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...teleportation circles?
I'm curious whether anyone else's party questioned why they should bother with the teleportation circles. From their perspective, the dungeon hasn't been big enough to necessitate fast travel points, and the circles could be used by Vault denizens to pursue the party or escape and attack Otari.
The in-narrative justification I offered them was that they wouldn't know where the portals went until going through them. It was entirely possible they might open a portal whose other end was active, which would open up an otherwise inaccessible part of the the dungeon. That convinced them to try it, and once they got the first XP award they were of course super motivated to do so. But I still don't entirely get why activating the portals is a relevant enough achievement to award XP.
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...teleportation circles?
I'm curious whether anyone else's party questioned why they should bother with the teleportation circles. From their perspective, the dungeon hasn't been big enough to necessitate fast travel points, and the circles could be used by Vault denizens to pursue the party or escape and attack Otari.
The in-narrative justification I offered them was that they wouldn't know where the portals went until going through them. It was entirely possible they might open a portal whose other end was active, which would open up an otherwise inaccessible part of the the dungeon. That convinced them to try it, and once they got the first XP award they were of course super motivated to do so. But I still don't entirely get why activating the portals is a relevant enough achievement to award XP.
Also depends on how 'dynamic' you let these vaults be.
If the party can freely travel through the levels without danger of being ambushed, there is less of a need to use the portals.So throw in some random encounters or just start ominously rolling dice whenever the party decides to take te long route through the levels ;-)
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Being able to go from level 8 to level 0 in a split second is useful when minutes count. It's also useful for when you need to hire a bunch of gutless level 0 workers to come clear all that crap out of the stairwell on level 6.
"Slowly traipse through 6 levels of possibly uncleared levels of monsters? No thanks, I'll take the express elevator"
My players barricaded the kitchen on floor 6, freed the captured people, and activated the teleportation circle to escape outside and get them on a path to the Darklands. It comes in handy!
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This is why I added random encounter tables. I think I'm going to start rolling random encounters every time my party re-enters the dungeon, one check for every floor they "travel" through. That way we can still handwave traveling into the dungeon, but it gives an incentive to find the fast travel options and still preserves the flavor of delving deeper.
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This is why I added random encounter tables. I think I'm going to start rolling random encounters every time my party re-enters the dungeon, one check for every floor they "travel" through. That way we can still handwave traveling into the dungeon, but it gives an incentive to find the fast travel options and still preserves the flavor of delving deeper.
The GM's Guide has a decent list of Nhimbaloth cultist encounters you can seed on every floor. I roll a d6 for every floor they go through, and on a 1, they get an encounter (I don't duplicate them, so for example, the fourth floor encounter only happens once).
This is why I added random encounter tables. I think I'm going to start rolling random encounters every time my party re-enters the dungeon, one check for every floor they "travel" through. That way we can still handwave traveling into the dungeon, but it gives an incentive to find the fast travel options and still preserves the flavor of delving deeper.The GM's Guide has a decent list of Nhimbaloth cultist encounters you can seed on every floor. I roll a d6 for every floor they go through, and on a 1, they get an encounter (I don't duplicate them, so for example, the fourth floor encounter only happens once).
Oh, I didn't know this existed! Nice resource!
We just finished AV and as players we ignored them until we had more than a couple to bypass. We were worried about encountering something way above our pay-grade. :)