Open door, kill monster, loots and repeat.
by
, May 5th, 2017 at 20:47 (15409 Views)
Many of us started role playing games that way, we would enter a dungeons/ruins/castle for some reason, explore rooms after rooms, killing monsters along the way for loots. Then go back to town, sell the loots for gold and buy nice gear for our characters so we can do it again.
It was the way most of D&D adventure were created 30 years ago, many new players coming from computer game think like that too, and there's nothing wrong if that's the kind of game you want to play. I have been running a conversion to 5e of the original Temple of Elemental Evil and the players seem to be enjoying that kind of large dungeons adventure.
But monsters shouldnt be static, waiting in their room for the players to open the door, maybe they hear the players fighting and have ready actions to attack the first to open that door, or they can come out of their room to help defeat the group. In some corridor of the temple going west, the group (mostly level 3 at the time) opened a door to 3 ghouls, not really difficult for group working together but by round 3 more ghouls joined the fight, then more at round 7, then a pair of ghast took another round came from the north corridor getting behind the spellcasters. What would have been a serie of 4 or 5 easy almost boring fight became an epic battle. (despite my best try i didnt kill any players :-D )
Players go on rampage for a day in a dungeon, go back to the village to rest... have the dungeon owner add reinforcemnt and traps to wait for them to come back. Have monsters be on alert or patrol. A dungeon should evolve, the evil priest see that some annoying heroes destroyed his undead, have him raise more to replace them, the villain should be smart, he doesnt want the group to win after all and kill him.
P.S.: I do often threaten my players of having them kill, but all survive in the end for some reason.