Saturday, January 31, 2015

Do your dungeons re-pop, re-stock, or stay static?

The title says it all.

First, some definitions:

Re-Pop: After a certain amount of time, or intervals of some kind, or after a random roll, the room or rooms re-populate with the original monsters encountered there. Kill the dragon in room 21, after X months room 21 gets another identical dragon (or a stronger one.)

Re-Stock: After a certain amount of time, or intervals of some kind, or after a random roll, new monsters move in to cleared areas. They may move in from other locations in the dungeon, or show up from random rolls on a monster-stocking table.

Static: Anything cleared, remains cleared. Cleared areas are not re-populated, re-stocked, or otherwise changed except through direct player action.

I'll accept a multiple answer - I have special areas that with definitely rep-pop, even if my dungeon is almost entirely re-stock. I find static works well for the S&W B-Team, since we play so rarely that re-pop or re-stock would totally derail exploration of new areas.

But yeah, like it says, do you do those in your dungeons or (especially) megadungeons?

12 comments:

  1. Re-stock. Not that it's come up yet, but the two dungeons where my players have been have new stuff in the rooms where they've been, as well as a few other rooms affected by their actions. I use a table from I think is on Grognardia to handle all this.

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    Replies
    1. Can you link to it, if you find where it is at?

      I use one myself:
      http://dungeonfantastic.blogspot.com/2012/03/megadungeon-stocking.html
      http://dungeonfantastic.blogspot.com/2012/01/stocking-megadungeon.html

      Delete
  2. I prefer some of it to re-stock.
    I just started my own DF blog here, thanks tou your inspiration.
    https://wordpress.com/read/blog/id/52720194/

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  3. In my dungeons the faerie races (ogres, trolls, goblins etc.) can gain entry into the dungeon when the dungeon has been uninhabited or patrolled for a long time. The boundry between the worlds of the evil faerie races and the mundane world weakens when there is darkness and evil in the world. So a pathway opens between worlds and the evil faerie races can enter. That is why it is important for the forces of good to patrol areas of darkness and evil to keep the boundries between the evil faerie worlds and the mundane world strong.

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  4. Re-stock. New creatures come from unexplored area to repopulate cleared areas. Also, there are little guy who re-set the traps or plant new ones.

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  5. Does it count as re-stock if you don't add monsters, but they wander in from other parts of the dungeon? My overall numbers of monsters generally only ever goes down (usually by player action), but the monsters do wander around and fill in the void spaces. Case in point, after my players wiped out a temple of evil, the orcs next door swooped in and claimed the area for themselves, un-recovered loot and all.

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    Replies
    1. I should probably add that a few areas stay static. The dungeon residents know that only death awaits behind certain doors. Even if the players wipe out the things that monsters fear, the rest of the dungeon won't move in. They'll still be afraid of the cleared areas.

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    2. I think if you're re-shuffling the monsters, that's a subset of restocking.

      I too have places that will stay static - and generally, I don't have monsters kill off and loot special places. That's just creating more work for myself.

      A few areas are so special they're effectively one-offs, too.

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  6. Re-pop (Legend of Zelda) and static (Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance) are the only methods I've observed before outside of your blog, but re-stocking looks like the method I would actually prefer to use. When I used to roll d20s at piles of hit points, we never visited the same dungeon twice (but curiously every single dungeon throughout all our campaigns had the exact same floor plan; mass-production dungeon designers at work?).

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