The Vampire sandbox

I listened to a podcast that discussed the first scenario for Vampire, in the back of the 2nd ed rulebook. I remember when Vampire was the hottest thing, and how I bought that book and pored over it. I tried to figure out how to make a "personal horror" game out of it, and even though we played it a bit it never really fulfilled its potential. Looking at that example scenario do provide some fairly good hints on how the creator, Mark Rein Hagen, really envisioned his game.

The scenario is very limited in its geographical location. There are no extensive secondary world to explore, there are no obvious fights and no obvious treasure. But, there are a crowd of NPCs.

While I never really came to appreciate the "super heroes with fangs" aspects of Vampire, I did find the idea of a NPC based scenario to be intriguing. I've found that it is a challenge to make them flow well, though. If the NPCs one after one come up to the PCs and talk, then walk away to make way to the next in line, it will feel like the players really are standing there with a line of people. To make it still feel like a place, like something is happening, was always a challenge to me.

If we take a look at some scenarios that look like that, which I've had more success with, I at once think of Call of Cthulhu. Many CoC scenarios have many people to talk to, but they also almost always have a strong plot element. Sometimes even so strong it can be considered railroaded. But, I've found that is one of the best ways to make the "crowd of people" scenario work. If you have some plot going on, with things happening no matter what, all that talk doesn't feel as much like it's happening in a vacuum.

Now, you know what I first thought when I listened to how the podcasters (I wish I remembered which podcast it was, but my mp3 player have crashed and I have no copy of the file anywhere and no recollection of how I found it) described the scenario? I thought, "this sounds like a sandbox"! But, often sandboxes are described as a setting, a place, where the players are free to create their own plot and explore freely. This is another kind of sandbox, that is almost not a place and not about exploration. It's a sandbox of people.

I've never thought about that before, and naturally it makes me wonder if anyone have thought of doing a sandbox like that for their game, their old school game of D&D and similar games? Has it been done, or have we not yet left the dungeon?

Empty rooms and slow moving dungeons

You how the players in your game always wakes up when you without hesitation give a name to a NPC, or suddenly mentions the look of a door in the dungeon?

I have been sitting in agony, trying to get a game moving again after I in passing mentioned some details of dungeon room that was in all other respects just empty. Naturally, if there's a description it has to mean something, right?

A suggestion for us all.

When describing a room in a dungeon, always mention one thing of dungeon dressing per room. 

If there's one item, smell or oddity in each room, they will have to consider it all.

Should this lead to games where everything is examined for 15 minutes and the players insist on rolling some ability to find the clue, then just drop a piano on them. Yeah, in a dungeon. Go ahead.

Gamer ADD strikes again

I had just decided that I needed to capitalize on the enthusiasm I had left from JackerCon and run an online Hangout game of my own. I found an old favourite on my shelves, Tomb of Abysthor, and decided it would be suitable for a Delving Deeper game. After browsing the module a bit I found that maybe I should have a lead in adventure to bump up the participants to level two. Once again I went to the shelves and found DCC #31. All set. Except that I felt I needed to have a settlement next to the dungeon for refreshing hitpoints, buy potions and suchlike. Guess what? I grabbed my copy of the Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign setting and now I feel I have to read that 300 page book to find a good place to set the dungeon. Argh!

I wonder if I'm making this too hard?

Filling in the boring parts

When I posted about empty dungeons, Joshua had an interesting idea in the comments.

You can have interesting rooms be miles apart, as long as you're willing to let the players traverse those miles without playing out each 10' square in between. Tell them how long it takes and the resources consumed, and dial it back in when it's time for the next important decision.

 This reminded me of something I heard on the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff podcast. Robin talked about how he did when his players were just passing through some terrain, like those miles mentioned above. He suggested you ask the players how they did pass through that terrain. They got to narrate, and establish colour for their character and the question is never if they are going to make it through those miles, but how it looks. He also suggested you could have them roll for it, but ot to invalidate their narration, but to see how much resources they used up.

Pair this with the idea of Saturday Night Specials in the dungeon, and the new school idea of shared narrative power and I think we have a winner. Everyone get a chance to look cool, and those who crave detailed crawling can narrate it as much as they like, even to the extent of pulling in other characters and making rolls.

Personally I never managed to make wilderness travel very fun. It's either a few rolls on survival skills or something improvised if there are no skills around, and then it's done. Neither suspense nor a feeling of trekking in the beautiful and dangerous outdoors. Next time I'm letting they players talk instead.

A new "one page dungeon"-like project

For those of you who have missed it, the excellent podcast Happy Jacks RPG Podcast are having a contest in the style of the One Page Dungeon one. It's called 2 Sides: 1 Epic, which I personally think sounds fairly bland, but the idea is solid. You have one sheet of paper, now cover both sides with your generic adventure and tag it with genre tags, and your name and send it in.

I'm pretty sure Stu and crew would love to see some more contributors. I'm trying to come up with one myself. Check it out!

Where to go for you next game setting? The bible!

Even if you care nothing for the religious dimensions of the christian bible, read this marvellous post by FrDave! That is a truly inspired post that takes a literary basis and weaves from it a setting with dynamics and both a dungeon and NPCs. Great work!

What do we do when we play?

I remember seeing this a short while back, and I saved the quote. Well put, well put indeed.

We don't explore characters; we explore dungeons.

 It makes a hell of a lot of sense to describe old school play like that. Sometimes I think some people don't appreciate how much can be contained in the idea of role playing.

Dungeons in new games

Zak wrote something interesting about dungeons the other day. He notes that newer RPG are often a bit more cinematic and also they usually don't feature dungeons. This made me think.

I have a few friends who have been playing role playing games since way back. They also have one thing in common in that they look and sound a lot less enthusiastic when you mention the word "dungeon".

For some people the fun part, and even the whole point of, playing a RPG is to interact with NPCs - to roleplay. What is interesting with dungeons though, is that like Zak writes anything, however mundane, is potentially interesting. Exploring the environment is what the game is about. Your role is not method acting, it's interacting with the other party members and acting out your role in the party. This doesn't necessarily mean you don't do roleplaying!

I still wonder how to make my friends more enthusiastic about this kind of roleplaying. We might like slightly different kinds of gaming, but you play with the gamers you've got and like to hang out with. Also, I like to think roleplaying can be a lot of different things, maybe even at the same time, for different people.

Maybe there is a way to make NPC interactions more common in a dungeon environment? Maybe there is a way to make the virtues of explorative play more common in the NPC crowded city based game? I'm not sure how, but I like to think it can be done.

If James Joyce does that in his exploration of Dublin, maybe I need to read it? I think that sometimes cityscapes have been less used as a canvas of the fantastic than they deserve. While going down a hole in the ground to dig out treasure have a certain resonance of the Hero's Journey, I guess the urban jungle can be just as wild and feel just as much like a game of exploration. How would it be to do a hexcrawl of a fantasy city?

It would be interesting if Zak Sabbath was the one who finally made me read James Joyce, because I wanted to read the dungeon crawl novel, Ulysses.

Dungeon Density, again

I recently got hold of two volumes of the Central Casting series of sourcebooks. Some of you might know about these books. Once again it's Paul Jaquays name on the cover. That happens fairly often when I buy game books, for some reasons.

Apart from the ones about fleshing our your character by rolling on a boat load of tables, there's one volume about designing dungeons. Quite interesting considering the qualities Paul have as a dungeon designer, I think.

In the beginning of the Central Casting: Dungeons book, there's a table about dungeon density. I have written about this before, and I think it's worth visiting that subject again in light of what CC:D have to say on the matter.

Looking at the Dungeon Density Table, you will find a lot of different ratings for density. Comparing most of the dungeons published by TSR and other companies, I think they could be classified as "loose-very loose". This is not a scientific verification of everything published, but a general feeling I have. Considering that the densities on the table have a very wide range I wonder why I have gotten that general feeling.

In the megadungeon thread on Dragonsfoot.org forums, many pictures where posted of dungeon maps people had drawn. My impressions of those where that they where pretty dense affairs.

Personally I've found that if I try to fill up every blank area of graph paper, I usually create things which look exciting, but when scrutinized closely they only have one entry point and one exit. Apparently my maps often become linear, and without some empty spaces it's harder for me to detect and remedy that problem. It would be very interesting to hear some input on how different designers handle that.

While I realize this is very much based on my personal impressions of a limited set of data, I still wonder if I'm not onto something.

Why is it that so many published dungeons are fairly "airy", while so many designers at home seem to prefer the dense, involved and convoluted maps? Is this a sign of the tournament dungeon proliferation among published TSR products?

A report from outside the dungeon. There's a dungeon here!

I'm in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on a business trip right now. As can be expected, nothing much related to gaming happens on a business trip. But, traveling to my hotel last night I saw something odd. There's a dungeon here, and it's even advertised for on the streets!

I have always held the opinion that one of the masterstrokes of Tunnels & Trolls is Ken St Andre's marvelous idea of dungeons as playgrounds created by insane wizards and "gods". You get a reason for dungeons to exist, and you have a place for them in the greater economy and you can get a laugh out of that funny character downtown handing out flyers trying to attract delvers to a newly digged dungeon.

In Amsterdam (and apparently London, Edinburgh, York and Hamburg) it's even for real! In this case it's lacking the insane wizard. I hope.

Mixing two flavour that don't match? - GURPS Dungeon Fantasy

I have known about this line a while, since I read the Daily Illuminator, but I haven't investigated what it meant. Until now.

There's a line for GURPS called GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, and it's supposed to be a way to do dungeon crawling with GURPS. This sounds like everything but a match made in heaven. When I last made a character for GURPS, it took ages to shuffle points around and look through long lists of Advantages and Disadvantages. Can you really do a dungeon crawl that way? With traps? With puzzles and really dangerous monsters? With a real threat of a TPK?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that a dungeon crawl has to be a meatgrinder, but if I ran a game where the experience of making a character was that tiring, I'd be tempted to cuddle the players. That is what I think sounds like a recepie for a boring game. Maybe it's just me. Maybe it just works. Maybe.

It makes me wonder why crazy I am that am talking about Ars Magica, DragonQuest and Mythic Europe. Something odd in the water, maybe?

Navigating caves

As if he had been reading my mind, Chgowiz posted about describing caves this Friday. I've been thinking of that subject since I once again started to look closer at dungeons as environments for adventure. Just like city maps, which I have posted about before, I find cave maps hard to use.

One of the things dungeons do, as compared to the wilderness or city, is to contain the adventure and funnel the delvers along a path. There might be forks in that path and total freedom in moving about, but nobody will go off on a tangent you as DM is totally caught out by. Using that picture, a dungeon can be considered a flowchart of the possibilities in that dungeon delve. So, what difference does it make if the dungeon is of carved stone, roughly hewn rock or blue cheese?

I remember when I first read the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide for AD&D1, how the underworld suddenly became much dirtier, wetter and muddier than it was in my mind's eye up until then. While it might be realistic, it's not always desirable. Now a few days after reading what Chgowiz wrote about how he found it hard to describe caves, I wonder what they bring to the table that classic 10' corridors don't. Since I have had a hard time with those irregularly shaped locations myself I think that maybe all that muck might be a reason to use them after all.

The reason I find caves hard to use, is that if you describe a irregularly shaped room it is very hard to give a mental picture that even remotely resembles how that cave looks on the map. Like Chgowiz summarized it, there are a few ways to do it, and the only one that gives a good enough picture to make the nooks and crannies mean anything are when you draw for the players. If there is a set of stone blocks that are significant because there's a secret tunnel behind a wall of mud, you either describe them clearly and give a big honking hint they are significant, or you draw it out. Personally I've drawn the map on the battlemap, but it takes time and is really work that should be done by the players.

Can you tell my mind is split about this? I like to have a naturalistic spellunking experience, but, I grumble about those naturalistic details since they mess things up and take time. If we go back for a second to DSG, I think that maybe the best way to do it is to describe the rooms sketchily and and let the dice and game mechanics do the work, instead of having the player tell me where they tap or seek. The muck and mud can be environmental "dungeon dressing" and maybe that will give it enough solidity to feel real, without too many rules to slow it down. Will I learn to love the caves? Who knows, but I do feel tempted to try to DM S4 The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth which have been gathering dust on my shelf a while now. Nothing but caves. Anyone want to play AD&D?

New projects starting to brew

I have been on an emotional roller coaster the last few days. There have been happy event with my family, depressing news on the web about misconduct and deception in rpg publishing, and sad news like the death of old guard Blackmoor player Richard L. Snider. The usual ups and downs.

Many times I don't feel like a very creative individual. Starting this blog and posting once every other day is one way to force myself to be creative. Now I have gotten some ideas, though. For the first time since I started to run my T&T campaign have I really felt like creating something new. I have a pad of graph paper by my bed, so when I get one of those ideas as I fall asleep I can grab the pad and sketch some dungeon rooms. I'm thinking that some of the sad things might have spurred me into action.

I know that since Knockspell magazine and Fight On! magazine started publishing, and many old school D&D bloggers started to sell their creations, there have been mumblings to the effect that it seems like those venues suck up all the good stuff. The result would be that there are no longer so that people put stuff up for free.

Do you think this is a correct picture of reality? I have no idea, myself. But, it makes me think. I have been saying that I am considering publishing on a more serious scale myself if the conditions can be met. But, at the same time I'm wondering about who would care about my dungeon scribblings?

So, I'm probably going to put some of it up here, and then we'll see what comes of it. Hopefully it will give me some hints on how to proceed.