How Do YOU Play D&D?

[inkmeister]

I'm curious what sort of games people here run. What is your default D&D? Do you run campaign/mega dungeons? Do you do wilderness sandboxes? Do you do smaller adventures made up of lair dungeons? If you do smaller dungeons, do you place them in the context of a wilderness sandbox, or do you zoom straight to the dungeon until it is done, and then on to the next, handwaving the inbetween stuff? How much emphasis is there on the world? Do you do town/city adventures?

Is your game open-world or do you direct players to the adventure (this is not automatically the same as a railroad - the setting, ie dungeon, may be selected but the players can be free within that setting). Is the game dungeon focused?

The U&WA book implies that there will be a central dungeon, and that it must be large and complex enough to satisfy players for an entire campaign ("so they will never grow tired of it.") But it also goes into some degree of wilderness design, implying that the dungeon is not to be everything.

Moldvay - my second favorite D&D - seems to imply a much smaller dungeon style, what could be called a scenario dungeon. Choosing a scenario is part of the step by step design process, and this implies that a dungeon is not a campaign affair, but rather something for limited use. Moldvay also says rather directly that the game begins in the dungeon (strongly implying that town and wilderness activity is to be handwaved.)

On the interwebz, there is all kind of talk of megadungeons and hexcrawls and sandboxes, and all are fascinating. But I'm curious as to whether this is what most of you are doing, or if it is more typical to do something perhaps less idealistic, and more practical (with no value judgment from me either way).

I'm only recently returning to refereeing, after over a decade off. The only games I've played in recent memory are 3rd edition or 4th edition (both awful), where dungeon was a bad word, and the games were very railroad/story heavy. I, of course, am not interested in duplicating that approach, but there seems so much variety in the world of old school gaming, and it is frankly like a buffet of awesomeness and I can't possibly load up on everything. I'm presently playing with my wife and running a smaller dungeon and thinking of expanding that game into an open world sandbox. I also find the campaign dungeon to be a form of nerd-crack, and am anxious to design a true beast of a dungeon. (I could key what I've got already - I enjoy drawing big maps... but find keying them to be the hard part). On the other hand, my obsessive mind can get just overwhelmed with possibilities, and consequently there is some appeal in keeping the game far more casual and dungeon focused - less emphasis on world and background and more on just playing a silly - but challenging and awesome - game.

So I'm curious how the rest of you folks roll.

[blackbarn]

In the past we have played Hex-exploring wilderness games (using Moldvay) which also had dungeon elements, as well as shorter "here's the adventure/plot" type games. But currently I am running our first game with OD&D rules, and it is shaping up to be a megadungeon. It's based around the Portown/Zenopus sample dungeon from Holmes basic, but I have expanded that dungeon map a lot, both on the first level and lower levels/sub-levels. So far the group has made it down to the second level, after about 12 game sessions, with the party being at least level 2 themselves, and with plenty of hirelings.

It's not railroady at all (aside from giving the Holmes background on the dungeon and implying that's what we were playing the first game session), and I am letting the players come up with their own goals and reasons to do things. This has not been a problem, and they love messing with various NPCs and so forth. They made a bit of an alliance with the magic-user mentioned in the Holmes dungeon, as well as his bodyguard, and that has come back into play quite often. They've tangled with pirates, and also introduced a charmed goblin into the dungeon ecology with some interesting results. I never said the game was limited to the dungeon, but the players seemed to naturally fall into the concept of "where in the dungeon are we going this week?" I never said they couldn't leave town either, but they never even asked me what's out there.

I made maps for several of the dungeon levels before we started playing, but only the first (in the Holmes book) was really keyed. I keyed the second level well before they got there, but as of right now there is little else keyed (I need to do that, actually). There is so much to keep the players busy that a little goes a long way and I don't feel like it all needs to be done right away. As their ability to make longer expeditions and go deeper increases, the need to have more keyed becomes evident, but it is a natural pace, and I don't feel under stress to overwork myself. A lot can be done with random rolls on tables, and interaction between players and monsters/NPCs/magical doo-dads in rooms, etc.

We're having fun with it, and it's the first time I can remember playing any version of D&D where I didn't eventually feel like I was overwhelmed or could not handle it as we got more into the game. It seems like with OD&D all the tools you need are just there, and winging it is perfectly acceptable and encouraged. I am using the original 3 booklets plus the JG Ready Ref Sheets (barely), and not much else. Some random tables and things I found online are used, but those are more for ideas and color than for rules.

[inkmeister]

Thanks a lot for your detailed reply, Blackbarn! It sounds like you started out aiming for a dungeon game, but not investing too heavily in the concept so that you could expand in other directions if need be.

I'm curious, have there been many casualties in your game? My wife has lost some characters thus far, and finds it a little stressful, even though we both agree that risk is essential for any sense of accomplishment in the game. I wonder how others gear their game in terms of lethality. Personally, I want a fairly intense game with at least some casualties. That's what I'd like to play if I were a player (unfortunately, all the games I played in recently were all about all the cool big numbers and items on our character sheets, and there was zero sense of earning anything, and zero sense of risk).

One thing I'm surprised about thus far is how much you can get out of so little. A few rooms of a dungeon, or a few NPC's in town can take up quite a bit of game time.

[Deleted]

I came up with an interesting solution to low level character losses.

In the first session, the PCs watched a peasant family bring their dead father for burial. They were very poor, but their father was known to have been a very talented woodcarver.

The local patriarch said, in my best Marlon Brando impersonation, "Some day... and this day may never come... the Temple of Cuthbert will need a favor. And on that day, you will remember this favor I do you." and raised the peasant from the dead.

So, when a PC got killed, they did the same... and I said, "notice he put the quest on you BEFORE you rolled the CON check."

My players bought into this because they know that at some future date, they are going to get sent on an adventure. It's good for the patriarch, because it doesn't hurt to have a bunch of adventurers owing you a favor.

Just a thought.

[Koren n'Rhys]

I like the limited sandbox approach. A smallish area for sandbox-style exploration, stocked with a number of smaller lair/dungeons, adventure sites, villages and towns. The PCs receive plenty of clues in the form of rumors, job offers, or treasure maps to point them towards those adventure sites without forcing them towards anything in particular.

The hex crawl wilderness aspect is still present in between defined locations, allowing for random fun.

I think overall, that allows me to write adventures and world-build, yet forces me as DM to think on my feet at times, keeping the game more fun and challenging for me, but still gives the players all the freedom they could want without leaving them floundering about, unsure what to do.

[monk]

My current campaign is the second we've played in my Lost Continent setting, influenced by Howard's Conan stories, CA Smith's stories, Fomalhaut, Indiana Jones, Carcosa, and some other stuff (sometimes Scooby Doo). I began in a large city sandbox and did a ton of work preparing a megadungeon below the city, thinking the group would poke around finding things and getting hired to carry out missions in the megadungeon more and more, until they became all embroiled in the mysteries below. That did happen at first, but then they got a little tired of the undercity and began to get overwhelmed by the openness and number of options. They didn’t feel like initiating their own adventures every time and were getting a little confused/bored. I had gotten caught up in "how you're supposed to play", and pushed the sandbox/megadungeon thing even though it wasn’t working very well for them.

Luckily, sanity returned to me and, realizing this is a game meant for fun, I started to tweak the style little by little until everyone was having more fun. I'm still tweaking, but at the moment what I do is make several adventure options available to the players by dropping hooks into the play. My players like the hooks to be pretty obvious. Once they finish an adventure, they look at the hooks in front of them, then the characters argue over which one they want to do first, second, etc. and we're off. (They occasionally want to roleplay the purchasing of goods or a house or something, and we use Jeff Rients’ intersession “Party like it’s 999” rules). They hexcrawl when traveling, but not usually just for the heck of it.

I don’t know what you call this style of play. Multiple railroads? Sandbox with lots of signs? I must admit that I like it more and more, though. I find myself not creating a ton of content that doesn’t get used, and it seems to emulate the Fafhrd/Gray M and Conan stories I love, where the main characters are always hanging out at the beginning and circumstances draw them into some crazy adventure. The players always have the option of stepping out of the current adventure and doing their own thing, but as yet have never wanted to. They give me plenty of feedback about what they’d like to do in the future (one guy really wants to ride a dinosaur and another wants to hit the high seas) so maybe that helps.

As for PC deaths—several early PCs suffered quick, ignominious deaths in our campaign, so the players are pretty cautious now. They don’t like to die, and pay heavily for resurrections once they get up a few levels because they really like their characters by that time. They know how easy it is to buy it and respect the danger.

Our rules are a mix of B/X, Whitebox OD&D, and Holmes.

[monk]

Okay, what Koren said! That was what I meant to say, I guess, except he did it concisely. Haha

[Koren n'Rhys]

:-)
I'm all about concision. Sure it's a word, I used it didn't I?

[xerxez]

Been on hiatus for a bit, other than three sessions play testing a rules light story telling system I recently created. Have been prepping for an Empire of the Petal throne run.

But when I do run D&D, I have always preferred Holmes or Modlvay Basic and expert. Now normally I have players who prefer 2nd Edition or even Pathfinder but they know I won't run this and so they persist for 1st Edition AD&D because they grumble that Holmes or Moldvay doesn't offer enough options--yet some of our best games have been Holmes low level adventures.

I can run AD&D fairly well and to me it is essentially the original D&D with the supplements but that's a delicate matter of contention here. I like Holmes because it's simple, end of story. To me it was the simplest and most concise set of rules ever written.

When I run D&D, I tend to go with Dungeon based campaigns relieved with the occasional town adventure and wilderness/world building plot. But I think dungeons are where it's at. They are linear, they allow a DM to plan and be prepared for most contingencies, yet they will be different every time you run them with a different group of players.

As often as possible we play by candlelight and I try (usually unsuccessfully) to limit all communication to in character. I'm one of those weird players that is immensely disappointed by a D&D game that is a bunch of guffawing and masculinity re-affirming vulgarity with non stop joking all the way through. Really sucks, I'm like, you just shot my fantasy all to heck. I wanted to channel Tolkien or Howard and we're channeling Beavis and Butthead instead. If you feel insecure about playing and have to negate this feeling by acting super cool, perhaps you oughtn't play the game. I love humor in the game but not that kind, at least not every time, and its not cause I'm a prude--it just obliterates the aesthetic I seek in the games.

I do get that some people enjoy that and they like the hanging out and all and I respect it but its not my style of play. I joke that way at work sometimes with buddies and some are my gaming buddies, but by God when the books are open and the dice are on the table, we're not in Kansas anymore Toto and I expect to experience the realms of imagination, not endless a*grabbing.

[aramis]

At present, I don't. Should I ever be coerced into it again, it will be Cyclopedia or the Dark Dungeons retroclone thereof, or something looking a lot more like the Dalluhn Manuscript.

My campaign style for D&D is Dungeon crawls to 3rd, travel to dungeon crawls through about 7th, politics and dungeon crawls through about 12th and attempts to "TPK with balanced encounters and fair rules" through about 20th.

[Deleted]

I'm currently working out the details of a wilderlands campaign. For wilderness travel and exploration I'll use a consolidated chainmail combat system. In the dungeon or for single heroic duels I'll use the alternative combat system. I'm also using the abilities (ie skills) rules from Bob Conley's "Majestic Wilderlands" as well as the new classes from that book.

[inkmeister]

I certainly appreciate every last one of these replies, and welcome more. Thanks for taking the time to talk about how you do it.

Xerxes, I appreciate what you say. I too am frustrated with the way some groups take D&D to be an excuse to get as absolutely stupid as possible. I admit I've done it that way too, but it doesn't satisfy me for any stretch of time. I found it fascinating that Gygax and co. would play with Gygax hidden behind file cabinets so there was only the voice of the DM. I don't want to do it that way, but I like that they seemed to take the game a bit more seriously than a lot of folks do. Not that there is anything wrong with reckless silly fun, but I think a more serious approach is interesting as well. Fight on, man.

At the moment I only play with my wife. And it's great. We both joke around, but we also take the game seriously too - it's the right balance for us, but you might expect that, given that we get along well enough to have seen fit to get married in the first place.

Oh, before I forget, the advice from Mike Mornard on resurrection is awesome - thanks. I don't know that I'll take it, however, as I kind of like the idea of death being final, and I also am removing clerics from my OD&D game.

[blackbarn]

Nov 13, 2012 8:57:17 GMT -6 inkmeister said:

I'm curious, have there been many casualties in your game?

No, actually, though we are not fudging anything. I make monster attacks and damage rolls in front of everyone with no DM screen. There have been close calls, and we do say that at zero HP exactly you are just knocked-out, not dead (which has happened!)

Remember that so far they are only as deep as the second dungeon level, and this has allowed them a relatively easy escape to the surface should a battle go badly for them. They are smart about retreating when they get injured. Also... at one point there were 18 people total, including hirelings, so... yeah. That helps, maybe too much!

The group has lost a few hirelings, but no PCs have bitten the dust as of yet. There's generally a good attitude about the possibility though, lethality is just joked about. Our motto is a line we borrowed from Rocky IV, "If he dies... he dies."

[machfront]

Though I love many other flavors, my 'default' is B/X.

"How"?
Hm.
I guess my answer is....anything and everything.. more or less sandbox-y.
If it's something that would fit in a place midway between any and every Fafhrd and Grey Mouser tale and The Hobbit or...errmm...Krull and/or The Sword & The Sorcerer then it's [in] my game(s).

I and everyone I've ever played with my whole life, long-time gamers and complete newbies and 'experienced' newbies strongly dislike dungeon stuffs. If it's more than a crypt or a cavern or buried tower level then... no thanks... Yawn.
Everything else is game.

Assuming 'heroes' is great fun.
Assuming 'yokels' brave and/or dumb/desperate enough to adventure is wonderful.
Assuming 'cut above' die-hards grinding though the brutal world is exciting.
I/We dig all of those depending on mood.

[Finarvyn]

Most of the time I default to OD&D or C&C, but my rules philosophy is "less is better" and I try not to look up much at all during the adventure. I wing it a lot, with the exception of the monsters that I need to look up as needed. The catch with monsters is that I keep my RC, OD&D box, 2E AD&D Monsterous Manual, and C&C Monsters & Treasure books handy and grab one book more-or-less at random to look up the monster. This means that AC or HP may vary somewhat for my monsters from encounter to encounter.

As far as campaign style goes, I try to vary my game every several months. I run shorter campaigns, let characters achieve some sort of goal, then have them roll over and start a new campaign. I've run the Wilderlands, Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Middle-earth, Haunted Highlands, and many more including quite a few home-brew settings where I just throw a few ideas together and let them explore. This means that some games are centered around a dungeon, others in a city, others wandering the wilderness, etc.

[Alex]

My gaming history is not so much OD&D, as I just discovered it two years ago. Most of my gaming was in 2E and 3E where "dungeon was a bad word", as inkmeister put it. Except for the occasional <10 room enclosed space we never stepped under ground, nor did we ever encount a dragon since they were 200' long almost-gods, which in afterthought makes me wonder why I never saw the irony that we claimed to be playing "Dungeons" and "Dragons"! The games were mostly heavily plot driven (not necessarily story driven) with a thin veil of freedom of choice on top. Never-the-less, I always liked the dungeon the most.

When I abandoned 3.5E completely I ran Mentzer Basic + Expert. My style was 50% published modules and 50% my own creations, connected with my own plot "glue" created reactively to what the players chose to do. The dungeons were about 10x larger (90-100 rooms vs 9 or 10) but not megadungeons or sandboxy since they were populated with a purpose. Then I found OD&D and a meetup that had a megadungeon and some aspects of sandbox play. It's the most fun I've had. I have started emulating it, though like you I get option paralysis from all the great campaign settings, adventure ideas, and variant rules I want to try. But most likely I won't get the chance for 99% of that, so I'm sticking with the OD&D megadungeon and pseudo-sandbox as my default now.

[inkmeister]

I'm curious, Machfront, what you and your group dislike about dungeons. What is different in your game than what you might get in a more dungeon centered game? (There is no value judgment from me on your playstyle, just curiosity).

I am curious if there are others that feel the same way about dungeons. The last two groups I played in seemed to want to avoid dungeons; one DM said he despised dungeons.

I'm curious if there are similar feelings towards hexcrawling and the like. I admit I've felt very ambivalent about hexcrawls. I've never been able to conceptualize a procedure that felt right to me. I've never played a game where there was any sort of precise tracking of overland/wilderness travel, so I can't say whether I like it from experience or not. The closest I've come to it is FAllout 1 and 2, which are awesome games. I love the experience of wandering around and getting into weird encounters and finding unexpected stuff/places. But somehow the RPG application seems strained to me (again, without having tried it... just working out how I might approach it for my own game).

This thread (and some others) have been interesting for shedding light on how varied the playstyles can be with OD&D and similar games; the image can seem to be that there is almost a dogmatic devotion to sandbox hexcrawling and megadungeon gaming. What I see is that a lot of the cliches are not true; some don't like dungeons, some don't hexcrawl, some don't like rigorous sandbox gameplay, some don't do XP for treasure, some don't even track XP at all, and so on.

For what it is worth, I can see myself enjoying many gameplay styles with these older games (I don't have the patience for much heavier games).

[Deleted]

Nov 14, 2012 21:34:34 GMT -6 inkmeister said:

I too am frustrated with the way some groups take D&D to be an excuse to get as absolutely stupid as possible.

Simply playing out the logical consequences to their actions is a good cure for this. See comments elsewhere about Rob Kuntz' "Dark Chateau" where the goblins have set an ambush on the way up to the manor house; if the players are stupid, there WILL be a TPK.

[rjkuntz]

Yep. And "stupid" here, as Gronan notes, is merely careless. This often arises from the idea that players believe they (PCs) are entering static environments with creatures therein just waiting to "animate" only to serve their adventuring needs. Not so. This may be the WotC prescription (i.e., computerized and mostly static environments) with encounters waiting around to die and to thus hand over experience and "goodies," but it is not in reality any where near the idea of a live environment having duration over extended time periods. So: If adventurers can approach the manse, that informs us that "others" may have already done so. That leads to thinking out the concluding matter and heightens play rather than limiting it. Adventuring is not for picnickers or Sunday strollers. It's a dangerous occupation.

[Deleted]

I'm pleased to note that my players said "We're not going up the road, they'll be waiting for us." They snuck through the woods and saw the open back of the shed... and the PCs had bows too. A short fight and not a happy one for the goblins. Twangity twangity twang twang twang.

[rjkuntz]

Nov 30, 2012 18:00:54 GMT -6 @gronanofsimmerya said:

I'm pleased to note that my players said "We're not going up the road, they'll be waiting for us." They snuck through the woods and saw the open back of the shed... and the PCs had bows too. A short fight and not a happy one for the goblins. Twangity twangity twang twang twang.

And good for them, too! Smart thinking only grows future opportunities.

[Vile Traveller]

Once it clicks that experienced players are more important than experienced characters, everything is smooth sailing. In other words, it's okay to have purple worms in a Basic Set!

[rjkuntz]

Vile quoth: "Once it clicks that experienced players are more important than experienced characters, everything is smooth sailing."

That should be someone's sig!

Yes, mix it up and keep it coming to keep the players on their toes. Only great things come from valued-added experiences.

[benoist]

I discovered the game when I was eleven years old. I was playing AD&D First Edition solo with my much older cousin, and I was exploring the wilderness around Hommlet and the Temple of Elemental Evil. It was tough, my cousin didn't pull any punches to be sure. I must have gone through a good half dozen characters before one made it to level 2, but what victory it was that day for me! I loved playing AD&D.

I would start running games later, first with L'Oeil Noir, Das Schwarze Auge, and then later using the basic D&D set of Frank Mentzer. I remember TPKing the party during my first session with a few ghouls. That was something for just a fledging DM who didn't know much what to do - I wondered if I was doing something wrong at the time. Turns out I ran the thing fairly and the players just got caught off guard.

In any case, I drifted later and played other RPGs, first with BRP variants like Stormbringer, Hawkmoon, RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, then with French games like In Nomine Satanis Magna Veritas, Bitume, Mega and others, then with White Wolf games, including Vampire the Masquerade, which remains my favorite of the bunch to this day.

I came back to D&D with 3rd edition. I bought the books when I was not playing very much RPGs. I was going through a lot of changes in my life at the time, and I thought I had seen and played everything tabletop RPGs could offer - like you can visit all the worlds of your imagination in just a few years! Ah, I was naive.

I did play D&D later on, however, after my move from France to Canada or around that time, IIRC, and found out that I had missed the game all this time. So I played it, ran it, and was very much into the OGL and third party products of folks like Necromancer Games, Malhavoc Press and so on. Progressively, however, something would start to tickle me in the back of my mind. I wasn't satisfied in the way the discussions surrounding 3rd ed would always devolve into pissing matches about game balance, or game mechanics in general, how the rules became the game if you will, and the game the rules. I would think of running Castles & Crusades. Lejendary Adventures.

The clentcher I think was in part due to the changes in the game and community itself, around 2007, with the announcement of a 4th edition and all that. Also, most of the people who were playing with me at the time left the island where I lived, so I was pretty much thrown into a Sabbatical without really wanting it, which made me think about what we did, how we played the game, and how I would do things differently given the chance. I actually was so disappointed by the online communities that I would unplug for a few months. And that's when the idea of running the original game came to me. I would acquire a World of Greyhawk boxed set and retool the thing to make it mine. I would go back to what I liked about these first games with my cousin, and the worlds of my imagination.

It was a revelation to me. Kind of an epiphany really, an epiphany to which many friends on and off line contributed by the way, like Rob here in no small part. I drifted back to AD&D ultimately, but would look at it in a completely different way than I did when I was a child. Things that did not make sense to me suddenly did (including level limits, Rob! ), and I found that I "got it", I mean the dialog of one DM to another, the role of the referee in the picture, the suggestions and thoughts thrown at me to challenge me to be the best DM I could be.

That's pretty much where I am now. I don't see that trajectory, that is, my love affair with the original game, the advanced game, and some of its variants (Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea, I am looking at you) end any time soon. More ideas are coming to my mind every day. I'm playing regularly with a French crew over Skype right now and will probably launch games with an English-speaking crew as well at some point. Gaming's good, and that's awesome.

Crap. I realize I haven't answered the OP.

How do I play D&D? I start with a fairly standard structure of a small regional or local setting, a wilderness area, a dungeon nearby, and a town in the area as well where the PCs can meet people and trade and the like. Then we create characters and launch the game. And then it goes literally wherever. I don't "plot" the game. I don't think of it as a "storyline". It just "is". Players do whatever they want, go wherever they want, and they find adventure along the way. Like players role play their own characters, I basically role play the world. I just respond to their input, and the world spins into motion. Amazing things happen, most of which I never would have thought of on my own, and I love it that way.

In practice, it generally turns into a mix of wilderness, dungeon adventuring, with investigations in between of the people in the area, the forces in presence, what their (sometimes nefarious) activities are, and then the PCs just get involved with all this in some fashion, and the focus of the world gets larger as the PCs explore it and rise in levels, up to the point connections are made to other worlds, the big picture becomes known, and becomes important to them, and so on.

I'm not sure I'm describing all this very well. In any case, if you want a good idea of my personal take on things you can check out my advice to build a mega-dungeon and the campaign around it linked in my sig - it's not over by any means but hopefully there's something there that'll be helpful for you. And there's the thread recounting the events of the AS&SH game I am playing with the French crew I talked about earlier as well. The link is in my sig as well. I guess these might help explain how I play the game and what I enjoy about it.

[inkmeister]

Awesome post, Benoist; thanks for your thorough reply.

I have already read much of your advice on megadungeon building. That is an impressive piece of work! It makes me wonder if the dungeon in your "fairly standard structure" is a "true megadungeon" or more of a small scale dungeon that is available as an option for players among many other options (not that you can't do this with a megadungeon, but a mega D is a lot of work if you don't want the dungeon to be the main focus of the game).

Some folks here in this thread remark on the fact that a very open sandbox game leaves their players kind of lost - do you experience that or do your players revel in the open-endedness?

Are your games particularly lethal?

Do you do xp by the book or more freeform as some others here do?

Some people talk about prepping situations rather than plots. It sounds like that is what you are doing. Do you drop hooks or are your players more self directed to find things out, while you respond to them?

Thanks again for your comment.

[benoist]

Dec 5, 2012 12:01:00 GMT -6 inkmeister said:

Awesome post, Benoist; thanks for your thorough reply.

I have already read much of your advice on megadungeon building. That is an impressive piece of work!

Thanks mate. I really appreciate the compliment. There's still a lot of work to do, and I plan on packaging all that into a neat document when I'm all done so that it can hopefully be printed, looked at, taken apart by those who find it inspiring in some way, shape or form. It's the point really, and seeing how people like you and others like it and get inspired by it is really its own reward. I thank you very much.

Dec 5, 2012 12:01:00 GMT -6 inkmeister said:

It makes me wonder if the dungeon in your "fairly standard structure" is a "true megadungeon" or more of a small scale dungeon that is available as an option for players among many other options (not that you can't do this with a megadungeon, but a mega D is a lot of work if you don't want the dungeon to be the main focus of the game).

It is a lot of work true, but it doesn't feel that much as work when the dungeon grows organically with the campaign, which is really the approach advised by U&WA to begin with. It's all supposed to be fun. If it feels like a chore to come up with yet-another-dungeon-level, then yeah, absolutely, do something else. Trying to think outside the box and come up with variety is a way to keep the fire going, for me.

In any case, usually my campaign structure will involve one (or several) main dungeon, which is construed as an underworld, or mega-dungeon, where the PCs can potentially go over and over and discover more about the world around them through their adventures in its depths. But the local wilderness will also include some smaller dungeons or lairs of different factions or groups or creatures or individuals living nearby. Some of them will be connected with the mega-dungeon (that is, with explicit links to it, like for instance a lair of hobgoblins, some of them in contact with the hobgoblins of the mega-dungeon, with the potential to find some traces of the connection and/or interrogate prisoners, or with teleporters leading directly into the mega-dungeon, or some NPC that is encountered there and has a piece of information about the mega-dungeon, like a map or gossip or whatnot, etc.), while some of them will stand alone. It's about populating the wilderness/hex map and making it interesting, with a multiplicity of choices and possible actions on the PCs' parts, and also about providing a sense of coherence of the world around them, so that thte whole makes sense bit by bit and reveal more of the tapestry of mysteries and conspiracies and whatever else is going on in the background as the PCs explore it.

Dec 5, 2012 12:01:00 GMT -6 inkmeister said:

Some folks here in this thread remark on the fact that a very open sandbox game leaves their players kind of lost - do you experience that or do your players revel in the open-endedness?

Well the ultimate sandbox would be a white field with no features whatsoever and no hook to anything to do and nothing going on in it, really. And that sandbox is going to fail in play, hard. It's all about the excluded middle in fact: if you provide too many choices, the players won't know what to care about. They'll be confused, will look around and just feel overloaded with information, and in the end they might just give up or start doing something stupid just to get it over with and actually "do" something you know. If you don't provide enough choices, then the same basic thing happens: the players don't know what to do, there's nothing to really care about, and no opportunities for their PCs to get involved into anything. The world is static, dead, boring. So they quit, or they start kicking doors and doing stupid stuff just you know... to make things happen.

The "true" sandbox in my mind is somewhere in the middle between those two extremes: there's a region around the PCs. There are things going on in it. When they go to the inn they will hear about attacks on the roads around town. If they listen to the town crier outside they'll hear about the visit of a foreign baron to these lands and how there's a tourney organized for the occasion. If they talk to the guard asking for work he'll tell them about the troubles down in the sewers that scared the living hell out of his men. Then they get involved with whatever strikes their fancy. Provide choices, hooks, events and situations, let the NPCs talk. Then the PCs get involved into something, and that starts a chain reaction of action-reaction that basically makes the world come alive.

Dec 5, 2012 12:01:00 GMT -6 inkmeister said:

Are your games particularly lethal?

They are. I don't fudge dice, I referee with fairness, and if that means that the party is flanked and taken apart by an unforgiving enemy, I will do just that. I am not running the Tomb of Horrors as a campaign standard, of course, but I do not pull my punches. I role play the opposition, whatever it is, fairly. Ogres will be dumb but tough, hobgoblins will be cunning and organized. And so on. Just don't think I'm going to change a die roll or go all illusionist on you changing stuff at the last moment because you made a mistake. Not going to happen.

The first combat in my current AS&SH game a character went down like this. The others provided help and he came back from his near death experience, but the players realized I wasn't kidding. Which is good. It makes the game more exciting because there's an actual penalty for failure.

Dec 5, 2012 12:01:00 GMT -6 inkmeister said:

Do you do xp by the book or more freeform as some others here do?

I try to follow the guidelines of the game. I might and will give various awards in various situations that might not be covered by the books, but the basic things like monster XP values, 1 XP for 1 GP, these kinds of things I don't modify.

Training is different. I did use the training rules of AD&D books, I see the logic behind it and have nothing against that process per se, but at the same time I don't find it particularly appealing. For the AS&SH game I am more lenient, and just level up the PCs as they go, in part because of the practicality of the time frame and the events in the game, in part because of a problem of continuity which is already challenged in the context of an open table policy where players can show up and not show up for game sessions and you play anyway, and in part because most of the players are not used to concepts like the stables of characters, or simply hiring henchmen and hirelings as potential alternate PCs, and are *just* starting to really get it. Enforcing strict training rules would make it a lot harder for them, so I ignore those as a "rule as written" but treat them more as an opportunity to role play occasionally some change in the characters as they get more experienced and find mentors, old magics and the like.

Dec 5, 2012 12:01:00 GMT -6 inkmeister said:

Some people talk about prepping situations rather than plots. It sounds like that is what you are doing. Do you drop hooks or are your players more self directed to find things out, while you respond to them?

Both. I don't treat hooks as "hooks" per se. In the world you live in you'll just hear about regional events, you'll stumble on gossip in taverns, etc. It's just stuff happening around the PCs. And then they choose what they want to care about, including "nothing" to rather do what they have in mind instead. Just as if the world would be "real", in motion, a living world where stuff happens and people are free to choose what they want to do when they get up in the morning.

Dec 5, 2012 12:01:00 GMT -6 inkmeister said:

Thanks again for your comment.

My pleasure.

[robertsconley]

I run sandbox campaigns where the adventure is largely driven by the characters motivations and the clash of culture, religion, and politics set against a backdrop of what you find in the Monster Manual and DMG. I used the same setting for fantasy since the early 80s( around 1982)

[robertsconley]

Nov 30, 2012 12:49:00 GMT -6 inkmeister said:

I'm curious if there are similar feelings towards hexcrawling and the like. I admit I've felt very ambivalent about hexcrawls. I've never been able to conceptualize a procedure that felt right to me. I've never played a game where there was any sort of precise tracking of overland/wilderness travel, so I can't say whether I like it from experience or not.

When asked, I explain the best way is to judge it as a referee is imagine that you are there and describe it to the players and only when there significant details.

For example when traversing a mountainous region. Don't go into each and every ridge crossing unless there something in the valley ahead. But do describe cresting the ridge when they go over the last high ridge and see the lowlying landscape ahead.

[inkmeister]

Thanks again for another thorough and thoughtful reply Benoist. Folks like you do a lot of good for the wider community.

I'm designing my own mega-dungeon at the moment. I find drawing levels to be relatively easy (I have always enjoyed drawing very detailed, complicated things - as a kid I used to draw mazes, for example), but I find stocking them to be mindblowingly difficult and tedious. I'm just not good at it. I'm running some smaller dungeons with my wife at the moment, and she seems to enjoy it thus far, but I find a lot of fault in my designs (and in my refereeing!). I question whether dungeons are really my thing or not (maybe with time I'll go the way Machfront has gone - leaving the dungeons behind), or if I just have to really grasp the practice of them before there is any payoff. I am addicted to the idea of dungeons though, and always got disappointed as a player that none of the referees I played with had any interest in dungeons at all.

RobertSConley, thanks for your reply too. I've read some of your work (ie Blackmarsh) and your writings (including on creating a sandbox campaign).

I'm sold on the hexcrawl in theory. Like I said, I've never played one or run one at the table before, but I got a taste of that style from the Fallout games (1 and 2), and really liked being able to roam around and do things my way. At it's best, I'm sure it's vastly superior in a table top format.

My questions surrounding hexcrawls are: 1) can multiple things exist in a hex (a 6 mile hex encompasses somewhere over 30 square miles), and if so, how do you decide what is located and what is not? 2) Do players automatically "trigger" a hex or not? 3) Is the hexcrawl form meant to be like a dungeon; ie, are the hexes containers for encounters/situations?, or is the hexcrawl meant to serve more as a measuring tool for travel - ie it takes this long to reach X location and will cost Y resources and involve Z risk of possibly hostile encounters? Despite studying the topic a bit, I don't feel I understand it very well. I also see a lot of differences in how people handle it.

So far I've taken as much of an open-ended sandbox approach as I can, giving my wife a lot of rumors and pieces of information, and a number of things going on, and she has chosen her own course of action and seems to be enjoying the game. But no hex-crawling yet (indeed, I have no such map ready), and no megadungeon.

At the moment I consider myself a student of this hobby more than anything. I want to dig into it more. I'm fortunate to have a good amount of spare time. Still, I want to develop a style for myself that has a very good prep to play ratio. The hexcrawl/megadungeon stuff seems very intensive to me so far.

[Ynas Midgard]

Dec 5, 2012 10:35:56 GMT -6 benoist said:

I would start running games later, first with L'Oeil Noir, Das Schwarze Auge, and then later using the basic D&D set of Frank Mentzer. I remember TPKing the party during my first session with a few ghouls. That was something for just a fledging DM who didn't know much what to do - I wondered if I was doing something wrong at the time. Turns out I ran the thing fairly and the players just got caught off guard.

I TPKed my party at the first session by a couple of hobgoblins or goblins, who happened to have a classed leader (rogue, I guess; it happened under D&D 3E). I had no better idea than improvising a scene as they encounter a Lawful (Good, perhaps) god who tells them he is going to bring them back to life if they swear an oath of loyalty to him. Turned out to be a pretty neat, albeit fresh and naive, campaign, after all.

Also, thanks for the great posts!