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If you’ve followed my posts here you’ll know I’m a fan of role-playing during a game of D&D. I certainly enjoy tactical war games, but if I want to play one I will generally choose something besides 4e D&D. That being said, for those of you who couldn’t make it to GenCon this year, I’d like to tell you about a format that I thoroughly enjoyed: Dungeon Delves.
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, the Dungeon Delve features pregenerated and simplified characters for a party of five players. They are timed events, and generally they last for one hour. You score points based on your performance over two encounters. You get one point for playing, two points for reaching the second encounter, three points for at least bloodying every enemy in the second encounter, and four points for finishing both encounters. The encounters are designed to stretch the party’s resources and force movement. The time constraint means you have to be ready on your turn and you can’t be debating strategy or looking up powers. If time runs out on you, the game is over. It doesn’t matter if the party is at full health and the last enemy is hiding behind a tower with 1 hp.
The result is a collaborative tactical wargame with the added complexity of a difficult time constraint. While it’s disappointing to be three quarters through when time runs out and be told the game is over, it makes winning those close games exciting! I played in a number of these delves at GenCon and I have a few great memories. In one delve the GM told us that nobody had yet beaten his delve, and we beat it with only 7 seconds left on the timer.
The format also has the benefit of encouraging less metagaming between turns and teaching players to speed up their play. It also has the obvious benefit of lasting only one hour. It’s nice for the DM because, honestly, they are easy to prepare. In a couple of hours you can come up with an evening’s worth of game that has a set and predictable ending time.
I enjoyed the format as an interesting change of pace. I plan on incorporating them into weeks when I don’t have a lot of time to prepare or the group is trying to fit a game into a short period of time. It’s not as rewarding to me as a rich and creative campaign, and after playing two my group was ready to go back to a normal game of D&D, but they have their own charm and I think they’ll be making repeat appearances in my game. When players who have important roleplaying implications in the next adventure can’t make it to the table, I can pull out a dungeon delve and everyone can enjoy a break from their normal characters.
Unfortunately, I was looking through the Wizards of the Coast site for downloadable Dungeon Delve content but did not find anything. It would be nice if they made those encounters available to give us a better idea of the difficulty level and types of complexities they used so we could use them as benchmarks for our own delves.
At the age of eight JackOfHearts was invited to play Dungeons & Dragons during summer camp by kids that were much cooler than him. When he wasn't working on the family farm or practicing tennis, he spent much of his teen years reading fantasy novels and playing games of the role playing, collectible card, tabletop, and video varieties. He's now a nine-to-fiver who never forgot the joy of descending into a tomb for forgotten treasures. 
This sounds like exactly the sort of thing my current group needs to learn how to play 4E more efficiently; we’re still relatively new to the system and our combats tend to get bogged down in rules confusion and out of character rambling. Plus it would give me an excuse to play with monsters I wouldn’t otherwise be throwing their way.
I wonder what a good use of the delve rewards system would be outside of a con experience. If the 1-4 points had some benefit to the group, it would provide incentive beyond the thrill of victory (if such an incentive is needed).
I hesitate to reward actual campaign xp for a successful delve, but… Perhaps the points earned could be a separate pool of action points that are available to the whole party to spend during our campaign?
I haven’t had the chance to try anything like this but I have to say the reports from those that played in the numerous Delves at Gencon have really wetted my appetite to try this out. I’m even considering dropping the odd timed encounter into my existing campaign to challenge my players just that little bit more.
I bought the Dungeon Delve book from WotC and it made great reading with 3 encounters per Delve, and a Delve for every level from 1 to 30. Its a great resource even if you just plunder it for ideas.
This sounds different from the old Dungeon Delve format that WotC used as an organized play event (and the book by the same title) which was 3 encounters, no time limit, designed to be played competitivley (as in the DM trying to kill the PC’s). They didn’t make the official ones available to DM’s that weren’t running an event in public. They put the program on hold last June, promising on a new format. I think it intends on being the D&D equivalent to Friday Night Magic. Hopefully there’ll be some support for home players as it works well for the “I want a tacical mini’s game, but I don’t want to buy a new game” crowd, the ones that miss DDM.
Here’s the bit on my DDI tiddlywiki for dungeon delves published in dungeon… There’re only 3 at the moment.
http://asmor.com/tw/ddi.html#Delves
I thought about giving out xp for my ongoing campaign for the dungeon delve but didn’t do it. I like the idea of giving out a group action point based on how well they do using the point system.
I used the WotC Dungeon Delves book for a few of my campaign’s encounters. I don’t have a problem rewarding XP for them as long as it doesn’t effect the overall storyline. If one or more of my players mention something about vampires (”ugh…my gf is in LOVE with Twilight”), then the next time they show up in a town, they may find Dungeon Delve #10 – “A nest of vampires has claimed a dark forest and the surrounding human towns as its domain. Some of the local residents revere the vampires and serve as daylight guardians and spies. However, most of the townsfolk live in a state of dread. Those townsfolk have finally scavenged enough valuables to hire a band of adventurers to destroy the nest.”
Sure, I lost a session of storytelling that goes towards the campaign, but as shod on tuesdays said, it gives me an excuse to play with monsters I may not normally use and everyone still has fun. Besides, it shows your campaign world is much bigger than just the places and people you make up for the party to interact with. And who knows…there may be items, npcs or experiences that come out of that session that spark ideas for other content in the campaign. Suppose the head vampire gets away in the end and goes to work for the main villain of the story, or one of the PCs is bitten and begins to have vampiric tendencies that the party has to deal with for the rest of the campaign. Suddenly they have to make arrangements to travel if it is during the day and they have to find the party member a source for blood so he/she doesn’t go crazy and turn on the party. Anything is possible.
There is a hardcover book titled Dungeon Delve from WotC that has individual delves spanning the entire range of levels from 1-30. It also looks like another is being planned (at least according to a thread on the Wizards site a few days back. I don’t have that thread link handy though.)
Delves are definitely fun. Not all the time, but for a nice bang-bang change of pace.