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So I'm currently working on designing a dungeon crawl fantasy heartbreaker sort of game, and I want to run a nice and ruthless old school dungeon dive to see how well it handles. What are some really great classic dungeons I should look up to get my dungeon-designing juices flowing?
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Jul 21, 2014 20:34
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ProfessorProf posted:In the mecha game I'm running, the party has a whole crew of NPCs running their flagship (with a PC captain in charge). They're useful for dumping exposition, players can pick them up temporarily if a character is temporarily AWOL/captured/whatever, and the ship can take pot shots at enemies randomly during fights to provide a bit of utility while still keeping the party members in the spotlight. I think it's worked pretty well. For my zombie game here, I've actually got a stable of 18 NPCs that I can randomly select from the list whenever a new NPC is needed. All of them are fleshed out enough (thanks to a random generator) that they're usable as realistic PC analogues, so if they join the party they can round out its capabilities in a situation where only 2 or 3 PCs need to do a job for 4 or 5. Their personalities and goals can also provide convenient sources of drama and conflict at appropriate moments.
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Jul 21, 2014 20:45
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There's nothing wrong with having NPC allies who join the PCs, the big key is that it should be the PCs' choice to let them in. Ask your players if they want to go out and hire a Healer or something, and if they say yes, let them shop around or have a hand in coming up with their backup. There's nothing wrong with NPCs tagging along so long as they do it because the players want them there and the focus still remains on the player.
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Jul 21, 2014 21:23
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Night10194 posted:There's nothing wrong with having NPC allies who join the PCs, the big key is that it should be the PCs' choice to let them in. Ask your players if they want to go out and hire a Healer or something, and if they say yes, let them shop around or have a hand in coming up with their backup. There's nothing wrong with NPCs tagging along so long as they do it because the players want them there and the focus still remains on the player. The other tricks are to make sure that the NPC's have a personality that fits with the group, that the NPC's follow the groups orders, and that the NPC's NEVER overshadow the groups capabilities.
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Jul 22, 2014 02:36
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Why not have a healer DMPC who has taken a vow to do no harm? Maybe the sanctity of the vow is the source of their healing powers.
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Jul 22, 2014 03:18
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Give the PCs a Hobson's choice. They interview for healers and get three tryouts with different personalities. That way you get to put the decision in their hands (as well as the decision of whether to have an NPC at all).
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Jul 22, 2014 07:52
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ProfessorProf posted:So I'm currently working on designing a dungeon crawl fantasy heartbreaker sort of game, and I want to run a nice and ruthless old school dungeon dive to see how well it handles. Read Gary Gygax modules. Tomb of Horrors is a bit too cruel even for upper level characters. Temple of Elemental Evil is a good start. A classic. If you want to learn about worlds look at the shoulders that carry them. Can't go wrong. Me? I am of the belief that Ravenloft (I6 version) is the single best module ever created for D&D. I've been on both sides of it, player and DM, and both times it was so loving awesomely epic. Both times, the final fight played out like a Wrestlemania main event where you didn't know who would win. Both times it was the players who did. The players never again reached the pinnacle of triumph that comes with essentially being the beat up and bloodied John McClain at the end of Die Hard either time.
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Jul 22, 2014 13:00
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While tomb of horrors probably is too evil, there's nothing stopping NPCs referring to whatever dungeon you make as "that... [crash of thunder] TOMB OF HORRORS". Watch the PCs squirm.
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Jul 22, 2014 13:41
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ProfessorProf posted:So I'm currently working on designing a dungeon crawl fantasy heartbreaker sort of game, and I want to run a nice and ruthless old school dungeon dive to see how well it handles. Caverns of Thracia is probably the best. It's worth looking up White Plume Mountain and telling your players you're looking at Tomb of Horrors.
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Jul 25, 2014 02:06
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Tomb of Horrors is really almost an amazing piece of performance art in the realm of Adventure Design, from a time when the genre itself was barely out of its infancy. Having run it, there are SO MANY moments where the adventure is basically saying "oh man, watch this -- the players are totally going to do <X>" and then sure enough, they fall into whatever trap is there, hidden in plain sight purely by established dungeon convention and rote player behaviors. Without any prompting or direction on my end, the party wandered into almost all the "major" elements of the dungeon exactly as predicted like clockwork. It was kind of an awesome experience. That being said, it's designed to basically be as dickish to players as possible, rather than riding that line between challenge and reward that is optimally 'fun'. There's a lot of "gently caress you" elements to it that I wouldn't want to spring on the average party.
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Jul 25, 2014 05:40
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Hubis posted:Tomb of Horrors is really almost an amazing piece of performance art in the realm of Adventure Design, from a time when the genre itself was barely out of its infancy. Having run it, there are SO MANY moments where the adventure is basically saying "oh man, watch this -- the players are totally going to do <X>" and then sure enough, they fall into whatever trap is there, hidden in plain sight purely by established dungeon convention and rote player behaviors. Without any prompting or direction on my end, the party wandered into almost all the "major" elements of the dungeon exactly as predicted like clockwork. It was kind of an awesome experience. There is only one caveat with ToH: don't use characters that you care about. And maybe bring a spare. It's an amazing piece of design, having DM'd it, and i'd recommend it to everyone.
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Jul 25, 2014 07:06
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So, I suck at making maps. Does anyone have a good map for a mine? We've been playing almost all of this without incredibly detailed maps so far, and I'm a little stuck on where to look.
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Jul 25, 2014 13:06
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Writer Cath posted:So, I suck at making maps. Does anyone have a good map for a mine? We've been playing almost all of this without incredibly detailed maps so far, and I'm a little stuck on where to look. Here's a map of an Ohio coal mine. Just Googling "Mine maps" and doing image search brings up a ton of options.
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Jul 25, 2014 15:27
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Whenever I need a map, I always look at cartographersguild.com first.
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Jul 25, 2014 16:23
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sebmojo posted:There is only one caveat with ToH: don't use characters that you care about. And maybe bring a spare. As I recall, The Tomb was written by Gygax explicitly to remove a few overpowered PCs from his campaign, including one of the "Original PCs" (Rigby, I think?) who solo'd the Temple of Elemental Evil. Let me put it this way: As written, the original ToH has a 3 "entrances", 2 of which are traps and can result in insta-death for anyone trying to use them. The "real" entrance isn't a lot better. That being said, if you run it, play as close to the "neutral abriter of facts" GM style as possible and resist the urge to hint or push the players along the way. Player frustration is a key part to the "magic" of The Tomb I think, whether it's them getting annoyed into carelessness and triggering a trap or trying something random that has absolutely no chance of working and being stunned when it does.
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Jul 25, 2014 16:34
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Has anyone got knowledge of items in D&D that would be useful in deflecting attempts by PCs using Charm Person spells? I got a situation coming up where such a magical ring or scroll or the like would make a huge impact in how I'm looking to set things up.
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Jul 26, 2014 02:42
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So I'm in a Call of Cthulhu group where the DM switches every week, and my turn's coming up pretty soon and this is my first time DMing basically anything. In my campaign, one of the other players will be functioning as basically Nemesis from Resident Evil 3 (just substitute rocket launcher for Spectral Razor, really.) How would I best hide said player's movements from the main party so that there's as little chance for metagaming as possible?
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Jul 26, 2014 03:36
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3.X only mind you. Against most mind control spells there are a few options. The one I use as a PC is a Custom item with circle of protection. Anything which can provide mind blank is much more expensive but is also an option. That said there are a few other work around methods. Some species are immune to mind affecting and/or various enchantment spells. Like say... undead. Or nonhumanoid beings. Charm spells are will based right? Anything which buffs will saves will help. From feats to items to crystal augments to a friendly psion or priest nearby. Hope this helps.
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Jul 26, 2014 04:10
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chitoryu12 posted:Here's a map of an Ohio coal mine. Just Googling "Mine maps" and doing image search brings up a ton of options. It was the most obvious option and I missed it 
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Jul 27, 2014 14:10
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So, I'm running Only War, and I want to make a vibe of lovely urban occupation ops. Since the players like investigation, I want to throw in some of that, and I need suggestions. They've landed on a lovely planet that has been razed by religious conflict - a Synod regarding the legitimacy of a sector sect has been called on nearby planet, and that has supporters throwing a fit, attacking tithe shipments from the planets recently restored industry as they make their way to guard-held starports. First they make planetfall, escort a convoy that gets attacked, and try out how the combat rules work and such. It's going to be fun for the whole family. Then I want to send them to do something to contact the locals, find out what the issue is, but I'm drawing a blank on good plot hooks here. Something about meeting with local clerics, I reckon. Also, I need to work out whether the maybe-soon-to-be-outlawed cult is actually involved with Chaos. What would be most entertaining? All feedback appreciated, it's like I have a really good idea of the mood and experience I want to give (urban unrest, religious strife, depressing squalor), but no good scenario structure.
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Jul 27, 2014 14:58
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I'd try not to plan too far ahead. Have the cult be/not be chaos depending on what's more fun at the time, and decide based on how their investigation goes. If they're convinced the slimeball bishop did it, let them be right. You could also do something a bit more unusual - maybe it's a xeno race/artifact they're worshipping, calling a hive fleet (or whatever) towards the sector.
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Jul 27, 2014 15:10
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Thanks, this is what I am leaning towards too. I'd just like to have some options plannet out in advance if they players flounder, I guess.
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Jul 27, 2014 15:20
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Tias posted:Thanks, this is what I am leaning towards too. I'd just like to have some options plannet out in advance if they players flounder, I guess. I found that one of the best tricks to use is to give the players time to speculate. A lot of times they'll come up with ideas that are just as cool as the stuff you were planning, or you can tweak their ideas to make them your own.
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Jul 27, 2014 16:20
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No one can run circles around a plan better than my players, who switched goals and proposed methods no less than three times each last night while they were carrying out the plan and managed to delay things enough to shift the climactic end-of-storyarc encounter it had all been building towards to six weeks from now. Pretty much all of it came from players who explicitly weren't the one whose character the arc is about. Dicks. All in the name of feeling super duper extra safe and risk-free while being an adventurer. "yeah our bad we played that too much like Shadowrun lol." Well don't cause it isn't. What's a good picture of a D&D party being as badass as they possibly can, because I'm gonna change the desktop image on our battlemap display to that. ... aside from venting, though, we talked it over, and the main problem seemed to be that they wanted info on how well built the enemy fort and how strong the enemy army were so they could make a plan, while I wanted to know what they'd like to plan so I could tell them what obstacles they'd have to take care of. Told the instigators that instead of asking "how many are there" it would have been more helpful to ask "are there too many to just bust in, if yes, can we make a big distraction" and got "well that's not what a person in this world would say." I'm like, if you're a person you're an Indiana Jones kind of person, and Indiana Jones doesn't turn tail at the temple door because he thinks the traps could be above his league, Indiana Jones goes in and knows there are probably traps but deals with them one at a time, hoping for the best, and when poo poo goes downhill he somehow pulls through against all odds where any lesser person would have been instantly killed, and you don't need us to establish that in the narrative before you act like it because when we started this game I flat out said Make That Kind Of Person, It's That Kind Of Game. e: as well as that, if every character you play defaults to a "get as much info as you can, know your enemy before they know you, above all play it safe" kind of guy, including the one you specifically described as the opposite, maaaybe rethink that whole "think like the character" approach to RPing you're putting forth as an argument. My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Jul 27, 2014 |
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Jul 27, 2014 21:00
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quote:I'm like, if you're a person you're an Indiana Jones kind of person, and Indiana Jones doesn't turn tail at the temple door because he thinks the traps could be above his league, Indiana Jones goes in and knows there are probably traps but deals with them one at a time, hoping for the best, and when poo poo goes downhill he somehow pulls through against all odds where any lesser person would have been instantly killed, and you don't need us to establish that in the narrative before you act like it because when we started this game I flat out said Make That Kind Of Person, It's That Kind Of Game. Or they're That Person who wants to do exactly the opposite of whatever the plot may suggest, often for no purpose other than to do what they want, and creates convoluted Rube Goldbergian plans that rely on the GM just taking everything in stride and allowing it to work to see what happens.
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Jul 27, 2014 23:08
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That, at least, they're pretty good about. They're overall good guys, it's just that session that didn't go optimally and I'm venting. Although in the future, in addition to prompting them to reveal their plans if necessary, I'm going to pace things so that big decision points like "how do we approach this" fall at the end of a session so I can properly prep whatever they decide on for the next one. (Also handy to avoid them going off in a different direction altogether. "Last time you said you wanted to go to Mount Dismemberment and that's what I prepped, we can set an adventure in Fluffy Kitten Forest next time.") In fairness, now the big final encounter takes place at night instead of during the day, and a layer of torch lighting and dimly lit corners does add some tactical options to my maps in places where I thought they could use some, so maybe it'll all turn out to be for the best. Really what bugs me most isn't that instead of rushing in and starting a fight they wanted to make a proper plan. That's cool with me and I was even prepared to abandon fighting altogether for this bit and let them find a peaceful solution. It's more that they started a plan, got to a point where I thought, hey that's cool, I can work with that and it'll be a great scene, then pulled back on that plan and made a different one, and it all ended with them rushing in anyway so essentially we wasted three hours and the whole next session. That and, like I said, they wanted to find out what to expect and plan around that, and I wanted them to tell me what they'd like to do and come up with appropriate things to expect. Next time this happens they'll miraculously just find out that the ideal approach would be "kick in the door, and let them have it." e: I mean really. You want to know what's in the dungeon? Fights and traps. You want to prepare for those? You already made 4E characters. My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Jul 28, 2014 |
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Jul 28, 2014 14:09
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I don't know when it'll happen, I don't know why it'll happen, but by god, I'm sending my party to Mount Dismemberment one of these days.
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Jul 28, 2014 14:15
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Hmm, that looks like Post Traumatic Adversarial DM Syndrome. I'd prescribe some FATE if your players are not storygame intolerant.
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Jul 28, 2014 14:26
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The words "so we have to... trust the DM?", in a tone that suggested "it makes logical sense, but can it be right?", were definitely and verbatim said. I don't think FATE is going to happen with this crew in this lifetime 
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Jul 28, 2014 14:37
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chitoryu12 posted:Or they're That Person who wants to do exactly the opposite of whatever the plot may suggest, often for no purpose other than to do what they want, and creates convoluted Rube Goldbergian plans that rely on the GM just taking everything in stride and allowing it to work to see what happens. We had a player who didn't want to adventure. Like, his character was a bit like Rimmer, rules focused. We had a plot where our noble family wouldn't take action against their evil rivals cult machinations because of the usual disbelief/politics tropes. So, the players resolved to sneak out and save the world. This part was heavily railroaded, and that was fine because it was the opening plot hook to get the story moving. Except rimmer wouldn't disobey his father, and we spent the first part of the adventure trying to raise the alarm that we were sneaking out, and we had struggled to stop him. To get things back on track the GM had the character her reported to take our side and knock him the gently caress out and we dragged him with us. That was fine, except the player had clearly taken it as some grave insult rather than an amusing aside, and repeatedly tried to leave the party to run back home, and it meant the entire night just loving dragged. So yeah, if the GM is making a campaign about high loving adventure, you don't roll up a character who sits in the basement all day and wont leave. Except people seem to do this. Also he put an actual pin on his model to get that authentic rapier look. The model was raising his sword dramatically! Leaning over that table to move your dude was fun.
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Jul 28, 2014 15:01
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quote:Also he put an actual pin on his model to get that authentic rapier look. The model was raising his sword dramatically! This may be the first time a player has managed to injure the other guys without touching them. I just hate the super complex plans that I always see get thought up, usually on the spur of the moment. Is it an effort to look smart by "beating" the GM? Are they trying to cover all the angles so absolutely nothing can throw a wrench into it? gently caress if I know. I don't think like them. The most ridiculous example for these in my games would probably be either: 1. A plot to drive a car filled with explosives into a machine gun-filled building in Berlin wherein one of the players suggested tying down the steering wheel at the exact right angle and putting a brick on the exact right part of the gas pedal so the car would turn through a 90 degree corner to the building and hit it perfectly without us having to drive it out of the garage and onto the road ourselves. He didn't understand how mind-bogglingly difficult it would be to pull this off, especially when none of them brought arithmetic tools or anything. or 2. One of my players wants to test if a building he's breaking into has bulletproof glass. He does this by staging a brawl with his partner on the street (without telling the other player this) and then "angrily" drawing his .357 and firing it into the window next to his head to see if the bullet would smash the window. As opposed to.....standing at a safe distance and shooting it, then running? Like, shooting at a building in the middle of a city just to test its defenses is already a little bit risky. The part that confuses me is that he felt the need to cover himself in some manner by staging a fake fight so he would have a reason to publicly shoot his gun. The cops and public are going to react the same to a .357 going off whether or not you punched a tiny dude in the face first, buddy. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Jul 28, 2014 |
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Jul 28, 2014 16:28
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I love Dungeon World's Mastermind class's approach to this. The players don't plan at all: they roll for how well they prepare, and get a stack of 'plan' tokens depending on the roll. During the heist they can spend those tokens to reveal that they planned for exactly this situation, and what they did to prepare.
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Jul 28, 2014 17:38
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And if the Mastermind's not turned up yet, we just pilot the flying castle into the enemy army instead. 
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Jul 28, 2014 18:24
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My Lovely Horse posted:they wanted to find out what to expect and plan around that, and I wanted them to tell me what they'd like to do and come up with appropriate things to expect. I'm afraid I have to side with your players on that. As the GM, you're taking on the burden of planning and setting up way more thing than them. Their approach is that they want to analyze a situation - a consistent, concrete situation - and figure out a plan to deal with it. The game they're playing is sort of like an optimization puzzle. They want to be problem solvers - if they're Indiana, their problem would be 'how do I get this gold thing out of that tomb?' They want to look before they leap. Or see a map with the enemy's disposition and decide where they could throw their bag of chickens to cause the biggest mess. Expecting them to come up with a plan (or a general intent) of how to deal with a situation before they know what the situation is must seem very weird and backwards to them. You want their adventure to play out like a movie scene, but they are roleplaying the people who have to dive into some poo poo, they have a solid stat-based representation of all their assets and limitations, and from their perspective, it'd be insane to expect everything to always 'just work out' and win against all odds. They want to decide where and how to go in, so they can play to their own strengths. If you get them to come up with a plan of action before they know what they're planning against, then they're going to want to re-plan and change their approach as soon as they get more information. There are a few ways to deal with this, A) Just accept it. Come up with a full scenario, and an opposition with a sensible and coherent disposition. Have some idea of what the opposition has in store, so you can know how it would react to them doing something weird. Let them analyze some known factors about it, and come up with their own plan. That's what they want to do. B) Give them situations with inherently limited foreknowledge. You know the Tomb is trapped, but nobody knows the details. The cave has 'a monster' in it, but the villagers' stories are vague and contradictory, so they can only know that it has between two and six legs, and may or may not breathe fire. If they ask "how many are there?" then you can have someone answer, "i couldn't get a solid head count, but there had to be at least fifty. way too many to just bust in" instead of chiding them for asking that reasonable question. C) Have stuff just happen to them. This can get railroad-y if used constantly.
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Jul 28, 2014 21:26
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I dunno, Post Traumatic Adversarial DM Syndrome is a very real disroder. I think a good way of teaching them to trust the GM and not be afraid to deal with stuff on the way is, after having a friendly talk to do things your way, is to give them a pool of flashback points as a gesture of goodwill. Allow them to spend the points to interfere with the narrative because of retroactive preparation. You know, adding a useful trapdoors they totally learned about beforehand or finding [i]just the right item in the backpack[/i to deal with the obstacle. During the nurturing period, try not to veto their ideas unless they're really outrageous bullshit, even if it'd cheapen the encounter. Also, leave plot-enforced imprisonment out of your arsenal for a while, it'd probably make them feel betrayed by you. You can have them do a little montage-like scenes of them executing their ideas of research and espionage or have them cut a deal with your infodump NPCs of choice. Basically, where you'd normally reluctantly answer their questions, just fade to black and give them a flashback point, maybe along with some super-basic info like "there's a lot of goblins inside". And when they get comfortable, just start removing the training wheels one by one.
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Jul 28, 2014 21:50
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Setting up that sort of consistent situation that you can pick apart from different angles and decide on an approach completely freely frankly bores my tits off though. I mean, I get it, and I love doing that sort of stuff as a player in the right system, but I know my own and 4E's limits, which is why I pitched the campaign as a tactical combat focused thing and given that as the premise I sort of do feel that the onus of not jumping into Shadowrun mode is on them. The thing about saying "way too many to bust in" is that I always feel like that comes across as the DM shutting down a potential approach. That's kind of what I mean when I say "let me know the plan" - when they just ask "how many" and I say "about 50" (because about 50 sounds about right and I have no idea what they're getting at) there's a good chance they'll just go "oh dear, we can't just bust in then, let's think of something else" and I go "but busting in would have been a lot of fun, now we're back to square one, if they'd told me they were considering that I would have accomodated it." In this case there's an obligation on me to say "about 50, too many to just bust in, unless you create a distraction" but that in turn is infinitely easier to remember when they prompt it a little, even just by asking "how many are there, could we reasonably expect to just bust in." And in the end that kind of mutual prompting is what we agreed on afterwards so, y'know, not all is lost. Should probably also mention that it's only 2 out of 6 players who are really into the Shadowrun/consistent situation thing and they knew what they were getting into. They are also the ones who would just completely not do flashback or Mastermind stuff. e: nah, the only way imprisonment happens in this campaign is if they lose a fight, or as a previously agreed-upon consequence for something else. That's a premise on the level of "we do lots of combat." My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Jul 28, 2014 |
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Jul 28, 2014 21:55
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Ask them why they hate fun. Not for the betterment of your sessions, somebody on the Internet needs to know this.
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Jul 28, 2014 22:01
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You could also throw them a bone every once in a while and give them a plan of the castle (or whatever) from something on the internet, not so detailed that whatever you prepped can't be stuck inside, and make sure there's at least two ways to get in. They get to "plan", while you have already narrowed their options to front gate/sewer tunnel/scaling the cliffside.
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Jul 28, 2014 22:16
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For my games, unless they're specifically facing an uncountable horde (like dealing with zombies in a major city or something), I tend to create solid numbers of enemies and at least rough sketches of their capabilities and weapons. There's always a way for the players to surprise me and beat impossible odds, and if they do enough research and scouting to figure out exactly what the odds are, they may decide on their own whether or not it's doable. For instance, I'm currently prepping a 1940s mobster game with the PCs working for the Outfit. The second mission they're given involves stealing or destroying a rival family's semi-truck full of illegal whiskey to try and strike a blow to their bootlegging operation in Chicago. There's a ton of ways this can be done: they can hit the truck during loading, while it's heading out the gate, on the roads and interstate on the way to the town 2 hours south, or when it arrives at the distribution center in Bloomington. But there's specific, limited numbers of mobsters around: 14 guys in the distillery building, two guys at the gate, the guy in the truck has a gun for protection, etc. The chance of two or three guys in a relatively difficult game beating over a dozen similarly armed mobsters in a gunfight is extremely low (and obviously the police could get involved), but I would never tell them outright "You can't do that." If they don't think that a shootout with 17 people is very difficult (which I doubt after the first mission), they can try. Probably fail, but try. If they manage to actually beat the guys and take out the distillery itself, that's a good amount of CP that'll get handed to them for basically singlehandedly destroying the Falcone bootlegging operation. It's just most likely impossible with their relative skill level and resources.
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Jul 28, 2014 23:40
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I used to have a player in my regular group who would notoriously ask these (seemingly) non sequitur questions. "How thick is the floor?", "What's the weather like?", "What is the merchant wearing?" and so on. What I learned was that what he is trying to communicate when he asks that question is, "I have a plan, but I have not yet thought it through." "How thick is the floor?", is a way of saying, "I would like to break this floor but I have no idea what my next step would be." It's frustrating because he never had a plan; it was just so much brain-to-mouth discussion that nobody (not even the other players) were privy to. These days I typically lowball the difficulty as best as I can when players ask me poo poo like that, but there's always that whacky question I just can't anticipate. I've found players often assume that I have some pre-planned "correct approach" to a problem (I don't) and are probing me to discover what that might be. Or even worse, they think that I've created a 'real to life' simulation of some in-game thing and they need to think around it. Either way they're trying to engage in problem-solving. When my players continually beat around the bush I try to offer them a couple of clear options and encourage them to pick between them. Most of the time they eventually take over and I can stop offering branches in the road but it's easier than stalling game for 2 hours while they try to ascertain every inch of the castle defenses or whatever. "There are around 20 guards, poorly armed, moving in regular patrol groups" immediately gives them a couple of options.
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Jul 29, 2014 09:24
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