A quick recap to explain how i came to this conclusion:
Very untypical for me there is a dungeon in my ongoing campaign. I had already prepared that area and a prettty good idea what the local powers and factions are like but with the players nearby and likely to enter it I further prepared by fully sttocking the dungeon with encounters, traps and treasure.
Instead of entering the dungeon my players decided to enter a different place that is kind of like a dungeon aswell. This place I had mapped aswell but i never stocked it.
During the session I used my preexisting ideas of what this place should be like to roll for apripriatt encounters and treasure.
From my perspective the session went well
My takeaway:
I did not particularly enjoyed stocking the dungeon
At the time I took it as just me not beeing that much into dungeons
But now i feel like the reason i disliked it is because stocking is just a waste of time, both because filling the details in during play is probably faster than having to look it up in the notes and because i enjoy doing it in the session a lot.
My Question to You:
I am in generall curious to see how my way of running the game contrasts with other peoples takes on running the game but here are a few more concrete questions if you want to respond
Do you run a dungeon centric game?
Do you stock your dungeons/What do you prepare for your game and how detailed?
What aspect of prepping the game do you like?
What aspect of runnning the game do you like?
My answers:
My game mostly centers on overland exploration and dealing with the respective factions and powers .
I extensivly prepare the region my next campaign is going to be played to get familiar with the geography and present factions and major npcs and monsters. In addition i make sure to have the region surrouinding the players starting point to a high detail.
Once a campaign is running prep for me is bookkeping(seeing what impact the players actions had on those outside of the players direct perspective, aswell as faction progress) and filling regions with further detail if the players are about to or recently moved to an area not yet fleshed out that much(i.e. coming up with relevant npcs for villages along a road or coming up with precise numbers for how many forces are at the disposal of Warlord X)
When it comes to deliberate game prep it is definetly designing procedures that modell the surrounbding, be it random encounter tables or a procedure to determine faction progress. What I enhoy a lot is the incidental prep for example when today in the morning during my cycling tour i was reminded of a particualar npc and thought about them for 1/2h and kept developing them into a more and more fleshed out character.
Definetly the synsthesis of my prep and the players actions + random outcomes into approriatt reactions from the different elements of my campaign world
I do stock dungeons. It’s easier for me to create connections between disparate areas, whereas improvising would require me to create keys with no locks and locks with no keys. But even this is the kind of thing that can be addressed without fully keying an entire dungeon space if it’s not what you like. You can choose to pre-stock just the closely connected details, or decide that every couple of rooms you randomly generate you’ll generate an extra one further in the dungeon that has a relationship to the most recent one you made.
For the past 6 months or more I’ve been running (and playing) exclusively dungeon centric games. Megadungeons, multi-shot dungeons, etc. I don’t think I’ve had a session in that timeframe where the gameplay was outside of a dungeon for any substantial action.
I randomly stock dungeons… for the most part. If I have a thing I want to put in there specifically, I’ll drop it in wherever makes sense. I fill in the unstocked places randomly afterwards. I generally write no more than 4 sentences in a room, often much less with empty rooms.
In prep, I like coming up with the crafted encounters, the non-random ones. I like coming up with OSR-style problems in the dungeon.
In running, I like adjudicating and determining the outcomes of actions outside of mechanics. I generally lean towards diegetic resolution, and enjoy that thinking process.
I think your reaction to that session is totally reasonable. In the past I’ve often wondered if you can run a dungeon with no prep, rolling randomly when necessary. But I don’t think your experience really contradicts the idea that stocking during prep is unnecessary. I think it saves some people headache from rolling a bunch at the table and pausing play.
I think with well-crafted tables, you can stock as you go. But I agree that just coming up with dungeon contents out of your head as you go will probably make you repetitive or falling back on less creative ideas than if you had thought for a while before about what’s in the dungeon.
But now i feel like the reason i disliked it is because stocking is just a waste of time, both because filling the details in during play is probably faster than having to look it up in the notes and because i enjoy doing it in the session a lot.
Yeah I have also had this experience. If you have a good idea of the fundamentals of the dungeon (why it’s there, who is there and want to they want, what kind of feel does it have), then a lot of details can fill themselves in fairly quickly.
However, running with absolutely no idea (e.g., just blank dyson dungeons) can be a bit tiring. I had one campaign where I was doing that for a while and definitely started to hit the limits of my improv-ability. So having at least tables of some type to fall back on can help out with that.
I think with well-crafted tables, you can stock as you go. But I agree that just coming up with dungeon contents out of your head as you go will probably make you repetitive or falling back on less creative ideas than if you had thought for a while before about what’s in the dungeon.
Yeah I agree, although I think it’s sometimes the opposite case as well–sometimes I write out an idea alone and think it’s amazing, then in play turns out it’s a bit flat. Whereas when forced to improv it on the spot then something better comes up. So it can definitely cut both ways.
I don’t stock my dungeons. I just leave out a map and a glass of milk for the night, and when I wake up, the dungeon is stocked and the milk is gone.
I can improv a room-by-room crawl based on an encounter table and a rough idea. However, if I want to have a “bigger picture”, or stuff like foreshadowing, snippets of lore encoded in murals, puzzles or navigational challenges, it’s much better to at least write it out a little bit.
A middle ground: something like The Gardens of Ynn, those “depthcrawls”, where you roll up rooms on the go and improv around the basic details. They are tons of fun if well-themed.
How much notes did you write for the dungeons you stocked?
Having read the responses i guess it mostly comes down to my play just not focusing on dungeons.
I feel little need to foreshadow things in my dungeon or plant seeds because this has already happened, things from the dungeon have ventured into the surrounding, factions have interacted with the powers of the dungeon or even ventured into it before giving players the possibility to get that knowledge.
In my campaign if there appears a dungeon at all it is usually the realm of some faction or power and the players are here because they are strong enough to overpower it in its own realm or foolish enough that they believe themselves to be in such a position.
Sure from time to time i will have a dungeon hold a secret of its own but usually the things the players learn in the dungeons are more conformations of the superstitions they had before or stuff they might have completly missed before but I as a GM had been keeping in the backhand for some time.
Yeah that’s a good point, the role of a dungeon in a game predominantly focused on overland exploration is different than in a game focused on dungeon-crawling as its main thing.
Yesterday another session in my campaign was supposed to take place but because of massiv train delays my 1h ride back home took 4 hours so i had to cancel the session and had plenty of time on my hands so i thought i could write a litttle follow up how my players exploring the dungeon went and how it changed my original take a little.
I will give a little overview of the dungeon and how the last session went.
The dungeon is a giant spider net with the nodes beeing effectivly dungeon rooms and the strings the corridors connecting rooms.
Each node had the chance to contain spiders, treassure, a special encounter, a combinattion of the these or be empty.
In addition any violent or loud player actions had the chance tto attract nearby spiders or even THE Spider.
What i knew about THE Spider at this point was that it is house sized, had already lived for centuries, was sentient and had an old gruzdge against the plantmages and their by now fallen civilization.
I had not decided on any more specific characteristics and I also had not decided yet wether or not it could talk.
During the exploration of the net i rolled a special encounter for my players which came up as “Lunatic” “looks for” “Despair”
I decided that “Despair” would obviously be THE Spider and decided that the “Lunatic” was a denizen of a nearby settlement that was looking to talk with the spider because their peers told her not to do so and rules are to be broken.
Upon meeting her the players were curios and decided to follow her, encourage her to go through with her plan and then watch from the sideline probably getting eaten alive.
With the players getting closer to THE Spider i rolled for its personality and got “Unhinged Misantrope” I decided that for THE Spider this meant it was frustrated with its grudge against the ancient civilization ending with its fall and was obsessed with once again finding plantomancers to fight against. At this point I also decided it was capable of speech.
The players themselves had already encountered evidence of plantmagic a few times. While at least in my opinion their currenttt knowledge isnt even enough to get to the conclusion that there is one power behind these occurences with certainty the players had made up their made that there was a plant mage behind this so evil that they killed anything or anyone associated with plant magic on sight.
The encounter was great fun with the party and THE Spider encouraging each other in their hatred fo ttthe plantomancer and eagerly exchanging information on their common enemy, ending with THE Spider giving the party the task to investigate the nearby plant dungeon.
The players loved THE Spider and i had a blast with the encouncter aswell.
Besides the fact that vague random encoutners fucking rock, my key takeaway from the session is that I understated the role that GM enjoyment plays in how I prep.
I could have preprole THE Spiders personality and have done so for similiar NPCs in the past.
But creating NPCs live is a lot of fun for me and it is a lot harder for my get be creative in this way in prep. Giving the finishing touch that brings them to live when their is no one to live for bores me.