On Gameplay in the Megadungeon
There are three primary activities that take place within the megadungeon.
Exploration: This is the process of moving within the environment. The key factors in this are moving from area to area, examining things and searching for secrets, avoiding traps, and mapping.
Decisions made while engaged in this activity result in several things. Your choices struggle to conserve resources. Your approach determines your preparedness for battle. And gaining knowledge about your environment allows discoveries of hidden chambers and the ability to flee.
- Are you scouting ahead? Or will you be surprised by monsters?
- Will you discover secret rooms using your map?
- Will you avoid the traps and the relevant reduction in resources?
- Have you made good choices to maximize your distance moved per turn to minimize your chance of a wandering encounter?
Encounters: This occurs when you interact with other denizens. The key factors in this are surviving the encounter, extracting information from the denizen, and managing your faction relationships.
When you encounter non-monstrous denizens (which should be the majority of encounters you will have in a mega-dungeon) your choices determine how they feel about you, what requests they are likely to make, and what information they are likely to tell you.
- Are you playing the factions against each other?
- What can you gain from the encounter, versus what you have to lose? Information? A quest? Fighting and losing hit points?
- If you do encounter a monster denizen, can you lure it away? avoid it? make sure you have the advantage when you kill it?
When you encounter treasure, you are inundated with choices. What is most valuable? How slowly are we willing to move (i.e. how many random encounters are we willing to expose ourselves to) bringing this treasure out of the dungeon?
- Did you bring a cart? a mule? Are you willing to take the extra risk of encounters by bringing a tasty mule?
- Do you have a method of determining which treasure is most valuable?
Megadungeon activities
In my experience, the idea of what people believe is in a mega-dungeon is far removed from the actual reality of what is occurring in play.
Megadungeon play is not fast, slay all the monsters, and throw the treasure in a bag, type play. It's a slow, methodical, game, where every decision is one of degrees of badness, the tension mounting and mounting as you move further away from safety. When you discover a treasure hoard, there is no possibility you will be able to remove the whole thing, so you must pick and choose, knowing the more you take, the more vulnerable it makes you to death. When you become friendly with one faction, several others dislike you. Every choice is one between what you believe is the least worst option. And when action finally occurs, with the fire and the yelling and screaming and dying, you know you've already failed.
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