[August D&D RPG Mini-Convention Recap] Dungeon Delverz Extreme!

That’s me standing over to the right. Image courtesy of Rocky Sunico.

Last weekend was when me and a few other volunteer GMs kicked off our biggest attempt at a local mini-convention for tabletop roleplaying games in Manila. We try to run an event every month, and last month was our most ambitious event in the form of the August D&D mini-convention.

While the story behind the conventions and how it turned out is pretty cool, I’ll see if I can dedicate another blog post to talk about that. Today I wanted to share a little about the game I ran for the convention, which I called “Dungeon Delverz Extreme!”

Um, what?

Exactly. Here’s the pitch I gave:

In the near future, the most popular spectator sport to grace the holo-screens of every household is none other than Dungeon Delvers Extreme! Cyber athletes from around the world compete in virtual reality dungeon crawls against other teams, engaging in bloody spectacles of might and sorcery.

You and your team have made it as far as the qualifiers, and this match could mean the difference between moving on to the finals or going home as losers. Which will you be tonight?

As you can tell, there’s a fair amount of recursion here, with Players taking the role of Athletes, who basically take on the role of their virtual reality Avatars. I had initially opened the game up for 4 Players, but by the time the convention rolled around, I had 7.

Given that it was meant to simulate a holo-vid reality show, the experience wouldn’t be complete without a bit of audience participation. So I figured it would be a good idea to have a live audience.

Audience Participation

To get the audience more involved, I also added a small rule to the game.

Once per Encounter, a member of the Audience may request for a specific action to be taken by the party. If a player character is able to execute the action successfully during the encounter, they gain a Favor Token.

On their turn, a player may spend a Favor Token to gain any of the following:

• Reroll a failed check or save
• Stabilize and restore to 1 HP
• Heal 1 Hit Die worth of damage

This let the Audience throw in some interesting curveballs towards the players in each Encounter. This ranged from random product plugs “Quick do an in-character testimonial of how awesome this Hand Santizier is!” to specific actions, “Take the Lizardman’s head off!” and even a few of the more bizarre ones like, “Seduce the dragon!”

That said, despite losing my voice towards the last encounter, the team had a great time, and the audience was getting way into it, thinking of more crazy ideas of what to get the players to do to earn those Favor Tokens.