D&D General Hot Take: Dungeon Exploration Requires Light Rules To Be Fun

[pemerton]

I'm just hard pressed to see a particular distinction between "The whole session is going to be about penetrating this building, avoiding traps and alarms, fighting things when we must (but it'd be ideal if we could avoid that), doing what we came to do and picking up any side valuables along the way" as distinct from a dungeon crawl unless the latter has to mean its freeform to you, and that describes any number of Shadowrun missions.

You're focusing on the fiction, not on the process of play.

Just to give one illustration of the point: it's impossible to detail the contents of a corporate building in an adventure key; and their are no conventions that establish where the key info/clue/<whatever> is to be found in the building (eg it could be a bit of paper under a paperweight, or a file on a computer, or a memory card discarded in a bin, or . . . ).

Whereas a dungeon in the classic sense works (in part) because the salient contents of the location can all be detailed in the key, and therefore the play can centre the players and GM directly intuiting the fiction. And the salience of the salient contents is the product of conventions about how architecture and furniture in a dungeon feature in play.

EDIT because I saw this:

The one thing you probably won't see in a cyberpunk game is the somewhat traditional (but often kind of dumb) completely independent problems, which might make what you're talking about a problem. Basically, the first time you trigger a real alarm or encounter, unless you can find a way to spoof the situation you're now on the clock to finish what you want to do and get out before everything the place has to deploy comes after you; you're not going to get "Well you've fought with the ogres but the trolls on the other side of the area neither know nor care". I'm not sure that seems likely in any modern game (though it can happen in post-apocalypse games).

Right, so this highlights the scene-framing rules that govern a dungeon crawl: they're based around (i) where the players tell the GM their PCs are moving on the map, and (ii) the actions the players declare around opening portals, which are among the most salient features of the architecture and furniture.

That's a very distinctive process of play. It's not just about the fiction. (Although the fiction of "exploring an ancient ruin" helps put a fig-leaf of verisimilitude over the process.)

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't know that I can, or should even try to, convince you, but I'll put it this way:

When you have a lot of exploration ahead of you, light rules (meaning things are concise and systems are employed efficiently) allows you to cover more ground more quickly, which keeps the dungeon crawl from turning into a boring slog.

Well, you feel what you feel, but I always found wide-ranging dungeons where most of the areas you hit were either dull or trivial pretty boring no matter how much of it you covered.

 

[Reynard]

Well, you feel what you feel, but I always found wide-ranging dungeons where most of the areas you hit were either dull or trivial pretty boring no matter how much of it you covered.

That's just bad dungeon design. It doesn't mean dungeon crawling is bad.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That's just bad dungeon design. It doesn't mean dungeon crawling is bad.

No, but it doesn't mean speed makes it better, either. I'd rather have less areas with more engagement than the other way around.

 

[Gus L]

I think this is only true when they don't also have heavy mechanical support for exploration.

There's the second and third parts of the problem though...

A) Can you have a functional system that heavily mechanically supports EVERYTHING. I don't think you can, not if you expect to actually prepare and play games. Complexity takes play time, it takes prep time and it takes both player and referee attention. It's easy to imagine the perfect simulation (not in the GSN sense here) that has everything and calculates everything ... impossible in practice of course, but a popular thing for designers to strive for. You get something like GURPS or some 1990's huge heartbreaker type thing. It's playable, but take so much real time that it's very very hard for anything to happen in the 4-6 hour game session. Dungeon Crawling means moving through several rooms a session, because it depends on discovery, supply depletion and the tension around exploration's risk v. reward for its fun. You can't get much of that if it takes 6 hours to run a search of a single room and a combat encounter with three vermin.

So instead one has to pick what one emphasizes - define the locus of play.

B) Rules though aren't the only or even main way to pinpoint the locus, sometimes they can do the opposite. For example, older D&D's extensive rules for combat can act as a guardrail - they make combat dangerous to the characters and represent a penalty or potential lose condition (an inevitable one that also has the fun of gambling in it) when players push their luck too far, navigate poorly or run out of other options/ideas. The rules act to move play quickly through the combat and take agency away from the players to a degree, leaving their characters' fates to the dice and chance (at least to a degree). Resources like HP, spells, equipment and even PCs or retainers will be lost even in victory.

the rules for exploration are instead relatively simple compared to combat. Why? Because exploration play is meant to take up more time, to be the product of decision making among the party and the loop of referee description of the environment, player questions, referee answers, player stating character activity. The players interact directly with the fiction, largely unconstrained by rules, and instead appeal to and manipulate the fiction directly - they solve problems by reaching a consensus with the referee about how the setting functions (you can wade safely across a fast dungeon stream if your armor is in bundles you toss across and and you go over holding a secured rope etc). This takes real world time of course, more then combat, because the players and referee have to work out that consensus through description -> question -> answer ->action -> arbitration.

Rules to the extent they exist are about creating risk for caution, delay, and repeated questions or multiple efforts to act. That's how supply depletion and random encounters work. More rules don't make this process work better necessarily.

The one thing you probably won't see in a cyberpunk game is the somewhat traditional (but often kind of dumb) completely independent problems ... "Well you've fought with the ogres but the trolls on the other side of the area neither know nor care". I'm not sure that seems likely in any modern game.

It does seem somewhat unlikely in modern games ... but also in fantasy games where the location one is running is a single faction location. So if you're playing cyberpunk and somehow you have "Corporation A" and "Corporation B" in the same location and they don't like each other, precisely the same thing could happen. This doesn't really speak to mechanics though or the definition of Dungeon that I'm getting at, but more to the nature of most modern scenarios ... that they aren't exploration based by design but rather heists, sieges or assassinations. Such adventure types/goals and locations work fine in fantasy as well of course, and we have examples dating back to the earliest adventures.

 

[Aldarc]

But I do think one could theoretically create a heavier, more involved system that was highly focused on dungeon exploration. Darkest Dungeon is a good example of that in the video game space. I’m not sure, but I think maybe Torchbearer would be a decent tabletop analogue?

I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but Torchbearer supposedly served as the inspiration for Darkest Dungeon. The creators of DD even brought out one of the designers of Torchbearer - not sure which one - to run the DD designers through some adventures in the early stages of their design.

So here me out on this.

Humans aren't inherently good at logistics. The more things you need to track, the less good players are at tracking them. And as RPGs evolved, the weight of logistics has moved from gear management to ability management.

Take a handful of D&D characters and plop them in a dungeon/hex crawl. Think of all the stuff they must track.

HP/health
Magic/spell slots
Class/race features, including uses per day
Feats and other build features
Limited magic uses (charges)
One shot items (potions and scrolls)
Food and water
Ammo
Encumbrance
Gold and treasure
Rests and recharge systems
Light sources
Pet or mount gear and supplies (including feed)

That's a lot of things per day, and even if you cut a character down to it's bare minimum (a human champion fighter) that's still a lot of numbers to monitor. I'm not surprised that tracking ammo and food is something that sounds fun in theory but gets short-changed in the mix because combat and exploring is more fun than counting arrows.

IME, there has been a lot of innovation in the OSR (and OSR-adjacent) sphere that makes all of this much easier to track and quick to play (e.g., Black Hack, Mausritter, Forbidden Lands, etc.), including things like the Usage Die.

A couple principles for OS (especially dungeon) play from the Old School Primer
• Rulings, not Rules
• Player Skill, not Character Abilities

The reason, I think, that basic dnd became the lingua franca of the OSR is not only compatibility with old modules, but because it allows for the above principles in gameplay. That is, it's not about the amount of rules, but a stance toward the rules, which is to subordinate them to GM rulings, especially for the sake of quick play. Rules lite games, that is, games that don't have that many rules to begin with, just more easily facilitate this kind of approach to the game. Modern OSR games would take this further and simplify even more (compared to B/X). The core resolution mechanics of Into the Odd, Knave, The Black Hack, etc are very simple and could be fit onto a page.

I think that another reason why B/X became the lingua franca of the OSR is ironically because of the Forge and Google+. The Forge tended to respect focused games. There were a number of designers from the Forge, such as Luke Crane (a co-designer of Torchbearer), who looked retrospectively at B/X as a game that told you how it was meant to be played as a game! So there were indie designers playing B/X RAW, reporting their play sessions, and discussing its implied "game philosophy" with seriousness and admiration. So not only did B/X get boosted by what you mention, but also by Forge-inspired indie designers who praised B/X for delivering a good game that did what said it would do. There were definitely a number of Forge/indie designers who also had a foot planted in the OSR scene as well.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but Torchbearer supposedly served as the inspiration for Darkest Dungeon. The creators of DD even brought out one of the designers of Torchbearer - not sure which one - to run the DD designers through some adventures in the early stages of their design.

I didn’t know that, but it makes a lot of sense. I would love to play in a Torchbearer game some time.

 

[Thomas Shey]

There's the second and third parts of the problem though...

A) Can you have a functional system that heavily mechanically supports EVERYTHING. I don't think you can, not if you expect to actually prepare and play games. Complexity takes play time, it takes prep time and it takes both player and referee attention. It's easy to imagine the perfect simulation (not in the GSN sense here) that has everything and calculates everything ... impossible in practice of course, but a popular thing for designers to strive for. You get something like GURPS or some 1990's huge heartbreaker type thing. It's playable, but take so much real time that it's very very hard for anything to happen in the 4-6 hour game session. Dungeon Crawling means moving through several rooms a session, because it depends on discovery, supply depletion and the tension around exploration's risk v. reward for its fun. You can't get much of that if it takes 6 hours to run a search of a single room and a combat encounter with three vermin.

So instead one has to pick what one emphasizes - define the locus of play.

B) Rules though aren't the only or even main way to pinpoint the locus, sometimes they can do the opposite. For example, older D&D's extensive rules for combat can act as a guardrail - they make combat dangerous to the characters and represent a penalty or potential lose condition (an inevitable one that also has the fun of gambling in it) when players push their luck too far, navigate poorly or run out of other options/ideas. The rules act to move play quickly through the combat and take agency away from the players to a degree, leaving their characters' fates to the dice and chance (at least to a degree). Resources like HP, spells, equipment and even PCs or retainers will be lost even in victory.

the rules for exploration are instead relatively simple compared to combat. Why? Because exploration play is meant to take up more time, to be the product of decision making among the party and the loop of referee description of the environment, player questions, referee answers, player stating character activity. The players interact directly with the fiction, largely unconstrained by rules, and instead appeal to and manipulate the fiction directly - they solve problems by reaching a consensus with the referee about how the setting functions (you can wade safely across a fast dungeon stream if your armor is in bundles you toss across and and you go over holding a secured rope etc). This takes real world time of course, more then combat, because the players and referee have to work out that consensus through description -> question -> answer ->action -> arbitration.

But see, I don't see "manipulate the fiction directly" as being a good substitute for rules in a lot of exploration adjacent situations. (At least no more than it should be in combat, too). Climbing should be mostly about what the character knows how to do, not what the player does; same for searching, survival rolls and a lot of other things.

I think its a fine line between "The character could be run on autopilot" and "Everything is about description", but its a line worth finding.

I mean I'll be pretty blunt: I know this is a lot of the real world situation for some people and desirable for others, but an RPG where you can get most of what I'd want done in session in four hours isn't likely an RPG I'd find worth playing.

It does seem somewhat unlikely in modern games ... but also in fantasy games where the location one is running is a single faction location. So if you're playing cyberpunk and somehow you have "Corporation A" and "Corporation B" in the same location and they don't like each other, precisely the same thing could happen. This doesn't really speak to mechanics though or the definition of Dungeon that I'm getting at, but more to the nature of most modern scenarios ... that they aren't exploration based by design but rather heists, sieges or assassinations. Such adventure types/goals and locations work fine in fantasy as well of course, and we have examples dating back to the earliest adventures.

As I said, the problem is I don't usually find it makes all that much sense to have those sort of competing but hostile groups in the same structure, and when it is, I'd expect the border areas to be very heavily locked down. And that's not much less true in fantasy, honestly. You can make it work to a limited degree with non-intelligent opponents and some decent dead space in whatever structure/cavern complex/what-all you going on, but the more there are intelligent opponents in there that can be a real thread on a room to room basis to PCs, the more I'd expect some degree of cooperation among them, and that gets right back to the encapsulation of the areas not making a lot of sense. I mean, its not as bad as "all we have to do is make an intercom call" but it just doesn't entirely hold water there'd be no connection and response to the sound of a battle.

I guess the argument I'm making is "exploration" in the scale of a lot of traditional dungeons either should have very limited number of opponents, not very smart ones, or ones that operate by constraints that have nothing to do with anything mundane. Or they're still one big fight looking for a place to happen in a way that isn't really that distinct from the mega-corp situation.

Edit: To make it clear, I'm not telling people what they should or shouldn't enjoy, but it appears to me from reading this that what people are calling a "dungeon crawl" here is often dependent on what seems to me on the least logical and most stylized corner of what I saw called that back in the day. Which is fine if its what they want, but its turned "dungeon crawl" into a very heavily term-of-art thing.

 

[Aldarc]

I don't know that I can, or should even try to, convince you, but I'll put it this way:

When you have a lot of exploration ahead of you, light rules (meaning things are concise and systems are employed efficiently) allows you to cover more ground more quickly, which keeps the dungeon crawl from turning into a boring slog.

Hot Take: If you require rules to be light to enjoy dungeon-crawling, then that may say something about how you normally see dungeon-crawling as an unenjoyable slog.

I don't think that the best dungeon-crawling TTRPGs are necessarily "rules light." (Torchbearer is not.) I do think that many such games strip out a lot of the non-dungeoneering rules so that they can more tightly focus their rules on the dungeon-crawling aspects of gameplay as their primary form of gameplay. Generally what happens when those dungeon-crawl games start expanding their scope outside of the dungeon, however, is that the rules also get heavier and crunchier, often bolting on additional sub-systems. However, the dungeoneering rules stay the same.

I would estimate, for example, that the dungeoneering exploration procedures of 5e are probably lighter than B/X because the former game doesn't really care about it like the latter does. B/X dungeon exploration can be pretty involved, and I remember Luke Crane talking about this on Google+ when he played the game RAW. Which is more rules light when it comes to dungeoneering play procedures and rules: 5e D&D or B/X D&D? Probably 5e D&D. But which is the better dungeon exploration game: 5e D&D or B/X D&D? Probably B/X but that's what the game cares about and the rules are meant to facilitate.

 

[Reynard]

Hot Take: If you require rules to be light to enjoy dungeon-crawling, then that may say something about how you normally see dungeon-crawling as an unenjoyable slog.

I don't think that the best dungeon-crawling TTRPGs are necessarily "rules light." (Torchbearer is not.) I do think that many such games strip out a lot of the non-dungeoneering rules so that they can more tightly focus their rules on the dungeon-crawling aspects of gameplay as their primary form of gameplay. Generally what happens when those dungeon-crawl games start expanding their scope outside of the dungeon, however, is that the rules also get heavier and crunchier, often bolting on additional sub-systems. However, the dungeoneering rules stay the same.

I would estimate, for example, that the dungeoneering exploration procedures of 5e are probably lighter than B/X because the former game doesn't really care about it like the latter does. B/X dungeon exploration can be pretty involved, and I remember Luke Crane talking about this on Google+ when he played the game RAW. Which is more rules light when it comes to dungeoneering play procedures and rules: 5e D&D or B/X D&D? Probably 5e D&D. But which is the better dungeon exploration game: 5e D&D or B/X D&D? Probably B/X but that's what the game cares about and the rules are meant to facilitate.

If you are going to suggest 5E is a lighter game than B/X, I'm not sure there's much to discuss.