What needs to be removed to make high level dungeons work?

[Swordslinger]

How much railroading is too much? As DM's we all have to have something planned for the evenings entertainment, but when does a well planned adventure become a ride on the Plot Express? I tend to think that as long as the players have free agency in how they accomplish a goal, its fine if the goal itself is pre-determined.

I don't view preventing encounter skipping as railroading. That's just designing a difficult adventure. Figuring out how to overcome encounters is a major part of the game, and skipping them entirely is boring. It's good to allow a PC to sneak, bribe or disguise their way past guards instead of kill them, but skipping huge sections of the quest is probably not something you want.

Railroading is when you toss the PCs into an adventure they don't even want to play and they're forced to accept the quest whether they like it or not. Railroading is due to either DMs who design illogical quests that don't take their PCs motives into considerations, or PCs who want to do all kinds of random disruptive actions just to fuck with the game.

[TheFlatline]

Exactly. Which is why I brought it up when someone asked for an "unskippable module." I was answering what I thought was a simple question.

But you're still wrong. The characters can always kill themselves.

Which is exactly what happened when, in a Ravenloft game someone was running, we were put into something like an EL 17 encounter while we were level 4. A football arena sized zone of silence, with no warning, and a mage who had apparently memorized all his spells silenced, and had a maximized wand of fireballs, in a room that sealed shut with walls of force on all sides.

When he cast fly and went 100 feet straight up, the players said "we kill ourselves" because it was such a stupid, bullshit encounter. MC got pissed that we broke the adventure... Apparently we were supposed to surrender, but we couldn't communicate, and on the first round 2 of our party got killed in one shot. So we broke his adventure.

So unless you're going to hold a real gun to a player's head, there's *always* a way out of a module that breaks said module.

[hyzmarca]

I don't view preventing encounter skipping as railroading. That's just designing a difficult adventure. Figuring out how to overcome encounters is a major part of the game, and skipping them entirely is boring. It's good to allow a PC to sneak, bribe or disguise their way past guards instead of kill them, but skipping huge sections of the quest is probably not something you want.

The important questions are these: What is an encounter and what is skipping?

Why sneaking, bribing, or bluffing one's way past the guards at the gate guard perfectly acceptable while climbing the wall, digging a tunnel under the wall, or just disintegrating a section of the wall is not?


The correct response when the PCs come up with a perfectly valid alternate means of defeating an obstacle, even if it means "skipping" the "encounter" is to allow it.

The point of sneaking past the guard is to get into the castle, that's the goal. The goal should be the encounter. Sneaking past the guard shouldn't be an end unto itself.

And that's how you get around encounter skipping, by the way. The encounter isn't the monster or the trap, the encounter is the goal. Thus the only way to skip it is for the players to decide that the goal itself is stupid.

First you build a setting, you populate it with character, and you define a campaign goal that your PCs should be shooting for. This is the campaign win condition, as much as any campaign can truly be won.

This win condition should not be as simple as "kill BBEG". It shouldn't be something as tedious as "collect the rod of 147 parts" either. Fetch quests do not make for epic campaigns. It should be something that has strategic depth.

Your campaign is like a sandbox. The players can do what they will with it. And there will be consequences for their decisions.


Adventures should be a buffet that the players can pick and choose from, for reasons both IC and OOC. Each is a sub-goal that contributes to completed the campaign, but it shouldn't be necessary that all of them be completed, the PCs should have a choice.


To put it another words , Defeat the Empire of Japan is a campaign goal. Capturing Guadalcanal is an Adventure goal. It contributes to the campaign but isn't strictly necessary. It's a long and arduous adventure that requires winning many encounters.
Nuking Hiroshima is also an Adventure, and one much shorter. It's practically a dungeon bypass. But when your adventure goal is to destroy a city in the most spectacular way possible, you can't really blame the players for just dropping a nuke on it.

The important the here is that you can't just scry&die Hirohito. You have the capability, but killing the Emperor is insufficient to defeat the Empire. It's actually counter-productive in this case, since you need him alive to issue the surrender.

[Wrathzog]

But you're still wrong. The characters can always kill themselves.
...
So unless you're going to hold a real gun to a player's head, there's *always* a way out of a module that breaks said module.

And you're still missing the point. Your characters killed themselves out of the player's desires to protest to the DM's actions. Not because it made sense for the characters to do so.

Going by your steam of logic, even threatening to shoot someone unless they play my game isn't going to get them to play my game. They can bite their tongue off or make me shoot them. If we're going to be this asinine about the definition "unskippable" then there is no "unskippable" module in all of existence.

[RobbyPants]

I don't view preventing encounter skipping as railroading. That's just designing a difficult adventure. Figuring out how to overcome encounters is a major part of the game, and skipping them entirely is boring. It's good to allow a PC to sneak, bribe or disguise their way past guards instead of kill them, but skipping huge sections of the quest is probably not something you want.

Put it this way: what is the point of the encounter? Does it serve any real purpose?

If so, then the PCs need to have that encounter. If not, then there's no harm in skipping it. If the problem is that MC knows the encounter is mandatory but the PCs don't know and they skip it, then you have to get creative. So, to give examples:

- If the goal is to kill some guy, then yes, the PCs can't just skip the encounter.
- If the goal is to do some thing, and this guy is in their way, then they're still advancing the plot, even if they skip the encounter. He's incidental to the plot, even if MC thinks it'd be a super cool awesome encounter.
- If the guy has some really important info for the PCs, but they don't know it and they avoid him, that's MC's fault, not the PCs.

So, what exactly is your problem with "encounter skipping"?

[violence in the media]

And you're still missing the point. Your characters killed themselves out of the player's desires to protest to the DM's actions. Not because it made sense for the characters to do so.

Here's the point you are missing: player desires trump character desires.

Your players are not participating in the game because their characters want to, they're participating because they want to. As MC, you must keep the players involved. Nobody is going to suck it up and participate in a game against their wishes otherwise just so Moonshadow the elf will find her true love or avenge the death of her uncle or whatever. If the player doesn't want to be there, Moonshadow can fuck right off.

If the players that aren't having fun with the game and don't want to be there show up at all, it's because of other reasons unrelated to character concerns.

[sabs]

Game systems cannot fix douchebag players and DMs. If your adventures suck, then there's just nothing a game system can do. If your players read every module ever put out, and have the maps memorized so they know where all the treasure is. There's not a damn thing any game system can do.

Even at the very highest levels, there's nothing that you need to 'remove' to have a workable plot. You just have to understand that your BBEG have to be smart. You don't build in terms of encounters. Getting upset because the party is able to skip the masturbatory trap dungeon, is just silly. That trap dungeon probably did not need to be there. What you need is a set of goals that lead your plot along. Not, and now they fight 3 beholders and a cockatrice.

[Wrathzog]

Your players are not participating in the game because their characters want to, they're participating because they want to. As MC, you must keep the players involved. Nobody is going to suck it up and participate in a game against their wishes otherwise just so Moonshadow the elf will find her true love or avenge the death of her uncle or whatever. If the player doesn't want to be there, Moonshadow can fuck right off.

Okay, so wait. Are we talking about..
1) Skipping Ahead through the story? As in, I go from plot point 1 to plot point 5.
2) Skipping the entire story? As in, I never progress beyond plot point 1.
because these are definitely not the same thing.

[erik]

Skipping the entire story? How about choosing a different story?

I play a 3e campaign where we are a very anemic level 4-ish party. We are hanging around Rappan Athuk and I am sure our DM would love for us to delve it. However the average random encounters around there are TPKs, so we are bugging out.

I don't feel at all bad for our group doing other things than suicide in that dungeon. There are other dungeons, other menaces to slay. We have in character reasons for wanting to go, but we know it is suicide and we have in character reasons to stay alive and do other things too.

I do not believe our DM is put out about that either because he is not an idiot. He simply wants us to know it is there and available in his story/setting and it would be silly if it were to only suddenly appear once we are at the appropriate level.

If you feel your players have to fight every encounter, or run through every dungeon that you present, then you had better give them a good enough reason to do so. If not, then don't get bent out of joint when they go in another direction.

[violence in the media]

Okay, so wait. Are we talking about..
1) Skipping Ahead through the story? As in, I go from plot point 1 to plot point 5.
2) Skipping the entire story? As in, I never progress beyond plot point 1.
because these are definitely not the same thing.

See, from my standpoint, those are essentially the same thing. Just because we, as players, rejected your evil necromancer threatening the town adventure doesn't mean we don't want to play D&D. It just means we don't want to do that particular adventure. Hell, we probably didn't even know that was the only one you had planned.

If we leap ahead and kill the necromancer early, we probably just figured that was what we should do. We really aren't thinking that we're skipping any carefully-crafted, story-important encounters just because we arranged a trap and caught the guy in the loo.

Now, a lot of this miscommunication here I think stems from our differing approaches. When I approach a game, it's because I'm there to play D&D; not because I have a particular affection for your story or adventure that I likely know nothing about. I am an adventuring dude living in D&D land--I'm going to do what sounds good. Similarly, when I run games, I'm usually pretty sandboxy. I'll put the aforementioned Temple of Nine Dooms down in the world, but the players are under no obligation to go there.

Of course, there are limits to my brain, and I'm not going to hold the whole of the world inside it. But if I mentioned the Temple of Nine Dooms, the Valley of Monoliths, and the Forest of Grisly Fruit, you can safely assume that I have maps and encounters and adventures for all of them. If you say, "fuck that, we're heading west" then we're probably into wing-it territory and you're going to find yourselves encountering things like awakened gorilla druids riding ogres or some shit. At any rate, my feelings aren't going to be hurt because you didn't do what I prepped.

[sabs]

Gorilla druids riding ogres? That actually sounds pretty cool

[Novembermike]

The important questions are these: What is an encounter and what is skipping?

This is actually a decent question. I'd say that an adventure is usually going to consist of certain parts. Assassinating a king might require you to get inside the castle walls, blend in with the surrounding people, figure out where the king is and finally killing him. Now, a wizard is going to trivializing a number of those parts (teleport inside the gate, make an illusion for a disguise, charm someone to tell you where the king is and then just walk in there) which is generally a negative since it takes out a lot of the roleplaying, but it isn't skipping. I'd say skipping is when the player can simply scry out the king's location and send a teleporting rape squad in. Then there's no real adventure at all, just a single action you take.

[Novembermike]

But you're still wrong. The characters can always kill themselves.

I think you mean the players can be passive-aggressive. If you're pissed off about an encounter then tell the GM to go fuck himself.

[erik]

I'd say skipping is when the player can simply scry out the king's location and send a teleporting rape squad in. Then there's no real adventure at all, just a single action you take.

If that's all you have to do to kill someone who is supposedly bad ass enough to declare himself a king in a DnD world, then not only is it no real adventure, but that is no real king.

You want a king to assassinate for a party over level 9? Then he damn well better have his own might and magic backing him. Scry prevention should not be unreasonable for someone at that level. Having a court wizard, captain of the guards and master of assassins is a no-brainer.

In my last campaign world I was running the king was the highest level caster (a sorcerer) in the kingdom of which the players were citizens.

If people are sticking weak-ass mundane kingdoms in a DnD campaign then they deserve to have them toppled by a couple spells by bad ass adventurers.

[Novembermike]

If that's all you have to do to kill someone who is supposedly bad ass enough to declare himself a king in a DnD world, then not only is it no real adventure, but that is no real king.

They're trying to kill this guy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_Spain

King is just a political title. Even in a magical society it's going to mean a lot.

[Swordslinger]

The important questions are these: What is an encounter and what is skipping?

Why sneaking, bribing, or bluffing one's way past the guards at the gate guard perfectly acceptable while climbing the wall, digging a tunnel under the wall, or just disintegrating a section of the wall is not?

Because one involves interacting with the encounter and the other doesn't. There's no drama in digging underground, because there's no chance of failure, as there would be with sneaking or bluffing your way past the guards.

Now if you wanted you could try to run a dramatic encounter as they tunnel through where they risk cave-ins and getting crushed under tons of rock, but the D&D rules really don't handle that well.

And that's how you get around encounter skipping, by the way. The encounter isn't the monster or the trap, the encounter is the goal. Thus the only way to skip it is for the players to decide that the goal itself is stupid.

So you're basically proposing that there are no side encounters other than the goal battle? Literally, the entire bad guy's castle is empty except for the throne room containing him and his person guard? That's like taking any novel involving a journey and slicing out all but the first and final chapter. You've solved your problem of not being able to afford condoms by chopping your dick off. I'm not really sold.

The important the here is that you can't just scry&die Hirohito. You have the capability, but killing the Emperor is insufficient to defeat the Empire. It's actually counter-productive in this case, since you need him alive to issue the surrender.

Ok see, there's your problem. You're thinking in modern terms that don't apply to D&D. In D&D, It's not about defeating armies or forcing surrenders. Any high level character can take down an army no problem. The goal in a D&D adventure really is to kill the bad guy and maybe a few of his highest ranked people under him. Armies are crap in D&D, it's the general who everyone cares about. Kill him and everything falls.

[sabs]

That guy had guards. Advisors, Master Assassins. Yes, personally he was a chump, but the man had /clout/

You don't get to teleport in and kill the king of Spain. It just doesn't happen, he's ridiculously rich. That means he has MULTILE wizards on staff. Hell, he's probably gotten to use 1 wish on himself at the very least.

He's got trinkets of protection. He's surrounded by powerful guards of all ilks.

He's the king of a rich and powerful nation. Yes, he might be a chump, but the office is not a chump.

[Archmage]

King is just a political title. Even in a magical society it's going to mean a lot.

No, it's going to mean precisely nothing if he doesn't actually have any power to justify his authority.

[wotmaniac]

You're thinking in modern terms that don't apply to D&D. In D&D, It's not about defeating armies or forcing surrenders.

Why not?

Armies are crap in D&D, it's the general who everyone cares about. Kill him and everything falls.

then he has a very shallow chain of command/succession.

King is just a political title. Even in a magical society it's going to mean a lot.

No, it's going to mean precisely nothing if he doesn't actually have any power to justify his authority.

the perception of authority is its own power (and vise-versa).

[sabs]

But he needs to be able to defend that power from King Joblow down the street. Or Necromancer Beelzebub, his younger brother whose really jealous that King Crabs got all the love as a child.

[wotmaniac]

But he needs to be able to defend that power from King Joblow down the street. Or Necromancer Beelzebub, his younger brother whose really jealous that King Crabs got all the love as a child.

true.
my point was that along with the title of "king" comes all the kingly assets (to include the various "security" personnel) -- which means that he has the resources to maintain that position (provided, of course, he can navigate the political waters ..... )

[Archmage]

the perception of authority is its own power (and vise-versa).

If I can bind demons to do tasks for me and the local king can't, and he doesn't have anyone on a leash that can do it for him, there's no way I'm going to perceive the king as having authority over me.

[TheFlatline]

Going by your steam of logic, even threatening to shoot someone unless they play my game isn't going to get them to play my game. They can bite their tongue off or make me shoot them. If we're going to be this asinine about the definition "unskippable" then there is no "unskippable" module in all of existence.

My point is that free will trumps pre-written modules. Period. The characters first say "non serviam", and then the players if that doesn't work. The module breaks sooner or later, even if by "breaking" the players just don't play ball.

If the module *doesn't* break, it's because there has been at least an implicit agreement between the players and the DM to play the module as written, and to reign in their free will.

Free will is the ultimate knot-cutting tool. Bemoaning simplified knot-cutting when the 800 pound gorilla in the room is the entire *point* of the game is stupid and asinine.

My original question still stands: Name me one published module where characters exercising free will *doesn't* break the module. You can't, because no module can cover every possible idea that players could come up with.

As for "professional" module writers, D&D writers are crap. If memory serves, even Shadowrun adventures include blurbs like "what do you do if the players/characters don't want to go on this run?" which is something D&D doesn't even bother with. D&D modules are written like computer games: very little choice and free will, and it's assumed that you won't stray outside the lines the module establishes.

[Lago PARANOIA]

then he has a very shallow chain of command/succession.

It's not like that. In D&D the gap in power between levels of authority is immense. Not just soft political power but actual power. The lich-king's second in command can't replace him because he does not have enough power to actually do so.

And because it's seriously possible in D&D to eliminate entire armies without breaking a sweat, why should anyone with more power than the king listen to them? Why are the king's personal wizards listening to him at all if he's a vanilla 4th-level aristocrat? The only reason why they would is either out of personal loyalty (which is ridiculously unstable, especially with the extreme social darwinism of these times) or out of respect of the social contract (which hasn't been invented yet and probably will never be).

[Swordslinger]

Well, I think Lago addressed the king issue well enough, so I'll just address this.

Free will is the ultimate knot-cutting tool. Bemoaning simplified knot-cutting when the 800 pound gorilla in the room is the entire *point* of the game is stupid and asinine.

Refusing to undertake the quest isn't a knot cut, it's a failure condition. Failure is always going to be an option, regardless of what you do. The PCs could always simply die.

If they're not going to take on the quest the DM prepared, then why did the players show up to the session in the first place? This isn't a rules issue so much as an underlying problem with the group itself.