Dungeons all the way down – preview

I have a big post brewing about dungeons. It will probably be in two or more parts, and needs illustrations.

Here is a TL;DR preview so I can get the bulk of it out of my system. Ideas that wander in your system for too long, well, a) are exhausting and b) probably deserve to get out there.

On to the point.

Dungeons are :

1- enclosed units, space delimiting gameplay (you're in the dungeon or not, if you cross its borders, you get out of it or your GM needs to expand it) 

2- given visual representation (typically : a map, whatever form it takes)

3- filled to the brim with three things : a) dangers, b) weird stuff, c) opportunities (for treasure, adventure, story, advancement, etc.)

4- given procedures to travel in them and interacting with them.

Based on this definition, it appears that :

1- dungeons are dungeons (no joke ?!) 

2- megadungeons are dungeons (no joke ?!)

3- overworld spaces and maps are dungeons 

4- cities are dungeons (the "safe havens" just being particulary sleepy dungeons).

Corollaries :

5- overworlds and megadungeons differ mainly in their presentation (map, outside or subterranean...) and choice of travel procedures

6- you can treat any type of dungeon as any other type, and use procedures as you need them. Your dungeon is actually a forest or an island ? Okay. Your megadungeon is actually a lost valley ? Okay. Your overworld campaign world is actually underground, or is a single city ? Okay. Your gloomy city of thieves is so dangerous that some of its neighborhoods need dungeon procedures to be traversed ? Okay. (I've got references for most of these examples already, especially in video games.)

Final points :

- some games understand this very well already. I have not played it yet, but I understand that Electric Bastionland takes the "borough as a dungeon" approach quite seriously.

- you can use the same, or almost the same, universal basic procedures to fill your dungeons. Just change the content of the tables a bit. I have a d6 table that I use to fill any kind of dungeon.

- inversely, it can be interesting to taylor the travel procedures, and think about which you want to employ and why (to what effect).

- you can rename "dungeons" in my expanded meaning as "adventuring locales", "dungeon units", "gameplay units" or what have you. They still need a better name. Something with "blocks"?

- your can view your game world / campaign milieu as a landscape of fractal Legos. All your campaign is composed of dungeon blocks within blocks within blocks, arranged with all the variations you can imagine.

And that's all folks. Now to see if I can finish the detailed post(s) sometime in the summer. But you can share your thoughts already !

Reading Holmes right now

... and it's interesting. I lean even more rules-light ordinarily, and the book is still somewhat chaotic. But it's a good read, a good example on how to pack a complete game in 48 pages, and it's better organized than OD&D (which, admittedly, isn't a high bar to clear). There's a lot of good in it.

All in all, in a strange way, it's the official D&D version that I can grok the best, it seems.

Might share other impressions or house rules later.

Death at 0 HP – a simple adjustment

On matters of survival, older rules are harsh : out of HP, you're dead. It's quick and makes sense : the character can't take hits anymore. But it makes for deadly games, where lethality is a big threat. I think that is desirable (in old-school, exploration-focused, horror-adjacent games), but can be tweaked.

(More than enough digital ink has been competently spilled discussing this very topic elsewhere, I won't reiterate much here.)

Newer rules (for a wide acceptance of "new") offer many ways of mitigating the actual risk of death, sometimes effectively eliminating it from the game. So they naturally change the feelings and expectations at the table, and for the classical OSR game, we don't want that. In addition, these rules sometimes become fiddly and burdensome in play.

So here's a quick-and-dirty idea to find a middle ground that is a bit more permissive than, say, Holmes, but remains firmly in the old-school camp.

When a hit (or whatever) brings you to 0 HP (that's a floor, even if a hit should bring you to negative totals), you're out for the rest of the fight (if in combat) plus the rest of the dungeon turns till the resting turn. You are probably hurt, wounded, and someone tends to you.

Once that passes, you regain the use of your standard abilities, saves, attacks, etc. but stay at 0 HP. The HP recovery then happens at the usual rate.

But if you further lose a single point of HP when still at 0, you die.

Simple, no ? Puts some pressure on the PCs while giving them a tiny bit more air to breathe. It simply interprets "out of HP" as "you can't take further hits, but aren't dead yet" instead of "you can't take further hits, because you took them all and now you're dead".

Another advantage is that it allows TPKs to not end with everyone dead, but everyone KO. The party can subsequently be captured by the enemies, or some other story plans like that. 

So : 0 HP means KO, with a penalty, and any further hits kill the PC. That's it.

Further thoughts :

- enemies who don't want to kill the PCs can do just that.

- the GM is still free to rule that some attacks or other dangers can kill instead of KO, and should warn their players about this. Typical examples : dangers or attacks triggering saving throws, like dragon breath, falling into lava, drinking virulent poison, etc.

Note : remember that, in old-school D&D, there are other rules in place to manage and mitigate the risk of death. Inheritance is one, for example. Some select magics can be used to resurrect or bring back a PC, or healing them abnormally fast. (As usual, it's more interesting if they need a quest and/or come with a price.) And Holmes explicitly says that it's possible to play with 2 PCs at once, which helps a lot too. Finally, hirelings and henchmen are there as replacements.

Hope this helps ! I've put it in practice (as much as I practice these days), and I must say that it works quite well.