Radiohead is singing about the fade out, and I’m sitting in the living room, enjoying my holidays. Yesterday I was on a 24km hike with a friend so today I’m going to rest. It’s going to be 30°C outside, soon.
On Mastodon, I’ve had an interesting discussion with @phf about restocking rolls. We’re both running and playing in our Monday Games campaign. When I’m running the game, I run Stonehell; when he’s running the game, he runs Barrowmaze. In both our games, we use the following restocking rule:
“Whenever an empty room is left, it gets a restocking roll after the session.”
Thus, if there were monsters in the room, or if there was unguarded treasure in the room, it gets a restocking roll. If nobody went to check up on a room, the last restocking roll remains in effect an no restocking roll is made. If a room was visited but the monsters remained undefeated, or the unguarded treasure was not found, this also remains in effect and no restocking roll is made.
We use slightly different restocking tables but the differences are minor.
For Stonehell, I a d20:
5× empty, 1× unguarded treasure, 1× trap with treasure, 2× trap, 3× monster, 3× monster with treasure (incl. big boss variant), 4× special monster with treasure (altar, bombs, pets, fortifications), 1× new sub-level – 2022-03-29_Restocking
For Barrowmaze, Peter uses 1d6:
1 monster, 2 monster+treasure, 3-6 empty (but 1 in 6 chance of hidden treasure) and there are no traps that suddenly pop up
Thus, when it comes to monsters, we both have a 50% chance of monsters showing up.
There are some strange consequences to this, however: if there is a single entrance room it gets visited every single time, and therefore there’s always a 50% chance of monsters being there. The entrance room is pretty busy: we always visit. In the ten sessions of Barrowmaze we have played so far, we haven’t ever seen a monster in the entrance room. Does that mean that there’s a 2¹⁰:1 or 1024:1 chance that it has unguarded treasure? If so, is it worth getting the treasure, or is it better to have the first room protected from random restocking by unguarded treasure? 🤔 😆
I don’t restock the “safe portion” of the dungeon … I also don’t roll random encounters there. – Peter
Another consequence is of course that the dungeon is never cleared. Monsters keep returning and as a referee I have to keep making up stories of where the monsters come from. We have a player with a strong D&D 5 background and we got talking. They felt that the dungeon was super tough, we never seem to get more than five or six rooms in before our resources are exhausted or time runs out, and then next time there are monsters all over the place again, so that’s it.
Good point.
The conclusion for dungeon designers would be to just make most of everything that’s interesting reachable within five or six rooms from an entrance.
The conclusion for referees running a dungeon would be to make sure to use those reaction rolls so that enough encounters end up with friendly or helpful monsters, thus allowing some reprieve for player parties. I’m going to assume that positive reaction rolls hold if the same character encounters the monsters next time.
Sadly, Barrowmaze is so full of mindless undead it renders this mitigation strategy void. At the same time, we’re using Halberds and Helmets for our games and there are no clerics. This might end up being a big problem in a dungeon that’s full of undead.
No undead turning. No problem. It just makes undead a little more dangerous as they never roll reaction rolls and they never fail morale checks. – 2019-02-08 Still No Clerics
The conclusion for players playing the dungeon would be to take a lot of hired help into the dungeon. We’re both running our games with two or three players. These take along up to three characters each, so a party is usually consists of around six or seven characters. Perhaps we just need more hired hands: bring along 10 mercenaries, for example?
Another option in the Barrowmaze context would be to try and find a second entrance, allowing us once again to explore about five rooms in all directions. At the moment we’re trying to find new entrances from below. Surely a lot harder than when doing it from the surface where we might just explore more burial mounds but at the same time we had received dire warnings about exploring the surface above the Barrowmaze so I’m not sure whether I want to change our approach.
Another thought to consider is the restocking frequency. Let’s move away from the entrance room since that one just gets visited twice: once when we go in, and once when we leave. There’s no restocking happening while we’re in the dungeon as we run one expedition per session.
As the dungeon is not linear, there are rooms that we might backtrack to if we were to play for four hours or more. Within the same session there’s no restocking happening there and we don’t pass through the rooms near the entrance again, so there’s no restocking happening there, either. Unfortunately for us, we only play for about one and a half hours per session: we start at 20:15 and try to end around 22:00. Thus, every time we backtrack, we backtrack all the way out, and every time we return, restocking rolls took place.
There is some non-linear connection between session length and restocking roll frequencies if our expeditions are not strictly linear.
Let me return to that 50% chance for monsters showing up when restocking a room. In the Moldvay Basic D&D book, the first stocking of the room has less than 50% monsters! B52 has a 2 in 6 chance for monsters, plus a 1 in 6 chance for a special room, and these special rooms have strange sounds, disorienting traps, or illusions and not monsters, where as on my table the special restocking always adds special monsters. Thus there’s another surprising consequence of my restocking table: the monsters density actually goes up when returning to rooms after you’ve seen them the first time.
There is a penalty for returning to dungeon sections you have already explored.
I’m not quite sure what to do now. I know Peter tweaked his restocking table. At one point he mentioned simply using a larger die, thus more rooms stay empty. As for me, I’m not sure, yet.
#RPG