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[Telgin]

Yeah, honestly it just sounds like he plays too many video games and tried to model a boss fight like a modern video game would do it, and did a bad job of it on top of that.  D&D can definitely do that, but you have to play to its mechanics.

Anyway, if I want to play the games I'm interested in I usually have to GM them.  Not going to find many people who want to run Knockoff Star Fox in GURPS, for example.

Too bad I hate GMing.


(Stolen from The Oatmeal and edited appropriately.)

[Kagus]

I'm an idiot.

We wrapped up one arc of "Things a first-time DM shouldn't try to wrangle with no experience", and I've yeeted myself into another at full speed.

Now, "murder mystery" is more just ill-advised due to the system not supporting it at all and how you should probably prep stuff a bit beforehand to make sure it runs smoothly. But eh, it's still possible to kludge it, as proven.


...what I've done now, though, is promise myself a megadungeon. Which, naturally, I'm giving myself hangups about using random generators for. Not as a matter of pride per se, just that I'm having a hard time wrangling the random genned stuff into the thematic sense I want a ruined civilization to make.

So yeah. I'm predominantly hand-building a fuckload of rooms to try and make something resembling a megadungeon, having done nothing of the like before, and hopefully with at least a couple levels finished before the session they start cracking into it (most likely the one after next).

[Loud Whispers]

Murder mystery and 5e reminds me of one of my DM friends coming up with increasingly large numbers of reasons why the murder victims could provide no useful information whatsoever to our player that had speak with dead

Have you tried making just a big roll table for random rooms/encounters that would be thematically fitting for your mega dungeon?

[Kagus]

Murder mystery and 5e reminds me of one of my DM friends coming up with increasingly large numbers of reasons why the murder victims could provide no useful information whatsoever to our player that had speak with dead

Have you tried making just a big roll table for random rooms/encounters that would be thematically fitting for your mega dungeon?

My party didn't actually have Speak With Dead when they went into this debacle, but I'm only just realizing that it wouldn't actually have made that much of a difference anyway as there were never any (intact) bodies to be found...

They did spend most of a session interrogating and torturing a local school of fish though, and while the pitiful piscines naturally couldn't provide much help in the way of information about the land-village nearby, they did at least manage to point the players to a "human fin(ger)" that had fallen into the stream a while back, and the identifying wedding band thereon.


As far as encounters and theme goes, I'm mostly solid on that front... The issue comes in the form of the layout, and the layout is important because I'm specifically putting them into an old-school-inspired dungeon crawl, mapping and all.

And therein lies the issues I'm giving myself with random map generators: I feel that the collections of rooms are too chaotic and disorganized for being the ruins of a lived-in civilization of dwarves, and that there should be some more structure and intention behind the areas and interconnections... ...which of course means more doing stuff by hand, and planning out streets and districts in my head, which I'm historically absolute balls at.

Another issue is that... Well, nice and orderly districts aren't necessarily the most interesting to map and venture through. There, the more wild and interwoven randomly-generated dungeon rooms can be more compelling as they offer more varied and unpredictable environments. So I'm trying desperately to come to some sort of compromise between the two extremes, and by and large I've just been procrastinating instead of actually laying down rooms and tiles, because apparently I've just got some colossal mental block when it comes to actually doing things. Might potentially be related to my never having designed dungeons before.

[Loud Whispers]

You can just have two tables, one for theme, one for room type

Room theme 1 Forge - old forgeworks, mechanic shops, metalworks, furnaces, wood burners, stacks of ore and broken kilns 2 Farms - giant mushrooms. The remains of tilled rows and rusted farm tools hint at their former nature 3 Residential - old bedrooms full of broken beds and moth eaten clothes 4 Royal - anything catering to mayors, nobles, royals. Ballrooms, palace rooms, throne rooms, studies, libraries full of cursed tomes e.t.c. 5 Defences - ancient fortifications, corridors rigged to collapse (or already collapsed), barracks 6 Caverns - either straight up the caverns, or else over time the fortress has become opened up to the caverns 7 Vault - a treasure vault, artifact vault, ancient seal. Often a very fun opportunity for story telling - I once had my players discover a dwarven artifact vault, full of artifacts that were either too dangerous or considered not worth the effort of saving, as whatever made the dwarves leave made them leave in a hurry. 8 Temples (to Armok) 9 Camp remnants - camp remains/dwellings from denizens who moved into the ruins long after the dwarves left. 10 Out of place - things which were there long before the dwarves arrived...

Room type 1 Benign NPC (examples including wandering merchant hermit crab/mountain witch/tribe of animal men) 2 Benign atmospheric room (the room is an ordinary functioning example of its theme). Lots of fun opportunities to tell a story about the civilisation/people through benign atmospheric details (benign in the sense that they won't cause harm or pressure to PCs). One of the coolest ones I've ever had was when my DM described a larder room, where the household servants' skeletons were clutching each other, an empty vial by their side 3 Spooky atmospheric room (the room is unsettling and there is something wrong with it. The power wheels and mechanisms of the magma forge activate and begin turning when the players arrive, awakening ancient hammers and kilns. The fortifications are covered in nail scratches from the inside, and there is fresh blood on the floor. A camp of goblins has been destroyed, the goblins' bodies left to the cave worms). 4 Encounter - mushroom men, forge golems, vault guardians, spooky spectres, cavern critters, ancient beasts 5 Great hazard - giant axe blade traps, deep chasms and fissures from an ancient earthquake, collapsed tunnels, giant webs, weird glowing runes and magic walls. Anything that's bait for skill checks 6 Great treasure!

[Kagus]

Yes, again the thematic elements aren't a problem, the actually drawing out and connecting together the rooms is the issue. As in, putting everything down in Dungeon Scrawl. Determining the size and shape of the rooms, and where they are placed, and how they are connected to others. And then converting those determinations into lines on the page.

[NullForceOmega]

You don't have to do that tho'.  You can run it flow-chart style instead if the physical mapping is too arduous.