Letting My Players Choose the Next Campaign

I recently resumed work on my Deep Vaults adventure, but a complication arose this week. Our Tuesday night campaign is currently run by my friend Jeff, who I've known since college and with whom I swap off DM duties so we both have opportunities to play. He's been running a simple megadungeon concept, sort of an urban Caves of Chaos, to experiment with using some of the OSR principles I've shared with him.

We've been using the Into the Unknown (O5R) rule-set with some house mods for his campaign, and I think everyone is enjoying the simpler, more-grounded approach. Our players have grown a little jaded and lazy from computer games, though—and the isolation of Roll20 doesn't help in terms of player engagement—so Jeff and I both like 5e's core game engine to provide a framework for player actions (even though we loathe the setting and current direction of the game). 

Jeff's done a great job adapting to the OSR methodology but now wants to experience it as a player, so the plan was for me to run one area of his megadungeon. He still wants to do that, but has also indicated that he wants to wrap this experiment up soon and take a break from running while he applies what he's learned to a "real" campaign. As a result, my concept for the Deep Vaults is too ambitious for the near-future. I adapted the adventure from another concept that exists in my own campaign, so I don't want to waste it on something that will soon end and make it all irrelevant.

Thus, I'm forced to switch creative gears again. I'm still developing the Deep Vaults (which I will continue to post here along with the other adventures I'm working on), but for Jeff's campaign I've decided to run an older, unused dungeon I've had in my folder for awhile. It's an as-yet unnamed cavern crawl, sort of along the lines of Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, for levels 4-6. It's mostly done, I just need to finish up a few places in the key and create the Roll20 assets.

As for the future...

Like many DMs, I'm certain, I have a folder full of campaign concepts—half-baked ideas and scraps of worlds I'll likely never visit. As I discussed in an earlier post, I'm already working on multiple long-form dungeons, but I haven't committed to any single one. Those adventures represent old projects I'd like to finish, as opposed to starting new ones. 

I feel like if I can at least get those finalized and shared online, then I'm okay if I never actually use them in my own campaign. I've released that creative energy into the world and they can live or wither on their own. I have no illusions of fame or glory by sharing them, nor am I interested in how I can make a living writing game material...I think the barriers are high, and the effort-to-reward ratio is too low. It's fun to feed the creative beast, though, and if I can inspire even one other person with an idea, then it's worth it.

In any case, I have all these campaign concepts but I can't decide which one to pour new creative energy into. I have a few months...maybe a year to prepare. To combat the decision paralysis, I've decided to let the players choose. I've compiled a list of ten campaign ideas, some of which would be based on an old-school 5e rule-set and others on different rule systems altogether.

I've asked the players to rank the campaigns in order of interest level, from 1 (lowest) to highest (10). Unless one concept just blows everything else out of the water, we'll then take the top 3 scores and re-vote. The winner will be the campaign I develop over the next 4-6 months.

The survey list I sent them follows the break...

Moormist Manor Design Goals

Work continues apace on restoring Moormist Manor—my 80s-era mega-dungeon. As the weather turns cooler and I spend more of my time indoors, I've been experiencing a lot of creative energy around this project and I'm having a (mostly) good time revisiting my past self through the pages of my old notebooks.

Despite this dungeon being a tribute to Tegel Manor, I stupidly decided not to emulate the Judges Guild module's sparse style and concise descriptions. By this point in the late 80s, 2e's storytelling mode was in high gear and, like many would-be authors, I decided this adventure had to be BIG. It couldn't just be a mysterious haunted house on the hill; it needed HISTORY! I wrote a ridiculous amount of background lore in college-ruled notebooks, squeezing two mechanical pencil lines per page line. The text got so dense that the pages became permanently rippled.

This ultimately created a situation in which actually playing the adventure required its own campaign to do justice to the epic scope. My manor wasn't built to drop into and out of like Tegel Manor was; it needed to be THE focus of the campaign. On top of that, I felt like the entire thing had to be scrupulously complete before I was comfortable running it. The idea of creating the manor in broad strokes and then winging the details seemed like madness, and I lacked the confidence in my DMing skills to pull the trigger.

By the time the manor felt "complete" enough to play in the early 90s, it just didn't fit the tone of the low-fantasy, feudal European-style campaign I was running then (and ran until 2012-ish). That campaign was heavily influenced by Arthurian fables, Templar legends, and the cultural friction between early Christianity and pre-European paganism. The manor, on the other hand, was a wonderfully-creative mix of Hammer horror, Saturday morning cartoons, Arduin-style weirdness, and Monty Python-style humor. The two things just didn't work together, so the manor notebooks got tossed into a box (but never forgotten).

As I move forward with updating the material and getting it ready for my Tuesday-night players (perhaps sometime later next year when I resume DM duties), I want to make use of the lessons I've learned over the years since "finishing" it initially, and I want to apply the lessons of the OSR's analysis of early dungeon-building techniques. To help me order my thoughts and keep my work focused and consistent, I've established some goals for myself as I go through this design process.

Spell Saves and Magic Resistance in 5e

My gaming roots lie firmly in Basic D&D and First Edition AD&D, but my gaming sensibilities have changed over the years. The OSR edict: "Rulings, not rules" makes perfect sense to me in theory, and I'm quite certain there are lots of players out there who can work with a DM to make this practical around the table. My longtime Tuesday night players, on the other hand, are...curmudgeonly(?)...to say the least, and any free-form decision I make at the table is likely to provoke a spirited debate from at least one of them. 

We all came out of a local gaming community in the early 80s where the DM was definitely the opponent and the players had to scrape for any possible advantage. The local DMs weren't so much "killers" as they were "sadists"—cunning, cruel, and merciless—so we learned to be confrontational as a strategy. Sometimes it worked (but usually didn't.) Post-session player chatter usually amounted to how bad the latest screw-job was versus how much fun the adventure had been. I mean, surviving to complain about it was its own kind of fun, so I guess that made us masochists.

In any case, one of the things I enjoy about 5e is the reliably-simple core game engine. The mechanics are easy to understand, they provide a good flow through the action economy, and there are just a few sub-systems to learn rather than dozens. My curmudgeonly players get it and, more importantly, they abide by it. It's right there in black and white, where I can point to it and say, "Welp, that's the rule..."

It gives them structure within which to behave, and that takes almost all the pressure off me. I appreciate that and it makes me a more confident DM because in most cases, my players' innate skepticism about everything is soothed by an easy rule reference (even if they still don't necessarily agree).

That said, the official game is barreling off in a direction I don't appreciate: a pablum of high-fantasy nonsense and performative virtue. Much of the inherent "threat" of the game has been outright neutralized as a result because the current designers don't seem to believe characters should ever lose (or even be mildly inconvenienced). This is especially evident in the monster designs, where much of what made the creatures unique, interesting, and/or deadly have been dramatically altered or dropped altogether.

I mentioned the owlbear losing its Hug special attack in a previous post, but some other examples include rust monsters no longer eating magic items, carrion crawlers having a single tentacle attack (and a superfluous bite) instead of eight (!) tentacles, and displacer beasts whose primary defensive ability (displacement) is automatically nullified if they are hit by a single attack during a round. Silliness like that abounds, turning many 5e monsters into the much-maligned "boring bag of hit points."

Broadly, one of the most awesome monster abilities in 1e was magic resistance. Back in the day, it was a simple "percentage chance of any spell absolutely failing in the monster's presence." The base percentage indicated the monster's resistance against an 11th-level spellcaster, with a commensurate 5% increase or decrease in the net difference between 11th level and the level of the PC spellcaster. "Thus, a magic resistance of 95% means that a 10th level magic-user has no possibility of affecting the monster with a spell..." That's bad-ass. It certainly made creatures like demons, devils, and powerful undead absolutely terrifying in combat (especially if you are the now-nearly useless magic-user).

On top of that, "(e)ven if a spell does take effect on a magic-resistant creature, the creature is entitled to normal saving throws." So 1e magic resistance provides a potent additional layer of defense, scaled by the percentage listed under the monster's description. Finally, it's "always-on," meaning that your BBEG will be completely ignoring many/most spells. 

One of my favorite D&D images from my absolute favorite artist, the great Erol Otus. In your face, wizard!

This was a huge component of 1e boss fights that has been trivialized to the point where 5e sort of warns DMs against using a single enemy opponent because they won't survive long. But the concept of fantasy heroes uniting to defeat a singular powerful entity in a final, all-or-nothing battle is a staple of heroic fiction. A staple which 5e struggles to support.

Bergummo's Tower Playtest - Session 6

 As they put their heads together about what to do next, the party members realize they never fully searched the plinth room, so they return through the green mist to do so. They already know there are two secret doors in this room, one of which was opened by turning the dials on the plinth. They opened the second secret door from the other side, after descending the pit in the red mist, melting the grate with green slime, and ascending a subtly-sloping corridor. 

Bergummo's Tower Playtest - Session 5

Vic pokes his head into the 15x20 room and shines his candle around. Rotting velvet curtains line all four walls, save for the north corner of the west wall where a brightly-colored tapestry hangs. With his hand crossbow, Vic fires arrows at the sapphire floating slowly around the tip of a 6-ft. iron pole set into the middle of the floor. He hits the grape-sized gemstone several times, but fails to dislodge it from its orbit. Undeterred, he finally hits it with enough force to knock the sapphire loose. Its glow subsides as the jewel falls to the stone floor. Luckily, it is not damaged.

Bergummo's Tower Playtest - Session 4

With the party still working out the enigma of the bronze buttons emblazoned with sigils of the four seasons, Cane suggests correlating the mist colors to the seasons (red = Summer; blue = Winter; yellow = Fall; green = Spring). Vic presses this combination of buttons, but it only summons a pair of cockatrices to the south platform. After a brief fight, the party kills the horrid creatures.

Bergummo's Tower - Playtest Session 3

The spiral staircase descends 30 ft. below the cellar to a large, unlit room (the dwarves estimate the party is now 40-50 ft. beneath the surface). As Saynard’s bullseye lantern scans across the walls, the light reveals an octagonal-shaped chamber of finely-laid, dressed stone, with a 15-ft. high vaulted ceiling. A thick layer of dust covers the floor. In the center of the room, from floor to ceiling, stands a wide stone “column” within which the spiral staircase winds back up to the cellar.

Bergummo's Tower - Playtest Session 2

After hearing some movement downstairs (soft shuffling noises), Cane repositions himself, hiding behind some debris and taking a bead on the staircase doorway with his bow. Steeljaw drags Aerion’s and Saynard’s paralyzed forms over to the far wall, then hugs the wall next to the staircase doorway with his axe raised. Vic slides into the darkened bedchamber to the south and sets up an ambush. All three active party members now hear a gentle creaking as some creature carefully makes its way up the rickety stairs.

Bergummo's Tower - Playtest Session 1

I finally started my playtest sessions for an upcoming publishing attempt. I'm mostly checking the adventure for balance issues, but I'm also test-driving a few house rules and ideas I have for improving my regular game. 

We're playing 5e on Roll20 every Wednesday night, and I estimate the adventure will take 4-5 sessions to complete. I like 5e's core mechanic, for the most part, but I prefer OSR adventure design principles. Hopefully, this is a decent blend of those factors.

Five of my Tuesday-night players rolled up (2) characters -- one primary and one replacement in case the primary dies, although I am letting them swap out characters (if they desire to) whenever the party returns to base camp. 

I gave them this brief adventure synopsis and then started them right at the dungeon... 

Your party came into possession of a map with directions to the abandoned tower of a long dead-wizard. The tower stands deep in a nearby forest, and whispered rumors tell of fantastic treasures kept within, waiting for those brave or foolish enough to enter.

You and your comrades decided to form an expedition to investigate the rumors, and your party followed the map to the area. It was a long, arduous journey to reach the site, so returning to town for rest and resupply would not be an easy undertaking. Your party establishes a base camp several miles from the tower site, and half your expedition prepares to make the first foray: Aerion, dwarf paladin; Cane, wood elf monk; Saynard, human bard; Steeljaw, dwarf barbarian; and Vic, halfling rogue.

After a restful night, your party sets off shortly after dawn. After traveling through thick woods for two hours, you arrive at the spot marked on the map at 9:00 AM. There, you find a modest structure—a crumbling, three-story stone tower with a conical, shingled roof—standing in the middle of a forest clearing.

Thick, leafy vines shroud parts of the exterior wall. Brickwork has fallen away in places, leaving gaps in the tower wall. Part of the tower roof sags and patches of shingles are missing. Narrow, darkened windows stare into the surrounding forest. The front door is gone and the doorway stands wide open.

The entire area has a strange atmosphere about it, almost “humming” with unseen energy that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. As you approach the tower, the forest becomes noticeably quieter.

 Here is the session report...

D&D 5e House Rules

When my first D&D 5e campaign kicked off in 2015, I committed myself to running the rules as written (RAW) because I intended to publish content I developed over my four decades of playing and running the game. I wanted to ensure that I understood the game as intended and that any house rules or incorrect interpretations didn't bleed their way into my material. I also wanted my players to be confident that what they read in the PHB was what they experienced over Roll20.

This worked well except, over time, I grew increasingly dissatisfied with the game's default "easy" mode. So many elements are rendered trivial by the designers' desire to make the game "safe" and survivable, that much of the risk (and fun) is removed. That might be fine for brand-new players, but my veteran players were used to the difficulties of earlier editions, and became frustrated when they would, for instance, finally land a spell effect on the BBEG, only to have the target shrug off the effect on its next turn.

Now that we all have a few years under our belts and know the RAW version, I've begun incorporating a few house rules to address some of the things I don't like.