|
Currently also designing a megadungeon, inspired by Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and other roguelikes, centered around puzzle-like combat and combat-like puzzles in 5e D&D. Each floor is 8 regular rooms and 1 boss room, and the party levels up when they move down a floor. There are 1-3 short rests per floor (depending on certain objective completions) and 1 long rest between floors, during which the party can also access the shop to sell stuff, or buy from a predetermined list. Some highlights of how it's meant to work (Requires knowledge of 5e): Burst When the party first enters an encounter, before initiative is rolled, the Burst occurs. During a Burst each member of the party may perform any two of the following actions (duplicates allowed):
This is meant to replace passive perception in most cases, and terrible cases of "we roll to do everything, what do we find?" by making such preparing actions both limited and an opportunity cost. Death mechanics A player who dies loses one attunement slot and one random attuned magic item. Lost attunement slots are restored on a long rest.
Challenge rules The eight non-boss encounters the party faces? They sum to eight medium encounters. It might actually be four easy and four hard encounters, or any combination between, but that's the idea. Chances are the party can handle more than that, though! So any room has an opportunity, before entering it, to face an optional challenge mode.
That's the core of it. There's a few more rules like players worshipping homebrewed gods for extra abilities similar to a subclass, potion belt for up to one bonus action potion per encounter, and a trash bag of holding that you can't take anything out of or use during encounters, but which can hold an infinite amount of loot for sale only. This is meant to be a more focused and minimalist of a design. A minimegadungeon, if you will. Edit: Wording note everywhere I wrote "room" you should read "encounter". Too lazy to redo wording post. Emmideer fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Dec 19, 2020 |
#
¿
Dec 19, 2020 08:30
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 13, 2024 13:13 |
|
|
Interesting topic on the subject of megadungeons and encounter design in general: Traps & Other Environmental Hazards I think these can make for really interesting encounter and level design, but they're really easy to do wrong. In 5e, the system for my megadungeon, traps are done -really- wrong. It's a tactical system wherein out of nowhere, in the middle of a player's turn, they can get screwed out of their strategy if they didn't spot a trap. This feels bad for the player and gives them no room to react. Some have attempted to grapple with the problem, such as the The Angry GM with his "Click!" rule wherein players are given an opportunity when the "click!" happens (e.g. you step on a pressure plate) to describe what they're doing and that can give advantage or disadvantage. I think this is thinking in the right direction, but doesn't go far enough. Turns for a player in a tactical battle system should be sacred, or at least as sacred as possible (I'm looking at you, reactions). Otherwise, players can't do what they want and were preparing to do. The mess of things happening at once is for simultaneous resolution systems, not turn based. The solution is simple: You might trigger a trap in the middle of your turn, but a trap can only ever go off at the start or end of a turn. You walk forward and trip the wire. You have no idea what is about to happen, but it's probably going to happen on the end of your turn. Do you go ahead with the attack you were going to make? Do you dodge around? Do you dash out of the way? The actions a player has to consider have expanded in a positive way, rather a negative one. They can do exactly what they want, but with unknown consequences, or they can look to environmental clues to try and mitigate the consequences. The end is result is traps which, even undetected, lend themselves to interesting battlefield configurations, players paying attention, and psychological warfare. That feels much better than traps which screw a player out of what they were trying to do or, worse, simply do a burst of damage and nothing else. Now there's proper opportunity cost and tactical thinking baked right in, and it no longer feels as punishing to roll badly against a trap - it's your fault if you stood in place like a fool.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 21, 2020 23:53
|
|
|
Absurd Alhazred posted:FYI, there's a sale on these two along with Focal Point: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Running Extraordinary Sessions. When I followed that to DTRPG I found that there's an even bigger bundle with more of their stuff. Thanks, might pick these up.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 22, 2020 00:42
|
|
|
aldantefax posted:I'm interested in hearing more about your inspirations and design process of these systems too! It's clear that there has been a great deal of thought put into each segment in order to get a very specific kind of game feel. So this system actually evolved quite rapidly with a combination of thoughts and feedback. It started with two core ideas: The Burst mechanic, and the idea I wanted to make a roguelike in 5e with a procedurally generated layout of 20 layers deep, 1 level each. Almost immediately into design I noticed the procedural design concept was out - balance to make something challenging yet fair and fun was too difficult with randomly rolled and connected rooms. Because that's what I was really after in terms of the roguelike feel, where system mastery and clever/cautious thinking is rewarded. 5e is actually a great system for that! With some tweaks. The death mechanics came out because while dying wasn't a big deal in a normal roguelike - make a new character, try again - it would be untold hours of slapping together a new character. I think "you died, here's a new character" could work okay with 1 player and a lot of pre-generated characters to grind through, but since I was definitely making a dungeon to put an adventure party through, I wanted something that would let a dead player keep playing. Losing attuned magic items and attunement slots was a great way to use the existing mechanics of 5e and, sprinkling just a little on top, use them to put more "weight" into a boss encounter. Psychological weight of the situation is I think something roguelikes, especially older ones, do really well. And when players don't heed that weight, they tend to be punished for it. The challenge mechanic was really just "I want an opportunity for the party to challenge themselves" and again I sprinkled it on top of the existing encounter challenge rating system. It allows me to add detrimental environmental effects or extra monsters to an encounter, and the players get to choose if they want to play with those extra elements or not. You see these sort of "tempting you into an obvious trap" things in roguelikes all the time, delicious loot in a cage-match against monsters way above you. With these mechanics secured, I started building more into the idea of CRPG-like design for additional mechanics and the encounters themselves. Each encounter takes place in its own space the party is teleported to, so the game lacks any sort of exploration aspect outside of exploring within an encounter. What this sacrifices in overall vemisalitude is made up for in letting me treat each encounter like a locked room, and thus fine tune its difficulty before the party ever sees it, ensuring I can confidently claim nothing in the encounter was tailored to harm or help their characters specifically. It would be a useless endeavor even if I wanted to, as the game includes within the god worshipping mechanic to worship the god of character changing for a floor and, at the end of that floor, getting to entirely redesign your character from the ground up for the current level. It's not free, but it's not pricey either. Just a challenge and some time delay. Of course, worshipping a new god will get you the wrath of the old one, something I cribbed directly from DCSS. Overall though I use my potential players as a sounding board for what sounds like content that is overpowered, underpowered, or straight up pointless and finicky. While I can't share with them the encounters I've designed, I've been religiously following the encounter and monster creation rules, so nothing should be broken and, if it is, oh well - you design, you learn, you do better next time. If I ever do finish all twenty levels of this thing, and it playtests well, it'd be nice to publish it. Emmideer fucked around with this message at 07:51 on Dec 22, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Dec 22, 2020 07:46
|
|