D&D (2024) What could One D&D do to bring the game back to the dungeon?

[tetrasodium]

These are not uses for gold. They are penalties for lacking gold. Gold is not a reward in this case, it is a necessity, and if the DM fails to provide it the game stalls. Which is also the case in all Gold as Xp systems where you can spend money to increase character power. It looks like a reward, but if you don't get it your power curve sags. This is really, really tricky. You want the PCs to covet gold but to do so you got to give the players incentive to get gold for their characters.

Seriously, I think Conan does this best. Gold is a mcguffin that motivates PCs, but between adventures it is all spent carousing. You play with open cards, telling the players that gold is something their characters want but that it is useless to them as players.

Of course, there are many motivations besides gold in RPGs and I prefer motivations such as personal goals, loyalty, advance in an organization and such, but for dungeon crawling gold is indeed quite a central concept.

The two are intrinsically linked. When the system makes efforts to oblivizte too much of what is important to dungeon crawling it does not repair the gaps simply by changing how long a rest takes. Frustratingly is the gzxt that it's easy to undo aby bit of what you are broad brushing as "grittiness" when it's not desired but very difficult to put back when it's removed.

When condidered deeper though it becomes obvious why it was removed. Removing specific elements of "grittiness" might be a big buff for some pcs but there will be other pcs who get little nothing or even harmed & they will be justified in complaining about the resulting zany no rosh super hero slog. If that consequence free twilight zone style state of glad handling removal of all hurdles is the default though it's easy to force the One True Way to stay just by dismissing anything said to the contrary because there is no alternative to point at while expressing frustration

 

[Bill Zebub]

Think of all the inns run by retired adventurers, charging like 2cp for ale. There was no way those places were solvent with all the offered amenities. Obviously they had a hoard somewhere in the cellar with all their treasure and they were just draining it slowly to give new adventurers a place to rest up and heal.

It just hit me: those tavernkeepers PUT THE GIANT RATS IN THE BASEMENT.

 

[Reynard]

It just hit me: those tavernkeepers PUT THE GIANT RATS IN THE BASEMENT.

You can't REALLY retire until you have a replacement lined up, I guess.

 

[James Gasik]

This discussion seems to be less about dungeoneering and more about general grittiness. Not all of us want that, I would be sad if this became the standard mode of the game.

There are rules in the DMG for changing what a long and short rest is that can be used. A series of similar optional rules could be added to achieve the same goal. But DnD in all its editions is a pretty heroic game by level 3 or so. in 1E, many campaigns never reached 3rd level, and that I think is the reason 1E games were considered gritty. But in the end, perhaps DnD is not the best game for this kind of campaign. A game with less return from experience, such as Rune Quest, might be more suitable.

One thing I do agree with is that darkvision is an issue. For me it is much an aesthetic issue, and an issue of racial balance for rogues. Halflings and humans, the most iconic rogues, lack darkvision. My solution is to negate darkvision's ability to see in the dark. Dim light functions as bright light, and that is the entire effect. This makes orcs, goblins and such dependent on light, which I feel is much more aesthetically pleasing and true to genre. But yes, it is also something that disrupts dungeon crawling and basically bans races who lack darkvision from such campaigns.

I'm not calling you out, Starfox, but this post is an example of something that others keep saying, and don't understand what the fuss is about.

Darkness

What you see with a torch

What you see with darkvision

How, exactly, is darkvision so problematic, when it imposes disadvantage on perception (and -5 to passive perception)? To see better than this, you still need a light source in 5e.

 

[Manbearcat]

I think from a mechanical perspective you are right. But from a human behavioral perspective I’m not so sure. Taking anything away from a player tends to be infinitely worse than adding something for them.

Yup, that is certainly the other aspect of it (how rule-sets interact with a micro table's social contract or a macro TTRPG's culture).

So the questions become:

* How much should development and design of TTRPGs be beholden to the phenomena of a micro table's social contract or a macro TTRPG's culture?

* What are the tradeoffs and stakes when you prioritize one (the applied science of tightly designed systems and leaving it to the table to remove layers of rules or tightness-of-design) over the other (heavy-handed social engineering of both the macro TTRPG culture and the trickle-down effect of micro social contract for individual tables) or vice versa?


My opinion is that the tradeoffs are too much and stakes too high because getting tightly-integrated, tightly-tuned design from the inverse is a titanic ask of individual tables (if its even possible...and sometimes it just isn't the case...you're not squeezing the tightly-integrated, tightly-tuned performance and track experience of a Porsche GT3 RS out of a Volkwagen GTI...even though they're the same parent company and both are performance platforms) while asking individual tables to manage their social contract (without the extreme downward pressure of system design that bakes in these kind of top-down social engineering issues) is considerably less of an ask (despite the reality that it will surely lend itself to some awkwardness, discomfort, and potential confrontation for some tables). Meanwhile, D&D has a robust history of stripping out extremely consequential mechanical architecture (Wandering Monster Clock, Rest Requirement Per 4 Exploration Turns, NPC Reaction, Gold for XP, Encumbrance/Loadout Constraints to name just a few) whose net effect is to drastically change the play paradigm.

Another alternative is to design and intensely stress-test a robust chassis with concentric, layered design (several games out there do this) where the designers not only design toward detaching various layers without unforeseen system reverberations, but also explain the layers of design (what they are, what they do, what removing them will do to the play paradigm) and how to add new layers (Fate, Burning Wheel Family, Apocalypse World, Cortex+, Strike!, Blades in the Darkness are the exemplars here). 5e aimed for this lofty goal at the beginning but abandoned the project at some point (therefore falling far, far short of it).

 

[Greg Benage]

I'm trying to decide if explicit procedures are a thing that would be worth incorporating. I know a lot of OSR folks swear by them but I don't actually recall using them so religiously back in the day. But, it might be harder to keep track of time -- which i do consider a major element of successful dungeon based play -- without them.

We never used the procedures.* I played in AD&D Open tournaments at GenCon in the early 80s and they didn't use the procedures more often than not. In the last few years, procedures have become the key to the whole thing.

I agree with others upthread: The real key is to create interesting adventure locations to explore -- places with stories to discover and secrets to reveal. It's not vastly different from creating a good investigation for Call of Cthulhu. It takes a fair amount of work, either on the part of the designer/publisher or the DM if you're DIY.

Circling back to MC: I do think if they want to keep the equipment, they ought to go ahead and design some 5e rules for it. Ten-foot poles give advantage on checks to find pits and large mechanical traps. Bullseye lanterns provide advantage on checks to locate secret doors or other concealed details. Whatever. Like it or not, we put stuff on the character sheet these days. ETA: They do this with some stuff (climber's kit, crowbar, magnifying glass, etc.) and these are the items that actually get used IME.

* I played with a grognard in college in '85-86 (megadungeon mapped out on several sheets of blotter-size graph paper, a dozen or more players at once, PCs always start at 1st level and may be adventuring with 7th levels, etc.). He used callers. I asked him why he didn't use the time-keeping rules and he said, "I have a brain for that." But his dungeon was cool, with a layered story that we uncovered bit by bit the deeper we explored.

 

[Manbearcat]

We never used the procedures.*

<snip>

I asked him why he didn't use the time-keeping rules and he said, "I have a brain for that." But his dungeon was cool, with a layered story that we uncovered bit by bit the deeper we explored.

With respect to your friend, the only work “I have a brain” is doing here is the game layer of time is either elided or handwaved to such a degree that all the discrete and intersecting decision-points around it are muted to the point of obsolescence and/or play around these things is a GM-directed experience, my 2 in this post above rather than my 1, rather than directed by players & system collide to create meaty game layer which churns out play outputs.

* Removing Wandering Monsters and Rest per 4 Turns in Moldvay and Torch cost in GP/loadout and Turns of Light (and type of light) matters a ton to Moldvay.

* Removing The Grind, suspending all the various Condition Recovery rules in Camp/Town, and Torch cost in Resources/Loadout and Turns of Light (and type of light) matters a ton to Torchbearer.

Stripping any of those things out of those games and having the GM hand-wave them or elide them has dramatic "game as game" impacts upon play (and fundamentally reorients play toward the GM-directed play of 2 in my post above...which may be exactly what you're going for...which is fine...but 1 and 2 are deeply divergent things so we should recognize that).

 

[Greg Benage]

With respect to your friend, the only work “I have a brain” is doing here is the game layer of time is either elided or handwaved to such a degree that all the discrete and intersecting decision-points around it are muted to the point of obsolescence and/or play around these things is a GM-directed experience, my 2 in this post above rather than my 1, rather than directed by players & system collide to create meaty game layer which churns out play outputs.

That's a lot, but it wasn't our experience. YMMV.

 

[Manbearcat]

That's a lot, but it wasn't our experience. YMMV.

I edited my post to include the bottom entry:

Stripping any of those things out of those games and having the GM hand-wave them or elide them has dramatic "game as game" impacts upon play (and fundamentally reorients play toward the GM-directed play of 2 in my post above...which may be exactly what you're going for...which is fine...but 1 and 2 are deeply divergent things so we should recognize that).

Do you disagree with that?

Maybe, if you would, take a look at my play types 1 and 2 of the post #321 that I linked directly above which also cross-references/links back to post #235 to flesh out play type 1. Is it your position that these two play types are basically the same? If you feel they're basically the same, that is probably the biggest difficulty of bridge-crossing in these conversations. If we can at least agree on some basic, distinguishing structure and principles, we can at least converse about (if not suss out) "how to do the thing." But if "everything is the thing" vs "this thing is this thing and that thing is that thing", then the question of "what could one D&D do to bring the game back to the dungeon" becomes pretty intractable IMO.

 

[Greg Benage]

* Removing Wandering Monsters and Rest per 4 Turns in Moldvay and Torch cost in GP/loadout and Turns of Light (and type of light) matters a ton to Moldvay.

So in the "rules" case, the players know that the DM is rolling for wandering monsters every turn (B23) or every two turns (B53). Presumably the DM communicates which rule he's using beforehand. This creates a "decision point" for the players, because they know if they spend a turn moving, entering a room, listening, or searching, they may or may not encounter a wandering monster.

In the "rulings, not rules" case, the DM says, "The more time you spend in the dungeon, the more likely you are to encounter wandering monsters. It may be more likely to encounter wandering monsters in certain well-traveled areas. Making noise or otherwise attracting attention to yourselves may also increase the likelihood of encountering wandering monsters." This also creates decision points for the players, as they consider the time they're spending in the dungeon, signs of activity in the area of the dungeon they're exploring, and the precautions they're taking (or not) to conceal their presence in the dungeon.

The idea that you can't have meaningful decision points without this, to me, is a little odd:

Order of Events in One Game Turn
1. The DM rolls for wandering monsters (Id6; see page B53).
2. The party moves, enters room, listens, and searches.
3. If monsters are not encountered, the turn ends. If monsters are
encountered, the DM rolls for the Number Appearing.
4. The DM rolls 2d6 to check the distance between the monsters
and the party.
5. The DM rolls Id6 for both the monsters and the party to check
for surprise.
The DM and the party roll Id6 or for initiative to see who
moves first.
6. The DM rolls 2d6 for the Monster Reaction.
7. The party and the monsters react:
If both sides are willing to talk, the DM rolls for monster reactions
and initiative, as necessary.
If one side runs away, the DM should check the chance of
Evasion and Pursuit.
If combat begins, the DM should use the Combat
Sequence to handle combat.
8. End of Turn. Where necessary, the DM should check the character's
remaining hit points, whether or not they need rest
(see page B24), any changes in the party's marching order,
or possessions, their encumbrance (see page B20), their
sources of light, the durations of any spells in progress, and
the total time the party has spent in the dungeon.

Again, YMMV. I don't entirely get people who love the procedures, but have no problem with them loving the procedures.