Gauntlets and Embracing the Funhouse Dungeon

I was perusing my archives and came across this post on Dark Souls.  The section on gauntlets jumped out at me.  As noted previously, I've been considering trying to run an open-table OSE game, stealing bits from ACKS and elsewhere.  But I would need a dungeon.  I haven't been able to bring myself to make one.

My past dungeons have been fairly simulation-driven.  What was this place before, what was this room when it was inhabited.  And my players never really...  seemed to realize that background was there and make inferences based on it.  And because they were built to be "real", my dungeons tended to be similar to each other, most of the time.  I can point to definite similarities in the layout of the mountaintop monastery in the Bjornaborg campaign and the necromancer academy in the Shieldlands campaign, four years apart.

I think it was some combination of boredom and too much work that made me tired of making dungeons.  Rathell was a reaction against this, and I consider it a partial success - it was topologically interesting and fun to build and run NPC opposition in.  But it was too much Rathell.

Gauntlets provide an interesting out for "too much of the same".  Take a large dungeon.  Split it into "levels".  Jayquay connections between the levels.  Make the levels "test" different things.

• Class gauntlets - does your party have / have enough
• Clerics - undead (especially incorporeal), disease and poison
• Thieves - most dungeons are sort of thief-checks already.  Traps, locks, sheer surfaces, secret doors, enemies who sound alarms.
• Fighters - hard to say, because they are already so central / default.  I guess in ACKS where fighters cleave up, decent-sized groups of enemies who aren't big enough to waste a sleep on.
  
• Wizards - also hard to say, because they do too much.  Big non-undead lair fights where you need sleep, as a low-level example.
  
• Gear checks
• Ranged weapons - open areas with lots of broken terrain and pits and enemies who have ranged weapons 
• Melee - fog, lots of small rooms and tight corners
  
• Reach weapons - enemies who are dangerous to engage closely (poison blood, damage auras) or who have reach themselves
• Small weapons - confined spaces, enemies who grapple, enemies who swallow whole
  
• Iron spikes - areas with lots of portcullises and evil doors that shut by themselves unless spiked open
  
• Rope - pits
  
• Lanterns - wind that extinguishes torches (before continual light anyway)
  
• Axes, shovels, picks - wood, earthen, and stone barriers (or Barrowmaze's bricked-up doorways, for example)
  
• Lycanthropes and vampires already sort of fit this model as "gear check monsters" 
• And gargoyles and other enemies immune to nonmagic weapons
• Are shriekers and cave locusts silence 15' radius checks?
  
• Spell - maybe the right way to look at wizard checks is areas that get a lot easier if you have a particular spell available, and to consider it on a per-spell basis.  Detect Magic, Read Language, Dispel Magic, and the elemental resistances seem like sort of obvious ones.
  
• Culture / practice / adaptation checks
• Mapping - mazes, areas with lots of very similar rooms where it's easy to get lost if you don't map or do it badly
  
• Speed - areas with long hallways that take lots of time to traverse and "the park closes at sundown" areas.  Fast enemies who pursue.
  
• Encumbrance / carrying capacity - heavy treasure, heavy doors that need a lot of strength to open.
  
• Big party - 20' wide or wider hallways, where holding the line with just PCs isn't going to work
• Small party - 5' wide hallways, where large parties just get strung out and can't bring their power to bear on any particular point.
• Diplomacy - big sentient lairs who you can negotiate with but who are very dangerous if approached aggressively
• Courage / resolve - Strong but low-morale enemies, magic tricks that reward the first player to solve them (as also seen in Barrowmaze)
  
• Temperance (vs greed) - monkey traps, where the encumbrance is sufficient that if you try to take all of the loot you get got on the way out
  

And then you pick multiple.  So you might have a crypt with lots of locks and traps and undead which is a lot easier with both clerics and thieves, or a maze of narrow twisty passages full of portcullises which needs mapping, iron spikes, melee, and small parties to traverse efficiently.  And then if there's an area that your party is ill-suited for, you explore for routes that let you bypass it for areas that are better for you.

The interesting combinations are probably the ones that put you on the horns of dilemma.  Stacking both fog and lots of narrow corridors isn't very interesting, because they both encourage melee.  An area full of pits and portcullises and archers and high wind is interesting because you need a bunch of different gear and it all competes for encumbrance.

I'm not proposing to go maximalist with this.  Obviously players will find novel solutions, and that's good.  And there's no need to make every area so tightly-themed that (say) there are no living monsters in the crypt.  And if you can find a way for it to make sense within the world, great.  But using checks / testing as a source of inspiration for mixing things up sounds very useful.

I feel...  sort of dumb for not looking at designing dungeons for old-school play this way.  It's a very gamist lens.  It's very consistent with the conception of D&D as training.  It might also work especially well with an open table - if, on any particular day, you happen to get a weird party composition based on available players, that might allow them to punch through parts of the dungeon more easily than might be possible with a more normal / balanced composition.

And if you were a mad wizard building a funhouse dungeon to reward the best heroes, maybe this is what it would look like.  Proving they can do anything is part of proving they're the best.  It would probably work well with the Dungeon Dimensions too.

I worry a little about doing this though.  If your players know that you're doing this, does it detract from the immersion of the place?  But if they don't know that different parts of the dungeon will vary wildly in difficulty by party composition, then they're probably going to complain a lot when they beat their heads on stuff.  When they need a large party the one guy who doesn't like dealing with henchmen will be salty, and when they need a small party the guy who has all the henchmen will be salty.  I dunno.  Is it worth it?

If I write a blog post about it and spoil it, will I only get players who are already totally on-board with doing whatever is necessary to win, the players who "have no style at all", who don't benefit from this lesson, while players who might benefit from the challenge avoid the game?

The other predictable follow-on question: if this applies to building dungeons, does it apply to building wildernesses?

A final thought - looking at dungeons in this way, as structures composed of challenges first and foremost rather than places within a world being simulated, is very compatible with the sort of "multiple DMs, each of whom has their own megadungeon, running for a shared pool of players and characters" style of organization that was reportedly common back in the early days.

Infravision and Mapping

I lied, the nomad post is still in the works (it's like 80% done but I need to recheck my math and I had to reinstall my OS because I realized my kernel hadn't been updated since October 2018 and it's been an exciting two years for kernel exploits; I haven't copied my sourcebooks back over yet because my cat spilled water on the wallwart for my external hard drive enclosure.  It's been a fun week) but I had a quick thought while taking the trash out.

ACKS goes hard on removing infravision from PC races, because it leads to the party getting split into the infra-haves and the infra-have-nots.  I observed something like this once when I ran OSRIC - the assassins with infravision went out ahead and had all the adventure while the rest of the party hung back and occasionally came running to the rescue.  It wasn't great.  So I tend to agree with this move on ACKS' part.

I've been thinking about trying to run some OSE, which gives dwarves and elves 60' infravision.  I've been considering removing it from them but then I'd have to compensate them or rejigger their XP progression and it would get annoying.

Another issue I've run into while contemplating this is that I like having players maintain their own map of the dungeon (particularly - having one or more players each maintain their own maps representing items in the world that are being maintained by a character with two hands free), and that's annoying to do with VTTs.

Holding both of these in my head, they got to seeming sort of related.  Maybe mapping is one of the secret balance-points for infravision.  Maybe the rule "It is not possible to read in the dark with infravision, because fine detail cannot be perceived", the detail that it's heat vision instead of just light amplification, is important, because it means that if you have scouts with infravision out ahead of the party, they can't be mapping.  If you have a full-infravision party, they still need a light source to map.  So then you either need to have amazing spatial memory, or infravision becomes a fallback for when the light has been extinguished.

It's still not perfect; you could still get into a situation where you have the room-clearing commando group of dwarves and elves and then the baggage train of mapping humans and hobbits.  But it's a thought I hadn't had or heard explicitly before.  Maybe part of the cause when I ran into this problem in OSRIC is that I didn't know what I was doing and didn't make the party make their own map (also didn't throw random encounters at the back half of the party).

Wilderness as Dungeon Revisited

A lot of this is probably obvious; circling back around to typical ways of running the wilderness, but through the lens of dungeoneering.  Less a post about rules than about how to organize information.

Previously, I was thinking about 6-mile hexes as being like rooms in a dungeon.  Now I think maybe they're supposed to be more like a 10' square.  Hexes and squares are both the smallest unit of organization in mapping on their respective scales.  You can traverse multiple per unit-time (turn in dungeon, day in wilderness), but it takes a unit-time to search either.  They're also a unit of organization in your notes - you probably wouldn't have multiple encounters or multiple traps in a single 10' square in a dungeon, and you probably shouldn't in the wilderness either.  I think the difficulty of book-keeping involved in trying to cram multiple lairs into each hex is a big gripe of mine with ACKS' assumptions about wilderness density.  Yes, it makes sense in-the-world.  But it's bad UX.

So if a hex is like a 10' square, what implications does this have?

"Rooms" / "biomes" / "zones" / micro-regions of multiple 6-mi hexes sharing common terrain, common opposition, and isolated by surrounding hexes ("walls").  Possibly a single key entry in DM's notes - "Cradle Wood, hexes 0601, 0602, 0501, 0503, 0504.  Lush valley full of tall pine trees, ferns, stinging nettles, and moss.  Abundant small creeks with crayfish.  Three goblin villages (7, 5, 4 warbands) with wargs.  Chiefs Ugbu, Ordo, and Glum are all brothers."  And then you can vary random encounter tables by room - all demihuman encounters in Cradle Wood are goblins, or someaught.  Weather might also be particular to a particular "room" ("Ironvale, hexes ...  Valley in the hills where it rains most of the time.  Oak trees and mud.  Abundant iron and coal beneath the surface.  Dwarven vault built into the hillside has flooding problems.").  If naming "rooms" is too much hassle at scale, just number them like rooms on dungeon maps.

Vision - in the dungeon, the limit of your vision is by torchlight and measured in tens of feet.  In the wilderness, it's by height and blocking terrain, and measured in 6-mile hexes, with a default of two hexes on flat plains.  See also also Trilemma.

The function of walls in the dungeon, to block both movement and vision, is softened from boolean in the wilderness.  Most terrain that slows movement also blocks vision (hills, forests), but some doesn't (open water, tundra).  "Walls" in the wilderness are more like ridgelines.  They're probably their own "rooms", since you can enter them - it'll just be slow going.

Does it make sense to have "unroomed" hexes?  Sort of like hallways in dungeons, which are often unkeyed?  Unroomed / unkeyed hexes might work well for "walls" too.  Use default terrain random encounter tables to place dynamic lairs, assume low land-value relative to named and detailed areas.  Sort of like leaving parts of your megadungeon to be filled procedurally during play.

Random encounter distance is one place where the analogy breaks down a bit.  In the dungeon, a random encounter at book distances is unlikely to engage you for a turn or two.  In the wilderness, by-the-book distances put them on top of you in minutes, definitely not days.  I think it might be worthwhile to change random encounters to the "wandering monster / lurking threat" model, much like dungeon encounters - wargs picked up your trail and have been eating your leavings, elvish scouts have noticed your tree-cutting and are displeased, and so forth.  So extend the random encounter distance to 1d3-1 hexes or so; sometimes you do stumble right on top of them, and for some random encounters that's the only time they make sense (skeletons aren't going to follow you, probably).  My players have long complained about a lack of control over engagement in the wilderness, and having a little more advance warning might help.  Might also be worth stealing a page from DaW's book and having an opposed Strategic Ability roll to see which side gets advantageous terrain before a wilderness fight, and then use the book values for random encounter distance to figure out how far apart the forces are at the beginning of the fight.

If a hex is like a 10' square, then microsandboxes need to be reconsidered.  A 10 hex by 10 hex map is going to be very dense, without much room for rooms, much like a dungeon in a 10x10 grid, and my experiment with building such a tiny sandbox bears this impression out.  So the howling emptiness of early D&D follows naturally from this metaphor - empty hexes are OK-to-necessary when hexes are considered primarily in clusters rather than individually.

Random Encounters and Space Hulk's Blips

Blindsight got me thinking about Space Hulk, which got me thinking about the blips.  Space Hulk has a mechanic where the alien player conceals his forces and moves them as "blips" on the human player's radar until they come into line of sight of a human unit.  It's a nice way to handle information asymmetry and partially hidden movement.  I think something like it might solve one of the issues with random encounters as they are played.

The way a random encounter in the dungeon goes in D&D (certainly in my games, at least) is usually something like this:

• Party is doing stuff
• DM rolls d6, 6 for random encounter
• DM generates wandering monsters
• Surprise roll
• Reaction roll
• Initiative roll
• Combat 
• Return to exploration loop

What's missing here is tension.  The encounter happens, it is resolved, it probably doesn't really link to anything else in the dungeon because it was just generated.  Resource costs are applied and then life goes on; there is no qualitative change unless the random encounter was on the way out while the party was already resource-exhausted.  It's almost like Bad Trap Syndrome, but with a combat intead.

The other thing missing here is that a rule has been ignored - the random encounter distance rule, another roll between generation and surprise.  Nominally should be 2d6 * 10 feet in the dungeon, in ACKS at least.  That's a long way (in expectation).  That's outside torch radius on average (30' of bright light, 20 more feet of shadowy illumination).  It's also outside of average monster infravision radius (60').  If you, like me, tend to not have 70' hallways, generally that's going to be around multiple corners or through multiple doors.  This is not typically a "the monsters come around the corner or through the doorway, roll for surprise" situation.

The reason this rule is ignored is straightforward - tracking runtime-generated state outside of PC line of sight is a hassle.  If you're using a graphpaper map, there isn't a good way to track groups of monsters moving through the dungeon.  Digital tools could probably handle this better.

But if you're willing to pay the price to track these 'blips' outside of PC detection range, the atmospheric and gameplay benefits are, I suspect, significant.  They turn random encounters from "fire and forget" into lingering threat, things just outside your vision, eyes reflecting your torchlight.  Waiting in the dark for you to make a mistake, stalking you, looking for an opportunity to pounce (or maybe just to eat your dead).  A heavily-armored party might not even be able to close with and engage such groups due to speed differences.  I suspect these lingering random encounters might encourage the use of thieves in the shadowed zone (where they can quickly pin down or drive off such enemies; pickets) and other "lightweight" play.  Multiple random encounters might lead to multiple groups of uncommitted creatures - morlocks ahead, morlocks behind, nowhere to run.  Depending on the monsters and the ecology of the dungeon, multiple "open" random encounters might fight among themselves (presenting an opportunity to players) or join forces.  Players might detect them with listening or detect evil...  blips on the paladin-scanner.

These things in the dark become a source of tension, a source of potential energy for the dungeon.  The other shoe, ready to drop.

On reflection, this difference in use is reflected in the old naming - "wandering monster" instead of "random encounter".

What's the Point?

This is, ultimately, the question I've been wrestling with for the last year or so.  Why play D&D?  Especially OSR/TSR D&D, with encumbrance, logistics, prime requisites, and PC death.

This is an attempt at an answer.  It's only about half-coherent, and I can't tell whether it's obvious or just obviously wrong.  I don't love it, and I don't expect you to, but I figured I'd get a rough draft out.  I guess my new bar for 2018 is a post a month; maintenance doses.

D&D is an artifice for character-building for the participants (traditionally, poorly-socialized young men).  Success in OSR D&D requires a number of properties which are useful in real life, which may be worth taking the time and energy to develop (and to encourage one's acquaintances to develop) in low-risk environments.

What are the lessons that various antiquated features of OSR D&D are aimed at teaching?

• Stats in order - Play the hand you're dealt.  As Hamming said, "I will do the best I can with what I got."  
• Prime reqs - In terms of class selection, you can fight your rolled "nature", but you'll get a lot further faster if you play to your high stats.  Different classes demand different virtues of their players; thieves need risk-tolerance and faith in the rest of the party to come rescue them, wizards need patience, caution, and careful spell-timing, fighters need courage, persistence, and willingness to sacrifice themselves, and clerics need humility, the ability to accept that sometimes you're not the star of the show.  Prime reqs push you towards classes that you don't usually play, and situations that test virtues you might not be so good at.
• Mixed-level parties, characters with very different stat distributions - Life isn't fair.  If you're on the weak end, resenting the strong won't get you very far; work with them for mutual gain.  If you're on the strong end, treat those weaker than you well, because you might have a reversal of fortune at any time and end up back at the bottom of the heap.
• Monoclassing, minimal build - You are not special by default; you are Joe Fighter by default.  If you want to be somebody that people will tell stories about years later, it's on you to do something notable, not just to be something notable.
• Mapping, encumbrance, rations, Vancian magic - Come prepared, plan ahead, pay attention to the details.  Neglecting them can get you killed.
• PC death - Memento mori.  Some day, you will die.  Yes you, reader.  You can run from it, or you can accept it, figure out what you want, and go get it or die trying.  It's important, I think, that unlike eg Call of Cthulhu or Paranoia, death is not short-term inevitable in OSR D&D.  You need players to get attached to their characters, and that doesn't happen when death is too frequent.
• TPK / Near-TPK situations - How panic-prone are you?  If other players are panicking, do you keep your head, or do you catch the panic?  Can you calm others?  Watching panic spread through a group of players is really remarkable.  When you get crushed, do you ragequit, or reflect calmly on your mistakes and return for vengeance?  The reason PCs don't make morale rolls is that their players are dealing with their own, very real, morale.
• Levels / fully-quantitative and exponentially-scaling advancement - If you want to get ahead, you have to be willing to take some risks.  After the first couple levels, it doesn't just happen anymore with any sort of regularity.  You need to say "I want to level", to choose it.  And then you need to put in the work, take the risks, and probably get a little lucky.  And that's true of life too.  I'm hitting this point with my career, where I've done well but the organization I'm at is just small.  I find myself with a choice between slow, pretty-safe advancement over the course of years, or choosing to prioritize advancement and doing the work to make that happen, either somewhere else or via personal projects in my free time.  Since I'm here writing blog posts, you can guess how well that's going.
• Phases of play (dungeon / wilderness / domain) - Advancement has side effects, most of which involve new challenges, more responsibility, more patience, and more paperwork.  This is what happens to conventionally-successful people.  You can't have your cake and eat it too; you can stay in the dungeon forever, but you're not going to get over 6th level if you do.
• Old-School Wish - Be careful what you wish for.  Someone was once very surprised when I mentioned that I give out wishes in my games; she said "But wishes destroy campaigns!"  And I laughed.  No, wishes are temptation.
• Rulings, not rules - Negotiate for things that you want.  Don't appeal to authority; convince me.  Whine, bullshit, do math, resort to bribery, whatever, these are valid approaches and you should learn them all.

In conclusion: I really do think OSR D&D presents its players with challenges which are well-suited to the development of mindset / personality traits which are adaptive, and rewards them for performing those virtues, not merely playing someone with those virtues.  Other games foster different virtues; 3.x rewards you for reading rulebooks, finding loopholes, and doing math, which are very useful skills.  Traveller...  rewards you for automating the trade system, which is something, I guess.

What place does Fun have in this conception of D&D?  I agree with Tao that Fun Is Not The Point.  Fun is, however, a necessity.  If your game is not fun, your players will leave before learning the lessons the game could teach them.  So strive to make your games Fun Enough (probably Type 2 Fun); there's a balance.  Unfortunately there may be a race to the bottom with fun; games which are more-fun tend to outcompete games with are less-fun in the marketplace for players.  These games which are more-fun also tend to lack the features which promote controlled but real adversity, and consequently growth.  I do not know how to resolve this problem yet.

What place does Narrative have in this conception of D&D?  Likewise, narrative is a device.  Humans like it, and therefore you can exploit their preference for it to make your game more appealing, and consequently more effective at cultivating virtue.  I have been wrong about narrative.  There might even be some aspirational "play the sort of person you'd like to be" upside to dealing with characters and stories, but that's not something I would know anything about.  Classes are a very Jungian structure to begin with...

What place does Simulation have in this conception of D&D?  If you seek to prepare your players for Real Life, making your game reasonably realistic (at least to the level of "actions have consequences, which you can predict by analogy with real life, except when noted by the rulebook") is sensible.  Simulated details provide a hook for Attention to Detail, and can also factor into Convince Me.  I have probably over-invested in simulation in the past (but it was fun for me, so not a total waste I guess).

What place does Game have in this conception of D&D?  The game element, of luck and challenge and risk and reward, is pretty central.  But I suspect one of the lessons to be learned from OSR D&D is that yes, you can play the game well, and you can win it, but it's sort of hollow and the reward of power is tempered with paperwork, as opposed to setting out to do your own thing and winning on your own terms, like Rary.

What is the role of the DM in this conception of D&D?  Courtney hit the nail on the head with "shaman leading the group's collective vision-quest."  You are here to help them become what they could be; to point out their flaws, to put them under eustress, and to reward them when they grow.  And in this light, the ritual character of the D&D game which I found so disturbing seems perfectly natural.

I apologize, DMs, for adding "spiritual guidance" to your prep burdens (using a loose, materialist definition of "spiritual", as in "of or related to the human spirit; ie, morale, emotion, and character").  I certainly do not consider myself qualified in that department.

All this still doesn't answer the essential question of "is it worth it?"  If you're spending 12 hours a week on prep+game for four people, you're looking at effectively three hours each of time investment per week, for a very ill-defined return.  Could you do better by just...  unstructured socializing with these people for the same amount of time, and talking about their problems?  I think maybe no - the game and the ritual provide a context where failure and self-examination are tolerable, where we can get at hard truths precisely because we're all lying.

The ultimate measure of the game, from this perspective, might be "do people outgrow your games, and go on to live happy lives?"  I spoke with one of my old players recently, and he mentioned that he has come to see RPGs / storygames as a form of "group therapy."  I don't know that I'd go that far (those are very soft words), but I think it's reasonably consistent with my meaning.



Addendum:

I don't mean to say that TSR D&D was intentionally designed as a training program.  I think training is a welcome, desirable side effect which can justify the activity; for another example, consider The Morals of Chess or mahjong's correspondence with reality.  Norbert Wiener, in The Human Use of Human Beings (one of the seminal books of cybernetics), discusses the function of play, and argues that generally, play is training in vertebrate species, who come into the world with much more plasticity than eg invertebrates; you will never see an ant play.  We humans play as well, and for the same reasons: training and pack-bonding, in preparation for the difficulties of life.

Further Obvious Thoughts on Wilderness

My prep for Dungeons and Discourse continues.  Also, I had lunch with one of my ACKS stalwarts a week or two ago, and have been re-reading some old posts (particularly this one) and some thoughts came up.

Topology - Jayquaying is considered important in dungeons, but not something you hear about much in the wilderness.  This is because the wilderness is "open" by default - you don't have to take any particular measures to provide multiple paths through it.  On the other hand, this abundance of paths can also be boring.  An inverse of jayquaying for the wilderness to restrict available paths probably makes sense.  Quayjaying, if you will.  Hard quayjaying is limiting available paths by impassable obstacles, soft quayjaying is limiting it by obstacles which are expensive to traverse.

Traps - Thinking about the resource game in dungeons, it's true that zap traps and trivial encounters aren't interactive or particularly exciting, but they perform an important function - putting chip damage on the party to keep them under resource pressure.  Seems workable in wilderness too - as simple as "if you sleep in the mountains above the treeline, all party-members take 1d3 points of damage from exposure unless you can find a cave", "every time you traverse a glacier hex, there's a 1 in x chance a crevasse opens beneath a random 1d4 party members, save vs paralysis or take 3d6 falling damage", or "if you sleep in a swamp, there's a 1 in n chance that your rations spoil".  In addition to grinding down party resources and providing tension, this helps make Land Surveying actually useful.

Specials - If you look at the dungeon-stocking guidelines, 25% of rooms have a "unique" or special contents.  Like traps, this is something I've largely neglected in my wildernesses to date, despite having quite a few ideas for this sort of thing.  25% may be high for a sensible wilderness, particularly a large one - 25% means that every hex has like 1.5 "unique" neighbors, which is very dense.  14-16% would mean that on average every hex would have a "unique" neighbor, which is still high but probably more reasonable.

Treasure - One persistent complaint about wilderness adventuring is "there's not enough treasure per game-time compared to dungeoneering."  Fair enough.  One way to boost this somewhat is unguarded treasure.  30% of trapped rooms have treasure in a dungeon; a reasonable parallel would be for a "trap" hex like crevassing glacier to have treasure at the bottom of a crevasse.  Likewise, 15% of "empty" dungeon rooms have treasure; no reason empty wilderness shouldn't, either.  Maybe it's a natural resource like rare wood or exposed metal ore; maybe it's actual treasure buried in a barrow mound that isn't haunted for once.  I expect you'd have to search a hex to find it, but that's OK - creates a resource tradeoff, time and rations for a chance of treasure.  This also provides endpoints for treasure maps.

Dungeons - Sometimes I think about abandoning the quest to figure out the wilderness game and just run dungeons all the way up.  Generally I don't like using dungeons at high levels because giants need a lot of calories and it stops making any sort of sense, but supernatural monsters are a reasonable solution to this objection (and wards can also explain why they're not out terrorizing the countryside).  Matt noted that dungeons do get old, and that he thinks this is not a great solution.  Reflecting further on this, the correct solution is fairly obvious - I need to put dungeons in my wilderness.  This is, of course, exactly what the damn manual suggests, but I've been too lazy for it in the past, in large part because the wilderness prep effort has been heavy as a result of large wildernesses with very dense lairs.  But, having figured those out, prep effort declines.  Dungeons provide high-treasure targets out in the wilderness, as well as a break from worrying about rations and overland movement and such.  Looking at page 235 of ACKS core, it suggests 3 large dungeons (6-10 sessions each), 10 small dungeons (1-2 sessions each), and 17 lairs for a 30x40-hex wilderness.  For a 10x10 wilderness, that's about a 25% chance of a large dungeon, an 84% chance of a small dungeon, and 1.5 lairs; lower density than I really want.  Given that historically I've gotten 6-8 sessions out of most of my 3-level, 60ish-room dungeons, I assume that what I'm building is on the low end of "large".  I could probably get 1-2 sessions out of a single-level 20-30 room dungeon, and could comfortably put three of those in a 10x10 microsandbox in about six hours of prep effort.  Then you drop rumors and these become places that players have to go find (as Alexis says - if you tell the players precisely where something is, they will go directly there.  If you tell them vaguely where it is, they will go everywhere.  And I want them to go everywhere if at all possible, because that's efficient use of my prep effort).

Homesteads - I was skimming Renegade Crowns the other day, and its system generates quite a few homesteads out in the wilderness.  Think Beorn and Craster.  These present a great, ambiguous opportunity.  If your players meet orcs, the first instinct is to fight them.  But if they meet hillfolk, it's hard to tell whether they're normal and friendly or cannibal cultists until you agree to join them for dinner.  If it works out, they're potentially great allies against beastmen, and at the very least a "safe and sanitary" place to rest and recover resources.  Homesteads might fall under a more general category of "oasis" features where replenishment of certain resources is possible; Rivendell's another example.

Level range - An observation I mentioned to Matt is that just as 1st level, 2nd level, and post-3rd level dungeoncrawling are all very different, it's possible that 5th, 6th, and 7th+ level wilderness adventuring are very different, with lower levels being much more resource-constrained and dangerous.  Got me wondering if maybe launching a wilderness game closer to 7th wouldn't be a bad idea.

On further reflection, I think that even if I executed successfully on all of these ideas, in an unmapped borderlands microsandbox with limited lair density, some route-blocking topology, "trap" hexes, unguarded treasure, an abundance of special features, three dungeons, and a smattering of homesteads, that would still be somewhat unsatisfactory.  Better than my previous wilderness efforts, and pretty close to my first ACKS dungeon, but still merely an open world rather than a living world.  The folks I've been talking to here seem big into Dungeon World and fronts and clocks lately, but I think something more up my alley would be "build a big list of NPCs who might do something that the players might care about, along with some Renegade Crowns-style internal conflicts between NPCs.  Every session, roll on the list, think about what resources they have at their disposal and what they want, and then something happens."  Might be NPC-vs-NPC violence in the background, might be something aimed at the PCs if they're on that NPC's shit-list, might be a job offer from that NPC.  But something happens, because somebody wanted something in the world and they've finally gotten around to acting on it.

Microsandboxing

Someone asked a question about sandboxing on /r/rpg recently, and now I have the wilderness on the brain again.  I have some complaints about existing mapping doctrine.  In the standard ACKS doctrine, civilization is basically required to be mapped (for the domain game if nothing else), which is an awful lot of work for very little payoff because you're not adventuring there.  Really all you need is populations/market classes and travel times between points of interest in civilization, because the travel itself is minimally dangerous; random encounters are likely to be civilized folks, and there are roads and signs and farmers that you can ask for directions.  There aren't really any strategic choices to be made in civilized travel that benefit from the degree of detail that hexes bring.  Consequently, hexmapping civilization is a tremendous waste of time for the mid-levels, and frankly you could run a reasonable (simplified, population- rather than land-focused) domain game without it too.

In the West Marches approach, by contrast, civilization is left unmapped (which is great), but there is an onus to have functionally-infinite wilderness.  This likewise is neither efficient nor realistic.  It isn't efficient because anything that you build that the players never reach in the course of a campaign is probably wasted (sure, you can reuse it later maybe, but how many of us actually do that consistently?).  It also isn't realistic because civilization expands to fill the area that can support it.  The wilderness may be big, but there's always some civilization on the other side if you're willing to travel far enough (or lower your standards for civilization a little).

Ultimately I think the "non-state spaces" notion present in James C. Scott's writing (Seeing Like a State, The Art of Not Being Governed) presents a promising opportunity.  Non-state space enclaves within a state are (relatively) tiny, self-contained wilderness sandboxes that are easily reached from civilization.  I've talked about Mount Rainier before, and it's a good example - one could easily take a couple of hundred square miles around a large mountain, map it in detail, fill it with hill tribes and yetis and a dragon or two, and have a small, self-contained sandbox.  There's civilization on both sides of the Cascade Range (well, if you count Eastern Washington...  I kid), but there's still wilderness in the mountains.  In the historical D&D context, Dearthwood from the City-State of the Invincible Overlord springs to mind.  It's a forest practically up against the City-State's gates, and it's full of orcs.  This is a classic non-state space, and would make a perfect tiny wilderness sandbox conveniently close to a large market.  That was probably the whole point of Dearthwood, from the very beginning (with the trolls of the Mermist Marshes, a little further away, comprising a higher-level microsandbox).  The Isle of Dread is another good example; it's big enough to play for a couple of sessions, like a good-sized dungeon, but it's bounded and therefore manageable.

Obviously the non-state enclave isn't the only type of wilderness.  Borderlands between civilized areas can be bigger, and then there are places like the Russian steppe and the American Old West that are just huge.  But these are unmanageably big, both to DMs who would use them and to players who would traverse them.  If I have learned two things from running the Megadungeon Full of Rats, it is that tightly theming can stimulate DM creativity but bore players, and that tightly-scoping is really important.  My initial intent with the Dungeon Dimensions was not a full-page dungeon of rats; it was many small dungeons, each tightly-themed and linked.  In retrospect, that might have gone better, but I got carried away with the first level.  I think loosely-themed, tightly-scoped, small-scale wildernesses offer a lot of opportunity in this regard.  Having two or three such microsandboxes available offers choices and ability to alleviate boredom with a particular theme by handwaved safe travel through civilization.

So what are some decent ideas for wilderness microsandboxes?  Big enough to take some time to explore, small enough to be manageable to DM and to be easily reached from civilization, and evocative?

• The Lonely Mountain
• Mirkwood
• Swamp of the frogmen
• Tropical island chain with walled port-city and cannibal natives in the uplands
• Wasteland
• Result of magical experimentation, Chernobyl-style
• Result of necromancer / ghoul infestation
• Fungal forest, as in the Grim Fist

Such wee sandboxes are also relatively easy to drop into an existing campaign.

Of course, there is the distinct possibility that this is what the actual practice of sandbox wilderness play has been all along, everyone knows it but doesn't talk about it much (because talking about the West Marches is much sexier), and I'm a little slow on the uptake where grand ambitions and practical limits are concerned.  Much as I learned in a recent Autarch thread on having players draw their own maps (or not, as it turns out...).  In which case, this is a perfectly useful post for the "OSR Lessons Learned" file [1][2][3].  In the same way that the typical, practical OSR dungeon is not Dwimmermount or Stonehell, the typical, practical OSR wilderness is not the Wilderlands of High Fantasy.

On Running the Megadungeon: Monstrous NPCs

A long time ago, I started a series of posts intended to distill down OSR hearsay wisdom while linking OSR newbies to stuff that might want to read.  The first two posts went well!  But I got stuck on "advice for actually running an old-school dungeoncrawl."  I did not find much advice on this, and I suspect much of it was contradictory (or already covered in the first post, on general OSR advice).  Moreover, I was lacking in recent experience - at that time I hadn't run a game in a year, and certainly not a dungeoncrawling game.

While I have had some recent experience running dungeons, I still don't feel ready to write that post.  But this is a start in that direction.

Looking back on my past experiences running ACKS dungeons in contrast with RatHell, I recognize a critical mistake.  My previous dungeons were very undead-and-vermin heavy.  Of my six previous ACKS dungeons and ~50? sessions of ACKS, I recall about 15 dungeon encounters with sentients, most of which led to immediate violence and extermination.  I think only about three of the sentient groups encountered ever mattered in a later session.  A far cry from the "factions in the dungeon" that I mentioned in my previous post, but apparently failed to use in practice.

Relatedly, I also realized that my NPC game in ACKS has, historically, been extremely weak.  I'd create a couple town NPCs, and they'd mostly be ignored or killed.  The most mileage I got out of a townie NPC was that time an assassin guildmaster got out of Dodge before the party could catch him.  They sent spies after him and lived in fear of his return and it was great.  But ultimately my primary source of interesting NPCs was actually henchmen who defected - the party had an emotional investment and interest in them, and were on neutral footing; not out to kill 'em, but not friendly and downright helpful either.  This is where interesting "let's make a deal" interactions happen.  Also a good place for mutual suspicion and sudden but inevitable betrayal.

I think these things, lack of recurring intelligent monsters and lack of good NPCs, are very much related.

When the majority of the party's time and attention is in the dungeon, the dungeon is the correct place to find and create NPCs, and for the DM to spend effort on fleshing out NPCs.  And by NPCs, I mean "people the party wants to talk to rather than stab on sight," using "people" loosely.  Intelligent monsters who aren't necessarily immediately hostile and who survive multiple sessions are A+ NPCs.

Named NPCs in RatHell that the party knows about:

• Duke Kasimir: He's in charge of town.
• Seljuk the Tatar: He runs an institution where townsfolk can bet on which adventurers will survive dungeon expeditions.
• Pox the Piper: Late ratman chieftain, RIP.
• Scarface: Ratman taken prisoner and interrogated, named for "gruesome scarring" mortal wounds result from the fight where the party captured him.
• Scabies: Ratman distiller, location noted on Scarface's map.  Party has heard that he is a very reasonable businessrat, and they want to visit him.
• Limper: Ratman who fled after the party shot him in the leg with a crossbow.
• Dogeater: Ratman hero who killed the party's dog and their cleric and escaped to tell about it.  I think he deserves a bigger hat and another hit die.

Are any of these ratman NPCs going to be really friendly toward the party?  Probably not.  They have some grudges against the party, and the party has some grudges against them.  But there's another ratman lair to the north of the late Chieftain Pox's realm, and that clan is just itching to expand south...  and they're more than willing to feed Pox's kin to the Marrow Gnawer.  So maybe it's time to cut some deals.

At this point, my tentative rule is that any intelligent monster who escapes an encounter with the party gets a name until I've filled out a reasonable roster of dungeon NPCs.  They are a form of emergent campaign capital.  The joy of emergent ratman names is that I can use the sort of thing my players would've nicknamed them anyway...

This shift of the focus of NPC-creation to the dungeon mirrors the "the game is in the wilderness/dungeon, not in town" philosophy of the Western Marches.  Town is boring.  Townsfolk are boring.  They don't have anything you want that you can take without getting in deep trouble with the law.  Dungeon NPCs, on the other hand, have treasure and information and strength that can be applied to other critters in the dungeon, and you can kill 'em and take their stuff.  So much potential!

Another benefit of making heavier use of intelligent foes is that it is entertaining and intellectually stimulating for the DM, much more so than running stupid monsters.  Even with the orcs in Midnight, I felt constrained by the orc-nature, and my players' expectations of orcs as not very clever.  But ratmen are an unknown quantity, which leaves me free to make them reasonably devious.  It's a much nicer way to run intelligent foes than having to deal with classed/demihuman NPC stats.  I have been enjoying the counter-for-counter with my players, and being a ratman-bastard DM in general.

Old-School DMing Blogiography 2: Of Dungeons

Continued from Part 1

Old-school dungeoncrawls are conventionally resource-constrained.  Hit points and spells are limited, and the more time you spend in the dungeon, the more treasureless random encounters you'll have, which are a poor use of your resources.  The party is not in the dungeon to kill everything that moves.  Old-school dungeoneering has as much in common with the heist genre as the action genre.  Get in, get the goods, get out alive.  Players should reach consensus about the expedition (not adventure)'s objective before reaching the dungeon, and know when to call it quits and head back to town.  Retreat is an option; encourage players to exercise it regularly.  Does winning this fight advance the aims of the expedition?  How much (spells, HP, time, ammunition) will it cost you to win?  Any individual fight might be winnable, but they add up, and there's always the chance that there'll be one more random encounter than you expected on your way out of the dungeon.  Let them know these facts.

It is possible to build dungeons sufficiently small as to be clearable in a single expedition.  This is inadvisable.  Dungeon reuse is good, because it contributes to the emergent worldbuilding mentioned in the Dungeon of Signs link in part 1.  Players can experience the effects of their actions on the environment - if you kill all of the giant spiders, the bat and rat populations are going to grow out of control.  If you unseal the crypts, undead might start appearing as wandering monsters throughout the dungeon.  Stories and lore grow up around reused dungeons; the iron spikes, chalk marks, soot, blood, and corpses your players leave around provide emergent detail, and the dungeon takes on a character of its own.  Reusing a dungeon is also very prep-time efficient; once you've done the initial work of mapping and stocking, having some new monsters move in to replace the ones killed last session is very quick.

If your system of choice permits resources to be restored within the dungeon (ye olde Short Rest), this makes it somewhat more difficult to make a dungeon highly reusable, because the PCs will tend to rest in the dungeon instead of leaving and re-traversing territory.  This can be partially alleviated with "the park closes at sundown"-type rules for a supernatural underworld (pdf warning, see page 22)-style dungeon, especially if you keep careful track of time until 'doomsday'.  If taking a short rest trades limited time for spells and HP, parties will have to make careful resource-management decisions, which are one of the pillars of old-school play.

A half-sheet of graph paper of dungeon, stocked and ready to play today, is infinitely better than a ten-page megadungeon that you never finish building.  I've gotten about ten sessions out of a sheet-and-a-half-of-uncramped-graph-paper dungeon.  If you intend for your party to keep their own maps, you should take ease-of-duplication into account when designing your dungeons - rectangles are easy to describe precisely in words, curves and 37-degree angles are less so.  If you want to build reusable dungeons, you should Jayquay them - lots of entrances, exits, paths between levels, loops, and other topologically-interesting paths.  Re-traversing a linear dungeon many times is boring, and a linear dungeon also provides no paths around obstacles like particularly-deadly monster lairs.

Other considerations for building reusable, old-school dungeons: competing NPC/monster factions in the dungeon can add a lot of potential for divide-and-conquer, tenuous alliances, mutual betrayal, and other satisfying emergent narratives.  Empty rooms are great - they build tension and provide buffer zones between lairs of different types of monsters, good places to restock replacement monsters into, and areas for players to retreat through.  Building proper megadungeons on a hobbyist time-budget is really hard unless you take shortcuts like node-based design or filling in the blank spaces on the map during play.  Avoid Bad Trap Syndrome - Hack & Slash has many quality traps, which I heartily recommend.  Just as Hack & Slash emphasizes providing hints, clues, and actionable information about traps to PCs so that they can make informed decisions, you can (and should!) do the same for monsters within a dungeon and in the wilderness.

Most OSR rulebooks have plenty to say about filling dungeons with monsters and treasure.  I have little to add, save that building a custom random encounter / dungeon stocking table per level is great for differentiating / theming your dungeons, and that I find it works better to figure out how many monsters you need, then roll and place them sensibly, than to roll for each room and end up with nonsensical arrangements.  Pretty straightforward.

When in doubt, err on the side of too much treasure.  It's good for player morale and keeps the pace of levelling up, especially as PC deaths pull XP out of the party.  XP-for-treasure is a great rule, because it incentivizes interactions with the game-world other than violence.  There's no such thing as level-appropriate treasure - sometimes you roll a +3 suit of full plate in a first-level dungeon, and it's awesome, but ultimately it just means the party can play a little more aggressively, taking on stronger foes and greater risks.  Since monsters aren't tightly level-appropriate either, this isn't really a problem.  Magic items that would be wildly level-inappropriate in a new-school game become storied and important to the party as a whole.  I've seen players mount rescue missions for characters separated from the party because that character had an awesome magic item that the party was unwilling to lose.

Characterize your monsters.  Old-school statblocks don't differ all that much, but a few behavioral changes can make interactions with two monsters with similar statblocks very different.  This is hard to do on the fly, so it's wise to consider during prep.  Traveller's critter reaction mechanics and old D&D's morale and number encountered statblock entries are part of this, but a little extra effort in characteristic monster behavior can go a long way.

Next up - actually running an old-school dungeoncrawl.

An Old-School DMing Blogiography I: Unpacking Assumptions

LQuinze on the Autarch fora asked recently about running old-school games, noting that one does not usually see hex-crawling-style adventures in movies and literature and that a lot of OSR material has many implicit, poorly-documented assumptions.  I was going to reply there, but it turned out that there were more links than I felt would be polite in a forum post, so this was going to be a blog post instead.  But it got too long for that, too, so now it's going to be a series of posts...  I'm going to bold links that I believe are critical to the topic area.

Unpacking Some Important Assumptions:

The Alexandrian has done some great work documenting some of the assumptions of old-school play.  His posts Subtle Shifts in Play, Prime Requisites, and the Death of the Wandering Monster are must-reads, and his other Reactions to OD&D and OD&D in the Caverns of Thracia posts are also worthwhile.  Subtle Shifts are particularly relevant to ACKS, which wholeheartedly embraces the phase-changes Alexander talks about.

As the Prime Requisites post's section on Darwinian Attrition points out (and as the OD&D in Thracia posts suggest), death is a common part of the old-school experience and helps balance out the very random stat distribution.  There was an excellent post at Dungeon of Signs which argues that  PC death is useful for worldbuilding and that in OSR games, the party as a whole is the main character.  Also, death can be fun and shared danger helps unify the party.  Losing a PC is not the end of the game for a player; try to avoid putting PCs in positions of such cosmic significance (The Prophecied One!) that the death of a PC means the end of the game-world, because sometimes these things happen.  Do not point the dice at anything you are not willing to destroy - therefore if you are going to point the dice at PCs, you (and your campaign world) must be willing to tolerate the consequences of occasionally destroying those PCs.

If you are going to be harsh, you ought also to be fair, where by fair I mean consistent.  Autarch and the Judges' Guild prefer the term Judge to DM or GM, and I think this gives the right mindset.  I have in the past put substantial stock in Beyond the Black Gate's take on referee impartiality and the Western Marches approach, but am slowly swaying back the other way a little.  Still, make as many rolls as you reasonably can in the open, especially if a PC's life is at stake.  If you're going to kill a PC, it's best to do it By The Book, and to make sure your players agree that it was legitimately done - either through unambiguous application of the rules, or as an forseeable risk of interacting with something known to be dangerous and outside the rules (artifacts, deities, &c).  Avoid succumbing to DM bloodthirst; monsters should do their best to kill (or drive off, capture for ransom, implant with their eggs, or whatever their objective is) the PCs, but you as the DM don't need to make much of an effort.  Deaths will happen on their own, and typically PCs bring it on themselves by being too aggressive.

Next up: Dungeon Design