I'm putting together a hypercube dungeon for a short campaign of a home-brew I've been working on. I'm running through what should be in the different rooms and I decided that one room will have a lethal but unsolvable challenge. This challenge will be clearly marked as immensely difficult with tons of dead bodies, an actual sign, or something else that makes it obvious that it's not to be trifled with. Why? To teach some new players that there will be some situations where booking it is a good idea. Not every single thing they see can be beaten. Most challenges are, but some aren't.
The campaign has tons of advanced sci-fi tech, what can I throw at them that is far too difficult to master?
When I want to give new players that idea of "running away is the best option" I will have them go on a really difficult time-sensitive mission with lots of very powerful enemies. I will have a high level NPC accompany them to hold their hand and kick ass, and I'll usually have something about them be necessary for the player's survival. Then at a certain point when the situation is fucked, I'll have the high level NPC run away. The rest of the party will naturally follow them.
I'll have the players cycle through their equipment often; weapons break and are dropped, armor is broken, devices short-circuit, etc. But I will always replace their shit, or have NPC's give them new weapons, etc. for free.
You do this to build up their dependence on friendly NPC's. Then they view non-combative action as more important than cool gear or equipment. Then you can throw an enemy at them which threatens that security, and they will try to flee from it.
Alternatively, throw one super tough enemy at them which they use all their resources to defeat, then later, throw 3 or 4 of that enemy at them. They will have to run or die.
Lucas Johnson
There was literally a series of sci-fi horror films made about this very concept.
Look up Cube on putlocker.tv and watch the first one. It's actually pretty good. It used to have a small cult of fans, kind of like Event Horizon does. Not sure if it does anymore though, I haven't met a lot of people that have even heard of it.
Evan Morris
Actually, went back to check. Watch the second film first - Cube2: Hypercube. It's literally about a hypercube dungeon, complete with quantum mechanical bullshitery.
Charles Gray
Cube sucked cock. The only thing worse than Cube was Cube II. >Cube2 worse than cock-suckery
Xavier Clark
There's this one
Adrian Ross
Yeah but he's not going to be watching it for entertainment, so it doesn't matter.
Ryan Torres
I appreciate the advice, but I've already engineered all the NPCs to be non-combat oriented. This "campaign" is basically a three session event to put people into the combat system, throw around a little lore, and get them used to my GMing style. Your ideas will work great if I do a different campaign later. The last one might work though.
Thanks for the advice. I'll give that a shot.
There it is! I'm using that one, but I got lazy and posted my image as it was the first one I could find on my drive. The players don't need to explore all 64 rooms or even understand that it's a tesseract, but it will be fun to mess with their heads and I'll give them bonuses if they can figure stuff out.
Jack Collins
There's some other images floating around out there of a 5d hypercube dungeon, which requires a switching mechanism as each room exists within two tesseracts - for a total of 40 rooms.
The trick to it figuring out a satisfying way to manage the switch, some people use switches. I figured having a warped pocket of space at the center of each room that grows larger as you approach it and recedes when you back away, inverting over a person as they pass through would be the most fitting. Having parts of the dungeon be broken down and be missing these bubbles will give you space if you want to put something else in the room and objects protruding into both chambers will enhance the weirdness. It also allows you to fence off areas if you don't want them running into them too quickly.
If the PCs have access to the kinds of sci-fi tech the would make it possible or are playing hyper-intelligent mathematicians or AI constructs or something one thing to consider is giving them parts of the map after they've been exposed to the dungeon's unusual geometry. You can even grade this by giving them the 4d map, only to upgrade to the 5d map after they've have some time to wrap their heads around it and their characters have a second revelation. Plus if the players just look at the geometry and mentally zone out the map provides a handy guide that they can just use to node hop to their target based on how smart their characters are.
Lucas Walker
Barring factors that I am not aware of, I think this is a bad plan.
The players are operating inside of a game world so will be following game logic. In the real world, if you encountered a room 100% full of spinning lasers and buzzsaws, you would not enter it. Game logic states that everything that exists is a challenge placed there for you to overcome, so a room full of lasers and buzzsaws is probably the MOST IMPORTANT THING THERE IS and you must enter and overcome it FOR THE BEST POSSIBLE REWARDS.
If you want your players to flee from a dangerous situation, set it up so that the game challenge IS THE ACT OF FLEEING ITSELF or it will seem pointless. That is to say, make it difficult to flee, not just something that can be casually walked away from. An enemy powerful enough that it must be escaped is a form of game challenge. A room with complex traps and puzzles is also a form of game challenge. A room with complex traps and puzzles that should be ignored is confusing and pointless; if anything, you're teaching your players to AVOID playing your game.
What if, regardless of how absurdly difficult a challenge you concoct, your players think of a way through it that would reasonably work? Are you going to buttfuck them regardless of logic, just to teach them something...?
Just my 2 cents.
Jacob Taylor
Ok so thats a teserract a 4d cube.
And that ones a 5D cube.
Now say I gave my players a magic item with six sides, each corresponding to a dimensional dungeon.
1D: Not sure what to do with that. A single terribly long room that extends from one end of the dungeon to the other. 2D: Go full super mario on them and have the maps actually be 2D requiring jump checks and other navigational tricks to get around. 3D: An actual regular dungeon in a box? Perhaps introduce this item in this way, having it open up a dungeon when brought to a specific point? Party thinks its just a key to get into a sealed dungeon but its actually inside the item. 4D:5D:
Dominic Johnson
The D&D 3.5 DM guide actually tells you to try to keep your players thinking using real logic, even to the extent that some puzzles may be unsolvable in their current state.
Carter Martin
I think I'll go with the 1D one being a single target teleport based on location. One way only with the launch points large distances apart.
Caleb Adams
>And that ones a 5D cube.
Not exactly, a 5D cube has 40 cells. The one in the picture is more like an extended 4D hypercube that loops back on itself and has shortcuts to the other side of the loop.
Angel Green
Does anyone have a dungeon layout in 4 dimentions that isnt a cube?
or would that just be easier to random ally move from room to room
Daniel Wood
The basic principle for 4 dimensions is that it loops in every direction and orientation to adjacent sections changes relative to the direction traveled (like in the gif).
Nobody wants to play in this shit except other people who jerk it to math.
This is like the dungeon idea one of my autist players told me about of his own design: A single long hallway that takes years to traverse by foot. Every 100 miles divided by Force Walls. Between each Force Wall is a Neutronium Golem and other assorted DBZ bullshit.
I played in a game when I was a kid where one of my friends had just finished watching Cube. We entered a dungeon, got trapped. One player walked into the next room, failed a save. A screen made of criss-crossed sharp wires came out and diced him into thousands of cubes. We all stopped playing his adventure and did something else.
Nobody wants to play Autism: The Dungeoning.
Nicholas Rogers
That's why I suggested just straight up giving the players the map after they've messed with it for a bit: by dint of their character's own cleverness, some piece of tech they have, or something left behind by a previous explorer who met a bad end. In the meantime you have an opening to present a raft of spatial weirdness that wouldn't make sense anywhere else and create challenges based on it.
It's not a terrible idea, so long as it's presented the right way.
Ryan Adams
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Kayden Garcia
user, watch Jim Henson's The Cube. youtube.com/watch?v=MfWsCcAHp7I It's better than any hypercube bullshittery that others recommend.
