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Formations So this time around, I wanted to talk about using the physical design constraints of “what dice I brought with me to outer space”. As a quick recap, this was a collection of d6s and some FUDGE dice, as well as one of those cases you can use to hold your dice in snugly. While I was considering what to do with this the idea of a screenshot from a Japanese TRPG popped into my head that I think was being mentioned and Kickstarted in another thread, “Summon Skate”. This had a grid where you drew patterns as a figure skater in order to fight huge bosses. I have no idea how it works other than that. From the idea of “Dice and a grid” I decided to use the dice as signifiers to represent characters. FUDGE dice have three states: “Plus”, “Minus”, and “Blank”, which could also be changed by rotating the die so the face shows “X”, “Slash”, and “Blank” instead. By using these different states, I could place them onto a battlefield and then have them represent…Something. Prior to going off for a week and shouting into a microphone doing game design stuff, I played a lot of Amazing Cultivation Simulator, which is another one of those giant kitchen sink simulation type games like Dwarf Fortress, but for your own super powered martial arts story instead. Great game that I recommend highly. In its introduction and as a part of it was a formation system that could dramatically influence the outcome of a battle, since the master of your sect that you had to flee from gets thrown into the dumpster as a result of one from some mysterious enemies. Formations and their like on a tactical battlefield have showed up in a variety of games, mostly of the video game SRPG or war-game variety. Lots of games by Nippon Ichi Software, especially their older games that the Japan branch did like Disgaea 1, La Pucelle Tactics, and so on featured squares that gave various advantages or disadvantages over basic height and movement things that are common to other games. You also see it in Tash-Kalar, which I have not played, but I have seen reviews of, whereby you place units onto a field to make formations that cause damage to your opponent. I found the idea of “specific formations giving some kind of benefit” to be pretty exciting as I was rambling into a microphone trying to talk myself through it, and so I ended up creating a more complex system that still needs additional work regarding this. First, create a grid that you can use for specific battlefield sizes. For a party of four characters in a hex grid layout, a 5x5 grid might suffice. Then, take one FUDGE “Plus” die to serve as the “core” of a formation that will receive the most benefit. There must also be a minimum of one FUDGE “Minus” die, which is the “key” for the formation and dictates where the shape is formed. Using these dice, determine a formation shape in some way that makes sense. I came up with some basic ones: “Diamond”, short “T”, long “T”, and so on. The action economy in GURPS is quite stringent, so I figured that in order to make this system rewarding for players, fighting in formation meant they got pretty significant bonuses like extra actions or reactions. In other words, selectively breaking the pretty stringent rules. Now, this is one of those things that is a double-edged sword. Maybe they could use a formation even when it doesn’t look optimal because it grants them a big bonus. Monsters with forced movement options can shove them out of the formation or target specific people in the formation. It also means the players can fight together and streamline their combat options and get rewarded for it, plus it represents their increasing capability and organization as delvers. So far so good, so now let’s take a look at the actual design sheets.   There are two primary goals I want to do for this system: - Reward players for advance planning and thinking more tactically than they currently are. Empower organization and preparation - Create an extensible system that can be further improved later in a variety of ways (monster formations? giving out formations as a group reward? making 'natural' vs. 'artificial' formations? player submitted formations? multi-party formations?) Since this meets other general design philosophy goals I was working on, I can see how this could be represented also in a compact card-like format. I believe that is what Tash-Kalar does to great effect to detail everything one needs to know about the different formation shapes. I feel like this is is something that has some further sea legs to keep iterating on but like in Jon Joe's case, I will want to run it by the players first. The players that I have are curious but not so curious as to start trying to emulate monster tactics on them (DF monsters are supposed to be played as somewhat predictable and dumb anyway, and the calibration encounter with draugr that gave the players a hard time used attack modes they normally would not if played in that mode). Eventually as their understanding of the systems increase then they will find some good use in something like this. That said, they may come across this soon. Heh heh heh.
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Dec 22, 2020 23:56
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More Formations prototype work... Formations, II Formations need to be categorized by using some specific terminology for players: - Who should receive the benefits - Who is the eye of the formation - The shape of the formation - The benefits of the formation Determining the benefits has to do with GURPS specifically, so there should be one type of formation that amplify specific categories in combat: - Attacks (ranged, melee, and spell/innate) - Active defenses (blocks, dodges, and parries) - Movement and/or positioning (specifically grid movement as well as facing) - Preparation (item interactions, concentration but not finishing the cast of a spell) We should also consider the triggers which would grant benefits and penalties: - On state change of the formation (entering/exiting the formation) - On maintenance of the formation (ongoing effects) - On active maneuver of an action by someone in the formation (someone spends a turn in formation to do a formation maneuver) What roles do party members play in a formation? - (1 for every 2 Beneficiaries) Formation Leader. Anybody who is a dash symbol is the eye of the formation and must maintain cohesion to keep supplying other people with the buffs. They may voluntarily break formation by - (up to 2) Beneficiary. Any space designated by the plus symbol in a formation is considered receiving the effects of the formation. Agents must stay in the hexes relative to Formation Leader. - (Any remaining party members) Supporter. Can move freely, but if occupying a spot marked with a blank in the formation, provides a bonus to the rest of the formation. What benefits do party members get in a formation? - For every Formation Leader, pick 1 Major or 2 Minor effects, and its trigger. Major Effects: Intended to influence the action economy. Major Effects influence all beneficiaries in the formation. - Grant extra action relevant to the above benefit categories, following the same normal rules for an action. No penalty for using the action. - Grant a large bonus to Effective Skill when using an action under normal circumstances. - Transfer a resource that you normally cannot, such as transferring Move points or Speed points. - Reduce FP cost of a maneuver. - Cancel a major bad effect on someone before they act, such as being stunned by a major wound. Minor Effects: Intended for miscellaneous small benefits. You can select the same benefit twice, each one affects a different target. - Grant medium extra damage to a single damage roll, or small damage bonus to two different damaging effects. - Grant small bonus to Effective Skill tests in the same round. - Cancel a minor bad effect on someone for the round, such as penalty for HP or FP loss. - Grant a small bonus to Move or Speed. Spatial Requirements to Create Formations - Formations must have a maximum distance of 3 yards from any other member in the formation. - Formations must maintain line of perception somehow, otherwise the formation is broken. - Formations must have an aesthetic configuration to what its purpose is.
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Dec 27, 2020 17:56
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I have concluded the first big Mystery that between 8 players they really wanted to get solved, so I now have some data regarding their point spend relative to how many sessions were run. Numbers For a 50 point mystery, the players were unlocking milestones once or twice every week of play or so (keeping in mind there were two groups). Once they got closer to the ending of the Mystery, they committed more points to it to get it done faster. A 50 point mystery has 9 entries of content, which was a healthy and sustainable pace to add new "small details" to the game, and two "large details" with a crafty puzzle requiring an image decode to complete (some had their suspicions, but I gave them the answer following the conclusion of the Mystery). In terms of point spend, the split was 40% Sunday group and 60% Wednesday group. The most anybody individually spent was 6 to 8 points total on the Mystery. This made the return on investment of each delver getting 10 points back a total of 80 points awarded to the groups as well as all the interstitial awards (new mechanics, unfolding narrative, "secret stuff"). Thus far only one player has continued to engage with the Mystery, but it was only fully revealed yesterday. Their enthusiasm is likely bringing other people in to help with session activity. Takeaways All in all for experimental systems I'd say that the rates were pretty good. The timetable of about two to three months is within my expected resolution time, and it also has allowed people to think considerably about what they want their characters to level up and develop in now that they have their points returned. This also means with a deeper understanding of the mechanics and shiny new things to spend, they are finally getting a sizable level up since they were "holding back". Interestingly enough, it looks like there was 100% participation on this system in that everybody contributed at least 1 point. Since the rewards are static rather than based on how much which person spent, this also means that they have a new positive reinforcement regarding their characters when they re-enter the Mystery loop once again in greater detail. My design instincts built up from several years of testing and tweaking thus far appear to be on the right track for these groups, which also means I have the opportunity to continue diving into deeper more experimental systems, Formations of which will be next probably. Fine-Tuning There are some other interpretations that will need to be considered. A 50 point Mystery or higher is a pretty considerable undertaking for the players, and awarding 80 points as a refund and a smattering of other benefits means that if they continue play the rewards they will get will need to be a minimum of 100% refund but should be more to reflect the point spend each party is committing. I think it may be nice to grant the party that contributes certain thresholds of points more interesting dynamics. Not just "most contributed", but "least contributed" and "if points are evenly split, get an additional reward" type of thing. By giving more options than just a binary "spend points, or do not spend points" to engage with the system, there are opportunities to allow players even more choices regarding it to continue developing the system further. I also am looking at "alternate methods to develop Mysteries". This would mean that certain triggers in the game world need to happen. The first of these are "this Mystery will only progress when more delvers die". This would mean that if delvers were interested in developing this, they would need to make some calculated decisions on doing so, because if the rewards thus far have been pretty good, what happens when you die enough times? Lastly, I would like to figure out a way to make the reward for these larger Mysteries something truly special. Dragon's Crown did a great job of rewarding players for side quests by giving them these beautifully colored and composed illustrations (though some of them are heavy on the fanservice due to artistic direction). I think some kind of custom piece of curated lineart would be a fantastic way to reward the groups, but I will need to figure out how much time that would take and to prepare that as a lasting reward for a memorable character. This is a tangent but I think having an "earned artifact" like a piece of art, or a cool item, or a special ability that has been gained only after a great trial is something that not just megadungeons, but all games can really stand to do more. There are experiments on these fronts with newer games (I think Invisible Sun had a curated subscription service where the designers would send you GM packets for your group and collectors editions with special items too). While physical items are great, especially given the times and circumstance and the logistical hurdles, an "experience to remember" is something that I'd like to explore. A digital art, or a somewhat cheap voice actor spot doing a dramatic reading of an interesting bit of world lore could have potentially really big payoff and further hook people into the game. Anyway, feelin' pretty good!
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Dec 29, 2020 07:52
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Happy new year, friends! More exciting things going on in the Megastrata Project, mostly involving players discovering that they can do more "stuff" than they originally thought. Posting semi-out-of-order here, but I wanted to find ways to normalize characters making questionable decisions and then paying the price for it. One of the players thought it was "cheap" that their character died when a 'rocks fall, everybody take damage, one person died' scenario happened after a giant horned dinosaur charged at them. However, since they get resurrected pro bono in town, they realized that it wasn't actually that bad to die where they are now. As further encouragement, I made a modification to one of the Mysteries that hasn't been explored yet:  This dangles an interesting carrot in front of the characters. I'm interested in seeing how they react to this and other things going on, heh heh heh. To further put a punctuation on this, a lot of the players have been seeking large level up things, so they have received their first set of advancement quests. I'm a big fan of the concept of "earning stripes", as it were, and I feel like that in other games I run there isn't a good codified way of actually doing this. D&D has long diverged from this concept of questing for abilities, rather it is something you get as you level up as a given, so the earning process is lumped in by generic adventuring. However, part of the theme of this game is to have the players continue to develop their characters and get abilities through putting effort into it. This actually caused a minor amount of friction with the player base, but in good-natured fun. The wizard from the Wednesday group was like, "ooh, I want to put 8 points in muskets!" to which he was rebuffed -- quite thoroughly -- during downtime by the Musketeer guild trainer. When the player got frustrated in character and started acting smart, the trainer responded not as a "quest NPC", but as a character, which I think had the intended effect. Players are starting to get wise to things taking place because of things that they're beginning to question. They also have some new tricks up their sleeve that have been unlocked:   As death and dying becomes more normalized, the amount of experiments that take place within the Megastrata from a game design and encounter perspective will likely increase, which is also something that video games like Dark Souls use quite forgivingly with its "dying to fail forward" mechanisms. --- I also provided some additional context for the general rules of engagement with regards to how to approach the game, which I shall share with a screenshot of text here (too lazy for re-formatting to bbcode):  This was considered too verbose to non-players that read through it, so I tightened the language up a bit:  I think these kinds of things are important to show to multiple cohorts of people just to double check that it reads clearly enough. Since this will be at the very front of the Gazeteer, which is more or less the player's guide to the game, this should be clear to start and steadily get more esoteric. I've included both revisions in the game because they both have nuanced differences for what they intend. The Friday group is steadily working on their characters, but also, someone unlocked some "new mechanics" by making a backup character. This has been kicking around in my head for awhile, but this is "selectively" breaking rules and providing a reward for it. Specifically, the rule being broken here is Dungeon Fantasy's "Niche Protection", and putting in a way for players that are hungering for that extra action to get in and powerlevel characters. It also means they can experiment freely with new character builds, though it does mean that the characters they make can be potentially disposable if they make dumb decisions. 
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Jan 6, 2021 06:55
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Jon Joe posted:I think these can make for really interesting encounter and level design, but they're really easy to do wrong. In 5e, the system for my megadungeon, traps are done -really- wrong. It's a tactical system wherein out of nowhere, in the middle of a player's turn, they can get screwed out of their strategy if they didn't spot a trap. This feels bad for the player and gives them no room to react.
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Jan 6, 2021 19:07
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Halloween Jack posted:It seems to me that Official D&D never properly identified what makes a "trap" a unique feature of the design and what it's supposed to do. Is it a part of an encounter? An encounter itself? A way to bake some danger into the Exploration phase? (And if traps are part of combat encounters, we have to figure out what makes them fundamentally different from monsters. Several monsters are living traps.) I think in D&D's panoply of editions traps were one of two things: - major encounters in and of themselves that weren't combats (large room scale traps and puzzles) - speed bumps in a combat encounter as some additional spice I don't know that they fully addressed the intent on traps in 5e, but it is kind of silly since "trap design" doesn't have nearly the same experience budget as creature budget for combat encounters. I think you could make a non-combat trap encounter with combat monster statblocks and then just go from there.
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Jan 7, 2021 04:52
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I was mostly curious and also I wanted to preserve some of this writing in case this thread gets torpedoed to the sands of time. I did a wordcount of stuff I wrote in this thread and I guess we can celebrate going past 25 thousand words (25,556 words, apparently) and 24 images (not counting the dog from the OP). Is that a lot of words to talk about megadungeons on? I actually don't know if it is, since if I tried to export preview the musings in Ulysses, with the images it clocks at 111 pages of idiocy on mostly my part alone. I'd like to encourage other people to ask questions, pick apart things, and also contribute as well. There's been some nice encouragement from people who have chimed in on the thread to share their own experiences with their own things, and informally, others have mentioned that they do read this thread, but feel as if they have nothing to contribute, though it is interesting to them. One of my players did comment that they were getting inspired from reading this thread to go and make their own West Marches game, which is like a megadungeon in its own right. I think one of the beautiful things about this kind of design is that it is playing around with things and seeing what works, what doesn't, but curating for your own needs. Just going off on a tangent about West Marches in general, I've seen that people just kind of fall off the deep end when it comes to trying to run or play such a thing. Ben Robbins, creator of Microscope, goes into his own learnings from running such a game when he had a lot of time and little else to do, so he made the game and empowered the players to do things on their own terms. I think that a megadungeon is conceptually like a West Marches game, and of course a precursor to many video games that people use as their primary source of game literacy compared to citing D&D. As a result, there is a lot of overlap between these things but it need not necessarily be apples to apples. A West Marches campaign has this certain mystique about it that people find appealing as another kind of "ultimate gaming experience", but in practice there are many times where it falls short. How do these things fall short? I think it's interesting to understand the energy expenditure, player engagement and expectation, as well as the expectation to design something considered to be "of worth" to people's time. It was discussed elsewhere in a now buried thread but people were somewhat surprised to find that in the many groups of players I engage with, there are some who only will get together in social activities if it is that most sacred "Gaming Time", and not just that, but specifically "Tabletop Role Playing Game Time". Getting together to enjoy each other's company is not what some players are there for, they are there to, very seriously, game and experience another reality. In designing the systems to make a sustainable megadungeon, part of what some of my players have taken to try and do (you know who you are!) have been gently prodding in private or in public about theoreticals. This can get somewhat exhausting to answer, because the answer must be provided from an in character perspective as to what their character ought to know. Players then use this as a basis to theorycraft and look hopefully to me for tacit agreement. However, I am attempting to drive people to do as they will and suffer the consequences, whatever they might be, and if they lose a character as a result, this is something that they wrought by their own hands. I've been watching some more talking head games people on Youtube, namely, Dungeoncraft's Professor DM, and I think he drives interesting points where players are naturally risk averse, and though they may not admit it, they are also not looking for an entitled answer. However, a lot of contemporary systems like D&D 5e (and really for a long while now) make it quite difficult to die; niche and indie games tend to treat characters quite differently. The analogy of superheroes versus regular people is used when comparing level 1 characters in various editions. Since a talking head on video mentioned this, I think many will arrive at these same conclusions as well. As a GM, you are a designer and an actor and a manager and all things to your players, but you are not there to present a situation with no threat, and what threat is more clear and present than death itself to the characters? West Marches and megadungeons both take a different pedigree when it comes to game design using systems like D&D. They are natural byproducts of how games were originally structured and take things into consideration that are implied in their structural design but not explicitly stated. Megadungeons, for example, ought to have enough stuff to entertain players, but it is expressly not there to cater to them. The player role is then de-prioritized and they must treat the place with care and respect, since if they do not and delve too deep or foolishly unprepared, then their hubris will pay them back in much wailing and bone grinding. Part of what made West Marches and megadungeons so appealing in the modern era is that they are flat out dangerous. Character life is cheap, so triumphing where others of similar power or greater have failed actually feels earned. Because they come from a very specific pedigree (that is, Outdoor Survival, all old versions of D&D, and so on) the characters presented thusly were all quite fragile, especially at lower levels. The stories that are told from that era are of characters who triumphed against the odds and also the characters who littered the graveyards of the world. It's rare to have a character die in D&D 5e, 4e, and even 3.5e and all their derivatives. Indie games will make a point to highlight just how easy it is to be taken out of action in their game. This presents a sanity-reducing conundrum. How do West Marches designers and megadungeon designers create a real sense of danger in game engines which make it really fuckin' hard to die? The answer that I came across was to "change the game engine". GURPS is semi-forgiving (you only die after you've taken six times your max HP, but you could die sooner) but it does not make any bones about when characters die. When you die, you die! Simple as that. However, GURPS also has more rigor in what can be done with the system. Its modularity allows for a high amount of customization, because that's exactly what it wants you to do. How to be a GURPS GM, written by The Mook, is a fantastic book at understanding how this mindset approaches. West Marches games that I've read about on Reddit or other places tend to have a high failure rate because people run out of energy and interest or there's a gross miscalibration of player expectations. I've seen people who advertised their game as an MMORPG on demand and all other manner of flowery language, but then run out of steam real quick when they realize that making this thing is hard. ...Or is it hard? Let's say I wanted to make a West Marches game instead of a Megadungeon game. What really changes there? I mentioned they are pretty similar, but there are things that are interpreted in a unique way in West Marches games: - travel mechanics - wilderness survival mechanics - exploration at a regional scale (hexcrawly!) - lethality - dissemination of information across multiple player cohorts Hmm...Well, maybe these traits aren't actually interpreted in the same way for every West Marches games. I reckon you can transform this to more abstract componentry: - emphasis on discovery of information deliberately placed in spots - a clear risk of something for the player to mechanically lose (if not a character completely dying, something happening to them to narratively exit play) - player agency in balancing risk vs. reward - player agency for information sharing across multiple groups It comes back to making the game work with player agency, information management, and active risk management. If a game engine can service these needs mechanically, then for games like D&D 5e, it would not service some of these needs. Consider in D&D 5e things like death saving throws, cantrips, healing surges, short rests, and the adventuring day. All of these point to a character having a very high rate of survival close to 100% unless they have a party wipe, and most DMs will not explicitly kill parties, but rather take them prisoner or do other things of the sort. Thus, there is not really a clear risk of something for the player to mechanically lose in the core game. No, hit points are meaningless here. All heroes are mechanically perfect in health until they're unconscious, and even then they are generally going to make it. I think when it comes down to it, you're best served by shopping around for a different game engine or making your own by curating in depth how you want the experience to be. GURPS wholeheartedly encourages that, but D&D 5e doesn't have a way to make death and dying more clear and present because it considers those rules to be part of its core structure. Sure, 5e Hardcore Mode, 3rd party supplements, etc...But, the game engine itself will fight back at you without those major overhauls. D&D 5e does have quite a lot of resources in official published material (even the DMG, which is a better book than many give it credit for) to provide for some, but not all information. It does not have any mechanisms with which to commoditize sharing information between multiple cohorts, nor does it provide meaningful guidance for players to assess their risk (because their risk is determined by their mortality, and characters are generally immortal except in very specific circumstances). I've been picking at D&D 5e because it's a common system that most are familiar with, but if a West Marches game fails, I think part of the blame is shouldered by the game rules it is run in. Simple as that. If you wanted that game to succeed, you'd want to develop systems to generate content that doesn't tax the energy of the GMs excessively, provide a clear set of stakes to motivate players and clear consequences, and have some level of great risk that is mechanically reinforced somehow. Consider then you could make a West Marches game without hit points, armor class, death saves, or even dying, but you could make one by having players reveal information off of cards you had prepared ahead of time, and their loss is material; if they fail in their adventures, you take cards away from them that define their character, or use a correction pen to selectively delete who that character is until they have a blank character sheet. You could even do this in 5e, but you'd need to make a system to do so that supports this mode of play. I feel like the above one paragraph concept could be particularly interesting because instead of experiencing death by physical trauma, a character's sense of self is what is at stake as their existence is erased. To some that might be too abstract until the GM erases their name. Maybe there's a game like that? Nibiru does deal with amnesiac heroes that recall memories and stuff, but maybe not quite the same for a West Marches thingamajig. Anyway...Here's to another 25 thousand plus words of bullshit. I should probably consider putting some of this stuff on a blog.
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Jan 9, 2021 10:10
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As part of ruminating about Megadungeon things and now West Marches things (which I might just start calling Mega Marches because it’s funny that way) I am going to take an opportunity to brainstorm about things that might be interesting to put in the Megastrata project. This is definitely primordial soup type stuff but especially now that my brain is wandering to a variety of places, I think there can be things that can be introduced to further add more structural integrity or plant explosives with the current game design. Part of the fun of experimenting with adding everything to a game is watching bits and pieces just fall off and bounce off to the wayside. - Improvement in Mysteries collection and distribution. Maybe Exploration Lexicon / other “master data reference document” curated by players specifically? - Turn the players into GMs as part of endgame? - Give the players giant robots and run LANCER SITREPs in weird limited engagement? - Seasons passing? RuneQuest? - Beefing up the Pretenders system. What do benedictions, curses, and the like look like? How are they categorized and granted? - Rumor generation system - Monster details generation system. It would be pretty good to have general templates to use that I can then wing more details on as kind of a structural framework to extend - Dungeon boss encounter design - Setpiece design - Gate, gate crashers, and gate world design - Item world design - Item level-up design (see also Item world design) - Big things in places that they’re not supposed to be system design - Sample encounter maps to use for combat simulations that the players can use (Gloomhaven might be good idea for this) - Outer space - Inner space - Non-euclidean space generation - Traversing extreme distances in the Megastrata (like going from town into the Megastrata, which now connects to a moon or something) - Motorcycles? - Exotic earned things - More details about the “Quest for Gains” system, since although it is pretty clear to me, it may have come as a mild surprise and frustration to players. Too long/didn’t design yet: 1 quest parameter per 5 character points spent, all parameters are significant - More details about “World Tendency” - More details about “Monty Hauil” - Dungeon music? - Puzzles and their ilk
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Jan 13, 2021 07:44
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aldantefax posted:Thus far only one player has continued to engage with the Mystery, but it was only fully revealed yesterday. Their enthusiasm is likely bringing other people in to help with session activity. Hey that's me! I was sure that at least one other person was working on that, if not two. The other players aren't super keen on sharing information, a habit that I am guilty of, but I've been working on it. As far as West Marches go, I did attempt to run a West Marches game a few years ago and I did learn a lot of lessons and your game has given me a lot of good ideas. I originally invited a bunch of people and then said I could run Here's what I've learned: -Players won't share information. Most people aren't terribly active outside of session hours and those that are won't talk about their mysterious encounters or strange things happening. If you want to have a cool mystery where different groups get different pieces of information you have to be ready to have it either be passed over or, as the DM, write out your own battle reports and hope someone is interested enough to piece it together themselves. -Each resolved quest needs to lead to at least one but preferably multiple quests. I tried to do a more organic form of introducing quests by having characters see castles, forts, caves, or vague warnings to not go places. Player engagement was always best when players had a list of things they wanted to do. Fax has a quest board that is constantly regenerated to fill the "always leading to more quests" so if players don't have a strong preference they can always do one of those. If this campaign continues on I can see the quest board eventually becoming ignored as players become more financially independent or better revenue streams are discovered/unlocked. If I were doing a more exploration based version of this game I would keep a Discord channel with a list of things to do that players encountered as possible quests. Like one time a group of players passed a fort being held by a necromancer and had a map warning them to not enter the "Cave of Water" but used it as a landmark. I would add those do the channel as possible things to do, rather than relying on the players to remember, keep notes, and tell others in a report. -This one is embarrassing in retrospect, but have much more regularly scheduled times and groups. I had a fantasy dream of having 20 people in a discord, all of whom would talk and organize dynamic groups. This is probably impossible without the most enthusiastic players imaginable. What I would do now is have one or two time slots per week that I would run games and let people show up, after confirming that they can come, of course. Then I'd try to set up the sessions/dungeons/scenarios to resolve completely by the end of 1 or 2 sessions so the group can do their thing and dissolve. At the time I had a bunch of free time so I could run games almost anytime after work. So I tried to set it up where one player would organize a party and then basically meet up with me. But there were only a couple of players interested in organizing groups so the game kind of did a slow burn before smouldering out. The rest of the players felt lost and I was very dedicated to have the mysterious world that only gives information when you ask for it. This didn't work out. Obvious in hindsight, but I hope someone else can learn from my mistake. -If you do want dynamic groups of ever-changing players then I would recommend having one or two hard times to allow for games, like Sunday at 2pm-7pm and Wednesday at 6pm-10pm. Then you take those you'd expect to be the most engaged or active players and bring them aside and explain to them that they're the "power players" and you want them to help organize groups. Effectively recruiting them to help make the game better. Then as the DM you should make a mini-battle report after each session or quest. Just a really simple paragraph of "the players encountered some wild deer that were invested with ivy growing out of their flesh but declined to eat it. They then got to the vault of the Merchant-Knight and managed to unlock it, but only took a quarter of the treasure inside." Just enough to whet the appetite of the curious but passive players to make them engage more. If you only have static groups, such as in Fax's game then you can skip the battle report unless you want to have multiple groups in the same campaign working closely together. -Be generous with information. Most people won't remember what you want them to remember anyways, so the mystery component stays. If it's important repeat it at least three times. Things I've enjoyed as a player in Fax's game: -This is the first time I've had fun doing downtime activities. I like being presented with trying to research about zones and enemies before going into the adventure. -I liked the moment where I discovered that myself and the other wizard player both had encounters with the same psychic ghost squid. I'm dying to solve this multi-group mini-mystery or getting more information on it but the other player doesn't seem interested. I suppose it's another thing to add to the downtime activities list. -The quest board is great. I enjoy being able to poach good quests from other groups and just in general always having something for us to do if we don't feel like pursuing a specific goal. -Mysteries. A nice codified thing that all players can work towards to get group rewards. The players get to clearly pick what interests them and that allows the DM to focus their energy towards that.
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Jan 13, 2021 08:56
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aldantefax posted:I think in D&D's panoply of editions traps were one of two things: If you're playing a fighter and you get a few levels and some good armor, tooling around the 1st or 2nd dungeon level starts to become a predictable grind more like a CRPG--you can survive several combat encounters and then start looking for the exit. Except for traps. Traps bypass the to-hit mechanic and just gently caress you up with a lot of damage.
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Jan 13, 2021 18:54
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aldantefax posted:
This is something I'd really like to do with this sort of format; my biggest issue is figuring out exactly how I want to rejigger Lancer advancement.
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Jan 13, 2021 19:18
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Halloween Jack posted:There's a Flash game called Dungeon Robber (you've probably heard of it) that lets you play solo D&D using the tables in OD&D. One thing I noticed is that traps were kind of orthogonal to the rest of the gameplay loop. One need not forget to note that in 1e AD&D, poison had no other categories, so it was rolled as a save or die. That made opening chests, spikes, etc. extremely hairy. I lost many halfling rogues in such a situation. I think part of what makes it "un-fun" is that the character eats it on the whim of a single die roll and nobody likes player elimination in a role playing game in the modern era. I think though that when it comes down to "traps", they really are more "tricks" because the default assumption is that players will find a way to mitigate or circumvent it in order to make forward progress. It is rare that you see in adventure design a trap that not only prevents forward progress but also eliminates some or all of the players unless it's trying to make a point like the death beam at the start of Tomb of Horrors (and that had a very specific meeting by Gygax). I think also that when designing traps, particularly in the megadungeon, you can break some of these assumptions because of some things that take place in a megadungeon: - Blocked off path to get to a quest area and that's the only known path? Maybe there is a way to get around it, but it may require some lateral progress instead. - Blocked off path and there is no viable way to make progress on the thing? Go do another thing instead because you're not there expressly to go through that tunnel. - Blocked off path with a timer. Locks out temporarily. Come back later if you care enough and there may be something waiting for you behind the block.
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Jan 13, 2021 22:01
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LeSquide posted:This is something I'd really like to do with this sort of format; my biggest issue is figuring out exactly how I want to rejigger Lancer advancement. If it's for GURPS like a megadungeon, turn license levels into a thing you quest for explicitly or tie it to overall progression. You can compartmentalize it however you like or just give players mechs that are prebuilt instead.
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Jan 13, 2021 22:03
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aldantefax posted:I think though that when it comes down to "traps", they really are more "tricks" because the default assumption is that players will find a way to mitigate or circumvent it in order to make forward progress. It is rare that you see in adventure design a trap that not only prevents forward progress but also eliminates some or all of the players unless it's trying to make a point like the death beam at the start of Tomb of Horrors (and that had a very specific meeting by Gygax).
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Jan 14, 2021 05:43
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Honestly with things that seem dogmatic and the responses thereof it kind of misses the forest for the trees when you get into the nitty gritty of why a monster is such. I think if you have a certain attitude towards traps attempting to reconcile questionable design from specifically paid publishers and their adherents tends to cause weird decisions because the actual design goal is all skewed. To further put it as an example, any monster can become a trap monster by modifying them to be a part of a trap system. Or maybe the monsters deploy traps (that happens in Gloomhaven). I think if you are going to figure out how to properly "trap", then you likely need to go back to the drawing board to determine the following: - Is a trap really a trick? - Is the trap actually just a monster? (Mimic?) - What is going to be fun for the group and the GM? A trap that kills people in the Megastrata project may be more of something to exploit rather than avoid (especially since there is at least one Mystery is tied to death and dying. - Does the trap give some kind of suitable reward for going through the trouble of dealing with it? - This one is probably the most difficult thing, does the trap make players want to engage with it or other traps in the future? And, is that okay with the outcome of design? When you start trying to break apart traps using this type of thinking, then some traps make more sense than just barriers to entry, speed bumps, or what not. I would perhaps consider using traps as part of a larger "trick", which I think I ought to now talk about since "tricks" are key things in my Megastrata design that bear their own post.
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Jan 15, 2021 04:11
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Halloween Jack posted:Related to this, I don't really understand the arms race of "trap monsters" like the ear seeker. Like, aren't torches and wandering monsters the limiting factor on carefully examining everything and prodding it with a 10' pole? I actually viewed a video yesterday where Tim Kask, an old TSR employee, basically confirmed that they introduced monsters as specific GM counterplay to whatever was becoming first order optimal plays for the players. (Specifically, this is why the bulette eats horses!?) Which seems weird and counterproductive to me as well, when you've got time pressure built into the system.
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Jan 15, 2021 06:56
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Aldantefax I know you've got two big threads already, but have you thought about a GURPS thread? I really want to see more about the system and you seem to be one of the most active posters who uses it. If you don't start one I probably will, but I've just begun to get a feel for it. Your posts in this thread have me really interested in it!
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Jan 15, 2021 07:31
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Uhh, I could make one, sure, but I'll probably need to effort post the thread
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Jan 15, 2021 07:38
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If you're not feeling it I could try, but I'm definitely a novice when it comes to GURPS. I have that how to be a GURPS gm book though. It's incredible.
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Jan 15, 2021 08:20
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I am actually workin' on it as we speak, so worry not, friend
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Jan 15, 2021 08:29
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3955634 for the GURPS thread, which may be a companion thread to contextualize some of the things that were GURPS specific in this thread.
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Jan 15, 2021 10:10
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Anyway, I think I will work on trap and trick development since it came up and put some thoughts into this thread. I also want to talk about ecosystems and linking in megadungeons, because that's part of what makes megadungeons more interesting than regular dungeons. Look forward to that in the next whenever I get around to it, perhaps.
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Jan 15, 2021 10:22
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When it comes to megadungeons I think there is a fundamental assumption that is challenged about the illusion of choice. That is, if you intentionally keep things hidden behind the GM screen and only deploy it at the time to make things 'real', a resource can be deployed arbitrarily regardless of the path a group takes. Dungeons, and megadungeons, have very explicitly mapped out encounter zones that are keyed in specific ways. You know what you're getting into when you step into a specific area of the dungeon, which is also why video games like Dark Souls work. Through repeated journeys in a given area there is a meta-knowledge that is formed about the place and details begin to be fleshed out that have value in decision making and route making on behalf of the players. Take for example a fork in the dungeon. One way leads to treasure and more danger, the other leads to whatever the party was there to do in the first place. Janelle Jaquays mentions in her older dungeon design articles that dungeons should generally be loopy and forking, and need not necessarily be a closed system. Branches may have dead ends, loops, or some kind of mixture of items. By determining and establishing links between zones in a megadungeon, you can have a journey changed by the path that's taken. Here's a set of diagrams on what this might look like in various ways:  Because we know what the connectors are, we can ascribe a certain value to them randomly or deliberately, and then present the conditions to the players that they may make a decision based on the information available. This makes the illusion of choice more of a meaningful choice if you have the systems to back it up. If delvers know that going through the Hell Pits is going to get them in trouble, even if it is the shortest path or to the quest objective they may choose to take a longer route or even turn around and abandon the quest entirely. Megadungeons and very big dungeons all have interesting connectors associated with them ranging from slides, ladders, elevators, chutes, and so on to hidden doors, portals, and all manner of tricky doors to change the routing enough that it feels like a reward when someone unlocks a 'shortcut'. To avoid overloading in work one can easily cook the numbers on a random table to make more 'boring' linking types the most common, and put rare linking types into another table if so desired. This is similar to how procedurally generated roguelikes handle dungeon floor generation, which is to have a percentage chance to generate a special feature and then construct the world around it, be it a vault, an artifact, or maybe a monster den or boss level. Thus, it will curate once it finds an interesting marker, but by and large most common levels will just feature rooms and hallways to go through and maybe a secret door or three. In the example diagram I list out six basic types of links: - Hub. One zone links to many zones in the ten-layer mega-zone or area. - Grid. Zones have two to four links or more based on a square grid or other kind of grid. Easy navigation. - Wheels. A zone connection type that is predominantly loopy. Multiple connectors will lead to the same place. - Tree. Connectors start simple but quickly branch out to create multiple links per node, which can get very confusing quickly for players, inviting them to get lost. - Serial. Zones are in order and proceed one at a time. This is good for building up to a big encounter. - Trick. A combination of the other five zones along with any other special features you want to throw in as a GM. A special callout is to discuss links between one megazone and another. Currently I don't have anything designed for this except for the central hub of the Megabore where delvers can take elevators up and down. No groups yet have tried to double dip or explore outside of their quest constraints overmuch yet, so I am sure I will add more as time goes on about these linking mechanics.
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Jan 20, 2021 22:05
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Alexandrian, so take as you will, but an interesting way of visualizing dungeon flow: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/45711/roleplaying-games/jaquaying-the-dungeon-addendum-how-to-use-a-melan-diagram
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Jan 21, 2021 01:16
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Hypnobeard posted:Alexandrian, so take as you will, but an interesting way of visualizing dungeon flow: I was thinking of this article and Janelle Jaquays' work. I do have the Goodman Games "remastered" edition of Into the Unknown, which includes the Caves of Chaos and Keep on the Borderlands, and I think that it's a great example of a dungeon. The Alexandrian gets kind of abstract with the diagrams but has useful information for erstwhile dungeon designers. The lead engine designer for the great roguelike Unexplored, Joris Dormans, goes in depth about "cyclic dungeon generation" versus "branching tree generation" here in one of multiple different lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA6PacEZX9M Particularly with game literacy "generally" being higher now (but assess your players carefully!) you could definitely take ideas that they themselves were originally designed as derivatives from things which...we take for granted. However, things like what Joris and the Alexandrian both mention is that there are different ways to design a dungeon. The "core 5 plus a trick" idea I came up with was mostly to keep things understandable and elegant for myself, since who knows if I shall remember all this esoteric stuff in my noggin whenever I pick this up to play.
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Jan 21, 2021 02:01
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Let’s talk a bit about how the game has been going recently since I have rolled out the Friday group as well, as well as some insights from what other people have been mentioning here and elsewhere regarding megadungeons: - Onboarding new players to a system with simple rules but a lot of them makes still for an intimidating and overwhelming experience for some. Particularly for ongoing games with complex settings like a megadungeon, there should be an easy on-ramp so that people can work through the complexities a little at a time. - Reminding players of the gameplay loops and giving them resources is kind of effective but a resource that has no mechanical reinforcement to it (or not enough mechanical reinforcement) will be forgotten quite readily even if it is a large picture in the middle of the table There is still work to be done here but of course most of those items are not endemic to megadungeons, rather they are for any game of sufficient complexity or ones that need longer soak time for the context. In terms of megadungeons though one of the things that was communicated was that the method of “top down, procedural generation on demand” is different from the traditional method of “procedural generation in detail, flesh things out when zooming out”. This would make a true ‘classic’ megadungeon an incredibly onerous task. However, I was thinking about how I would approach doing a megadungeon in the classic way: A Workflow for Megadungeons - First, define the overall size and scope of a given dungeon level - Determine amount of multi-way entry/egress points, and amount of one-way egress points - Determine generation method. Will you use a specific procedural generation method like the 1e AD&D DMG or use a site like Donjon? In my opinion, a dungeon having some logic for it as well as 45 degree turns is fun, so I might use the 1e AD&D DMG - Determine the kind of dice that are needed from all your random generation tables - Prepare the medium which will record your authoritative dungeon map. I joked with someone that I would get an 8x4’ sheet of plywood and then put the entire dungeon map on there. It was a joke but it would make for a fantastic artifact to paint over a big piece of wood and literally paint the dungeon onto it! - Roll a shitload of dice. Like, have a page that is just full of random dice rolls of each type. Because you’re going to do a lot of dice rolling as the dungeon is generated, if I wanted to generate a dungeon efficiently I’ll likely be using d6, d10, d12, d20, and d100, so I’m going to generate a full page of each die rolls. - Start going through the mapping process. As each procedural node is consulted, mark off the next number in the list on the randomly generated number sheets. You can opt to reroll on demand or choose something that sounds cool. - Consider batching room clusters together and allow them to be reskinned to different themes. Just because a set of rooms together is described in procedural generation text is a prison doesn’t mean they couldn’t be dormitories, barracks, warehouse pens for hazardous materials, etc. Changing the purpose and the aesthetic of a room can cause some very interesting results, and it may be worth going back to add additional modifiers on how you want this cluster to be. - Populate the map for the first level or two, and one “out of depth” level in case there is something that drops an unlucky player into such an area. This is a classic megadungeon feature where the dungeon has connections to areas that are not gradated in threat, so you can turn a corner and fight an orc or a turbodracula or something. - Create random encounter tables. People will poo poo on this idea but you should have multiple columns for the random encounter tables that I’ll elaborate below. - Begin curating the dungeon levels after populating the map. I would probably populate the map by having the physical artifact and literally putting things on it like dice, miniatures, tokens, etc. This will help me to visualize the flow of dungeon inhabitants. Using a game board like Gloomhaven, an old HeroQuest board or Tabletop Simulator is probably extremely useful here. - Continue procedural generation for new clusters and levels until you feel pretty happy. - Repeat the generative process until you get to a point where you want to separate each major area by aesthetic. This might mean one dungeon level or many. - Figure out the connectors between those areas of the megadungeon and how the dungeon denizens treat one another. Random Encounter Generation For each zone, create tables that have the following columns: - Encounter name or NPC, monster name - Disposition band - Wants - Needs - Purpose - Faction - Lair The encounter name may refer to a curated encounter that can be met such as a chance meeting with a dungeon merchant. Disposition band refers to reaction rolls and where they start on the nonbinary reaction roll table. Oftentimes random encounters are not automatically hostile, but there may be things which cause enmity to rise or friendliness to rise. You may also ascribe certain qualities to the disposition tied to the specific encounter row. Wants is something that can be rolled dynamically, but a list of some of the things that your encounter wants (money, supplies, travel, security, etc) will help to communicate what their situation is Needs is something that the encounter needs or else a bad thing will happen to them. They will often have Needs to fulfill a specific Purpose. Purpose is then a quest seed which allows for NPCs to have dynamic ways to hand out tasks to players. “I need five bear asses or else the boss is gonna have MY rear end. Can you go get it for me?” Faction is a general logical grouping that allows players to identify and interact with encounter groups and change the Disposition. If the Orcs of the Blue Spheres know the adventuring party and had lunch with them, then they are more likely to hang out with the party. This implies a ‘faction metagame’ where the party can wheel and deal with the various factions (see: Everquest, World of Warcraft, Caves of Qud, many many MUDs, and so on for examples of implementation in videogames). Lair is a term to describe if the party has stumbled across the home base of a given encounter. A dungeon merchant in lair would likely mean that they have a full on shop, for example, or they are nearby one. If they aren’t, perhaps they are from the surface and they are just common peddlers. —- I think given the workflows above I could probably curate what would constitute the normal dungeon and forks to other dungeons similar to how Dungeon Crawl does this in enough quantity that I have enough to get a game launched with it. If I was focusing my spare energy on doing this, perhaps I could get it done in two weeks to a month pre game launch? Then, continue adding content over time until I reach whatever my target is.
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Feb 3, 2021 19:52
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I've been going through this thread slowly and really enjoying it. Aldantefax, your posts have really helped me to begin organizing my thoughts and putting a more solid foundation of what I've been doing with random creation. Recently I've been designing my own megadungeon as an artistic outlet, focusing mainly on map creation so far. The random generation of floor plans from dice rolls has really been holding my interest and keeping the designs fresh. I prefer to draw maps by hand on graph paper and then stylize them instead of using digital resources. I don't have any plans to use this dungeon in any games but I may eventually copy the maps digitally just for fun. So far I've used the random generator from the D&D 1e, 5e dungeon masters guide, and the Dungeon Builders Guidebook from 2e. The difference between the generated dungeon is different enough that I may utilize those differences as "stages" of the dungeon. Do you have any recommendations for any other random dungeon generators? Preferably ones that just list tables like the ones I listed. I'm not particularly interested in ones that will give a whole floor plan at once because the most interesting part of the whole process for me is discovering the dungeon as I roll. So far I've been throwing around a few ideas for why this megadungeon even exists and why the layers are here if I ever actually use this. The reason for the existence of the dungeon is secondary right now though. Just a few ideas: Player characters are dead and this is a proving ground for their souls prior to going to the true afterlife The dungeon was built by a king whose wealth came from the attached gold mine, maybe they kept digging for more gold and wanted stages for each mine level. Something about a crazy wizard.. The players are slaves in an evil society that uses the dungeon as a game to torture slaves for society's enjoyment. As an aside, the random generation of ideas has been incredibly helpful for my creativity. I get bogged down with a blank slate at the beginning and end up giving up before I start. I've used it for basically every aspect of the D&D games I've been playing. I started by creating characters entirely by dice rolls and then filling in backstories that make sense based on the major ideas given by the rolls. The World Builders Guide from 2e D&D has been my favorite book so far, it gives a method for randomly generating an entire world from the global level down to dungeons and towns. Nothing I've done so far has been as satisfying as generating a world and taking a section of it down to the local regional area.
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Feb 4, 2021 15:43
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There are a collection of other books out there, but if you're interested, Engineering Dungeons (Castles & Crusades) is a good one that is a very extensive treatment of dungeons. For random tables, I think it depends on what you're looking for - I got the Hubris campaign book for Dungeon Crawl Classics and it has some okay ideas but other very silly ideas that aren't my aesthetic. You could also get the Tome of Adventure Design, which is basically just an entire book full of random tables. You may also be interested in using "Geomorphs" for your dungeons. There are many out there but they are interesting to think about because if you break your dungeon into 'zones' and define your entries and egress points you can tile them in interesting ways. This would be what you mentioned, which is "the dungeon's purpose is to be there, and the meaning that other people ascribe to it is secondary". If you're looking for a detail-oriented curated approach on the purpose of a megadungeon, I think there's a couple of ways you can address it, which are "the megadungeon needs no purpose to exist; it is simply there, and people and things have imposed purpose on it" - this can have interesting ramifications since what happens when the megadungeon decides to manifest its own purpose? Another way you can do this is that the megadungeon was made by an entity or group, to which the nature of the megadungeon can be highly curated as you mention. If you're interested in this type of approach, try looking at How to Host A Dungeon. This is a side-view procedural generative process that provides an entire dungeon by the time you're good with it, and can be played solo with random tables. Fantastic game, I recommend it.
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Feb 4, 2021 18:14
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Thank you for the book recommendations, they were exactly what I was looking for. The Tome of Adventure Design, in particular, seems like a goldmine of ideas. I have taken a look at geomorphs that have been provided with different books I've read and they help me get a good feel for how a certain terrain might look on a map. Most of the geomorphs I've seen have been quite large though so I usually limit using them to avoid repetition and boredom when I copy them. I was planning on the inhabitants making changes to the dungeon as I begin to populate the levels. I was going to roll different monster types or groups of monsters for a particular "strata" of the dungeon and make changes based on what I think they would do. The idea of the dungeon existing as its own entity with its own conscious is very interesting and would allow the dungeon to become fluid, and I may have to begin using that once I get a few more layers deep. Now I need to think about what goals a dungeon itself could have? Killing and eating adventurers Containing a threat below Expanding itself as a parasite on the planet it was created on Maximize the number of people living in it Amassing wealth or worshippers who consider the dungeon itself a god Edit: The idea of the dungeon becoming a character itself and not just a setting is something I'm going to have to explore now. gurragadon fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Feb 4, 2021 |
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Feb 4, 2021 19:29
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There's nothing that really stops one from customizing the geomorphs in ways you might not expect - you could chop them in half and then use a marker to make new entry/exit points so that they're no longer a uniform size, or if you want to get really spicy with it, do 3D transformations on them like by printing out the geomorph and folding it over so that now you have to worry about height levels. Megadungeon ecology is interesting since it does imply that the various things living in the megadungeon interact with each other in ways that are both interesting and unexpected. Having procedural generation for this would definitely help out since even for me the book keeping of every faction that may or may not see play is somewhat unwieldly and I have a "playable forward" mentality when it comes to a megadungeon, hence my general approaches documented in this thread. If you're looking for an interesting way of having a very classic megadungeon implemented, check out the manga Dungeon Meshi - Delicious in Dungeon by Ryoko Kui. Without giving away too much, the dungeon there is constantly changing and has major ecosystems that the protagonists leverage because they're broke but need to eat and also rescue someone from inside the dungeon. The underpinnings of the why are important as it gets towards its conclusion, which seems to be coming up soon. If you're also interested in "motivations" for a dungeon itself as a character, you could consider looking at how old ego items were constructed for D&D in editions of yore. You could establish tables about how a dungeon has a specific purpose or it changed over time and it has its own wants/needs/goals that can then be incorporated into your random encounter tables. For example, what about a dungeon which manifests its desires by putting treasure in front of adventurers, but its goal is to have an adventurer take something specific out of it that it can't articulate? Or, perhaps the dungeon is load-bearing to the rest of the setting - Dark Souls and Bloodborne have this in mind as well. A dungeon seeking apotheosis may be interesting. This implies that it has its own consciousness to the point where it has an idea about divinity and worship and receives power from doing so. A megadungeon designed to "contain" is definitely another interesting one since this implies there are many ways to enter the dungeon from one side, but a sealed way from the other end which can have consequences if inadvertently opened. Consider also the connectors to each strata in your megadungeon can be very fluid while the actual megadungeon is somewhat static. This would mean that zones open and close based on certain conditions and that can change how delvers interact with it through physical barriers. Monster Hunter especially uses this to great effect, as well as games you might not realize leverage this type of bounded space like any battle royale game (PUBG, Apex Legends etc) or another FPS such as Call of Duty, Battlefield etc. I'm pleased to hear that you are megadungeoning it up and getting some worth out of the thread! I'm genuinely excited to read about any new updates you might have as you work on your project.
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Feb 4, 2021 20:44
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I recently had some chats with the players since we've been playing since around August of last year or so, which means it's been almost half a year or more since this whole thing got hatched and went into flight. In order to make things more manageable for me and to meet rising player demand, I've done the following: - Create a "Downtime Action" template which allows characters to roll their skills (even ones they should not know the result of, which is generally all of them) and to do research and resolve specific vignettes in between delving sessions - Revamp a TO-DO channel in Discord to mark when actions have been resolved. Any outstanding actions for things that need to be done can be migrated to Trello for further development (this is typically setting development and Mystery development). - Create a few play aids and empower players to re-organize themselves. More seasoned players are stepping up as guides for the admittedly byzantine ways of the game to newer players both from a mechanical level as well as a narrative level. I also had a bit of a time discrepancy and so should talk a bit about how time is tracked in the Megastrata. Namely, identifying when time advances and when it doesn't. Out of the actual expeditions, time is tracked abstractly through "Dungeon Periods". This can be any length of time, but the idea is that this only advances when all deployed parties return to Oratorio one way or the other. This means that no matter how long they actually take in the Megastrata itself and regardless of the outcome, they will return to town and time advances only when players move back to town. This is an important matter since strict time tracking is something that has kind of fallen out of favor in many games. A lot of games note the passage of time very strictly when it comes to combat, for example, but in terms of out of combat or when downtime takes place it is much more fluid. This video from Questing Beast talks about how one of the older versions of D&D (B/X, specifically) handled time out of combat but still in exploration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuJNIVcvHZ4 This examination of 'classic' dungeon rules also reminds us that the action happens in a dungeon as opposed to town; town is really only a place to resupply before going back into the dungeon itself, and in our case in this thread, the dungeon is very mega indeed. While it's not required to watch the video the gist of the matter is that time needs to be tracked in a clear way, but the actual amount of time that passes out of procedural exploration and fighting (that is, during the "Recovery" phase back in town) you can be as malleable as you want with time. Part of what time represents is when things happen in the game world that are exclusory opportunities. "Limited time" means that certain things like the random quests generated as well as certain events will come and go and maybe come back again. This would mean that players can, at their option, choose to engage with things only on a limited time, which makes them slightly more special. If they miss an opportunity, it will come back, eventually, but in order to get that opportunity back in town again, they must delve. This is a key aspect of this "Dungeon Period" system. It only advances when all parties go in and come back out. How do you avoid time drift then when you're running multiple parties? Once the first party has returned back to town after an expedition, there is a hidden timer that takes place of one to two game sessions behind the screen on the GM side. This is generally represented as monsters getting meaner, the megadungeon actively rejecting the delvers, or other menacing things. Nobody has actually attempted to stay in the Megastrata when a booming, disembodied voice says something like: "PREPARE FOR DEALLOCATION" or "MEGASTRATA RESTRUCTURING IN PROGRESS". It is a clear, if someone silly representation that the group is out of time and this is their last go at it. Having an escape mechanism then when you have delvers all the way into a quest in the Megastrata is extremely difficult to get them out of, unless you have a related tool which allows them to leave safely. To that end, I ended up making another narrative and mechanical tool, which is effectively a teleport back home. The main thing to keep in mind here is that you can use this in one of three ways: - "Oh poo poo": teleport a single person out and lose all your stuff but you get out in one second. The rest of the party stays behind. - "Can't make it today, good luck!" A character warps out but is held in stasis oblivious to matters and will return to town or wherever the party is once they return to play. This can have unexpected effects, namely the party losing a key player at a key moment (they can delay for that week though in the real world if needed). - "It's time to go home!": Takes ten seconds and a unanimous vote to get out of the dungeon. Will take the party, all their belongings, *and cargo* with them. The most common use case is for the parties to warp out using the third option when it's time to leave. This might be a cop-out to some, but the "Fast Escape" rules from the Alexandrian are more or less the same thing but hairier. https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/2149/roleplaying-games/escaping-the-dungeon The interesting thing about the escape system that I ended up putting in is it encourages risky behavior because it takes ten seconds. That means it can be triggered before a major fight's about to go down, but if the fight goes poorly and everybody eats it, that's a conscious choice the players made instead of escaping to safety (theoretically). I think I went into this in greater detail in other posts but the main thing is that with a Megadungeon it serves as its own world separated from the hustle and bustle of a town, but that doesn't mean that players exist in a temporal vacuum. I want to, eventually, have characters age (haven't figured out that one in detail yet) and start experiencing effects from that to better reflect that their delving career is finite, but players themselves can continue to play by creating a legacy and by sticking with the company. Anyway, since things can get a little tricky with regards to the passage of time when you are juggling three groups, I decided to pull the trigger and recalibrate and advance time more than needed as well as reveal explicitly to players (or at least, to one group thus far, the rest will be coming this week) an extended debrief as well as more details about how time actually works. Given that there is a very specific definition of time that is known now, if they were in the Megastrata, say, for 65 thousand years, but then returned to town, only one Dungeon Period would have elapsed, which has certain ramifications and is just goofy and weird, which is...kind of the point!
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Feb 9, 2021 06:18
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On the subject of dungeon "purpose", I recently came across this 2012 OSR campaign concept called HMS Apollyon. It's a megadungeon where the "dungeon" is a derelict ocean liner, The original author played it as a fairly straight dungeon crawl, with a community of survivors in the starting town sending players into the hulk to scavenge supplies, make contact with friendly groups, and clear sections of the ship for habitation. There's also a smattering of environmental storytelling as to how the ship was lost. In this mode there are some nice ideas around "treasure" being things like canned food, emergency generators, powerlines that can be tapped, and so on, but it's a fairly straight dungeon crawl with some interesting re-skinning. The reason I like this setting so much is that if the party are a salvage crew of some kind, we have a perfect justification for the old dungeon-crawling canard of "the environment is treasure and the players will try to steal everything nailed down, and then sell the nails". It would make perfect sense for salvagers to take apart valuable furniture and machinery and try to bring it out with them. A salvage scenario is the one case where it is entirely logical to value the environment in terms of the materials used to make it, and to gauge success by how much treasure you cart out at the end. A derelict ship is also a great place to play around with dungeon ecology if your tastes run that way.
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Feb 9, 2021 14:46
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Tying "treasure" to "practical material goods" instead of precious metals, fiat currency, or other similarly meaningless things helps to reinforce a certain tone. You could certainly run this as a modern day scenario as well or a near-future / post-apocalyptic scenario. I think there's a lot of interesting conceptual space surrounding leveraging impractical things for unexpected practical purposes, like finding a rope that is always slippery for some reason, or boots that play a song when going up or down a slope. I suppose also if you were looking for some inspiration when starting to scope a megadungeon (not you Loxbourne, but the generic 'you' to anybody reading) you could start by thinking about player motivations as a totally valid thing: 1d6 primary delver motivations: - 1: Survival. The focus is on gathering material goods necessary for improving 'home base'. See: HMS Apollyon, Escape from Tarkov. - 2: Economy. The focus is on gathering things that can sell for a high price to the right people. See: most regular megadungeons. - 3: Higher Purpose. The focus is on serving a higher power willingly by accomplishing deeds in the dungeon. This could be a supernatural or mundane higher power. See: BLAME!, Zone Raiders, Space Hulk? - 4: Denizens. The focus is on engaging with entities in the dungeon in whatever way delvers find suitable. See: Heterogenio Linguistica, Made in Abyss, Meikyuu Kingdom, Dungeon Meshi, others prioritizing dungeon ecology and socials. - 5: Boss Rush. The focus is to defeat one or more load-bearing bosses that are initially too powerful or too secure in the megadungeon to defeat. - 6: Fame and Glory: The focus is on conquering the dungeon and living to tell the tale like it's a mountain to climb. You can extend each of these very broad concepts and apply them in specific for your purposes, since 'survival' can be very different from game to game. You can also combine two or more of these things, but I think I wouldn't go past two elements to avoid getting it too twisted. Example: "We're broke but need to go rescue someone lost in the megadungeon, so we need to interact with the dungeon ecology as our food source." This could be Survival + Denizens, but it could also be Denizens + Higher Purpose! That's also the overarching plot of Dungeon Meshi, by the by. You could also have each theme you pick take more or less importance over time, or have one that is in the background that rises to the foreground and switches place with the other theme. Example: BLAME! is about the main character in an impossibly large megadungeon, but while he generally explores trying to get from one level to the next, he is searching for someone with "Net Terminal Genes", which would be a Higher Purpose. However, that is mostly in the background of the story, and the majority of it is based on moving from zone to zone in that search for countless years but dealing with the troubles of the things in those zones. This would then make the series primarily about Denizens, but the Higher Purpose is always lingering in the background until it's time to do the climax or change the trajectory of the narrative arcs.
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Feb 9, 2021 17:54
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This week is feedback week and town action for the associated groups, and thus far I have been getting some really good critical feedback and some nice encouraging words that generally speaking the game is on the right track. Here's some of the critical feedback that has been gathered from the two oldest groups (of three total): - consolidate channels in Discord. information is hard to find and conversations spill all over the place. we should move critical information to google docs collapse information sources to one unified source. google docs is OK, discord is hard to search - collapse resources to a gdrive - consider reducing choices - mysteries could be put into the google drive, or a separate doc for mysteries; maybe a separate tab - economy / resource spend should go into the spreadsheet - a form to enter finances on a per-player basis (to the ledger) - a form to enter mystery point expenditure on a per-player basis (to mystery spreadsheet) - use discord for procedural research filtering and sorting the quest sheet is good for decision making no major clear 'free exploration reward', so spending time to do that versus actively questing feels like a waste of that resource more specific methods on how to get clues or fabricate activities to make progress towards a goal with no clear objective - player decision fatigue - individual advancement quests work against the party goals - have an 'adventure sheet' to pick a quest but also investigation goals as a group Generally speaking this speaks to four major themes: - Information management: being able to find the right thing at the right time in the right place in the right format instead of having to look across multiple channels in Discord is important - Streamline player decision making: there are often decisions that are too difficult to make for players because putting individual needs (advancement quests for gains) in favor of party needs (pursue mysteries and metaplots) point to a conflict of interest. Having a time limit on quests are good, but there are just too many of them for some players to make reasonable decisions on - Tracking finances, character updates, and experience expenditures at scale is hard across 8+ people in two separate groups. A common ledger that everybody has access to is much better to enter data instead of trying to use Discord for this purpose. - Information fidelity: certain players are seeking (but did not previous explicitly state) understanding what the extent of their character knows because they have a hard time of keeping persistent metagame memory for stuff (did I see this clue five weeks ago, whereas my character with Photographic memory saw this an hour ago in game?). Because information fidelity for this game and for Megadungeons in general are intentionally designed to be imperfect, there is a much more in depth balancing act that has to take place when considering how many layers of interpretation a question asked by a player goes through, and what the interpreted response from the GM does. The last bit about information fidelity is interesting. Here is an example from discussion in the game's out of character chat: quote:Player: "What does Thickthigh think about this thing? Is the symbol something he has seen previously?" Since developing a megadungeon for practical play has to grapple with these kinds of things (and many other game types do), I figure I would put this in this thread to give it some love and also to help expose a little bit more about the pitfalls of designing something like this. Naturally I am not a designer by trade, so I'm sure some of this stuff could have been headed off in earlier prototyping, but while there's a whole laundry list of improvements to be made, all of it is moving in the right direction. As part of increasing player agency and knowing what to do, I'm also introducing an "Expedition Charter", which is a prototype of something that I'm working on for the Wild Crawl thread. This should help players in greater detail to plan their future expeditions on their own terms instead of constantly reacting to things that happen. The above represents a fundamental shift in how the game structure will be on the player side, but not so much on the GM side. This should help to solve some of the major beefs that were listed using more mechanics and play aids in a restructured way. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WFL0ZSUYzym-CWAH6QDxft0z97YqiLEzqmT7FxjEh3s/edit?usp=sharing
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Feb 12, 2021 09:09
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aldantefax posted:Information fidelity: certain players are seeking (but did not previous explicitly state) understanding what the extent of their character knows because they have a hard time of keeping persistent metagame memory for stuff (did I see this clue five weeks ago, whereas my character with Photographic memory saw this an hour ago in game?). Because information fidelity for this game and for Megadungeons in general are intentionally designed to be imperfect, there is a much more in depth balancing act that has to take place when considering how many layers of interpretation a question asked by a player goes through, and what the interpreted response from the GM does. But if you asked me now, I'd err more on the side of giving players the information their characters "should know", even if the player doesn't know it in real life. Watching new players struggle to navigate an area the rest of the team has already explored, or fall victim to traps and monsters that are a known quantity to the rest of the team, is not fun for me as the DM. If the characters in the game world have downtime between adventures, we can assume that they're sharing notes and pooling knowledge. Real life players have jobs and other things they devote their attention to, rather than updating documents and consulting game resources to ensure they're prepared. For the characters, this stuff is their job. I wrote play reports for every game, so hypothetically anyone could have read those to figure out what had happened in prior sessions. But in practice, few people are going to sift through a dozen blog posts to find out what's going on. And consolidating that information into a single, easy to reference document is itself a serious piece of work. aldantefax posted:no major clear 'free exploration reward', so spending time to do that versus actively questing feels like a waste of that resource aldantefax posted:Having a time limit on quests are good, but there are just too many of them for some players to make reasonable decisions on But by later sessions, there was so much stuff happening that it became impossible for the players to choose where they wanted to intervene. They'd pick one thing to do in a session, then the rest of the game world would zoom ahead around them, without any opportunity to intervene in the other stuff they cared about. After a certain point they just picked whichever offered the largest monetary reward, since there was no other meaningful way to choose. So I slowed the progression of time in-world, so that each session took place a game-day later rather than a week. Which kept the element of prioritization and urgency, but didn't immediately take away opportunities they wanted to pursue later. It also reduced the rate at which I had to create content, since stuff stayed on the board for longer.
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Feb 13, 2021 00:42
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There's always a bit of a balancing act and it depends on the type of players as well as the amount of players you have, I think. At the start, 1 quest per player with regenerating quests every 3 time chunks (which was maybe 6 weeks of real world time) seemed fine, but now there are more quests and more players, so there are 12 seeded quests, but also maybe another 6 to 8 quests that are advancement specific quests that are for specific players, but also all the stuff from Mysteries as well and maybe other emergency quests, so it's scope creeped quite rapidly. As the game progresses though there is also a changing scope of agency as players begin to achieve higher point totals effectively leveling up, while also getting a greater handle on the game itself, which was estimated (correctly) to be somewhat sticky, hairy, and overwhelming with the amount of information. Causing players serious duress with the amount of information though was something that I didn't originally anticipate, but to at least a subset of players the idea of not knowing something because it's buried somewhere that's hard to find is super frustrating to them. They want to be more active in the game, but at the same time, have a lot of responsibilities outside of it so spending time to find the info is very tough. However, re-calibration is always to be expected when designing for a broader audience, and it is super helpful as a designer and GM both to get quality critical feedback from players. The majority of the feedback came not from the players who were able to make every session since the beginning, but rather the players who missed a few sessions that found it super tough to re-engage. New players, predictably, still don't have a full handle on the game yet but things are starting to fall into place for them. Generally speaking the amount of time it takes to delve being "one generic unit" is actually super OK, particularly because that unit of time can be extremely fluid from less than a day to several years, possibly several thousands of years, maybe. Part of it is also succeeding in this world being so weird and out there that players have begun to question "what is real (in the context of the setting), are we in a simulation or something" to which, I will never fully answer that question intentionally unless they resolve a pretty big Mystery. Having several players holding at least one college degree in Philosophy makes for some interesting discussions.
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Feb 15, 2021 03:19
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Alright, I'm back. I want to talk about multiplayer, multi-group tenancy inside of a megadungeon. This is something that is generally considered to be a hallmark and defining meta-quality for megadungeons since a megadungeon is essentially "evergreen", it means it must support multiple player groups. There are a couple of ways that I perceive this: - Parallel, where there can be multiple groups in the dungeon at the same time - Serial, where only one group is really able to go into the same dungeon This assumes that the dungeon is actually the same dungeon as opposed to a copy of it for different play groups. You could copy a megadungeon all day from its "original" state (such as from a published work) and run it, then get a very wide set of results based on one group to another. However, a megadungeon that operates and reacts to players changing the fundamental game state is a bit rarer. You would need to have some specific things to accommodate this: - Size. A megadungeon should be sufficiently large to allow for groups to not be running into each other constantly. - Segmentation. There should be some way to travel from one zone to another but the game state changes happen to only a part of the megadungeon that players explore. When play overlaps in the same section, there should be changes to the game state that are observable. - Recording. Strict tracking should be encouraged for these items since if the game state is changing but there is no way to reflect that, there's a lot of smoke and mirrors to imply there was a change but not a true change. There are some challenges to this, of course, because a megadungeon of too-large size may mean that players will never encounter the changes that one or the other group has made except by some kind of artifice, like they agree to go through the same zone over and over and observe the changes that are made. If you put a hub in the megadungeon in such a way, then this could be pretty interesting. In the Megastrata Project, I have the "Elevators" which exist in the "Megabore", the giant hole in the ground that serves as the entry point into the other segmented zones of the megadungeon. Though the players do not expressly understand it yet (and I'm not going to share the details in this thread because it's one of the larger secrets), but there are hidden mechanics in play that imply that the megadungeon is changing in response to player activity over measurable time (dungeon periods). This is externalized narratively by the mascots of the game, the procedurally generated automatons that crew the actual elevators that go up and down the giant hole. Recording state changes is something I'm interested in codifying in some way, and the Expedition Charter stuff I'm working on is probably my solution to that, where there is a player-facing record of what happened and is easy to copy and modify to make a "secret record" if you're into that kind of thing. I think having some way of recording persistency that is a player facing artifact is not fully necessary, of course, but megadungeons are things that should be evergreen also for the same players over and over, and being able to have things that they know they were direct agents of change over is, I suspect, part of what keeps people coming back to tables for megadungeons.
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Apr 10, 2021 01:27
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How do you deal with player groups running into each other when the play groups are running in parallel? Theoretically, they would be able to join forces and then go on a rampage through the entire megadungeon, right? Well, yes and no - in most cases, I imagine, parallel delving groups will often be segmented both by where they journey (a function of sizing in the game construct) as well as when they're playing. If they are playing simultaneously in the real world, somehow that must mean I have successfully cloned myself or I'm doing some kind of sitcom "pretend to be in two places at once by going to the bathroom at tactical moments but actually just going to the other group to run it". The above situation would then have two ways of resolving specifically real-world simultaneous play: - Don't do it - Add another referee Having multi-tenancy for a megadungeon *can* work as a two way street, meaning both player groups and game masters can both take the same material and run with it in a variety of different ways. This shouldn't be new information since published megadungeons are intentionally engineered to be used by a wide variety of GMs and players on the mostly same format, but to do so simultaneously and to include rules for encountering other player groups at once can get very sticky. Historically, the main limitation of combining player groups (scheduling logistics aside) is considering action economy and ensuring everybody has stuff to do without getting too lost in the weeds. In older editions of D&D for example like the three-manual red box version, I understand that it was really more of a larger scale game with very light rules to allow for play up to 50 people simultaneously, and this was also reflected in "tournament-style play" (correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm going somewhere with this assumption). This would imply that there was indeed a way to go ahead and operate a game at scale, but perhaps not as a common thing. Some boardgames, as an aside, operate best when you add more people to it due to their design being focused on social engineering and social deduction - Two Rooms and a Boom, Secret Hitler, the Captain is Dead, whatever the hell that 5v5 submarine game is (Captain Sonar?), and others are in a special category of multi-team adversarial play. Given that (most) tabletop RPGs are instead cooperative play, how does one smash groups together in a simultaneous, reliable way? About Raids Taking inspiration from MMORPGs of yore and also the older ideas and inferred ideas taken from oD&D and elsewhere, I propose a system for having parties work together simultaneously in curated situations. That is, they don't happen by accident, this is something that requires planning to execute on a unified objective. The most common contemporary example of players operating at scale against a common objective is the MMORPG "raid", typically with anywhere from 2 to 8 groups of players that are in specific parties usually composing of 4 to 6 people. "40-man" and "20-man" raids are commonly referred to in MMORPG vocabulary to represent how a specific raid is treated and calibrated - in other words, 40 players or 20 players for one raid. Since these things are curated, we should also understand what raids actually are, which are very specific engineered adventures designed to test teamwork at scale. Characters operating in specific meta-roles like "tank", "healer", "DPS" etc. will then have a specific function and tactical plan dictated by the encounter itinerary, where some encounters favor one of the meta-roles more prominently than the other, or perhaps make no compromise and it's up to the players as a group (usually with a leader or group of leaders) to determine overall strategy and approach. These almost always are geared towards accomplishing a procedural or material objective in a mostly linear fashion until you reach some kind of climax whereby everybody piles in for a big showdown with the "raid boss". Or something like that. I'm not actually a hardcore raider but I have played a few MMOs and know many folks who are more than happy to gripe about them. In the Megastrata Project, I envision this concept of raiding to be generalized to "something that one party cannot accomplish by themselves" - meaning, there have to be multiple material objectives which require the parties to work together. This can be represented primarily in the following ways: - Interlocking gates: parties must unlock gates for one another in different parts of the same zone, or do a simultaneous unlock to get to the boss. Not just in MMORPGs, but you even see this in single player console RPGs as far back as Final Fantasy 6 (3, in the US) where you had to operate multiple parties and had to switch between them. - Large scale resource drains: this is one of the most common elements in MMORPGs, where you need to just throw more people at a specific problem, usually combat, and managing the resources of the group becomes a game in and of itself. I don't know that there are really any other primary categories but if someone has ideas on this please add a comment since I won't claim to be an expert on the topic. Raids are intentionally overtuned so that one party should not be able to handle the entire thing by itself. This means a somewhat lowered bar of error tolerance than what most people are used to in a tabletop RPG, which means a higher degree of threat and material loss - death spirals if part of the raid crumbles that turn into hilarious disasters, that kind of thing. Using LANCER RPG as an example, however, we can take its ideas of complex tactical encounters (SITREPs) and just make them...bigger. That is, take the idea of each thing conceptually and make it so that instead of requiring a single group, it requires multiple. Interlocking gates is an interesting one, since it requires a kind of leapfrog metagame to go ahead and clear through encounters until finally reaching the end of the raid. This is usually something like finding keys, hitting switches, or other procedural puzzles which requires people to discuss in detail what to do next. Resource drains need not be just combat but they often will involve combat in some way. I feel like having everybody be "useful" in combat especially as you scale a tactical game up is going to have some issues, but you'll likely want to abstract it to another layer and instead pool party resources in a way that says "this party gains/loses X amount of resources collectively, players figure out how to actually treat that". This opens some interesting ideas because part of what raids do is mitigate resource drains that would wipe out singular parties to entire groups, so it would be something like "target party gains X hit points" instead of "target player gains X hit points". GURPS, naturally, has a splatbook that is focused on battlefield and strategic scale fantasy magic use, which I suspect may prove useful here. Anyway. For a raid in a megadungeon to work, it needs to be mostly self contained with clearly defined stakes that represent a game state change that impacts all players, and have a specific goal - usually defeating or suppressing a raid boss. This requires multiple delver crews to resolve through a series of curated encounters that requires clever resource management and navigation to get to the big showdown. This would be a proposed answer to simultaneous multi-group play that could be scaled on both the player and GM side. Of course, because this is curated, this would mean that play can 'build up' in individual groups to get up to the actual raid, and it would be used only very sparingly, typically as the conclusion of an entire arc or campaign. However, the potential payoff could be extremely rewarding and memorable. I would propose some design constraints in order to avoid overengineering the whole thing: - Limit the amount of hours a raid will take. Because scheduling people is a logistical nightmare, it's very likely that being able to do simultaneous play is going to be a once in a blue moon type of scenario. Thus, we should curate the raid to get to its conclusion in, say, 4 to 8 hours with breaks, but should be done in a single day's worth of gaming. - Limit the amount of encounters a raid will take proportional to the amount of groups, possibly time-boxing them. You'll want to let players know of the time constraint in order to ensure they are not dallying too much, since play groups often love the idea of doing something, but they get too caught up in over-planning when sometimes they just need to knuckle down and get to it. - Provide an actual ending. Regardless of what happens in the raid, there has to be an end state defined that the players know is coming. This might move the timetable up if the players do interesting things. - Add a mix of procedural situations which engage multiple meta-roles. Since we think about who is good at what, we need to view all play groups as a whole and see what the distribution of meta-roles are like and create things for the meta-role rather than the individual player. There's likely ways to do this in a specific manner based on the role, but intuitively, there should be things that are 'fun' based on the character types and the player types. - Define a hierarchy for the players to self-organize, but then stick to a chain of command. The more players you add that have to interact directly with a referee, the more headaches you get. Thus, we should consider adopting the classic style of 'party leader', 'raid leader', 'caller', etc. so that people can plan and the actual execution is dictated to the referees who can then resolve the actions. I don't have a sample raid handy yet but I want to at some point this year I plan on making a go at it to squash the play groups together for a big dumb thing.
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Apr 10, 2021 17:01
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I recently finished up a dungeon jam with some people from my discord. Not really a full megadungeon, only 9 50 by 50 foot floors. But now a friend is actually running the whole thing for his group, and it's taught me a couple things about dungeon design.
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Jul 2, 2021 23:22
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Having friendly or non-hostile NPCs in a dungeon, particularly a megadungeon, helps to provide tonal variety, but there does feel like a certain need for there to be a mix of friendly and hostile NPCs. Part of the expectations do seem to be centered around your mostly standard conventions of going into a dungeon of any sort in the first place - fight stuff, get loot, get out and level up and do it all over again. Most of the most interesting stories that people take away from a table though have to do with things that aren’t fighting or looting unless the fights and loots are truly exceptional. Being able to create these kinds of entities sometimes can be difficult, but looking back at the notes from earlier in this thread, if any sentient or environmental entity could be friendly or non-hostile then it provides some kind of mental breathing room and variety to represent a given dungeon’s ecosystem, which is perhaps even more important in a megadungeon. The method of dungeon generation that you described is sometimes referred to as “Exquisite Corpse” design, taking after the artist’s exercise at creating part of an unseen whole that is revealed at the very end to an audience. It’s good to hear that it provides interesting and strange interactions, like the very MMORPG raid-esque “gently caress it, pull everything” strategies. I put the current megadungeon game to rest which I should write an after action report on, but the tl;dr is that I’m probably going to need to revisit information architecture for it and possibly consider creating a new rules engine to allow for the node-based generative megadungeon play in a toolkit variety that allows for others to make megadungeons without burning out.
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Jul 5, 2021 01:16
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