OSR The Basic/Expert Dungeon

[Yora]

I've been very curious for a while about how a campaign would actually play if you follow the advice in the Basic and Expert rules just as they are written. It won't reveal how people actually commonly played the game back in 1982, but the longer I keep studying the original rules and try to apply them, the more I discover that a lot of things I first thought to be quirky, unnecessary, or impractical are actually really clever design. Now I don't want to dismiss anything before I've seen how it actually behaves in practice and impacts play.

The Basic rules have two pages describing a process to create an adventure (for a low level party). I don't think any of the B-Series modules (or any others from TSR I know about) actually applied these suggested guidelines, except maybe B1 In Search of the Unknow, which predates B/X by several years. But the kind of dungeon you'll get by following the guidelines seems really quite interesting.

The suggested content for dungeon rooms is as follows:
1/3 of rooms with monsters, 1/2 of which have treasure.
1/6 of rooms with traps, 1/3 of which protect treasure.
1/6 of rooms with special features (magic devices, machines, ...)
1/3 of rooms that are empty, but 1/6 of which have treasure

If you apply these to a dungeon with 36 rooms, you get the following:
6 rooms with monsters and treasure
6 rooms with monsters
2 rooms with traps and treasure
4 rooms with traps
6 rooms with special features
2 rooms with a hidden treasure
10 empty rooms

When you add to this the fact that less than half of the monsters encountered will be hostile to the party (because of reaction rolls), things do get quite interesting.

• In total, this 36 room dungeon will have 6 encounters with hostile monsters. Presuming this dungeon will take 60 turns to complete, there will roughly 4 to 6 encounters with wandering monsters, of which again only 2 or 3 will be hostile to the party. That is not a lot of combat.
• Only a third of rooms is occupied by creatures, many of which won't have need or the ability to put up lights. If you're underground, this is going to be a very dark place.
• There will be 10 treasures in the dungeon, which will hold the bulk of all the valuables that the players can find. That does seem much more exciting to find than picking up 36 small pouches of coins.
• Interestingly, about 3 of the 10 treasures will be in the possession of monsters that are not agressive towards the party. Getting their treasure might still seem very appealing to the players, though.
• Using the surprise rules, there will be an 8 in 36 chance (22%) that the party catches monsters unaware. This allows them to strike first against the monsters before a reaction roll is made. Not a hard choice when sneaking up on two ogers roasting a halfling on a spit, but what about a group of dirty humans with rusty weapons? (This is also where things like "goblins will always attack dwarves" become meaningful.)
• In light of all this, clerics getting only a single 1st level spell at level 2, and maybe not even taking cure light wounds every time, is not that outlandish. Similarly, mages being unable to contribute in combat at low levels also isn't quite the end of the world, as only a tenth of turns in a dungeon might inlude combat at all.

The kind of environment described by these parameters really does evoke the image of a nearly abandoned ruin, where something big and nasty might be right behind every corner, but most of the time there's still more silent darkness. Very different from the typical villain strongholds or ant hive caves I see in most adventures.

 

[Mannahnin]

A good breakdown.

One thing I'd like to note that B/X doesn't go into a lot of detail on- as in OD&D, the intent is for the DM to curate and deliberately design and place a few special rooms and treasure hoards, and for the random generation to be used to fill in the remainder. If you go purely by the random generation system, your dungeon will tend to be under-treasured. If you compare the output to any of the B series modules, this becomes apparent, as you've noted.

 

[Jer]

This is pretty much how I designed dungeons for the first 2-3 years I DMed. Except as Mannahnin notes there needed to be a few extra treasure hoards/special encounters sprinkled in that went beyond the random generation. I don't know where I picked up that advice - I would have assumed it was in the B/X or B/E books somewhere, but if it wasn't in those I never DMd OD&D so I don't know where I would have gotten it from.

When you add to this the fact that less than half of the monsters encountered will be hostile to the party (because of reaction rolls), things do get quite interesting.

Less than half the monsters encountered will be initially hostile to the party. IME in those days the party very quickly made sure that most monster encounters turned hostile even if the initial reaction roll didn't indicate it.

 

[Yora]

Random treasure generation is one of the few things that I actually did throw out before testing it first, and never had used in 3rd edition either. There are lots of monsters that won't have any meaningful treasures, and if you populate a dungeon with a collection of creatures for a common theme, you can easily have situations where there is no meaningful treasure to be found.
If you randomize which creatures populate all your dungeons, then the treasure to threat ratio will approach a statistical balance eventually. Where that balance actually ends up is a different matter, though.

The Basic rules recommend that characters should get about three times as many XP from treasure as from monsters. Which I think sounds like a reasonable balance. So my approach is to simply add up the XP of all the monsters in the rooms, multiply by 3, and put that many coins in all the treasure stashes that are in the dungeon. Doesn't really matter what kind of creatures are guarding the stashes that are being guarded. Not all monsters will be fought, but not all treasue will be found. That should roughly even out.

I don't include wandering monsters in that calculation. Random encounters are meant to be a bad thing. Something that players should want to avoid by not making noise or dragging their feet. They should mostly be a cost, with little chance for reward.

 

[Mannahnin]

This is pretty much how I designed dungeons for the first 2-3 years I DMed. Except as Mannahnin notes there needed to be a few extra treasure hoards/special encounters sprinkled in that went beyond the random generation. I don't know where I picked up that advice - I would have assumed it was in the B/X or B/E books somewhere, but if it wasn't in those I never DMd OD&D so I don't know where I would have gotten it from.

The B/X dungeon generation rules are pretty vague about it- they tell you to deliberately design & stock a few "special" rooms as I recall. I'd have to look at the book to quote the exact wording. OD&D is much more explicit that you're expected specifically to "thoughtfully place" some rooms and important hoards, particularly comprised of gems, jewelry, and magic items. The good stuff!

 

[Yora]

Somehow it had not actually occured to me that you could stock a dungeon by rolling on the tables. Even though I did have to calculate the ratios from the random tables. Just have gotten so used to doing that for years.

I wouldn't randomly generate a dungeon by rolling dice, even if I were to run in a generic D&D setting.

 

[FriendlyFiend]

The kind of environment described by these parameters really does evoke the image of a nearly abandoned ruin, where something big and nasty might be right behind every corner, but most of the time there's still more silent darkness. Very different from the typical villain strongholds or ant hive caves I see in most adventures.

Seeing it laid out like this makes me realise why I've enjoyed games like Forbidden Lands and Beyond the Wall so much - they evoke that 'abandoned ruin' feel so well.

 

[Yora]

It's an aesthetic that D&D has always continued to present itself as. But the actual game structure to make it an engaging form of play have been discontinued many decades ago. I always felt that D&D could never provide the kind of adventures that it was promising, or at least I couldn't make it happen.
It took me until quite recently to understand why going from room to room in a ruin with no plot would be fun, and I needed someone to spell it out for me. It becomes fun when it's a struggle where wrong choices can have long lasting consequences instead of a series of setpieces, that individually are nothing special.

 

[Charlaquin]

This is very useful information, and definitely puts the power of low-level PCs into context. The abandoned ruin vibe seems very cool, I’d be really interested to try a game that carefully observed these guidelines.

 

[Mannahnin]

It's an aesthetic that D&D has always continued to present itself as. But the actual game structure to make it an engaging form of play have been discontinued many decades ago. I always felt that D&D could never provide the kind of adventures that it was promising, or at least I couldn't make it happen.
It took me until quite recently to understand why going from room to room in a ruin with no plot would be fun, and I needed someone to spell it out for me. It becomes fun when it's a struggle where wrong choices can have long lasting consequences instead of a series of setpieces, that individually are nothing special.

Well, sadly the dungeon crawling procedures/turn-based exploration fell out of mechanical support starting in 1989, but some folks did continue playing this way, and the OSR has been re-popularizing this approach.

I've played this way periodically at conventions going back to around 2010, and more continually since the pandemic, since I joined a couple of OSR Discord servers and FB group finders, and got into some old school games online. I've been running one for about two years as well.