Donjon at Phantasm.

[epweissengruber]

Points Raised in this Post
- Adapting old Dungeons to Donjon
- Foregrounding creative Gamism
- Setting Donjon's "Dials"
- The Effectiveness of the Dice Hack

Overview
Sunday, 3 pm, end of the convention.  I was really burned out.  Some players were curious about a game where they participated in the construction of a dungeon, but were short on creative energy too.  I decided to set a comic tone for the adventure so that they weren't too intimidated.  I got four to sit down.  The players chose a cleric, a telepath, and a demonologist.  They hipped to the fact that successful perception rolls allowed them to create reality and so chose those with supernatural long-distance perceptions.  Their muscle was the textbook butt-kicker, the Snaptooth Dragonkin.  When she started kicking and smashing walls, the other players realized that you didn't have to rely on perception skills to shape the Donjon.

Blurb
"The Slave Pits of the Undercity/Remixed"
The "Slave Lords" series was an influential series of D&D dungeon crawls that established the style tournament play still in effect today. In it, players take the role of soldiers of fortune on a mission to redeem enslaved persons from the clutches of orcs, ant men, and devious humans.  Journey through these RPG classics using Donjon, a rules-lite RPG that recaptures the excitement of early RPGs by giving players a chance to shape a dungeon as it unfolds.  Successful rolls allow players to dictate the nature of the threats that lie behind locked doors or in murky forests.  Player limit: 6.

Adapting old Dungeons to Donjon
I laid bare the restrictiveness of the original module.  The tournament dungeon was limited to 25% of a full facility.  The more rooms the players got through, the higher their score.  I put the map up on a big board and said this: "If you blow perception rolls and don't put your foes to flight, you will be stuck with this circuitious route.  The more successful you are, the more you will be able to take the shorter routes to your goal or even hack your own shortcuts through this space."
In other words, I put the tacit power relations for the dungeon to the forefront of our donjon play.

Foregrounding creative Gamism
This aspect of the system was attractive to the players and they exploited it wisely.  They realized that a master key would let them get through a slave pit.  So one of their number "saw" a slave running out of the building with the very key for which they were searching.  When I told them that they were entering a room of giant ant men, they used their facts to say they were "sleeping." 

Setting Donjon's "Dials"
I had hoped to have great tension or excitement.  But I didn't make the "dial" clear.  We fell into a style of play that mixed focussed gamism with self-conscious joking and kibbitzing.  I suggest following the advice of the rules and make the setting of dials a conscious and public act, rather that relying on habits.

The Effectiveness of the Dice Hack
I found the proposed modifications -- http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=14491.0simplifying the dice rolls down to pools of even and odd rolls on any die type, and using pools of successful initiative rolls in a bidding sub-game to decide who acts first -- to work quite well.  Strangely enough, we got through 9 rooms -- the same number that successful players were meant to get through in the original version!  The players never created an original monster.  Lots of fun and invention.  I was able to drag in the Big Bad with no handwaving: the players had manipulated a ghost into scaring off the Big Bad's assistant, and thus the evil high priest was without minions and had to face the opponnents alone.

[Mike Holmes]

And???

Sounds like a success. Did you have fun? The players?

Mike

[epweissengruber]

Despite our collective gaming exhaustion, we all had fun.

When the players made it clear that they were wiped out, I told them that it was up to them to force events to a conclusion.  The sooner they eliminated Big Bad and liberated the slaves, the sooner we could end.

So they kept coming up with fantastic excuses for hacking through the architecture of the donjon, but I kept coming up with fantastic opponents to mess with their heads.  It was like 2 punch drunk fighters keep hammering each other.  The blows were sloppy and the fighters were lurching but, God, was it a fun spectacle.

[Mike Holmes]

Sweet. Was your decision to use the Slaver series modules at all based on Ron's use of them for Elfs? Since then I've been thinking that they'd make excellend Donjon fodder, too. Or did you just come to that conclusion independently?

Mike

[Larry L.]

Sweet. Was your decision to use the Slaver series modules at all based on Ron's use of them for Elfs? Since then I've been thinking that they'd

(Slack-jawed.)
Is that what those cryptic references in Elfs are alluding to? Man, I'm just slow. (Evil seed now sown. Plotting...)

epweissengruber,

How much did this dungeon resemble the original? I've been kinda debating the value of old modules for Donjon.

[epweissengruber]

Sweet. Was your decision to use the Slaver series modules at all based on Ron's use of them for Elfs? Since then I've been thinking that they'd make excellend Donjon fodder, too. Or did you just come to that conclusion independently?

My attraction to the Slaver series is based on my 1st encounter with AD&D.  I thought that it would be great to take up swords against wicked demi-human slavers and liberate people.  So I was flashing back to my 11 year-old self.  To me, the Slaver's modules with their challenge to players to cover X amount of space in Y amount of time in order to win made perfect sense. As a kid, I hoped that the game aspect and the thematic aspect would come together.  It never did.  But I loved staring at those illustrations and maps.  So I brought them in and put them on my tactical display. 

The series makes excellent Donjon fodder because the modules state EXPLICITLY that GM's must keep players out of certain areas during non-tournament play.  The GM vs. players competition is encoded in the structure of the dungeon.  I am not hacking or parodying the original modules -- I am helping them become what they truly are.

How much did this dungeon resemble the original? I've been kinda debating the value of old modules for Donjon.

My goal: keep the players limited to the spaces open during "official" tournament play.  The players could use the rest of the map, and add details to the map.  So the space in which we adventured co-incided exactly with the original.  When the players found a weird justification for getting into a room that was closer to their target than one they were "supposed" to be in, I went with it -- and activated the monsters which the designers had placed in the room for non-tournament play.

So, we had fun at the expense of the casual sexism and shoddy illustrations of the original, but this was not a full-on parody a-la Elfs.   The modules are entirely useful.

One of my players looked at the assmeblage of rooms stuffed with incompatable monsters and said, "God, no wonder they keep coming up with new editions."  Yet he had just helped construct 3.5 hours of gamist fun.

[Mike Holmes]

All I can say is that this is all very cool. I think it's not a surprise that this works - Clinton explicitly made Donjon to be D&D done right (and not just another fantasy heartbreaker). So the fact that the old D&D material works well makes complete sense to me.

Mike