REFERENCE MAP – PLAYERS DO NOT LOOK!

The rest of you may want to open that up in a separate tab or window.

An effective megadungeon has three basic components:

1. A map.

2. A starting map key.

3. Wandering monster tables.

The map should be large and thoroughly xandered. Xandering is crucial in a campaign megadungeon because of the complex and dynamic environment it provides: Players need to be free to choose different experiences each time they return to the dungeon. If you force them to trudge down the exact same path each time, the dungeon will have no effective replay value.

The map key should be flavorful and interesting. It will be frequently rewritten, but the starting key should provide a strong foundation for you to build on and a rich soil in which the dungeon can grow. Most old school bloggers I’ve seen tend to advocate minimalistic keys that tend to de-emphasize memorable geography. (For example, the Castle of the Mad Archmage contains key entries like “ORC SERGEANT. (8 h.p.) armed with sword and flail. He has 12 e.p.” and “SECRET CHAMBER. Great skeleton (3 HD, 15 h.p., turns as a ghoul, otherwise as a normal skeleton). Small locked chest holds 75 g.p.”) But I disagree with this approach: The monsters in the dungeon are ephermeral. It’s the geography that’s going to stick around. Minimalist keys are fine, but use them to make memorable locales. (Check out my Halls of the Mad Mage for my own efforts to use a minimalistic key to create interesting locations.)

Wandering monster tables have generally gotten a bad rap in many modern gaming circles. They’re generally considered to be “wasted time”. But when properly employed, wandering monster tables are improv tools and low-tech procedural content generators. (See Breathing Life Into the Wandering Monster for a deeper look at how this works in practice.) Wandering monsters also play an important part in maintaining proper pacing throughout the dungeon complex and help to make the complex “come alive”. In all of these functions, wandering monster tables are playing a vital role in preventing the megadungeon from becoming a place that can be “cleared out”.

Caverns of Thracia, of course, provides all three of these essential elements: Although the reference map I’m using for this essay shows only the small, specific section of the dungeon complex I’ll be discussing in detail, there are, for example, three completely separate entrances into the caverns and the delves described below represent only a fraction of the sessions I’ve run there. Similarly, Jennell Jaquays’ map key positively drips with detail — the unique characters of the Caverns of Thracia seem to ooze out of every room description. Jaquays also provides detailed and dynamic wandering monster tables.

THE FOUNDATION

Let’s start with the basics. Looking at our reference map, allow me to present a very simplified/summarized version of the pertinent map key:

1. Walls once painted in brightly color murals. Now home to several hundred bats. The floor is covered a couple feet deep in bat guano.
2. Columned hall. More bats and guano.
3. Ruined statue, digging rubble pile turns up the face of Athena. More bats.
4. Ruined statue of a winged figure. Giant centipedes (x19).
5. Ruined statues reduced to complete rubble. Lizardmen hunting party (x4).
6. Spear trap.
7. Anubian Guardpost. (x6)
8. Sloping passage.

42. Rubble-filled cavern. Colony of rats in rubble (raise alarm if disturbed).
43. Guardpost and Pit Traps. Anubians (x4). One of the pits leads to a sub-level with a small, hibernating dragon.

In addition, the module provides two wandering monster tables — one for Level One and one for Level Two. There is a 1 in 10 chance per turn of generating an encounter.

Simple enough, right?

Now, let me show you how I’ve used these simple tools to run 20-30 hours of high quality gaming.

DELVE ONE and DELVE TWO

The first delve is pretty simple and by the book: The PCs entered the dungeon, held their noses at wading through bat dung as they headed through areas 1-3. They found the lizardmen in area 5 who were nursing a comrade who had been injured by the centipedes in area 4 (as described in the adventure key). They killed the lizardmen and then entered area 4 to fight the centipedes themselves. After a nasty fight, they spiked the door shut, dragged the corpses of the centipedes that they had killed out of the dungeon, and returned to the jungle. That night they feasted that night on roasted centipede meat.

When they returned to the dungeon the next day I generated a surface encounter using the Level One wandering monster tables. It turned out to be a rather tough one, featuring a minotaur along with half a dozen dog-faced anubians. What were they doing there? Guarding the entrance. The party’s wizard tried to use a sleep spell, but it failed spectacularly. He ran back to where the others were waiting, but they all dithered long enough for the minotaur to reach them and then it turned rather abruptly into a TPK.

The heads of the PCs were placed on pikes outside the dungeon entrance (where they remain to this day).

DELVE THREE

The players rolled up new characters and ended up entering the dungeon through a different entrance. A few sessions later, however, a different set of PCs returned to this area. They discovered a half dozen anubians (minus the minotaur) standing guard at the entrance. (Another random encounter, which also slotted naturally into the “guarding this entrance” concept.) This time the battle went much better for the heroes and they were able to clear away the freshly positioned guards.

Downstairs they returned to area 3. They could hear noises coming from behind the door to area 5 and saw that the door to area 4 had been spiked shut. They tried to ambush the anubians in area 5 (which had been generated from the wandering monster tables), but the door squeaked when they tried to open it and the anubians were warned. Despite this, they dispatched the anubians.

With their backs secure, they carefully pried up the spikes. Somebody scooped up some bat guano in a skull and tried to use it to grease the hinges and then they threw open the door.

Angry red centipedes looked up at them.

They slammed the door shut and spiked it again.

Exploring the room where the anubians had been, they found the secret door. They turned left, through area 8, and down to the second level.  They fought some giant rats in area 42, spotted the guards in area 43, and decided to retreat back to the first level and finish it off.

There they fought and killed the anubians in area 7, looted the treasure chest, spiked the door shut from the inside, and spent the night. In the morning there was a loud buzzing coming from outside the door, which turned out to be stirges which were feeding on the corpses they had left outside the door the night before. (The stirges were a wandering encounter; I figured feasting on corpses made the most sense given the circumstances.)

DELVE FOUR

The PC who had been mapping in the previous delve sold their maps to a newly formed adventuring party for a percentage of the treasure liberated on their expedition. (The player of the PC who owned the maps couldn’t play that night.)

This group returned to the tunnels and finished exploring this section of the first level. An elf in the party detected the secret door hidden behind some plaster at area 9A, but when they discovered that the inscription on the door read: “KNOW YE THAT BEYOND THIS PORTAL LIES THE DEMESNE OF THANATOS, THE CURSED, HATER OF LIFE, GOD OF DEATH. SEEK NOT TO PASS THIS GATE FOR IT LEADS ONLY TO HIS BOSOM.” They decided that discretion was the better part of valor and left it alone.

But what the party was really here for was to push through the guard outpost on Level 2. Down they went and got into a huge melee with the anubians. (Complicated by a wandering monster encounter that reinforced the guard post.) During the fight, one of the PCs fell down one of the pits depicted on the map… which led to a chamber where a small dragon was hibernating. (This was all according to the map key.)

There was some abrupt panic, but the PCs rallied and actually managed to kill the dragon. (They were very excited about that.) In the pit they found several ancient Thracian artifacts, which they hauled back to town and sold for a tidy profit. (It was at this point that Himbob Jimblejack bought up all the garlic futures in town and set up his monopoly on garlic sales.)

FIRST DESIGN INTERLUDE

Up until this point, things may seem fairly standard. I haven’t really deviated from or supplemented the original dungeon key. But the one key factor to note here is the effect that random encounters have had on the game. Half of the combat encounters have been with randomly generated encounters:

KEYED ENCOUNTERS

• Lizardmen (Area 5)
• Centipedes (Area 4)
• Anubian Guardpost (Area 7)
• Lower Anubian Guardpost (Area 43)
• Dragon (Area 43)

GENERATED ENCOUNTERS

• Minotaurs + Anubian Guards (Delve 2)
• Anubian Guards (Delve 3)
• Anubian Guards in Area 5 (Delve 3)
• Giant Rats (Delve 3)
• Stirges (Delve 3)

At this point, these generated encounters have accomplished three things.

First, they have slowed the pace of the PCs exploring the dungeon. By providing an additional ablative layer, they have prevented the PCs from delving as far into the dungeon as they otherwise would have been able to. This puts a premium on exploration — their knowledge of the deeper complex is hard-earned and, thus, more appreciated. (Of course, this also presumes that there are interesting and cool things to find down there in the first place. Fortunately, the Caverns of Thracia provide that.)

Second, they prevent a “return to save point” mentality. You can’t just leave the dungeon, come back at a later date, and pick up where you left off. Permanently clearing a section of the dungeon is hard work, and it’s not particularly permanent. (There are not guarantees that something won’t wander back in or that deeper denizens won’t extend their guard perimeter.) This provides a drive to “push on a little farther” because they know that they’ll have to fight hard just to get back to where they are now.

Third, they are keeping this section of the dungeon fresh. In many ways, it really is a completely new dungeon crawl every time they go in. But, on the other hand, their preexisting knowledge of the geography of the place is a reward in itself. (“Oh, I know how to get past these guys. There’s a secret passage a couple chambers to the west that we can use to bypass them.”) That this knowledge is valuable to them is proven by the fact that they were willing to pay cold, hard cash for it.

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at the next step in managing your megadungeon…

Go to Part 2

I wasn’t planning on doing this, but almost immediately after writing about my first set of rulebook woes with Castle Ravenloft I ended up playing the solo scenario “Adventure: Impossible” and running headlong into two particularly egregious problems.

First, a quick description of the “Adventure: Impossible” scenario: In the scenario you play each of the five Heroes in the game sequentially as they enter Castle Ravenloft’s dungeons in order to defeat 3 of Strahd’s powerful lieutenants. (Which three is randomly determined before the game begins and revealed as you play.) When one hero dies, the next hero arrives.

(Minor problem: The scenario doesn’t specify what happens to the dead Hero’s treasure. It also doesn’t specify what happens to the monsters which were controlled by the dead Hero. I arbitrarily ruled that the dead Hero’s treasure disappeared, but that their monster control cards and traps transferred to the new character.)

The scenario wasn’t going too badly for me until I got an Alarm trap. These traps generate a new monster every single turn until they’re disabled… and I could never get the damn thing disabled. My fighter failed to disable it twice and was then killed. He was replaced by the rogue, who has a +5 bonus to disabling traps (and thus has an 80% chance of success). The rogue failed three times, but was then fortunate enough to get teleported to the far side of the dungeon by an Encounter card. A few turns later, this was my predicament:

The Alarm trap was still spitting out monsters, all of which were pouring across the dungeon towards me. At this point I had killed one of Strahd’s lieutenants and was now engaging Klak. Klak’s appearance was actually quite lucky in some respects because he would cause unexplored tiles to flip over, which gave me room to continue moving away from the monsters pursuing me and, thus, enough time to kill Klak before they reached me.

PLACING MONSTERS

Here, however, we run into our first rulebook woe. The rule for placing Monsters reads:

When you have to “place a Monster” this is shorthand for draw a Monster Card and place the corresponding Monster figure on the bone pile that’s on the Dungeon Tile you just placed. If you already have the same Monster Card in play in front of you, discard that Monster Card and draw again. Note, however, that it’s okay to draw a Monster Card if another player has the same Monster in play.

(Minor problem: You will often be told to “place a Monster” in situations where you haven’t just placed a Dungeon Tile, so the first sentence is actually misleading in addition to being ungrammatical. But that’s just a quibble, really.)

The question becomes: What happens when you already have one copy of every single Monster Card in the game? Should multiple Monsters now be allowed? Or is it now impossible for new Monsters to appear? And if it’s impossible for new Monsters to appear, should I cycle through the entire deck?

I ask that last question, because the game is also unclear on what you should do when you get to the bottom of a deck of cards. Should you reshuffle the discards? Or have you simply depleted the dungeon of Monsters? (I think the answer here is pretty obviously “reshuffle”, but once again we’re seeing the sloppiness of the rulebook.)

In terms of whether or not Monsters should be drawn when you already have one copy of each Monster Control card, I see three possibillities:

(1) You don’t draw any additional monsters. (This is the most literal interpretation of the rules; it is also the most favorable to the players.)

(2) Draw an additional control card to determine what type of monster to place, place it, but then place the extra control card under the existing control card. The new monster will still be activated by the control card already in your hand. If one of these monsters is killed, remove one control card to your XP pile normally while leaving the other in play. (This allows new monsters to continue entering play, but doesn’t result in a single player activating the same monster multiple times on their turn.)

(3) Draw an additional control card, place the monster, and resolve the additional control card normally. (This is the most punitive possibility, since it means that the active player will be activating those monsters twice.)

I decided to go with the first possibility in thie scenario, largely because the alternative was pretty much certain death. In the future, however, I might actually use a house rule in which scenario #2 is always used when a duplicate control card is drawn. It might make the game slightly more difficult, but in a way that I feel would be more enjoyable and universally consistent.

TACTICAL FAIL

In any case, I’d managed to kill Klak, but the monsters were still coming.

oh shit…

I had them strung out pretty well so that I could take them one at a time, but the problem was that as soon as I killed one of them the Alarm trap would immediately respawn them. And I couldn’t keep that up indefinitely because the encounters would slowly whittle me away.

But then I got lucky and pulled a treasure that would let me teleport all the way back to the other side of the board where I could deactivate the Alarm trap.

… instead I missed the die roll three more times.

(If you’re keeping track at home, I have now missed the die roll seven times. One of these had a 55% chance of success and the others all had an 80% chance of success, meaning that there’s only a 0.002% chance that something like this could happen.)

I’m now down to 1 hp and the monsters are closing in, but I have a clever scheme which will allow me to circle around a corridor loop in the randomly generated dungeon, pull the monsters away from the Alarm trap, and give me one more shot at disabling the thing.

… except for the encounter card which teleported a spider right next to me for a guaranteed kill.

At this point, the cleric — my last Hero in the scenario — teleports in and makes a beeline for the Alarm trap. Once there, he proceeds to blow his disarm roll three more times. (I am officially done calculating the probability on this one.)

With more monsters closing in, the cleric fled down the hall, where he promptly discovered the Zombie Dragon (Strahd’s third lieutenant) lurking in a the Rotting Nook:

This does not look good.

And here, as the Zombie Dragon pins me in the corner, we reach our second rulebook woe. When a monster activates, you are supposed to check the Monster Tactics listed on their control card. The rules for this are:

• The Monster’s tactics are presented as a list. Each possible maneuver for the Monster starts with a statement. If that statement is true, the Monster follows the resulting tactics.
• If the statement is not true, go on to the next statement. If that statement is true, the Monster follows the resulting tactics.
• Once a Monster has selected and followed one set of tactics, the Monster’s turn ends. Do not continue to check its remaining tactics that turn.

What these rules fail to address is a situation in which a tactics statement is true, but the resulting tactics cannot be executed. For example, in the picture above my cleric is boxed into the corner by a skeleton and the Zombie Dragon. As a result, there are no adjacent spaces open next to the cleric. You can see just beyond the Zombie Dragon that there is a wolf and a spider waiting to pounce me. The wolf’s tactics read:

• If the Wolf is adjacent to a Hero, it attacks that Hero with a bite.
• If the Wolf is within 2 tiles of a Hero, it moves adjacent to the closest Hero and attacks that Hero with a pounce.
• Otherwise, the Wolf moves 2 tiles toward the closest Hero.

The first line doesn’t apply since the Wolf isn’t adjacent. The second line does apply (the Wolf is within 2 tiles of the cleric), but it can’t move adjacent. Does that mean it doesn’t attack at all? And, if so, should I instead execute the third line of the Wolf’s tactics? What if this wasn’t a solo scenario and the closest Hero was boxed in but there was another Hero within range who wasn’t? Should the Wolf attack the available target or freeze-up on the unavailable target?

Then consider that the spider’s tactics unambiguously trigger a web attack. (“If the Spider is within 1 tile of a Hero, it attacks the closest Hero with an acidic web.”) But the spider’s web attack is a +11 attack with the effect, “1 [damage] and Slowed. Place the Spider adjacent to the Hero.” Should the spider deal damage and then not move? Or is the entire effect canceled since part of it can’t apply?

What would probably be useful is a general rule for handling occupied spaces. Maybe something like, “If a Monster must move to or appear in a particular space and all possible spaces are occupied, the monster instead moves to an adjacent space.” This doesn’t necessarily clear up the question of whether or not the Wolf would be allowed to attack even though they didn’t get adjacent to their target, but it would help.

It would also clear up another issue with the “place a Monster” rules: What happens if the bone pile is already occupied by another monster? (Since many monsters won’t move when they appear and several encounters spawn multiple monsters, this situation actually crops up quite frequently.) We’ve been playing with the “place them in an adjacent space” rule since it obviously makes the most sense.

A couple days ago I posted my first thoughts on the Castle Ravenloft boardgame. One of the things I mentioned was the horrific quality of the rulebook. Today I want to expound upon that a little bit.

But first, let me mention how the session we played last night went: We had a couple of newbies at the table, so we started with Adventure 2: Find the Icon of Ravenloft. This is essentially the plain, vanilla version of the game. It’s a good way to get introduced to the basic gameplay, and then wraps up with a climactic fight in the Chapel. We were able to conserve our big AoE attacks until reaching the Chapel, but then two bad Encounter draws ended up teleporting two of our Heroes to opposite ends of the dungeon while spawning even more monsters. With a good deal of scrambling, however, we were able to strand a gargoyle, reconcentrate the enemies, and then blast our way out of the castle.

Good times.

We then moved to Adventure 9: Gauntlet of Terror. In this scenario the layout of the dungeon is largely predetermined at the beginning of play and groups of monsters are moving towards the dungeon’s entrance, seeking to escape and ransack the village. This adventure completely inverts the strategy of the game in almost every way.

The first time we played it, we screwed up the respawning rules for the monsters. Then a couple of players left and a new player showed up and we played through it a second time using all of the rules correctly. Both plays were great fun, with quite a few really tense moments. (Including one memorable turn where we ended up semi-intentionally spawning 7 monsters at the same time.)

I’ve now played the game a total of 18 times. It continues to deliver a consistently fun experience.

THE RULEBOOK

With that being said, I now want to discuss the inadequacies of the rulebook in a bit more detail. To quickly sum up the problem: Castle Ravenloft pretty much can’t be played without house-ruling nearly every facet of the game.

EXAMPLE 1: IMMOBILIZATION

The complete rules for the Immobilized condition read: “If your Hero is Immobilized, your Speed is reduced to 0 — you can’t move!”

Okay, that means that you can’t use a Move action to move (since your Speed has been reduced to 0). But can you still use At-Will, Utility, or Daily powers that allow you to move? What if another character uses a power that would move you… is that allowed? What if an encounter card is triggered with a trap-like effect that would ordinarily force you to move — does the Immobilized condition prevent that movement, too? What if the effect in question doesn’t use the word “move” to describe the positional change, should that be allowed?

For example, here’s the text from the Overwhelming Terror encounter card: “Place each Hero 2 tiles closer to the Start tile. If a Hero is on the same tile as a Monster after being placed, that Hero is slowed.”

Should Overwhelming Terror move an Immobilized Hero to a new tile? Does the flavor text (“A cacophony of shrieks and howls rises up around you, and you flee in terror.“) change your opinion?

If they aren’t moved, do you still check to see if they are slowed? And if you do, do you use the tile they’re currently on or the tile they would have been placed on if they were moved?

Okay, let’s consider Strahd’s Minions: “Place the active Hero and the two Monsters that are closest to that Hero on the tile farthest from the active Hero. If there are less than two Monsters in play, place a new Monster adjacent to the active Hero after he or she is placed.”

If an Immobilized Hero isn’t placed on a new tile, should you still move the monsters? And if not, should you draw a new monster if there are less than two in play? (After all, there is no “after he or she is placed” if the Hero was never placed.)

Should an immobilized rogue be allowed to move as part of their Deft Strike ability? (“Before the attack, you can move 2 squares. Attack one adjacent Monster.”) If not, should the immobilized rogue be allowed to move when the cleric uses Hallowed Advance? (“Hit or miss, each other Hero can move one tile.”) If not, can the fighter use Bodyguard when the immobilized rogue is attacked? (“The attack misses instead, and you swap positions with the Hero that was attacked.”) Can the fighter use Bodyguard if the fighter is the one who’s been immobilized?

In order to have a nice, consistent ruling for being immobilized, our table has been playing “Immobilized” to mean:

(1) The immobilized Hero cannot change their own location through the use of any action or power. Any other power, ability, or effect which would change the immobilized Hero’s location takes effect normally — including other Heroes using their powers, attacks from Villains and Monsters, and Encounter cards.

But other reasonable interpretations could include:

(2) “Immobilized” simply reduces the Hero’s speed to 0. Any effect (including their own powers) which allows a Hero to move without taking a Move action can be performed normally.

(3) An immobilized Hero “cannot move”. Nothing will cause them to leave they’re currently standing in.

(4) 4th Edition’s definition of Immobilized: “You can’t move from your space, although you can teleport and can be forced to move by a pull, a push, or a slide.”

Since forced movement isn’t defined as part of the Castle Ravenloft rules (and “pull, “push”, and “slide” are terms of art which are not used), this would still leave gray areas. But you could try to formalize something close to it by saying:

(5) An immobilized Hero has a speed of 0 and cannot move using a Move action. A Hero cannot use any of their own abilities to move. (Exception: The eladrin’s Fey Step ability can be used normally.) Any ability or effect which says that a Hero “may” or “can” change their position cannot be used by the Hero. Abilities or effects which do not give the Hero a choice in whether or not to move affect an immobilized Hero normally.

Of course, each of these variant interpretations result in significantly different gameplay. And many of them don’t provide clear guidance in resolving the tack-on issues of effects like Strahd’s Minions. (One of the reasons we use the interpretation we do is because it doesn’t have any gray areas in resolving abilities or powers found in the game. It may occasionally give “illogical” results based on the flavor text, but it can be applied with absolute consistency.)

EXAMPLE 2: GAUNTLET OF TERROR

Adventure 9: Gauntlet of Terror, like most of the adventures in the game, introduces several scenario-specific rules. For example:

When an active Hero moves within 1 tile of a tile with a face-down Monster token on it, or onto a tile with a face-down Monster token on it, flip that token over.

Seems simple enough. But does that mean that a Hero can avoid flipping Monster tokens by simply not moving on their turn? And if that’s the case, then we’ve also re-opened the whole “what counts as a move?” can of worms. Are we only talking about Move actions? What if you take a Move action (which may or may not be mandated by the game) but move 0 spaces? Or use your Move action to do something other than move? What if you’re immobilized?

And so forth.

(We interpreted this rule as, “If the active Hero is within 1 tile of a face-down Monster token or on the same tile as a Monster token at any point during their Hero phase, flip that token over.”

This seems to match the intention of the rule as written, but may be a distortion if “move” should be interpreted to include movement from Encounter cards (which are drawn after the active player’s Hero phase is completed). On the other hand, if we changed the rule to read “if the active Hero is within 1 tile of a face-down Monster token (…) at any point during their turn” we end up with a different kind of distortion because the Monster tokens can also be moved within range during their turn but after the Hero has moved. The rules as written clearly don’t suggest those tokens should be flipped over… but maybe they should? I don’t know.)

Complicating this, here’s another example from the same scenario:

Discard the token [you flipped over]. Then place a new Monster token from the box top face down on any tile (except for the Start tile) that doesn’t have a Monster token on it.

Does that mean we can place a Monster token on the same tile as the Monster token we just flipped over? And, if so, should we immediately flip it over again?

Another point of confusion: The rule as written reads, “When an active Hero moves within 1 tile (…) or onto a tile.” That’s a strange way of writing it because “within 1 tile” is interpreted consistently elsewhere in the game to include the tile you’re on. It’s probably just needless redundancy, but should it be interpreted to mean that “within 1 tile” doesn’t include “the tile the Monster token is on” in this particular case? If so, does that mean if you start your turn on a tile with a Monster token on it that you can actually move around on that tile without flipping the token over (since you wouldn’t be moving onto the tile)? Or even move diagonally off the tile (which would result in you being two tiles away and never “within 1 tile” due to the tile-counting rules)?

Final example:

Shuffle the Dungeon Tile stack and take out 15 tiles. One at a time, each player takes a turn placing one of those tiles adjacent to the unexplored edge that it closest to the Start tile until all 15 tiles have been placed.

This rule is problematic because it doesn’t tell you how to orient the tiles you’re placing. Since the monsters and monster tokens in the scenario follow the arrows on the tiles, the vagueness of the rule technically allows the players to construct a board in which all of the monsters move away from the Start tile (making the scenario ridicuously easy).

THE NEED FOR A REVISED RULEBOOK

Needless to say, these radically different interpretations and/or patchings of the rulebook are not trivial matters in terms of gameplay.

For example, if Monster tokens can be placed on the same tile you just removed a Monster token from and they can be triggered as you place them, you can actually end up in scenarios where all the remaining monsters in the game spontaneously generate.

On the other hand, consider the difference between (1) “characters moving as a result of encounter cards flip a monster token” and (2) “characters only flip monster tokens while using a Move action” when dealing with an encounter card like Strahd’s Minions (“Place the active Hero and the two Monsters that are closest to that Hero on the tile farthest from the active Hero. If there are less than two Monsters in play, place a new Monster adjacent to the active Hero after he or she is placed.”).

In the first scenario, you end up with a situation where a Hero can be teleported to the far side of the board and immediately spawn multiple monster tokens which will (probably) all attack them simultaneously on the same turn.

In the second scenario, however, the Hero is stranded in a far corner of the dungeon surrounded by prowling monsters, allowing the other players to move the monster tokens away from their location and prevent the mass-spawning which would otherwise occur on their next turn.

Off-hand, I can’t tell you which one makes for the more interesting game; nor can I tell you which one makes for a more balanced game; nor can I tell you which one the designers (Mike Mearls and Peter Lee) intended me to play.

And these are not isolated problems. Both the Rulebook and the Adventure Book are filled to the brim with this kind of vagueness and inaccuracy. I can’t really classify this as bad game design (I’m pretty certain the underlying design is actually quite robust and thoroughly playtested). It’s atrocious rules-writing, not bad rules-design.

But given this woeful shortcoming in the game, it’s surprising that Wizard’s response to the problem has been an overwhelming and deafening silence: No errata. No FAQ. No official clarification or support of any kind.

So, to conclude: Fun game. Very much worth grabbing a copy of. But be prepared to put in a little sweat equity to make the game function properly.

Go to Castle Ravenloft: More Rulebook Woes

When I first started playing roleplaying games, way back in elementary school, I used to play RPGs all the time. As I got older, of course, gaming became a bit scarcer. There were times when I didn’t have anyone to play with at all. But even when I did, it became tougher to coordinate schedules; tougher to find the free time even in my own schedule.

For the past few years I’ve been lucky enough to have a regular gaming group. But regular for us has usually meant averaging about two sessions a month. And it’s not just that I was in a completely different ballpark from the days when we would play every lunch hour… it’s that I was playing a completely different sport.

And I figured that was just the way things had to be. As we get older, after all, time becomes more precious.

But over the past year or so, I’ve realized that while I’ll probably never get back to that “every lunch hour” ballpark, it actually is possible to start playing the same sport again.

THE WAY WE PLAY

The ballpark/sport analogy is actually rather apt because what I’ve realized is that my schedule wasn’t the only thing that’s changed over the years. I’ve fundamentally changed the way I play roleplaying games. And while I did it for all the right reasons, I’m pretty sure now that I threw the baby out with the bathwater.

To understand what I mean, let me cast your thoughts back to that time when I used to game all the time: Lunch hour (or any other snatch of free time) would roll around and we’d pull out our D&D manuals and our character sheets. One of us would volunteer to DM and that guy would grab whatever dungeon he was currently working on (or he had just read through) and we would start playing. Eventually lunch hour would come to an end and we’d pack up our things. And the next time we played, we’d either continue exploring that same dungeon or we’d start exploring some other dungeon (possibly with a completely different DM). Maybe we’d use the same characters; maybe we’d have rolled up a new character or feel in the mood to play somebody else from our stable. Whatever worked, we did it.

Compare and contrast with the way my regular gaming group plays: At the beginning of each month, I send out an e-mail listing the best days that I’m free this month for gaming. I wait for everybody to reply back. Hopefully a couple of those days will be free for all of us, but if they don’t then I’ll go to the second best dates and start wrangling. Eventually we’ll have a couple of days scheduled. But if a conflict comes up, then we’ll need to cancel that session.

Other groups may have a larger tolerance for handling one or two missing PCs, but I don’t think I’m in error when I say that this is the way most people play RPGs now.

The important difference here is not our modern, adult, crowded schedules: It’s the fact that our games have become rigid affairs. The default mode of play is to gather a group of 5 or 6 people who plan to all get together on a regular or semi-regular basis for 10 or 20 or more 4-8 hour sessions.

THE COMMITMENT

The sheer level of commitment created by the now standard form of play is, in my opinion, huge.

For example, Expedition to Castle Ravenloft describes itself as “a mini-campaign lasting around fifteen to twenty sessions, or roughly five months of real time (assuming you play weekly)”.

This is not atypical. When you agree to join a typical campaign, you’re making a minimum commitment of 80 hours or more spread over months or years of your life. Dropping out or missing frequent sessions is usually considered bad form, since losing a player (and, therefore, their character) can be incredibly disruptive to the tightly woven continuity of the modern campaign.

This is the root of the “I can’t play because it’s too hard to find time for a roleplaying game” problem that many gamers face today. But there’s also another side to this problem: It becomes incredibly difficult to ask new players to join your game because of the huge commitment of time and focus you’re asking from them.

And this is particularly true if you’re talking about players who are completely new to roleplaying games because there’s really no way to judge whether they’ll like the game enough to want to commit a significant portion of their lives to it for the next year or more.

PLAYING CATCH

Let me put this another way. Imagine that you had never heard of baseball before and someone said, “Hey, wanna join a baseball team?”

“What’s that involve?” you ask.

“Well, we practice for 3 hours every Wednesday evening and we’ll have a game every Saturday afternoon for the next 7 months.”

You’d have to be really, really curious about baseball in order to take that guy up on his offer, right?

But, of course, that’s not how people get involved in baseball. Most people start playing baseball when somebody says, “Hey, wanna play catch?” And playing catch is easy. You pick up a ball and you throw it. And if you get bored, you put the ball down and you do something else. Some people, of course, will never pick that ball up again. But lots of people will find they like throwing the ball around, and some of those people will eventually find themselves agreeing to spend 300 hours every year participating in amateur baseball leagues.

Where’s the equivalent of “let’s play catch” in roleplaying games?

Well, it turns out I had the secret of it way back in elementary school. And then I forgot about it. I became myopically focused on how awesome a baseball league could be, and forgot that sometimes just throwing a ball back and forth can be fun, too. (And a lot easier to pull off.)

THE MEGADUNGEON

I rediscovered how to play catch in the Caverns of Thracia.

The Caverns of Thracia are an old school megadungeon designed by Jennell Jaquays. I’ve recounted some of the sessions I’ve run within its hallowed halls. I’ve also used it as the primary example of how to xander your dungeons. But it’s also taught me how the classic megadungeon campaign structure can be used to open up your game table and triple or quadruple your gaming.

The basic megadungeon campaign structure is pretty simple:

1. There’s a huge dungeon. So big that it can’t be cleared out in one or two or even a dozen gaming sessions. In fact, it’s so huge that the parts you’ve already cleared out will probably start repopulating with new monsters before you finish exploring the rest of it.

2. There’s a nearby “gold rush” town where PCs can form adventuring parties to explore the megadungeon.

3. At the end of each session, everybody heads back to town. At the start of the next session, a new adventuring party forms and heads back to the dungeon.

The last point is the the crucial one here: The megadungeon campaign structure fundamentally lends itself to variable playing groups. Who showed up for this week’s game? Which characters do they want to play? That’s your adventuring party for the week. Go!

This structure means that you don’t have to worry about wrangling schedules. Feel like playing on Thursday? Send out an e-mail saying, “We’re playing on Thursday. Who wants to come?”

It’s also incredibly easy to invite new players to join the game. Even if they only play the one time, they can have a great time without causing any disruption to “continuity”. In fact, if you can couple the megadungeon campaign structure to a fast-and-simple character creation system, it can be as easy to play a pick-up roleplaying game as it is pull a boardgame off the shelf.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Since putting a megadungeon back into my gaming repertory, I’ve radically increased the amount of roleplaying I’m doing. In fact, I can play now pretty much whenever I want to: I’ve got a mailing list of 30 players that I can send my invites out to, and from that list I’m almost guaranteed to get at least 3 or 4 people on any given night.

In the past year, I’ve also been able to play with a half dozen players completely new to roleplaying games and another half dozen players who hadn’t played in half a decade or more. (This is a large part of the reason why I have 30+ players on my mailing list now.)

With that being said, open table campaign structures are not the be-all and end-all of gaming. (Any more than catch is the be-all and end-all of playing baseball.) I’m still running my regular campaign, which has now reached its 60th session. And there’s a ton of depth, detail, and complexity in that dedicated campaign which is impossible to achieve in the loose style of the open table.

But, on the other hand, when I needed a replacement player for my regular campaign, I had developed a “stable” of players at my open table that made it easy to find a replacement.

The megadungeon, of course, is not the only form of play which can support this kind of open table. But it can be surprisingly hard, actually, to find the right mix of “I can GM this any time” and “the players can disengage at any time without making it difficult to pick things up again with a completely different group of players next week”. For example, for the past several months I’ve been trying to figure out how to build an open table campaign structure for Shadowrun… and pretty much failing. (A series of one-shots can work in a pinch, but they require a lot more prep work on the part of the GM and require a very precise sense of exactly how much gaming you can get done in a single evening.)

Another open table technique from my “golden age” of gaming was the use of multiple DMs all supporting the same stable of characters. In those elementary school games I used to be able to play the same cleric in Matt’s campaign, then take it over to Nick’s campaign, run it through Steve’s campaign, and then bring it back to Matt’s campaign without any problem. Haven’t really tried that lately, but I can’t see any reason why it can’t work now.

ADDITIONAL READING FOR OPEN TABLES
Open Table Manifesto
(Re-)Running the Megadungeon
Treasure Maps & The Unknown: Goals in the Megadungeon
Keep on the Borderlands: Factions in the Dungeon
The School of Turin: An Open Gaming Table in the Real World
Escaping the Dungeon

As I mentioned a couple days ago, the fun I’ve been having with the Castle Ravenloft board game has recently inspired me to read (or re-read) I6 Ravenloft and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. This has put me in the rather interesting position of comparing all three. And this has, in turn, forced me to ask a simple question:

Are we really this stupid?

Let me expand on that a little bit.

The Castle Ravenloft boardgame is a dungeon-crawler without a Dungeon Master. Out of necessity, therefore, it is forced to provide a “program” for each monster in the game. When the monster is activated, it simply follows the program and takes the actions described. It’s a relatively simple mechanic which provides some interesting strategic wrinkles. (Since you know what the monster will do when presented with a given set of stimuli, you can exert some degree of “control” over them in a semi-prescient fashion.)

That’s all fine. But let me give you a sampling of the text from the boardgame:

Place the Start tile on the table. Place each Hero on a square adjacent to the stairway on the Start Tile. When a Hero reveals the Laboratory […] place Klak on the bone pile.

(…)

If the Skeleton is adjacent to a Hero, it attacks that Hero with a scimitar. If the Skeleton is within 1 tile of a Hero, it moves adjacent to the closest Hero and attacks that Hero with a charging slice. Otherwise, the Skeleton moves 1 tile toward the closest hero.

And here’s some text from Expedition to Castle Ravenloft (pg. 32):

Have the players place their figures at the end of the tile, with the single circle closest to them and the other two farther away. Place a figure for Balam in the close circle.

(…)

On its turn, each zombie moves from its starting position toward the closest enemy it can attack. A zombie behind a door opens it as part of its first move action.

Both carcass eaters attack the closest PCs. If an adjacent character drops to -1 hit points or fewer for any reason, a carcass eater uses its rend fallen ability.

Is there a reason why we’re treating modern Dungeon Masters as if they were only barely more competent than an inanimate piece of cardboard?

Are we really this stupid?

ISOLATED ENCOUNTERS

Expedition to Castle Ravenloft was one of the earliest adventures to use the “delve format”. But this isn’t just a matter of growing pains: This kind of “so prepackaged you can just turn off your brain” method of designing encounters has remained a staple of WotC’s adventure design right up through today.

Conceptually, there’s one thing I really love about the delve format: Putting everything you need to run an encounter area in the description of the encounter area. That just makes good sense. But in practice, the delve format suffers from two problems:

First, it artificially isolates the “encounter”. This tends to fatally sabotage the entire point of the delve format to begin with.

For example, take encounter E6 in Expedition to Castle Ravenloft:

This encounter takes place the first time the PCs enter this crossroads from any direction.

Tactical Encounter: E6: Ghoul Foray on page 38.

Development: These ghouls are not part of the necromantic infection, but an independent pack of undead taking advantage of the chaos. After venturing out of the cemetery (area E8), the ghouls are moving from house to house in search of valuables and still-living creatures. They are upset by the quick conversion of zombie victims to yet more zombies, but they are so hungry that they consume even the rotting undead. They lust for fresh corpses.

That information is, in my opinion, rather crucial for running the encounter. Attempting to isolate a tactical encounter from the context in which that tactical encounter occurs, in my opinion, results in a very choppy, ineffective style of play.

But even if you moved that information into the tactical encounter itself, the problem still wouldn’t be solved because encounters shouldn’t be taking place in a physical vacuum. For example, encounter E6 here takes place just one block away from Barovia’s church, which is encounter E7. What happens if the battle with the ghouls goes poorly and the PCs decide to retreat towards the church? Now I’m forced to go back to the adventure key, reorient the encounter within the context of the other geographical features around it, and then flip to the delve format presentation of E7 in yet another section of the book.

Rather than making it easier for me to find all the information I need, you’ve got me flipping back and forth through the module just trying to orient myself.

(Most of these problems were solved by Keep on the Shadowfell, which simply keyed the adventure to the tactical encounters. But after Keep on the Shadowfell, Wizards went right back to doing it the broken way they’d been doing it before.)

THE PERFECT ENCOUNTER

The other problem with the delve format, in my opinion, is that it tends to encourage the unproductive false idol of the “perfect encounter”. (Partly because it isolates the encounter and partly because the format inherently forces all encounters to be designed to the same specs.) Each of these encounters is designed to be “perfectly balanced” with monsters who have been pre-selected, pre-positioned, and pre-programmed.

This tends to limit flexibility. You’ve invested a lot of preparation into carefully arranging the “perfect encounter” involving goblin bombadiers and guard drakes scurrying about a half-excavated room:

But if you have those goblin bombadiers respond to a cry for reinforcements from the goblins just down the hall, you’re throwing all of that preparation away.

Plus, when you’ve put this much effort into prepping an encounter, you can’t just let the PCs avoid it.

And, to make a long story short, that’s how you end up with adventure modules which are just long, linear strings of isolated, prepackaged encounters.

ENCOUNTERS ON THE FLY

The counter-argument, of course, is that encounters shouldn’t be boring.

I couldn’t agree more.

But I don’t think we need to try so hard. I think when the original Ravenloft module reads:

The maid, Helga, is a vampire who will attack the PCs only when an opportunity to do so without having to fight the entire party presents itself. She also attacks if commanded to do so by Strahd. Helga will join the party, if asked to. She claims to be the daughter of a villager, cruelly forced into service of the Strahd.

We don’t need a pregenerated tactical map showing where Helga is standing in room K32 with accompanying text telling the DM to have the players position their miniatures within 10 feet of the door when it opens in order to have an interesting encounter.

I think publishers can put a little more trust in DMs (and, as DMs, we can put a little more trust in ourselves). So that when we ask the question–

Are we really this stupid?

–the answer can be, “No. We’re not.”

And maybe that means the goblin bombadiers don’t lay an ambush in their excavated chamber. Maybe it means that the PCs end up barricading themselves in that chamber. Or the goblins all retreat into that chamber. Or the PCs return to find animated goblin zombies have been stationed in that chamber as guards.

Once you remove the shackles of believing that the “perfect encounter” can be predesigned, you’ll be tapping into the strength of the RPG medium in creating encounters which are perfect for your gaming group because they were created by your gaming group.