Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
In all the games I play, battles are nearly always set to the limit of our abilities. they consume all the abilities, one or two players are knocked unconscious, and then we devote days to recovering.
I'm looking at running some modules. I realize that in years of gaming I never did or ran a dungeon crawl. I was always "too cool" for it. But really, I'm scared. I don't know how to play without using all our abilities against the first kobold we see.
What am I missing? Why are they fun? How do you play them? How can I tell if a pre-written one is reasonable for a group?
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They are survival tests. For some folks, particularly old schoolers, resource attrition survival mode combat as war playstyle is the heart of the game.
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
As a GM, how do I communicate that value through gameplay? How do I prepare them to effectively ration abilities rather than burn them up?
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Its a hard philosophical 180. Have you ever heard of Dungeon Crawl Classics? They start with level 0 and each player makes up 4+ characters. Whichever of them lives the initial dungeon becomes the PC. Try adapting that for a one shot. Find some old school modules and churn the meat grinder a few times. Shouldn't take long to find out if you like it or not.
Solid advice. The first thing is, make sure they are interested in the first place!
Like Pan said, it's a big swing in playstyle. And, like Grimmy said, make sure your party is interested in trying the dungeon crawl style of play. Once you've done that, and if they're still interested, you'll probably need to start teaching the players about rationing their abilities.
First off, I'd say that you shouldn't have every single fight end up with half the party unconscious and everyone out of abilities when doing a dungeon crawl. That usually means you're throwing something like an APL+3 or APL+4 challenge at a party for each fight. I'm not saying you're "doing it wrong" or anything, because if it works for your current group, it's the right way to play with that group. But it's just not the typical thing you expect to see a GM do with a dungeon crawl. Instead, throw a bunch of APL+0, APL-1, and APL+1 encounters at your players. Try to teach them that going supernova on the first thing they fight isn't always a good tactic by making sure there's more than one fight per day. Most people seem to recommend around 3 or 4 encounters of varying difficulty per adventuring day.
One way to try to get them to change their ways is by interrupting their rest once or twice. Say they go to an inn to recuperate and refresh their expended abilities. Have some thieves break into their room while they're sleeping(waking them up in the process) and then they have to fight while they're out of spells or smites or whatever. Keep in mind that they also probably don't have their armor or anything on while they're trying to sleep, so adjust the encounter accordingly.
Another good way is to throw some kind of objective their way that requires them to complete it in X amount of time. Make it something like "If you don't stop the hobgoblin warband in 2 days, they'll raze half the countryside and an entire village will starve to death come winter." And then give them 4 or 5 APL+0/APL+1 encounters each day. If they continue to go supernova and then rest after their first encounter, then they'll fail the quest. Make sure that there are some lasting repercussions for it as well.
Do these kinds of things in your normal games to get them into the mindset of rationing their abilities. Because rationing abilities is usually a key part of a dungeon crawl. You never know when you're going to get your next chance to rest in a dungeon, and even when you do rest you never know if it's a spot that's actually safe.
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
So how does a basic, two level dungeon in Crown of the Kobold King play? That clearly has more than 4 encounters for the party a day. It looks like closer to a dozen. Is it suppose to take several adventuring days?
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dot.
I see the dungeon crawling adventure to tabletop RPGs as the sonnet is to poetry.
BobTheCoward wrote: So how does a basic, two level dungeon in Crown of the Kobold King play? That clearly has more than 4 encounters for the party a day. It looks like closer to a dozen. Is it suppose to take several adventuring days? This can be brutal or a cakewalk depending on how you run the monsters. If you leave the PCs alone, they'll keep resting and hitting the next encounter at full power. If instead, you have the encounters come to them if they try to slack off, it's going to hurt.
I think my party of PCs ran through Crown of the Kobold King in 2 days of game play. Mind you, they didn't scour the place and didn't fight every encounter listed. Some they bypassed by avoiding things that weren't in their way and others they roleplayed rather than fought. The lower level was a slugfest but they got through it alright. There were maybe 5 or 6 encounters for them on that level and they took it on in one day. Mind you, this was a party of 6.
Dungeon crawls do typically break the 4 encounters per day norm, but you can always tailor them to match the party's abilities (up or down depending on how edgy you want it to be). Good luck!
bfobar wrote: BobTheCoward wrote: So how does a basic, two level dungeon in Crown of the Kobold King play? That clearly has more than 4 encounters for the party a day. It looks like closer to a dozen. Is it suppose to take several adventuring days? This can be brutal or a cakewalk depending on how you run the monsters. If you leave the PCs alone, they'll keep resting and hitting the next encounter at full power. If instead, you have the encounters come to them if they try to slack off, it's going to hurt. I'm running this dungeon in a PbP right now as a player, and the GM has given us a single day to get the job done. We're pushing in there pretty hard, and we've done a pretty decent job of rationing our abilities, but now we're approaching the end and we're pretty well spent. So far we've taken care of one particularly nasty enemy at the end of the first level, and we've taken a pretty hefty beating in more than one fight. Thankfully, we spent almost all of our prior adventuring money on two wands of CLW to keep us up and running or else we'd be both out of abilities and nearly dead. I think we've burned through half to 3/4 of one of them so far.
One thing that's been nice is that we've gotten some of the kobolds to surrender and our bard knows Draconic, so we've interrogated them to find out about what's waiting ahead. It's allowed us to bypass some things that I have a feeling would be pretty bad to run into at this point.
Unruly wrote: bfobar wrote: BobTheCoward wrote: So how does a basic, two level dungeon in Crown of the Kobold King play? That clearly has more than 4 encounters for the party a day. It looks like closer to a dozen. Is it suppose to take several adventuring days? This can be brutal or a cakewalk depending on how you run the monsters. If you leave the PCs alone, they'll keep resting and hitting the next encounter at full power. If instead, you have the encounters come to them if they try to slack off, it's going to hurt. I'm running this dungeon in a PbP right now as a player, and the GM has given us a single day to get the job done. We're pushing in there pretty hard, and we've done a pretty decent job of rationing our abilities, but now we're approaching the end and we're pretty well spent. So far we've taken care of one particularly nasty enemy at the end of the first level, and we've taken a pretty hefty beating in more than one fight. Thankfully, we spent almost all of our prior adventuring money on two wands of CLW to keep us up and running or else we'd be both out of abilities and nearly dead. I think we've burned through half to 3/4 of one of them so far.
One thing that's been nice is that we've gotten some of the kobolds to surrender and our bard knows Draconic, so we've interrogated them to find out about what's waiting ahead. It's allowed us to bypass some things that I have a feeling would be pretty bad to run into at this point. This is an excellent example for the OP. Being clever will really pay off in the dungeon. If you think you can kick in every door and kill everything in sight you probably wont make it. Using guerrilla tactics, interrogating denizens, avoiding traps/encounters by being clever conquers the day in the dungeon.
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