Skip to main content

Dungeon Delve: When First Rooms Are Last


Passion and tenacity. That's ninety percent of seeing projects like this through to completion. I'm nothing if not determined, so to that end, I organized yet another playtest of my head-to-head skirmish rules for dungeon crawling (earlier playtest and game design discussions here and here). I started the rules in late 2016, completely revamped the core mechanics in early 2018, and feel as if I've been perpetually tinkering with both the rules and the content of the initial scenario, "The Crypt of Mighty Lord Thule," up until earlier today. I presume I'll know what finished looks like when I see it, but I'm not there yet.

In this past weekend's game, we limited the delving parties to just two this time, which is actually what the game best accommodates (we've tried a couple of times with three separate parties making the foray, but that results in a bit of downtime for one team). Rich McKee and I divvied up the characters for the Stank Gang while Zach Howard, Scott McKinley, and Jared Smith took Felonious Fist & Co. into the tomb in search for treasure and glory.

The wife was under the weather, and so she made but a short appearance to say hello to the gang and get the pizzas she ordered for us stowed in a warm oven until we resolved the current turn and took a short break to put chow down (after mindlessly gorging on peanut M&Ms and Utz pretzel nuggets the prior two hours). Alas, Ellen's absence means the combat photography is sparse and shot by my far inferior hands.

Click any photo to enlarge.

Lots of wound markers to go around in this tightly packed melee against a group of animated statues encountered in the very first room explored after the entrance chamber.

The other side of the dungeon from which our rivals, Felonious Fist and team, entered.

The sorceress might have had a better time of things if her offensive spell wasn't fire based, making it less than effective against killer statuary.


While definitely a playtest, the rules were tight enough to not get in the way of folks having a good time (I hope). (left to right: Scott and Zach)

 (left to right: Jared and Rich) Arrayed along the side table in the background is a menagerie of beasties that didn't make it into play.

Although we eventually managed to take down two of the four statues, by this point in the game my team had lost both our cleric and sorceress. In fact, a critical miss by my sorceress while casting her FlameSpray spell resulted in a fatal backfire and self-immolation!
Hope was definitely receding for the Stank Gang merely one room into the dungeon. 

Felonious's gang was faring better on the other side of the dungeon. They had lost their wizard in an encounter with two clay Golems, but they at least managed to best their foes (an incredible critical hit by their monk punched a hole straight through one of the lumpy constructs). The next room had them facing off against a Fire Elemental emerging from the embers of a pit in the center of a crematorium. 

My thief, Grouse Stank, knew he stood little chance standing toe to toe against the statues, and so in the first round he bolted to the far side of the room to take shots with his bow at the slow moving monstrosities. He sat by the a door ready to fling it open to make an escape route for his allies, but they sadly fell to the punishing blows of the magical statues first.

Most of the Stank Gang had now met a grisly end.

The unholy altar guarded by the Golems yielded nothing of use to the adventurers, so they moved in for combat with the Fire Elemental, preparing to gang up on it as it entered the chamber door.



The three brave glory seekers eventually reduced the Fire Elemental to dusty cinders. Alas, the hour was late, and the rest of their tale remains untold... 

FINAL THOUGHTS AND PARTING SHOTS

Jared has made the delve three times now, and though he's becoming a veteran of Thule's crypts, he's still seen less than half of the possible rooms, encounters, traps, etc. To my mind, that bodes well for replayability, but it also speaks to how long it is taking in each game to explore the crypt. And as Jared pointed out, in only one playtest have we ever actually had the adventuring parties eventually cross paths with one another and fight it out in the crypts, despite each game going for about four hours. That definitely is moving me to think about ways to speed up game play.

One area of the game that definitely needs refined is the strength of the encounters. I had given the statues the highest possible A.C. rating, which at first blush made sense--they're made of stone!--but it also made it nearly impossible to kill them. Pitting four adventurers with combat dice ranging from d4 to d8 against foes with A.C. dice of d12 ended up a no-win situation. As a result, Rich and I literally never made it out of the first room we explored. (For those curious, the thief who had stayed out of melee did manage to grab some loot form within that room and scurry past the statues back out of the dungeon alive...a Pyrrhic victory, to be sure.)

Ironically, just before sitting down to the game I had lamented that no adventurers had died in any of the previous playtests. On this run through, half of the total of eight adventurers comprising the two parties died in the very first rooms they each explored. This seems like an irrefutable signal that I need to do a much better job balancing the stats of the foes in the Room Encounters deck. I definitely want the real possibility of fatalities in this game, but barring tremendously poor luck, the adventurers should ideally be able to get through the first room without dying!

I introduced a number of mechanics this time that I generally liked, including the possibility of reviving characters knocked to zero hit points back from death's door (albeit with mounting uncertainty and the likelihood of handicaps for the rest of the game). I also introduced critical hits and misses for all sorts of attacks (melee, ranged, and magical). I need to smooth out the results tables a bit, but I think they added some fun drama to play (if you call wizards blowing themselves up with critical misses fun...which I do).

I definitely need to work on the damage multipliers, too, by codifying that no die roll, even after modifiers, can ever be less than 1, and I think I'll also cap non-critical-hit damage to a ceiling of 3 H.P. (most of the pre-gen adventurers are coming in with 3-5 hit points).

Scott made a valid observation that, while it was good fun to play your own party as well as your opponent's encounters, there's little currently in the game that keeps you from playing your opponent's encounters as if they were highly intelligent, with near-perfect knowledge of their opponents. On the one hand that doesn't bother me too much--I intentionally wanted a system in which the monsters aren't confined to some pre-programmed set of moves. They should be unpredictable and wily and challenging. But I do think there is a real opportunity that I haven't exploited enough to guide monster behaviors a bit. I could see adding stipulations in certain encounters like "the statues will not follow the party out of this room," or "the golems will target spellcasters last." Even simple things like, "gnolls will gang up on the weakest foe" or "closest foe" could help ameliorate a little bit of Scott's concerns, and it's an idea I like in the right circumstance. I've thought about it in the past in terms of some of the future scenarios I want to design, in which racial enmity could come into play (e.g., goblin archers will always target dwarves first, etc.).

Rich echoed a concern expressed by John Sears in an earlier playtest that the combat dice mechanics might be more complicated than necessary. When a game stretches on for as long as some of these playtests have (averaging about four hours), I definitely need to think hard about what variables are shaping the pace of play. Yet I confess that I really like these combat mechanics and how they help differentiate character stats; to me it feels just gritty enough to not be a variation on any of a dozen board games in the dungeon crawl genre. That was one of the real impetuses for me in creating this game: I wanted something more sophisticated than, say, recent board games like Descent or the D&D board games (e.g., Legend of Drizzt, et al.). I had purchased a good number of those over the years, and they all fell short of capturing the exploratory fun and tactical immersion I'm chasing with these rules.

I'm hoping that recalibrating a lot of the encounter cards will resolve some of these issues and speed up overall play a bit. That seems like the place to start before fundamentally rejiggering the core rules yet again.

All in all, though, I believe everyone enjoyed the evening, imperfections and all...and that's a success in and of itself!

Thanks for playing, fellas!



Comments

  1. Where did you get those brown dungeon doors?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The large double doors are from the Mantic game Dungeon Saga; they sell packs of spare doors separately. You can find those Dungeon Saga doors from a variety of sellers (e.g., eBay, Amazon, wargaming stores, etc.) The smaller pre-painted doors with the iron bounding strips are by Legendary Realms Terrain (https://www.lrhobbies.com/products/accessory-door-solid-wooden-set-of-4).

      Delete
    2. Good report Joe! Reading through your thoughts, one thing jumped out to me. You mentioned the stone statues being unkillable. I've been trying to incorporate a 'consolation prize' in my rules. Even if you fail at a task, you get a little something to take the sting out of it. Maybe a failed attack on the statues could create a crack in them (for example). For each crack, the players gain a bonus on subsequent attacks making the statues tough early on, but eventually killable. Just a thought!

      Delete
    3. John, that's a really great idea with a lot of merits. Not only can adding such twists and details give each encounter some unique flavor, but it's also an organic way to speed up the combats (e.g., minions fleeing when the leader is killed, a group of monsters being afraid of fire, etc.). I really appreciate your reading my ramblings and giving such useful feedback!

      Delete
  2. Joe, do you plan to publish / make these rules, cards and stuff donwloadable when you are finished? Because this thing looks like EXACTLY the kind of dungeon crawling ruleset I'm looking for. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I do, indeed, plan on publishing these rules, card decks, etc., perhaps in a little boxed set once I get them finished. I'll probably run a simple Kickstarter just to cover the costs. Not looking to build a new business out of this project, but would like to share it with folks who might enjoy it.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Well-thumbed posts

Scrum Con IV: In Your Face!

The Second Saturday Scrum Club rejoined the fray on April 8, organizing and hosting Scrum Con IV in Silver Spring, Maryland. Although we ran a surprisingly successful virtual convention in 2021 that took advantage of its online format to invite all sorts of participants we couldn't have otherwise (Dirk the Dice of Grognard Files  in the UK ran a game, and I interviewed wargame/RPG historian Jon Peterson via livestream ), Scrum Con IV marked our return to an in-person format. Because  Scrum Con 2020 ducked right under the pandemic lockdown on the last weekend of February that year, we were anxious to see if anybody would remember us. Turns out any fears were misplaced...because Scrum Con sold out again this year! In fact, every in-person convention we've organized has sold out, but this year's Scrum Con IV was almost 70% sold out of its 225 badges in the very first week, a pace that frankly caught us off-guard. About a week before the show, we had sold enough badges that

Take the High Road: Making Cheap and Easy Dirt Roads

I have wanted some good roads to add to my games for a while now. My first attempt was a couple of years ago when my standards were a bit lower and I wasn't sure how much I was interested in investing in this new hobby. I bought some PDFs of cobblestone roads that I sized, printed, and glued to felt. The result was okay, but the way my laser printer  produced the roads ended up being quite reflective to the point of almost being glossy looking. The combination of glue, paper, and felt also meant the roads had a wavy consistency and almost always curled at the edges. I used them once or twice but was never happy with them. My sub-par first attempt at making roads for my games using felt strips, glue, and printed designs. You can see how shiny and how wavy and curled at the edges they turned out. I never felt good about putting them on the table for our games and eventually stopped altogether. I've been meaning to take another crack at making some roads now that I have

Candid Photos From "Conan the Barbarian" (1982)

This post is barely gaming adjacent, but the Conan stories have informed much of my fantasy gaming since my first forays into the hobby. I've seen the John Milius adaptation more times than any other movie (probably over 50 times, though most of those viewings were on VHS or HBO as a teenager). The 1982 Conan  film was the first R rated movie I saw in a movie theater (age 12). The first convention game I ever played in was one in which I played the barbarian himself. The first convention game I ever ran as game master was an adaptation of Howard's "Beyond the Black River." For good or ill, I've spent a lot of time in that fantasy world. When I stumbled on an online trove of about 400 candid photos from various sets of Conan the Barbarian shot by somebody on the crew, it was oddly visceral for me. It generated a warm feeling getting to see these actors and sets from new angles, both in character and out, in situ and behind the scenes. Seeing Sandahl Bergman, Ge

Lost Art of D&D No. 2: Games Workshop's Holmes Basic (1977)

After Games Workshop attained the license to print a co-branded edition of TSR's 1977 Dungeons & Dragons basic rules book, they set about putting their own stamp on it, designing a new cover and replacing a number of the illustrations they deemed too crudely drawn for their U.K. market.  The cover art was by John Blanche at the very start of his career as a fantasy illustrator. Blanche went on to be a mainstay at Games Workshop, producing countless illustrations for them. His fannish enthusiasm for the material--as an artist as well as a lifelong gamer--has deservedly made him a favorite over the decades. I first encountered Blanche's work in the David Day compendium, A Tolkien Bestiary (1978), to which he contributed five illustrations that sit comfortably alongside the book's chief illustrator, Ian Miller. I have a special fondness for this book, having coveted it as a child during my incipient Middle Earth fixation. My parent's procured an out-of-print copy of t

Playing with Yourself: 'Rangers of Shadow Deep' vs. 'Sellswords & Spellslingers'

As the year crawls to an end, I'm looking through this blog and noticing a couple of posts I started and never finished. This is one of them. Back in July 2019, I placed the photos on the page, jotted down a few bullet-point placeholder notes, and then never actually went back and wrote anything to post.   The post was meant to be my informal review of Rangers of Shadow Deep after my first game of it with Josh O'Conner, who set it up for us to try in his basement. I think I never finished this post because I was not very impressed with the game but I knew Josh was, and we hadn't been gaming together long enough for me to be sure my candor about the game wouldn't hurt his feelings and sour a budding gaming friendship. I consider Josh more than a gaming friend these days, and so I'll go ahead and post this with some very short notes fleshing out the bullet points I had left as a reminder for myself back in 2019 (at least the one's I can still decipher the

Chainmail: Battle of Emridy Meadows

In my imagination, Chainmail has always been that shadowy precursor to Dungeons & Dragons that I was both intrigued by yet leery of. I loved the idea of a game involving mass battles in a fantasy setting akin to those depicted in the The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings , but I also had a sense that Chainmail , released in 1971 a mere year after I was born, was likely a clunky wargame that would be too frustrating to bother mastering. It also didn't help that my first inkling of its existence was around 1980 or so when I could never dream of amassing the miniature armies needed to play out these massive conflicts. No, back then I was pretty sure Chainmail was the province of grizzled old grognards who had started wargaming before I was even born. Even after my gaming rebirth decades later in 2016, I was fine with letting the dim past remain so, and was more than content during my first couple of years back in the hobby exploring rules of a more recent vintage and managea