PLAYERS & CHARACTERS
I'll reiterate my request for you all to please invite new players to join the game any time. This style of play will not be for everyone, but anyone can try it out and our club-style format means players attending sporadically, or even only once, will not be disruptive to the on-going game.
SCHEDULE
We're one week away from our next game. Please RSVP at your earliest convenience.
TIPS & TRICKS
The Calculus of the Dungeon
The Dungeon Masters Guide is quite prescriptive about the contents of dungeons. The individual referee can of course deviate from those instructions however desired, but in our game I stay close to the guidelines in order to provide predictability and consistency. One of the features of that predictability is that it's easy to estimate how much wealth and experience a character can hope to gain when delving the dungeon. Here's the break down according to the guidelines:
- 60% of the rooms in a dungeon will be empty of monsters, treasures, and traps
- 15% of the rooms will contain monsters guarding treasure worth an average of 600 gold per level
- 10% of the rooms will contain monsters without any treasure except their personal possessions
- 5% have unguarded treasure worth 272 gold per level on average
- 5% of the rooms have a trap, trick, or oddity
- 5% have stairs, a chute, a chimney, or a sloping passage
That creates a lot of empty ground to cover. Over a large sample set of rooms, the delvers should expect to find treasure worth about 104 gold per level per room. For a party containing 3 first level PCs, that means searching about 60 rooms before finding enough treasure for everyone to make second level.
I've adopted the ratios from the Basic rules in order to have a higher density:
- 28% of the rooms are completely empty
- 17% contain monsters with treasure
- 17% contain monsters without treasure
- 11% contain tricks or traps
- 9% contain stairs or a sloping passage
- 6% contain unguarded treasure
- 6% contain treasure guarded by tricks or traps
- 5% contain stairs/slope/etc. and treasure
- 2% contain an oddity and treasure
That brings the treasure density up to about 145 gold per room, and the ground needing to be covered in order to get that same party to second level down to about 41 rooms.
Delving deeper than the first level multiplies the size of the treasure, so that on the second level down guarded treasures average 1,200 gold and on the third level 1,800 gold. An unguarded treasure on the second level, at 544 gold on average, is almost as good as a guarded one on the first level. The threats do increase, too though.
The average hit dice of an op force in the first level of a dungeon is 6, but it could be as high as 15.75 (for something certainly hostile, and 18 if counting gnomes as a possible opposing force). At the second level down the average threat is 10 hit dice and the high as 26.25, while at the third level, 15.5 is average and 40 the max. The deeper level monsters tend to have more special attacks and defenses as well, so the hit dice alone isn't a perfect metric.
There might be any number of conclusions to draw from these statistics, however the one that jumps out to me is that guarded treasure will average a little over 100 gold per hit die of monster guarding it at any of the first three levels of the dungeon.