Manbearcat
Legend
By my reckoning, there are four types of "crawls":
1) The kind I posted about prior that features tight systemization and procedures that exert extreme and consistent downward pressure on the "crawlers" toward a Skilled Play paradigm, decision-point-intensiveness around a myriad of both discrete and converging parts. Moldvay Basic and Torchbearer are the exemplars here. I'm not going to recapitulate everything again, so just refer back to this post.
2) A heavily GM-directed experience where the crawl features free play, serial exploration and is more about performative aspects, ephemera (map and key and boxed text and possibly handouts), mood, tone, aesthetic than what (1) is about. GM's extrapolate their conception of the dungeon ecology and they play their mental model of the simulation while players try to suss out the GM's mental model while immersing themselves in all the stuff in that first sentence. Yes, resources are brought to bear and challenges are undertaken, but it is an extremely divergent experience from (1) above due to a number of reasons, structure and systemization of play + prospective roles and GMing techniques chief among them (both the inputs and the experience of the play).
3) Scene-based crawling with scene-based (or overwhelmingly so) PC build focus, where there is an express goal, codified assets for the opposition that the GM can bring to bear, problem areas/obstacles/conflicts, and action and conflict resolution mechanics that resolve the PCs interaction with problem areas/obstacles. Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy or MHRP, Dogs in the Vineyard Towns, D&D 4e, Blades in the Dark Scores, Mouse Guard Missions. These might be Social Crawls, Wilderness Crawls, Supernatural Crawls (like managing an occult situation/site), or an actual Delve into forgotten ruins et al.
4) The AW/DW "structured free form featuring snowballing play" approach where you have an attrition model and multi-faceted resource paradigm that is tightly systematized and heavy GM constraint integrated into the play. You have a Threat to deal with (which has a dramatic need, attendant moves, and stats/resources to bring to bear against you) and as you attempt to resolve it (or ignore it) it moves down its Clock until its Doom/Countdown goes off if the PCs haven't sufficiently intervened and resolved it. There are similarities to this and Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy/MHRP (because of the way Doom gathers and goes off in those games), but the encoding engine and the structure of play is entirely different (structured freeform with snowballing move resolution vs closed scene resolution > transition > closed scene resolution).
As it was conceived and is presently constituted, 5e can do (2) above. But it cannot do any of (1), (3), and (4) without a profound overhaul (not just in the PC build paradigm, the encounter budgeting, the core engine & action resolution, but also because the role of the GM, and the GMing techniques/principles that undergird that, in all of those other 3 are profoundly different than the role of the GM in (2) and all of the other aspects of system play deeply into that. You can't just say "hey GM, do (1) or (3) or (4)"...that is basically a non-sequitur as the systemization of those games were developed and ultimately systemitized to say "GM...here is your role and the techniques and principles to fulfill that...you'll do these particular things and not deviate because you'll muck up the fundamental paradigm of play if you go outside of that").
Because of that, it seems very unlikely that One D&D will amend the core and auxiliary aspects of 5e sufficient to pull off the other ones. I know you can design for (1) and get (3) by basically stripping away a few components if the game is concentrically designed well enough (modular). Torchbearer is designed entirely off the Mouse Guard engine so its trivial to get Mouse Guard out of Torchbearer by simply stripping away a few components of play. You could then basically get (2) out of it by ignoring structure/rules to the GM's heart is content, making a heavily GM-directed and GM-mediated game out of Mouse Guard basically (with a heavy focus on all of the stuff in 2 rather than the stuff of Mouse Guard). But going the opposite direction in the build paradigm (going from basically free form and GM-directed to deeply codified, deeply structured, deeply procedure-driven, GM-constrained play) is an ask that is far too profound.
I feel like I've been transported by to late 2012/2013 where I was saying these same things; from an applied science perspective, its infinitely easier to loosen and remove structure from a tightly designed game engine (and insert GM mediation and curation in the stead of those things) than it is to do the inverse.
1) The kind I posted about prior that features tight systemization and procedures that exert extreme and consistent downward pressure on the "crawlers" toward a Skilled Play paradigm, decision-point-intensiveness around a myriad of both discrete and converging parts. Moldvay Basic and Torchbearer are the exemplars here. I'm not going to recapitulate everything again, so just refer back to this post.
2) A heavily GM-directed experience where the crawl features free play, serial exploration and is more about performative aspects, ephemera (map and key and boxed text and possibly handouts), mood, tone, aesthetic than what (1) is about. GM's extrapolate their conception of the dungeon ecology and they play their mental model of the simulation while players try to suss out the GM's mental model while immersing themselves in all the stuff in that first sentence. Yes, resources are brought to bear and challenges are undertaken, but it is an extremely divergent experience from (1) above due to a number of reasons, structure and systemization of play + prospective roles and GMing techniques chief among them (both the inputs and the experience of the play).
3) Scene-based crawling with scene-based (or overwhelmingly so) PC build focus, where there is an express goal, codified assets for the opposition that the GM can bring to bear, problem areas/obstacles/conflicts, and action and conflict resolution mechanics that resolve the PCs interaction with problem areas/obstacles. Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy or MHRP, Dogs in the Vineyard Towns, D&D 4e, Blades in the Dark Scores, Mouse Guard Missions. These might be Social Crawls, Wilderness Crawls, Supernatural Crawls (like managing an occult situation/site), or an actual Delve into forgotten ruins et al.
4) The AW/DW "structured free form featuring snowballing play" approach where you have an attrition model and multi-faceted resource paradigm that is tightly systematized and heavy GM constraint integrated into the play. You have a Threat to deal with (which has a dramatic need, attendant moves, and stats/resources to bring to bear against you) and as you attempt to resolve it (or ignore it) it moves down its Clock until its Doom/Countdown goes off if the PCs haven't sufficiently intervened and resolved it. There are similarities to this and Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy/MHRP (because of the way Doom gathers and goes off in those games), but the encoding engine and the structure of play is entirely different (structured freeform with snowballing move resolution vs closed scene resolution > transition > closed scene resolution).
As it was conceived and is presently constituted, 5e can do (2) above. But it cannot do any of (1), (3), and (4) without a profound overhaul (not just in the PC build paradigm, the encounter budgeting, the core engine & action resolution, but also because the role of the GM, and the GMing techniques/principles that undergird that, in all of those other 3 are profoundly different than the role of the GM in (2) and all of the other aspects of system play deeply into that. You can't just say "hey GM, do (1) or (3) or (4)"...that is basically a non-sequitur as the systemization of those games were developed and ultimately systemitized to say "GM...here is your role and the techniques and principles to fulfill that...you'll do these particular things and not deviate because you'll muck up the fundamental paradigm of play if you go outside of that").
Because of that, it seems very unlikely that One D&D will amend the core and auxiliary aspects of 5e sufficient to pull off the other ones. I know you can design for (1) and get (3) by basically stripping away a few components if the game is concentrically designed well enough (modular). Torchbearer is designed entirely off the Mouse Guard engine so its trivial to get Mouse Guard out of Torchbearer by simply stripping away a few components of play. You could then basically get (2) out of it by ignoring structure/rules to the GM's heart is content, making a heavily GM-directed and GM-mediated game out of Mouse Guard basically (with a heavy focus on all of the stuff in 2 rather than the stuff of Mouse Guard). But going the opposite direction in the build paradigm (going from basically free form and GM-directed to deeply codified, deeply structured, deeply procedure-driven, GM-constrained play) is an ask that is far too profound.
I feel like I've been transported by to late 2012/2013 where I was saying these same things; from an applied science perspective, its infinitely easier to loosen and remove structure from a tightly designed game engine (and insert GM mediation and curation in the stead of those things) than it is to do the inverse.
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