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| The modern five room dungeon, arch-enemy of the megadungeon |
I jumped back into D&D 5e as a DM straight from AD&D First Edition a year ago now. All my players are familiar with 5e, so our campaign is an old school retro-thrill for them.
I'm The Dinosaur DM, hauling into the light old school AD&D elements that they're unfamiliar with, in some cases for good reason.
They're doing training between levels, for example, which was a roadblock mechanic from The Before Time, but one I always liked. It makes levelling up feel more earned, somehow. But it does slow things down, and 5e is about speeding everything up (including upleveling).
I really like Fifth Edition overall, it's much more streamlined and far more survivable. Some aspects of First Edition just weren't fun. A wizard who gets 1 spell to start spends a lot of time just trying to avoid dying.
These days, players heavily invest in their character creation. It's less about a bunch of random no-name adventurers heading down into a dungeon to possibly become rich and powerful (or to be brutally slaughtered), and more about a bunch of already exceptional heroes setting out on their heroic journey. The specialness is baked into the 5e character from the get go, while in AD&D, only a few survivors made it to that status.
There's a very different kind of game design philosophy at the root of it. For the most part, I think 5e takes the right path. On the other hand, it kind of defangs the fantasy world.
I'm not out to kill characters, mind. You want to cut players slack... just not too much slack. Take away the possibility of dying, and the thrill wanes. KIll players too often and the fun wanes.
But with the switch from characters starting out almost hapless, and trying to become exceptional, to 5e where they start out far more exceptional, is that they (quite understandably) want to prioritize their own personal journeys. Heck, the game could be called 'Heroic Journeys' (the name I gave the faux game in Dragon Garage), as the world revolves around the players much more than it used to.
That brings me to node vs. megadungeon adventure design.
A megadungeon is big and impersonal. It doesn't care about the players, one way or the other, and there's a lot in there that isn't related to the player's personal journey. That, however, doesn't fit with the character focused gameplay of 5e.
Players don't want to have to mess around with meaningless exploration: they want to get right to what's about them. To their personal journey. Who needs all that poking around in the dark?
That's where node based adventure design comes in: you create only encounters and situations that push the primary story along, and use a few random events and encounters to add a little padding/uncertainty. A node based game is far, far more streamlined and focused.
If they have to rescue someone, you set up a few key encounters along the way, but you don't have them wandering around a megadungeon trying to find their target. Players get bored quickly these days hence the popularity of the five room dungeon.
This leads me to a fundamental question: is there any place for a megadungeon in 5e? The megadungeon doesn't revolve around the players personal mission. It's a big shift going from a character-centred universe to an indifferent, deadly universe that you're just visiting (before inevitably popping off the mortal coil). It may feel slow, unfocused, meandering, and bloated compared to modern game play.
Personally, I like open world exploration games, where I'm not rail-roaded into fulfilling my journey (at least not right away), and I can take my time, smell the roses, kill the gerblins, that sort of thing. But that admittedly affects story flow, and can descend into meaninglessness.
The most efficient, streamlined way to tell a story through RPG mechanics is with node based adventures. It keeps things at a quick pace, and doesn't let the drama lag. And while it's more fulfilling drama and story wise... the megadungeon still feels more immersive.
What do you want from your flight of imagination?
One advantage of node based adventure design: it's a heck of a lot less work than building out an entire megadungeon complex!
I've got 2 levels of the megadungeon keyed beneath Castle Druidun, and a third underway. I'm considering changing to node based design after that, depending on how things go with the players, and how much energy I have.
There's a really great flow map of various classic D&D dungeons here by Melan.
Other posts in the series:
