What kind of dungeons would you enjoy visiting, if there were no rewards? (XP, loot, etc.)

[MrSmith]

I've reflected some more on my original answer, which was displaced to another thread, and I believe I would enjoy visiting a dungeon that requires the use of tactics to successfully complete a mission. The term "tactics" could mean any number of things, and so at a minimum, it is the use of group strategies and individual tactics to overcome a superior foe. Here too, the term does not mean simply gathering a group of 30th level characters to fight an immortal boss with countless immunities and spells.

This dungeon could have an obstacle(s) that requires rogue skills; invisible threats requiring supernatural skills (spells or potions); an organized foe where ranged fighters, spell casters, and melee fighters employ tactics (use of terrain, teaming, and special weapons or skills) and strategies (combined arms attacks and concentrating effects against an adversaries' center of gravity) to win.

The most important factor for this dungeon to be successful is its purpose for existing and the "why" that drives characters to have to go there in the first place.

Cheers!

[artemitavik]

Anything that's going to "force" me into a group, no matter how clever, would not be enjoyable. Outside of a DM even, certain classes or group builds required to get through a dungeon is huge turn off for me, especially for low population times.

[DaloLorn]

I agree with Dragonslayer. The mechanics are a crude kludge, but they do vaguely represent one of the two IC points of "adventuring for adventure's sake": Getting stronger and/or richer. The other point is to see and experience new things, but there's not nearly enough content for that approach to drag you to level 30 all by itself, even on your first character. (Subsequent characters may suffer from some level of IC/OOC bleedthrough, where you avoid the more boring destinations because of how bad they were the first time round.)

Roleplay incentives are ultimately the only way to do it. A number of my characters has visited and even revisited Ulcaster's because it was relevant to their RP, and from an OOC perspective, I find it sufficiently different from your standard BG fare that I occasionally throw a character in there just on the pretext of feeling adventurous enough to wander into the unknown. But making all our dungeons like Ulcaster's isn't the answer.

Someone in the spinoff thread made a good suggestion about dungeon-specific loot, though your insistence that the posts moved into that thread were off-topic (or rather, your insistence that this is the only subtopic worth discussing) makes me wonder if you might be experiencing a crippling case of tunnel vision right now.

But to answer the more mundane, mechanical question you've asked: Less HP sponges, less artificial difficulty, more mechanical variety, etc. BG's encounter design is so notoriously lazy that even admins and DMs are hopping on the "this sucks" bandwagon.

[gedweyignasia]

But to answer the question you actually asked instead of hijacking this thread when another one exists for exactly the things I was talking about earlier in this post: Less HP sponges, less artificial difficulty, more mechanical variety, etc.

That's exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for players' ideas on here.

Are enemies with higher AC+AB but less HP acceptable for players? I think the reason we gravitated towards HP sponges whose AB players can exceed with their AC is because players wanted the consistency that low AB, low AC, high HP enemies provided. (It also seems likely this design decision motivated players to build so heavily towards damage output.) I'm happy to shake up our meta, though. Perhaps you can suggest some other enemy archetypes that players might be OK fighting? I think this also speaks to your mechanical variety question, but if not, please elaborate on that too.

Can you explain what artificial difficulty is, give some examples of where it's used, and propose alternative measures to accomplish those same design goals? (I trust you're able to infer the purpose for the "artificial difficulty" mechanisms you don't like.)

This is where I'm trying to elicit ideas, not just direction.

[DaloLorn]

Tunnel vision, I'm telling you.

Oh, one thing I forgot to bring up regarding RP incentives: Different PCs will have different interests. Some might only be willing to fight undead and optionally constructs (Pixanie is like this, now that she's become a pacifist), others might refuse to fight one or more of the various types of monstrous humanoid that make up the bulk of our content, and some might prefer to fight their fellow non-monstrous humanoids (Rinn and Mainda love beating up other bandits/pirates). Some, like druids, might not want to fight animals and magical beasts unless they've been somehow corrupted by an external force, while others might be interested exclusively in hunting the Sword Coast's wildlife.

While BG is critically low on mechanical diversity (either in NPC or area design), fixing this does not necessarily add RP diversity, and there's still a fair bit of room for improvement on that front too.

Are enemies with higher AC+AB but less HP acceptable for players?

As a universal approach? No more than what we've got right now. But that is one category that's direly underrepresented in our content right now. Other categories include "fragile spellcaster" (which is currently a category only occupied by PCs) and various other takes on the "glass cannon" archetype, with low HP and AC counterbalanced by the fact that they'll wreck you if you don't kill them fast.

Putting aside the fact that the content as a whole feels overtuned at times, you need to balance encounters on multiple axes:

• Defense against effects and magic (saves, resistances, SR, and immunities), versus defense against mundane attacks (AC, HP, DR).
  
  BG's mobs tend to rate very highly on all of these, except arguably AC and sometimes DR. Definitely a lot of room for variety here; if you're not dealing tons of damage, and you're not making it possible for someone else to deal tons of damage, then why are you here?
• Frequency of successful attack (AB, spell DCs, spell penetration, difficulty of obtaining immunity against spells/special attacks), versus potency of successful attack (damage, AoE, debuff severity).
  
  A lot of non-casters rate relatively poorly on frequency (... at least against a dedicated tank...), but very strongly on potency. Could do with some diversification there. Meanwhile, casters tend to be very good at both due to a heavy emphasis on saveless and/or SR-ignoring offensive spells mixed in with occasional save-or-sucks/dies and dispels, and there are a few mobs on the server (beholders, illithids, greater basilisks) which rate exceptionally high on both of these simultaneously.
  
  This is further exaggerated by the use of such mobs as mooks instead of minibosses, thereby making it all but inevitable that a character without outright immunity to their special attacks (some of which you can't be immune to) will eventually be defeated either by attrition (illithids, unless you chug so many healing potions as to ruin any chance of turning a profit) or by failed saves (beholders and basilisks, but possibly also illithids if you forgot your Protection from Evil today).
• Encounter difficulty (individual mob difficulties versus group composition) versus encounter reward (XP, loot, gold). Technically, it should just be "individual mob difficulties versus group composition", with the overall difficulty/reward ratio being more or less constant... but we're not even close, and I'm not 100% convinced we'll be able to properly decouple the components of encounter difficulty from the components of encounter reward. Consequently, this is the one axis on which you should aim to have all your encounters land in roughly the same ballpark.
  
  Unfortunately, it's also the only axis on which BG is extremely inconsistent. CR scaling aside, difficulty is generally not calibrated beyond the power levels of individual NPCs (we probably have the MMO spawner to blame for this), and rewards are controlled only by changing spawn rates (because the 50-XP hard cap makes it highly uneconomical to kill small amounts of minibosses when you can kill large amounts of mooks in the same period, for possibly the same amount of XP per kill) or chest count (because the chest RNG is extremely swingy and largely beyond the area builder's control, while NPCs drop no loot except the occasional RIG bits).
  
  Short of writing a whole new spawner, I'm not sure how much we can do about mob distribution right now. For rewards, though? Region-specific loot would help, as would a more flexible XP cap.

Even these axes are too simplistic, too broad - you'd probably need an elaborate point buy system to start to approach a good ruleset for balancing NPCs, but making that system account for all the possible synergistic effects between the various things you've "bought" is a pain in the neck.

I think this also speaks to your mechanical variety question, but if not, please elaborate on that too.

Right now, BG has two primary dungeon types: Dungeons without magic, and dungeons with magic. Technically, both of these may or may not have sneak attacks added into the mix, but with their low-to-moderate AB, these don't often have as drastic an impact on the overall gameplay as spellcasters do. (For the purposes of this conversation, I'm treating stuff like basilisks as spellcasters, since the bulk of their lethality tends to come from their spells and special attacks.)

Our encounters basically all land in roughly the same ballpark on the abovementioned axes (with minor deviations), and then decide whether to add magic on top of that. This is why dungeons with mages are almost universally considered harder than dungeons without them - because the spells are added as an afterthought, after you've already set up all the stat blocks. (This may not be how it works devside, but it's definitely how it often feels, especially since the casters aren't noticeably weaker than their peers even before you consider their spellcasting potential. I've raised that complaint before.)

Can you explain what artificial difficulty is, give some examples of where it's used, and propose alternative measures to accomplish those same design goals? (I trust you're able to infer the purpose for the "artificial difficulty" mechanisms you don't like.)

Aside from the universality of HP sponges being a form of artificial difficulty in its own right? Arbitrary, undispellable stat buffs and immunities. By and large, it's been my impression that BG's non-boss NPCs can achieve higher health, higher AB, higher AC, higher saves, and higher damage than a PC of the same level, without having to compromise on any of these to quite the same degree as a PC... and then tack on undispellable damage resistances and immunities that the PCs sometimes can't emulate even in a dispellable form, despite those resistances/immunities not having any basis in PnP stats. (Granted, outright immunity is more commonly seen in bosses... but damage resistances are all over the place. What was it that our mohrgs had? DR 15/[+3, bludgeoning]? I've never actually fought them myself, so I'm going off my memory of a Discord conversation about it.)

Some of these are supposed to represent the NPCs prebuffing for the fight, or at least drinking potions and elixirs if they don't have any caster friends. But if this is the case, then those effects should be dispellable, and their baseline stats shouldn't (usually) be enough to singlehandedly challenge a decently-buffed PC. Also, maybe some of them should actually have more consumables they can spend during the fight. Healing potions, potions of short-duration spells like Displacement, spare potions of Mage Armor, etc.

[gedweyignasia]

Reviving this thread again to look for inspiration. (Not saying there won't be mechanical rewards commensurate to the risk involved; just looking for something other than "progression" which makes dungeons fun.)

[whatever123]

A dungeon could tell a story through hidden pieces of information scattered throughout the dungeon. This can mean a lot of things. Perhaps there are journal parts scattered throughout the dungeon telling the story of long gone adventurers. Or there could be murals on the walls revealing the history and original purpose of the dungeon. Maybe even lost spirits that you can commune with, if you find their hidden location. Basically little things that make it feel like the dungeon is an actual place with its own histoy and mysteries. This could at least be nice for characters and players that are interested in such stories.

Also, having multiple solutions to problems is always fun. Perhaps a rogue can open a locked door and sneak through a trap filled corridor, avoiding a tough monster encounter completely.