Hey folks, I'm returning to paying attention to gaming after a hiatus for much of this year (I've been off working on a master's degree). I'm posting here (naturally) because I'm looking at revving back up with an ACKS game.
I came across something curious in the ACKS core book when looking for guidance around monsters and dungeon level. On Page 149, there's a curious blurb about what hit dice of monsters are typically found on which dungeon levels
Level 1 - 1 HD monsters
Level 2 - 2-3 HD monsters
Level 3 - 4-5 HD monsters
Level 4 - 6-7 HD monsters
Level 5 - 8-9 HD monsters
Level 6 - 10+ HD monsters
I can read this one of two ways - that dungeon level corresponds to character level, and so a party of 5th level characters should spend much of their time fighting encounters populated with 8-9 HD monsters.
Alternatively, monster HD corresponds to player level, and so 4th-5th level players should be adventuring on the 3rd dungeon level and facing off against 4-5 HD monsters.
Anyway, I didn't see this point raised in the forums anywhere, so figured I'd ask. I'm assuming the first assumption is correct, and ACKs parties are slightly powered-up vs their retro-clone brethren, and so the tougher monsters-per-dungeon-level are warranted. The implication there is that deeper dungeons could use more higher level monsters to throw at a party - the core book has a paucity of monsters above level 10.
Nice to see Lairs & Encounters out there, I picked a good time to check back in!
Incidentally, here are monsters pivoted by HD to show a count:
I may be wrong (I am not an Autarch), but I read it as simply a guide to what you can find where.
Players should be adventuring wherever they want to be. By allowing them to choose their own challenge via predictable monster difficulty locations, they can just end up with what’s right for the party.
I don’t think there’s a unified monster HD:character level or dungeon level:character level converstion, not like the encounter guidelines of D&D 3rd and later. (If there were, it’d probably be based off monster XP value and not HD, since a 4*** HD monster is pretty different in power level from a straight 4 HD monster.)
[quote="jedavis"]
There is a table on page 243 which provides a more explicit relation between dungeon level and party level.
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Thanks for pointing that out, I've looked at the wandering monster charts on that page a number of times and never noticed the table with party level to dungeon level.
So yeah, ACKS does recommend monster HD for an encounter should basically be the party level (and a 5th level party is not ready for a by-the-book 5th level dungeon). Compressing 10 levels worth of adventuring in a 6-level dungeon implies the levels would be broader horizontally, and large enough to support a party gaining multiple levels of experience before descending to the next level. I'm sure it's not meant to be prescriptive, but it is very curious! Normally we'd talk about dungeon levels like this... "I prepared a 10th level dungeon for my party of 10th level characters..."; not, "I prepared a 6th level dungeon since the party is 10th level and ready for those types of challenges..."
Am I to understand that you have a tabular collection of all the ACKs monsters? Because that is something I'm very interested in possessing myself, but am too lazy to collate on my own.
Am I to understand that you have a tabular collection of all the ACKs monsters? Because that is something I'm very interested in possessing myself, but am too lazy to collate on my own.
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Back in the early days, Tavis posted a compilation of all the monsters on a google drive - it's still out there. Enjoy!
Like Aryx was saying farther up the thread, tailoring encounters specific to your party is probably not a great way to do ACKs, and I say this as someone currently running a 13th age game where I specifically tailor every encounter to them because it makes sense in the system. Generally, the more likely each battle is to be a set-piece battle that will take a lot of effort to make interesting, the more likely you want to tailor your encounter.
By contrast, the generally accepted (but of course it's possible to deviate) "best practice" for dungeons in a game like ACKs is to give some signaling of the relative difficulty of the areas and make it possible to get to areas of different difficulties. In this way, the players tailor the experience to their own preference of difficulty. This does require some other conceits, like not making the fate of the world depend on the party storming a particular dungeon and getting to the end in order to kill the last boss, which sort of slowly pushes the personalities of PCs to opportunistic looters, but ACKs at least gives alternatives to that lifestyle after about 5 levels.
I'm definitely on board with the old school dungeon approach of presenting access to multiple dungeon levels, and letting the players choose their own degree of risk and reward. I'm working through the ACKS assumptions to get a good handle on pacing and by-the-book encounter and XP values so I know where I want to deviate. The Six-level dungeon model caught my eye because it either said curious things about the competency of the party, or the implied size of the dungeon levels.
For example, a party of 5 adventurers needs about 120,000 to advance from level 4 to level 6 (it's roughly 40k for a group to go from level 4 to 5, and another 80k to go to level 6, using the fighter's progression as a median for the whole party). If you assumed your 4th and 5th level party would spend most of their time on a level 3 ACKS dungeon, they'd need to clear about 30 lairs if I used Keown's table up above to identify monster XP and treasure XP. Monster lairs occur in 1/3 of the rooms in the dungeon, so our dungeon level 3 needs at least 90 rooms - much larger if we don't want the players to have to clear every monster lair exhaustively and explore every nook.
I'm not going to make levels that large, but I wanted to understand the baseline in the book before altering it for my game. I'll take more of a prescriptive, top down approach to treasure distribution to fit the pacing I want the game to have, and use hoards and hoard types to guide the distribution of the top-down values.
If you assumed your 4th and 5th level party would spend most of their time on a level 3 ACKS dungeon, they'd need to clear about 30 lairs
... so our dungeon level 3 needs at least 90 rooms - much larger if we don't want the players to have to clear every monster lair exhaustively and explore every nook
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Most ACKS (or other 'old school') campaigns I've seen generally have the players sending their 4th+ level characters wandering around the wilderness, chasing treasure maps, trading, etc etc. This is why ACKS suggests in the 'Secrets' chapter a lot of small dungeons rather than one big one (Barrowmaze or Dwimmermount super-megadungeon). This is where the concept of 'dynamic lairs' comes from, also in the 'Secrets' chapter and the topic of the 'Lairs and Encounters' kickstarter.
So I think your '30 lairs' is about right.... but not in a single dungeon.
In the wilderness, lairs vary in strength A LOT, and you are from your base, and so a successful group of PCs has to pick and choose their fights carefully. This is a whole side to the player skill set that is not really explored in PF, 3.5 or 4th, etc.
So in my case at least, I actually build multi-level dungeons which are homogeneously a single “dungeon level” by difficulty, because yeah, fitting all of that into a single horizontal level is impracticable.