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From his blog:
As those of you who follow me on Twitter might know, I wrote up a dungeon for OD&D to run at this year's D&D Experience. Unfortunately, I didn't get the chance to run it at the con. However, I learned a useful lesson going forward: From now on, when I design an adventure I'll first approach it as if I'm running it using OD&D.
Complete post can be found here. My take? It's literally location, location, location. And that's fine. I'd like to have seen some examples, though.
I dropped D&D for ages and got back into it during 3.5.
The biggest shock for me was trying to write my own adventures. Old school was easy with the emphasis on plot, description, etc.
A typical orc encounter would be summed up as AC5, THAC0 19 damage d6, 6HPS each.
Now it seems I'm spending more time on stat blocks for various critters which get bashed in 4 rounds.
A typical orc encounter would be summed up as AC5, THAC0 19 damage d6, 6HPS each.
LOL - Oh how I miss those days! But for all the complexity, I do love 3E.
Peace,
tfad
That´s right, designing stats for adventures can be quite involved. That is the reason many published adventures use standard creatures there. For my homebrew, I just improvise a lot, especially with skills. HeroForge is a godsend for building NPCs in that regard. (I have to build a bard4/wizard14 human lich for my next adventure, re-designing a 2nd Ed. Dungeon adventure. Thats quite a task now.) If published adventures, especially at higher levels, use unique creatures a lot, they need a lot of space for stats and have less room for the story. I always see D&D as something akin to an action tv series. The more room action scenes are given, the less room is there for the story and character development. With 3.x, it is easy to fall for the "action scene trap" in designing adventures.
Stefan
I'm trying to convert Return to the Tomb of Horrors to Pathfinder.
What a nightmare!
All the stat blocks for critters will take up as much as the original module. Tried it with, the name escapes me at the mo', underdark campaign with the Aboleth city...gave up half way through book two.
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Complete post can be found here. My take? It's literally location, location, location. And that's fine. I'd like to have seen some examples, though.
Someone dropped me a line about this thread, so I thought I'd give a little more detail.
Pretty much at random, I decided that the OD&D dungeon would be an abandoned temple of Poseidon. I drew my map and started to stock it.
For the main altar area, I penciled in a huge statue of Poseidon, a bunch of columns carved to look like kraken, and a giant pool of water. My instincts at that point would then be to find monsters that would fit into that area, creatures that could use the pool in interesting ways (a aquatic spellcaster that the characters couldn't reach; critters that could climb the columns and attack from above), but OD&D doesn't really support that style. The creatures are really, really simple, so any special effects would have to come from the room.
That's when things got interesting. What if the room itself was the interesting bit, and whatever monsters were there just made the room more interesting, rather than vice versa?
I ended up with the following:
* The pool was a sacrificial pit, with offerings of gold and jewels thrown into it. Some treasure was still down there for the taking.
* Touching the pool was sacrilege, and any non-Poseidon worshiper who touched it sparked the sea god's wrath. The temple doors slammed shut and water poured from the columns to drown intruders. Of course, items could enter the pit just fine, so thinking of a way to use a pole or net to grab them would avoid Poseidon's anger.
* A trap door in the ceiling provided an escape from the flooded room, but you couldn't really spot it until the water level lifted you up to see it. Even then, you had to tap the ceiling/look for it.
* The state had a system of bellows and speaking tubes that allowed a high priest hidden in a secret chamber next door to "speak" with the voice of Poseidon.
* Later on, as I fleshed out the rest of the temple, I added short descriptions of murals on the walls that provided clues to other tricks and traps (a flooding chamber used for living sacrifices; a hidden door leading to a treasure room; the garb required to pass into the crypts). The murals also provided clues for the trap in the main temple.
* For the finishing touch, I decided that the "monster" in the room was a gnome illusionist who had discovered the secret speaking chamber. Speaking as Poseidon, he would demand sacrifices, order adventurers to engage in quests in his name, and so on. When dealing with troublemakers or adventurers who doubted him, he'd try to lure them into reaching into the pool to trigger the temple's death trap.
That's one example. Other stuff I've added to adventures with this process included the haunted skull of a dead adventurer that answered questions about the dungeon in return for a proper burial, the statue of a sea nymph that beguiled adventurers into adorning it with jewelry and other treasures, and a puzzle room where the priests of Poseidon ritually drowned heretics. That room had a sequence of actions you could take to unlock a sealed vault, but you could only learn the actions by studying the murals and tomes in a few, scattered rooms.
I've never played OD&D, so I don't really have the nostalgia that other players have. However, like you, I've discovered that interesting monsters are only half of what makes an adventure entertaining. If you can find ways to make the environment part of the challenge, it makes the encounter much more interesting and forces players to think more creatively about their tactics. I also find that it's often helpful to come up with the idea for the encounter first, and then figure out how the rules apply.
Personally, whenever I design an encounter, I write what I call a musing first. It's basically a free form, stream of consciousness journal that I use to flesh out ideas about story, characters, and any encounters I think I might want to include. Once I have these elements pretty well sketched out, then I try to figure out how the encounter will work within the system.
For example, I decided once that I wanted to create a group of pyromaniacs who set buildings on fire as part of their tactics. I didn't know how the fire would work in game, but I thought it would make for an entertaining scenario, even if I had to write my own rules for it. However, flipping through the DMG, I discovered that they actually have rules written for forest fires. So I used those.
Good to see Mike still thinks and plays D&D at some point.
I dropped D&D for ages and got back into it during 3.5.
The biggest shock for me was trying to write my own adventures. Old school was easy with the emphasis on plot, description, etc.
A typical orc encounter would be summed up as AC5, THAC0 19 damage d6, 6HPS each.
Now it seems I'm spending more time on stat blocks for various critters which get bashed in 4 rounds.
If you are writing the stats for your own game use, then there is no reason to go into any more detail than you did for the older editions.
A typical orc in 3.5 can be summed up as AC 13, Melee +4 damage 2d4+4, 5 hps.
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Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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If you are writing the stats for your own game use, then there is no reason to go into any more detail than you did for the older editions.A typical orc in 3.5 can be summed up as AC 13, Melee +4 damage 2d4+4, 5 hps.
I don't think that works for a very large number of encounters - touch/flat-footed AC, crit range, saving throws, and speed come up in almost every encounter. BAB, stats, Spot/Listen, and a handful of other abilities come up often enough that they should be included as well.
Though, I suppose, to be fair, saving throws probably came up just as often in prior editions - it was just slightly easier to reference that information (you only had to reference a table and not calculate a value based on stats/HD/good saves/etc.).
If you are writing the stats for your own game use, then there is no reason to go into any more detail than you did for the older editions.A typical orc in 3.5 can be summed up as AC 13, Melee +4 damage 2d4+4, 5 hps.
It is easier to refer to the monster books for standard creature than noting stat blocks that way. You could list the differences you need and be done. The OD&D/BD&D rules did have less situational modifiers to stats and left a lot to DM discretion. 3.x has a different design, allowing for more details, at the same time demanding more attention to said details. Of course, in a home game, you can always wing it, but for published stuff, this won´t work.
Stefan
A typical orc in 3.5 can be summed up as AC 13, Melee +4 damage 2d4+4, 5 hps
I have tried this but:
touch/flat-footed AC, crit range, saving throws, and speed come up in almost every encounter. BAB, stats, Spot/Listen, and a handful of other abilities come up often enough that they should be included as well
What I usually end up with is something akin to pres man's line, but with saves added, and with arrows and lines all over the place as I remember that I need to add X, Y, and Z, because the players have all these different abilities that effect the monsters/NPCs.
I do my best to simplify my work as a 3E DM, but I've yet to find the perfect formula (for me).
Peace,
tfad