D&D General Taking the "Dungeons" out of D&D

[robus]

Yes and no. Obviously not every day that passes during the course of an adventure will be an Adventuring Day. But generally days that aren’t adventuring days are days that just get narrated over. If nothing eventful happens during travel, you just brush over it in the narration. But if there’s enough going on in a day, that it’s worth playing out, it’s probably an adventuring day. Not every encounter needs to be combat; if you’re challenging the PCs and they’re expending resources to overcome that challenge, that’s an encounter, be it an exploration, social, or combat encounter.

And people wonder why the exploration pillar is shortchanged...

 

[Charlaquin]

And people wonder why the exploration pillar is shortchanged...

You misunderstand me. The takeaway is not “skip all of travel,” it’s “treat travel as part of the adventure.” Travel days should be adventuring days. But if they aren’t, skip ‘em. Get to whatever the actual adventure is.

 

[Lanefan]

The travel to a place is not the main point of the adventure, so just spend through that and get to the dungeon. To make things more realistic, add a encounter, but have the players tell you what happened and how they overcome it. There is not initiative and dice rolling for the random encounter to the real adventure. You just tell the players; "You have been traveling for three days and finally reach the dungeon." "Along the way, you had an encounter with goblins- tell me about what your PC did."

Go around the table and each player tells about something cool their PC did and spells let off or cool smites or such. The Players can tell cooler stuff sometimes than dice and the rules can allow, and it does not really affect how the encounter was going to go.

I would never do it this way, as it takes away in-the-moment choice from the players/PCs: by the time the players learn of the goblin encounter their PCs are already at the dungeon a few game-days later.

For all I know - and it wouldn't be the first time or even the tenth that I'd have DMed - on defeating those goblins the PCs would then decide to backtrack them to their lair, kill the rest, and see if they'd any decent loot. On doing this they might (or might not) find the goblins to be the tip of an iceberg, drawing the party into an entirely different adventure than they (or I-as-DM!) expected.

 

[Ancalagon]

And this is something designers should be clear-eyed about when including "rules structures": A lot of players simply won't use those structures if there's a more naturalistic (or maybe just lazier) way to handle them. In general, I think the OSR has taken elements such as "time in a dungeon," encumbrance, and the like way more seriously than most tables did when we were playing those games at the time. I played AD&D in tournament events at GenCon in the 80s where all those rules really should have been used, and they still weren't. I suspect they didn't fall out of the books by accident.

Fast forward to 5e, where it's revealed in every other complaint about "nova damage" or unbalanced spellcasting that DMs don't use the game's existing rules structures for the adventuring day. That shouldn't come as any surprise, because (many/most?) players always ignore rules structures it feels more "natural" to ignore.

I don't necessarily think there's any way around this, but recognizing that actual play is likely to be more "unstructured" than you assume is probably a decent baseline from which to start. Some designs may make it very difficult to play in a unstructured way (not naming any names), but those designs run the risk that players simply reject them in favor of those that accommodate their preferred playstyle more easily.

Two points/questions

1: Did you actually look at those rules? As I said, it's one page. Go look and let me know what you think. It's a lot more streamlined than it used to be.

2: When you say players, do you mean everyone at the table, or specifically the players as in "the people who controls the PCs"?

I'm asking that because how GM operates and players operate tends... not to be the same. I recently learned that one of my players never read the PHB entry for their class. (it explained a few things...)

 

[Ancalagon]

You misunderstand me. The takeaway is not “skip all of travel,” it’s “treat travel as part of the adventure.” Travel days should be adventuring days. But if they aren’t, skip ‘em. Get to whatever the actual adventure is.

I once had my PCs go on a long journey - several weeks of travel - to reach the destination where the "big" adventure was. But I told myself "surely stuff happened!". So I created all sorts of encounters and mini side quests... but then I realized after a few session that this was just third-grade stuff (edit: third-rate, not grade...) , and I fast-forwarded the last few weeks to arrive to the adventure.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Yeah, I'm a big fan. My preferred version of D&D would be something like B/X with no thief class and more freeform player-driven/GM adjudicated rules for everything from "skills" to spellcasting.

Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game (1991). Or go even further and run rpgs "free kriegspiel" without any written rules. My most successful sessions have used the latter 'system' but it also has limitations and I wouldn't necessarily advocate for it or claim it's the best approach to rpg-ing.

 

[Oofta]

I once had my PCs go on a long journey - several weeks of travel - to reach the destination where the "big" adventure was. But I told myself "surely stuff happened!". So I created all sorts of encounters and mini side quests... but then I realized after a few session that this was just third-grade stuff, and I fast-forwarded the last few weeks to arrive to the adventure.

When I do exploration I either treat the entire trip like one big "dungeon" in that it's a series of possible encounters that tells a story. There has to be a reason for travel to be so dangerous as to justify playing it out though. Are they infiltrating enemy territory? Entering the mournlands which are inimical to all living things? So sailing the inner sea? Most days go fine but then there's a sudden squall/keep the boat from sinking, they have to decide if they're going to take shelter at the mysterious island or try to push on and so forth. But that doesn't happen every time, in general it's only going to happen if they decide that taking this particular route will save them enough travel time even if it is a known risk.

The vast majority of time I just hand wave it outside of some RP and PC planning where appropriate. I kind of do the Indiana Jones "red line from point A to point B" thing, possibly narrating some minor conflicts along the way.

 

[Reynard]

One place where I think D&D could feel more like other flavors of fantasy is if there was a lot more non combat magic built into the game. Certainly if wizards can make wands of fireball they can make magically warm blankets. Surely if they can summon demons from the pits of Hell they can summon air elementals to ventilate mine shafts. Magic with which to cook and clean and other domestic tasks.

 

[TwoSix]

One place where I think D&D could feel more like other flavors of fantasy is if there was a lot more non combat magic built into the game. Certainly if wizards can make wands of fireball they can make magically warm blankets. Surely if they can summon demons from the pits of Hell they can summon air elementals to ventilate mine shafts. Magic with which to cook and clean and other domestic tasks.

Eberron has this, both in the described narrative and with some rules support in Rising from the Last War and Exploring Eberron.

 

[aco175]

I would never do it this way, as it takes away in-the-moment choice from the players/PCs: by the time the players learn of the goblin encounter their PCs are already at the dungeon a few game-days later.

For all I know - and it wouldn't be the first time or even the tenth that I'd have DMed - on defeating those goblins the PCs would then decide to backtrack them to their lair, kill the rest, and see if they'd any decent loot. On doing this they might (or might not) find the goblins to be the tip of an iceberg, drawing the party into an entirely different adventure than they (or I-as-DM!) expected.

From my understanding of how this was to work, the player would talk about tracking the goblins back to their den and how their PC managed to sneak in and scout it out before backstabbing the chief. The other player may add how his mage threw a fireball and such. They could even talk about treasure, but I would need to limit that.

I have never tried it, but thought it could work with the travel portion of an adventure or with players who like to roleplay more and maybe not the combat part of the game.