I was flipping through a friend’s copy of Dungeon Delve and took the opportunity to read through the introduction by Bill Slavicsek, the Director of R&D at WotC. He starts by describing the successful Dungeon Delves that WotC has run at various conventions over the past decade:
But from the opening of the show on Thursday, we knew we had found the crux of a winning formula. (…) The fans ate it up. We had enormous lines at the Delve that entire weekend. They lined up to get into the available party slots. They lined up to witness the action and see whether Monte Cook or Bruce Cordell or Ed Stark (or whoever else was part of the team at that time) could kill more characters as more and more of the Delve was revealed. They lined up to see the next dungeon details and character names get posted to the bulletin board. How far had they gotten? What had they killed? Who didn’t make it out of the last fight?
They had a winning format: A megadungeon serving as the shared campaign setting for a huge pool of players. They basically took core Old School play and condensed it down to a format that could be played rapid-fire over the couse of a convention weekend.
Nifty stuff.
With this book, the Dungeon Delve concept finally takes center stage as a core D&D product. It was a long time coming, but we needed that time to test concepts, try out new formats, and eventually get to the point where this product was not only viable, but in many ways necessary to the evolution of the D&D game.
This makes perfect sense. If you’re in the business of selling RPGs and you’ve got something that’s a proven success with RPG players, you should try to figure out how to bottle that success and sell it to the masses.
For the purpose of this product, a Dungeon Delve is a compact series of encounters appropriate for a specific level of play. This book contains 30 Dungeon Delves, one for each level of play. Each Delve features three encounters, forming a mini-adventure of sorts.
Wait… what?
So you had a format: Megadungeon. High mortality rate attracting lots of attention. Boatloads of players/characters sharing a single setting to create a sense of competition, rivalry, and shared accomplishment.
And your method of bringing this format to “center stage as a core D&D product” is to give us mini-dungeons featuring three encounters incapable of serving as a shared campaign setting in a system explicitly designed for low mortality rates?
WTF?
(And is it even possible for them to devalue the term “core” any more? Describing their splat books as “core” was bad enough, but now they’re actually claiming that their adventure modules are “core” products? Exactly what do you produce that isn’t a “core” product, WotC?)
Let me be clear here: There’s nothing wrong with either style of adventure. I think there’s room in any good campaign for both megadungeons and mini-adventures. I contributed mini-adventures to Atlas Games’ En Route II. My Mini-Adventure 1: Complex of Zombies is pretty much in the same ballpark. I haven’t actually taken a close look at the actual adventures in Dungeon Delve, but conceptually it’s an interesting and potentially useful product.
But what baffles me is a company saying, “Our goal is to do X. And in order to do X, we’re going to do not-X.”
I mean, there are many parts of the design of 4th Edition which followed that pattern: The designers say that they want to do X and then they release mechanics which either don’t do X or do the exact opposite of X.
I had simply assumed that was incompetence. But maybe that’s just the way that Slavicsek and his design team think. (Which would also explain why we got not-D&D when they tried to design D&D.)
ARCHIVED HALOSCAN COMMENTS
Brian Reeves
I love your site, and the clear, analytical way you explore game design. My only suggestion is to please select a color scheme a little easier on the eyes. White on black is dazzling after a while.
Friday, October 01, 2010, 11:42:58 PM
AzaLiN
whoa, big math mistake: i meant 350 itmes per week. whoops. its 50 per 10-hour DAY.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009, 2:19:18 AM
AzaLiN
Yeah, based on the mass production capacity of 5 level 10 spell casters can produce 50 level 70 level 10 magic items per week. The internal logic suggests Ebberon, which is a cool setting, but not exactly what i had in mind when i tried to do a low-magic campaign.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009, 2:16:50 AM
Devenger
Hey, I won’t have anyone saying rituals aren’t excellent in 4e. Crappy? Overpriced? Hah! You have Tenser’s Floating Disk, the classic pressure-plate avoiding, golden-statue carrying, prisoner-transporting versatile hoverboard, for only 10gp a day. And about 60 other rituals no-one ever needs. And Raise Dead, which breaks the setting into 6 million sharp pieces.
I love playing the Wizard, edition whatever. No-one else gets as much useless spellcasting as I do that breaks the internal logic of the game’s world. :/
Tuesday, April 28, 2009, 5:36:03 PM
Trackback
Trackback message
Title: Explosive Runes – 24 Apr 2009
Excerpt: Dungeon Delve WTF
Sounds like WotC discovered that loads of 4e players dig old school playing, so they capitalized by making…something else.
The Real Problem With Players Controlling “Story”
Being able to ensure, due to mechanics a…
Blog name: Lord Kilgore
Friday, April 24, 2009, 9:52:52 AM
AzaLiN
no, it took about a day to accumulate the 24; he skipped all his short rests during a big dungeon crawl in a higher level area. being a back row striker, he eventually pulled it off by not taking much damage and not bothering with encounter spells.
anyway, doesn’t matter. I just meant to improve my campaign a bit 😀
Friday, April 24, 2009, 5:11:51 AM
Scott W.
…not to be a dick or anything. I know, I know, different playstyles. It’s a shame how divisive this whole edition thing has been.
Thursday, April 23, 2009, 5:23:38 PM
Scott W.
1. Forgotten Realms stuff? True. If you don’t allow swordmages, twenty-seven pages of Arcane Power will be useless to you. If you ignore every dark-associated power because it debuted in the FRPG, you can scratch off roughly another two pages. This is indeed a shame.
As for the “core” discussion, see above regarding suits and marketers. Utter nonsense, best ignored entirely just like most of the marketing-speak rubbish that gets printed.
2. “Improved class”? Please. In the same way that illusion powers are an “improved class” for the wizard. Broken pact ability? Just… no. Theoretically, a Dark Pact warlock could deal 24d6 damage to someone… if he first managed to curse and then deal the killing blow to twenty-four enemies, while the fight is going on, and then at the end of all that somehow induce the final target into attacking him.
Under any sort of normal circumstances this whole setup would take something like twenty-four rounds, assuming you have twenty-five enemies, you can defeat twenty-four of them without any trouble, and that the twenty-fifth one is obliging enough to just ignore you and everyone else while you go through this ridiculous procedure… instead of, say, attacking the guy you actually want to kill right away and probably dealing somewhere in the range of 30d6+50 damage to him over that timespan.
[We should take this to a forum somewhere. These little tiny comment boxes make me claustrophobic.]
Thursday, April 23, 2009, 5:21:44 PM
AzaLiN
Oh, speaking of core:
The new arcane power book, a theoretically general expansion, assumes your using forgotten realms material for a lot of the content. Theres an improved class for a warlock using a broken FR pact ability that let him do 24d6 damage to an enemy at level 1. I don’t think core is a meaningful term in 4E as long as the book was one of the monthly publications by WoTC.
Thursday, April 23, 2009, 4:16:57 PM
AzaLiN
hardline 4e supporters
They spend, and I know you might not believe this, but its true- they spend an average of an hour a day, sometimes 3, playing with the character creator planning out their 4E characters till level 30, and versions of them, and alt-characters just for fun; they know every magic item near their level they might want, they know which unreleased books they want…
I don’t really have the heart to take it away from them. I actually have the 3E books on a shelf in the hallway Smile
I did some calculating: based on the speed of levelups, if i continue my campaign at the current pace, or even half pace, they’ll be 5-10 levels too high by act 5! grarrrr! One of them asked me to double xp rewards yesterday (btw: not a chance)
Thursday, April 23, 2009, 4:15:09 PM
Pathos
@AzaLiN
Why exactly do you not have the option of running 3E? Is it because you don’t have the books, or because your players are hardline 4e supporters, because if it’s the latter you could always do what I do as a DM in those situations…let them know if they don’t want to play the system I’m running, one of them is certainly welcome to take over DMing duties. You’ll be suprised how quickly most players will change their tune.
Thursday, April 23, 2009, 11:39:51 AM
tussock
-healing surges
Target the healer, same as always. Beetween fights, don’t let them rest every single time. You can especially throw runs of easy fights at them, or split a hard one into waves.
-encounter scaling that makes easy and hard encounters impractical and painful
Watch your monster levels don’t go above the party average, especially for soldiers, elites, and solos. Add more monsters of the same or lower level to make encounters harder. Swap in a few mooks one for one to make fights easier. Don’t use more than one controller. Have the monsters retreat once their team’s controller, artillery, or brute is down, have lurkers and skirmishers retreat when hurt.
-an avenger who swore
The oath of ganking? They’re one foe at a time type guys. Ignore the flavour text, the rules don’t even try to support it. For fun, have the guy they target run away. Ho ho ho.
-dependence on a large number of magic items
Yes, though you can do without by fighting lower level monsters, by about 1/5.
-no spells…
Mmm. Cut the price on rituals? 1/10?
Thursday, April 23, 2009, 5:16:45 AM
AzaLiN
Any advice for a DM who doesn’t have the option of switching from 4E to 3E? The campaign is going well, its just that the mechanics have shut down the type of game I intended to run…
Here’s the culprits:
-healing surges
-encounter scaling that makes easy and hard encounters impractical and painful
-an avenger who swore an oath of enmity against a sleeping stranger and ‘avenged’ (?) him for the gold he was carrying (evil avenger, but what the hell is he avenging and why can he swear 6 oaths per combat?)
-dependence on a large number of magic items
-no spells… just fireballs for my npcs and crappy, overpriced, too-high-level-for-them-to-use rituals.
LoL
Thursday, April 23, 2009, 3:35:14 AM
Scott W.
Speaking as a raging 4e fan, I have to admit that they do have a serious problem with the suits-and-marketers mindset right now. Particularly Bill Slavicsek. I’m unpleasantly surprised to learn that he actually has an important position at Wizards; I had assumed that he was an incompetent marketing goon (or at least that one is his ghostwriter), and am in the habit of skipping a page or three whenever he starts writing.
It’s not that he’s a suit and a shill. That’s not so bad. The problem is that he’s unforgivably bad at it, to the point where reading him diminishes my enjoyment of what are actually good products.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009, 8:02:43 PM
Tetsubo
That isn’t be cynical. That’s being observant.
This is how suits and marketers think.
I do not approve.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 6:43:52 AM
Leland J. Tankersley
> “Our goal is to do X. And in order to do X, we’re going to do not-X.”
Looked at cynically (and IMO it’s hard to go too far wrong doing that, regardless of the domain), one might imagine this translates to:
“Our goal is to make money. And in order to make money, we’re going to try to get as many people as possible to buy our latest product. One of the ways we will do this is by trying to link this new product in our potential customers’ minds with something else that was popular with them, whether or not that comparison holds up to close scrutiny. Most people don’t think that critically about claims in introductions, anyway.”
Monday, April 20, 2009, 8:55:24 PM
Tetsubo
4E: Not-D&D.
That’s beautiful man…
*sniff*
Saturday, April 18, 2009, 4:33:04 AM
Charles
not-D&D. I can’t stop giggling.
Friday, April 17, 2009, 6:16:09 PM
tussock
What the hell’s it got to do with the evolution of “the D&D game” anyway? Looks just like the old Book of Lairs stuff.
Well, looking deeper, it’s lacking a bit. Both give some detailed background, but here’s the comparative setups for PCs.
DD: The PCs are asked by the mayor to find out what happened to the two militia members.
BoL2: * A wave of thefts as well as an outbreak of disappearances of young women has been linked to a pack of rowdies who moved into a building at the edge of town. Authorities have been unable to get near the old place to question anyone.
* An old lady keeps complaining about the noise coming from the winery near her home. Raucous shouts, arguments, weird howling merciful Zorb, it’s enough to drive a body to refuge in the temple! Those city guardsmen, she’s complained to them over and over. “But they won’t do a thing about it,” she says. “Everybody knows they’re practically owned by the merchants, and they won’t do a thing unless you wave money at them.”
* “No, really! I heard inhuman screechin’ comin’ from yon buildin’ i’ the dark o’ last night. I tell ye, ’tis haunted! Haunted, an’ I’ll have none of it! Mark me, the property values are sure to plummet if somethin’ isn’t done.”
Three clues, cool.
The rest of the DD format is readaloud text that instructs the players who’s attacking them this time, huge stat blocks, a short table of local DCs for each battle, and some tiny battlemaps.
BoL meanwhile is thousands of words of descriptive text, personalised items, and a scant few lines of stats, on 1-2 pages rather than 6-8 for similar content in DD.
DD’s conclusions may as well not be there. Oh how far the mighty have fallen.
Friday, April 17, 2009, 10:17:03 AM
Chris
It worries me if Mr S. actually thinks that Dungeon Delve (which sounds more like TSR’s old 2E Treasure Maps set) captures the magic he’s talking about. Huge cognitive dissonance is HUEG!
Friday, April 17, 2009, 6:31:52 AM
Randolpho
Aww, man. I was hoping for, you know, a new Undermountain.
Ah, well.
Thursday, April 16, 2009, 9:15:41 PM
Iron Mongler
They should really expand on what is defined as ‘core’ or not. Players handbooks, monster manuals, and DMG’s should be obvious. Dungeon Delve though? Who actually needs that?
(The whole ‘not-dnd’ stuff is another argument for another day; I can at least agree with you on your dislike of this book’s design philosophy).
Thursday, April 16, 2009, 8:23:33 PM
Sideshow
I believe “core” may now be used to mean “setting-free”. So products specifically for the Forgotten Realms or Eberron are not core.
Thursday, April 16, 2009, 5:17:09 PM