QuasiWizard

Ok, I give up.

The conveniences of an actual blogging platform have won. My old blog here I did almost entirely by hand. Why did I do this to myself? It makes the drafting process so much more cumbersome. Anyways, I think I'm over it now, and have decided to do my wizardposting here now.

So welcome. This is now a second home, and I may move here permanently. We'll see if it works out.

Anyways, there was an idea I wanted to talk about.

Megadungeons & Random Encounters

 So I really want to run a megadungeon. I listened to all of Into the Megadungeon, a podcast explaining, exploring, and understanding how megadungeons work and function. I've always liked the idea, but this kinda put my mind to, yes, I want to do this myself.

I've been thinking about it a bunch. Two days ago I thought "Wouldn't it be neat to write a class-less level-less system FOR megadungeons?" And now here I am, 2700 words into a LibreOffice document of a system that consumes my thoughts. I also decided to include a sample first level, so most of those words are room keys for the 47 room dungeon. All in a day's not working.

I'm also realizing I need to make it more my own. I keyed those rooms but most are boring. I gotta inject the weirdness into its veins.

Also, why class-less and level-less system for a megadungeon? Doesn't that obviate the need to delve? I don't think so. If you can run a game in that kind of system, in a way that makes player engage with the world and so on, you can do it in a megadungeon. I think, at least. I'll let you know how it goes. But the idea is to pack all the cool overworld stuff into the dungeon, within reason. The usual adventure trappings should be down there. Quest givers of all kinds, danger and peril of course, and people just living and chilling. These things engage players but don't rely on innate gold desire that level systems incentivize.

Anyways, an idea I wanted to share. Oh yeah. It was to combine all your random encounter tables into one table with a rolling numbering system. Here's how it works:

List encounters that fit with each level, whichever way that works for your levels (maybe closer to a faction home base, or thematic fit). Then organize them in order of the level. Put all the level one stuff first. Then the level two stuff. Try to make a consistent amount of encounters per level. 

Now roll a usual random encounter roll, but add the dungeon level to the roll, so you move down the table as you progress through levels. Boom. Done.

But Why?

I was thinking on the idea of intermixing the different inhabitants within the megadungeon levels and areas, about how some group might end up stranded or interacting with other inhabitants, and a convenient way to build a random encounter table to make this easy to run, rather than just rewriting a new encounter table per level and copying things between lists.

Tips and Variants

I recommend using a two-dice roll to have a slight bell curve in your distribution so that end results are less common. This has the advantage of making encounters from far-away levels much rarer than the one current level's encounters. A one-die roll would make all the encounters of nearby levels equally likely, which doesn't convey the mixing of levels.

You can also do some variations on this idea. If you like many rooms on a floor (60+, say) you can make the bonus to the roll a function of room number or dungeon section. You get through the first 10 rooms, you end up adding +1 to the roll, and then +2 at the 20 room mark, and so on. Or if you pass a choke point, you can figure that not much mixing happens through here, so you add 1 to the roll bonus. 

You can also tie this to faction interactions. Instead of making lists level-themed, have them faction themed so that as you accumulate reputation or notoriety with different factions, you add bonuses to the roll to cause different encounters.

I'm gonna finish writing my megadungeon rules soon and try to playtest them, or just get feedback.