So this is an idea I'm working on. It doesn't really fit into my current campaign, but it's something I definitely want to try in the future. Has anyone else run anything like this, and if so what were the pitfalls?
The scenario:
The PCs will have control of some kind of powerful, evil and corrupting magical item that cannot be destroyed without acquiring something very specific. They are going to need to travel off on a quest to get it, but will be aware that there is a party of hostile adventurers trying to acquire it for evil purposes. For some reason, they have to leave the item behind - maybe its corrupting power is too strong, or maybe it's just too physically big.
Before they begin:
The DM creates the hostile adventuring party. Once designed, they are locked in, and can't be changed. I will probably create simplified character sheets (monster stat blocks) for them, or perhaps just compose the party from NPC monsters - for example a berserker, a bard, a knight, a necromancer and a warlock of the great old one.
The characters' goal:
The characters will spend at least a session choosing a location to hide it in, probably by looking into a series of possible locations, e.g. an abandoned mine, a crypt, and a ruined temple. They can go in, clear out any monsters they find there, and then it will be up to them to fortify the place. They can design traps, set up magical wards, lure creatures to live in it or hire mercenaries to guard it, construct golems, raise undead denizens and so on. They might need to ally with a local organisation, e.g. some druids and their fey allies, to man it, set guard rotas, organise supplies to feed them etc.
The players have to be given free reign to modify the building/temple/mine as they see fit, within reason. For example, if they employ a dwarven mining team, they might add a certain number of square feet worth of rooms to the abandoned mine. The dwarven miners can add two x 5 square foot cubes of space per miner per day, for example, so a team of 20 miners paid at 1gp per day per miner might create a room 25ft x 25ft with a 10ft ceiling in one day.
The players need to be given time and opportunity to work in secret on this, within a set of parameters. For example, they might be given a list of traps that local artisans could create, and a gold cost. The DM doesn't need to know the full layout, or the traps or secret doors. That allows for the players to create additional surprises for the DM. The more ingenious they are, the better!
What happens next:
After the players build their dungeon, they will go off on their mission and we'll play that out. At some point during that time, the DM declares that the dungeon is under attack.
From there, the players get to run the dungeon. They control the monsters, they control the traps, any puzzles that they've set up and so on.
This would all have to be run with a grain of salt to hand, and will only work if the players are in it for fun rather than for ultra-competitiveness. If they put in things that essentially prevent any access to the objective at all then that has to be dealt with by the adventuring party.
What do you think are the possible pitfalls of designing something like this?
What would you provide the players with so that they can fairly create the dungeon?
How would you try to ensure that the encounters were going to be semi-balanced or at least fun for the (probably doomed) hostile adventurers?
The idea is a lot of fun, though I can definitely imagine there being some issues.
Traditional DMing has the advantage of the world builder being a monolithic arbiter of the rules. If a party of 4-6 are working together to build a dungeon, there may be disagreements, and someone is likely to become the de facto narrator, leaving the others to be spectators.
The first thing that comes to mind is the way that the Sorcerer's stone was hidden in the Harry Potter books. Each professor was responsible for one checkpoint in a series of checkpoints. So, maybe you could do something similar. Have each player be allocated a "Dungeon Class" and a set of resources that they can spend on their section of the dungeon.
Each player gets a number of floor squares and a number of walls, then they can buy additional floors/walls/traps/monsters/hazards. Each new item or upgrade comes with a cost, but the "Dungeon Class" modifies those costs to encourage each player to prioritize different features. For example, a "Labyrinth Master" could buy cheap floors/walls, while the "Beast Master" could get a discount on Monsters according to CR.
Keeping each dungeon section separate would be comparable to having a discrete "Encounter Initiative", but each player could have a number of "Lair Actions" that allow them to interact within other players' dungeons.
DM plays the "Hostile Party" Player 1 Narrates the Chamber Players 2-6 can use actions on their turn such as "Summon minion", "Quake", "Reset trap", etc... (Minor obstacles that can be triggered without significantly changing Player 1's narration).
Basically, building it around the typical combat flow with "Encounter Sheets", instead of "Character Sheets".
Slightly off topic but your post made me think of an old computer/video game called Dungeon Keeper, its entire premise was to build a dungeon and get it working before the heroes of the land arrived to try and destroy it. It was very tongue in cheek and not very PC but a lot of fun. There are lots of clips on youtube if you fancy taking a stroll back in time.
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Slightly off topic but your post made me think of an old computer/video game called Dungeon Keeper, its entire premise was to build a dungeon and get it working before the heroes of the land arrived to try and destroy it. It was very tongue in cheek and not very PC but a lot of fun. There are lots of clips on youtube if you fancy taking a stroll back in time.
I played the demo before it was even out :) Yes I am old.
There's an RPG called Wicked Ones that does this (https://banditcamp.io/wickedones/) We played it recently as a one shot. Was a lot of fun. There maybe stuff in there you could use (steal) or just run it as is, for something a bit different.
My party in the game I play in is hoping to soon come into possession of a powerful magic item we need to keep out of the hands of the BBEG. I am going to propose just the same idea to my party: that we explore a dungeon we skipped earlier in the campaign and convert it to our own hoard.
You can do quite a bit with Stone Shape and Wall of Stone. Glyph of Warding is probably a good spell to spam.
Thinking of getting some of my druid buddies to do the job of stocking it with monsters: animal friends or conjured beasts, fey, and elementals.
Now, I suppose we the players could control the monsters in combat encounters, but I'm not sure it would be fair to move monsters around the dungeon, because our characters wouldn't automatically know complete information about what was happening.
Maybe we can set up some information supply, such as with Scrying and maybe a Glyph of Warding that triggers a Sending as an alarm. And then when we get a new piece of information, maybe we get to make a quick rearrangement of our forces.
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So this is an idea I'm working on. It doesn't really fit into my current campaign, but it's something I definitely want to try in the future. Has anyone else run anything like this, and if so what were the pitfalls?
The scenario:
The PCs will have control of some kind of powerful, evil and corrupting magical item that cannot be destroyed without acquiring something very specific. They are going to need to travel off on a quest to get it, but will be aware that there is a party of hostile adventurers trying to acquire it for evil purposes. For some reason, they have to leave the item behind - maybe its corrupting power is too strong, or maybe it's just too physically big.
Before they begin:
The DM creates the hostile adventuring party. Once designed, they are locked in, and can't be changed. I will probably create simplified character sheets (monster stat blocks) for them, or perhaps just compose the party from NPC monsters - for example a berserker, a bard, a knight, a necromancer and a warlock of the great old one.
The characters' goal:
The characters will spend at least a session choosing a location to hide it in, probably by looking into a series of possible locations, e.g. an abandoned mine, a crypt, and a ruined temple. They can go in, clear out any monsters they find there, and then it will be up to them to fortify the place. They can design traps, set up magical wards, lure creatures to live in it or hire mercenaries to guard it, construct golems, raise undead denizens and so on. They might need to ally with a local organisation, e.g. some druids and their fey allies, to man it, set guard rotas, organise supplies to feed them etc.
The players have to be given free reign to modify the building/temple/mine as they see fit, within reason. For example, if they employ a dwarven mining team, they might add a certain number of square feet worth of rooms to the abandoned mine. The dwarven miners can add two x 5 square foot cubes of space per miner per day, for example, so a team of 20 miners paid at 1gp per day per miner might create a room 25ft x 25ft with a 10ft ceiling in one day.
The players need to be given time and opportunity to work in secret on this, within a set of parameters. For example, they might be given a list of traps that local artisans could create, and a gold cost. The DM doesn't need to know the full layout, or the traps or secret doors. That allows for the players to create additional surprises for the DM. The more ingenious they are, the better!
What happens next:
After the players build their dungeon, they will go off on their mission and we'll play that out. At some point during that time, the DM declares that the dungeon is under attack.
From there, the players get to run the dungeon. They control the monsters, they control the traps, any puzzles that they've set up and so on.
This would all have to be run with a grain of salt to hand, and will only work if the players are in it for fun rather than for ultra-competitiveness. If they put in things that essentially prevent any access to the objective at all then that has to be dealt with by the adventuring party.
The idea is a lot of fun, though I can definitely imagine there being some issues.
Traditional DMing has the advantage of the world builder being a monolithic arbiter of the rules. If a party of 4-6 are working together to build a dungeon, there may be disagreements, and someone is likely to become the de facto narrator, leaving the others to be spectators.
The first thing that comes to mind is the way that the Sorcerer's stone was hidden in the Harry Potter books. Each professor was responsible for one checkpoint in a series of checkpoints. So, maybe you could do something similar. Have each player be allocated a "Dungeon Class" and a set of resources that they can spend on their section of the dungeon.
Each player gets a number of floor squares and a number of walls, then they can buy additional floors/walls/traps/monsters/hazards. Each new item or upgrade comes with a cost, but the "Dungeon Class" modifies those costs to encourage each player to prioritize different features. For example, a "Labyrinth Master" could buy cheap floors/walls, while the "Beast Master" could get a discount on Monsters according to CR.
Keeping each dungeon section separate would be comparable to having a discrete "Encounter Initiative", but each player could have a number of "Lair Actions" that allow them to interact within other players' dungeons.
DM plays the "Hostile Party"
Player 1 Narrates the Chamber
Players 2-6 can use actions on their turn such as "Summon minion", "Quake", "Reset trap", etc... (Minor obstacles that can be triggered without significantly changing Player 1's narration).
Basically, building it around the typical combat flow with "Encounter Sheets", instead of "Character Sheets".
Slightly off topic but your post made me think of an old computer/video game called Dungeon Keeper, its entire premise was to build a dungeon and get it working before the heroes of the land arrived to try and destroy it. It was very tongue in cheek and not very PC but a lot of fun. There are lots of clips on youtube if you fancy taking a stroll back in time.
I played the demo before it was even out :) Yes I am old.
There's an RPG called Wicked Ones that does this (https://banditcamp.io/wickedones/) We played it recently as a one shot. Was a lot of fun. There maybe stuff in there you could use (steal) or just run it as is, for something a bit different.
My party in the game I play in is hoping to soon come into possession of a powerful magic item we need to keep out of the hands of the BBEG. I am going to propose just the same idea to my party: that we explore a dungeon we skipped earlier in the campaign and convert it to our own hoard.
You can do quite a bit with Stone Shape and Wall of Stone. Glyph of Warding is probably a good spell to spam.
Thinking of getting some of my druid buddies to do the job of stocking it with monsters: animal friends or conjured beasts, fey, and elementals.
Now, I suppose we the players could control the monsters in combat encounters, but I'm not sure it would be fair to move monsters around the dungeon, because our characters wouldn't automatically know complete information about what was happening.
Maybe we can set up some information supply, such as with Scrying and maybe a Glyph of Warding that triggers a Sending as an alarm. And then when we get a new piece of information, maybe we get to make a quick rearrangement of our forces.