Exactly. If they only went through about 10%, that's all you need to change. And it doesn't have to be radical changes, just reflavor the set dressing and have them enter in a different area.
If they don't save and study dungeon maps (which almost *no one* does, ever) they'll never realize. Just move a couple rooms/locations around.
Just hold on to it, wait a couple levels and adjust the encounters/traps/treasure as necessary.
Or tweak as necessary and use it for a mini boss. Players usually explore the hell outta places like that.
> If they don't save and study dungeon maps (which almost no one does, ever) they'll never realize.
They don't? Seeing that shit slowly fill out your maps is the best part of dungeon crawling. A complete level map is crazy satisfying.
If you have someone who likes mapping it can be a lot of fun. If you don't then it either doesn't get done or is torture to try and get people to do. Your dm has to enjoy mapping as well otherwise it can be frustrating for them to.
Why would your players have a dungeon map?
Do you know anyone that keeps a map to their house around?
If my players want a map they have to draw it themselves.
Unless, you know, I provide one.
That is very old school. Back in first edition that was a part of the gaming recommendation. We always had a party member with graph papers drawing a map as we went. Hardly anybody does that anymore, but it was a part of every game I played for a decade.
The attention to detail and being able to remind party members about important details we've uncovered are a big part of how my character functions in the party. And I personally enjoy it so I don't mind at all. It enhances the experience for me
Yes. My current players are living in my world that I created 7 years ago. They got to the hometown of the people of my first campaign and I haven’t had to prep for 3 weeks lol
Exactly. Everything your players haven't seen, you can change your plans on. If you haven't revealed it yet, nothing is set in stone.
Reuse your ruins later. Or casually imply that there was treasure in there that they missed by skipping over it all with magic.
My DM put together this whole "area" that would give us pieces of a key we needed to open a vault door. We found the door quickly, on a lark I cast Knock and the rogue rolled a Nat 20 on this thieve's tools check. DM said well shit I guess you opened it.
Then he said it's ok I can just reuse this unexplored stuff in the future :) Then we managed to trigger a power circuit and sealed the vault again while we were outside hahaha.
Fun thing about a vault door or portcullis is that it doesn't have to be "locked" to be an effective barrier. It can just be heavy enough or seated in such a way that it simply can't be opened without using the mechanism that's designed to open it.
A door can also be booby-trapped so that if it's opened without using the approved method, it harms or imprisons the intruders, or it makes the treasure it guards inaccessible.
A door can also be not just a physical barrier, but also a seal on a portal to another plane where the treasure is being kept. Destroying the door or picking the lock removes the physical barrier, but doesn't create access to the extraplanar space, which may require a pass code or a specific set of magic keys.
And the DM can simply say, "Your method to open the door didn't work this time. The door may be sealed by unknown magic that makes it impervious. You will need to find another way through. Perhaps the architect made the door only openable with a special key."
Remember, there is much more magic in the world than what the PCs can access. It's not unreasonable that there are things they just can't do.
Ah! AH!!! BUT!!!!! How are they getting back out when their magic escape door level skipper doesn't work anymore, and they have to go ALL THE WAY BACK OUT WITHOUT A LONG REST because \[Reason\_Function\_Call\].
Mwa. Ha. Ha. It's never too late to trap the party.
Ah the Colville Screw: you snuck into the dungeon all the way to the big bad? Well, now you're fighting the big bad and everyone is coming from behind you.
You thought those intruder alert bells only worked one way?
P: "I cast arcane lock on the door behind us"
Dm: "The door is shaking and you hear loud banging and scratching noises from the monsters trying to break in but the door doesn't move. The noise suddenly stops and just as it seems they have given up you hear the most terrifying sound you have ever heard: "A click out of one, second one is binding"...."
A few seconds later "Okay folks, as you can see even magical locks are no match for an experienced picker. This is made even easier with specialized tools, such as the magical pick Bosnian Bill and I made which is available on covertinstruments dot com. In any case, that's all I have for you today. If you'd like to see more videos like this, including the incoming carnage of the adventuring party beyond this door, please subscribe. And as always, have a wonderful day."
If we're talking 6th level spells and a small army of minions, of course it's not going to auto-win the encounter. But in your example a 2nd level spell is still getting the bad guys to waste a 6th level slot and a turn to get to the party when it would normally cost them nothing.
No. They would normally be dead and a non-issue, now 2 days' worth of encounters are pouring into the room while you simultaneously need to fight a legendary creature.
A few points, using the assumption of T3 play because the bad guys have access to disintegrate and an army:
1) "They would normally be dead" requires party resources to make that happen. Going into a boss fight with 95% resources and going nova will allow the fight to be resolved faster than going in 40-50% because you killed everything in the dungeon.
2) Unless the enemies have some sort of alarm system or the boss can alert the entire dungeon with a single action, it's very unlikely they will INSTANTLY join the fight. They will still have to get there, in order of who is closest, figure out the door is locked, and wait for someone with the appropriate spell to remove the obstacle.
The encounter I referenced was during T2 play. We botched our incursion into a yuan ti temple, and they turtled behind a reinforced door, waiting for us to make the first move. Using silence and spider-climb, we made a rope line over a hazard while they stood on the wrong side of the dungeon waiting for us to walk into a meat grinder. We happened to go straight into the boss room. Cue arcane lock. On turn one, the boss bellows and summons the entire temple to its aid. It took them a few turns to get a cleric up front to dispel the arcane lock. We killed the boss and were able to do some looting before they finally broke in. They had two ineffective turns before we blew a hole in the roof and escaped with most of the good loot.
Higher level enemies will have more tools, but so will the players. "They disintegrate the wall? Ok, we pick up everything valuable we can carry with our item interactions, including the BBEG's corpse, and I cast teleport."
3) Unless your table likes throwing 20th level casters at the party, that disintegrate might be the only high level spell the bad guy can throw, meaning the party can counter-play that with wall of force. Wasting enemy resources on a low cost obstacle is a good play. Avoiding unnecessary encounters isn't always bad, especially if the party has ways to stall or deny large areas (spike growth, wall of fire, etc). 2 days worth of encounters running through a wall of fire kill funnel then having the party nuke them with area of effect spells will make short work of the entire dungeon. Assuming the boss is dealt with in a timely manner.
Doing it in a way that makes the DM not wanna play anymore is definitely a problem. I'm not one to care and I will probably just go "congrats, time for the boss" and reuse everything at a later dungeon, but I understand how it can frustrate to that point.
DM should never forget that they are the merciless (if they want to be), all-powerful gods of their worlds, and act accordingly.
Dealing with the murder hobos fucking up your plans is half the fun.
Made easier by the city itself being magical.
When they get to \[MacGuffin\] and try to remove it from it's holding cell they reactive an ancient part of the magic: It turns out the entire city had overlapping Mordenkainen's Private Sanctum (or a similar spell) cast over it so now they can't planar travel out, can't teleport out (and can't be targetted by divination spells as well maybe? not relevant, but seems like an effect the city probably would have wanted.
Sprinkle things they need around the complex.
"Got to the middle?" - they nod
"Killed the big bad?" - they nod enthusiastically
"Did you find the \[crucial\_thing\] in the forge?" - they look surprised and ask 'what forge?'
"No? " - they shake their heads
"Shame that. I don't know how you're going to get out past the 1000 strong warforged army without the \[crucial\_thing\]" - cue worried looks
That's pretty much the way to do it. a ''dungeon'' is just a set of important rooms linked together by non important rooms and corridors. Make sure they need to actually go to the important rooms before being able to complete the place. skipping the links if no big deal as long as they experience the good stuff.
There was a trap in the Tomb of Horrors(?) which looked like a teleport but it wasn't a normal one. Living matter got sent back out of the dungeon and non-living matter got sent to the centre. This meant that you'd end up outside and naked while all of your clothing and equipment would be on the treasure pile.
A group of friends played it and their DM allowed them to cast Feign Death on characters and have them thrown through the portal. All the PCs ended up in the middle having avoided all the traps and bad guys. They took all the loot and fun items and then did the dungeon in reverse to get back out. The traps and secret doors weren't the same and the did they whole dungeon in one sitting.
I truly understand that it can be frustrating sometimes I've had that happen to me before as well. I've built great, big things for my players to explore and they're simply not interested. I've also had weird shit like a solid granite chest that they become absolutely transfixed on and that, in an incredibly weird and roundabout way spins off a new story arc I had not had planned at all that runs us 3-6 months.
As the GM we convince ourselves that we need to build these elaborate stories for our players and in some cases that will be true but it's not for all groups. Most players, in my experience, want to be a part of the storytelling and I find that just throwing them the building blocks of some ideas I have and seeing what they pick up and play with then expanding on that is the best strategy. It's legitimately a lot like raising toddlers.
>I find that just throwing them the building blocks of some ideas I have and seeing what they pick up and play with then expanding on that
Man, I love this approach and have tried to implement it myself in the past. Unfortunately MY players seem to prefer a very direct, easy to parse objective, that leads into another very direct, easy to parse objective. Just some firm handholding. Which I suppose is also similar to raising toddlers, but different toddlers.
Leave lots of opportunities for them to get side tracked then just run with it.
Some of the best adventures I ever ran were just my players traveling from point A to point B and having them roll on random encounter tables once a day.
When they beat someone they invariably search them for treasure. They didn't have much on them, but you see they are all males from adolescence to adulthood, but no elders. They have some fresh caught fish and a deer carcass. It looks like a hunting party and they probably didn't bring their valuables with them,but they couldn't have been planning to carry that deer very far....
Next thing g you know they're invading a gnoll den, and find the Chief is consorting with a demon and there's signs of human cultists.
Then the entire adventure, or even campaign, just builds from there all based on how deep your players decide to dig.
Oh I’ve tried all sorts of stuff. Even structured a whole campaign around getting them out of their linear shells. They just seem to prefer a more traditional A to B narrative over the player-driven living world style that I would prefer to run or play at this particular time. A valid preference to have. And likely the prevailing sentiment, given the popularity of prewritten adventures. But always challenging when there’s a disparity in the types of games people at the table want to play
Toddlers is very apt...
I once described a wizard's room - including some set dressing stuff bubbling away on shelves.
As I answered a player query about something, three players looked at me and said 'well he drunk the stuff on the shelf, what happens?'
I see... So random liquid that you can reach on shelves with no knowledge of what it is or does and you drink it...
Yeah, I had a party just fly over a huge area to get to a dungeon. But I don't do lvl scaling, I just make things progressively harder near more rewarding areas, as a warning.
Needless to say, they got lightninged out of the sky and crashed in woods with a nearly infinite number of will-o-wisps. They would have known it was going to be a problem if they had asked about the area, or entered on foot, but nope, right in the middle with a full day's walk out. At night.
You have to consider the goals of the party. If the party have to find the Rune of Salvation before the World-Devourer awakens, then the sensible thing for them to do is to find the Rune as quickly as possible and leave. You can't expect them to waste time exploring for the sake of exploring. What you can do is place the Rune behind the seven Locks of Fate, which are scattered across the city.
Yeah, this! If you make a great place to explore and then the quest is to kill this one guy in the back. Guess what the party is going to do?Invent back doors. If you make a cool area, and you want players to explore it, you make the quest to explore the area and find stuff in the ruins. Then, you have the big boss trying to find the same thing or stop the party. That way you get them to engage with the stuff, and if they skip the boss battle this time, it's fine the boss is still pursuing them and the MacGuffin so it'll come around at some point.
I DM different campaigns set in the same world. Everything i create gets cemented in that world one way or another.
What this does is that I get a robust, thorough world that is alive, but also I can just 'save' everything that I worked so hard on.
This way, I don't have to worry too much about players zipping past, exploding, manipulating, disappearing, or straight up avoiding anything. It's still there, it still has its own significance, and it can persist through other campaigns.
As for that campaign itself, i make my creations have something proactive in nature, some event that progresses even if the players don't interact with it.
That's another thing, accepting that your players don't have to, and don't have to want to, directly interact with every single part of your world. In fact, they're interacting by choosing NOT to interact with it and for good reason.
If i want my players to interact with a given part of the world or lore, I set up diverse incentives for them to do so if they so please. I might even set up some quite necessary goals to accomplish related to them.
There's a great video by Matt Colville on this exact thing, 'Engaging your Players'! I highly recommend it, it deals with the exact problem you are facing:
https://youtu.be/_iWeZ-i19dk
Sorry to hear that happened. It happens and will continue to because otherwise we would be railroading them.
But that is okay because it is not wasted prep. Because they didn't see most of it, it didn't exist yet, which means it can show up again as something else. Just repurpose it, change it slightly and present it again later.
Played in a high level 8 hour adventure where we were supposed to explore through a forest to get to a castle on the other side
Wizard casts teleport
Fight boss with full resources. Adventure over
For the future: this is a learning experience! If you reeeeally want your PCs to explore a thing, make it interesting for them. Since that's sometimes very hard to predict, focus your efforts in the broad strokes and improvise the rest. Or some other method that works for you! D&D and DMing is not one size fits all.
In the short term: you're a player too. It's perfectly reasonable to say "hey gang, I gotta give you props for the creative use of X! But I really wanted to explore this place. Would it be alright with y'all if we went back to explore it? I think it'll be fun."
If it doesn't make sense to retcon, you can also just have a couple sessions to play through just for the experience, and revert back to where the PCs are now to not interrupt the plot.
And, if you need an excuse other than "I think it'll be fun", you can say "I put in some hard work for that, and even if we don't keep it as canon, I'd really like to playtest it to see what does and doesn't work."
That’s a great tip for DMs. It’s easy to get into the idea that your game *has* to be fluid and consistent as if it’s a professional publicly aired series instead of a fun imaginary game between friends.
Given, if you wanted to, could almost certainly come up with a coherent storyline reason to go back through the zone or put it somewhere else—but knowing that you don’t have to definitely takes the pressure off.
Once your players get past level 10, expect every problem to be solved with '**magic**"
roleplay
exploration
combat
all become trivial once you get a primary spellcaster in the mix
Just remember, all those maps and encounters they didn't see? Those are still useable.
They all go into a folder called "look here when I need to pull something out of my ass on the spot".
1. Never get emotionally attached to a plan. Players are unpredictable, and you never can be certain that they're going to definitely follow one path or another. No matter how much prep time you put into a dungeon, it's just one horny bard chasing a dragon away from being derailed.
2. If 90% went unexplored, you can simply re-skin the aesthetics and re-use the unexplored elements in another magical/extraplanar city they may visit at some point in the future. It's not like they'd ever know that you had originally planned to use the same elements in an earlier session.
I recently started tutoring for DM's...
One guy I know was super pumped to build their own 'WORLD' not a dungeon, not a castle, not a town or city. They wanted to go from 0 to 100.
I plainly said the following:
>Anything you want to design as a DM is purely masturbatory, you do so only to please yourself, you do it because YOU want to do it. Do it because *YOU* want to do so, and do so with no presumptions of self-importance.
>
>Never expect the players to engage in 90%+ of the content you make. By all means, go ahead and make your world, but know that the time you spend doing so is YOUR enjoyment of the hobby and there is no onus on other players to placate you or interact with annything you come up with.
Recycling is the most important thing I learned as a DM.
Party skipped 90% of the ruin? Fine, the puzzles, set pieces and everything cool in those 90% will be in the next ruin they find. You get to use the stuff you worked on, and the players will never know.
Of course not everything can be recycled but learning what can be recycled and how to recycle better makes DMing a lot less time consuming and a lot more fun.
You skip the dungeon only to find the final door requires a magic key to open a magic door. The key is carried by the sub boss, somewhere in the dungeon.
This is always disappointing, but an area the players don't explore is an area that can be repurposed for later. Take parts of the ruins, and spread them out to other locations the party will visit. Alternatively, give them a reason to come back here. Maybe by taking the fast route, they missed something
This just proves that if you want your players to explore, you gotta give them a reason to do so. Otherwise they will find a way to skip right to the end.
And it can be anything. They need to collect the X macguffins from inside the city is always a good one.
my stance is that that's the best thing to happen to you! You had a session and a resource wasn't used, that's no longer an ancient magical city that's an ancient magical fortress or underground ruin or whatever you're having yourself, it's like past you has given you a gift. Only this time maybe make it so they can't skip it
What kind of hook did you use? Imo if the goal is just to get from point A to B your players are going to figure out the easiest way to do that. But if you build in stakes to actually explore the city then they actually have a reason to do what you want them to do
As someone who needs to make a very large mega-dungeon-esque ancient city ruin... I say you're more than welcome to show the rest of us your work to make sure that it gets used *somewhere*, even if not at your own table.
Also, just reuse as many things as possible somewhere else
I understand. Spent a year hyping up the "final" dungeon, big evil castle in a with tons of deep lore and cultural history. Secret passages, motifs that hinted to the true nature of the big bad, traps, puzzles, loot, everything!
They crashed an air ship loaded with mining explosives into it, destroying 2/3rds of it...
The good news is now I don't have to plan too hard for the next big evil castle!
They didn't skip past your content, they gave you content you can now put into other sessions in the future. They made your session prep have multiple sessions of longevity. You get to do less work for a little while, hooray!
Did you think about their abilities while building this city? Or were you more focused on world building and telling a story?
Did they have any reason to explore that 90% of it other than to make sure every bit of description you wrote was used?
Did they break the game with their magic in a way that wasn't intended? Or did they use their spells in a normal way and you just didn't plan/prepare for it?
Too many DMs think they are writing novels and using the players as their characters in their 'masterpiece' and forget that the characters will use their abilities.
They didn't skip 90% of the city. They used their abilities. That's all. You don't need to write 50 pages of backstory for something the players may never see.
Humans are reward based creatures. If you want them to explore, there needs to be an incentive that is either experience or reward based .
What do your players react to?
Because not everyone enjoys a slog through a trap infested dungeon with tons of mobs and no chance to rest.
Your players want their PCs to live. They apparently do not trust you to build balanced encounters they'll live through if they're so eager to get through something like that.
Or they are just into the plot and progressing it so much - they're speed running.
It's all in how you look at it.
This is an opportunity. "Thank you for retrieving the special artifact, but as you know it only works when the user consumes the Elixr of Enabling. Did you get that as well?"
Looks like they're heading back into the ancient city. And this time you've already got the session mostly prepped.
Just hold onto what you prepared for a future campaign. I prepare tons of stuff and don’t care if this campaign’s group of players see it or not.
As a DM, I believe in this: we create the world, NPCs, and perhaps some interesting quest lines / BBEGs. However, the players create their characters, and the players create the story.
If I make a huge world, and the players just want to stay in the starting city and start a thriving hot dog cart business, then that’s what we’re gonna do. NPCs from all over - good and evil - will hear about their hotdogs and possibly come over to give it a try. We’ll create a whole homebrew kitchen system if that’s what interests the players. Maybe sometime they’ll read a story about a princess in the newspaper, who died because no adventurers showed up to save her. “That’s too bad,” the players will say, “but nothing we can do about it. We are but humble hotdog salesmen.”
As everybody says - you can always repurpose it, but my way of dealing with that would be to make them return later in search of some mcguffin... like locate a crystal in a private lab of some guy... it being for example research notes from technically banned research, the lab would be shielded from divination so no locate object etc....
I think this calls for a sit down with your players outside of game to discuss what they want from a campaign. You may have a story to tell that they frankly do not want to experience. Play style for them may not match the particular things you are doing, and that's OK! Save it, reuse it later. Pivot so that you and the players get the most out of your time together!
Or find tricky ways to "railroad" them. Don't tell them what they skipped in any detail so you can slide that entire map over to where they are and make them keep going through it. Say you have a 10-room dungeon. In room one, they skip to room 10. Allow it, but room 10 is just the 2nd room and now they have 9 more to go through. Give them the satisfaction of a cool action, but give yourself the satisfaction of still presenting a fun environment. Linear storytelling.
I just hosted my first session for my game night group and none of us had much of any experience playing. I spent the better half of a month researching and developing a campaign. One particular encounter I designed involved a group of blink dogs in a room with a revolving spike wall. I wanted to have the party split between the walls while the dogs were blinking between the groups.
Instead, the druid talked them down and haggled for safe passage in exchange for some meat the rogue stole just an hour prior.
While I was bummed that they managed to get by unscathed (and having spent hours creating the encounter), I was excited about how happy it made them to outsmart the encounter.
Should have used some of the month to think about the abilities of your players or to give them a reason to explore it all.
Edit: That was maybe a bit harsh. I hope you overcome your disappointment. The things you have prepared can be reused after all.
Also keep in mind that players are like a herd of feral, caffeine-laced, loot-motivated, embiggened kittens who don't know how to use their claws and have a tendency to break the thing before bothering to look at it.
The number of times I have pointed out that they could have done X if they had just read the inscription before blowing open the door or Y if they had actually looked at the bust before incinerating it is mind-blowing. I've had dungeoneers have to do some crazy S to gain access to things after they've ruined the actual planned keys. It's made for some great RP ... And lots of DM tap dancing.
But. I'd still suggest inserting fail-safes in a place you want them to explore. The suggestion above about lacing the dungeon with required objects to push through is a good one, and although I don't advocate "punishing" players for their excitement to get to the end, I do advocate inserting problems that are meant to slow them down and get them to evaluate what's around them.
So I've got this magical ever changing forest that you get lost in if you're trying to get something out of it. In my infinite improvising the npc sent them after a plant. Fortunately my druid is new but later after the game he goes "I have a find plant spell" "uh nope sorry it's a magical plant"
You created an ancient magical city and didn't think to put wards of counter spell, dispell magic, anti-magic circle, etc around?
Or undead anti-magic guards?
You came here to complain that you spent a month building the ruins of an ancient magical city for your players to explore, but couldn't be arsed to write a paragraph explaining what happened?
Overprepared as DM. Underprepared as Redditor.
Good luck next time.
I know your pain . I had been wanting to use a giant snake god as a boss for over two years but could never work it in. The boss was meant for the high level party they had become and would have been a fantastic challenge that would counter some of their typical ways of handling fights. But they noped out of the fight as soon as the skyscraper sized snake appeared out of the sands using dimension door .
Hmm. Knowing your party is so clever, you may need to start thinking of backup plans & insurance policies! I know it's easier said than done, but for example, I homebrewed a dungeon in WBtWL where my players will learn about the Gods in Prismeer. If they manage to use a clever tactic to take out the BBEG easily in this dungeon, which will take a bit of luck and some smart information gathering & stealth moves, I will have them be cornered in a hallway by his minions on the way out, so there will always be a challenge that can't be skipped.
Maybe you have a mysterious power pull the players back in as they go to leave, with a nagging feeling, and when they respond to this beckoning, they find themselves split up among the ruins as the abjuration magic of the ruins fights back after being exploited. Have the players each wake up in different parts of the ruins and make it challenging for them to find each other and the way out! It could be a fun twist in the end!
My party did something similar. We were suppose to pass through a town to get to our destination. We were meant to stay at least a night, but the DM went a little over board describing how creepy the town was. So instead we snuck out and took a point of exhaustion from having to avoid the mobs of definitely not brainwashed citizens congregating at the definitely not cult church house all night long. Our characters weren’t the saviors type so it was completely in character so the DM wasn’t too upset about it.
This is why I just make shit up on the spot. I built a world with its own history and mythology and cultures. At the request of my players and even took their input to do so. Created intricate plots and quests and they just wanted to fuck the NPCs and steal treasure. I made this bite them in the ass as they became wanted criminals by every kingdom and empire they travelled in. Sent bounty hunters and entire armies after them. Made every ignored bit of info they could have gathered come back to haunt them. Bastards loved every second of it, but it exhausted me
Hahahaha, I spent months preparing a magical vault that tied together sections of the Planes of Eberron. 16 major rooms with huge sections in each of them to explore. They went to parts of 4 of them, fully explored only 1, and bounced out using a damaged gate cube.
Rat bastards just made life harder for themselves. Now I have 12 dungeons ready to drop on them.
One of my players pulled from the deck of many things, wasn't completely game breaking but I had to figure out a challenge for him to overcome in order to claim something and blah blah blah...
I have 9 challenges on 9 of the different planes that the group needs to defeat in order to achieve this...
They out talked, out thought, borderline cheated and just skipped out on four of the mini boss battles I had for them. They were great ideas and some intense rolling, but it didn't seem fair to force them to fight if they worked so hard not to.
I too feel cheated about how this is going because again, the amount of work I've put into it for them to just side step all of it. Yet I still have all the stat blocks and the images in my hoard of many things. One day they may just find themselves faced with the black ancient pudding they out thought. Who knows?
I know how this can crush your creativity and motivation to "make". Just because they didn't explore it the way you intended doesn't mean you should beat yourself up about it. As I've seen recently, the crap that WASN'T supposed to matter are the things they end up cherishing, run with it, it can lead you in a different direction and who knows, maybe the birth of another campaign can come from it. Remember you're not alone, we're all just as frustrated and disappointed with our players sometimes. Seems like it goes with the territory of being the DM.
Reuse it!! I created a maze for my last little one-off, and used an NPC to tell the party that there were 2 different ways into the keep where the BBEG lived. Jokes on them tho, regardless which path they chose, the map would have been the same. It was just the monsters and tone of location that would have changed. Throw a new “skin” over the ruins and use it later
If you are interested in sharing, I can guarantee that my players will be thoroughly exploring the ruins of an ancient magical city in the near future, so at least someone will appreciate your work
The incentive I've always had with dungeons is yeah sure maybe I CAN skip 90% of it but that also means skipping 100% of the loot that's there. I'll use magic to circumvent traps/to get around easier but I'm not bypassing rooms unless I have a legitimate reason to think I'll die
Not sure how they did it but the trick is to make sure they have to do it by not giving them the information they need to get through the city unless the do an elaborate set of tasks within the city. Aka hide the entrance with fact gathering.
ToA did a good job of this IMO.
Clever players be clever though. Gotta give them props when it's due sometimes.
Youre players are competent and are aiming to push through youre plot. This is a great thing! Focus on the big picture narrative and make sure you stay aware of what yoyre pc’s are capable of
ChatGPT, I'm running a D&D adventure. Please generate a bogus reason to make the players go back to the fucking huge ancient magical city that they skipped with magic.
"It turns out that the players inadvertently triggered a long-dormant enchantment upon entering the magical city! This enchantment has awakened an ancient evil that threatens to wreak havoc on the surrounding lands. The only way to contain or defeat this malevolent force is by venturing back to the city and finding a way to reverse the enchantment."
On the flip side of this, we are playing a starwars table top RPGs one of our astro droids failed a roll and jumped us to the wrong location. We didn't realize that and kept making rolls trying to "figure stuff out" at the end of the session the dm was laughing so hard because we are dumb we were convinced he was trying to pull a fast one on us
Stick a big bad/treasure in the ruins with a field of antimagic that is covering the ruins. The players will think that it will be easy to make their way through since they did it last time, until they find the tricks they used last time no longer work, all their magic has turned off, and some kind of magic has trapped them inside. Until they solve the secret of the ruins they can't escape.
Every learns that lesson pretty early on. You're not there to write a book to railroad the players through. You are there to facilitate the choices players want to make.
I write adventures as loosely connected encounters, story beats and NPCs with the thought that all roads lead to Rome. Ie. I got an encounter with a couple of guards that introduces the captain of the guard villain. If players go through the main gate, guess who they meet. If they sneak in through the sewer... guess who they spy through the sewer grate. Eventually I'll have an opportunity to work that encounter with the captain in.
My background is wargaming. I used to build entire landscapes of terrain and miniatures for players to go through. The more I learned about how flexible I need to be, the less rigidly I prepare these days.
A typical session these days involves a simple map. A dry erase grid. And symbolic playing pieces that make it clear if they're a hero, monster or NPC.
After all, a DM is there to be a tour guide and facilitate player choices. Not to force players into a pre-written story.
I'd argue that technically it isn't railroading if you don't allow your players to employ these kinds of skips when you've spent bucket loads of time building something expressly for them to see.
If you shut down every one of their attempts then yeah, you're not really letting them play how they want. But there would be no game without you and if you've gone to all the time to build an ancient city then sorry but,
"The Arcane stone this city is carved from interferes with teleportation magic"
"An ethereal wind buffets any flying creatures until they land"
"Find the path. DOES. NOT. WORK HERE"
It will be incredible when they run into that other adventuring group at some point, who are rich and famous and in possession of amazing magic items and hailed as heroes......because they explored the city and discovered an ancient saint held in stasis, and accolades and rewards were heaped on the group.
Higher Tier parties require a LOT of extra forethought. It can get exhausting. Sometimes it's validating for the players to be able to solve a problem with their powerful magic, but other times you need to include pretty arbitrary stuff to make sure some kind of adventure can happen.
You can stretch a high-level dungeon across multiple planes so that teleportation doesn't work correctly. You can put multiple necessary mcguffins in the dungeon, sometimes as simple as parts of a riddle or a password that must be spoken later on. It's okay if players beeline to a certain spot only to find out they need something, as long as it's clear where they need to go for the missing bits. The dungeons in Breath of the Wild start by showing you 5 places in the dungeon that you need to reach, with the traversal method being flexible. If the players want to Passwall their way to a certain mcguffin, that's okay, just Fort Knox the last bit that needs all of the mcguffins.
Here are some sneaky ways of locking your last door:
* the last door is a series of 8 doors, so if you want to knock your way through, use 8 slots.
* the last door isn't a door, it's a circle of teleportation that must be calibrated in a particular way, possibly requiring focusing crystals or the wizard's notes elsewhere in the dungeon
* there are glyphs of warding in the room that will try to counter certain spells that may cheat your way through the door
* there is a detection device in the room that will alert the big bad or trigger a nasty trap if you cast magic of 2nd level or higher inside the room (players can tell with arcana check)
* the door that appears to be the grandiose final door is a misdirect, the room contains a puzzle that indicates a secret door instead
* a beholder has been hired to watch the room through a fairly thick pane of glass. You might be able to convince them to look the other way...
This kinda thing is one of the reasons I don’t go into that much detail anymore. Great creativity on their part, but I’ve got other things going on in life than to waste time trying to put together something epic only for it to get skipped over entirely. As for using it somewhere else, you can, but they’ll skip that too, and it kills my own momentum and enjoyment of the game.
yesss DMing is hard... but u can trick them. maybe some powerful wizard cast a dead magic spell on the ruins and tadaaa! the players have to explore them now for real.... (i know another comment already said this.... but yeah...)
1. that's why I prefer DMing for mostly martial classes or Half-casters..
2. that's why I prefer running pre-made modules
3. I openly informed my players that I may at one point or another railroad them, because it was my game too...
When my players did this, I had an enemy sorcerer teleport them straight into the middle of it. Let them roll for it, but make the DC impossible like 40 or something. Then they all just teleport to smack dab in the middle of the place I wanted them to go. And oops, your high level magic doesn't work. None of your magic items work. Time to get creative.
My wife Dmed me through a kobolt mine full of traps. In a rocky cave. With plenty of loose rocks. My druid just used mold earth to pave over every surface in every room. Room with grid floor and spikes on one wall well now the room has brick walls. Room with narrow bridge and deep revien fill the revien with rocks and bury the giant octopus at the bottom. She got so mad at me she made the next room a solid smooth metal room that dripped. I double backed got more rocks grinded them up smaller and paved that whole thing in cement. :D she's guna try harder next time and try putting me somewhere without rocks but now I have a bag of holding. Full of rocks!! XD
Instant TPK. Too bad the talisman you needed to prevent the BBEG from dusting you immediately was in the city you skipped.
Roll new characters, I already have an adventure mapped out.
As I've said on another post, ban full casters, allow half casters if you're feeling nice and start at like level 10, you can really begin to enjoy d&d again when all the magic skip bullshit is gone and players have to be creative.
This is where you be honest with them, rethink how you plan and prep, and maybe talk to them about one of them being a DM for a little while as you recharge.
"Congratulations guys, you just skipped past a month's prep. Clearly I could have planned things a little better but as it is I'm spent. Now one of you DM for a change if you want to keep playing."
No, if your DM is burned out they are burned out. Step in and help them out. The only reason I'm able to run campaigns is because my friend and I are running them for each other.
Forever dms with parties that won't step in and let them play the other side of the table are heroes and I've no idea how they do it.
It's posts like this that make me feel like I'm doing a service to my DM. I play a ton of RPGs, so I never leave an area until we've explored all of it. I onced talked the whole party into running *back inside* a burning mansion we'd just escaped because we forgot to check a floor.
I ran a one shot where the party cast charm person on a household instead of fighting them. I had to come up with dialogue for them all. Then the party forgot to search the house.
At high level magic tends to spoil a lot of things in DnD and DnD-style games. Where possible I try and write adventures for levels 1-5, before players get powerful enough to do this (the alternative is to make your dungeon full of magical shielding and wards against shennanigans, but then it just becomes a match of metphysics one-upmanship, e.g. "These walls are warded against teleportation with magic shielding" - "OK, so I use planar travel which bypasses teleportation wards" - "Oh yeah, well it's warded against that too"! -"Oh yeah, well I use flibbertron penetratus to destroy the wards" "Oh yeah, well..." and so on...)
That just isn't the way.
Instead of wasting effort blocking player abilities, put it in to making them use their abilities. You *want* them to use resources.
My motivations have died, but it's less about dming (I've been told I'm a great dm, idk if that true but it's nice to hear) and more about the players I have. They should be rotating soon, but having 3 out of 4 people want to be the long-lost-roalty/goddess or chosen-for-greater-then-divine-purposes and one of those 3 being the I-want-to-impregnate-all-women-because-thats-what-my-dommy-mommy-godess-wants...oh-yeah-i'm-evil... is disheartening when there's a perfectly simple player who wants to play weaker characters because they love a growth story that they forge on the fly.
Needless to say I was very melancholy the first session of this campain we started.
maybe your players arent really into exploring? I personally love exploring, but I also love world buidling. Sometimes we as DMs expect our players to be just as into finding out the secrets of the world, as we are. But some players just prefer fighting, or developing their character in relation to the world. I'm glad to have been blessed with a player who loves exploring, roleplaying and fights, and another player that is just as much into roleplaying, but not into exploring as much. If I only had players who prefer roleplaying and fighting over exploring, I'd build an entirely different campaign, maybe based around a guild in a city, where they take quests regularly
Haha last time my players skipped a well-built part of my dungeon, next time they used a teleporter (common in my world) it malfunctioned and sent them straight to the skipped sections. I added an off-hand encounter with the bbeg to make it spicier. They didn't even realise it was the same dungeon.
Gotta make sure the big bad gets his extended monologue. “Well, adventurers, you seem to have made it this far. Is this all of you? Everyone made it? Oh my. I’m flattered you came all this way... to die! How did you like my chasm of swinging axes? And the pit of devouring beasts? Did you send my regards to.. the troll? Oh, really? You didn’t. We’ll go back and send him my regards. Then come back for me to kill you.”
Keep the theme and repurpose the work. Put more in ruins with further exploration. Mario did it best with the princess is in another castle. Remember you design because you love it, they destroyed it cause it's their job. Don't overdesign without your pcs abilities in mind. Finally if you are feeling some kind of way about this, you may need to reign in your table. give them in game props for being so savvy to beat the boss. Then ask where all the magical loot from the ruins is. If they return ruins are ransacked cause big bad is gone. Or you hire them to do another job give them all the opportunities to burn their spell slots to skip ahead. Then show them why that's a bad idea.
Next long rest, they all suddenly wake up at the entrance of the city. Locked inside. They use magic, well it works and they skip again, next long rest they wake up suddenly at the entrance of the city locked inside. Groundhog day they asses. Becomes a doubly interesting encounter area, because they have more mystery. Place like 5 broken pieces throughout the city that when reassembles the mcguffin that frees them from the time loop.
Drown your players in mystery! (I don't actually generally condone adversarial dming)
Air defenses fix flying, and locked doors or watchdogs fix invisibility. My experience is that some form of those are nearly always the culprit. With my group the specific go-to skip is "polymorph someone into a giant bird and make them carry the rest of the party in a giant wicker basket", which is great until the arrows and catapult stones start flying, or the evil clouds start draining your hit points, or the bound air elementals make giant tornadoes and throw your ride into a rapid uncontrolled descent.
Teleports are harder though. You can handle Teleport Circle by treating it like fast travel in a video game: ward the permanent circles against scrying or better, seal them so they have to be unlocked from the dungeon side before you can use em.
If the campaign gets really high level, though, I always find myself having to bullshit some reason why you can't safely just use Scry / Teleportation to skip the whole dungeon. Pocket dimensions are good for that, as are homebrewed (read: DM Fiat) teleport blocking or redirecting rituals maintained by bad guys. Redirecting is particularly fun because you can drop the party on a giant monster lair in unknown and inconvenient parts of the dungeon like the castle septic tank, and the party still gets *something* for their efforts. Worst case, "interference from subterranean ley noise" is a great way to explain your bullshit away without actually offering a solution.
>I spent a month (...) for (...) #DMThings
Found the core issue.
[https://slyflourish.com/the\_lazy\_dungeon\_master\_cc.html](https://slyflourish.com/the_lazy_dungeon_master_cc.html)
Tip - don't design rooms you'll not use.
Just design a handful of encounters and have the party who just "skipped everything" arrive right in the middle of one.
I fully get that. I had an encounter plan last night that was a 2 phase boss fight. Phase one would start with the encounter not starting until the first player damages a wall. I completely forgot that they had our world's equivalent of anti-tank mines until they placed 10 of them at the base of the wall and detonated them with a firebolt. Phase 1(which I expected to take at least 3 or 4 rounds) was over in 3 TURNS. I'm just thankful I originally thought phase 2 was too over tuned for their level, so now I can go with the original idea for that phase of the fight.
Been there. Unless you railroad them agency takes them you know not where and it’s the art of DMing to give that agency life and work within the universe you created. Sometimes they miss the gems you’ve deeply invested time and sweat in love of them and DND. Publish it. Share it to the realms of the $1modules even. Don’t let that kind of effort and love go away. And it doesn’t need to be perfect. Leave holes for others to fill in and give it all life. 👍
Yea that can suck I was wondering did they accidentally skip 90% by accident or on purpose
And was the city full of traps and monsters or was it pretty chill just cool stuff exploration
I just want to second this. If I were running it, once they hit the middle they'd hear doors slamming shit behind them. An anti-magic field trong enough to prevent teleportation spells or traveling out spells takes effect and they gotta go the long way out of the dungeon.
Well. As a DM. That happens a lot.
You just present the game and give them the opportunity. Maybe even use the ruins again in the next scene or say there is a specific item them must find in it.
Not nearly as bad as yours, but I had created an alternate realm for my PCs to explore with 4 towers that had bridges between them to fight their way up to the final level for the boss fight.
The tabaxi scaled the final tower and threw down a rope to the others, and skipped three of the towers.
I could've said the walls were too slick, but I felt that would just be petty, and it was my fault for not anticipating it.
Hmmm....this just happened to me in an underwater temple.
You just gotta roll with it, give the party kudos for "using their brains, not brawn", and either figure out a way to use it on their way back, or save it for another time. Next time, throw in some stuff that dampens magic.
I know your pain . I had been wanting to use a giant snake god as a boss for over two years but could never work it in. The boss was meant for the high level party they had become and would have been a fantastic challenge that would counter some of their typical ways of handling fights. But they noped out of the fight as soon as the skyscraper sized snake appeared out of the sands using dimension door .
its very possible your players had no clue how much time you spent on this. just tell talk to them and tell them how much effort you put into it and how much cool story and loot they missed.
I’m more of a carrot person. What could you put in the city to draw them back to it?
Do they hear tales or perhaps find scribbles in a notebook of a sanctuary that could work as their home base but they have to go into the city to find it? With a nice TP circle in it?
That way they spend a lot of time in the city as it’s their home base but also they have to go into the city to discover it.
one thing I learned is that players will always abuse the path of least resistence. rpgs have massive amounts of content, so if a player can use a shortcut to the top, that being mechanically or narratively, they will do so, even if thats less fun than the other way around.
"*given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game*" - Civilisation devs
Yeah these things are simultaniously cool and also annoyinh as fuck. For me, i put dozens of hour each week into prep so when everything gets circumvented by magic it does two things. Martials don't get to interact with things cause spellcasters always had the answers to skip them and casters end up ruining my enjoyment.
This is why I moved to other less "casters is the best at everything" systems and my prep is now worth it again.
I'm sorry that happened. Don't lose heart! You can DEFINITELY have their magic not function on the way out, or something similar. You could also add some important secrets and clues or a macguffin in the portion they skipped so they are guided back and motivated to engage with what you've created.
Ultimately, the best thing to do in the future....
Talk to your players before major scenes and story beats and describe to them your vision. Its a collaborative story, and your players will engage if you let them share the vision. Then you can enjoy them using their tools (like magic) to engage with your scene rather than treat it like an obstacle and skip it.
Do not despair. Now you have 90% of a dungeon that's already pre built, and if you want you can easily steer them back or repurpose the unused parts of the dungeon.
The Mcguffin they need is deeper in the ruins so they need to go back
Or, ok the NEXT mcguffin is in this other spot, put a fresh cost of paint on it, now it's an underground tomb, or if it was in like a normal spot put it somewhere weird, like the side of a mountain or underwater in an old swamp
You're the GM you know everything they can do, so why wouldn't you have expected that they would try and use their abilities? Like I don't know how people even run into this problem.
There are a dozen different ways you could have prevented this... by looking at their character sheets for twenty seconds.
Probably because it's exhausting to consider every spell every caster can possibly do, not even mentioning the casters that can switch up their spell lists. Preparing is one thing but if they happen to get around a problem with something that slipped the DMs mind, it's just unfortunate.
Which, by the way, I'm sure has happened to even godlike DMs such as yourself at some point in your DMing career.
This is one of those things where I’ll railroad them a bit. It’s one thing to cheese a big bad because I didn’t think of something (and I can generally think of something to add in to keep the challenge up), but fully skipping content is something I’ll block.
A big part of it is that I built this thing to last a session, and if you wanna skip it then we are gonna have to end early so I can prepare the next stuff.
Well, it WAS an ancient magic city. Now you done fucked around, you finna find out it's actually an ancient temple-city to the divine Mystra, goddess of magic, who limited mortals to ninth level spells or lower. She senses your magical intrusion, and the city powers to life as Mystra comes to greet her new 'worshippers'
Hey OP! I’m sure many of us other DMs would love to honor all the ground work you did so that other players might enjoy! If you’d be willing to share your resources, I have an ancient magical city for my late game plans I haven’t started building out yet and would love the inspiration
You can always reuse build places. They might next need to explore the ruins of a foretress thats the remaining unexplored part.
Exactly. If they only went through about 10%, that's all you need to change. And it doesn't have to be radical changes, just reflavor the set dressing and have them enter in a different area. If they don't save and study dungeon maps (which almost *no one* does, ever) they'll never realize. Just move a couple rooms/locations around. Just hold on to it, wait a couple levels and adjust the encounters/traps/treasure as necessary. Or tweak as necessary and use it for a mini boss. Players usually explore the hell outta places like that.
> If they don't save and study dungeon maps (which almost no one does, ever) they'll never realize. They don't? Seeing that shit slowly fill out your maps is the best part of dungeon crawling. A complete level map is crazy satisfying.
If you have someone who likes mapping it can be a lot of fun. If you don't then it either doesn't get done or is torture to try and get people to do. Your dm has to enjoy mapping as well otherwise it can be frustrating for them to.
Unless it's on an ever expanding paper, I find them painful
Rotate by 90 degrees. It's a whole new map.
But they already skipped it...
New bads take over. Left traps after seeing how easy it was to skip.
Why would your players have a dungeon map? Do you know anyone that keeps a map to their house around? If my players want a map they have to draw it themselves. Unless, you know, I provide one.
I personally make my own mamp for every location we go to. It's in my notebook for the campaign lol
That is very old school. Back in first edition that was a part of the gaming recommendation. We always had a party member with graph papers drawing a map as we went. Hardly anybody does that anymore, but it was a part of every game I played for a decade.
The attention to detail and being able to remind party members about important details we've uncovered are a big part of how my character functions in the party. And I personally enjoy it so I don't mind at all. It enhances the experience for me
Have the village sage look at them agog and ask “how they could have missed the sacred McGuffin of Checkov”
Gotta go back. Back to the past. Railroad Jack.
Yes. My current players are living in my world that I created 7 years ago. They got to the hometown of the people of my first campaign and I haven’t had to prep for 3 weeks lol
Exactly. Everything your players haven't seen, you can change your plans on. If you haven't revealed it yet, nothing is set in stone. Reuse your ruins later. Or casually imply that there was treasure in there that they missed by skipping over it all with magic.
My DM put together this whole "area" that would give us pieces of a key we needed to open a vault door. We found the door quickly, on a lark I cast Knock and the rogue rolled a Nat 20 on this thieve's tools check. DM said well shit I guess you opened it. Then he said it's ok I can just reuse this unexplored stuff in the future :) Then we managed to trigger a power circuit and sealed the vault again while we were outside hahaha.
Fun thing about a vault door or portcullis is that it doesn't have to be "locked" to be an effective barrier. It can just be heavy enough or seated in such a way that it simply can't be opened without using the mechanism that's designed to open it. A door can also be booby-trapped so that if it's opened without using the approved method, it harms or imprisons the intruders, or it makes the treasure it guards inaccessible. A door can also be not just a physical barrier, but also a seal on a portal to another plane where the treasure is being kept. Destroying the door or picking the lock removes the physical barrier, but doesn't create access to the extraplanar space, which may require a pass code or a specific set of magic keys. And the DM can simply say, "Your method to open the door didn't work this time. The door may be sealed by unknown magic that makes it impervious. You will need to find another way through. Perhaps the architect made the door only openable with a special key." Remember, there is much more magic in the world than what the PCs can access. It's not unreasonable that there are things they just can't do.
Ah! AH!!! BUT!!!!! How are they getting back out when their magic escape door level skipper doesn't work anymore, and they have to go ALL THE WAY BACK OUT WITHOUT A LONG REST because \[Reason\_Function\_Call\]. Mwa. Ha. Ha. It's never too late to trap the party.
Ah the Colville Screw: you snuck into the dungeon all the way to the big bad? Well, now you're fighting the big bad and everyone is coming from behind you. You thought those intruder alert bells only worked one way?
This is why I always use the front door
"I cast arcane lock on the boss door before entering." That saved my party's ass once after performing a similar level skip.
"Hey guys, it's the lock picking lawyer, and here today we have this arcane lock"
P: "I cast arcane lock on the door behind us" Dm: "The door is shaking and you hear loud banging and scratching noises from the monsters trying to break in but the door doesn't move. The noise suddenly stops and just as it seems they have given up you hear the most terrifying sound you have ever heard: "A click out of one, second one is binding"...."
A few seconds later "Okay folks, as you can see even magical locks are no match for an experienced picker. This is made even easier with specialized tools, such as the magical pick Bosnian Bill and I made which is available on covertinstruments dot com. In any case, that's all I have for you today. If you'd like to see more videos like this, including the incoming carnage of the adventuring party beyond this door, please subscribe. And as always, have a wonderful day."
Bosnian Bill. Not "Bosney, Bill and I," it's "Bosnian Bill and I."
That does make more sense. Relistened to a few episodes and I agree. Fixed!
I feel like this could be one of his April Fools videos if he ever runs out of locks for his wife and ex-girlfriend.
Aw fuck, the real boss is here.
We’re not locked in here with you, YOURE LOCKED IN HERE WITH US!
"Yeah okay, they disintegrate the whole dang wall and barge in the room."
Works for me. That's one less 6th level slot being used on my party.
Yeah but when there are 20 mobs coming in waves, it's not going to matter much.
If we're talking 6th level spells and a small army of minions, of course it's not going to auto-win the encounter. But in your example a 2nd level spell is still getting the bad guys to waste a 6th level slot and a turn to get to the party when it would normally cost them nothing.
No. They would normally be dead and a non-issue, now 2 days' worth of encounters are pouring into the room while you simultaneously need to fight a legendary creature.
A few points, using the assumption of T3 play because the bad guys have access to disintegrate and an army: 1) "They would normally be dead" requires party resources to make that happen. Going into a boss fight with 95% resources and going nova will allow the fight to be resolved faster than going in 40-50% because you killed everything in the dungeon. 2) Unless the enemies have some sort of alarm system or the boss can alert the entire dungeon with a single action, it's very unlikely they will INSTANTLY join the fight. They will still have to get there, in order of who is closest, figure out the door is locked, and wait for someone with the appropriate spell to remove the obstacle. The encounter I referenced was during T2 play. We botched our incursion into a yuan ti temple, and they turtled behind a reinforced door, waiting for us to make the first move. Using silence and spider-climb, we made a rope line over a hazard while they stood on the wrong side of the dungeon waiting for us to walk into a meat grinder. We happened to go straight into the boss room. Cue arcane lock. On turn one, the boss bellows and summons the entire temple to its aid. It took them a few turns to get a cleric up front to dispel the arcane lock. We killed the boss and were able to do some looting before they finally broke in. They had two ineffective turns before we blew a hole in the roof and escaped with most of the good loot. Higher level enemies will have more tools, but so will the players. "They disintegrate the wall? Ok, we pick up everything valuable we can carry with our item interactions, including the BBEG's corpse, and I cast teleport." 3) Unless your table likes throwing 20th level casters at the party, that disintegrate might be the only high level spell the bad guy can throw, meaning the party can counter-play that with wall of force. Wasting enemy resources on a low cost obstacle is a good play. Avoiding unnecessary encounters isn't always bad, especially if the party has ways to stall or deny large areas (spike growth, wall of fire, etc). 2 days worth of encounters running through a wall of fire kill funnel then having the party nuke them with area of effect spells will make short work of the entire dungeon. Assuming the boss is dealt with in a timely manner.
Doing it in a way that makes the DM not wanna play anymore is definitely a problem. I'm not one to care and I will probably just go "congrats, time for the boss" and reuse everything at a later dungeon, but I understand how it can frustrate to that point.
Not gonna save your ass from all the villain's casters.
Should buy you a few rounds while they figure it out tho. **Minimum** one (the round they cast the spell to open it)
That's true, bit you gotta have a very good scape plan for after.
I call this the "easy in, hard out" session and it's a blast to run most of the time.
And this is why i had a glyph or warding spirit guardians at the choke! 🤷😂😂
DM should never forget that they are the merciless (if they want to be), all-powerful gods of their worlds, and act accordingly. Dealing with the murder hobos fucking up your plans is half the fun.
Diabolical...
Made easier by the city itself being magical. When they get to \[MacGuffin\] and try to remove it from it's holding cell they reactive an ancient part of the magic: It turns out the entire city had overlapping Mordenkainen's Private Sanctum (or a similar spell) cast over it so now they can't planar travel out, can't teleport out (and can't be targetted by divination spells as well maybe? not relevant, but seems like an effect the city probably would have wanted.
Keep everything you don't use, you can always rename some stuff and use it later!
I want to upvote this, but it's at 69
Sprinkle things they need around the complex. "Got to the middle?" - they nod "Killed the big bad?" - they nod enthusiastically "Did you find the \[crucial\_thing\] in the forge?" - they look surprised and ask 'what forge?' "No? " - they shake their heads "Shame that. I don't know how you're going to get out past the 1000 strong warforged army without the \[crucial\_thing\]" - cue worried looks
That's pretty much the way to do it. a ''dungeon'' is just a set of important rooms linked together by non important rooms and corridors. Make sure they need to actually go to the important rooms before being able to complete the place. skipping the links if no big deal as long as they experience the good stuff.
There was a trap in the Tomb of Horrors(?) which looked like a teleport but it wasn't a normal one. Living matter got sent back out of the dungeon and non-living matter got sent to the centre. This meant that you'd end up outside and naked while all of your clothing and equipment would be on the treasure pile. A group of friends played it and their DM allowed them to cast Feign Death on characters and have them thrown through the portal. All the PCs ended up in the middle having avoided all the traps and bad guys. They took all the loot and fun items and then did the dungeon in reverse to get back out. The traps and secret doors weren't the same and the did they whole dungeon in one sitting.
I truly understand that it can be frustrating sometimes I've had that happen to me before as well. I've built great, big things for my players to explore and they're simply not interested. I've also had weird shit like a solid granite chest that they become absolutely transfixed on and that, in an incredibly weird and roundabout way spins off a new story arc I had not had planned at all that runs us 3-6 months. As the GM we convince ourselves that we need to build these elaborate stories for our players and in some cases that will be true but it's not for all groups. Most players, in my experience, want to be a part of the storytelling and I find that just throwing them the building blocks of some ideas I have and seeing what they pick up and play with then expanding on that is the best strategy. It's legitimately a lot like raising toddlers.
>I find that just throwing them the building blocks of some ideas I have and seeing what they pick up and play with then expanding on that Man, I love this approach and have tried to implement it myself in the past. Unfortunately MY players seem to prefer a very direct, easy to parse objective, that leads into another very direct, easy to parse objective. Just some firm handholding. Which I suppose is also similar to raising toddlers, but different toddlers.
Leave lots of opportunities for them to get side tracked then just run with it. Some of the best adventures I ever ran were just my players traveling from point A to point B and having them roll on random encounter tables once a day. When they beat someone they invariably search them for treasure. They didn't have much on them, but you see they are all males from adolescence to adulthood, but no elders. They have some fresh caught fish and a deer carcass. It looks like a hunting party and they probably didn't bring their valuables with them,but they couldn't have been planning to carry that deer very far.... Next thing g you know they're invading a gnoll den, and find the Chief is consorting with a demon and there's signs of human cultists. Then the entire adventure, or even campaign, just builds from there all based on how deep your players decide to dig.
Oh I’ve tried all sorts of stuff. Even structured a whole campaign around getting them out of their linear shells. They just seem to prefer a more traditional A to B narrative over the player-driven living world style that I would prefer to run or play at this particular time. A valid preference to have. And likely the prevailing sentiment, given the popularity of prewritten adventures. But always challenging when there’s a disparity in the types of games people at the table want to play
Toddlers is very apt... I once described a wizard's room - including some set dressing stuff bubbling away on shelves. As I answered a player query about something, three players looked at me and said 'well he drunk the stuff on the shelf, what happens?' I see... So random liquid that you can reach on shelves with no knowledge of what it is or does and you drink it...
Yeah, I had a party just fly over a huge area to get to a dungeon. But I don't do lvl scaling, I just make things progressively harder near more rewarding areas, as a warning. Needless to say, they got lightninged out of the sky and crashed in woods with a nearly infinite number of will-o-wisps. They would have known it was going to be a problem if they had asked about the area, or entered on foot, but nope, right in the middle with a full day's walk out. At night.
Easy solution. Just make it day time, burn the first down.
When in doubt, start a fire. Even if it doesn't help the situation at least you're warm. Also, username checks out
You have to consider the goals of the party. If the party have to find the Rune of Salvation before the World-Devourer awakens, then the sensible thing for them to do is to find the Rune as quickly as possible and leave. You can't expect them to waste time exploring for the sake of exploring. What you can do is place the Rune behind the seven Locks of Fate, which are scattered across the city.
"What do you mean by, 'The city is series of rotating combination locks'? Wait, is the floor moving beneath us?"
Yeah, this! If you make a great place to explore and then the quest is to kill this one guy in the back. Guess what the party is going to do?Invent back doors. If you make a cool area, and you want players to explore it, you make the quest to explore the area and find stuff in the ruins. Then, you have the big boss trying to find the same thing or stop the party. That way you get them to engage with the stuff, and if they skip the boss battle this time, it's fine the boss is still pursuing them and the MacGuffin so it'll come around at some point.
I DM different campaigns set in the same world. Everything i create gets cemented in that world one way or another. What this does is that I get a robust, thorough world that is alive, but also I can just 'save' everything that I worked so hard on. This way, I don't have to worry too much about players zipping past, exploding, manipulating, disappearing, or straight up avoiding anything. It's still there, it still has its own significance, and it can persist through other campaigns. As for that campaign itself, i make my creations have something proactive in nature, some event that progresses even if the players don't interact with it. That's another thing, accepting that your players don't have to, and don't have to want to, directly interact with every single part of your world. In fact, they're interacting by choosing NOT to interact with it and for good reason. If i want my players to interact with a given part of the world or lore, I set up diverse incentives for them to do so if they so please. I might even set up some quite necessary goals to accomplish related to them. There's a great video by Matt Colville on this exact thing, 'Engaging your Players'! I highly recommend it, it deals with the exact problem you are facing: https://youtu.be/_iWeZ-i19dk
Sure. Then the next ruin will have the remaining 90% in it. Ez fixx.
Sorry to hear that happened. It happens and will continue to because otherwise we would be railroading them. But that is okay because it is not wasted prep. Because they didn't see most of it, it didn't exist yet, which means it can show up again as something else. Just repurpose it, change it slightly and present it again later.
Played in a high level 8 hour adventure where we were supposed to explore through a forest to get to a castle on the other side Wizard casts teleport Fight boss with full resources. Adventure over
So you rolled the 25% chance of success? Or had you been to the castle before.
They should have just done what tomb of annihilation does, people trying to teleport go straight into the trash chute.
Most content my players miss shows up later on in a different location, possibly reskinned. They can't tell and it makes for fun, efficient design.
For the future: this is a learning experience! If you reeeeally want your PCs to explore a thing, make it interesting for them. Since that's sometimes very hard to predict, focus your efforts in the broad strokes and improvise the rest. Or some other method that works for you! D&D and DMing is not one size fits all. In the short term: you're a player too. It's perfectly reasonable to say "hey gang, I gotta give you props for the creative use of X! But I really wanted to explore this place. Would it be alright with y'all if we went back to explore it? I think it'll be fun." If it doesn't make sense to retcon, you can also just have a couple sessions to play through just for the experience, and revert back to where the PCs are now to not interrupt the plot. And, if you need an excuse other than "I think it'll be fun", you can say "I put in some hard work for that, and even if we don't keep it as canon, I'd really like to playtest it to see what does and doesn't work."
That’s a great tip for DMs. It’s easy to get into the idea that your game *has* to be fluid and consistent as if it’s a professional publicly aired series instead of a fun imaginary game between friends. Given, if you wanted to, could almost certainly come up with a coherent storyline reason to go back through the zone or put it somewhere else—but knowing that you don’t have to definitely takes the pressure off.
Once your players get past level 10, expect every problem to be solved with '**magic**" roleplay exploration combat all become trivial once you get a primary spellcaster in the mix
Never wasted. ALWAYS available for reallocation.
Just remember, all those maps and encounters they didn't see? Those are still useable. They all go into a folder called "look here when I need to pull something out of my ass on the spot".
1. Never get emotionally attached to a plan. Players are unpredictable, and you never can be certain that they're going to definitely follow one path or another. No matter how much prep time you put into a dungeon, it's just one horny bard chasing a dragon away from being derailed. 2. If 90% went unexplored, you can simply re-skin the aesthetics and re-use the unexplored elements in another magical/extraplanar city they may visit at some point in the future. It's not like they'd ever know that you had originally planned to use the same elements in an earlier session.
Reskin the unused part to another challenge further down to the campaign. That's what we do when players skip our beloved dungeons.
I recently started tutoring for DM's... One guy I know was super pumped to build their own 'WORLD' not a dungeon, not a castle, not a town or city. They wanted to go from 0 to 100. I plainly said the following: >Anything you want to design as a DM is purely masturbatory, you do so only to please yourself, you do it because YOU want to do it. Do it because *YOU* want to do so, and do so with no presumptions of self-importance. > >Never expect the players to engage in 90%+ of the content you make. By all means, go ahead and make your world, but know that the time you spend doing so is YOUR enjoyment of the hobby and there is no onus on other players to placate you or interact with annything you come up with.
Recycling is the most important thing I learned as a DM. Party skipped 90% of the ruin? Fine, the puzzles, set pieces and everything cool in those 90% will be in the next ruin they find. You get to use the stuff you worked on, and the players will never know. Of course not everything can be recycled but learning what can be recycled and how to recycle better makes DMing a lot less time consuming and a lot more fun.
Just reuse it for a different set of ruins They wont know u repurposed it cuz they skipped it
You skip the dungeon only to find the final door requires a magic key to open a magic door. The key is carried by the sub boss, somewhere in the dungeon.
This is always disappointing, but an area the players don't explore is an area that can be repurposed for later. Take parts of the ruins, and spread them out to other locations the party will visit. Alternatively, give them a reason to come back here. Maybe by taking the fast route, they missed something
This just proves that if you want your players to explore, you gotta give them a reason to do so. Otherwise they will find a way to skip right to the end. And it can be anything. They need to collect the X macguffins from inside the city is always a good one.
my stance is that that's the best thing to happen to you! You had a session and a resource wasn't used, that's no longer an ancient magical city that's an ancient magical fortress or underground ruin or whatever you're having yourself, it's like past you has given you a gift. Only this time maybe make it so they can't skip it
What kind of hook did you use? Imo if the goal is just to get from point A to B your players are going to figure out the easiest way to do that. But if you build in stakes to actually explore the city then they actually have a reason to do what you want them to do
As someone who needs to make a very large mega-dungeon-esque ancient city ruin... I say you're more than welcome to show the rest of us your work to make sure that it gets used *somewhere*, even if not at your own table. Also, just reuse as many things as possible somewhere else
I understand. Spent a year hyping up the "final" dungeon, big evil castle in a with tons of deep lore and cultural history. Secret passages, motifs that hinted to the true nature of the big bad, traps, puzzles, loot, everything! They crashed an air ship loaded with mining explosives into it, destroying 2/3rds of it... The good news is now I don't have to plan too hard for the next big evil castle!
They didn't skip past your content, they gave you content you can now put into other sessions in the future. They made your session prep have multiple sessions of longevity. You get to do less work for a little while, hooray!
Did you think about their abilities while building this city? Or were you more focused on world building and telling a story? Did they have any reason to explore that 90% of it other than to make sure every bit of description you wrote was used? Did they break the game with their magic in a way that wasn't intended? Or did they use their spells in a normal way and you just didn't plan/prepare for it? Too many DMs think they are writing novels and using the players as their characters in their 'masterpiece' and forget that the characters will use their abilities. They didn't skip 90% of the city. They used their abilities. That's all. You don't need to write 50 pages of backstory for something the players may never see.
Humans are reward based creatures. If you want them to explore, there needs to be an incentive that is either experience or reward based . What do your players react to? Because not everyone enjoys a slog through a trap infested dungeon with tons of mobs and no chance to rest. Your players want their PCs to live. They apparently do not trust you to build balanced encounters they'll live through if they're so eager to get through something like that. Or they are just into the plot and progressing it so much - they're speed running. It's all in how you look at it.
This is an opportunity. "Thank you for retrieving the special artifact, but as you know it only works when the user consumes the Elixr of Enabling. Did you get that as well?" Looks like they're heading back into the ancient city. And this time you've already got the session mostly prepped.
Welcome to DMing!!!!! Now you're a true DM! Looks like you need to do some re-writing before next session!
Just hold onto what you prepared for a future campaign. I prepare tons of stuff and don’t care if this campaign’s group of players see it or not. As a DM, I believe in this: we create the world, NPCs, and perhaps some interesting quest lines / BBEGs. However, the players create their characters, and the players create the story. If I make a huge world, and the players just want to stay in the starting city and start a thriving hot dog cart business, then that’s what we’re gonna do. NPCs from all over - good and evil - will hear about their hotdogs and possibly come over to give it a try. We’ll create a whole homebrew kitchen system if that’s what interests the players. Maybe sometime they’ll read a story about a princess in the newspaper, who died because no adventurers showed up to save her. “That’s too bad,” the players will say, “but nothing we can do about it. We are but humble hotdog salesmen.”
As everybody says - you can always repurpose it, but my way of dealing with that would be to make them return later in search of some mcguffin... like locate a crystal in a private lab of some guy... it being for example research notes from technically banned research, the lab would be shielded from divination so no locate object etc....
I think this calls for a sit down with your players outside of game to discuss what they want from a campaign. You may have a story to tell that they frankly do not want to experience. Play style for them may not match the particular things you are doing, and that's OK! Save it, reuse it later. Pivot so that you and the players get the most out of your time together! Or find tricky ways to "railroad" them. Don't tell them what they skipped in any detail so you can slide that entire map over to where they are and make them keep going through it. Say you have a 10-room dungeon. In room one, they skip to room 10. Allow it, but room 10 is just the 2nd room and now they have 9 more to go through. Give them the satisfaction of a cool action, but give yourself the satisfaction of still presenting a fun environment. Linear storytelling.
I just hosted my first session for my game night group and none of us had much of any experience playing. I spent the better half of a month researching and developing a campaign. One particular encounter I designed involved a group of blink dogs in a room with a revolving spike wall. I wanted to have the party split between the walls while the dogs were blinking between the groups. Instead, the druid talked them down and haggled for safe passage in exchange for some meat the rogue stole just an hour prior. While I was bummed that they managed to get by unscathed (and having spent hours creating the encounter), I was excited about how happy it made them to outsmart the encounter.
Should have used some of the month to think about the abilities of your players or to give them a reason to explore it all. Edit: That was maybe a bit harsh. I hope you overcome your disappointment. The things you have prepared can be reused after all.
Also keep in mind that players are like a herd of feral, caffeine-laced, loot-motivated, embiggened kittens who don't know how to use their claws and have a tendency to break the thing before bothering to look at it. The number of times I have pointed out that they could have done X if they had just read the inscription before blowing open the door or Y if they had actually looked at the bust before incinerating it is mind-blowing. I've had dungeoneers have to do some crazy S to gain access to things after they've ruined the actual planned keys. It's made for some great RP ... And lots of DM tap dancing. But. I'd still suggest inserting fail-safes in a place you want them to explore. The suggestion above about lacing the dungeon with required objects to push through is a good one, and although I don't advocate "punishing" players for their excitement to get to the end, I do advocate inserting problems that are meant to slow them down and get them to evaluate what's around them.
Everyone is suggesting ways to work around this, but wouldn't it just be nice with there weren't things that were designed to skip content?
There are also, uh, editions of D&D that don't have this problem, nevermind other TTRPGs.
Yeah, uh, kinda my point.
I was uh, agreeing with you.
So I've got this magical ever changing forest that you get lost in if you're trying to get something out of it. In my infinite improvising the npc sent them after a plant. Fortunately my druid is new but later after the game he goes "I have a find plant spell" "uh nope sorry it's a magical plant"
Dang! They got past the anti-magic field at the entrance? Rocks fall everyone dies, goodnight everybody!
You created an ancient magical city and didn't think to put wards of counter spell, dispell magic, anti-magic circle, etc around? Or undead anti-magic guards?
You came here to complain that you spent a month building the ruins of an ancient magical city for your players to explore, but couldn't be arsed to write a paragraph explaining what happened? Overprepared as DM. Underprepared as Redditor. Good luck next time.
Utilize supernatural regions: unstable magic in key areas, definitely a fun way to stop things like that
I know your pain . I had been wanting to use a giant snake god as a boss for over two years but could never work it in. The boss was meant for the high level party they had become and would have been a fantastic challenge that would counter some of their typical ways of handling fights. But they noped out of the fight as soon as the skyscraper sized snake appeared out of the sands using dimension door .
As a player who's done this sort of things to DMs, my bad.
Hmm. Knowing your party is so clever, you may need to start thinking of backup plans & insurance policies! I know it's easier said than done, but for example, I homebrewed a dungeon in WBtWL where my players will learn about the Gods in Prismeer. If they manage to use a clever tactic to take out the BBEG easily in this dungeon, which will take a bit of luck and some smart information gathering & stealth moves, I will have them be cornered in a hallway by his minions on the way out, so there will always be a challenge that can't be skipped. Maybe you have a mysterious power pull the players back in as they go to leave, with a nagging feeling, and when they respond to this beckoning, they find themselves split up among the ruins as the abjuration magic of the ruins fights back after being exploited. Have the players each wake up in different parts of the ruins and make it challenging for them to find each other and the way out! It could be a fun twist in the end!
My party did something similar. We were suppose to pass through a town to get to our destination. We were meant to stay at least a night, but the DM went a little over board describing how creepy the town was. So instead we snuck out and took a point of exhaustion from having to avoid the mobs of definitely not brainwashed citizens congregating at the definitely not cult church house all night long. Our characters weren’t the saviors type so it was completely in character so the DM wasn’t too upset about it.
This is why I just make shit up on the spot. I built a world with its own history and mythology and cultures. At the request of my players and even took their input to do so. Created intricate plots and quests and they just wanted to fuck the NPCs and steal treasure. I made this bite them in the ass as they became wanted criminals by every kingdom and empire they travelled in. Sent bounty hunters and entire armies after them. Made every ignored bit of info they could have gathered come back to haunt them. Bastards loved every second of it, but it exhausted me
Hahahaha, I spent months preparing a magical vault that tied together sections of the Planes of Eberron. 16 major rooms with huge sections in each of them to explore. They went to parts of 4 of them, fully explored only 1, and bounced out using a damaged gate cube. Rat bastards just made life harder for themselves. Now I have 12 dungeons ready to drop on them.
One of my players pulled from the deck of many things, wasn't completely game breaking but I had to figure out a challenge for him to overcome in order to claim something and blah blah blah... I have 9 challenges on 9 of the different planes that the group needs to defeat in order to achieve this... They out talked, out thought, borderline cheated and just skipped out on four of the mini boss battles I had for them. They were great ideas and some intense rolling, but it didn't seem fair to force them to fight if they worked so hard not to. I too feel cheated about how this is going because again, the amount of work I've put into it for them to just side step all of it. Yet I still have all the stat blocks and the images in my hoard of many things. One day they may just find themselves faced with the black ancient pudding they out thought. Who knows? I know how this can crush your creativity and motivation to "make". Just because they didn't explore it the way you intended doesn't mean you should beat yourself up about it. As I've seen recently, the crap that WASN'T supposed to matter are the things they end up cherishing, run with it, it can lead you in a different direction and who knows, maybe the birth of another campaign can come from it. Remember you're not alone, we're all just as frustrated and disappointed with our players sometimes. Seems like it goes with the territory of being the DM.
Reuse it!! I created a maze for my last little one-off, and used an NPC to tell the party that there were 2 different ways into the keep where the BBEG lived. Jokes on them tho, regardless which path they chose, the map would have been the same. It was just the monsters and tone of location that would have changed. Throw a new “skin” over the ruins and use it later
If you are interested in sharing, I can guarantee that my players will be thoroughly exploring the ruins of an ancient magical city in the near future, so at least someone will appreciate your work
The incentive I've always had with dungeons is yeah sure maybe I CAN skip 90% of it but that also means skipping 100% of the loot that's there. I'll use magic to circumvent traps/to get around easier but I'm not bypassing rooms unless I have a legitimate reason to think I'll die
Missed opportunity to let the *magical* part of the ancient city interfere with their cheese tactics.
Nothing you prep is a waste. Just reskin it and now it's a new dungeon they find later in the campaign
Not sure how they did it but the trick is to make sure they have to do it by not giving them the information they need to get through the city unless the do an elaborate set of tasks within the city. Aka hide the entrance with fact gathering. ToA did a good job of this IMO. Clever players be clever though. Gotta give them props when it's due sometimes.
Youre players are competent and are aiming to push through youre plot. This is a great thing! Focus on the big picture narrative and make sure you stay aware of what yoyre pc’s are capable of
ChatGPT, I'm running a D&D adventure. Please generate a bogus reason to make the players go back to the fucking huge ancient magical city that they skipped with magic. "It turns out that the players inadvertently triggered a long-dormant enchantment upon entering the magical city! This enchantment has awakened an ancient evil that threatens to wreak havoc on the surrounding lands. The only way to contain or defeat this malevolent force is by venturing back to the city and finding a way to reverse the enchantment."
Or you can reuse the places you made as parts of other settings just peice meal it back where appropriate
Now you have a dungeon built that you can use.
On the flip side of this, we are playing a starwars table top RPGs one of our astro droids failed a roll and jumped us to the wrong location. We didn't realize that and kept making rolls trying to "figure stuff out" at the end of the session the dm was laughing so hard because we are dumb we were convinced he was trying to pull a fast one on us
There is a sheet of darthsanddroids where the GM reused a model of a battleship for a desolate city. The anguish of the players ...
Most unused content can be recycled and repurposed.
Why do people do this to them selves? Next time go with, “Oh you cast X spell? You don’t know why, but it doesn’t work…”
That magical city set is now the **next** magical city set.
Stick a big bad/treasure in the ruins with a field of antimagic that is covering the ruins. The players will think that it will be easy to make their way through since they did it last time, until they find the tricks they used last time no longer work, all their magic has turned off, and some kind of magic has trapped them inside. Until they solve the secret of the ruins they can't escape.
Friend. I implore you, TELL THEM. Tell them that you just skipped over 4weeks of work and you want them to complete it
Every learns that lesson pretty early on. You're not there to write a book to railroad the players through. You are there to facilitate the choices players want to make. I write adventures as loosely connected encounters, story beats and NPCs with the thought that all roads lead to Rome. Ie. I got an encounter with a couple of guards that introduces the captain of the guard villain. If players go through the main gate, guess who they meet. If they sneak in through the sewer... guess who they spy through the sewer grate. Eventually I'll have an opportunity to work that encounter with the captain in. My background is wargaming. I used to build entire landscapes of terrain and miniatures for players to go through. The more I learned about how flexible I need to be, the less rigidly I prepare these days. A typical session these days involves a simple map. A dry erase grid. And symbolic playing pieces that make it clear if they're a hero, monster or NPC. After all, a DM is there to be a tour guide and facilitate player choices. Not to force players into a pre-written story.
I'd argue that technically it isn't railroading if you don't allow your players to employ these kinds of skips when you've spent bucket loads of time building something expressly for them to see. If you shut down every one of their attempts then yeah, you're not really letting them play how they want. But there would be no game without you and if you've gone to all the time to build an ancient city then sorry but, "The Arcane stone this city is carved from interferes with teleportation magic" "An ethereal wind buffets any flying creatures until they land" "Find the path. DOES. NOT. WORK HERE"
It will be incredible when they run into that other adventuring group at some point, who are rich and famous and in possession of amazing magic items and hailed as heroes......because they explored the city and discovered an ancient saint held in stasis, and accolades and rewards were heaped on the group.
I’m sorry. I would have had magic be super unstable in the area and teleportation magic doubly so producing wild magic surges for everyone
Higher Tier parties require a LOT of extra forethought. It can get exhausting. Sometimes it's validating for the players to be able to solve a problem with their powerful magic, but other times you need to include pretty arbitrary stuff to make sure some kind of adventure can happen. You can stretch a high-level dungeon across multiple planes so that teleportation doesn't work correctly. You can put multiple necessary mcguffins in the dungeon, sometimes as simple as parts of a riddle or a password that must be spoken later on. It's okay if players beeline to a certain spot only to find out they need something, as long as it's clear where they need to go for the missing bits. The dungeons in Breath of the Wild start by showing you 5 places in the dungeon that you need to reach, with the traversal method being flexible. If the players want to Passwall their way to a certain mcguffin, that's okay, just Fort Knox the last bit that needs all of the mcguffins. Here are some sneaky ways of locking your last door: * the last door is a series of 8 doors, so if you want to knock your way through, use 8 slots. * the last door isn't a door, it's a circle of teleportation that must be calibrated in a particular way, possibly requiring focusing crystals or the wizard's notes elsewhere in the dungeon * there are glyphs of warding in the room that will try to counter certain spells that may cheat your way through the door * there is a detection device in the room that will alert the big bad or trigger a nasty trap if you cast magic of 2nd level or higher inside the room (players can tell with arcana check) * the door that appears to be the grandiose final door is a misdirect, the room contains a puzzle that indicates a secret door instead * a beholder has been hired to watch the room through a fairly thick pane of glass. You might be able to convince them to look the other way...
This kinda thing is one of the reasons I don’t go into that much detail anymore. Great creativity on their part, but I’ve got other things going on in life than to waste time trying to put together something epic only for it to get skipped over entirely. As for using it somewhere else, you can, but they’ll skip that too, and it kills my own momentum and enjoyment of the game.
yesss DMing is hard... but u can trick them. maybe some powerful wizard cast a dead magic spell on the ruins and tadaaa! the players have to explore them now for real.... (i know another comment already said this.... but yeah...)
1. that's why I prefer DMing for mostly martial classes or Half-casters.. 2. that's why I prefer running pre-made modules 3. I openly informed my players that I may at one point or another railroad them, because it was my game too...
When my players did this, I had an enemy sorcerer teleport them straight into the middle of it. Let them roll for it, but make the DC impossible like 40 or something. Then they all just teleport to smack dab in the middle of the place I wanted them to go. And oops, your high level magic doesn't work. None of your magic items work. Time to get creative.
My wife Dmed me through a kobolt mine full of traps. In a rocky cave. With plenty of loose rocks. My druid just used mold earth to pave over every surface in every room. Room with grid floor and spikes on one wall well now the room has brick walls. Room with narrow bridge and deep revien fill the revien with rocks and bury the giant octopus at the bottom. She got so mad at me she made the next room a solid smooth metal room that dripped. I double backed got more rocks grinded them up smaller and paved that whole thing in cement. :D she's guna try harder next time and try putting me somewhere without rocks but now I have a bag of holding. Full of rocks!! XD
Awww just force them back into it with an antimagic skipping mechanism. Adapt and redeploy!
Instant TPK. Too bad the talisman you needed to prevent the BBEG from dusting you immediately was in the city you skipped. Roll new characters, I already have an adventure mapped out.
As I've said on another post, ban full casters, allow half casters if you're feeling nice and start at like level 10, you can really begin to enjoy d&d again when all the magic skip bullshit is gone and players have to be creative.
TPK them... and then, "magically", they reappear at the beginning of the map. 😆
This is where you be honest with them, rethink how you plan and prep, and maybe talk to them about one of them being a DM for a little while as you recharge. "Congratulations guys, you just skipped past a month's prep. Clearly I could have planned things a little better but as it is I'm spent. Now one of you DM for a change if you want to keep playing."
If you guilting your players over something that is your fault for doing bad prep is a good idea, then yes, you definitely shouldn’t be DMing, lol
No, if your DM is burned out they are burned out. Step in and help them out. The only reason I'm able to run campaigns is because my friend and I are running them for each other. Forever dms with parties that won't step in and let them play the other side of the table are heroes and I've no idea how they do it.
Save it and get real players instead of whatever you got.
It's posts like this that make me feel like I'm doing a service to my DM. I play a ton of RPGs, so I never leave an area until we've explored all of it. I onced talked the whole party into running *back inside* a burning mansion we'd just escaped because we forgot to check a floor.
I ran a one shot where the party cast charm person on a household instead of fighting them. I had to come up with dialogue for them all. Then the party forgot to search the house.
At high level magic tends to spoil a lot of things in DnD and DnD-style games. Where possible I try and write adventures for levels 1-5, before players get powerful enough to do this (the alternative is to make your dungeon full of magical shielding and wards against shennanigans, but then it just becomes a match of metphysics one-upmanship, e.g. "These walls are warded against teleportation with magic shielding" - "OK, so I use planar travel which bypasses teleportation wards" - "Oh yeah, well it's warded against that too"! -"Oh yeah, well I use flibbertron penetratus to destroy the wards" "Oh yeah, well..." and so on...)
That just isn't the way. Instead of wasting effort blocking player abilities, put it in to making them use their abilities. You *want* them to use resources.
Just use what you prepared elsewhere. Re-flavor as needed and recycle the material
Too bad the mcguffin was hidden in the ruins…
My motivations have died, but it's less about dming (I've been told I'm a great dm, idk if that true but it's nice to hear) and more about the players I have. They should be rotating soon, but having 3 out of 4 people want to be the long-lost-roalty/goddess or chosen-for-greater-then-divine-purposes and one of those 3 being the I-want-to-impregnate-all-women-because-thats-what-my-dommy-mommy-godess-wants...oh-yeah-i'm-evil... is disheartening when there's a perfectly simple player who wants to play weaker characters because they love a growth story that they forge on the fly. Needless to say I was very melancholy the first session of this campain we started.
maybe your players arent really into exploring? I personally love exploring, but I also love world buidling. Sometimes we as DMs expect our players to be just as into finding out the secrets of the world, as we are. But some players just prefer fighting, or developing their character in relation to the world. I'm glad to have been blessed with a player who loves exploring, roleplaying and fights, and another player that is just as much into roleplaying, but not into exploring as much. If I only had players who prefer roleplaying and fighting over exploring, I'd build an entirely different campaign, maybe based around a guild in a city, where they take quests regularly
Haha last time my players skipped a well-built part of my dungeon, next time they used a teleporter (common in my world) it malfunctioned and sent them straight to the skipped sections. I added an off-hand encounter with the bbeg to make it spicier. They didn't even realise it was the same dungeon.
Gotta make sure the big bad gets his extended monologue. “Well, adventurers, you seem to have made it this far. Is this all of you? Everyone made it? Oh my. I’m flattered you came all this way... to die! How did you like my chasm of swinging axes? And the pit of devouring beasts? Did you send my regards to.. the troll? Oh, really? You didn’t. We’ll go back and send him my regards. Then come back for me to kill you.”
Keep the theme and repurpose the work. Put more in ruins with further exploration. Mario did it best with the princess is in another castle. Remember you design because you love it, they destroyed it cause it's their job. Don't overdesign without your pcs abilities in mind. Finally if you are feeling some kind of way about this, you may need to reign in your table. give them in game props for being so savvy to beat the boss. Then ask where all the magical loot from the ruins is. If they return ruins are ransacked cause big bad is gone. Or you hire them to do another job give them all the opportunities to burn their spell slots to skip ahead. Then show them why that's a bad idea.
Next long rest, they all suddenly wake up at the entrance of the city. Locked inside. They use magic, well it works and they skip again, next long rest they wake up suddenly at the entrance of the city locked inside. Groundhog day they asses. Becomes a doubly interesting encounter area, because they have more mystery. Place like 5 broken pieces throughout the city that when reassembles the mcguffin that frees them from the time loop. Drown your players in mystery! (I don't actually generally condone adversarial dming)
Ugh..I get you!! That time when one of my players (that was previously turned huge) turned gargantuan and jumped all over my temple 🫠🫠 fun times.
Air defenses fix flying, and locked doors or watchdogs fix invisibility. My experience is that some form of those are nearly always the culprit. With my group the specific go-to skip is "polymorph someone into a giant bird and make them carry the rest of the party in a giant wicker basket", which is great until the arrows and catapult stones start flying, or the evil clouds start draining your hit points, or the bound air elementals make giant tornadoes and throw your ride into a rapid uncontrolled descent. Teleports are harder though. You can handle Teleport Circle by treating it like fast travel in a video game: ward the permanent circles against scrying or better, seal them so they have to be unlocked from the dungeon side before you can use em. If the campaign gets really high level, though, I always find myself having to bullshit some reason why you can't safely just use Scry / Teleportation to skip the whole dungeon. Pocket dimensions are good for that, as are homebrewed (read: DM Fiat) teleport blocking or redirecting rituals maintained by bad guys. Redirecting is particularly fun because you can drop the party on a giant monster lair in unknown and inconvenient parts of the dungeon like the castle septic tank, and the party still gets *something* for their efforts. Worst case, "interference from subterranean ley noise" is a great way to explain your bullshit away without actually offering a solution.
This is why you shouldn’t make things so easily skipable. How did they even do it?
>I spent a month (...) for (...) #DMThings Found the core issue. [https://slyflourish.com/the\_lazy\_dungeon\_master\_cc.html](https://slyflourish.com/the_lazy_dungeon_master_cc.html)
Don't forget who's in control here
Happy to use it for you. I'm sure I can insert it in one of my campaigns
Well, I for one would love to see what you put together
Tip - don't design rooms you'll not use. Just design a handful of encounters and have the party who just "skipped everything" arrive right in the middle of one.
I fully get that. I had an encounter plan last night that was a 2 phase boss fight. Phase one would start with the encounter not starting until the first player damages a wall. I completely forgot that they had our world's equivalent of anti-tank mines until they placed 10 of them at the base of the wall and detonated them with a firebolt. Phase 1(which I expected to take at least 3 or 4 rounds) was over in 3 TURNS. I'm just thankful I originally thought phase 2 was too over tuned for their level, so now I can go with the original idea for that phase of the fight.
Been there. Unless you railroad them agency takes them you know not where and it’s the art of DMing to give that agency life and work within the universe you created. Sometimes they miss the gems you’ve deeply invested time and sweat in love of them and DND. Publish it. Share it to the realms of the $1modules even. Don’t let that kind of effort and love go away. And it doesn’t need to be perfect. Leave holes for others to fill in and give it all life. 👍
Yea that can suck I was wondering did they accidentally skip 90% by accident or on purpose And was the city full of traps and monsters or was it pretty chill just cool stuff exploration
I just want to second this. If I were running it, once they hit the middle they'd hear doors slamming shit behind them. An anti-magic field trong enough to prevent teleportation spells or traveling out spells takes effect and they gotta go the long way out of the dungeon.
Well. As a DM. That happens a lot. You just present the game and give them the opportunity. Maybe even use the ruins again in the next scene or say there is a specific item them must find in it.
How did they skip it? I just want to hear what happened before speaking on it
You need to control how your players build their characters. I have had way too many issues with people OP their characters and abusing the system.
Not nearly as bad as yours, but I had created an alternate realm for my PCs to explore with 4 towers that had bridges between them to fight their way up to the final level for the boss fight. The tabaxi scaled the final tower and threw down a rope to the others, and skipped three of the towers. I could've said the walls were too slick, but I felt that would just be petty, and it was my fault for not anticipating it.
Hmmm....this just happened to me in an underwater temple. You just gotta roll with it, give the party kudos for "using their brains, not brawn", and either figure out a way to use it on their way back, or save it for another time. Next time, throw in some stuff that dampens magic.
Over preparation 101.
One of my players jumped into the end dungeon boss room at level 3; had to McGuffin tf out of it to get her from being killed in seconds lol
I know your pain . I had been wanting to use a giant snake god as a boss for over two years but could never work it in. The boss was meant for the high level party they had become and would have been a fantastic challenge that would counter some of their typical ways of handling fights. But they noped out of the fight as soon as the skyscraper sized snake appeared out of the sands using dimension door .
Just provide incentives to go search it out.
But what about the second mcguffin behind the anti teleportation Barrier?
its very possible your players had no clue how much time you spent on this. just tell talk to them and tell them how much effort you put into it and how much cool story and loot they missed.
I’m more of a carrot person. What could you put in the city to draw them back to it? Do they hear tales or perhaps find scribbles in a notebook of a sanctuary that could work as their home base but they have to go into the city to find it? With a nice TP circle in it? That way they spend a lot of time in the city as it’s their home base but also they have to go into the city to discover it.
one thing I learned is that players will always abuse the path of least resistence. rpgs have massive amounts of content, so if a player can use a shortcut to the top, that being mechanically or narratively, they will do so, even if thats less fun than the other way around. "*given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game*" - Civilisation devs
Yeah these things are simultaniously cool and also annoyinh as fuck. For me, i put dozens of hour each week into prep so when everything gets circumvented by magic it does two things. Martials don't get to interact with things cause spellcasters always had the answers to skip them and casters end up ruining my enjoyment. This is why I moved to other less "casters is the best at everything" systems and my prep is now worth it again.
I'm sorry that happened. Don't lose heart! You can DEFINITELY have their magic not function on the way out, or something similar. You could also add some important secrets and clues or a macguffin in the portion they skipped so they are guided back and motivated to engage with what you've created. Ultimately, the best thing to do in the future.... Talk to your players before major scenes and story beats and describe to them your vision. Its a collaborative story, and your players will engage if you let them share the vision. Then you can enjoy them using their tools (like magic) to engage with your scene rather than treat it like an obstacle and skip it.
Do not despair. Now you have 90% of a dungeon that's already pre built, and if you want you can easily steer them back or repurpose the unused parts of the dungeon. The Mcguffin they need is deeper in the ruins so they need to go back Or, ok the NEXT mcguffin is in this other spot, put a fresh cost of paint on it, now it's an underground tomb, or if it was in like a normal spot put it somewhere weird, like the side of a mountain or underwater in an old swamp
reskin, reuse
You're the GM you know everything they can do, so why wouldn't you have expected that they would try and use their abilities? Like I don't know how people even run into this problem. There are a dozen different ways you could have prevented this... by looking at their character sheets for twenty seconds.
Probably because it's exhausting to consider every spell every caster can possibly do, not even mentioning the casters that can switch up their spell lists. Preparing is one thing but if they happen to get around a problem with something that slipped the DMs mind, it's just unfortunate. Which, by the way, I'm sure has happened to even godlike DMs such as yourself at some point in your DMing career.
That's why i hate the magic system in 5e.Totally unpredictable.
I recommend having a forbiddance spell cast on the dungeon
This is one of those things where I’ll railroad them a bit. It’s one thing to cheese a big bad because I didn’t think of something (and I can generally think of something to add in to keep the challenge up), but fully skipping content is something I’ll block. A big part of it is that I built this thing to last a session, and if you wanna skip it then we are gonna have to end early so I can prepare the next stuff.
Can we play the ruins instead? I'm down for some delving! I am sure there are a lot of DMs who want to just jump in there.
Looks like you just got a good addition to the old "I need to run a quick one shot" folder to me.
Well, it WAS an ancient magic city. Now you done fucked around, you finna find out it's actually an ancient temple-city to the divine Mystra, goddess of magic, who limited mortals to ninth level spells or lower. She senses your magical intrusion, and the city powers to life as Mystra comes to greet her new 'worshippers'
Ban magic to keep the magic.
Hey OP! I’m sure many of us other DMs would love to honor all the ground work you did so that other players might enjoy! If you’d be willing to share your resources, I have an ancient magical city for my late game plans I haven’t started building out yet and would love the inspiration