TFT Dungeon Crawling

[tomc]

Originally Posted by tbeard1999

What are some other ideas to make TFT more dungeon friendly?

I made a huge table-driven solo dungeon generator for TFT, that nowadays would be considered "rogue-like", except that you played a party instead of a single character. There were plenty of healing potions on the treasure tables, and when you needed more you could spend your gold at one of the vending machines scattered about.

It got tedious pretty quickly (no surprise) but as the monster, villain, room and treasure tables got larger, interesting combinations would spring up. Such as a reptile man with a pike ax blocking a 1 hex wide bridge across a functionally bottomless pit, with a pair of archers shooting from the entry hexes at the far end. Do you rush the pike ax and trade arrows with the archers? Who does the Wizard target for his lightning bolt? Maybe he summons a gargoyle (or an illusion of one) to sic on the archers.

There was enough there to find your own drama if you tried, especially if you were attached to your characters, but what it needed were puzzles, sub-plots, and some continuing bad guys who could run away and fight another day. Things a GM can do easily, but are hard with a solo system. Gloomhaven has some really neat innovations along this line.

You can look at a prolonged dungeon crawl as an exercise in economics. You dish out X hits/turn, take Y hits/turn, absorb Z hits/turn with armor. You need to heal on average as many hits/room as you take, or you get worn down until a few bad rolls seal your fate.

So balancing the availability of healing is a big deal. Too much and the adventure becomes too easy. Too little and the adventure quickly becomes frustrating or fatal.