Environments that are actually fun for players

[SheepishEidolon]

Lately, my local GM enjoyed dragging us into aquatic adventures. And frankly, I hated all these restrictions that come with operating in water (optional rant in spoiler tags):

Spoiler:

You can't do that, you can do this only half as well as usual etc.. With opponents appearantly never affected. And the usual solution is "caster casts some specialized spell to completely remove the problem" - YAWN. It might be realistic (well, beside the spell), but it isn't fun IMO.

So I thought about environments that actually give new, interesting options to the players. Like subjective gravity to move more freely, a network of short-range teleportation circles or the ability to throw big chunks of terrain around. The opponents would have the same options.

Does anyone have further ideas?

[Ryze Kuja]

A few campaigns back, the primary BBEG of the entire campaign was a black wyrm shapechanged as a politician in a major city. The campaign finale was a final showdown between the BBEG (now in dragon form) and the PC's right in the middle of the city, and the BBEG basically did a DM-modified-version of "Reverse Gravity", except the BBEG casted it on the earth itself and caused an upheaval and threw about 1/8th of the city upwards, thousands of yards straight up into the air. There were lots of chunks of earth, buildings/houses, and civilians that all got tossed. Anywho, the BBEG dragon was flying around this swirling vortex of chaos fighting the PC's on these upheavaled chunks, and after about 6-ish rounds they killed him. Immediately after the fight was over, all these chunks of earth, buildings, and civilians were falling back to the city below, and before it all impacted the city, the PC's used a Wish to teleport the falling civilians to safety, and with that same Wish, they teleported all the falling chunks/buildings/debris off to the side of the city and created their own version of Mount Rushmore with the PC's Faces.

During the fight, we had to stack battle maps on empty dice boxes to set up uneven terrain around the table, and the dragon would fly in-between the terrains and bombard them while they fought back.

It was pretty epic. And now that huge hole of missing earth in the middle of that city, as well as the Mount Rushmore thing are permanent landmarks in my homebrew world :P

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I also did a dungeon crawl where they were going through an Indiana Jones style temple that was full of other-dimensional relics, and they grabbed one of these relics but it was booby trapped as a self-destruct thing. They basically had 30 seconds to get out of the temple before it collapsed on them, so even though there weren't any monsters left, we went into Initiative and they had 6 rounds to get out. Each of the PC's got a turn in Initiative like normal, but the temple itself also had a "turn" in Initiative, and on the temple's turn, there would be falling rocks, broken bridges, collapsing doorways, etc. I assigned all the rooms, doors, bridges, and ceilings a number and me and each of the PC's themselves would roll a %die on the temple's turn. So each turn, there was about 5-6 things getting destroyed or collapsing around the various sections of the temple. They were only level 5 or 6, I can't remember, but they didn't have teleport or d door so it was quite a challenge. Surprisingly, they all got out alive, but that was pretty cool.

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As far as any aquatic adventures, I usually don't do those til around level 8-12ish. Fighting underwater before having access to stuff like Freedom of Movement is annoying, for both the players and myself.

In an upcoming thing, I'm planning on the PC's going to the Plane of Air, I'm gonna let the players do super jumps up to 300ft away as sort of a "wind-boosted"/"lesser gravity" sort of thing :P

[Andostre]

One of the guys at Penny Arcade ran an extra-planar adventure where there were all of these building-sized planetoids floating next to each other. He actually crafted these spheres and set them up at varying heights above the game table. The PCs (with velcro-based miniatures) would run around the spheres as needed, and there was some sort of mechanic in place where they could attempt to jump from one sphere to the next.

He said that his players loved it, and it does sound fun.

[Mark Hoover 330]

I've used a fair number of unique environments over the years:

1. PCs moving through a swamp (wetland with forest) with random occurrences of Entangle localized to 20x20 areas

2. A series of "fey revels;" unique pockets of terrain where the memories of dangerous Fey debauchery could be experienced and interacted with for PCs to gain knowledge of the story so far

3. A vacuous cavern with random air geysers that could be navigated and used by PCs or enemies to make aerial charge attacks or flight assisted jump checks

4. Time dilation: squares in a dungeon permanently affected by Haste or Slow effects. PCs or villains moving through these squares gain the effects for that round; they cannot end their movement in those squares. They can't just sit in and occupy a Hasted square for example b/c it also rapidly ages the occupant; more than 6 seconds' worth of exposure would start causing stat shift and eventually disintegration

5. Laser grid: not a trap that's gonna get detected/disabled by the PCs, but a straight up series of white hot beams permanently in place. Since they're lasers, not Scorching Rays, PCs had the option of using mirrors to protect themselves. Incidentally, 2 rooms before I'd given the PCs a scroll of Mirror Polish.

There's other full environments to consider: lava pits, magma flows, cliffside ledges and such. Some of these already have standard rules but you can add unique terrain elements.

Thing is, my current batch of players just sees these things as mechanics. Like, it's hard to really get my players to see combats as anything more than chess: how do I maximize my strategy, isolate & contain big foes while ignoring "pawns" until genuine threats are removed?

For example with the air geyser cavern, I figured the monk PC would take advantage & he did, once; he jumped on one airstream, carried himself to a ledge on the wall, then stayed there using Readied actions with a Reach weapon to just damage anything that got near him. It minimized the danger to his PC while optimizing his one attack for the round. The foes tried using Ranged attacks but the monk has a high AC and the geysers hindered some shots.

Frankly I've gotten very bland with my settings over the past year. The players don't appreciate it for one. Another challegnge is that, like with the swamp I have the PCs facing a dragon that is unaffected by even magical terrain-based difficult terrain, then those same players cry that I'm using threats with unfair advantages. Instead I run vanilla fights that devolve into rocket tag and my players have fun either winning or losing battles based solely on RAW, dice rolls and 2d strategy.

[Mark Hoover 330]

Small thread res. What about video game environments? I haven't done this since I was a little, LITTLE kid (like maybe 10?) but I used to run games that would blend standard D&D environments with games we played at the time:

1. PCs enter a massive, marble-floored plaza with glowing rods on pedestals. Taking a rod immediately transforms the PC into a being of light magically grafted with a 2-wheeled vehicle capable of traveling at tremendous speed. While moving the "bike" leaves a trail of solid light behind it and the PCs can only move through the marble area. The goal is to outmaneuver enemy "bikes" by trapping the enemies and causing them to crash into solid light trails

2. In another arena-like chamber, the PCs find discs of light similar to the rods. Once touched, the discs were the only thing PCs could wield. PCs would face enemy disc wielders while a solid light column descends from the ceiling. If the column finishes it's descent, it traps the PC within it. The party needs to hit and destroy the corresponding colors of the column with their discs while also defending themselves against their enemies

3. A series of platforms across an open landscape; the only way to progress is to move up and through the platforms from one section to the next, but the platforms are too far apart for jumping. Just as the party enters this area, they spy several large, flightless birds they can ride. The objective is to ride the birds, using their powerful legs to leap to and fro, while enemy riders on their own birds appear from one-way portals amid the platforms. The enemy riders charge at the PCs with lances

I'm sure you could do this with tons of modern games, not just the arcade games I played in the 80's. Doom has a pretty unique, pseudo-living environment, or you could use a weird building mechanic from Fortnite or Minecraft?

[DeathlessOne]

Hmm, well... the final area in the Iron Gods adventure path

Spoiler:

... takes place in an 'extra-dimensional space' that is pretty much a virtual reality environment. My players and myself got real creative with that particular space and had a blast. Quite literally.

In my custom campaign setting, the players entered into a 'timeless' environment that existed outside of the normal time stream. It was a fairly chaotic and malleable environment, and since they were mythic, they got to play around with the space quite a bit.

[Azothath]

you are really talking about environment or back-drop/setting/location.

Variety is the spice of life but too much of a good thing can be trying.

I've had great success with a modified Lovecraftian setting using the Dreamlands. It gives the game an interesting twist.
Mindscapes are unique but at the end it is usually met with a sigh of relief.