Reexamining the Dungeon
In 3rd edition’s latter days, D&D introduced the tactical encounter. This was a revolution. Each one was a script for running a combat. Its structured format helps DMs run complex and dynamic encounters involving creatures, traps, hazards, special terrain and more. For all the benefits this format introduced, it was not without its challenges too.
I was skeptical about tactical encounters at the start. A combat encounter was something that “might” occur in an adventure. Might, because the PCs weren’t expected to fight and kill every monster, because the PCs might talk their way through the fight, sneak past it, or use some other trick to bypass a costly encounter. This, in my mind, was a contributing factor to why “room” and “event” entries tucked the creature information below the other descriptions, usually with a Creature: and then the information the DM needed.
I’ll admit, the old way encouraged the “4 orcs,” “4 orcs,” “4 orcs” design so prevalent in older adventures. Also, if you were lucky enough to get a stat-block, it was either so abbreviated (as in 1e and 2e) you had to have the monster’s entry on hand to use it fully or it was so compressed (early 3e) it was easy to miss important abilities. And if the combat had a terrain feature, it hid inside the descriptive text. In short, combats were harder to run.
So I eventually warmed to the new format. Tactical encounters made the whole enterprise easier. Features, creatures, setup, and all the important content were in their sections. A DM could run the fight cold, without having to mark up the adventure to highlight key elements. Fights became more interesting and far more engaging. In the end, I embraced the tactical encounter format (not that I had much of a choice).
Years later, I’m still chewing on them and their implementation in the game. When writing adventures using this format, there’s less room to develop story content because every expected combat must fall in the one or two page encounter spread. If I put three fights in a 10-page adventure, I only have 4 pages left to frame in the plot. That’s pretty damned tough. Furthermore, devoting 6 pages to combat encounters in the adventure suggests they really shouldn’t be option. Skip one fight and you’ve lost 20% of the adventure content.
What I’ve found (and I’m sure some folks have done the same) is that the tactical encounters have come to define the adventures. Exploration, unconventional thinking, and problem solving have taken a back seat to tactics and optimization. For dungeon delves, this is awesome. For ongoing campaigns?
Resting mechanics and encounter composition exacerbate these problems. Short rests and extended rests are narrative explanations for how character regain expended resources. The short rest refreshes encounter powers and lets PCs to recover hit points. Extended rests refresh the action point and daily powers. Whether the character actually rests or not depends on how much you want the story to influence what is really a necessary procedure that allows heroes to keep fighting, exploring, etc. Resting is a nifty way to manage this process, but it also creates expectations. Players expect they can refresh their resources after each encounter segment and if they don’t, they rightly call foul. Without a refresh, the character is likely reduced to at-wills, doesn’t have a chance to gain another action point, and is ultimately unable to meet the next combat challenge. It doesn’t matter if a five minute siesta doesn’t make sense given the environment. The characters *must* regain their resources or they face a wipe.
Extended rests are even worse. Yes, 3rd edition was sick with the 5 minute adventuring day and it was easily the one thing I hated most about that edition. Now, characters have enough tools to push on for several combats before having to hunker down and refresh their most powerful abilities. Still, healing surges set a hard line for how far a party can go. When an adventurer drops to 1 or 0 healing surges, the extended rest is no longer an option and instead a must to avoid a party wipe during the next encounter. We’re still stuck with the same weirdness of DM handwaving that sees the PCs finding a safe place in the dungeon where they can bed down for six hours without attracting attention from the inhabitants.
Resting to me feels artificial and it breaks the game’s narrative. But this issue doesn’t compare to encounter composition. Without a doubt, the encounters I hate the most are the 8 x 8 rooms with one creature per PC. These fights drag. Everything interesting about the encounter lives inside the monster stat-blocks. And, it is rather upfront about what it’s there to do: let the PCs mine for XP/treasure.
Early on, designers talked about building tactical encounters that incorporated several rooms, diverse monster assortments, and interesting environmental mechanics. For all the great ideas, more and more combat encounters morph into the above construction and step away from multi-room environments where new monsters might join the fight, new dangers might reveal themselves as the combat unfolds. Instead, the PCs walk into a room, trigger the fight, and then hunker down in the hallway for an hour until the battle is done.
What it seems is happening now is that the designer/DM creates a warband to throw against the PCs. They duke it out. The PCs win. The PCs get their reward. The PCs move to the next room and face the next warband.
Warbands grow from how we build encounters. Every encounter has an XP budget. The XP budget is a quantity of experience points determined by level and number of players. The DM spends XP to “buy” monsters to populate the encounter. Thus, a budget of 500 XP allows five 100 XP monsters, four 100 XP and four 25 XP, and so on.
For whatever reason, most adventures use the XP budget to create a band of monsters. In some cases, this makes perfect sense. Orc archers fire on the PCs from balconies. A brute or two wade forward to engage the front lines, while a controller zaps the PC defenders. Fun, interesting, and all too often used.
Bring all these elements together, and my hackles raise. This system works and it works well, but its structure has replaced the familiar game play elements that existed in prior editions. Exploration and roleplaying exist in the lulls between encounters. And, when the challenge presents itself as monsters spoiling for a fight or a complex skill challenge, game play shifts toward a mechanized procedure, wherein resources are spent and, at the end, recovered.
The solution, as I see it, is to deconstruct the artificial boundaries in game play. We must move beyond the concrete game mode and return to a more narrative structure. I think this can happen without sacrificing the core elements that make fourth edition play so well. And I think we can achieve this by reexamining the dungeon as adventuring location.
Classic dungeons consisted of rooms linked by corridors. Today, many dungeons are large areas linked by short corridors, creating weird and unlikely environments designed to create enough room for battles to unfold. Instead of defaulting to the 8 x 8 rooms, I propose going back to the older model. Then, divide the dungeon into multi-room sections I’ll call sectors for lack of a better term. A sector might be a large single room or several smaller rooms linked by corridors, staircases, and so on.
Each sector exists for a reason. There is something the characters must do, find, or survive before the sector can be “completed.” We’ll call this the victory condition. The PCs must find the entrance to the Ghoul King’s lair. The PCs must find the magic sword. The PCs must rescue Prince Humperdink from the ogre. Assign an XP reward for achieving the victory condition. The XP reward should be worth a minor quest.
Next, populate the sector. Use the standard XP budget, but for one or two levels above the PCs. Use the XP to by monsters of around the PCs level. This should give you more critters to play with. You don’t have to link them to each other, though you do have to link them to the sector. For example, you might buy 4 orcs, a few stirges, and a gelatinous cube with your XP budget. Then, place the 4 orcs in room X, where they act as sentries. The stirges hang out in a cave near the lair of the Ghoul King’s entrance. Finally, the cube roams a side passage.
The “tactical encounter” begins when the PCs enter the dungeon sector. The PCs don’t roll initiative yet as they are in exploring mode. As they move through the sector, they might encounter the smaller groups, at which point they could roll initiative and fight, sneak by the enemy, or talk their way through the monsters. A party might roll initiative two or three times before they complete the sector. For example, the heroes come upon the orcs. They botch the parlay. Combat begins. The PCs fall back and stumble into the gelatinous cube and so on.
While exploring the sector, the PCs can investigate their surroundings, scour the rooms, defeat the bad guys. Only when the PCs achieve the sector’s objective (whether or not they slaughter the monsters) do they earn XP. And only when they earn the XP can they take a short rest. I think the PCs should be able to retreat, take an extended rest if they can find someplace safe, and return for another go. And I also think that the DM should respond by repopulating the sector. But there it is.
This method incorporates all the features from tactical encounters but pushes back the artificial start and end points so they occur at actual pauses in the action. Since the focus is exploration, the heroes are learning about their environments, can use the sector to construct viable tactics, and also encourages combat encounters to occur in phases. Anyway, these are rough ideas, but you now have an idea where my head’s at.
Thanx for a great article!
As a new DM that really got into DMing because the old one’s game fell apart, I’ve relied much on running published adventures, which in their design are very encounter driven. For me, the exploration part of the game became very miniscule, and coupled with the problem of combats taking very long time (party due to all of us being new to the 4e, and often having to check up the rules), we’d spend a very very long time in a dungeon. Having random encounters (as in H2 – Thunderspire Labyrinth) even slowed down the progress of the adventure even further.
As a consequence I decided to get rid of XP altogether, and luckily my gaming group didn’t protest too much. My reasoning behind this decision was to remove a game mechanic that encouraged the PCs to fight every monster in the dungeon just gain XP and levels. Instead I decided that solving crucial plot goals would eventually give them levels. Loot could always be handled in other ways, such as being given by a patron after a successful quest, or something similar. Also, there’s an intrinsic rewards for the heroes just being heroes and doing heroic things, and feeling good about saving the world and basking in people’s admiration
Another reason for skipping XP was game balancing… with the extra material that was published on H1 through DDI the PCs were lvl6 when they started H2, and thus I had to level up the monsters, which took some extra DM effort. Now, being on my third adventure, P3 – King of the Trollhaunt Warrens, I believe using the “sector-approach” will improve the exploration part of the game, and make the dungeons feel less like a series of encounters separated by short rests. This paired with ChattyDMs ideas of “fronts”, (http://critical-hits.com/2010/09/24/re-examining-the-dungeon-section-factions-and-fronts/) will create even more incentives for the PCs to interact with the denizens of a dungeon that doesn’t necessary involve killing them, but maybe instead using sneaky ideas to bypass heavily guarded areas, or play out different factions against each other.
Regards
/M
@Rob:
Your reply was absolutely right on almost every count. I was in a… poor… state of mind when I made my comment, and I fully cop to fielding a lot of egregious fallacies. I apologize, in the words of John Cleese, unreservedly.
In a more rational vein, let me just make the following, brief, comments.
It’s true that I didn’t play 4E very long. I admit that means I probably don’t have a good basis for most of my charges, but, in fairness to my side, I didn’t play it long because I *didn’t like* what I experienced – that simple.
You’re right that both editions provide guidance in building encounters and setting rewards – all editions have done that in their own ways. I guess the thing that left the bad taste in my mouth regarding treasure packages was when I found out – and perhaps this is in error, but this was the impression I got – that my thief couldn’t earn any “off the books” cash by pickpocketing. It was a zero-sum game. Anything I got by interacting with the world in an organic fashion came off of my total allowable haul by level. Again, that may be wrong, but after a few reads-through, this was my impression of how the system worked. That didn’t do anything to inspire confidence. That and the fact that skill targets re-normed every few levels so that I never really got any “better” at using my skills. Again, possibly a mis-reading of the rules, but that’s what I came away with.
I fully admit I don’t have the experience with 4E to cogently defend my other points, and I admit they were made in haste and while in a peevish state. It was just my impression, from my limited experience with 4E, that the game is so much more… hemmed in… than in previous editions. Maybe I just never noticed that people playing 1E, 2E, and 3E all fell into routines as well – different for each edition, but routines nonetheless. Maybe they did and I didn’t see it, and maybe the presentation of 4E just foregrounds the sorts of routines it’s easy to fall into to.
And…
…maybe…
I was just jarred by the differences from previous editions, and I’m getting old and curmudgeonly.
Sigh.
Then again, I remember “someone” who once said he’d change from 1E/2E to 3E when they pried his old books from his cold, dead fingers. (grin)
Maybe this is my 3E.
I’m sorry, man, I am, for any offense given. You deserve better.
[...] Schwalb has a really interesting blog called Reexamining the Dungeon. Go read it. I’ll [...]
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[...] Reexamining the Dungeon: The post the sparked the discussion, Robert Schwalb brainstorms a ‘sector’-based approach to laying out dungeon adventures. [...]
I know this topic is so old, but I was flipping through Revenge of the Giants and encounter C4 (p 34) sort of has a sector-like setup. Have you seen that encounter? Is this close to what you are describing?
Yeah. This is close.
Interestingly enough, I have started to roll out “sector based” myself (although not using those terms) as a natural part of making outdoor encounters. As my group are travelling between cities, I acquired a ton of outdoors dungeon tiles (Ruins of the Wild + Sinister Woods), and combined with the large size of the push-tack notice-board I was using to secure them, I found that I just couldn’t stick to standard sized (2*12 inch squares) encounters; the concept of boundaries outside is so meaningles that I just kept adding extra tiles around the outsides.
This had two important effects: 1. The “long range” mechanic suddenly becomes important, the ranged couldn’t take it for granted that they’d hit any unobstructed target; 2. I ended up setting multiple encounters near to each other to make use of the space, creating the “sector” effect.
One example is a recent Feywild encounter, where they befriended a group of Eladrin chasing a unicorn; if they’d been hostile this would’ve been an encounter on its own; instead they tried to help capture the unicorn, which triggered an encounter with other denizens of the feywild who wanted to protect the unicorn (an Owlbear, sprite swarm, Gnome and the Unicorn itself); but rather than hunker down to this encounter, half the group instead pressed on and triggered a THIRD encounter with a very nasty group of Powries determined to kill the unicorn.
To throw them a bone, I made sure that the Eladrin helped out just enough to buy them some time; unfortunately for them, one of them ran straight to an Eladrin woman sitting on her own by a pool in the far corner of the encounter to beg her for help; which she gladly offered on hearing a unicorn was involved; but she was in-fact a bog-hag who was responsible for sending the Powries out after the Unicorn, which is what triggered the Eladrin to try and secure the Unicorn (preferably alive, but dead if it was the only way to keep it out of evil hands) in the first place.
What happened was that they triggered multiple encounters simultaneously, creating one big fight that was dynamic and free-roaming. On the whole it worked rather well; they were overwhelmed, they learned to respect the Feywild as a very dangerous and alien location, and they found themselves presented with countless possibilities (who to ally with, who should they trust?) that wouldn’t've happened in a linear encounter progression.
The main down-side is that I ended up having to control a LOT of monsters, which slowed things down, and because they weren’t able to ration their powers, it did turn out to be a familiar Monster Manual 1 “at-will HP grind” against some creatures. Fortunately, my group are new and slow, so appreciated the additional time it gave them to figure out their moves.
The last two encounters were similar: A typical tree-in-the-road style ambush; beyond the tree-line flanking the road I put a keep down. The adventure was broken down to three encounters: The Ambush (Minions and an elite brute leader tackling those near trees, Lurkers and a Skirmisher attacking the wagon that was further back); Archers using the keep and its difficult terrain as superior cover while a Champion mounted on a dire-wolf harried the targets outside the keep; and a third dungeon-based encounter set below the keep where the elite leader from the first encounter was going to run to.
As expected, the first encounter provided to major problem for the group, although by splitting the ranged up from the front-line they made it easy for the lurkers and skirmisher to deal some big hits; but that’s where the problems arose for the party. Having scared the group into reforming, the lurker was free to steal their wagon and drive it through the tree-line. The rogue tried to run after it on his own, triggering the second encounter by immediately getting hit by a ton of arrows that the archers had as a readied action, seriously injuring him. The melee tried to jump in the back to use it as a trojan horse, but failed the skill checks and ended up being dragged along behind it and ended up triggering the champion and dire-wolf. Although they managed to kill nearly everything, they neglected to tackle the weak archers (two levels lower than the party) and without securing the keep as cover, left them to deal big damage. One of their characters died. Really dead. It’s not an encounter they’re going to forget in a hurry.
Once again, by triggering two encounters almost simultaneously, they found themselves low on encounter / dailies and heals. It was a major change to the “one room, two room” dungeons I’d been running in Keep on the Shadowfell, and the other source books.
One thing I found interesting was also the change in the use of some dailies; those that last “until the end of the encounter” mean that without them taking a short rest, they get a lot more mileage out of them, which can seriously mitigate the draw-back of being low on encounter powers.
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Zooming out from encounters and considering the entire adventure (the narrative, exploration, the story, the history, the motives of those involved) is something I’ve really focused on this year. Some of it is inspired by all the dynamic choices games like Dragon Age give, and some it is a naturally consequence of what Robert Schwalb has already discovered: there’s some drawbacks in repeatedly using the cookie-cutter 4e encounter design, especially combat encounters. Great read, thank you Robert.
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[...] most recent addition to fray is the thoughtful article by Robert J. Schwalb, which presents a possible solution for the slow grind of combat and awkward rest mechanics in 4e. [...]
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