I'd assume somebody already came this way. In the corridors leading to the room, there would be dead bodies, some loot, and even a warning scratched on a wall or a parchment. The door itself would be shut and spiked. The room would be in the same state as above, but with additional dead bodies and more loot.

I'd assume (because as you later stated, we don't know how ghasts work in this game), that ghasts are basically programmable undead with some basic logic but not thinking on their own, with some being 'flawed' (will pursue further and even roam). Because why have an army of undead if they can't follow orders?

And yeah. I'm adding in my own speculations here, and a lot of this is how *I* would run such a thing if I were putting it into a dungeon I was running. Again, the key point here is that this serves more as an "terrain feature" in a dungeon, not an encounter to be overcome in one step. It makes the whole thing feel like it's an actual living breathing environment where various things exist and have existed for some time, until recent events somewhat upset things and now here we are.

I'm completely fine with discussing different approaches to dungeon building . Also, I mostly prefer dungeons that give players the ability to make educated guesses - not just a string of encounters.

What I tried to say originally with the puzzle/trap stuff was: if your players expect each room to be a standalone encounter with solution, you preparing a detailed dungeon with internal logic and rooms that are 'just there' will lead to players not enjoying it. Same if it was reversed. Player expectations & GM expectations should match and should be discussed if there is mismatch. Nothing more.

Again though, I think that GMs should design dungeons based not on "what puzzles can I get my players to solve", but "what would realistically be here?". The best puzzles are not to have them in the first place. The characters should not be looking for some special "trick" to solve something, but rather thinking a)"what is this?", B)"how does this intereact with the NPCs in the area", and C)"how do those NPCs manage this?". If your players are trying to figure out what *you* the GM put in front of them and how to "solve" it, you've really failed at dungeon design IMO. Everything in the game world was created by the NPCs within it (or exists naturally within it). That's what should motivate the design.

And in this case, it's:

A) A sinkhole that clearly opened this room up to something nasty below
B) it collapsed long ago, leading to nasty things, but those nasty things are only in this one room
C) The denizens of the dungeon closed/barred the door and just leave it alone now.

That's how this entire thing "fits" into the dungeon. It needs nothing more. There is such a thing as massively overthinking things.

Again, I was discussing the 'old school' megadungeon approach. I even remember there was some kind of booklet that stated there are rooms that a) are empty, b) contain encounters, c) contain trap, d) contain puzzle e) contain trick. Not sure if it was official or third party.

We are not in disagreement, although I'd say that it's just different approach, not failure in dungeon design: however, I would agree that if the GM is going for realistic dungeon with internal logic and is sandbox-focused and creates a dungeon using the approach 'empty-encounter-trap-puzzle-trick', the results will be a failure.

My usual design is focused on time & denizens. As time moves on, what happens? Who moves in? Who is pushed out? Who tries to get inside? Who conquers which part and what do they change?

However, if I were creating a dungeon for beer & pretzels game, I'd most probably use more of the old-school approach; it saves time and may deliver much funnier experience. So it has its merits, even though it does not deliver what you or I would expect from a dungeon.

As for how the ghast-sinkhole room fits into a dungeon: this would be sufficient (I'd only add the 'why are there so many ghasts & why did they stay there and not roam elsewhere rationalisation from my point above). Although what made me focus on the 'old school' approach was exactly the information from Talakeal's notes and absence of any warning signs. However, these were not discussed separately - so this may be an assumption on my side.

Well. This player group apparently doesn't understand the value of scouting and/or gaining intelligence about... anything.

My long-term opinion is that Talakeal wants to play a different game as his players. His players are in for beer & pretzels 'kick-in-the-door-kill-cool-but-weak-enemies-feel-good-collect-cool-loot' game, Talakeal is in for a high-stakes careful risk-reward management game.

*shrug*

Can't fix that easily from my viewpoint.

[Pauly]

I think the flaw here is assuming that every room in a dungeon must have a "purpose" from the pov of the adventuring party exploring it. This is a mistake for GMs to fall into IMO, and results in poor and unrealistic dungeon design. Worse, it actually leads players into assuming that this is the case and are then "looking for the purpose" of each and every room.

The room is just what is there. It does not have an innate "purpose". It just is. In this case, it used to be a store room, and long ago the floor collapsed, opening up access to a lower level where a large horde of ghasts are, so it was closed off and has been left alone since then. This is just environmental. There's no "puzzle" to figure out here. No treasure to be gained. At most, it's environment building. It shows you that there are lower levels, and that this place is old, and that parts of it are falling apart/collapsing. It also does kinda serve the "purpose" of giving the players some clue about one of the hazards that lies in a lower level that they may need to look out for. And if, upon later exploring that level, they run into some other denizens who warn them not to go in a given direction because of "hordes of ghasts", the lightbulb will go off that this is what was below that room they ran into. It creates a sense of continuitiy within the dungeon itself.

The reason I framed my comments in the manner I did is that it reads to me that is running a storytelling dungeon. As opposed to a realistic dungeon or an old school challenge gauntlet.
There is a time pressure to complete the dungeon ASAP for plot reasons.
There are lore dumps which are important to be found.
If you’re running an old school challenge gauntlet ‘it just is’ is a valid reason to include something. For a realistic dungeon there should be a functional reason. For a storytelling dungeon there should be a story related reason for things to exist.
In LoTR Old Man Willow and Tom Bombadil exist to show that the world is both dangerous and that unlooked for allies exist, even if those encounters don’t propel the main story forward.

I agree not every room needs to exist to propel the plot forward, but this room clearly does. It’s linked directly to the evil overlord’s plans and provides a taste of the real risks

[Talakeal]

Previously in the thread you mentioned that there is a range on the ghast’s detect prey ability, but it isn’t mentioned in your GM notes what is. Since the ghasts only start coming out once the party enter the room, the reasonable assumption is that it can’t be much more than 20 feet.

Line of sight.

But they have other senses as well, including a keen sense of smell.

Anyway, what is the purpose of this room?
It isn’t the path to downstairs.
It isn’t to give the party a chance to thin out or eliminate the ghasts.
It can’t be cleared [i.e. kill all the monsters in it]
It doesn’t appear to be a barrier to forward progress to the next room, since collapsing the ceiling would presumably block the room with rubble, and your GM notes indicate that the room needs to be locked off or bad things will happen.
There doesn’t appear to be any cool treasure they can loot or important lore to be found. And collapsing the ceiling carries the risk that if the spellcaster messes up their aim the ceiling will collapse on the stuff they’re meant to find.
It seems that failure to adopt a GM approved solution [collapse the ceiling/lock the door] will punish the players with more and more ghasts until they adopt the GM approved solution.
So why does this room exist? What does the party gain by solving this puzzle? NB since the room can’t be cleared and the ghasts can’t be negotiated with it is a puzzle not an encounter.

Game mechanics wise, the players get XP for exploring rooms.

Narrative wise, just to illustrate that the dungeon is unstable and that there are lots of undead on the floor below.

Rooms don't really have a "purpose" as such though; some contain treasure, some contain monsters, some contain traps or environmental hazards, some contain lore or friendly NPCs, and some are just passages to other places. Most are several of these at once. That goes for more or less the entire dungeon; its an environment for the players to explore with monsters to kill and treasures to loot. And, if they make it to the very bottom, a chance to save the world.

PAnother question. Hoe strong are these ghasts - STR 25 or something similar? Because mud is heavy, and it needs to be displaced somewhere so the ghast can get out. In mine collapses and earthquakes, people buried under more than a foot or so of soil/dust/gravel are unable to dig themselves out.

There are probably many who are completely buried who have no ability to dig themselves out. Most of them are only partially buried and digging themselves out over time as they are motivated to do so by the presence of prey.

On the reinforcements issue. I have read what your intention is. However, as a player if I encountered the ghast room it would feel to me exactly like a video game mechanic to me.

Ok, let me toss the ball back into your court then.

Imagine you are playing a tabletop RPG.

You have infiltrated any enemy fortification with a large number of guards within. You're characters don't know the exact number, but they are spread throughout the compound and there are way more than you can handle in a straight up fight. You make your way to your objective which is, say, picking the lock on a vault, when you accidentally trip an alarm, letting the entire compound know that there are dangerous intruders in the vault. You now have dozens of guards making a beeline to your location to stop you from getting into the vault.

This is the in universe setup.

Mechanically, how would you recommend a GM run this scenario so that it doesn't feel exactly like a video game?

Re Shard of Hate. My experience is that once the tactical map is layed out players will assume the situation is a tactical problem with a tactical solution. My advice is that if there is no tactical solution available to not lay out the tactical map.

That was actually the opposite of the problem. I wanted my players to find a tactical solution; it just had to be one that didn't involve dealing HP damage until the monster died. The players were convinced the whole thing was a trick and that there was some magical way to kill it that either didn't involve HP damage or a certain type of HP damage that would put it down for good even though I had told them flat out that it can't be stopped by violence.

Re locked door treated as a puzzle. One lesson I learned as a young player was when our party had a similar situation. The GM had us role a perception check, and to the player who rolled the highest he passed a note saying that there are no levers, no clues and absolutely no indications of anything else similar and your character realizes that this is not a puzzle. Since then I’ve used that method when the players are barking up the wrong tree in the wrong forest.

Then the players just shut down and do nothing, claiming I have put them in an impossible situation.

This continues until eventually I break character and list out ways they could do this, and then they get mad at me and claim I am making them feel dumb.

I assume that, leaving aside all the troubles that come out in this sort of forum-therapy, you guys still have fun playing. So I think you could consider channelling that into something constructive, and start broadcasting your sessions, with the final goal of acquiring a loyal fanbase that would go to the lengths of drawing and animating scenes like these and putting them on youtube for everyone's enjoyment.

I actually suggested it. The players said no.

Of course, I imagine everyone would behave differently if they knew they were being recorded.

Perhaps if you said “After you kill the ghast you look around and see that it was the last ghast in the room and the door to the room is open and unlocked. You can see the next ghast [x] feet away down the corridor beyond the door. What do you want to do with the rest of your turn?” Brian would have responded better.
Saying “it’s a great chance to move up and make progress rather than just treading water and being surrounded” carries a pretty heavy implication that the player is doing something wrong.

Perhaps. I always feel like I am walking on land mines when talking to Brian; I never know what the right thing to say is as he is annoying combination of dense and sensitive.

I'd watch it.

Also: forum-therapy is actually a nice term for what's happening in these threads. Did the opening post get an actual answer?

It did, several.

I decided upon restocking the dungeon with stronger monsters over time, which has so far worked will, and smart reactive monsters, which has worked extremely poorly.

I was basing my estimation on the assumption they did not know this fact and they did not see down the chamber based on following:

If the players look down into the sinkhole, they just see a lot of mud and darkness and a lot of half buried ghasts. They do not know that they are part of the larger undead legion. This is not an accessible path to the lower level (let alone the only one), although I suppose they could theoretically excavate it if they had the time, architectural knowledge, inclination, and ability to deal with all the ghasts as they popped up.

For me, in D&D, this would scream "puzzle time!" - and while I know the OP does not use D&D, the game is set in megadungeon and the opening post stated it was about old-school megadungeon.

Old-school megadungeons - in my mind, based on the assortment of articles I read about those - had specific encounters that were 'puzzle encounters' and this would definitely look like one from players' point of view - fighting does not work as solution, so it's a puzzle, a trick or a trap. There were no 'endless streams' of enemies (that would be the 'puzzle' or 'trick' entry), there were just stated random amounts: overwhelming amounts of enemies are normal, endless stream means there is a puzzle/trap/trick encounter and you need to figure it out.

Let's say the players saw the 'horde of ghasts'. In that case, plugging the hole becomes a matter of survival and pushing forward makes sense. If they did not see it, just a room with x ghasts and some additional ones digging out... there are two possible views (from my side): endless stream or final number. Final number of ghasts is just a matter of time. We slowly whittle them down, at this relatively comfortable defensive position. Endless stream? We need to plug it. They tried, they failed.

Now the problem with failure in this case is communication: depending on communication between the GM and players, players may take it as 'you failed so this is not the correct way' or 'this attempt failed, but yes, this is the correct idea'. It's also a matter of mechanics: in this case, failing forward principle is something that solves a lot of these issues ('yes, you plugged it but you also made something fall from above and that something is not happy' or 'yes, you plugged it but you also blocked this door on the other side, so you'll have to spend time and resources to dig through that'). Mechanically speaking, solving a 'puzzle' like this, could be handled just by expending resources (e.g. spell slots, mana, fatigue) if you provide a sound solution. I personally prefer systems that have a reroll mechanic exactly for these reasons (metacurrencies are sometimes a good idea).

From my point of view, in this specific case, players did not perform the appropriate scouting to find out if this was a combat encounter, or a puzzle/trap/trick. The fun thing is, it solved the 15 minute adventuring day issue...

For me, puzzles have a very negative connotation as they are closely linked with railroading.

A true puzzle has only one right answer, and the DM has gone out of their way to shoot down any other solutions. For example, someone (King of Nowhere) upthread says that this setup stinks of having "one right solution" and the players being "punished" for guessing wrong.

By your definition of puzzle, any scenario which is not solved by just beating down an enemy with bigger dice rolls could qualify as a puzzle. By that definition, sure, this is a puzzle, and ideally most rooms in the dungeon, including the one's with a manageable number of monsters to kill, should be treated as puzzles.

The fun thing is, it solved the 15 minute adventuring day issue...

How so? AFAICT it made it worse.

My long-term opinion is that Talakeal wants to play a different game as his players. His players are in for beer & pretzels 'kick-in-the-door-kill-cool-but-weak-enemies-feel-good-collect-cool-loot' game, Talakeal is in for a high-stakes careful risk-reward management game.

*shrug*

Can't fix that easily from my viewpoint.

True this.

Although my players are hardly in unison about what they want either, and they aren't really honest with me when giving feedback. For example, they urge that they want "balanced" fights, but for some reason that "balance" is supposed to mean they always win.

The reason I framed my comments in the manner I did is that it reads to me that is running a storytelling dungeon. As opposed to a realistic dungeon or an old school challenge gauntlet.
There is a time pressure to complete the dungeon ASAP for plot reasons.
There are lore dumps which are important to be found.
If you’re running an old school challenge gauntlet ‘it just is’ is a valid reason to include something. For a realistic dungeon there should be a functional reason. For a storytelling dungeon there should be a story related reason for things to exist.
In LoTR Old Man Willow and Tom Bombadil exist to show that the world is both dangerous and that unlooked for allies exist, even if those encounters don’t propel the main story forward.

I agree not every room needs to exist to propel the plot forward, but this room clearly does. It’s linked directly to the evil overlord’s plans and provides a taste of the real risks

I tend to run a mixture of gamist and simulationist.

This dungeon runs mostly on setting logic, although it is specifically set up to give the players monsters to kill and treasure to loot.

Although, the deeper the players go, the less it will follow real world logic and the more it will follow dream logic, as the ultimate source of the dungeon is wholly supernatural.

[tyckspoon]

True this.

Although my players are hardly in unison about what they want either, and they aren't really honest with me when giving feedback. For example, they urge that they want "balanced" fights, but for some reason that "balance" is supposed to mean they always win.

There's somebody around here with a signature that says something like (very roughly and poorly paraphrased) 'What players want in play is easy victories. What they want when telling stories about it is a hard battle they won by the skin of their teeth/clever strategies/miraculous luck.' Your play group would appear to be very much in that nature - what they will tell you they 'want' is what they would like to believe they can do. That unfortunately does not necessarily mean it was what they actually can or will enjoy in actual practice. While I would not want to discourage you from seeking feedback from your players (most of the time More Communication is More Betterer), you do have to take into consideration whether your players are actually capable of providing honest self-assessment.

(Or potentially that the player who claims to want 'balanced' combats is operating on the 3.x concept of 'balance' in which the players are heavily favored to win and will mostly be expending easily renewed resources to do so, and there is a mismatch of definitions there if you understand 'balanced combat' to mean 'there is a notable chance the players will lose or suffer serious damage in the course of victory' .. and also that an easily-won 'balanced' fight from your perspective may be a non-balanced 'we're getting way too beat up' fight from your players because you are consistently expecting them to be more capable than they actually are.)

[gbaji]

There are several different approaches to dungeon design - I will play the devil's advocate a bit, as my approach is much closer to your than the others, but it's worth noting that the 'realistic environment' approach is not the only one. To simplify it - as the approaches can be anywhere on the scale between each other - I usually tend to just talk about three 'extremes':

The 'old school' megadungeon approach with a labyrinth of corridors that leads players through relatively random rooms containing semi-contained encounters and random encounters usually ignores the logistics/logic/environmental needs of denizens, but has its own 'game' logic that it follows. And it usually tends to be the 'rule of cool' dungeon design, leading to cool strange stuff piled onto even cooler stranger stuff.

Then there was the 'environment above all' approach: you plan what the denizens eat, you plan where they sleep, you check if they have somewhere to place their waste... so you can't place the orcish tribe next to pixies (one of them would get wiped out) but you can place the waste-eating demon below the orcish toilets. So the internal logic is there: you choose what the building used to be originally, apply the passage of time, migrating denizens, monsters, and lead it to the logical conclusion of a dungeon.

And lastly, storytelling approach. The GM has a specific vision of the dungeon and things the players need to see in it and plans it like a simple flowchart. Skyrim did this with most of their dungeons: relatively linear experiences with tidbits of story which the player can observe, collect and enjoy. It does not focus on the environment or the individual encounters, but it follows specific line of narrative.

Of course, most people tend to use a mixture of these three approaches, but prefer one of them. I'd say each has its own merits for specific game: neither is just 'wrong', but it could be used wrong or can be viewed as wrong for specific group/game/gameplay style.

Yeah. I get that. And yeah, I tend strongly towards the "what is this place? What is its history? Who lives there? Why do they live there? What lived there before? Etc..." approach. I have (and still do on occasion) run pure "kick in the door and deal with what's in this room" dungeons. That's fun in the moment of course, but IMO not much in the way of long term enjoyment. I find that most people start there, and then gravitate towards something at least leaning somewhat more towards the "realistic environment" approach. And yeah, it's a matter of degrees. I don't tend to think through things like waste managment and whatnot, but I do tend to ensure that if there are living creatures in an area, there must be resources in the area sufficient for them to live on, and if there are different types of creatures in an area, they either should be friendly (or at least non-confrontational), or balanced and in some sort of conflict, or one should have wiped the other out some time ago.

I actually do use the storytelling approach (somewhat), but not in something like a dungeon environment. This is more something I'll set up when encountering things in town, or wandering around, where I'm more focused on setting up what information the PCs have, and what hooks they bite on, when determining where they go next sorts of things. My general assumption is that if they have arrived at some sort of specific location, they've already followed whatever storytelling bits lead them to this location, know what is there (somewhat), know why they are there (again, somewhat), and have some idea what they are trying to achieve while there. My job is to fill in the location itself with things that make sense within those confines (and sure, I'll add in some unexpected stuff as well, but again with an eye towards it all making some sort of sense).

I was also mainly focusing on the "realistic dungeon" angle because from the descriptions, this seemed to be what was being set up. Or at least what he was trying to do. Whether that's what his players actually want is another question.

I'd have set it a bit differently: there would be a 'ramp' - the part of the collapsed room would be on the farther side, with a slope down, giving the players a good view of the masses below. Since there would be an 'army' of ghasts stationed, waiting for orders from their long-dead master down there... there are two options:
1. I'd assume nobody ever came this way. That means the door is closed, part of the ghasts lies destroyed under the mud & rocks, there is still 250+ of them in the large room below. They are stationary until they see an intruder and will follow the lead of the first ones. They will pursue, but most of them will stop if they lose sight of the intruder and return back, some (25% chance) will follow the intruder until the last point they saw them and possibly continue pursuit if they see them again; otherwise return to their original position. Some (10% chance) will start roaming, so I'd add a random encounter with them.

2. I'd assume somebody already came this way. In the corridors leading to the room, there would be dead bodies, some loot, and even a warning scratched on a wall or a parchment. The door itself would be shut and spiked. The room would be in the same state as above, but with additional dead bodies and more loot.

I'd assume (because as you later stated, we don't know how ghasts work in this game), that ghasts are basically programmable undead with some basic logic but not thinking on their own, with some being 'flawed' (will pursue further and even roam). Because why have an army of undead if they can't follow orders?

Hah! The funny thing is that was exactly what I was envisioning as well (well, how I would have set it up). Instead of a hole in the middle of the room, a sloped floor with the hole at the far end, leading down down down into <horde of ghasts>. Said slope is maybe too steep/slippery/dangerous for attempting, and well... there's hordes of undead down there, so why? Same deal though. Gives them a view of "something we really don't want to mess with", and a small number of those things coming up to mess with the party, with a promise of yet more of them if they stick around.

And yeah. I was leaning heavily towards option number 2 there. It seems unreasonable that in all the time this has been here, no one has ever opened this door and looked to see what is inside. Of course, it's possible that the same earthquake that opened up access to this dungeon also collapsed that floor, so that's a possibility too.

I am also somewhat going with the "army of ghasts had to be summoned/arrived/whatever via some method", and that they are normally directed to do things, but aren't at the moment, so this is just them kinda milling around and only going after anything that comes near where they are. Just leaving the proximity should result in them no longer chasing the party, or at least prevent any more from climbing up into the room. The ones already there may continue to roam around causing trouble, but should presumably be something the party can handle.

And with those simple assumptions, the only actual way to fail at this is to just stand in the room forcing you to fight an overwhelming number of foes. All other actions result in "success". Of course, if the party actually thinks they have the time and resources to fight them all, then maybe they can sit there playing whack-a-mole in the room and kill them all. Then again, maybe whatever is in control of the ghasts is actually still down there, dormant, but if enough of the ghasts shift position, clearly attracted to some opponent, it may awaken.... Dun dun dun!

And this may just be me and how I like to run games. I would never put something in like this expecting the players to adopt a video game approach to "defeat" it. A horde of undead, clearly more than you can possibly fight, is intentionally something you are being told not to fight. Trying to find some other novel way to fight them (like lure them up one at a time until they are all gone) is not going to work. It'll work for a short time, and then the situation will change to make it not work anymore (because maybe the purpose they are there for isn't actually "kill people up that muddy ramp", so they'll stop after some number of them are killed). If I put an army of undead in somewhere, that army exists for a reason and serves a purpose, and the party is somewhat expected to have to figure out that purpose and resolve it as the means of dealing with said army. And no. That's not a "puzzle to solve". It'll always be something somewhat obvious and logical, but in this specific case, will require that the party actually travel down via another means to that lower level, do some exploring, maybe talk to the denizens there, learn around this army, its history, rummors, etc, and then find out what brought it there, what keeps it there, what commands its members, etc, and then discover what will disperse it, send it away, destroy it, whatever. And *then* maybe they enact a plan to fight their way through some portion of those undead to find the <whatsit> they need to destroy it. It will never just be "kill them until they are all dead".

I actually ran something similar to this, but with ghouls instead of ghasts. The backstory was an ancient underground city, tasked with defending a sealed off portal to the underworld. At some point, one of their rulers succumed to temptation and used the ancient relics used to seal the portal to open it instead, becoming a powerful ghoul lord and allowing the ghouls to roam into the city killing most of his people and enslaving the rest (ghouls gotta eat, right?). Some of the other leaders of the time escaped with some of the other relics and dispersed into other underground areas (IIRC there were like three relic pieces involved). The party encountered later generations of these people, scattered about as they explored though various vast underground caverns and tunnels, and over time discover what happend which turned them into lost refugees. They then had to find the two relic pieces and assemble them (which was not easy because the people scattered and then many of them fell to other nasty things out there), then travel to the ancient city and defeat the ghoul lord. The point being that until the portal was sealed, there was effectively an unlimited number of ghouls (and they were more powerful than they would be otherwise, feeding on negative energy from the portal's proximity). The could not just fight ghouls until they were dead. They had to learn what had happened, who was in charge, find people who had maps of the ancient city (including secret routes into the old palace), figure out how to make their way there without getting overwhelmed, and then find and defeat the big bad as quickly as possible, then use his relic along with the other pieces to seal the portal. Only then could the ghouls be managed (but was now achievable instead of "absoultely imposible" before).


I suppose you could categorize that as a "puzzle", but not in the sense of entering a single room and then having to figure out something to move on, or something else silly. The entire thing has a consistent logical backstory, and is more about "what do you need to obtain to defeat the threat" than "I put in an arbitrary sequence of numbers/levers/buttons/whatever you have to figure out from a riddle wirtten on the wall" type of thing. I tend to avoid the latter method becuase it's really somewhat silly. It would be like posting a hint to your alarm code outside your front door. No one would actually do that.

What I tried to say originally with the puzzle/trap stuff was: if your players expect each room to be a standalone encounter with solution, you preparing a detailed dungeon with internal logic and rooms that are 'just there' will lead to players not enjoying it. Same if it was reversed. Player expectations & GM expectations should match and should be discussed if there is mismatch. Nothing more.

Agreed. I'm just going based on how the dungeon history and setup was described previously. You are correct that there may be a disconnect between what Talakeal is trying to set up here and what the players actually want to do. Dunno. From past descriptions it also sounds like his players want things that make sense and are consistent, but then don't actually want them to make sense or be consistent when this is inconvenient to them for some reason. And I'm still scratching my head a bit over that, and wondering how much of this is miscommunication or just bizarre behavior by the players. Could be a bit of both. Or something else? Who knows?

As for how the ghast-sinkhole room fits into a dungeon: this would be sufficient (I'd only add the 'why are there so many ghasts & why did they stay there and not roam elsewhere rationalisation from my point above). Although what made me focus on the 'old school' approach was exactly the information from Talakeal's notes and absence of any warning signs. However, these were not discussed separately - so this may be an assumption on my side.

Yup. And that's exactly the thought process that got me to where I've been kinda assuming things as well. The initial description immediately makes me think "how did they get there?", and "why are they still there?", and "why haven't they already either filled out the entire complex or been destroyed already?". There must be some sort of backstory to explain this. Or at least, I would expect there *should* be one. And if I were a player in this game, I would be looking for the answers to those questions rather than just thinking "Ok. How do I kill an army of ghasts in this one room?". And that's going to lead me to table the issue for now, expecting to come across additional information later, and then take action based on that information. There's nothing in this one room that requires that we destroy this huge army of ghasts. There may very well be something we run into later/deeper into the dungeon that will make this both become an objective *and* provide additional information as to how exactly to achieve this.

I'm also not assuming that the absence of Talakeal specifically stating there were or were not warning signs (or even just indications that the door had previously been sealed), means that this wasn't actually there. He only even mentioned the existence of a door in the context of "they didn't close it", but I had to ask a couple follow up questions to determine where that door actually was. So yeah, I'm kinda trying to fill in the gaps here too. Which may very well be a mistake on my part. I thought he mentioned somewhere earlier in the thread that the kobolds had warned the party about the area, but I could totally just be imagining that.

[Talakeal]

I'm also not assuming that the absence of Talakeal specifically stating there were or were not warning signs (or even just indications that the door had previously been sealed), means that this wasn't actually there. He only even mentioned the existence of a door in the context of "they didn't close it", but I had to ask a couple follow up questions to determine where that door actually was. So yeah, I'm kinda trying to fill in the gaps here too. Which may very well be a mistake on my part. I thought he mentioned somewhere earlier in the thread that the kobolds had warned the party about the area, but I could totally just be imagining that.

Not this room specifically, no. They did say that the floor below was the domain of the "bone men" and that they no longer go down there and have sealed up the entraces because its too dangerous.

[GloatingSwine]

True this.

Although my players are hardly in unison about what they want either, and they aren't really honest with me when giving feedback. For example, they urge that they want "balanced" fights, but for some reason that "balance" is supposed to mean they always win.

It is quite possible to have a definition of "balanced" encounters where the players are expected to win, because "balanced" does not necessarily relate to the chances of victory.

"Balanced" can mean "multiple strategies and character builds have an even chance of prevailing", it can mean "rewards feel appropriate for the difficulty of the encounter, and difficulty feels appropriate for the significance to the story".

And difficulty also doesn't necessarily impact the chances of victory but how many resources have to be spent to get it.

[gbaji]

Yeah. I think that somewhat goes without saying. I don't thnk players will long play a game where every single encounter has a 50/50 chance of them being defeated.

I go with the "difficulty to reward" angle as well.

[Talakeal]

Yeah, "balanced" is, in a vacuum, kind of a meaningless term.

I tend to structure games around the 3.5 guidelines; 4-6 encounters in an adventuring day with a total resource cost of ~80%. Of course, sufficiently bad lack, tactics, or party composition does, sometimes, push this into loss territory (about 1/200 fights) where the party retreats, suffers a casualty, or uses more consumables from the adventure than they gained. And if this happens, you better believe I will hear about how it was "imbalanced" or "impossible".

[Pauly]

Line of sight.

But they have other senses as well, including a keen sense of smell
Narrative wise, just to illustrate that the dungeon is unstable and that there are lots of undead on the floor below.

Rooms don't really have a "purpose" as such though; some contain treasure, some contain monsters, some contain traps or environmental hazards, some contain lore or friendly NPCs, and some are just passages to other places. Most are several of these at once. That goes for more or less the entire dungeon; its an environment for the players to explore with monsters to kill and treasures to loot. And, if they make it to the very bottom, a chance to save the world.

[snip]

Ok, let me toss the ball back into your court then.

Imagine you are playing a tabletop RPG.

You have infiltrated any enemy fortification with a large number of guards within. You're characters don't know the exact number, but they are spread throughout the compound and there are way more than you can handle in a straight up fight. You make your way to your objective which is, say, picking the lock on a vault, when you accidentally trip an alarm, letting the entire compound know that there are dangerous intruders in the vault. You now have dozens of guards making a beeline to your location to stop you from getting into the vault.

This is the in universe setup.

Mechanically, how would you recommend a GM run this scenario so that it doesn't feel exactly like a video game?


[snip]


If the players look down into the sinkhole, they just see a lot of mud and darkness and a lot of half buried ghasts. They do not know that they are part of the larger undead legion. This is not an accessible path to the lower level (let alone the only one), although I suppose they could theoretically excavate it if they had the time, architectural knowledge, inclination, and ability to deal with all the ghasts as they popped up.

[snip]

I tend to run a mixture of gamist and simulationist.

This dungeon runs mostly on setting logic, although it is specifically set up to give the players monsters to kill and treasure to loot.

Although, the deeper the players go, the less it will follow real world logic and the more it will follow dream logic, as the ultimate source of the dungeon is wholly supernatural.

Talakeal, have you ever been underground? I mean in a mine or similar?
I did some work in my university summer holidays at an old underground gold mine that had been repurposed as a tourist attraction. I worked in the office, but still had to do the full underground OH&S course. Which means on the 1-10 scale of knowledge of how underground places work I’m like a 0.1.

Ceilings are low for 3 reasons.
1) structural integrity.
2) Excavating rock is hard work
3) Removing the fill to the surface is hard work.
Most pre-20th century mines will have ceilings of less than 6 feet., and even in the 20th century 7 or 8 feet is about the maximum except for major places.

Vertical separation.
Normally in mines levels are separated by 100 to 150 feet. Although in particularly stable rock it might come down to 50 feet. In less stable rock it might be 250 to 300 feet of vertical separation between levels. Improvements in struts and bracing technology have been countered by the increasing weight of mine machinery, so this hasn’t changed much over the years.

Where I’ve been having difficulty is that I’ve been using approximations of real world numbers, and that doesn’t work.
In a fantasy physics plausible setting you might get to 9 feet high ceilings and 20 feet between levels. At which point if you have the sinkhole create a ramp that ghasts can clamber up with some difficulty. The problem is line of sight. At best there will be maybe 10 ghasts that will be able to get a line of sight into the room above. Just draw a few diagrams on what the LOS could be to get the idea.

Ventilation in mines is important, hence the well known story of the canary in the coal mine. There is no natural wind to carry scents. If you have a ventilation plan that places the ghasts downwind of the sinkhole, then all the ghasts should be trying to get up there because they can smell all the goblins and kobolds. If the ghasts are up wind, then the scent is carried away from them.

I just don’t get a realistically plausible scenario where an endless stream of ghasts keep coming out of the sinkhole.
If the purpose is to show the party that the dungeon is unstable and there are a lot of undead on the floor below, you can achieve your arm just by having a collapsed floor through which the party can see all the ghasts below without having an endless stream of them attacking the party.

The difference between this room and the army base setting are
1) The players know before they enter the base what it is and that it’s full of soldiers.
2) The players should have a plan of the base showing where the sensitive areas are, or at the least they can read the signs on the walls saying that this is a restricted area and too keep out. It isn’t random rooms that are alarmed and primed with lots of nearby soldiers ready to attack at a moment’s notice.
3) the players have non combat options such as surrender, bluff or hide that aren’t on the table with ghasts.

[Reversefigure4]

So your job as GM should be to give them an adventure high in wealth and pride. Hint: defeating them with Tuckers kobolds is the opposite of that.

So you need foes that are powerful and foolish, that the party (your players) can outsmart. “Average citizens” dumb enough to have not outsmarted your players, where they will ask for help with monsters that can be kited or defeated with simple traps. You need a world dumb enough that your players (and thereby their characters) look smart in comparison. In a word (and I can’t believe I’m suggesting this), you need the Forgotten Realms, as Ed writes it, where everyone wears their pants on their heads, and thinks it is normal to do so. You need the land of the blind, where your one-eyed players can be king. I never thought I’d be praising that facet of FR, or advising anyone to replicate it, but here we are.

I’m thinking that that’s what your players mean when they say that you take the game more seriously than they do. They want a game where they can come across as smart and competent without having to play the “5d Wizard Chess” that they perceive you to do. Or so I suspect.

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner. You need to balance to your table, which is way outside of the norm. Most people want a reactive dungeon for verisimilitude and/or challenge. But you've tried a reactive dungeon. The players hate it, because they consider basic things like terrain to be cheating, let alone reactive monsters.

So the world - the entire world - needs to get a lot dumber so that, as Quertus so adaptly puts in, your one-eyed players can be king.

Look at various levels of intelligence and fantasy world tactics that monsters and enemies might have based on their capacity for reason.

1: Mindless. These enemies can't make decisions. Skeletons, oozes and the like. Intelligence of -. Might do things like:
- Stay in one square the entire combat.
- Walk directly into open pit traps in front of them
- Continue to fire their bow even though they're out of arrows
- Simply attack the target closest to them unless it falls prone (whereupon they instantly become convinced it's dead), etc.
They are unable to surrender or run away, or react to noise from a room next to them. They cannot fathom the difference between PCs. Any form of 'tactic' outmatches them. Their valuables are in a heap in the middle of the room.

2: Dumb-dumbs. Troglodytes, ogres, stupid monsters. Tactically, might do things like:
- Advance on the first target they see.
- Charge into a room and run directly into the pit trap the party have dug.
- Stay in their 'safe' room and refuse to leave, even if the party are firing arrows through the door. After 3 rounds, will shut the door to stop the ouchie.
- If the enemy is at range, and they have a ranged weapon, and they aren't drunk or hungry, they might engage at range.
- After enough swords are stabbed into their flesh, they realise that the shiny metal hurts bad, but are generally too dumb to retreat, convinced they can smash the target in front of them.
- Will always AoE their own allies accidentally.
They do not perceive that the wizard in the pointy hat is making the magic fire that hurts worse than the sword. They won't bother to check the room next door even if murder noises come out, because they're too dumb or lazy. Their valuables are in a sack marked "Shinies".

3: Dumb or panicked civilian (untrained in combat). Capable of intelligent thought given time, but reacts in a panicked fashion.
- Might use flanking once in a combat.
- Can work out the wizard is making the magic fire, but too frightened of the man with the sharp sword to get at the wizard
- Might pointlessly provoke attacks of opportunity by moving into disadvantageous positions.
- Stubborn and prideful, they rarely surrender and run (yes, they're panicking cowards who don't run away much).
- Will change between ranged and melee weapons as appropriate.
- Will AoE their own allies 50% of the time accidentally.
Their valuables are in a chest with no locks or traps. If they hear murder noises in the next room, given enough time to think about it, they will flee - but panicking and leaving their valuables.

4: Mildly trained combatant.
- Uses flanking whenever they can do it at no risk to them.
- Know the wizard is using bad magic fire, but will only attack him if there's a clear path to doing so.
- Carries both melee and ranged weapons routinely. Might have one single other obvious tactic, like shouting aloud to their allies "Quick, tip over the barrels of oil then light them on fire to burn them!" directly in front of the party.
- Most of the time just gets slaughtered, but sometimes surrenders abjectly to the party's glory, giving up their possessions, information, and family immediately.
- Will use spells, but won't target them well (no picking that the armored guy is probably a warrior with a weak will save). Tries not to AoE own allies.
Their valuables are in a chest with a lock (no traps). If they hear murder noises in the next room, they will investigate tomorrow.

5: Well trained but not particularly bright combatant.
- Uses flanking routinely, as well as trips, grapples, etc, where appropriate and advantageous.
- Knows the wizard can't use magic fire if he's gagged, but doesn't necessarily have the capacity to do it.
- Will work out they can't hit the warrior's 43 AC after rolling a 19 for near their best swing, and move on to a different target or tactic.
Their valuables are in a locked chest hidden under a blanket. If they hear murder noises in the next room, they move casually towards them. If the party retreats and comes back another day, they're probably all huddling in one room together because more numbers is better.

6: Smart foes
- Recognise that pointy hat is a wizard before the fire comes, and preemptively attack him as a priority target.
- Utilises the tactics available with their current resources. May gather new resources if given enough time.
Their valuables require a check to find and disarm the trap. If they hear murder noises, they hunker down or swiftly move towards them.

7: Super-smart foes
- Dress themselves in illusory armour, so pointy-hat wizard looks like armoured warrior and vice versa.
- Have spies in town to research adventurers coming into the dungeon.
- Prepare party countering spells if they learn suitable ones.
- Form traps for the enemy if alerted, or flee before them if they seem overwhelming and there is little reason to stay.
Their valuables are in another place altogether (buried in the woods, on a demi-plane).

Most games have a mix of these. It can be fun to fight the mindless skeletons, or periodically face super-smart goes. But your players are operating on about a 3.5. And they enjoy crushing enemies with vastly superior power. So about 30% of their encounters at level 1, 40% at level 2, 20% at level 3, 5% at level 4 and maybe one single BBEG per campaign at level 5. Never any foes at level 6 or 7. Foes should impart any necessary information in a clunky and obvious format (yelling to each other "Joe, go protect the room with the red door, where our treasure is" or a note that says "Joe, remember the door password is 1-2-3".) Even then, expect your players to ignore the information for fear of being tricked.

Additionally, if you have to use terrain for your own satisfaction, decrease the tactics of the monsters accordingly or use terrain that disadvantages everyone equally (why are the harpies fighting underwater instead of a clifftop? Because they live in StupidLand), and lower the levels and intelligence of anything with special abilities so they use them inappropriately. Make sure each encounter is effectively a CR-2, at absolute most. (Remember that you communicate information to the party historically badly, so terrain, puzzle fights, or special abilities always provide more of an problem than you intend).

Now, you yourself have expressed that you won't enjoy this style of opponent. But you also don't enjoy playing with your current group(s), yet stick firmly to the idea that "bad gaming is better than no gaming". At least the majority of the table will be happy?

[Lacco]

There's somebody around here with a signature that says something like (very roughly and poorly paraphrased) 'What players want in play is easy victories. What they want when telling stories about it is a hard battle they won by the skin of their teeth/clever strategies/miraculous luck.' Your play group would appear to be very much in that nature - what they will tell you they 'want' is what they would like to believe they can do. That unfortunately does not necessarily mean it was what they actually can or will enjoy in actual practice. While I would not want to discourage you from seeking feedback from your players (most of the time More Communication is More Betterer), you do have to take into consideration whether your players are actually capable of providing honest self-assessment.

I think the rule is from Jay R's rules for the GM.

But I may be wrong.

Regarding feedback from players: what players want and what they will enjoy may be two different things, but often the main discrepancy is between the assumptions and expectations between the provider and the receiver of the feedback. As a receiver, one needs to be able to put aside one's assumptions. When people state their 'wants' or 'needs', a person getting the feedback should attempt to discover what they are actually saying and one's assumptions can easily cloud the whole conversation.

"I want realistic adventure" viewed through my lens & assumptions would mean "I want to consider travel time, camping, encumbrance, light, food & water, comfort, illnesses, terrain, fumbles, basically play something like fantasy Oregon Trail with roleplaying. If one of my players (that I know) states the same, they may mean they want no narrative contrivances, no storytelling mechanics, just a dungeon crawl.

So my advice for OP regarding the feedback from his players: asking clarifying/qualifying questions will help. "What does realistic mean for you?", "What do you expect from the game?" and "What I should avoid to fulfill the requirement?" would be good questions in my case.

Yeah. I get that. And yeah, I tend strongly towards the "what is this place? What is its history? Who lives there? Why do they live there? What lived there before? Etc..." approach. I have (and still do on occasion) run pure "kick in the door and deal with what's in this room" dungeons. That's fun in the moment of course, but IMO not much in the way of long term enjoyment. I find that most people start there, and then gravitate towards something at least leaning somewhat more towards the "realistic environment" approach. And yeah, it's a matter of degrees. I don't tend to think through things like waste managment and whatnot, but I do tend to ensure that if there are living creatures in an area, there must be resources in the area sufficient for them to live on, and if there are different types of creatures in an area, they either should be friendly (or at least non-confrontational), or balanced and in some sort of conflict, or one should have wiped the other out some time ago.

The best approach that works for me is to have layers. On the surface, the dungeon may look like pure 'kick in the door' and could even be played like that. Then there is a layer of dungeon history (who/what lived there, how did they change the dungeon, what happened...), dungeon 'ecology' (which denizens live/eat/sleep/... where, how do they fulfill the basic living requirements), social stuff (who is friendly with whom, who bears grudge, who is secretly someone's enemy...), even a 'puzzle' layer (puzzle being 'how to go through this dungeon most efficiently" or 'how to win fights without fighting') and players can interact with the layers, but don't have to (e.g. if I place a puzzle door, it will lead them through a shortcut, provide a tactical advantage, or some additional loot, but is not vital for them to go through if they have some 'quest' to do in the dungeon).

Voluntary layers work for me.

I actually do use the storytelling approach (somewhat), but not in something like a dungeon environment. This is more something I'll set up when encountering things in town, or wandering around, where I'm more focused on setting up what information the PCs have, and what hooks they bite on, when determining where they go next sorts of things. My general assumption is that if they have arrived at some sort of specific location, they've already followed whatever storytelling bits lead them to this location, know what is there (somewhat), know why they are there (again, somewhat), and have some idea what they are trying to achieve while there. My job is to fill in the location itself with things that make sense within those confines (and sure, I'll add in some unexpected stuff as well, but again with an eye towards it all making some sort of sense).

I was also mainly focusing on the "realistic dungeon" angle because from the descriptions, this seemed to be what was being set up. Or at least what he was trying to do. Whether that's what his players actually want is another question.

Again, I tend to layer things, so there will be some narrative layer even in the dungeon - there will be overall 'story' for the dungeon that the players can piece together and use to their advantage, there will be books (containing further information on something they may decide to investigate), letters, lockets with pictures, grafitti and everything will build a story - for the dungeon, its denizens, or the world. Everything with its own 'adventure hooks' even if the adventure is just 'travel here to return the locket'.

However, this is also an artifact of the games I play: dungeons play secondary or even tertiary role, and mostly work as location dressing.

Hah! The funny thing is that was exactly what I was envisioning as well (well, how I would have set it up). Instead of a hole in the middle of the room, a sloped floor with the hole at the far end, leading down down down into <horde of ghasts>. Said slope is maybe too steep/slippery/dangerous for attempting, and well... there's hordes of undead down there, so why? Same deal though. Gives them a view of "something we really don't want to mess with", and a small number of those things coming up to mess with the party, with a promise of yet more of them if they stick around.

And yeah. I was leaning heavily towards option number 2 there. It seems unreasonable that in all the time this has been here, no one has ever opened this door and looked to see what is inside. Of course, it's possible that the same earthquake that opened up access to this dungeon also collapsed that floor, so that's a possibility too.

I am also somewhat going with the "army of ghasts had to be summoned/arrived/whatever via some method", and that they are normally directed to do things, but aren't at the moment, so this is just them kinda milling around and only going after anything that comes near where they are. Just leaving the proximity should result in them no longer chasing the party, or at least prevent any more from climbing up into the room. The ones already there may continue to roam around causing trouble, but should presumably be something the party can handle.

And with those simple assumptions, the only actual way to fail at this is to just stand in the room forcing you to fight an overwhelming number of foes. All other actions result in "success". Of course, if the party actually thinks they have the time and resources to fight them all, then maybe they can sit there playing whack-a-mole in the room and kill them all. Then again, maybe whatever is in control of the ghasts is actually still down there, dormant, but if enough of the ghasts shift position, clearly attracted to some opponent, it may awaken.... Dun dun dun!

I agree, that would make much more sense and work for me. With this kind of setup, I would have no actual comments and would definitely say it was a tactical error on players' side to get involved and not retreat immediately/after few rounds.

And this may just be me and how I like to run games. I would never put something in like this expecting the players to adopt a video game approach to "defeat" it. A horde of undead, clearly more than you can possibly fight, is intentionally something you are being told not to fight. Trying to find some other novel way to fight them (like lure them up one at a time until they are all gone) is not going to work. It'll work for a short time, and then the situation will change to make it not work anymore (because maybe the purpose they are there for isn't actually "kill people up that muddy ramp", so they'll stop after some number of them are killed). If I put an army of undead in somewhere, that army exists for a reason and serves a purpose, and the party is somewhat expected to have to figure out that purpose and resolve it as the means of dealing with said army. And no. That's not a "puzzle to solve". It'll always be something somewhat obvious and logical, but in this specific case, will require that the party actually travel down via another means to that lower level, do some exploring, maybe talk to the denizens there, learn around this army, its history, rummors, etc, and then find out what brought it there, what keeps it there, what commands its members, etc, and then discover what will disperse it, send it away, destroy it, whatever. And *then* maybe they enact a plan to fight their way through some portion of those undead to find the <whatsit> they need to destroy it. It will never just be "kill them until they are all dead".

*SNIP*

I suppose you could categorize that as a "puzzle", but not in the sense of entering a single room and then having to figure out something to move on, or something else silly. The entire thing has a consistent logical backstory, and is more about "what do you need to obtain to defeat the threat" than "I put in an arbitrary sequence of numbers/levers/buttons/whatever you have to figure out from a riddle wirtten on the wall" type of thing. I tend to avoid the latter method becuase it's really somewhat silly. It would be like posting a hint to your alarm code outside your front door. No one would actually do that.

Puzzles!

I think 'puzzles' get a very negative rep based on the often used but seldom working single-solution, read GM's mind, mother-may-I puzzles.

For me, puzzles in RPGs can be used all the time. There are one-room puzzles (there's a riddle written on the wall that when solved will allow you to open the door), combat-as-puzzle (there is an enemy that can not be defeated using standard hack & slash tactics, but requires specific type of attack - e.g. standard highly-flammable regenerating trolls), and even a dungeon as puzzle. When there is something for the players to figure out, and you leave clues, it's a puzzle for me:

As for the riddle on the wall being silly... yes, I get that. Still, I understand one specific reason why those exist: factions. If we have some faction/group (e.g. a cult) and there is some 'secret' inside knowledge (e.g. the eldritch god Xghalsbrlsark has a taste for human flesh, fire and thyme as per chapter MDLXIII, verse 22 of book of Xghalsbrlsark), they may get the bright idea to put a door into their inner sanctum which requires burning of human flesh and some thyme - because of course only pure Xghalsbrlsarkianist would know that - to open (the example is not from actual game, just first crazy idea that occured to me).

The fact that this knowledge may have become widely known, or is available now in your average bookstore, is just something like 'save' icon being a floppy disc - it's just a thing that happens.

In other cases, a puzzle door could serve either as distraction or time-waster. Specifically giving you a long, arduous task, such as the standard 'sheep-wolf-grass' riddle, where you have to drag a stone statue of a sheep away from the grass and into a small ship to get to the other side of underground river, will ensure that you a) lose time doing so b) may become fatigued by the actual dragging c) may be a trap (the ship sinks your boat). This may specifically show an evil, twisted humor of the dungeon creator ('I'm rich enough to be crazy!').

Also, having a number puzzle or writing on the wall: for us, in civilized times, where basic literacy is considered 'basic' and not a luxury, it's simple to disregard those. But they could have their places. Still, thinking of an original riddle, that does not suck is hard, so unless I have a pretty good idea, I tend to avoid them.

Now puzzles on the 'dungeon' scope, these I like. Figuring out that there is a secret part of the dungeon based on the layout, few scraps of information and the fact that some enemies just disappear in two of the rooms - is a puzzle for me. Figuring out that the horde of ghasts can be commanded around using the mask worn by the dungeon overlord (deceased long ago) from a manuscript, few wall drawings and some rumors... is a puzzle.

Ideally, a puzzle has a multiple possible solutions AND alternative solutions, internal logic, abundance of clues, does not bottleneck (if they fail to solve it, they can still move on), is be interesting to solve (OOC) and should be immersive and provide worldbuilding opportunities (IC).

Yeah, "balanced" is, in a vacuum, kind of a meaningless term.

I tend to structure games around the 3.5 guidelines; 4-6 encounters in an adventuring day with a total resource cost of ~80%. Of course, sufficiently bad lack, tactics, or party composition does, sometimes, push this into loss territory (about 1/200 fights) where the party retreats, suffers a casualty, or uses more consumables from the adventure than they gained. And if this happens, you better believe I will hear about how it was "imbalanced" or "impossible".

I have to ask: Why?

Talakeal, have you ever been underground? I mean in a mine or similar?
I did some work in my university summer holidays at an old underground gold mine that had been repurposed as a tourist attraction. I worked in the office, but still had to do the full underground OH&S course. Which means on the 1-10 scale of knowledge of how underground places work I’m like a 0.1.

Ceilings are low for 3 reasons.
1) structural integrity.
2) Excavating rock is hard work
3) Removing the fill to the surface is hard work.
Most pre-20th century mines will have ceilings of less than 6 feet., and even in the 20th century 7 or 8 feet is about the maximum except for major places.

I've visited some mines that are now open to public. What I brought back was mainly the feeling that swinging a longsword around in one would be quite hard in most cases.

Also, thanks for the information. Never thought about ventilation this way: will have few surprises for my players next time *evil GM walrus grin*.

[Talakeal]

Talakeal, have you ever been underground? I mean in a mine or similar?
I did some work in my university summer holidays at an old underground gold mine that had been repurposed as a tourist attraction. I worked in the office, but still had to do the full underground OH&S course. Which means on the 1-10 scale of knowledge of how underground places work I’m like a 0.1.

Ceilings are low for 3 reasons.
1) structural integrity.
2) Excavating rock is hard work
3) Removing the fill to the surface is hard work.
Most pre-20th century mines will have ceilings of less than 6 feet., and even in the 20th century 7 or 8 feet is about the maximum except for major places.

Vertical separation.
Normally in mines levels are separated by 100 to 150 feet. Although in particularly stable rock it might come down to 50 feet. In less stable rock it might be 250 to 300 feet of vertical separation between levels. Improvements in struts and bracing technology have been countered by the increasing weight of mine machinery, so this hasn’t changed much over the years.

Where I’ve been having difficulty is that I’ve been using approximations of real world numbers, and that doesn’t work.
In a fantasy physics plausible setting you might get to 9 feet high ceilings and 20 feet between levels. At which point if you have the sinkhole create a ramp that ghasts can clamber up with some difficulty. The problem is line of sight. At best there will be maybe 10 ghasts that will be able to get a line of sight into the room above. Just draw a few diagrams on what the LOS could be to get the idea.

Ventilation in mines is important, hence the well known story of the canary in the coal mine. There is no natural wind to carry scents. If you have a ventilation plan that places the ghasts downwind of the sinkhole, then all the ghasts should be trying to get up there because they can smell all the goblins and kobolds. If the ghasts are up wind, then the scent is carried away from them.

I just don’t get a realistically plausible scenario where an endless stream of ghasts keep coming out of the sinkhole.
If the purpose is to show the party that the dungeon is unstable and there are a lot of undead on the floor below, you can achieve your arm just by having a collapsed floor through which the party can see all the ghasts below without having an endless stream of them attacking the party.

No, I am not an expert in caves or engineering. And I agree this scenario, and indeed most scenarios in most dungeons, aren't technically possible when looked at from a modern scientific perspective. However, this is a fantasy world, and even within the fantasy world this place is operating under not wholly right physics as (spoiler) the area is being consumed by a dream and the deeper you go the more it operates on dream logic than real world logic.

That being said, this isn't actually a cave or even a dungeon in the traditional sense. It is two compounds that were built, centuries apart, on top of one another in an area of swampy and earthquake prone ground. What I am imagining is that when the ceiling of the lower building collapsed, the room slowly filled with mud coming in from the sides, and the ghasts kind of treaded water, leaving some fully buried, some partially buried, and some standing on top.

Of course, my players don't know any of this, they just see a big muddy pit with a lot of half buried ghasts slowly digging their way out while their companions above fight, and their complaints weren't about realism but about how the fight wasn't "balanced" because if they used turtle tactics they took more damage than was expected from a single encounter. (Of course, it could swing the other way, I imagine if they had used the choke points and sealed the door they would have taken far less damage than expected from a single encounter).

The difference between this room and the army base setting are
1) The players know before they enter the base what it is and that it’s full of soldiers.
2) The players should have a plan of the base showing where the sensitive areas are, or at the least they can read the signs on the walls saying that this is a restricted area and too keep out. It isn’t random rooms that are alarmed and primed with lots of nearby soldiers ready to attack at a moment’s notice.
3) the players have non combat options such as surrender, bluff or hide that aren’t on the table with ghasts.

That's great, but it doesn't really touch on my question about how you handle reinforcement mechanics without it feeling like a video game.

I have to ask: Why?

Because that is what 3E D&D implied was the norm and what I am used to.

Now, you yourself have expressed that you won't enjoy this style of opponent. But you also don't enjoy playing with your current group(s), yet stick firmly to the idea that "bad gaming is better than no gaming". At least the majority of the table will be happy?

I didn't say I don't enjoy gaming with my current group.

Actually playing is fine, its just that once every few sessions they need to stop the game for a bitch session, get pouty if I actually try and resolve the issue, and then I go on the forum for a bitch session of my own.

But the vast majority of games are perfectly enjoyable.

Also... I have to say that your tactical scale really needs to go up to 10 if balanced for a general gaming audience, because I have seen tactics, even at my table, that are a lot more complex than your seven.

[GloatingSwine]

That's great, but it doesn't really touch on my question about how you handle reinforcement mechanics without it feeling like a video game.

The thing about videogame reinforcement mechanics is that they don't exist in the world before they appear as reinforcements and the consequences of them appearing don't matter later.

If you want reinforcements to feel like a naturalistic part of the world they have to come from somewhere. That means that if they don't appear as reinforcements now they will still be in the place they came from, and if they do appear then they won't be there later.

So where are the reinforcements before the fight starts? What's the consequence of them being defeated now? Can the players anticipate them and do something to impede them?

The ghast room doesn't really read as "reinforcements" though. It's a spawner, it poops out new enemies at a fixed rate until you figure out how to turn it off. (Unless the door was described as being unusually sturdy and fortified, "just shut the door" doesn't really feel like it should work because surely they'll smash it down?)

[Talakeal]

The thing about videogame reinforcement mechanics is that they don't exist in the world before they appear as reinforcements and the consequences of them appearing don't matter later.

If you want reinforcements to feel like a naturalistic part of the world they have to come from somewhere. That means that if they don't appear as reinforcements now they will still be in the place they came from, and if they do appear then they won't be there later.

So where are the reinforcements before the fight starts? What's the consequence of them being defeated now? Can the players anticipate them and do something to impede them?

Ok. So what does this look like from the player's side?

If the ghasts were all "on the board" in another room, but positioned so that they could only enter the PCs room at a rate of 1 each round, that would look exactly the same from the PCs perspective.

Likewise, the GM could actually map out the whole castle behind their screen and roll perception tests for every guard every turn and move them, but would that look any different from the players perspective than just having a squad show up every X turns?

Its really no different in principle than a classic "wandering monster" roll IMO. Although, I suppose if video games had existed in 1973 they might well have referred to wandering monsters as feelinkg like video games as well.

The ghast room doesn't really read as "reinforcements" though. It's a spawner, it poops out new enemies at a fixed rate until you figure out how to turn it off. (Unless the door was described as being unusually sturdy and fortified, "just shut the door" doesn't really feel like it should work because surely they'll smash it down?)

It follows my system's reinforcement mechanics, albeit with values tweaked so that it equals one ghoul a round. Basically, the DM sets the percentage based on distance, population density, and enemy perception scores, and rolls a dice each turn, with a small squad showing up on a success. In the castle scenario above, it would probably be the same average, but with 4 guards showing up 25% of the time rather than 1:1.

Simply shutting the door wouldn't work if they are still in the area. I expected (again, expectation does not mean puzzle with only one solution or railroad) so defeat the ghasts and then blockade or collapse the hallway somehow (which is what the ultimately did, albeit the outer doors rather than the inner, creating future problems). If they aren't in the area, the ghasts have no motivation to break down the door and will go back into their "dormant" state.

The first time they went into the room, they blocked off the sinkhole with a wall of tentacles, and could have easily shut the door and then fallen back, and then been long gone by the time the tentacles dissipated, leaving the ghasts without incentive to pursue.

There's somebody around here with a signature that says something like (very roughly and poorly paraphrased) 'What players want in play is easy victories. What they want when telling stories about it is a hard battle they won by the skin of their teeth/clever strategies/miraculous luck.' Your play group would appear to be very much in that nature - what they will tell you they 'want' is what they would like to believe they can do. That unfortunately does not necessarily mean it was what they actually can or will enjoy in actual practice. While I would not want to discourage you from seeking feedback from your players (most of the time More Communication is More Betterer), you do have to take into consideration whether your players are actually capable of providing honest self-assessment.

I very much believe this myself.

My players do not.

Easy fights rarely register for them, and challenging fights tend to provoke bitch sessions and bitter feelings that last for years.

(Or potentially that the player who claims to want 'balanced' combats is operating on the 3.x concept of 'balance' in which the players are heavily favored to win and will mostly be expending easily renewed resources to do so, and there is a mismatch of definitions there if you understand 'balanced combat' to mean 'there is a notable chance the players will lose or suffer serious damage in the course of victory' .. and also that an easily-won 'balanced' fight from your perspective may be a non-balanced 'we're getting way too beat up' fight from your players because you are consistently expecting them to be more capable than they actually are.)

So do I. It is very rare at my table that the players actually straight up lose a fight, generally about 1/200 fights or once every 20 adventures / 1-2 years of of real time.


This campaign is very different than my normal game as I tend to run linear and balanced adventures, but in the mega-dungeon where they go and how far they go are up to the PCs, so anything can happen. Even so, they have never actually lost a fight; they split the party when fighting the kobolds and chose to parlay rather than lose the isolated PCs but would have won the fight if they fought to the death (albeit at the cost of lives, they made the right choice imo), and against the Olags they fell back rather than fighting because they pushed to far ahead the first time, and the second time the manticore forced them to fight the olags to the death (and the PCs won with no deaths) and then came in and blackmailed them without a combat.

[GloatingSwine]

Ok. So what does this look like from the player's side?

If the ghasts were all "on the board" in another room, but positioned so that they could only enter the PCs room at a rate of 1 each round, that would look exactly the same from the PCs perspective.

If they're never going to go to the place the ghasts came from there is no difference to the players. Ghasts are just spawned into the world from the immaterium and they stop when you figure out what the off button looks like and press it. Ideally then they get something for doing it (access to treasure, for instance) because that's the loop your players are looking for. Do encounter, get treasure.

Remember that not everything in your "wandering monster" encounter table needs to be a fight. It can be "near misses" with monsters that make the players feel like there's more things around them (eg. something dashes out of sight in the shadows, if they pursue it they can't find it, nothing ever comes of it). It can be other non-hostile NPCs that give the impression of life in the world, encounters with allies, etc.

It follows my system's reinforcement mechanics, albeit with values tweaked so that it equals one ghoul a round. Basically, the DM sets the percentage based on distance, population density, and enemy perception scores, and rolls a dice each turn, with a small squad showing up on a success. In the castle scenario above, it would probably be the same average, but with 4 guards showing up 25% of the time rather than 1:1.

Right, which is why it feels videogamey. Because the reinforcements are spawned procedurally out of thin air infinitely. If the players are at A and 4 extra guards show up from B then when the players go to B there should be 4 less guards there. Anyone who is in range to affect the current encounter should be reasonably known to the GM and there should be consequences if they do it. It sounds very much like your reinforcement mechanics are only ever bad for the players. If reinforcements appear now it's harder now but nothing else changes later.

Like consider the alternative, in our example above if the players at A have an advantageous position somehow (high ground, for instance) that they wouldn't have at B then if reinforcements come from B to A then the players can actually benefit from reinforcements arriving, they draw strength away from what would have been a tougher encounter.

The first time they went into the room, they blocked off the sinkhole with a wall of tentacles, and could have easily shut the door and then fallen back, and then been long gone by the time the tentacles dissipated, leaving the ghasts without incentive to pursue.

But did they know that? Did they have any way of knowing that the ghasts would turn off again ever? You know that because you designed the encounter, but the players can't use knowledge that only exists in your head to guide them to the correct course of action!

(NB also it still means that the only way to actually "win" this encounter is to never have it in the first place because if you poke the hive you can only spend resources to get you back to the situation you were in before you ever went into that room).

[Talakeal]

If they're never going to go to the place the ghasts came from there is no difference to the players. Ghasts are just spawned into the world from the immaterium and they stop when you figure out what the off button looks like and press it. Ideally then they get something for doing it (access to treasure, for instance) because that's the loop your players are looking for. Do encounter, get treasure.

Right, which is why it feels videogamey. Because the reinforcements are spawned procedurally out of thin air infinitely. If the players are at A and 4 extra guards show up from B then when the players go to B there should be 4 less guards there. Anyone who is in range to affect the current encounter should be reasonably known to the GM and there should be consequences if they do it. It sounds very much like your reinforcement mechanics are only ever bad for the players. If reinforcements appear now it's harder now but nothing else changes later.

Everything is spawned out of the immaterium; its an RPG, it only exists in the DM's mind / notes until it is on the board.

The reinforcement mechanic is very similar to a wandering monster roll, but instead of representing a huge dungeon that can never be fully cleared, it represents getting the attention of a force that is too large for the PCs to actually take on in a straight fight but cannot mobilize all at once.

From the player's perspective, it shouldn't really look any different than if the DM is keeping meticulous track of everyone in the dungeon and rolling perception tests for the guards, and therefore shouldn't feel video-gamey, but its a hell of a lot less work on the DM's side of the screen; a shortcut that is conceptually no different from, say using stat arrays for monsters instead of rolling each one's stats individually.

It is an interesting idea to deplete the dungeon based on it, something I will take into consideration. But again, wandering monsters has the same issue, and in fifty years of gaming articles I don't think I have ever heard someone propose that, let alone suggest it is a necessary step in avoiding it feeling like a video game.

But did they know that? Did they have any way of knowing that the ghasts would turn off again ever? You know that because you designed the encounter, but the players can't use knowledge that only exists in your head to guide them to the correct course of action!

This doesn't seem to be a very out there leap of logic. Barricading the door to stop the flood of zombies is something the players could have picked up from 60 years of horror movies, and basic knowledge of how undead work in the game world would tell them they won't be pursued once they are out of sensory range. Indeed, they did barricade the door on the second attempt.

(NB also it still means that the only way to actually "win" this encounter is to never have it in the first place because if you poke the hive you can only spend resources to get you back to the situation you were in before you ever went into that room).

On a meta-game level, they get XP for exploring rooms.

On an in character level, they had no way of knowing what was in there until they checked, so it could have been treasure, clues, or a connecting room.

Either way, the same can be said of any room which contains only traps and / or monsters, of which there are many in this dungeon.

Remember that not everything in your "wandering monster" encounter table needs to be a fight. It can be "near misses" with monsters that make the players feel like there's more things around them (eg. something dashes out of sight in the shadows, if they pursue it they can't find it, nothing ever comes of it). It can be other non-hostile NPCs that give the impression of life in the world, encounters with allies, etc.

This is true, but I don't see how it has any bearing on how much it feels like a video game.

[Pauly]

That's great, but it doesn't really touch on my question about how you handle reinforcement mechanics without it feeling like a video game.
.

I haven’t run fantasy games in a long time and my games run more to ‘army base’ than ‘megadungeon’, so I don’t know what I do ports over to your scenario.

1) There is a finite amount of enemies that come from somewhere
2) Enemies move in groups/squads. I’ll have 5 enemies show up every 5th turn rather than 1 enemy show up every turn.
3) Players are informed when the reinforcements are incoming and when they are not, usually by telling them something like the alarm is on or the alarm has been turned off.
4) Not all the enemies come running. Some will maintain their position if they’re guarding something important. Others will keep to their sector and maintain a perimeter around the alarmed sector, they will only start running to the alarm if an actual firefight breaks out.
5) If LOS is going to be important I map out who can see where, and if needed will do it in 3D which just takes a little maths.

Edit to add:
In your scenario, what I would do.
1) Each ghast only responds to what it can sense. Having the default mode as responding to hunting calls strikes me as a very good way for an enemy to lure half your ghasts out of position just before a battle.
2) Map out how many ghasts can see the party at various points. And of those can potentially see the party only a portion will have their heads pointed in the right direction.
At point X1, N1 ghasts are activated, at point X2, an additional N2 ghasts are activated and so on.
3) ghasts outside of [smell range] will stop pursuing the party if the party retreat out of LOS.
4) I would describe the ghasts as clambering up a steep ramp, not climbing out of the mud.

For example lets set X1 as opening the door to the room, N1 as 10 ghasts in addition to the 6(?) already in the room.and [smell range as 30 feet].
The party open the door and engage the ghasts in the room and see the ghasts coming up the ramp. They adopt turtle tactics after 3 ghast reinforcements arrive and fall back 10 feet down the hallway. With smel, range of 30 feet that might mean an additional 2 ghasts on the ramp can smell the party.
After these 2 arrive no more additional ghasts arrive. After dealing with the first 9 ghasts and 2 reinforcements there are 5 ghasts who will come on as reinforcements at the rate if 1/turn when the party return to X1. If the party go back to town to restock there will be 5 ghasts in the storeroom, but no reinforcements will be activated until the party move to X2
X2 might be the edge of the ramp and N2 might be 20 ghasts

The only way for the party to face an endless stream of ghasts would be for the party to advance down into the middle of the ghasts with big glowing “here I am” signs above their heads, in which case they’ll get what they deserve.

[Talakeal]

I haven’t run fantasy games in a long time and my games run more to ‘army base’ than ‘megadungeon’, so I don’t know what I do ports over to your scenario.

1) There is a finite amount of enemies that come from somewhere.
2) Enemies move in groups/squads. I’ll have 5 enemies show up every 5th turn rather than 1 enemy show up every turn.
3) Players are informed when the reinforcements are incoming and when they are not, usually by telling them something like the alarm is on or the alarm has been turned off.
4) Not all the enemies come running. Some will maintain their position if they’re guarding something important. Others will keep to their sector and maintain a perimeter around the alarmed sector, they will only start running to the alarm if an actual firefight breaks out.
5) If LOS is going to be important I map out who can see where, and if needed will do it in 3D which just takes a little maths.

That really doesn't sound too different to me.

1:
Whether they are finite or infinite doesn't actually matter to the players if there are more than they can realistically kill. But yeah, if the players do manage to set up a kill box where they can handle huge numbers, then it doesn't really make sense to keep bringing in reinforcements.

2:
Yeah, normally that is what I do. But in this particular where it is a disorganized mob of corpses it was a lot easier (both for me to keep track of and for the players to formulate strategies around) to just have it be 1 every 1.

3:
Yes. Players should generally be informed, at least if their characters would be aware of the alarm. In this case, I told them right up that there were *a lot* of undead down there in the process of digging themselves out.

4:
This is also true. Although it runs pretty counter to GloatingSwine's point, and doesn't really apply to the undead.

5:
Agreed.

[GloatingSwine]

It is an interesting idea to deplete the dungeon based on it, something I will take into consideration. But again, wandering monsters has the same issue, and in fifty years of gaming articles I don't think I have ever heard someone propose that, let alone suggest it is a necessary step in avoiding it feeling like a video game.

Well no because even videogames don't do random encouters any more :P

Overall though the point of "not feeling like a videogame" is making it feel like a living environment that reacts in ways a videogame couldn't have accounted for. Spitting up an infinite number of reinforcements or wandering monsters are things videogames can do very easily and often do.

So yeah, your dungeon should absolutely have a finite number of things in it because that's what a real environment would have, and the individual floors of the dungeon aren't so incomprehensibly vast that the players could never have accounted for everything in them (because "account for everything in the floor" is explicitly the progression they are expected to pursue).

Reinforcements showing up should have a consequence for the place they came from, and there should always be a place for them to have come from.

This doesn't seem to be a very out there leap of logic. Barricading the door to stop the flood of zombies is something the players could have picked up from 60 years of horror movies, and basic knowledge of how undead work in the game world would tell them they won't be pursued once they are out of sensory range. Indeed, they did barricade the door on the second attempt.

It never actually works in the zombie movies though. They always break through. It's a delay whilst you do something else, not a solution.

[BRC]

Re: Reinforcements, to me I think it mostly just matters that you can build an easily understandable story about the reinforcements, who they are, where they came from, why they arrived when they did and in the numbers they did.


Tala's example seems fine to me. The sinkhole opens to a room below full of an unknown, but high, number of wights. They're all mindlessly trying to climb out to get to that delicious, delicious living meat. with all the wights clambering over each other to climb up, only one wight a round makes it to the top of the sinkhole. It's a decent enough explanation for why only one wight a round would be showing up.

The joy of TTRPG's is that so long as you're willing to adapt to circumstances, you don't really need to have everything perfectly mapped out.

Like, the default assumption, where the PC's block the hole and leave (Or just seal the door and leave) is fine enough. If they DID set something up that would have a major impact on the number of Wights, like, say, making a big fire or something in the sinkhole, you can adjust your notes to deal with that later. The world of the game extends beyond the board.

[Lacco]

That's great, but it doesn't really touch on my question about how you handle reinforcement mechanics without it feeling like a video game.

GloatingSwine managed to sum it pretty well.

My usual aproach is:
1. call for reinforcements & announcement
2. delay
3. arrival
4. leadership

If reinforcements just appear, without reason, they feel spawny. Imagine a werewolf, howling. Once it howls, you may hear answers from the wolves. Or if you raise an alarm in military barracks, you may hear general commotion, orders being shouted and confirmations.

It takes some time for the reinforcements to arrive: they do not 'appear' or 'spawn' right away. In our case, you'll see shadows in the forest and hear howls, or notice that there is a group of soldiers slowly forming in front of the barracks.

Once the reinforcements arrive, they will join battle, but in some cases they will take a round to prepare - split apart, give orders to each other, or even just observe to be able to jump in. Some of them may charge immediately, but oftentimes there will be a moment of respite as the enemies reform.

Lastly, reinforcements usually require some form of leadership - or they won't be organized. If you have a clear leader, he will be seen/heard. If there is just the first guy who charges ahead and the rest follows, that's still good. But if there is no leadership, the reinforcements won't be organized at all - and need to act in line with it.

So for the example that gbaji set above (a steep ramp), I'd make the following considerations:
1. every ghast that sees the PCs will attempt to charge them, but if the players are seen and can't be attacked by the given ghast (e.g. they are turtling and there's no space), they will let out a scream, raising 'alarm'.
2. other ghasts, not seen (or seen just as lurking shadows beyond clear line of sight) will respond to the scream; there may be dozens of shadowy figures seen in distance and lots of movement,
3. it will take a ghast 2-4 rounds to climb up the ramp (eyeballed) to join his pals; if more than 3 are climbing, the rest will just slip/fall down and attempt it later
4. once a ghast is up there, he just attempts to attack, no consideration for any tactics.

Fourth point will change as soon as whatever power kept them dormant down there wakes up and decides to check who's at the door.

Because that is what 3E D&D implied was the norm and what I am used to.

Why?

D&D implied that was the norm for D&D, but it's not really an universal guideline.

Depending on the system (can't really say I went and studied your system), this could be one of the issues.

This would be most probably its own thread, but I'd consider reviewing your expectations, the D&D norm of 80% spendings and the players' view. Because for a relatively lethal game, I'd most probably turle like hell if I was expecting 80% of my HP to be spent by the end of adventuring day.

Also... I have to say that your tactical scale really needs to go up to 10 if balanced for a general gaming audience, because I have seen tactics, even at my table, that are a lot more complex than your seven.

One personal note, I'd avoid statements like these: it sounds like you are patronizing the poster. I assume you meant it in good will (stating your players' plans are usually on the more complex side), but take it as an advice.

Its really no different in principle than a classic "wandering monster" roll IMO. Although, I suppose if video games had existed in 1973 they might well have referred to wandering monsters as feelinkg like video games as well.

There is a difference between having a labyrinth of corridors that you wander for 8 hours and meeting a 'wandering monster' and setting up a camp in a corridor, getting attacked from one side by a monster, finding out it came from a dead end and then getting attacked from the same side during rest because 'random encounter!'.

It follows my system's reinforcement mechanics, albeit with values tweaked so that it equals one ghoul a round. Basically, the DM sets the percentage based on distance, population density, and enemy perception scores, and rolls a dice each turn, with a small squad showing up on a success. In the castle scenario above, it would probably be the same average, but with 4 guards showing up 25% of the time rather than 1:1.

Or it would be a four-guard group, and afterwards a whole squad with a lieutenant - because it makes no sense sending out 4 guys just because dice said it.

Remember that not everything in your "wandering monster" encounter table needs to be a fight. It can be "near misses" with monsters that make the players feel like there's more things around them (eg. something dashes out of sight in the shadows, if they pursue it they can't find it, nothing ever comes of it). It can be other non-hostile NPCs that give the impression of life in the world, encounters with allies, etc.

I usually add 'clue' and 'forewarning' to the random encounter table. I usually reroll those two to see what the clue/forewarning is about (another entry on the table). If they get a clue about local goblin group, they can find their former victims, a dungeon grafitti, broken weapons or just some markings. Beasts leave carcasses, feathers, fur, processed food... and forewarnings are usually sounds or visuals of the enemy from afar (sounds of combat, a orcish drums, wolf howl).

Also, very nice summary on the videogamey feel of the mechanics.

Everything is spawned out of the immaterium; its an RPG, it only exists in the DM's mind / notes until it is on the board.

You are technically correct, but this is irrelevant to the topic.

From the player's perspective, it shouldn't really look any different than if the DM is keeping meticulous track of everyone in the dungeon and rolling perception tests for the guards, and therefore shouldn't feel video-gamey, but its a hell of a lot less work on the DM's side of the screen; a shortcut that is conceptually no different from, say using stat arrays for monsters instead of rolling each one's stats individually.

As far as I remember, I was one of the people that stated that it feels 'videogamey', but it was from the viewpoint of a GM. However, from the viewpoint of a player, if I see that GM marks off my fifteenth kill in the same room, I will take it differently than when I just hear him say that I see another ghoul dig himself out after a round.

...also, are you saying each of your goblins does not have a name, family tree, life aspirations and his own character sheet...?

So, from players' point of view: if I notice a pattern that feels videogamey, it may activate the part of my brain that works on the video-game logic.

It is an interesting idea to deplete the dungeon based on it, something I will take into consideration. But again, wandering monsters has the same issue, and in fifty years of gaming articles I don't think I have ever heard someone propose that, let alone suggest it is a necessary step in avoiding it feeling like a video game.

There are few articles that discuss depleting/switching up random encounters in dungeon. I remember one that stated you should decrease a dice size per encounter, or have checkboxes for limited encounters, with either a list of replacements or even empty spots once you cleared it out sufficiently; one of the options was ability to either multiply or reduce encounters based on elimination of camps (e.g. destroy goblin camp in dungeon and you get less goblin encounters, but raise an alarm in goblin camp and you get more bands looking for trouble).

No idea where I saw it. I'd start with Alexandrian in this case, but I think he only mentioned the original source of the idea somewhere in the whole 'how to handle dungeon roster' area.

And again, static tables of wandering monsters are quite the old school stuff, and mostly tend to fall into the 'video-gamey' territory at this point, as there are not too many video games where 'random encounters' have their own counter. Undertale even builds on that with the 'but nobody came' mechanic (once you kill enough monsters in one area, random encounters just stop showing up) - but Undertale is basically a deconstruction of traditional RPG video game tropes... so yeah. Try going to Dungeon Master 2 and just spend few years killing floaty pointy things and those little grabby bearded guys and you'll see what we're talking about.