Skip to main content

Relax and enjoy the crawl: how CSI-esque behavior by the players can spoil the dungeon crawl experience

Relax and enjoy the crawl: how CSI-esque behavior by the players can spoil the dungeon crawl experience

If there’s something that I don’t like anymore, over the years of playing and running OSR/OS games (and I don’t know if I ever liked it) is: the fear of exploration due to traps and surprises during the dungeon crawling.

When players understand the playstyle and how ten foot pole exploration works, it can often cause the real focus of exploration in the dungeon crawl to be lost.

Of course, this is all according to my experience and opinion. What I think is best about the dungeon crawl is the exploration experience itself. And by exploration I mean: looking at how and why this structure exists geologically, architectonically, socially and how it was organized around that.

When someone wants to visit/explore, even as a tourist, a new (possibly dangerous) place, something like the history of the place and its origin and even a contemplation of the environment to understand the place in a broad way, will not only help to avoid dangers and even understand the challenges, but to give mean to the delve.

The delve doesn’t have to be an Indiana Jones-style exploration, with traps and adrenaline all over it. If it’s still unclear, my point is: When too much time is wasted in anticipating danger and even avoiding it, this kind of exploration can get lost.

If the dungeon is a rock formation, its geological origin can be explored metaphysically into how the “gods shaped” that location, or how the geological history of this place resulted with this formation; still how and why the current inhabitants explored and shaped the dungeon. If it is a construction, more history can be explored and revealed. All of this can be linked to a metaplot, so that hooks, new revelations and insertions of this larger plot can be presented here. That’s why I think it’s not just a matter of survival, but of moving on with the fiction and story.

It’s clear to me that survival and looting tournament OS playstyle may have guided all of this. This can be fun for an unassuming one shot, very close to a survival board game-ish dungeon exploration game. But I personally expect a little more density in a campaign or an adventure.

Another criticism similar to the one above, is to only focus on hack and slash exploration, I really don’t like it. I think it might just be me, and I might be giving a lot of expectation on a simple dungeon crawl, but I’d really like a whole plot built around it.

So, although your PC will most likely die, relax and enjoy the crawl!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Game Design Choices fo MiniBX Hello friends, as you people probably noticed, I’m running an itch funding for my new game MiniBX here . It is an attempt to make this game, already released in Portuguese, a real thing in English as well. I ran the playtest, or the first play of it, with my kids, and also in a Neverland mini campaign with close friends. It ran well and, of course, some adjustments were made during the sessions, so the English version is a bit different from the Portuguese one. I can’t lie that it has been some time since I engaged in a big campaign of this game, or played several sessions, so I kinda forgot what my design choices were. But, the recent reviews of the game made me remember that it is kind of a cool game with some interesting design choices. So I will try to write about the most important design choices here. Of course this is an attempt to get this game funded and all its awesome stretch goals, so if you like this idea back it, it w...
10 comments
Read more

Hollow Earth Magic: mechanical changes in MiniBx Core

  I’m working on a hollow earth setting for MiniBX, and started thinking about some mechanical changes to fit. In others blog posts when I beginning to work with the setting, I have wrote about the setting magic flavor, how the flux of it was energy and how this energy is drowned by the environment and it depletes the very world, the posts here explain a bit how this was being structured: energy flux, as magic , hollow earth first idea , corrupted magic . To synthetize all posts ideas:  magic is draining users and the world itself vital energy,  the ancient society in the depths knows and started to (and almost completely) leave/left  this world. Monsters, strange tech were left behind. The surface society is not aware about all of this, just some “sages” or apocalypse prophets. The original Minibx magic rule does not take this in consideration, originally it reads:  Archetypes like Wizard, Cleric, and Elf allow players to cast spells. At first level, Elf and W...
Post a Comment
Read more

Wilderness Challenges - A short rule and some insights about wilderness exploration.

In another short trip to the countryside of my state in Brazil, I was lucky enough to visit one of the most beautiful and isolated waterfalls I have ever seen. In my perspective, the reason for its isolation is that it is very, very hard to reach there.  Of course, my RPG mind made some parallels and tried to figure how to transfer the challenge/adventure I have lived, to a game mechanic. Most wilderness encounters in d&d-like games are monsters, some modules have some odd places, climate challenges, and of course they all make a lot of sense.   But if we consider the OS/OSR paradigm that the characters are not heroes but common people, as I indeed am, I can tell that a trail like this can be very difficult and challenging, it surely can cost the characters lives. All I am asking is for any wilderness random encounter table to have a 10% chance of A WILDERNESS CHALLENGE, and, of course, I will describe below a proto rule for it. (Yes, I am aware of the cool 4e rule of...
Post a Comment
Read more