Quote from: Sable Wyvern;855492IMO, what he's designing is definitely not a megadungeon -- it's just a largish, (possibly fairly linear) dungeon. I dare say that a lot of the pushback in this thread could have been avoided if he'd chosen a different word to define the project.

Beyond that, I find what he's doing quite interesting, and I doubt it will be as stale as all the number-crunching may lead one to believe at first glance. Stupid amounts of number-crunching and analysis are something I used to do a lot of just for the hell of it, back when I had a lot more time on my hands. What I rarely managed to do was follow through on all that back-end work and show something of value at the end.

Will the finished result of this guy's efforts be something that's fun to play through? I don't know, but I think it's a bit early to be claiming that it won't be just because it's not really a megadungeon.

I'm mostly interested in how he takes video game exploration tropes and applies them to dungeon design.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;855494I'm mostly interested in how he takes video game exploration tropes and applies them to dungeon design.

Yeah, I did like his "bracketing" theory. If it works as intended, I can see real value there.

Quote from: Ddogwood;855375Agreed, trying to set up "balanced encounters" in 3e & 4e burned me out on DMing for a long time.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I largely avoided creating "balanced encounters" for 3e. Instead, I created random encounter tables......and had plausible random (and non-random) events that would occur.....whether or not they were "level appropriate". Not that I tried to kill characters, but I focused more on creating a living environment that made sense.....rather than focusing on arbitrary notions of "balance".

I did the same thing for 3e that I did for AD&D, in regards to encounter difficulty, world-building, and "balance". It worked just fine. The only real difficulty I had was that 3e stat blocks were harder for me to write. More detail, and more customization for 3e.....but 3e was harder to write. So it was a trade-off.

After this thread, I was prepared for Elaine eye rolling. I was wrong.

See, I'm just starting to dig into 5e. I learned to hate 3/3.5 and never played 4e. I'm not a big fan of the whole adventure game/encounter balance. At the same time, I feel you ignore it at your peril. So anything that breaks it down and teaches you how to make it your bitch sounds cool to me!

So while yes, the goals and practices are at odds with my instincts, the series is shaping up to be a good inside view into how to manipulate the 5e design principles to do some cool things.

But yeah, AD&D was easier to design for, mostly because you didn't have to sweat all this weird math. But even Gygax always said designing an adventure for publication was more complicated than it looked on its face. And I haven't read anything about his process. I doubt he was busy with spreadsheets but I suspect it was more than rolling for empty rooms. So, I'm interested. Let's see where it goes.

Tom

Quote from: Blusponge;855540See, I'm just starting to dig into 5e. I learned to hate 3/3.5 and never played 4e. I'm not a big fan of the whole adventure game/encounter balance. At the same time, I feel you ignore it at your peril. So anything that breaks it down and teaches you how to make it your bitch sounds cool to me!

IME 5e works fine ignoring encounter balance and treating CR just as you would Monster Level in AD&D - a rough guide to monster toughness and which (mega)dungeon level to put the critter on. What Angry is doing seems completely unneccessary for 5e and possibly counterproductive, though I can see a case for in in 4e.

I wonder what defines a "megadungeon"? I once created one where the top level, "ground level" was, I think, 6 graph papers big. The second level was about equal to that. The third was down to 4, the ones below that were just 1-2 graph papers in size. Is that big enough for the "megadungeon" rank or too small? (The scenario involved an army besieging a large fort and the PCs are sent inside to investigate what was going on.)

Or maybe I'm mistaken and number of graph papers doesn't matter? Does it take something like the Drow series Underdark map to qualify?

Quote from: Doughdee222;855563I wonder what defines a "megadungeon"?

Clearly size is necessary, but I don't think there's any exact cutoff where you could be one room short of a megadungeon. The size should be such that the players can only explore a tiny portion at a time, but the exploration is cumulative; the megadungeon should be big enough to support an entire campaign of many sessions.

I think sprawling (multiple sheets of graph paper for one level, probably) is necessary because it shouldn't have a nearly singular path through it; a sequence of rooms which can only be explored in order wouldn't be a megadungeon no matter how many rooms there were.

I don't know that there's anything else that a megadungeon would have to have; maybe there's a crucial balance between diversity (so it's not a monster suburbia with every room having the same kind of opponents) and theme (so there's some potential for understanding it or a significant portion of it enough to inform future exploration).

Question from someone who has no experience with this era/form of tabletop gaming:

  Would Castlevania in Symphony of the Night qualify as a megadungeon?

Here's a whole forum devoted to megadungeons and a good thread there.

Quote from: Doughdee222;855563I wonder what defines a "megadungeon"? I once created one where the top level, "ground level" was, I think, 6 graph papers big. The second level was about equal to that. The third was down to 4, the ones below that were just 1-2 graph papers in size. Is that big enough for the "megadungeon" rank or too small? (The scenario involved an army besieging a large fort and the PCs are sent inside to investigate what was going on.)

Or maybe I'm mistaken and number of graph papers doesn't matter? Does it take something like the Drow series Underdark map to qualify?

I don't have it at hand, but the original D&D text said something like that a proper dungeon should have no less than thirteen levels, with sub-levels branching off, and ongoing modification and addition.

The original advice was also that there should be plenty of ways among the levels, because players won't appreciate being hemmed in.

I don't think human nature has changed radically in a few decades, that we old-timers are a different species. However, if all you offer is a railroad then people who aren't looking to buy a ticket for that kind of trip -- or find it's delivered better by, say, video games -- naturally go elsewhere.

As long as the author creates a cool, fun dungeon.....with a dynamic environment, that's all I really care about (megadungeon or not).

Random Encounter Tables will definitely help him build on that environment.

"Megadungeon" simply seems to be what the "cool kids" call what we used to call a "dungeon."

One thing I like about the original underworld/town/wilderness setup is that it gives a good return on the work (which really need not be very much to start).

The big payoff is from not needing to work out a sequence of events, then start over. Instead, we have elements than can keep generating a wide range of events. Characters don't need specific plotted moves because they have motives. Instead of scenery for a scene, we have living places.

Big stat blocks are of course more cumbersome. Snakepipe Hollow is remarkably big for a RuneQuest dungeon, not so much for old D&D, and Big Rubble adopts a more procedural than detail-mapped approach.

A Megadungeon is bigger than an Ultradungeon, but smaller than a Gigadungeon.

I think it's one of those terms that wasn't very well defined in the beginning.