Combat in games like The Fantasy Trip or Blades & Black Magic is just too lethal for classic D&D megadungeons. So how can you game them?
So What Is A Classic Megadungeon?
At its most basic level, a megadungeon is a very big dungeon. Now it is not that simple, and you will see tons written on the Internet about what constitutes a classic "megadungeon." But when you boil things down, from a combat or survival perspective, megadungeons are large, complex structures that continually wear the characters down and chew up resources.
They do this by having 7 or more levels, with what could be hundreds of rooms filled with monsters and traps, most of which are dangerous. Every feature does not have to be lethal–they can be puzzles or opportunities for roleplaying. Still, if you look at a lot of the published classic megadungeon adventures, a higher proportion of the rooms and features (especially in the lower levels) are very dangerous.
And that brings up how suitable a classic megadungeon would be for The Fantasy Trip and its various clones, like Blades & Black Magic. TFT is notorious for having lethal combats, and if each one can seriously injure members in a party–that is a strong concern.
Why Are TFT And Its Clones So Lethal?
This is a very good question. I think it boils down to the fact that in TFT, Blades or their various clones the chance of you being hit is dependent on the attacker, and the chance of you being hurt is dependent on you.
In other words, except for some form of magic or defensive actions like dodging, the attacker is rolling against his ability, no matter what you do. On the other hand, if he does hit, the damage he does depends on your armor or any defensive magics you might have. That is out of his hands, but entirely within yours.
Couple this with the limited number of hit points characters get in TFT, and the damage weapons do, and it means you can only take a limited number of solid hits before you are toast. So any combat is dicey, and must be undertaken with deliberate thought.
Contrast that with D&D, where as you level up you get tons of hit points, it gets harder to simply hit you based on your level, and you can shrug off combats except the really dire ones from strong opponents. That is because the hit roll and the damage reduction from armor is rolled into a single roll. This leads D&D to be very forgiving when it comes to combat, except at the lowest character levels.
How Can You Game Them?
OK, so if a classic megadungeon adventure would be a high risk, most likely lethal proposition in TFT and its clones, can you have them in your games? I think the answer is a solid yes!
I think TFT can still be used with megadungeons, but it requires a bit of a mental adjustment on the part of the Game Master or Referee. You have to look at the dungeon design as something more than just a series of combats and traps strung together. Now most people do see that, but I’m saying you need to take it further.
One simple way is to stretch the structure out, and increase the distances between the encounters or features. This would make it more of an underground wilderness adventure, where food and light would need to be managed more closely. If you look at Moria in The Lord of the Rings, the Company walk around for days underground. You could do the same here, even taking the travel into the vertical realm, not just old-school horizontal structures with stairs between levels.
Another way to take things further is to introduce more confusion into the adventure. By that I mean adding things that make the adventure more difficult for the characters, from puzzles to opportunities for the characters–the players–to get lost. This could also include tasks within the story structure that the players must accomplish, like finding something to move forward.
Yet another way to reduce the lethality of TFT megadungeons is to change the way the characters may interact with any dungeon denizens. Instead of being immediately hostile, give the players the opportunity to have their characters interact with different factions, maybe playing them off against each other, or simply getting them to cooperate with them. That may or may not be possible, depending on who the creatures are, but with some thought it should be workable.
All of these changes could make a large megadungeon definitely possible as an adventure opportunity with TFT and its related games. They will take some thought and care, but they are doable.
If you have any experience in playing megadungeons with TFT, please let me know what you found in the comments below!
Marko ∞
Most of my experience with megadungeons in TFT is simply a proof that they don’t really work as written — basically the game flow went like this — party enters dungeon, party meets first opponents, party has typical TFT fight, party retreats outside the dungeon to lick its wounds, wash, rinse, repeat. Parties never really advanced past the first few rooms of any dungeon — even the Caves of Chaos from Keep on the Borderlands is a suicide mission by TFT standards…
The one exception was when I took the demonstration dungeon (it was a map showing seven levels (if I recall correctly) of tunnels and occasional rooms with nothing annotated so you could invent your own big dungeon) from the original TFT: ITL and populated it very lightly. In that one case, the players had a blast, since most of their efforts were devoted to avoiding or disarming traps and tricks, solving the occasional puzzle, and with fairly rare “wandering monster” encounters. Of course, I had added some healing potions and things to help matters along, but overall that one example worked pretty well. Shortly thereafter I went off to the USAF and never have had the opportunity to do anything like it since.
Clearly, the lesson in TFT is, the journey is more important than the destination! 🙂
The healing potion is a good point. Even in low fantasy settings, you have to have the potions to keep the party going. Even Death Test needed that.