Fixing Dungeon Crawls. Or, Playing the World
God forbid, the Devil’s fruit has returned from Eve’s belly and tempted me: the sweet savour of system sings as a siren. I’ve facilitated games as a referee using variations of primitive D&Ds for a long while and among my many obs is that the basic rules are merely pretty good for dungeon crawl gameplay rather than dope nasty as they could perhaps be. “Pourquoi monsieur?” you ask desperately as I stare at the clefted wrinkles of your aged forehead. Well, mon ami, allow me to enumerate my numerable problems.
The dungeon model ought to be based on attrition. You get whacked, you use items, and you soldier on. Rotate your ranks tactically to preserve your HP-havers and take calculated gambles to win the day. Problem is: a first level dude is killed in approximately two or three whacks. Before you jump up and down, your frail body motivated only by the phantom of a long extinguished youth, and exclaim “Skill issue!” I must of course clarify that, yes, it is possible to work around this via skilled play (I wrote an almost award winning guide on just this) but it tends to require a style of play which is less joy-sparking then it becomes at around the level 3 mark. It is at that point that the primitive D&D Fighting-man graduates Fighting school and is properly able to hold his own. A first level Fighter only possesses a slight advantage to a mere Goblin, and much of that is a matter of wit rather than brawn; A third level Fighter is like three Goblins stacked up on top of each other. The number of Hit Dice possessed by a single creature is the main determinant of its power, especially at low levels. Each player character, then, is about the same strength as the weakest of guys: our friend the Goblin. And while the first level Fighter will more often than not win, there is always a chance of being instantly impaled to death on a high damage roll.
A conjecturist I asked told me that this makes sense in the context of D&D’s history. OD&D developed out of wargames where players would command armies and rosters of special dudes. These special dudes only become really special by going through the gruelling Fighting-man school of hard knocks. Dank basements sporting shocks of black mold upon their shaggy argyle-brown carpets facilitated the grand campaigns of ye olden days in which cross-faded middle aged men would feed their sick and twisted Medieval Napoleon x Hammer Horror fantasies by throwing polyhedrons and yelling at their wives. The context of play is now very different, and the Dungeon Crawl itself has ossified and come into its own: so much so that capital letters feel appropriate.
I think of DCC, some say the Classic of Dungeon Crawls, and its efforts to reinvigorate the Dungeon Crawl Campaign by recapturing the feel ye olde D&D. DCC leans into variability to recreate that special spark of imagination: the Fighting-man’s Mighty Deeds and transmogrifying Wizards facilitate a style of play that implies absurd picaresque adventures. The presented world has an excessive bawdiness to it that leans into what is the natural outcome of D&Ds one hit men. Plucky heroes descend into graves and tombs only for their little paper lives to be quashed in a sick tragicomedy of errors; from the giblets of their friend’s bodies, however, there appear too few shining heroes. Amongst six men that enter two return — with them the golden chalice of the Lost King Phendral, silver coins stamped with the Vulpus Empire’s symbol of authority, and an absolutely sickening magic sword that’s blade is shaped like a bolt of Zeus. DCC captures this manic energy with its tendency toward extreme results. The Baby’s First Crawl, also known as the Funnel, is the purest distillation of this mania.
Yet there’s another sort of Dungeon Crawl there. At Starbucks the other week Plato told me that the ideal Crawler is still out there, somewhere. This Crawler is ruled by laws indivisible: it is not a zany crockfest of hell but instead a methodical clockwork-like structure in which each thing has its place and each place has its thing. Marie Kondo picks through this system and shrugs, “Yeah it’s all pretty good. Nothing to throw out here.” Luke Gearing emerges from the water, divine tool of creation in hand, and says “That’s pretty good.” The sun’s beams blaze off his wet, bald head and he tosses the knife aside; this pork is fat-free. Everybody claps for me and attends my celebratory barbecue. Ahem…
This ideal has been explored in what the kids call “NSR spaces.” Errant is far and away the best attempt at it; but it demands too much of me. Errant as a system, wonderful as it is, acts as an engine upon the world, changing the gamestate through its various interlocking systems. Cool as this is, I crave the gentle law of the Fairy grove. Invisible, cooling, gentle.
“What is to be done?” a famous bald man once spake. Rambling and gambling is over, let me not mince words:
Character’s ought to begin at a level of power roughly equivalent to D&D’s third level. Famous blog post The Baker Street Campaign provides some good reasons for this.
The Battle Model of D&D is delusive and swingy, all the more so at lower levels. Ava’s post here illustrates the mathematical reasons for this, which I am too brainslow to recreate myself. Combat ought to churn; the morass of violence ticking toward a visible end point. Unless, that is, our heroes tactically dream-scheme their way out of defeat.
Combat is never really designed around playing Mind Theatre. Now… The secret is that this isn’t about mechanics. Mind Theatre is a specialized skill developed overtime by the expert referee. Yet the rules should really be guiding the referee and players toward mind theatre if that’s the intended way to play.
Growth should be less linear than D&D, yet still progressive. The GLOG’s focus on only 4 ranks, with each being significant, is appealing and sexually invigorating. A flatter power curve solves and creates problems in equal measure (That is, the 9th level Fighting-man is unspeakably badass, and its hard to recreate that without that sort of linear power scaling)
Dungeon Crawl mechanics themselves are a solved issue. Some cruft can be crufted off, such as the obligatory rest every six turns that no one uses. Movement in the dungeon, in practice, is handled loosely as movement between key areas. Formalize this shiz, but no stress allowed. Errant actually has some pretty nicey-nicey-roll-a-dicey movement mechanics for the fabled Crawl.
Hexcrawls and their mechanics largely suck. Either Hexcrawlin’ just needs to get out of the way and be very simple, or it needs to be engaging and cool. Glogbert, the father of GLOG, explains some of the issues with Hexcrawls here. The solution he opts for, however, feels unfun to me in that the end result becomes even heavier than a dungeon crawl in terms of resolution. I do not need more or heavier systems to solve a problem created by systems. Most hexcrawl systems, like the nice n’ easy one in Wolves Upon The Coast, exist in an awkward space between Too Much and Too Little. They take good Playin’ Time away from the fun stuff without adding much of interest. The secret: this is as much an issue of map design as it is of mechanics.
Outside of HP, attrition models are mostly bad. Counting rations and then going “I eat my ration” sucks. “How many days away is Bethlehem” “It’s a five days walk, six if it rains” “Okay I buy seven days of food” “How much is that?” “Uhhhh let me get the PDF up” “Hey Havoc can you subtract the money for the food” “Okay I’m on it” “Wait stop Havoc I already did” “Don’t touch that shit man, I’m the quartermaster.” Counting arrows and going “I eat my arrow” is fine, actually. Rechargeable abilities suck more than you will ever know. “I use my ability, then I go to bed and use it again.” No, brother, you can only use it as much as you can use it and then it's gone forever and ever. “Should I use Power Punch?” is not the pinnacle of game design that people think it is.
Most encumbrance systems these days are what we in the business call “slotees”. These either provide enough slots that nothing matters anyway, or they’re Mausritter and they work really well. I’ve taken to only worrying about encumbrance when dragging treasure out of dungeons. This works okay, but its still unsatisfying. Most players don’t bring pots and pans and then they say “I cook the scorpion we killed” and I say “yeah sick with it brother” and then without any cooking ware they cook the scorpion because I don’t want to say “Sorry my best and closest friend, but you have to go back to town and buy the pots and pans to cook that scorpion” because that’s the opposite of all ages fun. That’s fun only for some ages: the age of pedants.
Talking about, but not actually doing, domain play is all the rage. If you want to venture into those hallowed grounds you best be thinking in terms of compatibility between tiers of play. This is where ancient D&D is supreme and enduring; I worship at your alter.
Bugbears accumulate and must be slain. They only reveal themselves to those who play. There is a fine balance that must be struck between two commandments, each as lovely with her soft glowing curves as the other.
Thou shalt be convenient and fun to play. Fun is a tyrant, but he is a benevolent tyrant named Benvolio. Inconvenience is okay when it's generative. Tedium for tedium’s sake is tedious. This is where the game of the game comes from. Every bit of system must be in the service of fun. All of it. Where it isn’t fun, or where it doesn’t serve us, we refer to our other commandment. She is older and all the more beautiful for it.
Thou shalt Play the World. This is that shit you’ve heard before. Let your heart not deceive you, old man: we are here for wicked fun games of imagination and advanced tactical problem solving which involves engaging all our engines. For those engines to be engaged we’ve got to have the World fleshed out such that we’ve got fuel. We’ve got to have trust and love for our fellow game-players such that each can create their slice of the world in turn, and we can tango our minds with and between each other in an orgiastic confluence of imaginary power.
Playing the World means that those Laws you call Rules must be derived from first principles. Otherwise they are a ghostly scaffold; you'll fall if you climb an ethereal ladder! Anything that facilitates play is great, but I think more can be done.
For that reason all my respect and love goes out to games like Wolves Upon The Coast which build out a playable campaign with its own rules in mind. I've heard these called capsule games. The ideal Dungeon Crawl must occur in a Dungeon Crawlers world. A world of rude ‘tude dudes in the mood to brood in a dungeon room.
This blog post was written to think through what I want from a campaign, and the relationship between Rules/System and the game you actually play at the table. The caveat, as always, is that rules can be tossed aside or used as needed. However: there is an ontology at play when it comes to rules. 8HD is 8HD and 1HD is 1HD. Those basic principles of design become highly generative in play and actively shape player decision making. Hence the recourse to first principles: what are the rules of the world, rather than of the game-we-overlay-on-the-world? How do those rules operate mathematically to facilitate World Playing?