2019-03-15 Episode 21

{.right} Halberds and Helmets Podcast Running Dungeons, when to roll for random encounters, how much XP to give for monsters, how to restock dungeons

Halberds and Helmets Podcast

21-halberds-and-helmets.mp3

Links:

The Tao of XP: “First, and most importantly, 100xp per hit die is brain dead easy. I can do all the math in my head for parties of 6 characters or less and with a jot or two on some paper I can handle more.”
2017-03-04 Monster List: “While writing the book I’ve started to wonder whether I should just move away from the tricky calculation of monster XP back to the very old 100XP/HD. Sure, suddenly we’re back to gaining levels by killing 20 orcs. But is that such a problem? I don’t think so. Determining what counts as a special ability and what does not is boring.”
2017-01-23 Random Encounters: “If your players are pressed for time and after two or three hours they need to leave, and thus the dungeon exploration ends, then additional random encounters don’t do much, I think. They sometimes surprise the referee and add some color, that is all. That’s how I run it. I just roll the dice when I’m bored as a minor tax on players taking too long to make decisions or listening and checking for traps all the time.”
2013-08-21 One Roll Dungeon Stocking: “When I stocked my dungeon yesterday, I used the Moldvay Dungeon Stocking procedure. To be honest, my wife used it. The two tables are somewhat confusing.”
2019-02-22 Magic Items: “The one hundred magic items of Old *Eilif* of *Trazadan*.” A list of generated magic items from Hex Describe.
2014-04-30 Independent Existence of Imaginary Worlds: “For me, the most important aspect of using treasure tables is that there is no choice involved. Just roll. It’s like discovering the world by rolling on the table, it’s about being surprised even if you’re the referee of the game, it helps me suspend disbelief. The mechanics make sure that I’m not thinking of it as a figment of my imagination. It feels like a real thing.”
One Page Dungeon Contest Archive: an archive I maintain of all the entries submitted to the *One Page Dungeon Contest*.
Halberds and Helmets: my homebrew rule set with links to the PDF files

The Tao of XP

2017-03-04 Monster List

2017-01-23 Random Encounters

2013-08-21 One Roll Dungeon Stocking

2019-02-22 Magic Items

Hex Describe

2014-04-30 Independent Existence of Imaginary Worlds

One Page Dungeon Contest Archive

Halberds and Helmets

Dungeons

#Halberds and Helmets Podcast

Comments

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I was looking for blog posts about dungeon stocking...

Random dungeon stocking on *The City of Iron*, where Gavin Norman talks about the “Specials” result. He suspects that it comes up a lot, which it does, but then he discovers that he likes writing something up.
Random Dungeon Stocking on *Delta’s D&D Hotspot*, where Delta writes about the method he uses, and then compares that with the instructions in various editions of D&D. He doesn’t like Moldvay’s procedure all that much because the Special result means more work for the person stocking the dungeon.
B/X D&D vs. Labyrinth Lord dungeon stocking on Yore, where Martin Ralya compares the B/X and Labyrinth Lord stocking tables.
Stocking a Dungeon on *Save vs. Total Party Kill*, where Ramanan Sivaranjan does what many programmers do, I guess. “I have a little program that spits out what should be in each room using the rules from the Moldvay basic book.”
Excel and Random Dungeon Stocking on *Dreams in the Lich House*, where John Arendt tells you how to do this using Excel.
Stocking the Dungeon on *Paul’s Gameblog*, where Paul quotes from OD&D and notes: “the expectation is that you place the important stuff first, and then use the random charts to fill in the rest.”

Random dungeon stocking

Random Dungeon Stocking

B/X D&D vs. Labyrinth Lord dungeon stocking

Stocking a Dungeon

Excel and Random Dungeon Stocking

Stocking the Dungeon

And there is more out there. Ramanan’s post has links to bunch of other posts talking about making dungeons with links to many more articles.

I guess this goes to show that I really like to think of dungeons as very simple environments. I don’t spend too much time on making them!

– Alex Schroeder 2019-03-15 12:19 UTC

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These episodes are just awesome. Short but packed with experience and wisdom. Keep them coming! 🙂

– Björn Buckwalter 2019-03-16 14:34 UTC

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Thanks! 😅

– Alex Schroeder 2019-03-16 21:48 UTC