D&D General What do you think of mega-dungeons for online D&D play?

[Klaudius Rex]

My main story for delving into the Dungeon of the Mad Mage is simple: they are all members of a Zhentarim strikeforce headed to Skullport to infiltrate and assassinate key leaders of the Xanathar's thieves guild. This feud between the Zhentarim vs Xanathar's guild is already canon with WotC , and i get to allow my players to live our thier wildest fantasies of being super kill team min/maxers with crazy builds... Duke Nuke'Em style!! They are delving and interacting with the dungeon, but all of the slogging relatively unaffects the main quest which is simple and in the back of thier minds while they kick ass all the way through the slog! I'm basically trying to make a mega-dungeon crawl a fun time! because story almost has to take a backseat to slogging through rooms after rooms after rooms after monsters and more monsters in more rooms....

 

[Rhenny]

Dungeon delves are terrific for online play with VTT for a few reasons:

1) Visually, using map and tokens really feels right in those settings.
2) It is easy to break up sessions into smaller moments of exploration so you can have 3 hour sessions or 1 hour sessions as you wish. Sometimes with open world or out of dungeon play, it takes longer to advance the story/explore or get through key encounters or goals, making it a little more difficult to have shorter sessions when needed.

Right now in my campaign for Tomb of Annihilation, we are at the end stage where it will all take place in the Tomb of the Old Gods (The Tomb of Annihilation). It is a pretty big dungeon. My players are loving it because they know they are nearing the end game and so much of what they’ve explored and encountered up until now has either been wilderness exploration, or smaller site based encounters.

I like how this adventure path in particular affords variety prior to the mega dungeon as the end game.

Enjoy your delve!

 

[Klaudius Rex]

Dungeon delves are terrific for online play with VTT for a few reasons:

1) Visually, using map and tokens really feels right in those settings.
2) It is easy to break up sessions into smaller moments of exploration so you can have 3 hour sessions or 1 hour sessions as you wish. Sometimes with open world or out of dungeon play, it takes longer to advance the story/explore or get through key encounters or goals, making it a little more difficult to have shorter sessions when needed.

Right now in my campaign for Tomb of Annihilation, we are at the end stage where it will all take place in the Tomb of the Old Gods (The Tomb of Annihilation). It is a pretty big dungeon. My players are loving it because they know they are nearing the end game and so much of what they’ve explored and encountered up until now has either been wilderness exploration, or smaller site based encounters.

I like how this adventure path in particular affords variety prior to the mega dungeon as the end game.

Enjoy your delve!

Yes! I ran Tomb of Annihilation before the pandemic in person, and the story was great for the most part the entire game...however, less so when they entered the actual Tomb of the Nine Gods when it felt like a slog and less interesting for my players to dungeon crawl in person...

However, i'm convinced that dungeon crawls like ToA and DotMM are fantastically suited for VTT as long as your players fully understand that it is a slog and they dont get other ideas of exploration beyond the dungeon