@D_Luck: As Wax mentions right after you, the Megadungeon does not have to be something you have to finish. Like Cyberpunk, it’s really a matter of attitude. As I read the comments, my project takes shape more and more…

@Wax: Ahh my favorite prose master is back and as entertaining as always. As you saw in my comments, I’ll likely abandon making an Old School game with 4e.

I shall however create a short campaign for my gaming group based on carefully picked Megadungeon tropes. It will be centered on a huge sprawling dungeon… in fact the dungeon will likely by a main NPC of that campaign!

As you so aptly put it, Old School/New School argument are tedious and sterile, what counts is the game I create for my players… and tangentially the blog posts I shall generate from there…

And then later, who knows, maybe we can all team up and make something bigger and grander. The offers of help from you and others have not fallen on deaf ears.

Oh and I hear ya for the XP and may very well do just that. Leveling up when it feels right has worked before for our group.

I’ve already settled on a campaign model and I will likely go for multiple interlinked 5 ‘encounter’ dungeons (along with empty rooms) set in the same Megadungeon. Each sharing a theme and being the focus of a one or two gaming sessions.

This is wisdom, though the ‘old school’ types don’t dig that noise. Then again, you’re not trying to ‘design a megadungeon,’ you’re trying to design a fun roleplaying game for your friends using D&D rules. So the physical layout is a distant secondary concern to: do they have interesting choices to make? Can you as DM make those choices more interesting at runtime (excuse me, gametime) by weaving in temporal (i.e. narrative) concerns that aren’t there on the page? Can you respond to the players’ express desires and their unexpressed (or unconsciously expressed) longings, as you perceive them, to scar their memories the way that ridiculous blue or white box did when you were a babychild? There’s no pure form to the game, nor to ‘dungeons’ in general, so

Do As Thou Wilt

shall be the whole of the law. Obviously. I mean, it’s a game, not a church service. (Man, this ‘old school’ talk puts me off. Though as a n00b that’s to be expected, right?!)

Wax Bankss last blog post..Older school H3: Pyramid of Shadows.

One way of getting around the encounters-per-level concern is simply to abandon the (silly, verisimilitude-shattering) XP-bookkeeping aspect of the game and level up when it’s dramatically appropriate – imagine a mechanic whereby the DM gives a PC her new character sheet (which the PC has made up, maybe a couple weekends prior) when her character achieves something fantastic. Or just when she reaches the stairs to the next level. The XP-shopping guideline for encounter design could be kept in place, but XP math is nothing more than a minor pain in the balls and is easily-enough jettisoned by an attentive, drama-minded DM.

I’m with Jonathan Drain on this one: a city is a megadungeon with a ceiling so high you can’t see it. The old-school ‘megadungeon’ fetish is little more than nostalgia and border-drawing – a terminological concern and a personal one – but once you’re past the lexicographical preoccupation the whole topic seems straightforward enough. 4e encourages DMs to think in terms of encounter design rather than room design (experientially rather than spatially), and more importantly (with its action points/encounter powers/milestones/5-minute spell durations) in terms of the flow between encounters, rewarding methodical approaches by restoring powers but also rewarding let’s-get-the-bastards!-style play with action points/milestones/ever-growing balls.

Look, you can build a dungeon that’s infinitely large in every direction as long as you provide clues re: stair/chute/tunnel location (airflow, monster access, gurgling water, eldritch vapours, drums in the deep, etc.) and build session-sized areas that offer both moment-to-moment and afternoon-scale thrills. i.e. Give the players something fun to do (choose) every few minutes, something stunning every 60 minutes, and something lifechanging every week or two, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re spelunking without a map in Mammoth Cave or leading a group of lackeys to overthrow PM Harper. ‘Megadungeon’ is ultimately an attitude, an atmosphere: something huge, a quantity and quality of information that encourages the PCs to think of consideration as daring, opportunities to sneak, to fight, to run, to collect, to analyze.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with goddamn graph paper and even less to do with the layout of subterranean caves, a topic about which nearly every megadungeon ‘designer’ in history has demonstrated he knows absolute zero.

A dungeon is a flowchart dressed like a cave; it’s a decision tree with fangs. The graph paper fetish is a historical artifact (cf. Crowther and Woods’s ‘Adventure’ game, the smaller Zork megadungeon, etc.) and shouldn’t limit how you think of megadungeon design.

And as little as ‘dungeon’ layout has to do with caves and graph paper, it’s got even less to do with the ruleset governing players’ actions within it.

Philip – good luck, baby! Sounds like a fun project and I look forward to seeing what you come up with. Hell, I’d kind of like to help out sometime.

Wax Bankss last blog post..Older school H3: Pyramid of Shadows.

They were fun to play though.

Maybe after a little more D&D experience under my belt I’ll be more of an active participant in these types of discussions.

Vulcan Stevs last blog post..Goober’s Words of Wisdom 3-8-09

I’ve already settled on a campaign model and I will likely go for multiple interlinked 5 ‘encounter’ dungeons (along with empty rooms) set in the same Megadungeon. Each sharing a theme and being the focus of a one or two gaming sessions.

More this week.

Also, wandering monsters are a must, but be sneaky: Make a custom of list of encounters that are interesting and that hold clues or information or other stuff useful for making sense of or coping with stationary encounters. That way, they don’t seem such a waste. Also, one possibility is to give no experience and no conventional treasure for them. Treasure parcels are only hidden in stationary locations, be they lairs or other things.

I would not call the result an old school dungeon, but it could be a viable 4e megadungeon.

The rest is, as you say, semantics and personal preferences.

The new school vs. old school arguments for Dungeonaday seems more based on ownership of subscription content and lack of support for old school game play. How are you stopped from saving files I wonder? It’s nice to see the old-schoolers plotting their own mega-dungeon.

Old school and new school are not rules-bound. They are styles of play that differ in attitude towards the game. 4E advocates new school play and makes no bones about it. You can play it old school of course. At the end of the day, it’s your game.

satyres last blog post..upon a red horse and bearing a sword

“Chatty DM: There are many potential obstacles to make an Old School Mega Dungeon in 4e , mostly because of the design decisions behind the game…”

It seems the only real issue is the rules light style of OD&D versus the rules “medium” style (compared to rules heavy 3e) of 4e, and what to modify to make the game flow properly. I’m a firm believer in making the system conform to your vision, as compared to making your vision conform to the system.

Maybe its time for an old school/4e hybrid, why not, it could be a great system. Now I fully realize that the hardcore old school and the 4e converts are never going to like this idea, but who cares. Its all about making things your own, and system isn’t sacred.

Jack Crows last blog post..New Featured Posts

The Worlds’ Largest Dungeon filled our Third Edition playtime grandly without much advanced preparation from yours truly, and that’s what I’d look for in a 4e Mega-Dungeon – something you could pick up, explore and play without much fuss, picking it up and restarting as required.

Must put more thought into this. Good stuff!

Since it was drawn on 8′X11” or 8’14” Graph paper (4 to 5 squares to the Inch) a level was often either one sheet or several taped together. I recall the ones I used to draw when I was 10 and they were mostly 1 sheet per level.

Anyway, I agree with both Johnn and Graham for the rest. 4e is mega dungeon friendlier than 3.x both prep wise and stat wise. In fact, Rob Conley (of Bat in the Attic) shared some firsthand experience about running such games in 4e on Mike Mearls’ blog.

Whenever I think megadungeon, I think of Diablo 1.

Each level in Diablo would contain, probably, 5-8 encounters of a 4e size. The mega part came by being as deep as hell itself.

(Of course, then there’s the old dungeon-crawling game that came on a cassette tape for the TI99/4 my uncle had. [Tunnels of Doom, I think.] That would be more of a “classic” old-school dungeon design.)

.

Other than that, I agree with Johnn Four that 4e has a lot to offer a megadungeon. I also believe that the work described by Chatty, while more in 4e than 1e, is less than 3e/3.5e was.

* Improved PC resources let them do more each “cycle”. Unless you whack them with very hard encounters every second room, PCs should actually be able to chew through more territory than ever before.

* New challenges. Disease and poison tracks plus skill challenges enable a fun layer of storytelling/gaming. Not that you couldn’t do this before, but it’s been codified nicely in 4E and helps spur encounter designers’ imaginations.

* Ding! The auto-level ups and genericization (my first made-up word of the day! May there be oogly more!) of such things as ritual components and other resources means fewer logistical issues with being stuck in a dungeon.

* Emphasis on traps and hazards as part of encounters and challenge ratings. Again, more tools to make what often becomes kick-down-the-door and fight-toe-to-toe experiences lively again.

* Big environments. Movement, powers, and whatnot favour larger combat zones than in previous editons. This rewards creative environment design and switches up from dense maps that sometimes can drag the game down.

I don’t think old school dungeons were designed like that. Although I clearly recall reading about Gygax and Kuntz designing part of their respective dungeons to specifically challenge their players.

I’m not entirely sure that each levels of a dungeon had to fit character levels. From what I gathered from James’ Dwimmermount reports, players refrained from taking any stairs going down before they were all 2nd level.

What follows will likely make it into a post soon but I’d rather put it down while it’s on my mind.

The way I see a 4e pre-mapped Megadungeon would be to have a certain number of set-piece encounters per map level. Probably 6 or 7. I would also have a bunch of empty rooms, some with interactive terrain features (chasms, pools, ridges, etc…)

Finally, I’d have random encounter tables that fit the level’s theme (plus possible wanderers from nearby levels) to bring the total number of encounters of the whole level to 12-15.

I’d make the average level of all encounters fit the dungeon’s level but I’d use the whole range suggested by the DMG (from party level-2 to party level +5).

I’d finally put in a few ‘Climax level’ encounters per level, maybe one or two, representing something far stronger than the PCs. Maybe the HQ of 2 factions. PCs would have to avoid or Roleplay themselves through these areas.

Or maybe there would be something very big and strong wandering through the level, looking for lunch. Maybe like a Dragon or a Demon. Heck Mike Mearls mentioned having an Aspect of Orcus walking around on level 1 and creating a skill challenge to convince it to keep the party alive.

(Damn I’m writing novels here!)

@Anders: Welcome to the blog! I would never dream of trying to design a dungeon for a 20 player campaign (with 6-10 players showing up each session) with 4e, at least not with my current grasp of the game.

Were I to do it, I’d take Labyrinth Lord and give Jeff Rient a call!

@Yan: As we discussed, you already have many of the answers to the questions I asked. If we go forward with the pilot scale of this project, this will not be an old school mega dungeon because the whole group would not be willing to do it more than one or two session… if at all.

I’m not quite grocking what you’re talking about here. Can you maybe go into a little detail about how player psychology-driven controlled encounters are designed?

I’ll be following this project with interest. Old or new school, ideas for cool dungeon features and unusual encounters are always welcome.

Brians last blog post..“You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.”