When Players Leave the Dungeon




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1E AD&D is pretty harsh to player characters in a dungeon crawl.  Time passes slowly.  Movement slows.  There are forced rest periods.  Hit points don't recover unless there is magic or potions present.  Spellcasters run out of spells.  Eventually, the party has to carry all the loot.  Sometimes the party has enough to level up, so there's no point in continuing due to the leveling up rules.  So in a long dungeon it's not unusual for player characters to leave and then return later.

This happened in the dungeon that our adventurers played in the last few weeks (this dungeon took almost twelve hours of game time to get through).  I posted this dungeon in my last post.  After clearing two of the three levels, the party decided to leave and return later.  The party went back to the wood elf village that they had encountered on the way to the dungeon.

When they left they were able to heal up, sell their loot, and they were able to level up.  Of course I made them lost in the dark forest after they left the dungeon, so it took extra long to get to the wood elf village.  All this combined took about three months to accomplish (get to the village, heal, level up, sell/buy things, return to the dungeon).

This is where it gets interesting.  The dungeon isn't a static thing.  Because the party was gone for so long the dungeon repopulated!  Instead of leaving the first two levels empty, I was able to add creatures that took advantage of the absence of the original bad guys.  Then there are relatively non-intelligent creatures like carrion crawlers that you can put in the dungeon, eating the bodies from the party's first trip through.  To top it all off, the remaining bad guys (and their "new" allies) learned from their first encounter with the party so were tougher the second time through.

Our party expected the dungeon to be how it was when they left, so this was a nasty surprise!  And, since the party had leveled up I was able to increase the difficulty of the creatures in the dungeon to continue to make the adventure challenging.

The point is, you don't have to make your dungeons be static things!


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