[RPG] How to actually crawl through a dungeon in online play

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Yes, this is quite a silly question considering I've been gamemastering for almost five years now, but one thing that drove me away from (and the same thing that made me return to) D&D 4E was Dungeon Crawling.

We've been using Savage Worlds as our system for a while, but we finally decided to give 4E a second go since we really like the encounters.

Since my group is comprised by two local friends and two foreigners, we use Roll20.net to play our adventures. However I don't have any idea on how to run an actual dungeon crawl using a virtual tabletop.

What I've tried is saving the map image as a file and then using it on the virtual tabletop and using fog of war for vision, however this has two issues:

  1. Playing becomes very boring since it's a mess to constantly move the character minis on the map every time they wish to check something and I constantly have to fiddle with the Fog of War. Some rooms that only have loot feel like a hindrance instead of a reward as we have to laboriously move minis through them while I remove the fog.

  2. The whole map feels like just one big encounter map if we "walk" through it. Instead of specific areas being unique encounters (like "the Torture Chamber is plagued by ghosts" or "this Slime Pit is the home of a Solo Monster") my players start leading the monster into other parts of the map, sometimes making the long encounter way longer. The rooms for encounters lose their focus, and the preparation feels wasted since, well, I designed them for the encounter.

Since the encounters are what brought us back to D&D 4e and dungeoncrawls, these things are really undermining the enjoyment we were hoping for.

So, how do you actually navigate players through a dungeon in an online game?

Best Answer

Usually I either describe the dungeon verbally, only drawing out the rooms that the players interact with, or I draw the overview of the map on another sheet of paper. I think the problems you're having are a symptom of using an online table.

Here are some ideas.

  1. Do the dungeon verbally .. err... textually. Describe rooms to the players. Load them up as needed.
  2. Don't put treasure and monsters on the map in advance. Add them when the players go into the right room. That should help with some of the Fog of War tedium.
  3. Treat the party as a single entity. Instead of moving the fighter, then the rogue, then the wizard, then the cleric, just move the party token. When an encounter happens, determine more specific positions.

I'd also like to respond to this part:

my players start leading the monster into other parts of the map, sometimes making the long encounter way longer. The rooms for encounters lose their focus, and the preparation feels wasted since, well, I designed them for the encounter.

That's okay! You're not running a video game. You're running a pen and paper roleplaying game, albeit facilitated by an electronic table simulator. One of the strengths of P&P RPGs is that the players can go anywhere and do anything that the GM can react to instead of being cut off by what the designer/programmer planned for. The fact that the players wander into another room that you thought would be offscreen is fine. It means the players have choice and can act on that choice, even if it makes their battleground a little less interesting.

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