Stealing MMO Mechanics for Your Tabletop — Blackfathom Deeps

Salutations, nerds! Today I’m sharing ideas for stealing mechanics from MMORPGs, how to make them work and an example my players enjoyed. Suffice it to say your mileage may vary. I’m going to be dissecting Blackfathom Deeps from World of Warcraft. On top of being an extremely long dungeon there some really good concepts to steal from this dungeon and a couple of things that just wouldn’t translate well.

What Doesn’t Work

I know a lot of people who have tried to lift dungeons from MMOs whole cloth. The thing is this doesn’t work. Even the most gung-ho table about combat is unlikely to want to fight as many trash mobs as you find in an MMO dungeon.

There are also many instances in dungeons of things like platforming that require the game’s specific interface.

There’s an easy jump puzzle at the beginning of Blackfathom Deeps. Characters must hop between a series of partially sunken platforms with broken pieces to get to the dungeon proper and after someone makes it they can throw a rope over. It would be easy enough to make this an Athletics check but it definitely loses something in translation between actually having to time your jump and making it a simple die roll.

What to Steal

While I wouldn’t advise taking anything out of Blackfathom Deeps whole cloth there are a couple of things you can learn from as design choices.

First, there are parts of this dungeon where you have to go underwater to access others and some of those tunnels can be pretty narrow. There’s nothing mechanically to challenge your players about this but it’s almost certain to make them nervous and it’s the same effect in the video game as it would be at tabletop. If you want to make them set their teeth on edge you can have them get attacked in the water.

Second, there’s a mechanic just before and during one of the boss fights with Twilight Lord Kelris. Dark matter appears on the dungeon floor and pulls the characters toward it, forcing movement and dealing damage if you get too close.

Having something on the field that pulls characters on initiative count 10 or 20 feels urgent, makes them consider more how to use their movement and can really spice up an otherwise straightforward encounter — especially if there are things on the floor they shouldn’t be standing in and could potentially be dragged through.

Finally, toward the end of the dungeon there are tentacles sticking out of the walls that can grab people on their way by if they aren’t careful. They have their own health bars and can be killed. A grappler planted at certain choke points in your dungeon that can’t move is another way to spice up your terrain without over complicating it.

All of these things suit an eldritch dungeon but all of them can be repurposed for something else. When I ran the dark matter for my gaming group we were in a space setting and it was a small gravity well. You could have vines grabbing people instead of tentacles. The point is knowing what each of these things does mechanically for your encounter and applying them with the right paint job for your backdrop.

Whether you’re an avid MMO player or not, there are a lot of things you can learn from the choices made in dungeon design from them. Some of them do translate better to the tabletop than others and I hope you found something of use to you here. Do you have a favorite dungeon? Just want to say hi? Drop me a note in the comments below. And go read Torchlighters. You deserve more weird fiction in your life

Stay Nerdy!

*Featured image — Tyler Jacobson illustrates the archlich Acererak as he raises an army of undead and prepares to unleash it on an unsuspecting world. [Image courtesy Wizards of the Coast]

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