Quote from: Pierce InverarityNo, but that's just it, droog--if you run it tongue in cheek, it's bound to be HORRIBLE. You have to find a way to take it seriously. And what Drew said, for example, is such a way--it's like the more Cthulhuesque parts of Conan. The Things Beneath The City Of Slaves (TM). You know, turning incongruity into horror.

Exactly. Dark magic, twisted perceptions, a sense of things best left undisturbed. I vastly prefer the dungeon as a place that partially intersects with the underworld of myth. The spawning pits of deep-dwelling horrors, and all that. It meshes surprisingly well with action adventure stories, Conan and Moria being excellent examples of how to present such an environment without stinting on the bloody mayhem.

QuoteBTW, Dragon Warriors will be republished by James Wallis, right?

Yep. The last I'd heard was that the artwork was in, so hopefully it won't be too long now.

Quote from: Pierce InverarityNo, but that's just it, droog--if you run it tongue in cheek, it's bound to be HORRIBLE. You have to find a way to take it seriously. And what Drew said, for example, is such a way--it's like the more Cthulhuesque parts of Conan. The Things Beneath The City Of Slaves (TM). You know, turning incongruity into horror.

Yeah, I get that, too; though I think you can do tongue-in-cheek for just about anything. But if it's going to be special and horrific, again I'm wondering just how often you can pull one out. They become a cliche through overuse.

Quote from: CalithenaMike -

Your multi-area encounter shows that you 'get it', but I do think that some of the older dungeons actually show more of what you're regarding as the 'newer wisdom' then you give them credit for. In particular, Jaquays' and Gygax's best work (Dark Tower, Caverns of Thracia, some of the G/D series) is, I'm almost certain, designed for the kind of integrated play environment/broader scale tactical challenge you're talking about. It's a somewhat forgotten art in the gaming discussion-sphere but I think it's being rediscovered right now, by amateurs and pros alike - some of whom never 'lost' it in play in the first place, granted.

Melan has an article on circular routes in dungeons (can't find the link, but I know he posted it at enworld once upon a time) that addresses some issues that are relevant here.

So anyway, I agree with you about the theory based on what you've posted so far, and I agree with you that bad dungeons are teh suck, but some of the old dungeons are actually really well designed by the standards I think you're trying to articulate, if you fill in the explanatory text we'd expect nowadays for yourself. I don't think this was accidental either.

Melan's article, if it's the one I'm thinking of over at Dragonsfoot, is awesome. It's been circulated around RPG R&D, and it's influenced my own designs.

The one area that older modules have trouble when you update them is in the design of specific encounters. A lot of the fights are really simple, kick in the door and kick some ass affairs. Some of them have the potential to turn into slogs.

I've been toying with doing an update of Keep on the Borderlands, or at least messing around with parts of it. Things like the weird, mind blasting patterns in the chaos shrine, I'd love to take that stuff and integrate it into a fight scene, or throw some magical effects in the maze to make the misdirection a tactical thing as the minotaur chases down the PCs, stuff like that.

IMO, a lot of it is taking the stuff from the old days, re-learning those lessons, and then channeling them through the rules we have today.

QuoteIMO, a lot of it is taking the stuff from the old days, re-learning those lessons, and then channeling them through the rules we have today.

I DMed a lot of old modules with 3.5. as well as the RC. There is two very major things that "enforce" more thoughts balance on the individual encounters in 3.5:

1) Inabilty to run away. Someone in the group will have that 4.5m movement allowance.

2) Lack of morale rules. In KotB, it´s a well tried tactic for first level characters to rush in, surprise, and kill just enough humanoids to enforce a morale check. That´s not possible in Vanilla 3.5.

Quote from: droogYeah, I get that, too; though I think you can do tongue-in-cheek for just about anything. But if it's going to be special and horrific, again I'm wondering just how often you can pull one out. They become a cliche through overuse.

It's all in the presentation. I try to make every dungeon I run a unique place that offers a distinct thematic flavour in addition to specific tactical challenge. I wouldn't use the word horror (which is a genre unto itself) so much as suspense, which can be derived from all manner of sources. A series of partially collapsed tunnels inhabited by a tribe of half-starved beastmen caught up in the ritualised appeasement of their dark gods is going to feel very different to a waterlogged temple complex haunted by the drowned ghosts of sacrificial victims.

It only becomes cliched when you start running low on ideas.

A Dungeon adventure is a lot like cooking, its all in the presentation to get the most out of your meal.

If you are running a dungeon the way a first-person shooter game on the PC is run, then you have already failed - your players will leave your game for World of Warcraft because its got better graphics. If you try to get your players immersed into the environment of the Dungeon (the smells, the sounds, the shadows moving just out of torchlight range) then you're on the right track because you are triggering the imagination of the players. If getting their imaginations involved means having NPCs to chat with, then so be it, monsters can talk too and nothing says that they can't speak common.

Does this mean ignore combat? No, just don't let combat dominate the Dungeon. Or do, if the players have had a bad day and just aren't up to a story type of adventure, the let them kill some monsters and take their stuff. A lot is riding on the interaction between the gamemaster and the players here in making that judgement call.

As to why people like Dungeons? I'd say it was because they are elegant adventures. Everything you need for an adventure is distilled down into a single location, so the plotline can be only so complex and the monsters you encounter are dictated by the size and location of the Dungeon. Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest ones, thus the Dungeon is the best simple solution to the question of "What adventure are we going to play tonight?"

As to wacky Dungeon ecologies and dragons in 10'x10' rooms, this can be attributed to bad writing or just plain not caring. Or even, actually being more interested in the Dungeon as a place to game than in creating a world.

Quote from: Settembrini1) Inabilty to run away. Someone in the group will have that 4.5m movement allowance.

Well, you don't have to outrun the monster...
This is a problem even when the whole group is just lightly armored. Lots of monsters can take shortcuts or aren't as encumbered by rubble, traps, etc.

I'd say that flight depends more on the dungeon design than on the actual encounter, also those two obviously influence each other. Can't run from ghostly monks

Quote from: Settembrini2) Lack of morale rules. In KotB, it´s a well tried tactic for first level characters to rush in, surprise, and kill just enough humanoids to enforce a morale check. That´s not possible in Vanilla 3.5.

Yeah, we definitely need a "courage" ability
I've never been a big fan of morale rules, though. Most of the time the modifiers are more important than the base values, so that it boils down to some ad-hoc ruling anyway, cf. Intimidate.

Quote from: droogYeah, I get that, too; though I think you can do tongue-in-cheek for just about anything. But if it's going to be special and horrific, again I'm wondering just how often you can pull one out. They become a cliche through overuse.

Very good point. I don't run em' anymore. I'm going to be running one soon..but the last time I ran a "dungeon" it was something like the first season of "Prison Break" where the pcs had to plan their escape from a huge lab of an Alien wizard populated by malicious wardens and dodgy inmates...but how often can "I" pull off something like this ? Others I'm sure can run "classic" dungeons, but I would get bored after a while.

Regards,
David R

QuoteCan't run from ghostly monks

In OD&D, you either move OR attack. Most creatures can´t charge. So you can run. In Addition, there´s the escape table.

These options don´t exist anymore. Sure, you can ad-hoc rule something. But after the vanilla 3.5, there is no disengagement after Initiative has been rolled for.

The morale modifiers in RC and AD&D 1st and even 2nd aren´t that cumbersome, in the RC it´s pretty easily remembered.
And it has it´s own step in the combat sequence.

Really, I´m just reporting the experiences I made. There surely are remedies for that, but in Actual Play, this is what I encountered on a consecutive basis.

QuoteThe one area that older modules have trouble when you update them is in the design of specific encounters. A lot of the fights are really simple, kick in the door and kick some ass affairs. Some of them have the potential to turn into slogs.

I agree that this is often the case with the texts as written. I think in play, with the 'good DM' of lore, they often turned out to be more integrated. A lot of factors played into this that aren't relevant.

I think the big challenge for you guys making this kind of stuff fun with 3.5 is going to be finding ways to integrate broader setting stuff into individual combats so that the 'tactical' and 'strategic' dimensions of play blend into each other. (This also fits with what you're saying.) Most garden-variety 3.x adventures I've played (maybe a dozen published ones, plus a dozen more I wrote myself) are really good on the tactical end, and 3.x supports a big focus on tactical play (what do I do, right now, with my character to win this fight)? The feats, spells, magic items, etc. also all feed into the tactical mentality at the player level.

But a lot of us older DMs, when we bitch and wheeze about 3.x, will point out that this deprives the game of some of the strategic dimensions that were more important back in the seventies and eighties when the transitional roots to wargaming and tabletop miniatures gaming (which reward what I'm here calling 'strategy' much more than 'tactics' a lot of the time) were stronger. Melan's article is good because it calls direct attention to one important way you can build strategy of this kind into your dungeons.

Now, you can put strategic elements into your 3.x dungeon, to be sure. There are some systematic factors (the two Sett mentions, movement and morale, are among them; also the decreased abstraction of the system more generally) that work against this. On the other hand, there are some things that 3.x does really well along these lines too: in our play we found over and over that the use of terrain is much more rewarded at the tactical level (again, due to decreased abstraction) in 3.x than in earlier versions of the game.

(One quick example: we had a fight where the party broke down a door and a gnome rogue won initiative. She ran into the room and got off a sneak attack against one of two flat-footed deodanths. The deodanths went next, and one of them slammed the door in the face of the rest of the party, while the other went after the gnome. Suddenly it's a DC 18 flat Strength check to reunite the party, and the odds have dramatically switched with one action. In general it's the fixed DCs for terrain effects and the ability of characters to exploit them regardless of level that creates the 'game break' here - which is a GOOD thing. A game like Rune rationalizes this sort of trick in a way that initially seems appealing, but actually I think it's better to have some ways you can 'work the world' out of proportion with your 'level' in it. Old D&D thrived on these sort of tricks, leading some to complain about balance, but I think that it's a big part of the fun.)

But what you'd really want to do is work with the system's strengths, which would mean finding ways to integrate strategic elements into individual scenes, so that the tactical 'focus' of 3.x grows naturally (especially for smarter players - this opens up a skill dimension) into the strategic level for victory. Which seems to me, again, what you're talking about here:

QuoteI've been toying with doing an update of Keep on the Borderlands, or at least messing around with parts of it. Things like the weird, mind blasting patterns in the chaos shrine, I'd love to take that stuff and integrate it into a fight scene, or throw some magical effects in the maze to make the misdirection a tactical thing as the minotaur chases down the PCs, stuff like that.

I think the best DMs found ways to introduce these types of tricks into play in the old days, partly through system but partly through a kind of ad hoccery - which hand waving is however more supported by abstractions like 1 minute combat rounds, etc. But comparing versions of the game is more boring than figuring out what the problems any version needs to confront are, so enough of that.

But it seems also that what you're talking above is more 'meta-tactics' than strategy. That is, there's

- doing things in situation
- manipulating the situations you're in locally
- getting control over what situations there are to be dealt with by manipulating the broader environment

The first is what I've been calling tactics and what BtB 3.x most naturally excels at. Good dungeon design should address the second 'metatactical' and third 'strategic' level as well.

Your shifting chaos rune from B2 is a good metatactical example. It's there; maybe it's a Hypnotic Pattern or something. Then there's this fight. The DM and players can both use it, if they think of it. How? Bluff checks to distract someone to look at it; grappling someone and forcing them to look at it; use a mirror to reflect it at someone; etc. You can hack away with your sword if you want, but there's a bonus to thinking outside the box. But that doesn't go outside that particular situation.

The minotaur maze, while slightly more extended, is also metatactical. Party in maze, minotaur hunting. You can march along, try to stay together, make saving throws or get separated. Or, you can try to wait it out, but the minotaur is patient and has food; you don't. Or you can do a Theseus trick and use a string, or mark the walls; maybe the minotaur will mess with that too. Set an ambush? Use metal wire and send a shocking grasp down it when you think the minotaur is moving it around to mess up your trail? What plan will work isn't entirely clear, but having one is better than getting picked off one by one after you miss your misdirection saving throw.

What I really want to see, and what Melan's article addresses, is more play at the strategic level. Making alliances with monsters, recon, maps as valuable information-bearing adjuncts, playing off big monsters against each other so you don't have to do the hard work of killing them, etc. Working the dungeon environment as a whole, as you discover it (and DMs shouldn't be too parsimonious with information, either).

This strategy will feed into metatactics, but it should be more than that too.

The way to make it 'more' in terms of dungeon design for a game like 3.5, I think, is to find ways for interesting strategic approaches to the dungeon to figure directly into in-scene bonuses.

Anyway, fun talking about this stuff with you, and I'm really glad to see that you're thinking along these lines.

Quote from: SettembriniIn OD&D, you either move OR attack. Most creatures can´t charge. So you can run. In Addition, there´s the escape table.

These options don´t exist anymore. Sure, you can ad-hoc rule something. But after the vanilla 3.5, there is no disengagement after Initiative has been rolled for.

Yes, apart from initiative, there's no magical Final Fantasy combat mode in there. You have rules for movement and withdrawal, but whether the monsters follow you is not regulated by the rules. I certainly agree with that, as this would break the whole-dungeon look on things -- apart from the fact that believable rules would be rather complicated.

Quote from: SettembriniThe morale modifiers in RC and AD&D 1st and even 2nd aren´t that cumbersome, in the RC it´s pretty easily remembered.

That's the problem, I wouldn't use them that way. As opposed to simply hitting things, morale is in an area of role-playing where I don't want to simplify that much. It seems the 3E designers agree with that assumption and thus let the DM handle it instead of providing some quick-and-dirty rules for that.

If the players think that running away isn't an option because there's no explicit "Escape Encounter" action, or a DM lets monsters fight to the death because they don't have explicit morale values, well, that's their mistake.

Both points are sections of game play where rules would put this a little too deep in the wargaming territory. We've got enough stupid rules in there that influence player decisions anyway.

QuoteWhat I really want to see, and what Melan's article addresses, is more play at the strategic level. Making alliances with monsters, recon, maps as valuable information-bearing adjuncts, playing off big monsters against each other so you don't have to do the hard work of killing them, etc. Working the dungeon environment as a whole, as you discover it (and DMs shouldn't be too parsimonious with information, either).

Not all is bad in the 3.5 Adventure Path Age of Worms, for example.
The module: "A Gathering of Winds" had these elements, in addition to some grandiose tactical 3.5ish terrain-based encounters. It was the best of both worlds, really.

Our DM also turned "Three Faces of Evil" into a similiar experience.

The utterly awesome module in the Riftcrawl Fissure (Name?) at Kongen Thulnir also had several acting parties, strategic thinking and insanely cool terrain-based encounters.

The recent entries to the Savage Tide AP are ridiculous railroading, OTOH.
Imagine a ten foot wide mountain pass, that you have to follow for days,
without any option of taking another route. Then, Gargoyles attack you, they had hidden in the stone walls.
Bad, bad design: a boobytrapped railroad. Frustrating.

QuoteThat's the problem, I wouldn't use them that way. As opposed to simply hitting things, morale is in an area of role-playing where I don't want to simplify that much. It seems the 3E designers agree with that assumption and thus let the DM handle it instead of providing some quick-and-dirty rules for that.

Well, I could argue against that, but that deviates to much from the thread. Another time, maybe.

Let´s settle it with:
How morale is handled, must be kept in mind.

In terms of WotC stuff, the environment in the last part of "Lord of the Iron Fortress" is good. The first two parts of the mod I don't care for at all, but once you land on that square extraplanar moon you've got a good integrated environment to work with as player or DM. We had at least a half-dozen awesome fights in that one and the finale against the lord and the pit fiend is the longest fun combat I've ever played in - went almost 60 melee rounds.

In terms of non-WotC stuff, I was very impressed by Bill Kenower's Vault of Larin Karr, which has endless strategic opportunities at multiple levels and is an excellent example of a 'dungeon minicampaign' presented in a reasonable number of pages.

But both cases still rely on the DM to play the environment. Which is actually fine, you know, it's a good way to play and I don't feel a strong need to systematize stuff like this any more. A few pages of good advice on how to do this would probably be welcome in the current DMG - along with the advice that if your players out-think you and game a situation better than you did, let them have it, that's part of the fun of the game and what they're playing for.

But given the strengths of 3e as a system, if I was a pro designer for it, I'd want to find ways to mechanically integrate the pieces of the environment into each other, so that the tactical play fed into a strategic puzzle that you could 'unlock' with good performance.

I suspect there may be some lessons here from computer games and MMoRPGs but the challenge is doing it in a non-restrictive way with real-time tabletop technology.

Pierce, we're kind of hijacking your thread, but at least it's an interesting hijack.

Ancient temples, crashed starships, wizards' towers, the hidden thieves' guild in the sewers under the city...those are all dungeons too. Any integrated site presenting consistent adversity is a dungeon.

Is it just the hole in the ground thing that bothers you, or is it the whole idea of wading into sequential hackfests that you don't like?