Friday, August 29, 2008

Five Room Dungeons

I've gravitated towards this type of adventure design over the years. I never knew it was quite so popular.

I should read more stuff on the intertubes.

It's perfect for homemade adventures. Not so much for published adventure modules.

Chatty DM's Project Kobold Love: The Adventure Plan is a 5 room adventure, that I'd run as a one-shot if I had the time, but as I wrote in the comments, I have one problem with it.

I like everything except for “Scene 1, Dungeons and Diplomacy”. I’ve seen a fair bit of scaled skill challenges with successes reducing number of combatants, and I honestly I don’t like em.

I prefer a different approach. Design a balanced combat and map partial successes to a delay before the underlings get their act together.

A good success could be a bloodless victory, in this case the leader is mollified, wishes the party luck and goes away. Yay!

A total failure would be immediate combat; the leader and all his underlings are pissed off and enter the fray with blood in their eyes.

A middling success could a lesser number of combatants in the first round. The leader and a variable number of his underlings are upset and immediately attacking, but some of the underlings thought the diplomacy sounded reasonable, and aren’t ready. When their leader ups and attacks the kobolds though, it’s just a matter of time (one round probably) before they snap out of their confusion, grab their weapons and join in.

(i.e. The leader cries “Attack boyz!” and charges into combat, but the first round all that the rest of the group does is look confused and draw their weapons… the discussion was going so well!)

That way we can have a well planned tactical challenge that doesn’t become dangerous with a total failure, nor trivially easy with a near total success. What happens if 7/8 (or 9/10 or whatever) of the threats wander off, do you really want to play out that combat against the sole foe? How about a complete failure and zero threats wandering off. TPK?

3 comments:

ChattyDM said...

Thanks for the feedback... You are right that I didn't think the consequences of hitting the extremes ends in the Skill Challenge.

ChattyDM said...

you Live from Montreal? What a coincidence... moi aussi...

:)

Will you come play Kobold Love at Draconis in October then?

Plotter said...

If the stars align and the wife allows, I may attend Draconis. Probably only on the Saturday though.

If I do, I'd love to play "Kobold Love".