Worldbuilding Day 12: The Speculative Element

Today's exercise is to think on what differences a particular speculative element of the store would have on the setting. This has been considered in great depth by many players. Why if clerics can make food are there still farmers? The question of why in a world with alchemy and healing magic should sickness and injury exist was recent discussed on Reddit. My answer is that there is a cost, either material component or faith, that makes it inefficient to just rely on magic. The real question that should concern me is: does a megadungeon make sense (or does it even have to)?

Ah, verisimilitude. Using monster relationships to improve megadungeon verisimilitude. Jaquaying the dungeon. Gygaxian naturalism vs the dungeon as mythic underworld. A lot has been written on trying to give megadungeons internal consistency, or conversely, no internal consistency in the case of the mythic underworld theory. I fall on the side of a megadungeon needing internal consistency. There should hopefully be no "gotcha" moments where the players die purely to blind chance. Every threat in the dungeon should be able to be predicted to a degree, as long as you have enough knowledge before hand. The acquisition of knowledge should be a key goal of the players.

I know it is not really a dungeon game, but I look at Portal for inspiration. You are given the rules on how the portal gun works and face a simple puzzle. From there you proceed to more and more complex iterations of effectively the same puzzle. Same goes to the megadungeon; introduce the logic for solving the problems they encounter and just make the problems more complex. This is not a perfect parallel since RPG's are more complex than Portal. The approach I will take is to either introduce information about a threat before the players encounter it or to introduce new threats in a way that is less likely to be lethal. A good example for the less lethal option would be discovering a trap that malfunctions. They now know what to look for for indications of that trap without causing them great harm. This hopefully has them avoid the "paranoia crawl" where players constantly try and roll for perception and constantly tap the floor with a 10-foot pole checking for spike pits.