World's Largest Dungeon: Honeymoon Over

From a post by RPGnetter hyphz:

Finally got my copy of the WLD...

But am I bit shocked at the number of changes and hacks at makes to standard D&D rules:

* No PC teleportation. (The DMG says, "Don't design dungeons that ban fly and teleport spells just because doing so is hard." Why should the paid designers not be held to the guidelines given for amateurs?)

* Don't use the standard XP progression. Use something else instead. Dunno what. The guide says the PCs should advance twice per map, but not what points system to use to ensure they do so.

* No entangle/web spells.

* No summoning spells for PCs.

* No druid PCs.

* No take 10/take 20.

And the PCs are trapped in the dungeon for the entire campaign!

Now all these items are merely recommendations, but I'm still scratching my head. Trapped in the dungeon I'm okay with, though it's not my first choice. But that's a pretty long list of rules changes to be applied to a a frickin' dungeon adventure. Dungeons is what D&D 3.x was designed for, right? Am I the only one who remembers the "Back to the dungeon" tagline for 3.0? I do not understand why someone would tackle a project like the World's Largest Dungeon if they couldn't get it done while sticking to the rules as written. What's the point? The no teleport/no druids/no summonings rule looks like sheer laziness. No web spells? WTF? And screwing with the XP system is asking for trouble. The only changes I would ever brook to the current XP system would be to add ways of earning points. Like re-introducing XP for treasure. I thought it was ass-tastic to remove loot XP from the system. Yes, getting the gold and xp both seems like double dipping, even moreso for magic items and XP. But so what? In my experience chests full o' XPs are a much bigger motiviation for PCs than chests full of mere coins. If anything, the WLD (and maybe dungeoneering games in general) should be giving a bonus for clearing a level, on top of anything else earned the usual ways.

Hmmm. I rushed over here to blog about my indignation over these discoveries. Obviously the people behind WLD can design anything they want, but I'm still worked up that this product doesn't seem to quite meet with my simple expectation that it follow the frickin' rules. My sensibilities are offended. Nevermind the fact that last 3E campaign I wussed out long before anybody could cast teleport. Still, at least this list crazy no-no list gives me things to think about when designing my own dungeon.

Medieval Streetcars are Go!

My new regular game night was cancelled but Jim and his sons came over this afternoon. We played two games. The first was Streetcar from Mayfair, a tile-laying game with a little railroady theme. Fun game, but I suck at it. The second game of the day was new to me: Medieval by GMT. This is a cute little economics-and-war type cardgame with great production values and a nifty little cardmap of Europe. I actually won this one. I AM TEH WINNAR!!!!11111onelevene!!!!!! Frankly, good card pulls and lucky dice had more to do with my victory than did canny play, though I think I made a couple of smart moves. But I wouldn't be surprised if I got absolutely creamed on a second game of Medieval. Still, I'd play either game again. Streetcar has a nifty little hose-over-another-player mechanic to it that makes even last place a hoot.

Dungeon Mungery

My earlier blog entry on the World's Largest Dungeon has got me thinking about maybe trying again to run the 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons. During my first campaign I didn't give 3E the total effort I could have exerted and I whimped out when the power level started to rub against my comfort zone. I know I can do better than that. D&D 3E may not be my favorite incarnation of Dungeons & Dragons, but I feel kinda alienated from my own hobby because I'm not playing the Big Game. Sure, I went through my "D&D sucks, [insert random game here] rules!" period in the early nineties, but I can lay a lot of that attitude at the feet of TSR and its misdeeds. The rest was youthful exuberance at discovering other gamers who actually played other games. It wasn't long before I was back kicking doors and swording orcs.

More importantly, I've come to a conclusion regarding my Game Mastery skills. I like to try lotsa different things, but I really only have my "A" game going when I am running a classic fantasy dungeon crawl. I look back over my years of GMing and I see things like the Dungeon of Doom as the high points. I put a lot of work into the Dungeon of Doom and it played out very well. I'd like to rebottle some of that lightning without it being a dusty old system that "nobody" likes to play any more. The solution seems to be to sit down and write a multi-level underground extravaganza for 3.0 or 3.5 D&D. The alternative systems (earlier versions of D&D, fantasy-flavored Savage Worlds, Castles & Crusades, BESM d20, SenZar, World of Synnibarr) all shrink the potential pool of players for relatively little gain. Savage Worlds at least gives me a readily available player base, but how long will it be before it is no longer the local flavor-of-the-month?

Pat was over today and he and I talked this situation out a bit. As usual, he is uber supportive of whatever direction I want to go. He referred to Black Fire, the draft game linked from Ron Edwards' Gamist Essay. I went back and re-read it but I don't see how it fits into a proposed 3E campaign. Pat, if you read this, could you drop a note in the comments section explaining what you have in mind?

One of the things we discussed was the perennial problem in modular games: what do we take out, what do we put in? Pat lobbied for a serious consideration of some of the materials in the new Unearthed Arcana. I'll have to take a look at that. Another factor to consider is what will players be able to use for making characters. I bounce between the two extremes of "three corebooks only" and "any published classes and races are fine". One option helps keep a tight focus to the game, the other really allows the players to cut loose.

If I'm really going to tackle a 3E campaign the first thing I need to do is re-read my copies of the core books. Right after I'm done putzing around with SenZar.

More comical goodness - with minor spoilers

I got over to the library this morning. I picked up several comics: a Powers trade paperback titled Who Killed Retro Girl?; a Stormwatch trade called Forces of Nature or something like that; volume 6 of the complete Crumb, and The Big Book of Grimm. I also got a collection of short stories called something something Supermen, doing the whole post-human thing. The Powers book was a fun read. I wasn't expecting one of the superheroes to pull a Jack Ruby on Retro Girl's killer. This was my first encounter with Stormwatch. It looks like maybe this volume comes fairly late in the run as I can see some of the themes in the Authority starting to develop. And Jenny Sparks shows up in it in all her washed-up rockstar glory. Volumes two through five of Crumb were not to be found today, so I leaped straight from the mostly innocent Crumb of volume 1 right into the psychedelic, pornographic, radical material he is more known for. Jumping gears like that was a little bit of a shock. I mean, I've seen this sort of stuff in comics before but it was still kinda odd to be at the public library, checking out a comic book that depicts a cartoon orgy on the cover at the same time I'm getting my daughter some frickin' Elmo DVDs. The Big Book of Grimm is another excellent entry in the Big Book line, this particular volume presenting the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm as they originally appeared in all their horrific glory. I have yet to read a Big Book that didn't deliver.

I haven't started the sci-fi short stories yet. I'm not sure if I'll get to it or not. I seem to be on a big sequential art kick lately. "Are you obsessed with comic books?" -- my wife.

Return of the Monster Games

Board wargamers have enjoyed monster games for years. These are games that are so large in scope that just getting the game set up is a Herculean task. Lou Zocchi did a version of the Battle of Britain that tracked every single plane involved on its own control sheet, quite a task for the largest aerial campaign in history! Campaign for North Africa is another that the wargamers mention when discussion turns to the monster games. You essentially need two teams to manage this "two-player", each team basically representing a high command. According to reports this game tracks things like when was the last time you change the oil on your troop transports. Italian troops are penalized on water usage, because they boil pasta for meals even when fighting a desert campaign. My brother-in-law has the maps for DAK, another Rommel in Africa game, on his game room wall. I believe the overall map measures about 36 inches by eight or ten feet long. I think the battefield for the First Battle of El Alamein takes up something like six hexes on that map.

Role-players have long enjoyed big projects like the monster games. Even today people are still gaga over playing T1-4 The Temple of Elemental Evil followed by A1-4 Scourge of the Slavelords and topped of by GDQ1-7 Queen of the Spiders. That's approximately eighteen levels of adventure in 3 big fat supermodules! Time for that disjointed and flawed (but still classic) series to step aside for the new kid on the block AEG's World's Largest Dungeon.


The 16 poster-sized maps make quite an impressive display, eh?

This puppy is over 800 pages long, over a million words of text! It contains nearly every monster in the SRD! Even a Terrasque! This huge and mighty tome has an MSRP of a cool one hundred bucks, but Amazon will part with one for only $68.

I'm not a huge fan of the current incarnations of Dungeons & Dragons, but holy crap does this product get my blood a-pumpin'. It's like WLD is the Mount Everest of dungeoncrawling. I want to tackle it just cause it's the biggest, baddest dungeon around. I'm not sure I could DM it, but I sure as hell would love to be a player in a campaign that focused exclusively on tackling this module. One of the things that has fallen out of D&D for me is a sense of purpose. Back in the days of 1st edition Advanced and especially the Basic/Expert era every campaign had an implicit goal: Level up until you build a kickass castle and retire surrounded by minions and henchmen. Maybe you fought some wars or something but basically your adventuring days were supposed to be mostly over at that point. If you played the Mentzer edit of D&D or was a big Deities and Demigods fan you could tackle the more ambitious project of achieving divinity. Either way when playing earlier versions of D&D it was always easier for me to see a clear victory condition that I could strive for. Whether I suceeded or not was secondary, I needed an overall challenge to test myself against.

For much the same reason I've always been drawn to the idea of a campaign centered around looting one exceptionally large dungeon, whether it be the originals (Castles Blockmoor and Greyhawk), my own meager efforts (particularly my Dungeon of Doom) or this new World's Largest Dungeon. Unlike the boilerplate "what is an rpg" text I've always felt as if a good role-playing campaign ought to have a goal. Just buttknockering around a large campaign map getting into trouble seems insufficient for me these days. "Here's your mission this week" gaming seems equally incomplete. I guess maybe I let superhero games slide on this count, because superhero comics are so darn reactionary in nature. Apart from supers though I tend to favor building a winning condition into a campaign, if for no other reason than to give the campaign an endgame, a limit, a sense of closure.

One way to construct such a game would be to focus on one mega-dungeon and when that dungeon is cleared the campaign is over. If you're going to play the kind of campaign in which dungeoncrawling is the main activity of the group, why not make that activity the centerpiece of the campaign? I tend to suspect that a lot of groups engage in what I might call "abashed dungeoncrawling". These folks construct elaborate plots which inevitably lead to some form of dungeoncrawl. Find the Dingus quests are often like this. By having an elaborate backstory on hand the group can convince itself that they're not really dungeoncrawling hackmonkeys. "After all, we are only going into this ruined temple because our intricately crafted plot demands it. Not because we like hacking orcs for dollars. No, that can't be it. We're grown up gamers."

Well, funk that. I like measuring my D&D success by killcounts and gps looted. And few things feel better in a game than discovering that you have successfully cleared another level and found the stairs down to boot. I want to descend into hell, kick some ass, and win fabulous prizes. Maybe that makes me a hack-n-slashy munchkin, I dunno. I'd like to think that it makes me a Gamist. Either way I know that it would be about the coolest thing ever to be able to some day say "World's Largest Dungeon? Been there, done that."

DC5K

Inspired by the JLA One Million trade paperback, I've been doing a lot of thinking about a futuristic sci-fi/superhero game. My idea doesn't reach as far into the future as DC's mini-series (set in the year 85,000-and-something) but I do want to place it far enough into the future that even the Legion of Superheroes is a part of the remote past. Trouble is, I don't know bupkis about the Legion era, so I can't really effectively build from it. I suppose at this point I could invoke the notion of setting the campaign on a remote colony, perhaps cut off from the rest of human space. That removes the possibility of setting an adventure on Mars, which I would paint as a haunted planet, haunted by the spirits of Martians past and haunted by J'onn J'onzz. Also there's the simple fact that threatening to destroy Earth packs a bigger emotional punch than threatening to destroy Colonial 62B-Ophiuchi or whatever. Maybe the old DC Heroes supplement on the Legion contains enough material to work up a future DC campaign.

Of course, once all the setting details are thrashed out we still return to the age old question for supers games: What system? Most made-for-supers systems don't do a very good job of tackling the high power levels of Superman and his ilk. I can let that slide for most supers games, but I think this concept calls for cosmic level powers. The aforementioned DC Heroes game and its descendant Blood of Heroes ought to do the trick, but I'm not sure I want to tackle an old-school crunchy system like that. I owned one of the DC boxed sets at one time, but back then I couldn't wrap my head around the system. Maybe all these years later I could do it, but do I want to? The new Authority rpg from Guardians of Order takes their Silver Age Sentinels system and dials the power level to eleven, so that might work. After those two their a zillion other supers games, generic systems, and doing wierd things like ripping off non-supers games. I'm sure I could find some folks on RPG.net that would urge me to use Nobilis or Exalted for the task. Maybe I could tackle this project as a one shot or a con game, in which case I the ideal system would be A) popular, B) easy to use, and C) already in my collection. I wish I could think of a game like that right now.

Crumb!

I finally scanned in my two favorite pieces from volume 1 of The Complete R. Crumb Comics.
Up until this point the cat's adventures had all been very domestic and kinda goofy, but night falls and the comic becomes darker and more dangerous.



Perfect use of a silent panel to set up a great understated punchline!