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mellonbread posted:I almost never put locked doors in my dungeons. That's something I'm glad the hobby discarded early on, having to roll to open every door, roll to break open stuck doors... Hard-to-use doors make no sense, but they have good game effects. They keep the party together and the best way to deal with doors is to have multiple people pushing at the same time and retreat routes are not assured. Locked and/or barred doors are okay because axes exist.
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Jan 21, 2023 02:43
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I'm going to continue to ramble a bit about what is going to be now Megastrata 23, which is definitely not a reference to Megazone 23, I promise. Since the first part of generating the structure for Dungeon23 is to provide "as much structure as needed", I'm choosing to take January to prepare all the structures for more rapid creation. While the idea of creating every day is great and I encourage it, I also recognize that for me, I have a lot of things on my plate and I can only reasonably channel that creativity in very small chunks on a regular basis and then expand those into much larger chunks later. Thus, starting from a broad base and moving into further detail is how I'm choosing to approach this (and as noted is the tactic that has worked well for me in the past for design). I'm going to take one of the zones, Burning Sands, and then start thinking about the major themes of it informed by its evocative name. To keep things lightweight, I'll draft broad ideas in this aesthetic and narrow it down from there. - Mummy Lords in ancient pyramids - Mirages and false oases - Legendarily tough nomads with hearts of gold, but you must earn their respect - Death Valley - Mission Architecture - Well-traveled, people have a general handle on this place, but danger comes suddenly and quickly - Blistering heat. Travel at night and predawn. Lantern walkers. - Dancing sentient cactuses. Cactuar? I like adding things that make sense but also things that are more esoteric or weird in nature as iconic or mascots for this type of thing. Perhaps each larger zone also has a "zone boss", owing to old school video game logic of having mid-bosses and stage end bosses that are notorious monsters that everybody knows about. I like the idea of having dragons - you can never really have enough cool dragons, in my opinion - and the title "Dragon of the Burning Sands" sounds extremely badass that further gets people thinking. A simple but also powerful name thus opens more opportunities. One of the things to consider in a meta-design sense for a megadungeon is how often players will come into contact with the area, so I wanted to note that is indeed well-traveled but dangerous. Players will often be making there way through here and it will likely hold secret passages, sealed treasure troves, perhaps some key factions of the megadungeon, and serve as a kind of sprawling hub for a large number of places to get to. Using these less broad themes allows me to continue to start diving into the idea hole more and more. You can add some specific key words to each of the bullet points: - (Powerful faction) Mummy Lords in ancient pyramids - (Signature hazard) Mirages and false oases - (Allies) Legendarily tough nomads with hearts of gold, but you must earn their respect - (Environment reference) Death Valley - (Aesthetic reference) Mission Architecture - (Environment) Well-traveled, people have a general handle on this place, but danger comes suddenly and quickly - (Signature hazard) Blistering heat. Travel at night and predawn. Lantern walkers. - (Mascot/Fun) Dancing sentient cactuses. Cactuar? If I wanted to adhere to the Dungeon23 schedule then with 20 days into January I should have created 20 rooms in the Megastrata, but instead I have created 12 broad ideas and 8 specific ideas that I can turn into different things further. This is a good place to stop for the day because I have other stuff to do, but at least I can take a few minutes to write out the thought process in the hope that others reading the thread might find this task to be more approachable with some more applied structure and examples.
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Jan 21, 2023 03:00
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mellonbread posted:I almost never put locked doors in my dungeons. That's something I'm glad the hobby discarded early on, having to roll to open every door, roll to break open stuck doors... I'll commit to the bit, but the next floor down's gonna be way more flexible.
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Jan 21, 2023 03:47
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Archipelago23 week 3 report   That's the Can Opener, Bunker Island, and Execution Island; all the details for them and the other 4 islands this week are in this itch devlog (plus some rules changes to the game I'm making).
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Jan 21, 2023 15:33
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While I was out walking the doggo I had a think on other ‘broad modifiers’ which also can further dictate more specific design decision making processes. In theory, once you have your structures set up there should be enough cues that allow for faster individual and specific idea creation because you know already sort of where you’re going. This follows a similar format as before where it’s really just outlining each area, trait, or zone with descriptive key words. In this case, “time” is the concept I want to mess around with. Thinking about time as a design tool in this way for megadungeons means that we could look at toying around with the concept of layering - one of the more common overarching designs of a megadungeon is a complex that has constantly changed over a very long period of time causing many different major zones to be established. I’ll recommend at this point “How to Host A Dungeon” because it has a really fantastic toolbox and structure to provide to people who are trying to embark on Dungeon23 - https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/299497 Not only does How to Host A Dungeon deal with vertical layers, it also plays with the concepts of time and factions and how those factions get established and expand over time. Creating zones with a time theme can then provide some broader strokes: - Ancient Burning Sands - Primeval Forest from the Dawn of Time - Ten-Thousand-Year Lost Bastion - New Frozen Hell Pit - Demonic Future Breaches? If you were a procedural generation type you could create a table to randomly assign an age score to each zone for how far in the past it might be. You could weight the results so that the majority of them may be from a specific era that fits to an existing campaign history, or if the megadungeon is designed in a vacuum, you might be get some unexpected results. I would say that the default for megadungeons is that they are ancient places that are repurposed. However, I think there’s something interesting to be said about things that are newly turned into whatever they are now, or have yet to do so. “New Frozen Hell Pit” perhaps means that the place recently was transformed into it or it was simply willed into being by some kind of terrible force. “Demonic Future Breaches” may mean that for some reason there are rifts in time where demons from the future are using it as some kind of futuristic staging ground before conquering the rest of the megadungeon. I’ll have to mess around with this a little more but you could go specific on time if you wanted to for a variety of components. Maybe there are old and new bits, or old things that inhabit new places. What happens when those different elements interact with one another?
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Jan 21, 2023 16:24
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aldantefax posted:By way of example, I’m defining and/or reusing these larger zones and some ideas that came to my head lying in bed after a very long week. These will be the twelve primary zones that will have encounter areas or ‘rooms’ associated with them. They are not ordered and are not strictly constrained into a megadungeon format, this could potentially be a point crawl or a hex crawl instead. I think it’s interesting though to consider that these could be potentially stacked on top of one another. These are evocative as hell and I'm following this interestedly.
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Jan 21, 2023 18:18
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I'm pretty quickly finding that the "key one room a day" conceit of #dungeon23 really doesn't work with how I think. I feel like I normally spend about 75% of my design time on a dungeon thinking about things from more of a bird's eye view, with the room keying itself usually being the last quick thing I do. What I'm making with my first dungeon just feels really disjointed--especially spatially. It's really hard to think about how rooms flow together and where to put staircases/etc when you're so zoomed in each day. I'm planning on changing up how I think about the 'daily' work a bit. I'm going to do one "task" per day instead of one room. Maybe a task is drawing 5 rooms on a map, maybe it's keying 2 rooms, maybe it's designing a faction. I'm also working on some digital tools to help me with this, since I love this poo poo and designing workflow aids is kind of why I'm in this project in the first place.
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Jan 21, 2023 18:31
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I saw a video on designing megadungeons like Super Metroid and I think that’s generally a neat idea. With the consideration that adventuring groups will be moving across the same areas over and over again, as they get new capabilities then their perception of the area should change. Case in point, I think I’d like to add specific rewards that players can get in each zone, starting with bicycles in the Burning Sands. I imagine that the Burning Sands are vast swathes of overland dunes - perhaps it’s actually the overland approach to Megastrata 23. Part of the way that people are able to travel it so well such as the nomads could be a mixture of caravans, wagons, beasts of burden - but why not also bicycles? I think this would make for some interesting and potentially hilarious situations as a bicycle is not something you would normally be able to get usage out of in a megadungeon, but not for its general function - rather, it’s just never been really introduced as a piece of gear that enables more interaction, just as having a horse inside the megadungeon is somewhat fruitless unless you have nice long clear charging lanes for the Paladin or whoever to make a heroic charge. Perhaps there are dedicated trails that would be impractical to hike based on their distance but they have been trailblazed specifically for bicycle riding in the Burning Sands. Maybe the reason why it’s something you have to earn is because the supplies to make a bicycle or group of bicycles is somewhat difficult to obtain or maintain (sand gets everywhere, after all). You could create a completely separate set of encounter tables for when you’re on a bicycle versus on foot, and so on. A Mummy Lord could ride up on a bicycle. Everybody fears cactuses when they have their bicycles with them. You get the idea. On the topic of locked places and keys, I think one of the satisfying things for players is getting access to something they previously could not access. Particularly in a megadungeon setting, a lot of things ought be earned through play interaction, instead of a steady power treadmill of magic swords (as came up in an unrelated 4e D&D related conversation). I think it would be interesting for players because it isn’t just another doohickey - it changes individual and group interactions with the world and their perceptions. Anyway, 12 of those things might be a bit overkill, but centerpiece rewards that enable more fun are something to thing about.
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Jan 21, 2023 20:38
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Week 3 of The Walking Kingdom delves into the Lava Mines, where the residents harvested obsidian (because that's what Minecraft taught me would be there). I also decided that the residents of this kingdom naturally grew gems on their bodies, which I admit I forgot earlier today when I made a room centered around a magic biological-heart-shaped gem. Is it the remains of a person, still in some way persisting? Why is it ice cold in a room filled with lava? Why is it fixed in place? I have no idea. Might figure it out at some point. I like drawing weirdly-shaped caverns. I might want to try weirder shapes for man-made rooms, too, just to see what it forces me to justify.
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Jan 22, 2023 00:42
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 I got some popsicle sticks and random wooden game pieces to use as part of the tactile room design. Maybe this is some kind of Mummy Lord entrance in the Burning Sands guarded and barricaded by some undead with an idol in the background. It could also be lantern globes in the Ancient Technology Factory that channel electricity into a deep lab.
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Jan 23, 2023 00:56
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Ok, I haven't posted for a minute, but I'd like to show off just to let other people doing stuff know that we're all in this together. I'm trying to come up w/ a workflow to creating dungeon layouts quickly with my iPad. Right now I use watabou's one page dungeon to get a layout, redraw it in procreate, and then populate the dungeon with rooms via random tables. Clearly this is just the PNG of the procreate file, so just imagine the tables and interactions scribbled on a notepad. + This is very quick to play/run + I would never think of some of this stuff + The weirdness lends to fun/engagement + My one time playing it went pretty quickly. It gamified the exploration which helps me know where to make the content + Printing out the maps + cutting them out made for a fun reveal. I *think* this is what cricut stuff is for? Maybe? - I'm not 100% happy with the layout and iconography - Drawing the hashes outside the map is very time consuming and relatively low value - If I'm doing half pages the maps are relatively small (A5 pages are 5.82" x 8.26" which is 23x33 max quarter inch spaces, and half letter and/or margins make it even smaller) - Unsure how much fudging I need to do to make it my own rather than procedurally generated -/+ I could do a full spread, but that's a lot of work and yeah I think my overall goal will be to print out a booklet. Something super simple like letter sheets folded in half, explanations of each room, tables. Keeping the layout open to being printed on A5 sheets might be cool, but I don't know how to do book layouts. I'm currently using Google Docs to do this. It's *ok*. I kinda want to get Affinity Publisher, but that's $100, so I don't want to be too casual about that pickup. TLDR task list * Come up with map layout/iconography that is fast to make, clear to read * Make more custom encounter/random tables * Combine it all into one booklet Oh I want to learn how to take a bunch of PDF sheets and reorganize the page order so I can print 2 per page front/back and fold to get a booklet. I've seen websites that'll do that for you, but I'd prefer to have a program that I own... is that weird?
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Jan 24, 2023 13:56
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Does procreate let you make custom brushes? That would make drawing the hatches around the walls a lot faster.
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Jan 24, 2023 17:42
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mellonbread posted:Does procreate let you make custom brushes? That would make drawing the hatches around the walls a lot faster. I think it's a procreate feature but i honestly haven't done much w procreate other than draw. I think I'll have to look into this For my personal reference when i get back to my desk: https://kmalexander.com/free-stuff/fantasy-map-brushes/
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Jan 24, 2023 19:51
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anothergod posted:I kinda want to get Affinity Publisher, but that's $100, so I don't want to be too casual about that pickup.
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Jan 24, 2023 20:08
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 Figured out how to make a hash brush. Way easier than I thought. I don't know if I can make a "looks like hand drawn" grid brush, but I might try for this one considering how well this one turned out. Also I didn't use watabou this time, so A++ to me.
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Jan 26, 2023 04:25
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Detective Eyestorm posted:I like drawing weirdly-shaped caverns. I might want to try weirder shapes for man-made rooms, too, just to see what it forces me to justify. Archipelago23 week 4 report    That's Heracles Island (a lethal challenge), the Albatross Pyramid (with gory hieroglyphs and trapped explorers), and Carver Island (home to violent foliage and a beloved machine); explorations for them and 4 more islands are in the itch devlog I wrote.
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Jan 28, 2023 12:37
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Speaking of weird shapes... These ones are still natural formations. But they're pretty cool, I think. The Great Chasm is a crack in the belly of the Walking Kingdom. A daring climber will discover an expedient route upwards, as well as a mysterious relationship between the moon, magic, and electricity. (The Tome of Adventure Design has been helpful in coming up Weird Stuff - turn to a random page, check what my thumb is touching, see what I can do.) I'll do a little three-room area to cap off January before moving to the next floor.
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Jan 28, 2023 18:01
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I got too excited and rushed forward all the way to room 67. That's levels 3 and 4 finished and keyed.  It's going to be a real pain to go through everything and enforce a more readable numbering system than just "the order I came up with the rooms in". I'll wait until the entire thing is done for that, otherwise I'll just have to do it again on the other levels. The good news is already have most of the content figured out for the upper two floors, I just need to put in the work of mapping and room descriptions. I'm using the OSE Advanced DM book for monsters and magic items. The generators on the SRD page are a huge help for quickly NPC loadouts, treasure hoards, memorized spells... Detective Eyestorm posted:The Great Chasm is a crack in the belly of the Walking Kingdom. A daring climber will discover an expedient route upwards, as well as a mysterious relationship between the moon, magic, and electricity. (The Tome of Adventure Design has been helpful in coming up Weird Stuff - turn to a random page, check what my thumb is touching, see what I can do.)
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Jan 30, 2023 21:24
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I decided to flesh out some more of the zones with some additional ideas and more clearly highlighted the Super Metroid inspired “key items” as well as some mascot-type things. Burning Sands - Mummy lords in ancient pyramids - False oases and mirages - Legendary tough nomads with hearts of gold, but you must earn their respect - Death Valley - Mission-style Architecture - Well-traveled, but danger comes suddenly and quickly - Blistering heat, travel is at night, predawn. Lantern walkers - Dancing sentient cactuses. Cactuar? - Key item: bicycles. Travel lots of horizontal distances with mechanical assistance, can carry larger loads. Able to take underground. Primeval Forest - Megafauna - Lost World - dinosaurs, reptilians - The savage yet beautiful wilds - Key item: ninja grappling claws. High verticality due to climbing vines, trees, rocks, and other grabby things. - Militant nature exclusionists. Do not want any adventurers in the forest. Opposed to harvesters, wants to see them gone. Chaotic. - Harvesters. Destructive loggers seeking Primeval Wood, highly prized in the Far Reaches. Disrupts the ecosystem in the name of civilization. Lawful. - Silverback gorilla enforcers. Wise, powerful, hostile. The ancestral rulers. Frozen Hell Pit - A place of lost spirits that abandoned others in the natural elements - Crevasses hidden by snow. Ice and snow danger - Key item: Freeze gun. Instantly solidifies a body of water in liquid or gas form. Can create ice blocks, bridges, that kind of thing. Does not work on large bodies of water. Combine with ninja claws to scale impossible surfaces. - Trickster demons and people looking for help rendered snowblind, frostbitten. - Air and heat will be tricky to manage. - Seals the Demonic Breaches.
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Jan 31, 2023 05:40
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I also decided to write up some encounters for the Burning Sands: - A wandering detachment of a long-forgotten mummy lord searching for some kind of treasure - A group of nomads that keep their masks up and their distance far. They will observe the party before disappearing underneath the sand dunes (how?) - Marathon cyclists making their way through the Burning Sands from one oasis to the next - A Cactuar dance party - A lone nomad who is performing funeral rites for a pile of bleached bones sticking out of the sand dunes - A lantern walker and their Moon Wagons. Their curses will spell a wasting and terrible end for the unlucky. - A sand witch and some ogres returning or dispatching from a secret lab - An ancient dragon that breathes burning sand heading towards a red mountain rising in the mirages. Or was it just imagination?
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Jan 31, 2023 06:13
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My personal Dungeon23 challenge is more of a Module23 challenge, just trying to plan and generate as much content as I can for up to 12 modules in 6 different systems throughout the year. If it goes well, I can post once a month with a little summary of a new module I’ve been working on, at least in part, that month. MODULE #1 The Stone-Flesh Gift System: Mothership A quiet rumor whispers of a chunk of dark stone, hard as steel, with an organic membrane running through it like a vein of ore. Its owner holds proof of the discovery of a free-drifting ship of untold age, found only through local density scans and how its silhouette blocks the starlight. This pitch-black anti-beacon was once a great, ancient offering, capable of incredible feats of bioengineering with forgotten techniques, now lost in transit to the recipient. What it carries can only be imagined. And what strings could possibly be attached to cargo abandoned to space for a few million years? The idea was to essentially stick an ancient stone dungeon (complete with biofuel torches) floating in space as a setting for a bit of exploration-based body horror with a couple simple puzzles. In reality, it’s a “wombship,” made by an ancient species as a gift to an ally kingdom across the stars. Both the sender and recipient civilizations have long died out. If the players are careful and thorough as they avoid or neutralize the strange engineered creatures who evolved from those designed to maintain the ship as organic automatons, they can clean out the ship, gain control of it through a direct brain link with the neurocouncil of thinkmatter in jars that run it, and have a stone-and-flesh ship to call their own, if they can avoid infection from the various contagious bioforms within and avoid capture by everyone that wants the ship. I’ve got about 30 rooms, 10 diseases, and 7 creatures (corrupted texture, mandimite, popule, osseus, bone planer, and Father Seminicus). I think this worked pretty well, getting the module to about 75-80% of the way to a playtestable state, though I have done a decent bit of preplanning to set the basic themes and structures of each module beforehand. My notes for two basic days as examples: ANOINTING CHAMBER Backup-Power Cleansing saliva flows from a wide opening high above, like a waterfall. It eliminates all micro-organisms that may be on the surfaces it rinses. Can be collected as a STERILIZING AGENT, but sometimes it’s too powerful. The doors in and out are covered in carved reliefs of fertility figures and of two snakes consuming each other, twisted into a double helix, ouroboros design. –CON’X: AIRLOCK-A; AIRLOCK-B WELCOME HALL No-Power (missing vein-wires) A large, empty, and pitch black stone hall where every sound echoes. It was intended as a ceremonial gathering place, meeting hall, and general-purpose space. Exploring with lights reveals two tall and thick METAL DOORS, locked and sparkling with crimson flecks. Carved PICTOGRAPHS of both FOOD and DRINK on the floor lead to two small trenches running straight down the edges of a wide hallway (toward OFFERING MAWS). One wall is slick with blood from a burst blood clot in a vein-wire halfway up. –CON’X: AIRLOCK-B; CENTRAL TWITCH (LOCKED); OFFERING MAWS Normalize posting messy, illegible note pics! (My pages are a bit empty because I tend to start just brainstorming on paper, then transition to a Google Doc.)       I also want to be clear that I don't write a full room description cold each day. I try to get the foundational idea of a room/area established for the day, then any time I'm working on it in the month, I can bounce around to flesh things out. JMBosch fucked around with this message at 19:01 on Jan 31, 2023 |
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Jan 31, 2023 18:33
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that poo poo absolutely slaps and fucks, what a cool adventure
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Feb 1, 2023 02:57
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Since it’s the end of January and technically I need to have 31 rooms “done” by now with the original spirit of the Dungeon23 challenge set up, I suppose I have enough to actually write one-sentence descriptions for a series of rooms for each area. Burning Sands: BS-1. Mummy lord reverse pyramid foyer. Suddenly exposed entry (one of potentially many) to a reverse pyramid underneath the Burning Sands. A hall of pillars with sandfalls and a broken elevator and a giant crumbling balcony of sandstone which looks down into a dark yawning chasm. Abandoned ropes to scale down into the chasm are here, and broken tools. BS-2. Bicycle shop. A Cactuar mechanic is working on a bicycle suitable for riding in the Burning Sands but needs some kind of special durable and lightweight parts deeper in the pyramid. Retrieving them is no easy task, but will unlock Bicycles for use for the adventurers. BS-3. The Screw. A previously sealed machine room which operates the massive elevator, it appears to be non-functional because of some kind of jam. There is a narrow ladder that leads below the foyer to manually open sand floodgates to allow for ancient counterweights to begin working again. A skeleton with a caved-in skull has part of a clay tablet in its hand that describes the riddle of the Screw. BS-4. Servant warrens. Those who had previously maintained this place shuffled about in these tunnels and small rooms but are no longer here after the long march of time. A dry fountain holds a large shiny key about as large as a sword to something. The key can be used as a club, probably, but may break. BS-5. The Lock. The sealed tomb to this Mummy Lord has a massive keyhole in it, presumably for the key found in the warrens. Unlocking the tomb invokes a terrible event of some kind and possibly awakens the Mummy Lord. BS-6. The Chamber of the Sun, Moon, and Stars. Three platforms with levers exist here and a large moving mural can be manipulated with them. Depending on which symbol is in the highest position, three more deep chambers can be accessed with high danger. A special combination will unlock a fourth chamber. BS-7. The Vault of the Sun. Burning oil lamps and reflective copper mirrors create searing rays of light that focus on any who step into this place. There are bicycle parts here. BS-8. The Vault of the Moon. A place that is dark and stays dark, the party must operate blind through here if they wish to retrieve what is in here. A valuable magic item likely awaits. Undead, which have no need for eyesight, are ready to harangue the party. BS-9. The Vault of the Stars. A curious chamber of ancient technology which describes a far-away place called “Earth”, and the people who traveled from there to the Megastrata crashed in the Burning Sands many eons ago. Broken astronaut suits are here. BS-10. The Hidden Vault of Ages. One of the very few Time Chambers which can alter what the reverse pyramid and revert it from present to past, and possibly to future? This allows for rooms to be re-traversed and seen in different aspects with the opportunity for different parts. Unexpected outcomes may occur if the party tampers with this unwisely. BS-11. Geofront. At the bottom of the reverse pyramid is a shaft which leads to other parts of the Megastrata. When the grand elevator is unlocked, this can be reached fairly easily and used as a staging ground. Giant stone statues and rock-eating insectoids may be wandering around here. BS-12. Mummy Lord Sarcophagus. The actual Mummy Lord in the tomb beyond the Lock is in an open sarcophagus that fills an entire hall, because the Mummy Lord is gigantic in size. Only the most brazen adventurers would dare to loot things off of a Mummy Lord in their place of repose.
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Feb 1, 2023 05:12
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SlimGoodbody posted:that poo poo absolutely slaps and fucks, what a cool adventure If I ever publish it in some form, I'll send a free version out to anyone on my mailing list. For now, here are a couple more rooms: CALCIUM STORAGE No-Power A huge, dark chamber of pale pillars made of various calcium compounds, a BONE FOREST of sorts. Patrolled by d4 !Planers, crawling up and down the bones, scraping organic matter from them. –CON’X: MATERIALS RESEARCH (LOCKED); OSSOMEMORUM OSSOMEMORUM No-Power A cavern carved into the ship’s stone-flesh walls by millions of swings with an unknown tool. A hall of crypts, each containing the last bone of some great, forgotten individual, memorializing them. None of the bones are recognizable. –CON’X: CALCIUM STORAGE A table of weird bones: d6 Memorum Bones
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Feb 2, 2023 06:49
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Went to a local D&D meetup to run Mork Borg with my watabou + dungeon gen quick process and I gotta get this off my chest It only sort of worked? I think there were a few pain points. - I'm not explaining how to do creative OSR style combat, so dungeon crawling doesn't seem fun from my end. The players were pretty gracious and said they were having fun, and while I generally try to take people for their word, I think they were just being polite. - The dungeon didn't have enough cyclical routes for the players to get in and have enough choices - I tried to shoehorn the 5 room dungeon flow in and it only sort of worked https://www.roleplayingtips.com/5-room-dungeons/ +/- there's content that they missed + stacking 2 smaller dungeons worked + I was able to get people through a 10 room dungeon in 2 hours I think I need to make sure to involve the cyclic creation in the dungeon generation. I am pretty sure that'll come from taking the watabou one page dungeons and redrawing them and adding cycles. I tried this a couple times, but the additions seemed to conflict with the thing I like about watabou's dungeons. The biggest thing I like about the watabou dungeons is that they feel architecturally sound - like there's symmetry and broken symmetry so it feels very intentional - and fudging the cycles seems exactly like that. Maybe that'll come with time. It's February and I have 2 sketches of dungeons. I fixing the problems above will make it easier for me to solidify at least one of these dungeons to see if it's viable as a full on MB campaign. I think. Yeah.
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Feb 2, 2023 15:00
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anothergod posted:- I'm not explaining how to do creative OSR style combat, so dungeon crawling doesn't seem fun from my end. The players were pretty gracious and said they were having fun, and while I generally try to take people for their word, I think they were just being polite.
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Feb 2, 2023 19:42
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How is ODnD any better?
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Feb 3, 2023 01:15
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anothergod posted:How is ODnD any better?
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Feb 3, 2023 05:32
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Are there any OSR or just easy d20 systems where the combat does feel good? I'm mostly sticking to this because it's easier to get traction when you can work with other modules...
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Feb 3, 2023 14:45
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The OSR thread has your number, though “good combat” is highly nebulous. —- I’m considering what the next 12 to 19 rooms are going to be for the January month. I could use that to create a set of “in between rooms” that can be plonked into any level of the megadungeon or in between. Something that people talk about, particularly for the “Empty Room” concept, is that the tension inside of a megadungeon should ramp up and down and have areas of breathing room. Given that the majority of play is adventuring to or in the megadungeon, I also offer a third less explored route: adventuring between the megadungeon zones. I imagine that this would have a series of encounters but also some more fantastic types of rooms. I suppose this is very similar in nature to the interstitial rooms you saw in Super Metroid and I’m kind of following along with that kind of concept. Rooms Between - RB-1. The Mush Room. A megadungeon tavern that is considered fully neutral ground. Sentient monsters come to co-miserate about encounters they’ve been subject to by greedy adventurers, and beasts will also arrive to be fed by the gracious staff, a collection of myconids that serve mushroom coffee and mushroom tea. If adventurers do happen upon this place, they can temporarily hire unique guides and gain rumors not otherwise available outside the Megastrata. They can also purchase comestible goods here and drink for random benefits (note: benefits may not actually be beneficial) - RB-2. The Library. An extremely large, possibly infinite library full of books in all languages. It is dangerous to roam these halls without purpose. Library attendants wander about constantly re-indexing and cataloging materials. Use special encounter table to find esoteric knowledge, though there is a low chance (that is clearly noted) that adventurers may be sucked into another space and time and may need to be Time Rescued. - RB-3. Dog Sancutary. A place where dogs of all shape and size have been gathered and rescued and attended to by saintly beings. A good place to camp. Wrongdoers are met with swift and ineffable obliteration. - RB-4. Reverse Polarity room. This room once encountered can change the orientation of rooms across the Megastrata that are specifically designated, which can potentially unlock secrets and new zones. Care should be taken to not adjust polarity too often, lest hapless adventurers draw the ire of the Magnet Jesters.
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Feb 3, 2023 15:49
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anothergod posted:Are there any OSR or just easy d20 systems where the combat does feel good? I'm mostly sticking to this because it's easier to get traction when you can work with other modules... I'm a big fan of Into the Odd and its relatives (Electric Bastionland, Cairn, etc) for this, although their solution to good combat is mostly just to make it quick and decisive--low HP that resets between fights, no rolling to hit, powerful items. In an OSR mindset, good combat generally means "starting positioning/context matters a lot, after a few rounds of combat the side that's losing should probably run away or make a gambit, interesting combat is more about context than having a bunch of special abilities". Like, interesting OSR fights I've been in have had moments like "the gargoyle knows they're losing, so they grab your unconscious halfling and make a run for it", "they're going to sound the alarm if you don't finish them off this turn", or "oh god, two goblins got past the front line and now the mage can't cast any spells until they're dealt with". Put the players in tough situations that aren't written on the monster's statblock. Extra importantly, just give the players fights that are stacked against them mechanically, but then be extremely open to them trying out a weird idea that gives them the upper hand again. Powerful foes with exploitable flaws are way more interesting than fair fights against competent but unimaginative monsters.
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Feb 3, 2023 19:00
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Level two of the dungeon is now feature complete. We've got a Necropolis, a Dragon Cult Stronghold, a Water Termite Colony, Lizard Infested Hot Springs, the Ancient City, the Depths, and the Lair of the Devil Swine. All that's left to add is the Gaol, the Vivisectionist Library and the Surface Keep. You can see we've moved farther and farther away from the reference pixel in the top right, I'm going to try and shift the next map back to the East. Dungeon Scrawl has so far proven adequate for my specific use case: bare bones layouts with no lighting or special objects. I would love pay for a desktop version of the program, but that's the opposite of how things are currently going - the only option is to pay a monthly subscription fee for expanded features in the browser version. And if I wanted to pay a subscription fee, there are plenty of layer based image editors which are more powerful and versatile. anothergod posted:Are there any OSR or just easy d20 systems where the combat does feel good? I'm mostly sticking to this because it's easier to get traction when you can work with other modules... First you should consider that your players may have been telling the truth - they really don't have a problem with Mork Borg or the way you run it. I know I said the combat is dull, but I also knew people from that same session who came away really enjoying it - either because they had a higher tolerance for frustration than me, or they just were better able to immerse themselves and not just see it as a tedious exchange of mechanically simulated blows. If the players like it then switching horses in the middle of the race is unnecessary. But let's say they really were bored, or you just want a system that you personally find more engaging. I'll start by endorsing what OtspIII said, both because I was going to say something similar, but also because I think he's run and played more games in this genre than I have. I was thinking about this subject when people were discussing "Dark Souls RPGs" in the Chat thread. Stripped of context, the Dark Souls combat system is kind of bad, a 1 on 1 fight between two players usually devolves into endless circling for a backstab. The reason why people say it's good is the map design - staging encounters in varied locations, against creatures that do more than just run at the player and deal damage. Easier said than done, I know. In any RPG, it's hard to make any option more appealing to a player than "attack and deal damage" Additional games off the top of my head that do combat a bit different.
mellonbread fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Feb 3, 2023 |
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Feb 3, 2023 20:42
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mellonbread posted:In any RPG, it's hard to make any option more appealing to a player than "attack and deal damage" Next time I run ItO I'm going to try adding a house rule semi-stolen from 5e. Every character gets one attack per round and bonus action per round. The bonus action can be used for anything that doesn't inflict direct damage (maybe casting a spell would count as an attack, too). The hope is that it will encourage players to do more weird stuff without messing up the HP/damage economy. mellonbread posted:My personal "solution" to the problem was to write my own heartbreaker that makes combat more interesting by causing a bunch of other cascading balance problems, which I've so far chosen to ignore. This is the correct answer to this problem, obviously. The only true OSR system is the one you haphazardly built yourself.
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Feb 3, 2023 21:35
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Archipelago23 week 5 report I revisited some earlier islands to test the mecahnics for returning to places I've already explored... and decided that's probably not worth doing in this game.  
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Feb 4, 2023 12:50
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anothergod posted:Are there any OSR or just easy d20 systems where the combat does feel good? I'm mostly sticking to this because it's easier to get traction when you can work with other modules... Party-focused play where it's never "your" turn, and all attacks are rolled at once, works well IME. Re: dungeon 23 I have only the shame of being behind to report.
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Feb 4, 2023 23:44
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The "January" portion of this week's maps gives us a "boss fight" of sorts that gives a climactic, moon/electric encounter: February takes us upward into a space slowly retaken by massive trees, with a healthy dose of inspiration from a few Metroid Prime rooms:  I'm currently running with the Bone Naga I included in an early map and fleshing out a larger domain for it. If the first month was about how excavation has transformed the land, this second month is about the land's response. Or something.
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Feb 5, 2023 04:22
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Floors 1 and 0 are done.  That's the Gaol, the Vivisectionist Library, and the Ruined Keep polished off. Path forward is
Sax Solo posted:Party-focused play where it's never "your" turn, and all attacks are rolled at once, works well IME.
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Feb 8, 2023 04:33
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mellonbread posted:
How does one find out how to do this? Great job on your dungeons btw.
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Feb 9, 2023 02:33
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SlimGoodbody posted:How does one find out how to do this? Great job on your dungeons btw. Magic items I just dropped in wherever it seemed fun, then did a pass to remove some from the upper levels so that there would be a general progression of deeper=better stuff. If you're looking for something more formal, you can try the system from OSE. The core rules are free on the SRD page, and I use their generators all the time.
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Feb 9, 2023 07:21
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This is all really useful, thank you! I'm gonna scan my (lagging behind 😞) dungeon soon and would love some critique or advice, especially on magic items and general challenge level, or like, is this poo poo even interesting.
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Feb 10, 2023 00:09
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