Quote from: Justin Alexander;590968I disagree that the giants should be scattered about specifically because the scenario is interesting when run as an active compound. Because while the majority of the giants were in the great hall, the majority of the treasure wasn't.

If you run the scenario as a static environment, then its current design is incredibly boring: There's a ridiculously tough encounter in area 11 and the rest of the compound is filled with penny ante opposition. It's completely lopsided and poorly paced.

It's when the scenario is run as an active environment that this setup becomes interesting: Do you alert the giants? Can you successfully ambush them with area-effect spells? Can you barricade them in an burn the whole place down around them? Can you wait for them to take bathroom breaks and pick them off one by one? Can you take out the support staff ninja-style and then fill the compound with booby traps that you can lure the giants through?

My fault, that should be 'scattered about the steading' though I think the rest of what I was saying is exactly what you are saying here.

Scattered about the steading they are going to be very difficult to take down with area effect spells.

Quote from: _kent_;590960We are at a point where we might define a third category of DM, a very large one at that, of great pretenders who claim to be creative but do little more than rearrange the furniture, move and resize rectangles into 'new' maps and restock random tables with brand new monsters from the monster manual (or the fiend folio!) to make a new dungeon.

For this category there is of course no difference between running their own permutation of the same old shit and the same old shit itself. Are they creative? No, they are not creative.

I see what you mean. You are talking about the GMs who run modules in a pseudo-creative fashion, then just run their own thing by switching around the look of the elements but don't basically come up with anything of their own. These guys do exist, there's no doubt about it.

What I'm talking about is the guys that are creative individuals, run whatever comes into their grasp as their own, injecting their own creativity into it, and do that naturally as it comes to design their own for their enjoyment.

As to whether one category's bigger than the other at any one time, I'm not sure. I honestly have no guess to give. But what I am sure of is that these categories are fluid, in the sense that GMs can move from being one type to the other, and back and forth over time, and that the game structures, the games themselves, the modules etc can either help them being creative, or on the contrary trap them into a prefabricated experience, both of which will likely shape their expectations for latter products as well.

The core question to me is how a module can go about helping and encouraging the GM to run things using his own creative juices and in effect, get a clue that he, as anyone, can be that great GM he always wanted to be. I'm not sure there's a perfect, ultimate way to go about this, because the module format comes with its own inherent flaw of being written by someone else, but the content can help certainly, instead of you know, cutting off your creative balls to change you from a fired up creator to a braindead consumer.

Quote from: Benoist;590992I see what you mean. You are talking about the GMs who run modules in a pseudo-creative fashion, then just run their own thing by switching around the look of the elements but don't basically come up with anything of their own. These guys do exist, there's no doubt about it.

To add a general point is that there is no single creative stat an individual possesses. A person may be highly original when it comes to creating and roleplaying NPCs but very derivative when creating locales like a dungeon. In short creativity comes in different flavors and measures.

Kent is way off base in his definition of who is creative and who is not. Being able to successfully adjudicate and manage a roleplaying session is a highly creative process in of itself. Even only using material made by others.

Quote from: estar;590996To add a general point is that there is no single creative stat an individual possesses. A person may be highly original when it comes to creating and roleplaying NPCs but very derivative when creating locales like a dungeon. In short creativity comes in different flavors and measures.

Kent is way off base in his definition of who is creative and who is not. Being able to successfully adjudicate and manage a roleplaying session is a highly creative process in of itself. Even only using material made by others.

I think collectively, everyone is applying their own definitions to what creativity is, or what being creative means.

So...they're being creative, in the definition of creativity?

The Giants module was one of my favorite modules I ever played.  And yes, our DM ran it quite dynamically.  

As players we managed to figure out that sometimes many giants were gathered in the great hall.  So we waited for one of those times, and our mage and thief got up on the roof of the hall, the thief quietly carved a hole in the ceiling, and then the mage started to fire down area attack spells at the giants in the hall.  The rest of the party ambushed any giants fleeing out the main doors.

The giants reacted by throwing big things at the hole in the ceiling, and then doing a giant-pyramid to get to it.  Meanwhile, they rapidly figured out the ambush, closed and held their main doors locked, and started to bust through two walls (on either side of the room) to open up new exits.  They're very strong, so this was doable.  

Suddenly our clever ambush turned into our party being split and under assault.  We eventually ended up fleeing, with crap being toss at us from afar for a while.  

And on our return, the giants had an entirely different setup and tactics prepared, with barricades, reinforcements from some of the outer rooms, a better alarm system, the works.

We did eventually win out against them, but damn was that a fun module. I love it when strategy can play such a strong role in the outcome, as opposed to purely PC abilities.  It really felt like a problem to solve for us as players, as opposed to just combat.

I think there's a huge excluded middle here.  

Do some newbie GMs get the modules, run them 100% as is, even stopping characters from doing something that isn't accounted for in the module?  Yeah, some do.  And then they realize how much that sucks and they stop.

Are there GMs who have never read a single module, and have through deep self-evaluation and Jungian psycho-surgery prevented their mind from absorbing things from movies, books, comics, real life, etc and everything springs from their mind a wholly new creation? Umm, well maybe the never read a module part.

Everyone else is in between.

Quote from: Novastar;591152So...they're being creative, in the definition of creativity?

But some are being more creative with the definition of creative than others.

I never ran the "Giants" modules; but I plan to run a very modified version of it rather shortly.  I'll let people know how it goes.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Justin Alexander;589975I was not a member of that group, but the one thing that leaped out at me was the lack of awesome. I'm a big fan of negative space contrasting positive space in adventure design, but 90% of my negative space is still filled with interesting things.

For example, the "best gamer rant I've heard in a long time" (as Tenkar described it) is talking about room 46. In the original notes that room is keyed as:



In the current draft, that's been expanded to:



When I talked in the other thread about the fact that Maliszewski's method of expanding his minimalist key mostly consisted of using more words to describe a minimalist key, this is what I was talking about.

How could you take that same minimalist key and make it something interesting?

This room contains broken pieces of wood, straw, string, and other random detritus that 9 giant rats have collected and brought here. In the center of the room -- in a space cleared of rubbish -- are twenty skulls arranged in a circle. Each skull has been filled with exactly 100 copper pieces.

When anyone enters the room, a number of rats equal to the number of people entering the room will circle counter-clockwise around the circle of skulls, approach the entrants, rise up on the hind legs, and stretch out their paws as if waiting to receive something. Each of the rats has the holy symbol of a Thulian god branded onto its back.

If the rats are given a coin, they will place it in one of the skulls. (But there will still only be 100 coins in each skull.) If they are given any other valuables, they will scurry away and hide them in the piles of refuse. If anyone attempts to cross the room without giving them a coin or something else of value, the rats will swarm and attack.

Amidst this rubbish can be found 2000 cp, a jeweled pin (800 gp), a gold necklace (200 gp), and an expensive comb (30gp). The jeweled pin is actually a Thulian officer's pin that once belonged to one of the apparitions in room 59. If it is returned to its original owner, the ghost will reward the good citizen by offering to teach them the game of zatriko.

Estar says this place is really, really cool if you've played with Maliszewski DMing it. Sounds plausible. But that has not translated itself well into his written key. (Estar will probably ascribe this to the "impossibility" of realizing a megadungeon in print. In reality, it's just a failure to execute.)

Now, see, this would have been interesting.

There is something going on.  There are choices that could come up, not necessarily obvious, such as giving the rats something.  There are consequences to the actions (such as getting attacked, or not).  There are consequences that reach outside the room.

All of which still amount to 'nine rats, 2000cp, and a couple miscellaneous items' mechanically.  This option engages the players.

Now, it's arguable that Erik could have done this... but in a dungeon prepared by someone else, I would expect that sort of thing to be considered already.  That's the purpose behind running someone else's work.  If we'd just wanted random monster selection plus treasure, we've got that in the DMG.

Quote from: Joethelawyer;590028In a module, anything that gives certain tools for the players to allow them to overcome obstacles in an unexpected, creative way, or to overcome stuff when they really had no right to expect to do so based on the relative level of the combatants, stuff like that.

For example, we were playing with the same group in another adventure.  It was an old mine, there were mining carts that were disabled, there were mine tracks which ran thru the rooms ahead, some barrels of oil, there was rope, there was a room with people who knew some of the layout of the rest of the place, and we caught one and he was able to give us some info.  Using all that which was provided in the module, we fixed up a mine cart, set it on the tracks which ran thru the next sets of rooms, tied up the prisoner, stuck him in the mine cart, filled it with oil, and pushed it down the tracks so that there was a screaming fiery inferno plowing down the hall towards his companions.  Had the effect of demoralizing and causing a WTF?!?! reaction in his companions, allowed us to get surprise rounds with missile weapon people who were situated in a position to take advantage of the situation, and turned what would have been a suicidal frontal assault into a slaughter on our part.  It evened the odds.  The module provided us with the tools to be awesome, the rooms had stuff that allowed us to pull a McGyver with some creative thought.

That was an awesome session, things just came together.

I think Erik was mildly stunned, but he rolled with it well.

My session report describes how my character, James Ironwall, saw things.

Quote from: Joethelawyer;590028Dwimmermount provided neither the need to do anything like that, nor the tools of opportunity even if there was a need (the rope, oil, cart, tracks, prisoner who knew the rooms ahead, etc.)  If the dungeon is all empty rooms with nothing of use or note or even potentially interesting in them that might be used in some unconventional way later, or standard "kick the door down, kill 3 orcs, lather, rinse, repeat"  then it's kind of hard to be awesome in that way.

Agreed.  We had lots of moldy, broken-down crap we could maybe set fires with, but nothing really usable in a meaningful way otherwise.

Quote from: kjdavies;595225We had lots of moldy, broken-down crap we could maybe set fires with, but nothing really usable in a meaningful way otherwise.

A number of us have touched on this already - that emptiness can still be interesting and engaging - but at the risk of being dogpiled by the F(riends)o(f)J(ames), I wonder if Maliszewski simply doesn't get this, or if he's just really bad at it.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;595229A number of us have touched on this already - that emptiness can still be interesting and engaging - but at the risk of being dogpiled by the F(riends)o(f)J(ames), I wonder if Maliszewski simply doesn't get this, or if he's just really bad at it.

I don't think I've particularly interacted with him.

I'm coming in late.  I was one of the players in the sessions that prompted this thread.

I had the impression, while playing, of roaming an abandoned museum of broken stuff.  Somebody cared about these things at some point, but there was nothing present to really engage us.

The ghosts?  After we tried to interact with them and there was nothing we could do, I suggested we leave.  "Let's go.  Looks like someone just left the TV on."

Anachronistic, perhaps, but the ghosts were no more interesting to us than the paintings on the wall.  It's possible there was something there and we just didn't get the right combination of actions to trigger it, but that itself is kind of tedious.

There was no particular cause to go anywhere.  The most exciting thing we found as far as gaining some kind of direction was, as I recall, a locked iron door (and as it happens, trapped).  Something different we could interact with, finally!

I started running a megadungeon on Wednesday.  The section explored by the PCs so far is mostly empty because it's the shattered shell of a tower that blew up a little bit a couple generations ago and it's been picked over.  In the three major areas the PCs explored they had a single encounter with a single creature -- and they seemed much more entertained than we were during the Dwimmermount adventure.

The big difference?  They had things to do and mess with. They had something of a goal -- when they found the clock tower and discovered that it spanned up and down from where they were, they wanted to see what was at the bottom, but declined 'jungle gyming' their way down.  That led to some more exploration, blowing through areas that were of no interest (sleeping quarters, abandoned for 40-50 years, with locals picking the place over, are unlikely to have anything of interest) but getting some excited when they found stairs that led to a cellar.

As always, agency is critical.  In Dwimmermount we didn't feel like we really had any.  Even for a random exploration trip, there has to be something to grab the attention of the players.

Quote from: kjdavies;595234I don't think I've particularly interacted with him.

I'm coming in late.  I was one of the players in the sessions that prompted this thread.

I had the impression, while playing, of roaming an abandoned museum of broken stuff.  Somebody cared about these things at some point, but there was nothing present to really engage us.

The ghosts?  After we tried to interact with them and there was nothing we could do, I suggested we leave.  "Let's go.  Looks like someone just left the TV on."

Anachronistic, perhaps, but the ghosts were no more interesting to us than the paintings on the wall.  It's possible there was something there and we just didn't get the right combination of actions to trigger it, but that itself is kind of tedious.

There was no particular cause to go anywhere.  The most exciting thing we found as far as gaining some kind of direction was, as I recall, a locked iron door (and as it happens, trapped).  Something different we could interact with, finally!

I started running a megadungeon on Wednesday.  The section explored by the PCs so far is mostly empty because it's the shattered shell of a tower that blew up a little bit a couple generations ago and it's been picked over.  In the three major areas the PCs explored they had a single encounter with a single creature -- and they seemed much more entertained than we were during the Dwimmermount adventure.

The big difference?  They had things to do and mess with. They had something of a goal -- when they found the clock tower and discovered that it spanned up and down from where they were, they wanted to see what was at the bottom, but declined 'jungle gyming' their way down.  That led to some more exploration, blowing through areas that were of no interest (sleeping quarters, abandoned for 40-50 years, with locals picking the place over, are unlikely to have anything of interest) but getting some excited when they found stairs that led to a cellar.

As always, agency is critical.  In Dwimmermount we didn't feel like we really had any.  Even for a random exploration trip, there has to be something to grab the attention of the players.

Yup, Keith was with us in that game.  This whole debacle, and the debate that has ensued, has been a heck of an interesting learning experience as far as dungeon design goes.  His line that someone left the TV on was perfectly timed to relieve the frustration, best moment in that section of the dungeon.

Resurrecting this for my own playtest report. I had not seen this thread before (or had forgotten it) and found through a google for "D&D Empty Rooms"



Session Report. My Remix is Suck.

Instead of usual weekly game The Pretty Girl, Pokeboy and Little Girl all agreed to play in my remixed level 1 of Dwimmermount. They hated it. After talking about it after I decided that they would have hated the original more ... they agreed. They could have been playing nice but I don't think so.

I was proud of my rewrite ... " a work of genius!" In reality I believe all I did was turn "expansive minimalist room descriptions" in to "terse room descriptions."

The Pretty Girl likes 3e and is confused by basic. The kids hate "1e" as they call it. No one likes to map.
They made a loop from 1 to 16-20, 10, 6, 3, 1, 2, 61, 62, 63.

They liked the Mol-Min, mostly because I do a good campy "Surface Dwellers! Destroy them!" Little girl specifically stated after that orcs are boring. And that at 13 years-old. They couldn't figure out what the statues of the old gods in room 1 wanted them to do. The bodies in 16 were boring. Pokeboy liked flipping switches in 17/the training room, but that was it. 18 was boring, 20 was lame, even though there were sleeping monsters that they decided to not attack. They seemed to enjoy the library in 19, mostly because of the detail of the book, map, and scroll. They heard voices in 14 but didn't go in. 10 was boring. 6 was boring. "Oh boy, more bodies." They slept all the Mol-Min in 3 and beheaded them all. 2 was boring. Little girl hugged the pillar in 61 (because I did it in a Tower of Gygax game at GenCon that she played with me) but she was a human so nothing happened, although they took rubbings of the pillar. The Pretty Girl really liked room 62 because they found the secret door under the dais. The ended up in room 63 where they slept half the Mol-Min and the other three killed them.

The Pretty Girl says that the problem is that there are too many empty rooms. She counts hallways and doors as empty rooms. She wants every room to have something interesting in it ... something to interact with, I think. She loved Tower of Gygax (and lived for 6 hours) because of the interactivity of EVERY room, I think. She specifically commented that the place seemed to have no history.

They liked the Mol-Min. I think they would have liked the Lab Rats. The bogloids are too plain as written, I think.

We talked about the treasure after. They loved ALL of the magic items and they loved the jeweled pin of the elf chick I put in to the rat room. They all agreed they would have kept it for their character to wear. From this I believe that I need to work a little harder on the mundane treasure, but am on the right track, and that the magic treasure is excellent. (Although I am unhappy with the tuba.) The descriptions given to the book, map, and scroll in the library were all well liked.

The rooms need more/better things in them and basing them off of the original doesn't work in the manner in which I did them. The monster rooms need more variety/dressing in them (like the bogloids building the defensive wall, I think?) The empty rooms MUST have things to interact with. The pretty girl is right: empty hallways and normal counts count as 'empty rooms.' They are boring. The real rooms have to break up that monotony.

I read Justin Alexanders example of his take on the rat room. It's not clear I can come up with that degree of interactivity either on the fly or in designing. I don't think I yet UNDERSTAND interactivity to the degree I UNDERSTAND magic items. This causes the rooms to suck. I'll go a little light on myself: I was trying to key of the map key that was already there. You know, the one I called boring 17 or so times in my review. The pillar in 61 or the statue in 11. The pillar has nothing going on, nor does the statue.  As a player you have to TRY HARD to get anything out of either encounter.

How does this sound: You shouldn't have to TRY HARD to have an adventure; you should be able to trip over it. You have to TRY HARD to succeed in the room ... or maybe just try? What is interactivity? What is discovering adventure?

Level 1 has to hit. It has to hit hard and has to hit quickly. The players have to WANT to go in to room after room. A megadungeon needs a hook for level 1. Not gold. Not power. Something else to motivate exploration ... but I'm not sure what that is.

Of course, I'm also now questioning my ability to run my Monday night game for the adult gang. Nothing like some self-loathing to make life fun for a DM.

Remix: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4wpCwKDa4dCbXFOTEktSWNRRkE/edit