[RPG] What do I need to consider running an open table dungeon crawl at a multi-day convention

conventionmegadungeon

A friend of mine and I came up with an idea to run a mega-epic open table dungeon crawl over the course of an entire 3 days convention, and we have some questions and thoughts as to how to make it work. First, just to make clear, by open table we mean that players can sit down at the table freely (up to say, 5 players at once), pick up a character and join the crawl, until they had their fill or otherwise decide to leave the table. Meaning, players are free to come and go as they please, join and enjoy some time of dungeon crawl, and the crawl continues as long as there're people who dare venture into it.

Our questions:

  1. Is there a specific system or mechanic we should consider? We though of using D&D [5], for now we have no real experience with the system, but it seems like a good fit.
  2. How to deal with unbalanced parties? A couple of issues that came to mind are A) dealing with a single player that made it to mid-high level (let's say for simplicity that it's D&D and he's level 10) while the rest of the party are level 1; and B) A level 5 party suddenly are joined by a new level 1 character.
  3. How to deal with a clean slate situation while previous parties cleared a major chunk of the dungeon already? The easiest example being the first day of the con is over, the players so far made it to a third of the way down and the encounters in these levels are about level 6, what to do at the beginning of the 2nd day? Should we start over at level 1? Start at level 6? Respawn the monsters?
  4. Considering we really want the players to make it to the end of the dungeon by the end of the con (and not sooner of course), how many encounters should we plan?
  5. Any general tips and advice would also be appreciated. What are we missing that would make this event a blast to take part in?

Finally, we'd really appreciate any help and input, but what we're mostly looking for is people who have real experience running this sort of event (though I guess people who played in such an event can also be of help).

Thanks!

Best Answer

  1. If at all possible I would go with a system that you are familiar with. Running something like this is stressful enough on its own, and introducing a set of rules you don't know well will slow things down and add extra complications.

  2. I would get rid of the idea of using XP individually, and level up all characters at the same time. You could also have versions of each character at each level you would expect them to reach over the duration of the con. Locking the level of the characters removes any issue of unbalanced parties, and guarantees the level the party will be at for each individual encounter you have, making it much easier to balance fights etc. Also, when you are designing your encounters, try to work the number of monsters/challenge per PC. This allows you to easily scale each encounter according to the number of players you have in the group at a particular time.

  3. I would design the adventure so that it has three sub-sections, each of which with a mini-climax at the end of the day. This rewards players who stick with you for a day, and gives a sense of structure to the whole thing. If you run with my idea of locking the progression of characters through the adventure, you will know the levels they will be at each point, and will be able to design each day's adventures accordingly.

  4. This is hard to answer definitively without knowing the system you are going to use, as different systems run at very different paces. However, my generic advice would be to identify your core encounters - those that are absolutely required to move the story within the adventure along. Leave plenty of wiggle room to account for slow play, but also have additional optional encounters that you can drop into play should the group be getting through the story faster than you anticipated.

  5. Keep it simple.