Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
 

I played GURPS back in the day, drifted away partly over dissatisfaction with the dissonance between the simulationist rules for runtime and the deeply gamist approach to character generation (especially advantages and disadvantages). I knew about GURPS: Dungeon Fantasy back then, but recently discovered that Dungeon Fantasy (Powered By GURPS) makes some small but important changes to character generation to constrain characters to only spend points on traits that fit their idiom (template). I'm excited to try it out and run a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl for my friends.

However, I'm a bit at a loss for how to balance dungeon levels, difficulty, and treasure. In the normal old-school dungeon crawl, players self-pace their difficulty by going deeper and deeper in the dungeon, fighting tougher and tougher monsters with more treasure.

The Dungeon Fantasy Bestiary... doesn't make that easy. Monsters aren't listed with even point totals, let alone a rough difficulty rating, number of monsters appearing, or treasure type. This makes constructing a "fair" hack-and-slash dungeon surprisingly challenging.

The best idea I have so far is not a terrific one: it's to run playtests (or possibly computer simulations) of combat encounters to see how much damage the monsters would inflict on a canonical small party (e.g. knight/barbarian/cleric) using simple tactics. Then, group encounters with similar damage totals into similar levels (with wandering monsters much more powerful than fixed encounters on the same level, to apply time pressure), and organize levels by ascending difficulty, and make rewards for each level proportional to difficulty level (but divided among monsters for that level in a way that is logical, e.g. give a larger share of the treasure to dragons as opposed to oozes).

Is anyone able to suggest a better way of writing dungeon crawls for DF?

Re: Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
 

Balancing Encounters Exploits p. 85 and How Much? p. 72 may be of help.

Personally I've never really understood this overwhelming concern with "balance". I'm always more interested in verisimilitude. If the PCs really insist on marching to the Nth layer of Hell, I'll oblige them. If they manage to reach the Treasure House of The Golden Empire, I'll oblige them there too.

I definitely prefer it, both as a player and a GM, when the party doesn't go into fights expecting them to be reliably rubber-banded to deplete x units of resources and predictably only be life-threatening in climactic boss battles. It's also fun to be able to defeat foes easily every now and then, and can give a sense of how much your character has progressed over time.

Giving them "ordinary" cool magic items, especially taken from the guy who was using it on them, rarely is an issue. Powerful artifacts typically have strings attached, even if not quasi-cursed, there is usually someone out there with a better claim on it than "crawled in a hole and killed a dude", and I like creating them, so I'll typically put one in reach every once in awhile. Otherwise you want to make sure they have the opportunity to pay the bills in town, and accumulate at least some wealth past that.

Re: Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
 

Something I overlooked when I came back to GURPS after a long break was the lethality of what D&D would consider low/no powered monsters. Its a big difference between D&D and GURPS. The amount of variation in possible advantages/skills/atributes (even if you use DFRPG Templates) makes it very hard to put a number on the difficulty of a monster relative to a PC. Also because of the combat system and the PCs HPs relative to "leveling" there is not such a great difference in the amount damage a monster is capable of inflicting on a beginning delver vs a 'high level' delver.

An Umber Hulk might be a TPK or a disappointing speed bump depending on the party even if the amount of character points is equal.

You can tweak many GURPS encounters easily enough by introducing an opportunistic but relatively low powered enemy. Example a basic Kobald/Goblin, when the PCs are dealing with larger encounters they might be jumped by a small squad of "trash" that is just trying to jump in when they feel like there is a possibility to get a cut of the spoils. If you have a Balrog encounter that seems to be going to easy drop a handful (or more) of goblins shooting arrows during the Balrog fight. They might be on both sides of the group, in front and behind etc... using poor quality weapons and shooting at distances that are very unlikely to hit but they can't safely be ignored.

If the players ignore them, up their accuracy, if the players just shrug off a basic arrow damage make them more lethal. You can tune it gently till you find that point where you feel the PCs are genuinely under stress. I find it easier to add more low power creatures than it is to try and tweak a single high powered creature.


Treasure I never stressed all that much. I use a couple different generation techniques but mostly if I want to add something specific, I just put it in. DFRPG cycles through PC gear faster than my normal GURPS games.

Re: Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
 

The thing is though that Dungeon Fantasy has nothing on verisimilitude either. If it said "Draugr usually come in groups of 1-6" I could shrug and go with that. But instead it just has combat stats for Draugr and nothing at all about number appearing OR difficulty rating, so unless I calculate the expected damage of six Draugr myself I have no clue whether they belong on the first level of the dungeon or the 7th. Unfortunately Exploits page 85 and 72 aren't really helpful--too vague and not quantitative enough. Edit: I guess even if it did say they come in groups of 1-6 I'd still have to figure out which dungeon level to stick them on.

For example, I already know from Lanchester's Laws that six Draugr have up to thirty-six times the combat power of a single Draug. (Six times the durability and six times the damage output per unit of durability.) Against AoEs like D&D Fireball they're "merely" six times as powerful (no increase in durability) but GURPS tends to have weak AoEs and DF seems to follow suit (Song of Terror is an exception, but it has side effects).

What I don't know is the baseline: 36 times as powerful as WHAT. Maybe I'll have to just math out each encounter in the dungeon before I run it, but surely I can't be the first person to try to build an old-school ascending-difficulty dungeon using Dungeon Fantasy rules, can I?

I 100% agree (easy fights are boring), but this is also a bit of a straw man as applied to my purposes. I fully expect my friends to be bored with easy fights too and to keep going deeper until they start feeling challenged. And yet, that requires some sort of "smooth" difficulty curve to exist in the first place! In OD&D terms, if the first time you enter a dungeon, there's a single zombie in one room, then THREE VAMPIRES in the next room, both on level 1, there's no way you're going to feel ready to descend to level 2 even if you survive the vampires.

Aside: I've recently taken to the idea of explaining the existence of cursed items by letting the owner of an item, or their slayer, curse the item as an act of spite. This explains both powerful individual cursed items (Heracles' bow still looks impressive but has a 2 in 6 chance to poison its own wielder, because of his anger at himself after killing his wife) and wholesale sources of cursed items (all the losers of the Elvish Civil War had their swords cursed by the victors, but barrow-robbers stole some of them and now there's a lot of cursed elvish swords floating around).

Re: Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
 

This is mostly a function of D&D magic having strong AoEs. AD&D orcs come in groups of 30-300, and 300 orcs would absolutely MURDER a party of 20th level Fighters. If they are in chain mail + shield (AC 4) you're looking roughly 9 rounds to kill all the Fighters even if only the 10% of orcs wielding crossbows do any damage. If they are in full plate + shield (AC 0) they live three times as long but still ultimately die without killing a majority of the orcs.

However, that doesn't happen because by 20th level either there are party wizards who can nuke the orcs 50 at a time, or the Fighters have turned into quasi-wizards hurling Necklaces of Missiles (Fireball).

GURPS has weak AoEs and strong weapon attacks, which is what makes it fun to play a melee fighter in GURPS, but mobs are fundamentally deadly in both D&D and GURPS. (Depending of course on which game you are thinking of within the D&D brand, but in all the variants I know--OD&D, AD&D, and 5E--mobs are deadly, same as they are in GURPS.)

That's fine. I only need to rate monsters relative to each other. If a PC is built to be strong against diffuse swarms but weak against weapon-wielding threats like ogres, that's the players' problem. But if I put six of monster A on level 1 of the dungeon, and four of monster B on level 2, and two monster C and one D on level 3--if it turns out that level 1 of the dungeon was objectively the toughest level of the dungeon, that will be a bad experience and I want to avoid that.


Again, balancing relative to PCs is not my goal.

Unfortunately this style of actively tailoring encounters on the fly is the opposite of the old-school, self-paced experience I want to offer to my friends. Changing the challenge on the fly seems very unfair to me.

Re: Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
 

This is unfortunately the 'steeper side' of the GURPS learning curve. This IS something you are going to have to try and see what happens.

I don't have a great answer for helping you, but I don't want to just point out something your already struggling with.... so here's some possible stuff

One idea might be gaining familiarity somewhat by trying to use premade modules (though Im not sure of more than a couple that are actually set up specifically for DFRPG). Regular GURPS fantasy style adventures will give you a similar baseline in melee experience, but you will probably continue to find the exposure to a multitude of monsters difficult to find.

Another idea is to run a Sandbox arena session or 2-3 so that the players can get used to their characters AND you can start to gauge that spot where a challenge devolves into a non-issue or becomes a party wipe. I dont know if your players have GURPS experience, if yes you might talk with them for some ideas of what they think it a challenge at their level, if no then you really should do some arena stuff so they can get a feel for what they are doing.

http://gurpswiki.wikidot.com/monsters tried to come up with a sort of CR system, and it might also be a place for you to try. I will tell you its not nearly as tested as the D&D CR system, because there is a lot of fudge factor in the point value of the monsters. It will give you another way to gauge monsters though.

I think pretty quickly you will begin to see what works for your table and what doesnt.

GM advise - be careful tuning DR because it has a disproportionate effect vs just giving a few more HP.
--A heavy hitter with a lot of HPs and low DR might be a challenge
--A Heavy hitter with low HPs and a high DR is a recipe for TPK

Its easier to modify HPs & damage on the fly than DR/abilities

If you have to adjust on the fly its good to have a go to... the wandering Orc scouts / wandering (slow) Gelatinous Cube / weird carnivorous cave worms attracted to the noise of battle. Something that fits with the theme of your dungeon, that you can use to ramp up a fight that isn't going the way you envisioned it.

Its ok to have an encounter fall flat, pretend that was part of your grand design and congratulate the players on a job well done... tweak it for the next one.

Running away is a tried and true method of survival, some players forget that, have some of your monsters do that from time to time... this will also freak the players out.

Re: Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
 

Thanks for the advice. I guess I will have to run some simulated fights after all, at least until I gain enough experience to start eyeballing it. I did find this dungeon generator to use as a baseline. (Source code from https://github.com/Syndaryl/DFRPGRandomDungeonGenerator)

Apparently ascending-difficulty dungeon crawls are more of a corner-case than I expected for DFRPG.

Re: Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
 

Christopher Rice came up with a detailed Combat Effectiveness Rating system for Dungeon Fantasy in Pyramid 3/77, if you want a detailed discussion.

But ... here's an idea: you could also do a very quick-and-dirty guesstimation of combat effectiveness by 1) adding up the average damage from the highest powered attack, 2) multiplying that by Basic Speed, 3) multiplying again by the number of basic attacks (i.e. not Rapid Strikes) per turn, and then 4) adding DR x 5 (or the point-value, if known, if the DR is modified, as with Tough Skin) to the total.

So a totally average, 0 point unarmed human would have a score of .5 (1d-3 cr punch) x Speed 5 x 1 attack, add 0 (DR 0): 2.5.

But a powerful delver - like the barbarian Argua from Delvers to Go - might have a much higher score: 4d+3 cut (17) x Speed 6.25 x 1 attack, add 12 (Tough Skin 4): 118.25. Note that Argua is nearly 50 times more powerful than an average human. This seems about right to me, since even a crowd of 50 0 point unarmed humans would never be able to injure Argua with barehanded attacks....

Or Miao Miao: 2d+4 cut (11) x Speed 8 x 1 attack, add 5 (DR 1): 93.

A bugbear from DFRPG Monsters: 2d+1 cr (8) x Speed 6.5 x 1 attack, add 0 (DR 0): 52.

A small dragon from DFRPG Monsters: 2d+4 cut (11) x Speed 6.75 x 2 attacks, add 15 (DR 3): 163.5.

A large dragon: 5d+7 imp (24.5) x Speed 7.25 x 4 attacks, add 45 (DR 9): 755.5

A draugr: 4d+2 cut (16) x Speed 7 x 1 attack, add 30 (DR 6): 142.

This would be a VERY quick and dirty way of assessing combat effectiveness. It totally leaves out resistance to mind control and a million other things, but for a hack-and-slash-heavy genre like DFRPG, I think this is a good trade off for being an easy way to eyeball encounters.

Note that Basic Speed is a hasty stand-in for active defenses, skill levels, and death checks and that damage is a stand-in for HP in this calculation.

Quick-and-dirty combat rating: (Damage x Speed x Attacks) + (DR x 5)

Re: Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
 

"It's a Threat!" Is also in Pyramid: Dungeon Fantasy Collected.

Although note the section of Exploits I referenced earlier does address this, I'm not entirely sure why we are ignoring it here.

Re: Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
 

Exploits 85: "matching encounters to the party is art, not science; there’s no mathematical formula."

I don't think we're ignoring it!

But I did think it might be useful to come up with a little mathematical formula to give that art a boost. And "It's a Threat!" is Dungeon Fantasy and not DFRPG, right? (It also seems pretty complicated to me, the kind of thing that would take me a good five minute pause and require a pen and a calculator every time.... Though of course it will be far more accurate than my QAD formula.)