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Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Megadungeon Best Practices X: Room Writeups

More "best practices" I've learned drawing, stocking, and running my megadungeon.

I'm not sure if I ever put this kind of thing up - this is how I note rooms in my dungeon files. While I like the idea of direct notation on the map, I find it's too hard to fit everything I need on the map in actual practice. Some notes go on it (and boy does that make for quick reference) but since multiple trips to a megadungeon accrue a lot of history, and since my maps are so small (8 squares to the inch), it's hard to really for me to put down sufficient useful detail.

So how to make the level key work better?

Make Your Rooms Easy to Find and Read. The goal in a megadungeon is to make it easy to find a specific room on your level key,

Use Unique Room Numbers - The map only says 1, 2, or 3, but coupled with the map label I create a unique identifier in my room key. Something off of, say, the second sub-level 5 layers down might be 5B-16, or room 8D-22 is room 22 on sublevel 8D, which is above level 9 but deeper than level 7. Makes it easy to use "Find" to zip to a room on my laptop.

Have a Standard Layout - Use the same fonts, emphasis (underline, bold, italics), etc for your rooms. That makes them easier to use at a glance, and speed of reference is speed of actual play.

Strikethrough Preserves Room History - I use strikethrough font to cross out stuff that's not there anymore. This lets me update my rooms without losing details of what was there before.

Putting it all together:

1-5) Elf Wizard's Office. Av/Av Door (DR 2 HP 29, -8). Walls lined with books lettered with gold elvish script. Heavy (300 lb!) wooden desk with floral patterns. Covered with writing stuff (10 lbs, 200 sp value total). Damp.

(3) Orcs (ST 13 DX 12 IQ 9 HT 12 Speed 6 Move 5, DR 2, 4 skull, Dodge 8, Parry 9. Axe-14 2d+1 cut Reach 1, Crossbow-15 1d+4 imp + poison HT-2 or 2 HP. Traits: Bully, Fearlessness 5 (14)) near the door, waiting for intruders.*

Treasure: Orcs 2d cp, 2d sp, 1d-4 gp each. One has bronze earring (30 sp). Books worth 1d x 1d x 100 sp each if taken, average weight 10 lbs each, all in elvish script. Total 120 books but only 22 are still intact due to age and moisture.


I also use strikethrough if rooms change. So if the PCs based the door down, killed the orcs, and ransacked the room, and then some other monsters moved in, I'd do this to it in my file:

1-5) Elf Wizard's Office. Av/Av Door (DR 2 HP 29, -8). Broken desk, rotten books scattered on the floor, shelves pulled from walls. Damp.
Walls lined with books lettered with gold elvish script. Heavy (300 lb!) wooden desk with floral patterns. Covered with writing stuff (10 lbs, 200 sp value total).

(1) Crazed Troll (ST 20 DX 14 IQ 9 HT 12 HP 20 Will 10 Per 10 FP 12 Speed 7 Move 7 SM+1 Dodge 11 Parry 11(x2) DR 0 Bite-15 2d cutting C grapple on SM+0 Claws(x2)-15 2d+1 cutting C-2 IT(NB,NV) Regen Dark Vision Berserk(BF)-6 Stealth-18 DFM1 p.31)


(3) Orcs (ST 13 DX 12 IQ 9 HT 12 Speed 6 Move 5, DR 2, 4 skull, Dodge 8, Parry 9. Axe-14 2d+1 cut Reach 1, Crossbow-15 1d+4 imp + poison HT-2 or 2 HP. Traits: Bully, Fearlessness 5 (14)) near the door, waiting for instruders.

Treasure: Orcs 2d cp, 2d sp, 1d-4 gp each. One has bronze earring (30 sp). Books worth 1d x 1d x 100 sp each if taken, average weight 10 lbs each, all in elvish script. Total 120 books but only 22 are still intact due to age and moisture. NO TREASURE.

It preserves the history of it without a bunch of file iterations on my computer. It looks messy but it's surprisingly easy for me in play.

* Too meta of a joke?

12 comments:

  1. Have you considered using version control? I'm keeping all the gca4 files for games I run under git these days -- so I can instantly grab a snapshot of what a character was like at this date.

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    1. I haven't, if only because just crossing out is simple enough. It would be nice if I could hide all strikethrough text as if I was doing Track Changes, of course, but if Word does that I don't know how to make it do so. Without using Track Changes, I mean - that gets messy IME.

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    2. I ended up setting up a wiki for my hex crawl campaign, so I had automatic versioning and revision control. It also made it easier to cross-link stuff, so I could just write up a monster once and then link each instance in a terrain to the stats.

      The strikethrough is useful just so you can tell the difference between "and then I had a better idea" and "and then the players changed stuff."

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    3. Yeah, the strikethrough gives me a nice "what was here" at a glance.

      A wiki with version control would be nice, but I don't game (or write for game) where I have WiFi so I need something that works offline.

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    4. You can set up MediaWiki on your own computer. It's a bit of a hassle but there are instructions. As long as you write and game on the same laptop, it's completely workable - it's what I did.

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    5. Oh, I write on one (a little netbook), and play on another (a big notebook). Not easily portable, then?

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    6. It's been a while since I looked at the set-up, but I think a MediaWiki has a database or a text repository or some such that stores all the text. You could share that between the machines with some kind of autosync. It might be a pain to set up, but I guess you already have some kind of off-line sync functionality to track changes in play.

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    7. I do, but it's just in the form of a strong habit of version control. I always come home from game and copy the changed stuff over the unchanged backups in turn, and ensure they're all synced.

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  2. Use the same fonts, emphasis (underline, bold, italics), etc for your rooms. That makes them easier to use at a glance, and speed of reference is speed of actual play.

    Excellent advice for any form of record-keeping. I find people often underestimate just how useful that is.

    The strikethrough idea is very cool -- I'll have to keep that one in mind.

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    1. Thanks. Yeah, I'm terrible about this in all other respects, but essentially have a "style guide" for my game stuff makes it easy to use.

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  3. This very useful. Consider it stolen :-)

    Couple of questions:
    Do you put all your rooms in one ever-growing document, or do you have separate files for each level/sub-level, or what?
    With room descriptions being variable number of paragraphs, how do you separate one room from another, visually? (horizontal lines, or extra space, etc)

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    1. Take it, it's yours!

      Your answers:

      - one ever-growing document, so I can use "Find" and look for anything in the dungeon when I need to.

      - I leave a blank line between rooms. Since I find them by Find, not visual search, it works out okay.

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