D&D 5E Let's Have A Thread of Veteran GM Advice

[Paul Farquhar]

I've been gaming for over 30 years now and still struggle with how to run dungeon crawls, especially mega-dungeons, in the most fun way possible. Specifically, navigating the labyrinth, resource management, and encounter balance (since consequences of death in RPGs is so high)

In my 43 years of DMing experience, I have learned this about megadungeons - there is no way to make them fun. They are repetitive, dull, mapping and resource management are chores that players have no interest in.

This is what I have learned: keep it varied, mix it up, have a little bit of of dungeon, have a little bit of wilderness, have a little bit of social, have a little bit of everything else you can think of.

Also, tabletop games are not video games. What is good in one may not be good in the other.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

With PC death:

• Roll up a new character at (or close to) party's level.
• Take control of a befriended NPC (Baulder's Gate like).

I’ve done both of these - player chooses. I tend to keep a bunch of NPC associates around, with PC stats, who can also fill in if a PC is captured.

• New PC at Level 1, but hey, at least the party can share some better gear to give them a chance to survive long enough to "catch up"

Nope, never do this.

 

[Lanefan]

Closest I've come to "perfect" with navigation is:

• Complete dungeon drawn out ahead of time that's slowly revealed as the party explorers.
  • I've used 5ft squares with individual PC minis, but that takes up a lot of space. I've found 10ft squares with one "party" miniature easier to manage.
• Printing the dungeon out on standard sized paper and cutting out all the individual rooms. When the players explorer, I just hand them the room they just walked in and let them use glue sticks to "map" it.

With resource management:

• Just ignoring it unless obvious encumbrance issues arise.
• Periodic dice rolls to "test" resource depletion.
• A mixture of Shadowdark's approach of losing a torch every hour of real-time and losing food whenever a rest is taken.

With PC death:

• Roll up a new character at (or close to) party's level.
• Take control of a befriended NPC (Baulder's Gate like).
• New PC at Level 1, but hey, at least the party can share some better gear to give them a chance to survive long enough to "catch up".

Curious to hear what others have done!

For navigation: I still expect the players to make their own maps of where they've been. No player-side map? OK, now you're lost - what do you do. I map out where they are on a chalkboard (or sometimes just describe it while a player draws the chalk map), but when they go somewhere else that map gets erased and a new one drawn. Usually one player takes on the role of party mapper, and as things get drawn on the board the mapper puts them on the party's paper map.

For resource management: situationally dependent. I expect the players to list on their character sheets the resources they start with (i.e. rations, ammo, torches, oil vials, etc.), but after that it depends on how the adventure goes. If for example they rescue a bunch of captives and suddenly find themselves with too many mouths to feed, tracking rations (and water!) becomes extremely important. Ditto if they get lost in inhospitable terrain e.g. a desert or the high arctic. Encumbrance limits how much loot they can haul out. And so on.

For PC death*: I usually let them play two characters at once but there's an expectation that players treat their characters as independent entities unless there's a solid in-fiction reason for them to be allies e.g. if they're brother and sister to each other. Replacements come in a level below the party average, or at a hard "floor" if the average is declining too fast.

* - or other situation that renders a character long-term unplayable e.g. captivity, petrification, feeblemind, polymorph, etc.

 

[Shardstone]

For those of you who run theater of the mind, do you have methods or tools for incorporating the environment into your games? Or betters for dealing with AoE abilities?

 

[Swarmkeeper]

For those of you who run theater of the mind, do you have methods or tools for incorporating the environment into your games? Or betters for dealing with AoE abilities?

@SlyFlourish has some great Theater of the Mind advice for AoE and other concerns

Sly Flourish's Guide to to Narrative "Theater of the Mind" Combat in the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons

Note, this guide has been updated since the original written in October 2015. This guide aims to help Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition DMs run narrative "theater of the mind" style combat. This style of...

slyflourish.com

 

[billd91]

stupid ad shenanigans messing up my iPad loads. Nothing to see here.

 

[Quickleaf]

I've been gaming for over 30 years now and still struggle with how to run dungeon crawls, especially mega-dungeons, in the most fun way possible. Specifically, navigating the labyrinth, resource management, and encounter balance (since consequences of death in RPGs is so high).

Video Games knock this out of the park thanks to being able to visually move around the maze with "fog of war" and tracking inventory with fancy User Interfaces. Both of these are designed so "fun", they're practically games in themselves. Oh, and PC death is never an issue, since you can just revert to an older save and try again. This gives the designers a lot more wiggle room in balancing encounters.

How am I suppose to compete!?

Closest I've come to "perfect" with navigation is:

• Complete dungeon drawn out ahead of time that's slowly revealed as the party explorers.
  • I've used 5ft squares with individual PC minis, but that takes up a lot of space. I've found 10ft squares with one "party" miniature easier to manage.
• Printing the dungeon out on standard sized paper and cutting out all the individual rooms. When the players explorer, I just hand them the room they just walked in and let them use glue sticks to "map" it.

With resource management:

• Just ignoring it unless obvious encumbrance issues arise.
• Periodic dice rolls to "test" resource depletion.
• A mixture of Shadowdark's approach of losing a torch every hour of real-time and losing food whenever a rest is taken.

With PC death:

• Roll up a new character at (or close to) party's level.
• Take control of a befriended NPC (Baulder's Gate like).
• New PC at Level 1, but hey, at least the party can share some better gear to give them a chance to survive long enough to "catch up".

Curious to hear what others have done!

Can’t answer ALL your questions, but I did discover a fun way to handle a big dungeon that was mapped out. For Tomb of the Nine Gods (Annihilation) I printed out the five dungeon levels at 11x17 and laminated them. Then I made DIY scratch-off paint (I used gold acrylic in two coatings cause it seemed thicker/more obscuring), painted them, let I dry. Brough to session and when players began exploring I scratched off first room with a penny and then handed the sheet and penny to the player to my left. It worked in that case because it was a very trap / puzzle heavy dungeon, not a ton of tactical combat. Basically I made a faux fog of war for physical table play.

 

[el-remmen]

In my 41 years of DMing experience, I have learned this about megadungeons - they are only fun if everyone at the table is into that kind of play and enjoy mapping and resource management and the consequences that come with them.

It may not be that helpful (though hopefully more helpful than claiming X, Y, or Z is always or never fun - since every group is different), I do avoid "mega" dungeons and limit my dungeons to 30 to 50 encounter areas. I know for some people this is already "mega" (esp. compared to the 5-room dungeon model) but compared to 100+ room places of multiple levels, 30 to 50 is doable.

Otherwise, I draw them out on the battlemat (or lay out DIY dungeon tiles) as the party explores and don't do anything too different from any other area they might explore. I don't worry too much about mapping and getting lost unless the place is really huge and there is no character that could be reasonably expected to keep track of such things and figure out their way around (like a ranger, or maybe someone with the Outlander background).

The PCs exploring a partially submerged dungeon while the party druid is wildshaped into a tiger shark.

 

[billd91]

Thanks for the advice everyone. But I think I didn't communicate the problem that well.

I run open-world sandbox games. So dropping rumors/hooks/jobs into the PCs' laps and letting them pick isn't the problem. Getting them to pick one also isn't really the problem. It's what comes next.

The players take up the rumor/hook/job and ask a few initial questions, I provide the answers, point them clearly to some next possible steps, then they largely seem to just falter and stop dead. The fact that they have options seems to confuse them. That there isn't one blinking neon sign pointing to an obvious right choice puts them into analysis paralysis. They're looking for the rails when there aren't any, and the fact that they can't find them causes them to freeze.

I had one group talk themselves into a dead end they'd decided was the only possible option and when I communicated to them that nothing was happening in the location, instead of rethinking or adjusting at all, they literally just sat down and waited for the plot to come to them. At a later point the same group decided they wanted to talk to an NPC. When I told them the NPC was out of town and wouldn't be back for a day or two, they decided to just hold up in the inn where he was staying and waited. Legit refused to do anything else both times. There were other hooks, other rumors, other NPCs or locations they could visit or investigate, other angles they could check out for the same rumor/hook/job...but they noped out.

Now, while I recognize the "hurry up and wait" group is uniquely bad, a lot of other groups I've run for still get caught up in the analysis paralysis I talk about in the third paragraph. I'm a fan of the Alexandrian blog, so I pepper redundant clues throughout, with multiple clues pointing to the same conclusion. I've also run CoC for decades, so the mystery element isn't a problem. I know better than to lock things behind one roll or check. I know better than to use red herrings. I don't devise overly complicated stuff. I love Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, so I'm fine with moving clues to wherever the PCs are. I'm also far more of an improv referee so I have no problem just following the PCs wherever they go.

The trouble is, after a few choices...they just freeze. They're looking for the tracks and the fact that they can't find them stops them dead. I've been running and playing RPGs almost 40 years now and, in my experience, this is a uniquely 5E player thing. I've never had this issue with any other game or any other edition of D&D. It literally never happened until running 5E.

I’ve seen similar behavior in multiple games, multiple editions. I suggest looking at the group dynamic. Are they leaders or followers? If there are leaders among them, are they and their input the problem?

 

[Quickleaf]

I’ve seen similar behavior in multiple games, multiple editions. I suggest looking at the group dynamic. Are they leaders or followers? If there are leaders among them, are they and their input the problem?

@overgeeked Definitely not unique to 5e by a long shot, in my experience. Just echoing what billd91 is saying.