2012-10-12

Megadungeon Boredom

We just got together to play last night, and I have a few thoughts to share on megadungeon boredom, which is apparently the "in" topic.  Or more likely WAS the "in" topic, and I'm a day late and a dollar short...

The first few hours of the session were epic.  A massive battle occurred at the players' apartment, where Janet, enhanced with Dr. Octopus tentacles and having the Evil Book strapped to her back, began tossing the cyborg-ified Brady Bunch family through the windows. It was a delightful battle, and wrapped up the whole Janet plotline nicely.

Then they hauled Mr. Roper off, and sacrified in such a half-assed way that they have no reason to expect that an Orbital God will ever ask anything of them again.  So the sacrifice-a-robot, Nisus-vs-Kiod plotline also wrapped up.

After all that epicness, anything that came after was bound to be anticlimactic.  And it was - they headed back into the dungeon, met the last few moktars fleeing the place, and walked around a few deserted rooms. There were puzzles, but they didn't engage, a fight with frogs that probably felt a lot like a bunch of giant rats, some treasure, some traps. But nobody was feeling it.

What does all this mean?  Not much.  There was no way that things were going to get more exciting after the events in Denethix, so I probably should have just called it a night.  What does this say about the recent Dwimmermount kerfuffle? Well, mood is a big part of things, so if the mood isn't right, there's no way things are going to play well.  I'm sure that's why the 2000 cp was a big deal, the players were bored early on and found something to get irritated about.  If things had gone better, nobody would have cared about whether it was 2000 cp or 1998 cp.

And finally, a warning to potential buyers - I use round numbers of coins most of the time. Makes addition simpler, and nobody really cares.  If you do care, I caution you against buying ASE, the inhabitants are mad for coin-rolls.

Seriously, I just popped my favorite module S2: White Plume Mountain open at random, here's the treasure: "1000 ep, 200 pp, 4 pieces of jewelry worth a total of 11000 gp, blah blah magic items".  Round numbers!

5 comments:

  1. The latest OSR non-troversy...round numbered coins.

    While I'm more sympathetic to those who believe they bought a product that wasn't worth the money, I think the whole 2000 cp thing is just bitching for the sake of bitching.

    When I'm running a module, I change anything in it I don't like. I don't think I've ever run a module "straight." My question is this: was the DM asleep at the wheel? Can we really say that a crappy game session is 100% the fault of the module?

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    1. I realized my comment didn't really express my feeling on this kerffule right - I understand the gripes over Dwimmermount, and don't think they were about round coin number treasure lots except as an example.

      The coin complainers are silly. Asking what can improve a player's experience is not silly, well no more than anything involved in table to RPGs.

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  3. I refuse to encourage lazy math among my players.

    Which is why all treasure in my games is based on a four-dimensional hypercube.

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    1. Ah, but what about your room dimensions? Rooms that are exactly 10x10 sound awfully...even...to me.

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