Quote from: RPGPundit;1003221Now, I get a lot of what you're saying above, but the fact is that it is still so close to D&D that if you run something like Death Frost Doom with the assumption that it is D&D and it is a D&D dungeon then the very things that PCs are SUPPOSED to do in standard D&D dungeons are what fucks them over in DFD.

Killing assumptions about D&D using a D&D-derived system is half the fun.

The concept of a 'standard D&D dungeon shouldn't exist in the first place.

The concept that there are things players are 'supposed' to do in a dungeon is awful

These things shouldn't have ever existed in officially published D&D, let alone in third party or offshoot publications.

D&D as a rules framework and process of play was excellent and a life changer. As a set of tropes, recognizable recording tidbits, and an assumed setting it isn't anything I've been interested in since high school.

If an adventure doesn't at least attempt to challenge both of those concepts, what is the point?

Quote from: JimLotFP;1003490If an adventure doesn't at least attempt to challenge both of those concepts, what is the point?

How did you intend for the players to figure out that if the plant stop singing it would cause the undead to rise? I have the first edition of DFD it wasn't clear how that could be discovered in the adventure.

Quote from: estar;1003491How did you intend for the players to figure out that if the plant stop singing it would cause the undead to rise? I have the first edition of DFD it wasn't clear how that could be discovered in the adventure.

I didn't. That's the start of the real adventure, in my view.

I don't know what spells or items or experience players or characters have before the adventure starts, so I don't worry how they'll figure out certain details. Their problem as players and characters, not mine as Referee or designer.

Quote from: JimLotFP;1003490The concept of a 'standard D&D dungeon shouldn't exist in the first place.

The concept that there are things players are 'supposed' to do in a dungeon is awful

Both those things would be utterly dull to me! I don't buy modules but it's unfortunate if they feel the need to adhere to certain guidelines and tropes which in turn cause players to do the same and behave the same way for every dungeon.

Quote from: JimLotFP;1003495I didn't. That's the start of the real adventure, in my view.

I don't know what spells or items or experience players or characters have before the adventure starts, so I don't worry how they'll figure out certain details. Their problem as players and characters, not mine as Referee or designer.

Every adventure is part of a setting whether specific or implied. The details of which are set by the referee. So the "problem" is yours as the referee. The plant doesn't exist in a vacuum. The fact the region of DFD is cursed arises from how the fantasy world you created works.  

Now it could very well be that magic in your setting is weird, horrifying, and unknowable. That the plant and its song a random mutation within a world infused with magic both benign and unholy. So anything like this going to a total mystery. But then again you did run this several times and not every one released the undead horde. It would be useful to know the possibilities for something with such drastic consequences.

Could be as simple as saying it was because the party was smart enough to have a cleric with the 2nd level spell Augury, who used it to determine it was a very bad idea to kill the plant. But I don't know because it wasn't written up. Yet you did take the space to write up a interesting backstory for Cyris Maximus. Another element of the adventures that has the potential for significant consequences for the party.

Let me clear, this is a specific criticism of a portion of an otherwise excellent adventure. There are area of the Majestic Wilderlands where this would work well with. I know how I would handle things. But not every referee is as experienced as I am nor have developed a setting to the degree I have. All I am saying that it would been useful to have some notes on how the party could figure it out.

As a counterpoint, the Organ with yellow mold. I am not critical of that because to it obvious how it can be resolved without killing the party. Take the time to examine it carefully and you will discover the airways are filled with yellow mold. The same with other section of the adventure. But not so for the plant and its song.

Again note I only have the earlier version.

While I see and appreciate estar's points, ultimately, perhaps to no one's surprise, I'm with James on this one.

Quote from: JimLotFP;1003495I didn't. That's the start of the real adventure, in my view.

I don't know what spells or items or experience players or characters have before the adventure starts, so I don't worry how they'll figure out certain details. Their problem as players and characters, not mine as Referee or designer.

In my LotFP game the PCs came across a deserted tower with a McGuffin in it. It was part of a keep that had been owned and run by an adventurer and his men who traveled on a ship to different versions of earth. The keep was desolate and decimated. The menagerie of beasts and demons he had brought back and imprisoned had escaped.

Two creatures were left alive, both in a the keep, battling each other when the players came across them. One could raise and control the undead. The other, The Mother of Unborn Flesh, could make mindless copies people to control.

The Players mucked about, realized what was going on, accidentally brought the two creatures in to open conflict... and before you knew it the tower was filled, wall to wall, with about 2,000 undead. They fled, the McGuffin still inside. And the two creatures that started the whole disaster. They sealed the door and tried to puzzle out what to...

I have no exception this was going to happen. I definitely had no idea how they would solve a huge fucking problem.

And lets be honest. I wrote a module about an abandoned keep once rules by an inter-dimensional adventurer and wrote:

QuoteLOCATION 14: This TOWER is filled wall to wall with 2,000 Undead. The front door is sealed shut with sturdy chains on the handles. A strange, steady SHIFTING can be heard within. If the chains are undone the Undead will pour out.

...some people (even some people on this thread) would be called preposterous, ridiculous, useless, and perhaps a negadungeon... especially since I, as the writer, offered no specific solutions to the problem AT ALL.

After some consideration they decided to gamble on a dangerous and fantastical magical item they had plundered from catacombs of The God That Crawls. (A Legion of Lead, for those of you who have read or played the module.)

I handed it to them... it was a bold, smart move if you think through the implications of the magical item and the circumstances. I could have never seen it coming -- for the very reasons James states above. They got XP for ALL the zombies and all leveled. They had a blast. They were chuffed with solving an unsolvable problem -- and rightly so.

This is the kind of unexposed playfulness the LotFP modules encourage. It can happen in any system, or at any game table, of course. But the LotFP products expect PCs, situations, spells, choices, magic items, and ideas to interact in unexpected ways. I've been on hiatus from the game while other people run different games in my Monday Night group -- but I can't wait to get back to the game for this very reason. And my players have literally stated exactly the same to me.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;1003520I have no exception this was going to happen. I definitely had no idea how they would solve a huge fucking problem.

And if this was turned into a published adventure and you didn't include a sentence or two about this or other experiences with the playtest in the work, I would be mildly critical. It doesn't needs to be a treatise but a couple of one or two sentence notes about how it worked in actual play would be helpful. Especially for things that have significant impact. And not like this has to be thought up, it stuff that happened during the playtest.

To take your example, yeah a tower with 2,000 zombies seems a little overkill but when you explain it the way you did, I went "Oh I see" and it gave me more possibilities of how I could use that in my own campaign.

Quote from: JimLotFP;1003490If an adventure doesn't at least attempt to challenge both of those concepts, what is the point?

Yes... But.

I don't particularly like the way some of the challenges are used... I think there are better ways of making adventures more challenging and interesting at the same time. It's very easy to create traps like, If you 'do this' you die. If you 'don't do' this you die. etc. Seems a bit arbitrary to me...

What makes DFD really interesting is not the actual dungeon crawl itself or killing boss after boss after boss, but the setting, background and the overall vibe in my opinion.

However, it's all a bit moot really. As any GM just takes what they want out of a published adventure and changes the rest. But it's all good... If someone wants to play/GM the way it's written by rote, go for it. But I prefer to do my own thing.

Quote from: The Exploited.;1003537If you 'do this' you die. If you 'don't do' this you die. etc. Seems a bit arbitrary to me...

For what it's worth, I agree with you that would be arbitrary. What I learned from using the LotFP modules is that while I used to see such situations in terms of If you "'do this' you die. If you 'don't do' this you die. etc." is the there are, in fact, an infinite number of other options the Players (via their PCs) can bring to bear that blow past this or this.

Quote from: estar;1003531And if this was turned into a published adventure and you didn't include a sentence or two about this or other experiences with the playtest in the work, I would be mildly critical. It doesn't needs to be a treatise but a couple of one or two sentence notes about how it worked in actual play would be helpful. Especially for things that have significant impact. And not like this has to be thought up, it stuff that happened during the playtest.

To take your example, yeah a tower with 2,000 zombies seems a little overkill but when you explain it the way you did, I went "Oh I see" and it gave me more possibilities of how I could use that in my own campaign.

Again, I see where you're coming from. But the stuff that ultimately produced the weird challenge of 2,000 Undead in a  tower was the result of leaning into things I had learned -- and learned to trust -- from playing several other LotFP modules. From running DFD, TGTC, Stranger Storm, and Scenic Dunnsmouth, I learned I could just toss crazy problems at my Players and it would be up to them to determine how to handle the problems. And they always did.

So I learned to simply keep making adductions based on the actions, following the logic as I best could. Which is, for example, in the example above, led to the 2,000 Undead -- which I didn't have an inkling would happen at all when I set up the situations within the keep.

I then left it to them to come up with their own solution. (Their solution could have been "to walk away," by the way.)

I only learned to have that fun encounter because I had played through the LotFP modules. I only trusted that I could simply let the chips fall where they may and follow the logic of a creature that made clones battling the undead controlled by another creature and the chaos that would ensue because we had played those modules. It shifted my way of playing in the best possible way.

My game isn't out to kill my the Player Characters at all. But it does allow the Players the stress of knowing, "If we're going to get through this, we can't assume the first idea is the best idea. Or the only idea."

Which, again, has been a blast to see what they come up with to solve problems that I don't know the solution to until they give it a shot.

Quote from: JimLotFP;1003490Killing assumptions about D&D using a D&D-derived system is half the fun.

The concept of a 'standard D&D dungeon shouldn't exist in the first place.

The concept that there are things players are 'supposed' to do in a dungeon is awful

These things shouldn't have ever existed in officially published D&D, let alone in third party or offshoot publications.

D&D as a rules framework and process of play was excellent and a life changer. As a set of tropes, recognizable recording tidbits, and an assumed setting it isn't anything I've been interested in since high school.

If an adventure doesn't at least attempt to challenge both of those concepts, what is the point?

OK, so at least now you're admitting it. That's progress.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1004254OK, so at least now you're admitting it. That's progress.

How come you're incapable of answering simple questions?

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;1004281How come you're incapable of answering simple questions?

He doesn't really have to.  We're all trolls, and he's lord high king of the trolls.  This entire site is trollbait.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1001471Well, I'll accept that different people put different boundaries on the definition of a "negadungeon". I guess to some, any adventure that isn't totally set up to just be a treasureless death-trap for PCs is not a negadungeon.  Meanwhile, I guess some other people might think of any adventure that is just really dangerous is a 'negadungeon'.
I would say, however, that any adventure that is set up to punish players for doing things that players will ordinarily think of as the right thing to do while dungeoneering is a negadungeon.

Thing is, what you're saying here, reads to me as "when Asen has dungeons, he tries to only run negadungeons".

Which is fine. I'll just keep that in mind for eventual purchases.

However, could you please tell us which are those "things players will ordinarily think of as the right thing to do [in a dungeon]"? Because that notion varies wildly between groups I have seen.
Some of those practices are stuff I'd like to "punish", yes, because I consider it stupid. Others, not really, because it makes total sense to me.

...I see now that CK also asked you for such a list. So yes, I guess I'm joining his request!

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;1001517However, the real juice for the Weird Fantasy elements of the game are in the Referee Book. (Which is free here, for anyone who is curious.) Raggi lays out his agenda for the kind of settings, mood, and play he wants to encourage with his product line -- which the LotFP products successfully support.

When I read the Referee Book all of Lamentations of the Flame Princess fell into place for me -- the game, the art, the modules. I saw that to run it I'd be best served by thinking of Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, the weird parts o R. E. Howard's Conan tales (which have lots of weirdness), a little bit of Gene Wolfe, and now, having begun reading his work, some Jeff VanderMeer. Even though the rules were based on B/X D&D, they had nothing at all to do with the sensibilities of the faux-Tolkien characters and bands of marauding monsters of different races found in almost all editions of D&D.

It was the Referee book of LotFP which got me really interested in OSR (and I only checked it after joining an OD&D game on TBP, which went much better than I expected).
Then I went "that's exactly what I'm trying to do, and the man obviously has been doing that for longer than me"!

Funny, now that I think of it, because I've never used the LotFP rules, or maybe I've only ever used them for a one-shot or two...but I've used ideas from the Referee book even when running stuff like Exalted and Feng Shui 2:D! In fact, my Exalted game is moving exactly in that direction by now (which manages to surprise my players, veterans of the Exalted setting).
And it combines very nicely with DCC, I must add.

Quote from: JimLotFP;1003490Killing assumptions about D&D using a D&D-derived system is half the fun.

The concept of a 'standard D&D dungeon shouldn't exist in the first place.

The concept that there are things players are 'supposed' to do in a dungeon is awful

These things shouldn't have ever existed in officially published D&D, let alone in third party or offshoot publications.

D&D as a rules framework and process of play was excellent and a life changer. As a set of tropes, recognizable recording tidbits, and an assumed setting it isn't anything I've been interested in since high school.

If an adventure doesn't at least attempt to challenge both of those concepts, what is the point?

I can only agree with this post.
Except I don't use a D&D-derived system, but that's a personal touch;).

Well, I'd agree that while people might derive certain practices from experience in delving dungeons, they shouldn't EXPECT them to work as it becomes metagaming at that point.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;1004281How come you're incapable of answering simple questions?

My point was that DFD was a negadungeon in the sense I was defining it. You initially rejected that notion, and then you turned around and admitted that in fact it does exactly what I said it does, and tried to defend that as a good thing.

Is it wrong to challenge D&D's default assumptions? No. I mean, I do that in every OSR book I've done so far. Lion & Dragon challenges the very assumption that you've ever actually played "medieval fantasy" until now.

The problem with negadungeons is that if it does this "challenge" at all, it is in a cheap, deceptive, weasely sort of way. It's a bait-and-switch on players. And it's not in any way a truly constructive "challenge"; it just deconstructs instead of producing some kind of viable (much less appealing) alternatives.