Has anybody here ever tried a tower defense style D&D campaign? I haven’t heard much about it or do I know anyone has tried it. It came to me as an idea the other day, so I looked it up and haven’t found much about it. I’d assume it’s a relatively unpopular play style and one of my fellow party members is concerned about it removing a lot of the social aspects of D&D in general.

I kinda want to make a campaign to try it, but not much info for a set standard to do this is around and I’m nervous to just wing it. I don’t want to lose all the elements of party mechanics and interactions that you’d normally find in a campaign, but I realize that may be tough to do in more of an action-based setting. Figured I’d just see if anyone here has tried it, if they liked it, what could be done to make it more interesting or should I just abandon the idea and just make something more traditional and cookie-cutter. Of course I’d be vetting the ideas with my party and not just throw them into something I haphazardly throw together that everyone will hate.

What the fuck do you mean "tower defense style D&D campaign"?

Just play a video game.

>>95966820
So basically your party would be confined to some sort of fortified structure while you fend off mobs and utilize items at your disposal or stuff you are able to loot to continue the battle.

>>95966826
Well that would be easy enough, but I’m curious about how these kind of genres would mix. It’s not one of my more farfetched combinations. Years ago my friend and I made a Battleship Magic (combing the board game Battleship with MTG). Don’t remember the rules of that, but it was a clusterfuck.

Tower defense works as a one-off scenario within a wider campaign ark, but it will get boring very fast if that's all they are doing every session. I run D&D 3/3.5 and we've done a couple large scale battles, one defending a Dwarven city from invaders, and the second was a massive assault on an Orc fortress.
These battles took 4-6 hours, and had hundreds of soldiers on both sides. I borrowed little soldiers and cavalry from the Risk board game and used a modified version of Risk's attack and defense dice for the mooks, while my players also utilized all thier characters abilities on thier turns. I rolled dice for the bad guys and let my players roll dice for the good guys. Each "squad" of guys got it's own dice roll as a group to speed things up.

>>95966874
Thanks for sharing this. That scenario was something I was considering to keep it engaging. Start off with more of a routine campaign and have it lead into some larger, more confined battle towards the end. Not only would it keep it from feeling like just choose action, roll dice, cycle turns, repeat; but it would also give it depth and make the final battle feel more worthwhile. The players will have already been immersed in the story and turn the battle into a pressing matter in their intersection instead of something they just “do”.

I’d like to make it less of a start to finish campaign and maybe introduce some sort of line movements on where the battle currently takes place. Like if the party is doing well they can advance and maybe wipe the enemy camps and loot them. If they aren’t doing as well, they can retreat into a more fortified position but lose that opportunity and instead be forced to fend off numbers but lose out on some of the wealth they could have accumulated. I’ll save that for further down the road and only if I wind up trying this and it goes well.

In your campaign did you have any sorts of stationary weapons the players could take advantage of or build?

>>95966874
>I run D&D 3/3.5
C-can I join?

>>95966753 (OP)
A carny shelf of the prizes no one should be forced to win.

>>95966753 (OP)
>>95966874
I'm doing a campaign where the party has a fortress with soldiers etc. in a dangerous land from which they delve into dungeons and sometimes dungeons come back to try delve into their fortress. The first defense was interesting, the second less so, I don't know if I'm gonna bother having a third attack because it's no longer interesting enough.

>>95966753 (OP)
For a campaign it's retarded, but I've had two adventures featuring a tower defense of this settlement. (the classic Night's Dark Terror and the 5e Essentials Kit doing a homage to it)

This is just domain play.