Quote from: bryce0lynch;625493The DM draws a map on posterboard before play and covers it with newsprint. The players use an x-acto knife to cut away the newsprint as they march along. There's a mini on the map to show where they are but the map isn't really to scale. (...)

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/100747085754234335719/albums/5841794244646012417/5841794247524367010?authkey=CKi6kcCxvLa0SA

Whoa!
Why didn't the mage turn right, towards the SALE, when he had the chance?

Quote from: bryce0lynch;625493I had some time to think about your comments while being swamped at work yesterday. I'm going to be all over the place in this post. Sorry.

Empty Rooms
I think I'm talking about some seriously empty/boring rooms when I say Empty Room. The empty rooms in Dwimmermount that have no purpose beyond simply being empty. A meaningless room, maybe? Just some dust and rubble/debris. The Pretty Girl doesn't like feeling that her has been wasted. Even some clues or dungeon history gives her something to think about when 'its not her turn.' She also believe that empty corridors and most doors qualify as empty rooms ... boring and meaninglessness compounded. Now what's the role of the TRULY empty room?

I don't know Dwimmermount off the top of my head like I do Tegal Manor. For Tegal I did the following. There was one player in the group that liked to poke around rooms and stuff. The sessions when he was present, I ran this at a game store so attendence was erratic, I ad-libbed the contents from the sparse notes I made when I placed Tegal Manor. While it was essentially in-game litter and garbage I was able to make it interesting by tying it back to the owners of the place the Rumps.

Doing this gave the place more life and history than the text of the module would otherwise indicate.

Because my experience running my dungeon which, at least on its upper levels, has both many more rooms and a vastly higher percentage of empty/unkeyed rooms than what folks are complaining about here - my first level has ~250 rooms (I don't know the exact number, it may well be higher) of which at least 75% are empty/unkeyed - is so different than what is being described here as far as player boredom, I wonder if maybe having so many empty rooms creates a different dynamic compared to the 1/3 or so of empty rooms in smaller levels (i.e. 60 rooms total, 20 of them empty) that seem to be drawing all the complaints. Perhaps at that level the empty rooms just seem like a waste of time, but when it's vastly greater - so you know that you pretty much always have to go through 3 or 4 empty rooms for every occupied one, and that in any given session you're going to pass through probably 20 or 30 of them - expectations change, and it becomes understood that the players need to make a pro-active effort to find the non-empty rooms, that that is a big part of the challenge of the game (and it's not random - there is a logic to which rooms are occupied/keyed if the players are paying attention), then it's less likely to draw complaints. My dungeon isn't set up to throw interesting stuff at the players as they sit there passively (though I do throw wandering monsters at them at a pretty high rate - which is (or at least should be) incentive to keep moving and not dawdle in hallways or open chambers), I expect them to explore and search for the interesting stuff. And, I guess, once the players understand and have accepted that, their attitude changes. (Or it could be that it's just the different set of people I'm playing with, and if I were playing with the folks who find 1/3 empty rooms boring they'd find my 75% empty rooms really really fucking boring...)

Also, re: mapping. My maps are deliberately complex and mazy, and probably pretty hard for players to accurately map. Which is fine with me - I don't care if they draw a map, certainly don't require it, and am not going to go out of my way to make it easier for them (if anything the opposite - I sort of want the players to get lost in my dungeon). If the players are drawing a map it's because they want one and think it will be helpful to them to find their way back to the surface, to more easily identify areas that they've already explored, to mark potential places to hole-up in, etc. All of that is their business, not mine. If the players want to make a map they're going to need the proper supplies, they're going to make slower progress (and draw more wandering monster checks), and if something happens to the map in-game it also happens to the RL map. I'd just as soon they made a line-map, or a list of turns, or made chalk-marks on the walls or strung a ball of twine (though the 1E PH shows what can happen with the latter than tried to recreate my map on their own sheet of graph paper. And, with the way my levels are designed, there's absolutely no way I could use that posterboard method.

Quote from: T. Foster;625895My dungeon isn't set up to throw interesting stuff at the players as they sit there passively (though I do throw wandering monsters at them at a pretty high rate - which is (or at least should be) incentive to keep moving and not dawdle in hallways or open chambers), I expect them to explore and search for the interesting stuff.

But that's working to get fun, dontcha know? :rolleyes:

Seriously, thanks for this post.  My experiences running my group thru my old megadungeon were very similar (mine featured 60-90 rooms/level, anywhere from 25-40% of the rooms being largely empty).  I was starting to think that maybe my approach was badwrong or something with everyone calling for sentient spoons and rats who learned to cast spells in every room.

I hardly ever have a single empty room. I tend to do much smaller locations, though.

Quote from: Gib;625930I hardly ever have a single empty room. I tend to do much smaller locations, though.

Likewise, if I'm creating a small outpost or something.  But a space meant for exploration is different.

Quote from: Gib;625930I hardly ever have a single empty room. I tend to do much smaller locations, though.

Same here.  I feel like I'm taking the lazy way out if I put an empty room.

Quote from: KenHR;625924My experiences running my group thru my old megadungeon were very similar (mine featured 60-90 rooms/level, anywhere from 25-40% of the rooms being largely empty).  I was starting to think that maybe my approach was badwrong or something with everyone calling for sentient spoons and rats who learned to cast spells in every room.

I'm very interested under what time records you ran/run your games.

Ken, Foster: What do you do for time (which I think really means "Wandering Monster Checks")? Searching one 10' square takes 1 turn which calls for 1 wandering check? All the walls in a 30x30 room means 11 turns (split between the party, maybe, not counting floors/ceilings.)  Or did you do something else?

Quote from: bryce0lynch;625940Ken, Foster: What do you do for time (which I think really means "Wandering Monster Checks")? Searching one 10' square takes 1 turn which calls for 1 wandering check? All the walls in a 30x30 room means 11 turns (split between the party, maybe, not counting floors/ceilings.)  Or did you do something else?

Firstly, most of my rooms are smaller than 30x30, and have exits, so we're mostly looking at more like 4-7 10' squares than 11. With multiple people searching that's pretty easily reduced to 1-2 turns. But mostly, it's not expected that every room, or even most rooms, will be searched in this way. Time should only be taken to search for secret doors where the players have some reasonable expectation (based on a gap in their map, or having been pursuing/tracking someone who went into this room and disappeared, or they were told there was one, or some other reason) that there actually is one. And when they do decide to spend that time, they should, if possible, spike the doors closed or take other precautions to prevent wandering monsters from coming in. Most of the rooms in my dungeon have doors, so that's usually possible. Open chambers are more difficult, because they can't usually be blocked off in this way (plus they're usually larger), so if the players are going to spend the time and take the risk to search an entire chamber for secret doors, they'd better have a pretty good reason for thinking they're going to find one. (Also, there are ways to find secret doors other than blindly searching for them - seeing a monster coming or going through one, or finding a map that shows one, or being shown one by a prisoner or friendly monster are all easier, safer, and more reliable (see also: wand of secret door and trap detection)).

Quote from: bryce0lynch;625940I'm very interested under what time records you ran/run your games.

Ken, Foster: What do you do for time (which I think really means "Wandering Monster Checks")? Searching one 10' square takes 1 turn which calls for 1 wandering check? All the walls in a 30x30 room means 11 turns (split between the party, maybe, not counting floors/ceilings.)  Or did you do something else?

Time also means "how long 'til we need to light another torch?"  A lot of the tension in the dungeon game comes from the use of limited resources (hit points, light sources, food, etc.).  Wandering monsters are just one element that can sap resources if the party tries to face down every single one.

Search time is pretty much by the book (I ran Lyche's Dungeon using B/X).  Part of the players' skill involves knowing when to search, not wasting time in every room looking for secret doors or loot unless they have a good reason to suspect something is there.

For example, the party learned early on not to search for secret doors until they had a good-sized area mapped out.  If they noted a big empty area, they'd suspect the presence of secret rooms, and try to narrow down where to search based on contextual clues.  For example, if an empty space was surrounded by a kitchen on one side and a private bedchamber on the other, it was more likely that a secret door would be in the bedchamber.  Same for stashed loot.

Like Trent said already, you can mitigate certain risk factors by spiking doors shut.  My players also started bringing in as many hirelings as they could and put them to work searching (and carrying more torches!  They never seemed to cast continual light for some reason).

I also had rooms calculated to waste time (a room full of empty chests-of-drawers or crates of rotted clothing, frex)....

And bruce, I apologize for a bit of my snark.  I honestly missed the fact that the folks you were running the game for were younger.  I can understand some of their frustration...maybe likening empty rooms and corridors to the empty rooms and corridors of an FPS level the way Eliot described above might help?

Quote from: T. Foster;625956But mostly, it's not expected that every room, or even most rooms, will be searched in this way. Time should only be taken to search for secret doors where the players have some reasonable expectation (based on a gap in their map, or having been pursuing/tracking someone who went into this room and disappeared, or they were told there was one, or some other reason) that there actually is one.

That pretty how it went down when I ran Tegal Manor. At first the players were systematically exploring every room but after a while they started only searching if they felt there was something to be found based on the map or a clue.

It started after they found the rat tunnels along with hitting some of the teleporters and got separated.

Quote from: KenHR;625976I honestly missed the fact that the folks you were running the game for were younger.  I can understand some of their frustration...maybe likening empty rooms and corridors to the empty rooms and corridors of an FPS level the way Eliot described above might help?

When I ran Tegal Manor it was at my FLGS and there were a bunch of younger players involved. One thing helped was the fact I used miniatures and dungeon tile setup similar to Dwarven Forge. So while they ran into empty rooms it looked more exciting than it did on paper, especially when they can see the progress by the sections already built.

I don't know if there any general technique to be learned from that experience. Mixed in there was all the other stuff I learned over thirty years of refereeing so sometimes it hard to figure out what works the best for a given campaign.

One thing I learned to master was a round robin technique where each players get a chance to state what their character was doing. I learned how to work it so even when the groups gets separated everybody remains reasonably occupied.

Back in the day I despised the caller system and learned how to do without it. Ironically the handful of times where I had 10+ gamers at a single session at the game store I had fall back on the caller system for somethings to keep the game flowing. First time since the early 80s where I refereed that many players at once.