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Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 8372127" data-attributes="member: 97077">Frankly I find the OSR games to be boring (though they have better adventures than WotC once adapted). I play in a few and it's the lack of options (and slow progression) that really turn me off. My D&D 5e dungeon crawls are way, way better than OSR dungeon crawls in my view. And outside of variant encumbrance, I don't often add much in the way of variant or optional rules. Sometimes I do, like banning all spells with an NPC's name in it, but it's not all that necessary to have something approaching the classic experience without all the lack of depth (for my taste).There are some easy tweaks to make for resource expenditure and exploration challenges without making it boring. Some examples:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Every time you rest - short or long - you have to eat a ration and drink the contents of your water skin. No food, no water? No benefits from the rest. They'll go through resources quickly and feel the pressure to forage, hunt, or trade off some spell slots to deal with it.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Random encounters are triggered whenever the PCs make a lot of noise - a consequence for failure on doing certain tasks.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Wandering monsters never have treasure. Or they aren't worth XP. Or both.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Differentiate between "traveling random encounters" and "static random encounters." The former is when the PCs are moving around and include exploration opportunities. The latter are all monsters, a third of which are lurkers (defined here as creatures that will try to surprise the PCs).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">You only find treasure through exploration - finding secret caches in hidden objects or places.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Secret doors always lead to some beneficial place - a treasure room, a safe place to rest, or a shortcut around a dangerous trap.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Abstract corridor travel and just focus on specific rooms in a dungeon like set pieces, but make it so the corridor travel has meaningful options to choose from - the Halls of Grognard is a quicker route, but there are more random encounters there, whereas the Howling Caverns of Argh takes longer but is somewhat safer.</li> </ul></blockquote>

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