[designchat] embracing kitchen sink RPG design via the megadungeon

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > [designchat] embracing kitchen sink RPG design via the megadungeon

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Leperflesh posted:

Why a megadungeon, instead of just a world - or a universe?

My hundred percent honest answer is "because I don't like wilderness travel". As both a player and a DM, I find exploration more interesting when it's through a series of well defined and architecturally distinct rooms, rather than nebulous "forest hexes" that all feel the same. I'd rather have five interesting things all in one big dungeon, rather than five separate dungeons that require a day to move between (with commensurate ticking off of rations, potential random encounters with bandits and other filler). Unless those five dungeons are somehow secretly linked, in which case it's basically a megadungeon anyway.

# ¿ Nov 24, 2020 20:34

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 13:09

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Whybird posted:

Maybe the answer is to make the hexes more interesting, then? Seems to me you're comparing a well-designed, interesting dungeon to a boring and lazily-designed hexcrawl.

I'm comparing something that interests me to something that interests me less. Yes, I could put more work into the things I'm not excited about, but that effort could just as easily be spent developing something I like better.

aldantefax posted:

You touch on an interesting point about "same-ness" which leads to "boring things". I think that having boring things is actually really key to making a megadungeon work because if you have something that's wholly removed from reality then players don't trust in their senses nor their abilities to get the job done. They should have competent delvers that have been around the block, so the feeling of helplessness or uncomfortable unfamiliarity needs to have some kind of procedural and narrative gap, perfect for the boring stuff to fit in.

This is something I've been going back and forth on for years - whether it's necessary to depict the more mundane aspects of adventuring in order to give context and contrast to the exciting stuff, or whether you can just hit the "high points" and let the other stuff happen offscreen. It's like empty rooms in a dungeon - they seem pointless at first, but they offer a reprieve from monsters and traps, much needed tactical diversity when choosing how to move through the dungeon, a place to retreat to, etc.

# ¿ Nov 24, 2020 22:46

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

How does character advancement work in your game? I read the setting bible (which was pretty cool, and evoked a lot of the stuff I like about DCSS) and couldn't figure out how Delvers mechanically increase their "level" and earn the right to go into the lower areas.

In my experience, "how do I get XP" is the primary driving force in what players choose to do when exploring a map, be it a hexcrawl or a dungeon.

# ¿ Nov 25, 2020 00:57

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

I'm not 100% on making the world like an MMO, but I do like what you've done with the Adventurer's Guild. One of my favorite things about the Pathfinder setting was the "Pathfinder Society" itself - an adventuring guild that claimed to be disinterested treasure hunters and archaeologists, but was a de facto mercenary army and counterintelligence agency. So the Venture Captain would tell you to dig up some tomb in the wastelands outside Cheliax and find some cool artifacts, but he'd also mention offhand that one of the local bureaucrats had blocked the Society's application to open a Lodge in the city - and if something were to happen to her, you'd find a little extra in your envelopes after the mission.

Golden Bee posted:

So what’s everyone’s mega dungeon ‘about’, and who would go into such a structure?

I had an idea for a Metro 2033 style game run in Esoteric Enterprises where the surface is uninhabitable (frozen, airless, radioactive, filled with monsters, whatever) and humanity (along with various other creatures) only survives underground. So instead of being a hidden underworld beneath a normal functioning city, the megadungeon would be the entire world. Players would explore it to find supplies, technology and magic to keep a small settlement alive.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2020 18:34

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

aldantefax posted:

Information fidelity: certain players are seeking (but did not previous explicitly state) understanding what the extent of their character knows because they have a hard time of keeping persistent metagame memory for stuff (did I see this clue five weeks ago, whereas my character with Photographic memory saw this an hour ago in game?). Because information fidelity for this game and for Megadungeons in general are intentionally designed to be imperfect, there is a much more in depth balancing act that has to take place when considering how many layers of interpretation a question asked by a player goes through, and what the interpreted response from the GM does.

When I started running my dungeon I came down hard on the side of knowledge being the players' responsibility - you know what you were personally at the table for, and what other players tell you or write down for you. And there's definitely a sense of legitimacy that comes from the players building a shared understanding of the dungeon through personal experience.

But if you asked me now, I'd err more on the side of giving players the information their characters "should know", even if the player doesn't know it in real life. Watching new players struggle to navigate an area the rest of the team has already explored, or fall victim to traps and monsters that are a known quantity to the rest of the team, is not fun for me as the DM. If the characters in the game world have downtime between adventures, we can assume that they're sharing notes and pooling knowledge. Real life players have jobs and other things they devote their attention to, rather than updating documents and consulting game resources to ensure they're prepared. For the characters, this stuff is their job.

I wrote play reports for every game, so hypothetically anyone could have read those to figure out what had happened in prior sessions. But in practice, few people are going to sift through a dozen blog posts to find out what's going on. And consolidating that information into a single, easy to reference document is itself a serious piece of work.

aldantefax posted:

no major clear 'free exploration reward', so spending time to do that versus actively questing feels like a waste of that resource

Yeah I had this same issue. Session after session the players would walk by unexplored passages and never bother to check what was inside. They had a job to do, they were on a timetable, and the dungeon was a dangerous place. All reasons to stick to the known route and the task at hand, rather than gamble on exploring a new area without a definite reward attached to it. Solution was to offer more jobs that required travel through the unvisited locations, including some explicitly centered on exploration ("find a path through the dungeon from this entrance to that one"). You could also offer explicit rewards for "free exploration", like someone who pays a fee for rooms mapped, no questions asked.

aldantefax posted:

Having a time limit on quests are good, but there are just too many of them for some players to make reasonable decisions on

Also had this issue. In the beginning, each session took place an in-game week after the previous one. This let factions do stuff in the background, police heat die down, player injuries to heal, illegal criminal enterprises to generate money, and it also matched the passage of time in the game world to how often we actually played in real life.

But by later sessions, there was so much stuff happening that it became impossible for the players to choose where they wanted to intervene. They'd pick one thing to do in a session, then the rest of the game world would zoom ahead around them, without any opportunity to intervene in the other stuff they cared about. After a certain point they just picked whichever offered the largest monetary reward, since there was no other meaningful way to choose. So I slowed the progression of time in-world, so that each session took place a game-day later rather than a week. Which kept the element of prioritization and urgency, but didn't immediately take away opportunities they wanted to pursue later. It also reduced the rate at which I had to create content, since stuff stayed on the board for longer.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2021 00:42

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

I recently finished up a dungeon jam with some people from my discord. Not really a full megadungeon, only 9 50 by 50 foot floors. But now a friend is actually running the whole thing for his group, and it's taught me a couple things about dungeon design.

System matters, but not in the way I thought. The original jam was meant to be system agnostic - something that could be run in OSE, DCC, Labyrinth Lord, whatever. There was always the possibility that you could use 5E, but nobody was really writing from that perspective. Well, the guy running the the game used 5E, albeit modified with stuff like treasure for XP, because it's what he and the players were experienced with. And apparently it's worked out great. Stealth, exploration and diplomacy all still matter, it's just that sometimes the players decide to solve a sticking point with an apocalyptic full floor brawl - which can and does result in player deaths. There was a great moment when the players reached the halfway point and met a shopkeeper who had secretly gathered the bodies of all the dead player characters the rest of the group hadn't recovered, with the intention of selling their gear back to them. The higher power level makes the players bolder, without totally wrecking the balance (which was never going to be balanced anyway, since every floor was made by a different person). I recall Gygax had a similar opinion about higher starting ability scores, which he felt made the players braver and therefore more fun to run the game for.
Pacing - on a macro level we actually lucked out with the layout, with more difficult floors alternating with safer, more sparsely populated ones. This was pure luck rather than coordination between individuals. When it comes to pacing within each floor, we could have done better. 50 by 50 is not actually a lot of room, and most people filled every room with creatures of some kind. Even when not all the creatures are hostile by default, this means that a single fight can rapidly become a meatgrinder, since nobody is ever farther than a couple rounds of movement from any given room. And I'm the worst offender out of anyone, just about every room on floor 8 (which the group hasn't reached yet) is filled with power armored duergar, alchemists with lightning rifles, and deep troll earth mages. Every floor except the rest area could have used more empty rooms and fewer monsters. In a way, it's a good thing the DM chose 5E, since it gives the players a chance of survival when they accidentally piss off an entire floor. Or deliberately piss them off, in the case of one guy who has a (partially justified) vendetta against ghouls.
Friendly NPCs in the dungeon. Everyone loves the Duke and the Merchant from Resident Evil, or all the dweebs you meet cleaning their swords in unexpected places in Dark Souls. In RPGs it's very easy to fall into the trap of making all your NPCs sarcastic, unhelpful assholes. Even a small amount of positivity goes a long way. Goblin Punch did a cool post about Dungeon Merchants a couple years back that I'm thinking about again.

Unrelated, I'm working on a proper megadungeon and hex crawl now. A salt lake populated by descendants of survivors from a ruined elven colony city underground. The challenge so far is populating the abandoned colony with things that feel suitably magical, rather than just machines of the type I put in the previous dwarven civ. Populating the surface has been a lot easier. There's a colony city from the nearest human civilization on the shore of the salt lake, made possible by an order of nuns who spend all day and night casting Create Water. Then across the lake there's an oasis built by an escaped slave of the elves, who uses a stolen decanter of endless water to feed the gardens of his magical tower.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2021 23:22

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 13:09

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

At the end of each session, ask them what they want to do next session. Present a small number of options. Two ticking clocks is an interesting choice. Thirty ticking clocks and there's realistically no way the players can ever get to them all, so why bother?

It requires "telescoping" the schedule, but things the players are interested in should generally happen soon, rather than forcing them to wait a certain number of in-game days. This may not be suitable for the kind of plot heavy, clock driven game it sounds like you're running. But based on your post it sounds like the players may not be interested in a plot/clock heavy game either.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2022 18:28

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > [designchat] embracing kitchen sink RPG design via the megadungeon