Premise: Underworlds are typically small in scale, modern ones even moreso. I want to explore having large spaces in underworlds and how they affect gameplay.
OD&D doesn’t give a sense of number of monsters appearing in the Underworld. There is some guidance basing numbers off of type and party size, but that’s it. Book 2, Monsters & Treasure, gives Number Appearing for monsters, but it is scaled for overland adventures. Later, in Book 3, it mentions up to 300 hobgoblins being restrictive in the Underworld, but still possible.
The gameplay challenges are manyfold: men-at-arms not going below certain dungeon levels restricts numbers of party member to hirelings, which is restricted by party charisma scores, being chief among them. This means 300 hobgoblins won’t ever be matched man to man by the party. Where the power balance can be equalized is thru higher level PCs. Fighting men in OD&D get many more attacks vs normal creatures (1HD or lower), magic-users & clerics get very powerful spells.
What are some way to game-ify/face these challenges as a normal party?
Infiltration (limited by disguises for non-humanoids), stealth, sabotage to allow fighting the monsters, maybe even parleying to gainnaccess thru the evil dwarf lair/village?
Any others you can think of regarding monster numbers at scale?
My next posts will be dungeon level scale and scales of distances between levels/floors. Thanks.
I would lean into faction play and negotiation. Make the inhabitants people with lives. 300 hobgoblins in a hole waiting to be murdered isn’t too gameable after all.
With a community this big there should be conflicts and factions among them. Players can exploit these and then suffer the consequences for meddling with hobgoblin politics.
A large faction of 300 hobgoblins would also be strong enough that they wouldn’t have to resort to violence immediately. As long as there are things to be gained from the players even just news from the surface they might welcome them as guests.
edit: Not Odnd but the Mothership megadungeon Gradient Descent has a lot of really large rooms sometimes filled with a lot of monsters/npcs. It’s very clear that these aren’t meant to fight or conquer. At least not without a lot of work by the players.
I wonder if you have to resort to humanizing the monsters in order to make it gameable, though? Can it be done with monstrous races? Obviously it wouldn’t be 300 black puddings, hobgoblins (or insert whatever humanoid race you like) have intelligence, but making them “friendly” seems a departure from the norm presented in pre-2e d&d
I wouldn’t have all 300 together in the same place where the PCs could stumble into them. They’d be spread out in smaller groups, grouped by however they do it (by immediate family group or extended relative group or whatever). A frontal assault by the PCs is something I’d consider Suicide By Monster, so I’d expect the PCs to sneak around a lot in pursuit of their goals, and negotiate with this group or that, and generally try to avoid getting the whole of the monster group riled up and chasing after them.
I wouldn’t worry about them being too „friendly“ just don’t make them cartoonishly evil. If they are intelligent there is some nuance to their behavior. Make dealing with them a ticking clock where the players know that they will eventually be betrayed once the Hobgoblins feel there is no more profit to be made.
Does that fit pre 2e D&D games? Sure why not? Is it the way people would have played it in the 70s? I don’t know.
Also, I don’t think a single room full 300 unintelligent monsters is necessarily boring. It can be an obstacle that isn’t meant to be overcome but avoided.@GusL has a room with hundreds of zombies in Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier.
That sounds more interesting. Like walking thru a tiger’s cage. Makes the reason for being there/passing thru all the more important. I don’t care for them being there just to be avoided, though. May as well put a wall there. Gotta have red buttons to press!
(I also don’t really care how people played in the 70s, their experience bears no authority on how we play now)
Well it is sort of a little puzzle. Not a difficult one though. The solution is simple: Don’t try to fight the 500 zombies. It also works as an introductory lesson to the dangers of the underworld.
And there is much you can do with a large room filled with monsters. It’s a bit like a room filled with lava. Maybe players figure out a way to profit from the death trap. Like seeding rumors about a powerful relic hidden among the horde in order to lure rival parties to their death. Or dig a hole from the level underneath and drop a horde of monsters into the domain of a powerful faction.
Frankly I don’t think about it? I tend to design dungeons from the organic, ecological, or Gygaxian Naturalist viewpoint. The number of monsters in a location is the number that makes sense for the location.
With OD&D generally I get that performing a sort of Philotomy’s Musing review to try to understand the intent is fun … but to a great degree I think there’s no coherent reading in OD&D… the document and the notes it emerged from seem to have shifted even as it was written.
Random encounter tables with numbers in the 100+ range for many intelligent monsters strike me as an artifact of the war game aspect. To say 300 hobgoblins is to say a force of 3 large units of heavy chaotic infantry, unaligned to a specific power. Much more a regional description then a dungeon room. Reasonable for that, and either a force to fight, bribe, hire etc if the player demesne wishes to take the hex.
In the dungeon the numbers would I think be smaller based on some of the advice in Underworld and Wilderness Encounters if I remember correctly. Obviously this isn’t how some people played and we see reports both from “Frist Fantasy Campaign” and “Alarums & Excursions” where the large encounter numbers are used - creating an interesting dynamic and leading to various adaptions.
I generally don’t think the random encounter, treasure and similar tables in OD&D (or any other D&D) are especially useful when designing adventures. They are at best a guide to balancing by level, and at worst a suicide pact - a sort of prescriptive but very high level/vague world building that isn’t designed for a particular setting and doesn’t reflect dungeon crawling in the contemporary sense (OSR dungeon crawling) well, but instead promotes a sort of catacomb based war game. This is fine … but leads to bad outcomes when the rest of the game doesn’t.