Wanted: Ideas for Unexplored Dungeon mechanic.

The easy way is to put the rooms on cards that are face down, and flip them over when a player visits them.

Some of the cards could be blank.

Also, each card (I was going to say 'tile') could be 'populated' by 2-3 face down chits... again, some of which are blank. The chits have things like treasures, Monsters, Items, whatever you might find in a dungeon.

Maybe you don't populatr a room until you are within a certain number of spaces, at which time you might hear noise from certain types of chits (they might have a colored border or something)

- Seth

Check out FF's Doom for ideas on how to do this.

Carl

Instead of face down cards, each player could build their board using large tiles, each containing a corridor or room (a little bit like Doom, but all tiles would have the same size). It would be build behind a large pannel preventing the other player from seeing. A large cardboard rectangle could surround those tiles, thus preventing them from moving (Optional). Players would then cover the board with black cardboard tiles, to simulate a "fog of war". There could be one black tile to cover one room tile. Each time a room or corridor is explored, the black tile is removed to display the room's content. Using black tiles remove the necessity of playing with face-down material, and having to "flip" the tiles face up (this can be a bother if you have material on tiles that are next to the one you flip). You could even prepopulate the dungeon with traps, monsters and chests, and then cover the each room with a black tile, along with its content. The major drawback of this setup is obviously the insane amount of material required to build this game (Room tiles, black tiles, large pannel to hide game setup, tiles for monsters, chests and traps, etc).

sigh.... Jebbou, you out-typed me.

~Josh

I see this as being one of the key considerations - do you want players, in their DM role, to lay out the whole dungeon, part of the dungeon or only the 'next bit' of the dungeon.

If you lay out the whole dungeon, players have free reign over where they go, and they may end up not going to certain places. This could be good, or it could be bad -

- If the dungeon is layed out a bit ahead of the adventurers, then they will most likely end up encountering most of the 'stuff' you have to put into the dungeon, as opposed to having the majority of the dungeon already laid out (above) in which case it is likely that players will not encounter certain things.

One more tile-idea:

There is a central bord with four rooms/areas of different types (stone castle-like hall; cavern; forested canyon; something-else).

Each player builds his dungeon using small tiles, but confrontations are resolved on the central board.

Stuff to use on the central board:
- Circle of sight: a plastic circle that defines the area that explorers see. You only populate that area with features.
- Walls: The rooms have different sizes and shapes, but you put walls in place as your opponents explore and see your dungeon/castle...
- Chits: Everything from monster over dust-pile to furniture or nothing-at-all. Chits should probably come in different vallues. (Dust is less exiting than a demon on his treasure-hoard)

==> Each tile could have a maximum value of chits that can be used in it. (This number goes up as you progress, some previously unseen stuff may be added on the way back if a room allows for it)
==> After a room is 'cleaned' (or declared clean by the DM), the DM puts the chits from the central board on the tile of his own dungeon, to mark what was/is there.
==> After a room is 'cleaned' (or declared clean by the DM), both the DM and players blindly take chits of certain vallues according to the encounter. So each player can strategicly plan his next rooms...

Maybe chits can involve either dungeon building and/or exploring.
==> Do you put the sword chit in your dungeon for others to find and use or do you find the sword in another player's dungeon to use yourself? Putting it in your dungeon for other players, should allow you to take extra chits or something; while using it yourself, does not and even limits your chit-choice by one (the sword itself)...

Cheese!

I think the basic idea in this game is interesting!

I have a concern, though. My guess is that, for reasons of fairness, most likely each player will have a nearly identical set of dungeon elements -- roughly the same number and variety of traps, treasures, monsters, etc. So, each player will lay out his dungeon from these elements. My concern is, what will be the difference between a dungeon laid out by a player and one assembled at random? What does a "good" dungeon look like? I fear you may be giving the players the appearance of an important decision (and one that will be very time consuming to perform) when in actual practice it may not be that important.

Another basic conceptual question. Let's say there are 4 players in the game. Does each player send a party into one other player's dungeon, or into all other players' dungeons, or one at a time? When does the game end, and how is it won?

Depending on how you do things, I think it might be interesting to having a mechanic whereby players have to draft their adventurers and the monsters in their dungeons. THEN there would be some decisions, since you want to construct your dungeon to emphasize the deficiencies of other players' parties. For example, if you can keep Joe from getting a thief in his party, you can toss in a bunch of locked doors and it will really give him problems.

I suspect the blind layout can be handled, I'm just wondering out loud how the game works and what in the game makes this layout phase important or interesting.

Sounds like a fun idea, though; good luck!

-Jeff

Perhaps some magnetic sheeting would work here. You have substrate tiles, to which dungeon tiles are magetically attached. Monsters and so on are then magnetically attached to dungeon tiles.

Then 'dungeon tiles' and various traps, beasties and so forth can be placed by the DM behind a screen, all face up, in the right positions, making dungeon planning easy and straight forward.

Having finished the dungeon layout, all tiles are flipped over, only to be revealed when adventurers reach that tile. Further, if monster/trap counters are placed face down, then you can add the circle of sight mechanism suggest by (I think) gogolski, so adventurers can see the dungeon layout on a per-tile basis, but specific items within that tile are only flipped over when they advance within say 2 squares of the item.

Constructing the tiles could be tricky, since you need two layers of magnetism - one to stick dungeon tiles to the substrate tiles, and one to stick individual traps and monsters to the dungeon tiles. I think it could be done like this (the diagram shows tiles in their post deployment 'hidden' mode):

Substrate tiles (say 3x3 squares)

side B
+-------------------------------------------------------+
| side A | <- slightly raised sides
| substrate tile, with metal sheet on side A | (not to scale)

Dungeon tiles (1 square each):

+--------------+ +--------------+ +--------------+ <- side A = magnetic
+--------------+ +--------------+ +--------------+ <- filler layer
+--------------+ +--------------+ +--------------+ <- side B = metalsheet

The metal sheet is overlaid with dungeon tile image stickers

Side A of dungeon tiles stick to side A of substrate tiles

Unit/trap/item tiles:

As for dungeon tiles, but stickers represent items & monsters etc, and no need for the final metal sheeting layer.

The substrate tiles have 'sides' high enough to accomodate one dungeon tile and one item tile such that when it is flipped into 'hidden' mode the resulting tile stack remains clear of the playing surface.

You may be thinking that the polarity of the magnetic sheet would prevent this double layering of magnetic sheeting from working. However I believe that the polarity of the magnetic field lines in this type of sheeting is parallel to the plane of the sheet, which should allow this scheme to work. Also the magnetic sheets I am talking about are strong enough to hold metal miniatures, so should more than suffice for counters.

Finally, if the magnetic sheeting does not work for reasons of polarity or expense (these sheets - magentic or steel, seem to retail around $6 per A4 page), then perhaps some kind of 'clickable' base solution could be substituted - though this could be very expensive to produce.

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Nope, just awesome ;-) The steel sheeting is 0.02" thick, as is the magnetic sheeting. See

http://www.litkoaero.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=LAI&Category_Code=MB

for just one example.

My two cents...

first, sounds like a wonderful game in the offing. can't wait to play it.

when you wrote it up what i immediately thought of was a two person game with opposing sides. a fixed board between the two players with a grid of say 9 tiles. The tiles would contain a number of rooms and passages with multiple in and out sections to other tiles. If they dead-end into the edges of fixed board then so be it. Each player tries to get from their entry point to the opposite entry point, as exit. This grid of tiles could be randomly shuffled or the players could take turns placing dealt tiles.

So far as the dm'ing mechanic, i was thinking of a Stratego-like chess piece that, as others have mentioned, would hold monster/treasure/trap/dummy symbols. The piece would be revealed only when a player lands in the room. Each DM would have as many pieces as rooms. For an added measure, you could provide generic trap/monster type counters and then have the adventurer draw from a challenge deck/trap deck/treasure deck - but then i like some random in with my strategy.

Darke - IMO what you are proposing seems significantly more complicated and expensive to prototype than the magnetic solution. I suspect my posts did not convey how simple, light, cheap and easy to work the magnetic materials are (you literally peel them off their backing plastic and stick them onto whatever you need having cut them with scissors or knife).

It may also be worth considering some hybrid scheme whereby only the counters/chits are magnetically affixed, if you have a good way of affixing room tiles and darkness tiles to the dungeon superstructure. This could make a magetic solution more feasible.

Also, the setup you outlined seems very vulnerable to slight knocks. In any case, it's up to your judgement of course but I'll be happy to provide more info on the magnetics via PM if you change your mind.