About two years ago Diogo Nogueira wrote a post which eloquently explained the importance of contextualizing choices in a dungeon. The referee cannot simply say “There are exits to the East and West.” That’s a false choice. A coin flip. Useless information. I performed a reading of it for Blogs on Tape.
Earlier this year Anne Hunter wrote a response to Diogo. She agreed that his method was the best way to run dungeons, but argued that the current state of published material made it an unreasonable expectation to place on referees. After all: if a hallway has 4 exits, that’s 4 rooms that must be referenced and processed into clues before the referee can finish describing the hallway. She suggests the problem could be alleviated by keying hallways to include these hints. I have performed a Blogs on Tape reading of her post as well.
Diogo is correct* about how dungeons ought to be described. The importance of giving players sufficient information to make their choices with real agency is fundamental to OSR play. Anne is likewise correct that most published material doesn’t support this style of play. Speaking for myself, I’ve only got so much mental bandwidth. Sometimes it’s difficult to process the current room’s description for my players. Processing every adjacent room’s text in the same breath just isn’t going to happen.
*(Though there is some unexplored ground on what can make a dungeon choice meaningful. A simple East or West choice can work if the players are mapping, and have a specific place they wish to reach or to avoid. Likewise, one corridor left undescribed while another is given detail creates a meaningful contrast. )
So my D&D friends are super cool people with clever thoughts about gameplay, and they deserve to have their work read. That’s good and great and all, but what’s the point of this post? Well: while Anne is correct in her criticism, I don’t like keying hallways as a solution. I have 3 reasons.
Reason the First: Adding descriptions to hallways would make dungeons more wordy. Words take time to read; so unless they are memorized more words means the game will run slower at the table. We ought to be aiming for dungeons that are less wordy, not more.
Reason the Second: If the idea is to add information to help referees give players meaningful choices about which exit to choose, then we couldn’t stop at hallways. All rooms have exits, and so all rooms would need this extra text, further exacerbating bloat issue.
Reason the Third: A set of static hints for what exists in adjacent spaces feels like a drift towards boxed text. It attempts to do the referee’s thinking for them, and in doing so makes the dungeon inflexible. I would rather a more open ended tool. One that can be interpreted different ways in different circumstances.
Rather than adding more text to our room descriptions, I believe the problem would best be solved by adding more descriptive art to our dungeon maps. This would avoid straining our readers’ attentions with bloated text, and make use of space that is otherwise left empty.
Take this Dyson Logos map. It’s gorgeous, modern, and empty. If someone were to use it for their module, they’d of course need to add reference numbers in each room they wished to key. The numbers alone would hardly fill the space, so why stop there? If each room also had a tiny doodled icon that represented its contents, that would turn the map into a vastly more powerful tool.
It is reasonable to assume that anyone running a published adventure will need to have read it through at least once. Their familiarity with the text will allow them to dynamically create their own hints for players on the fly. A cat-o-nine tails icon might indicate a torture chamber. When the players come to that door, the referee might describe screams of pain coming from beyond, or it might be smeared with blood, or an executioner’s hood might hang on a hook beside it. The referee is empowered, rather than dictated to.
The art need not be fancy, either. So long as the referee can look at what you doodled and be reminded of what they read, the goal is accomplished. I experimented with this in Mice with Legitimate Grievances, which has an ugly as hell map, but even my crude scribblings do the job of giving the referee better access to necessary information. I regret that I didn’t carry on with it in The Dachshund Dungeon, but I believe it’ll be a standard feature of my adventures from here on.
By all the gods real and imagined it feels good to get back to writing.
I tend to be in a similar place as you, I don’t want to write too many keys, and I do want player choices to be meaningful.
My own take on the corridors issue though is that a classical sort of dungeon is one that’s meant to understood level by level – the map itself a whole for the players to unravel and explore. If an intail choice of right or left seems fairly meaningless that’s simply because the players don’t have enough information yet. As knowledge of the map expands and the players familiarize themselves with the dungeon directions and corridor choices become meaningful – looking at their growing map the players may note that the left hall heads back towards the entrance, with the right seems like it will soon intersect with a previously discovered lair.
Yes GMs and designers can add clues and details in (drafts, sounds, changes in building material, graffiti and bad directions from dungeon denizens), and yes I like a map with some indication of room contents … but I don’t think its necessary in a larger scale dungeon crawl. In a one session lair the choices may be relatively meaningless, but in a mega-dungeon or even a regular sized dungeon (20+ rooms?) – anything where multiple expeditions or backtracking is necessary the directions themselves offer meaning and space for player conjecture.
Simply, the corridor can’t exist on its own, it’s part of a larger spatial pattern and the most basic overarching puzzle of successful dungeon crawl style play is figuring out how corridors and rooms fit into that puzzle so that the characters can move through it efficiently to extract its treasures and secrets risking fewer random encounter rolls and squandering fewer supplies or other characters resources.
All good points. I alluded to similar thoughts in my footnote, but you’ve laid them out much more clearly than I would have been able. I’ve definitely had referees who erred on the side of giving TOO much context for every choice, virtually ensuring that the entire party’s eyes had glazed over by the time their opportunity to make a choice arrived.
But in my experience, it’s a much less common issue.
I fear I resemble that last comment…
Lately, I think these sorts of questions are best addressed in the context of a specific playstyle. Anne and other’s “maze of meaninglessness” comments certainly have a lot more poignancy in a play style that’s narrative or uses encounter based design. Like how would this issue work in Pathfinder (if you can go back to your 2011 state of mind?)
It is difficult. In my 3.x days I wasn’t thinking about the game as a series of choices, I was thinking about it as a referee constructing a story and leading the players through it. I think most of the dungeons I ran were pretty linear, with small side digressions for secrets or traps.
But it is hard to send my mind that far back.
I think you’re on the money when you say that the way we notate dungeons is best addressed in the context of playstyle. “Icons would work best for Nick, and descriptions would work best for Anne” is a totally legitimate way for this conversation to end. But in the meantime it’s fun to smash the ideas against each other for a bit, and see if they produce an interesting synthesis.
Because the history of all hitherto existing games can best be understood as a product of dialectics. š
Not sure I’m prepared for dialectical phantasmagoria, but I don’t disagree that there are personalized ways of preparing keys, content and location.
Still I find myself less interested in that, then how best to produce these for consumption. Not personal variety of technique, but genre best practices. A sort of design principles matter because system matters. How does one approach hallways when writing for the classic dungeoncrawl? The contemporary traditional adventure path, the post OSR improvisational ultralight or even a story/dungeon crawl scene based hybrid?
It seems the answer would be different, but the number of categories is much smaller then individual GMs so a best practices could be discussed meaningfully.
Well, if we’re going to ask “how do we approach hallways when writing for the classic dungeon crawl?” I think we first need to ask “what is the purpose of hallways in the classic dungeon crawl.” Once we know that, our approach is the same as everywhere else: communicate the necessary information about the space to the referee efficiently so the writing can get out of their way and allow them to run the dungeon.
I’d say hallways have two purposes. They connect rooms together, and they serve as an empty space for gameplay to spill into.
[Comment Deleted by Administrator]
Transphobic white supremacists don’t get to talk about games on my website until they’ve made amends for being transphobic white supremacists.
I’ll address the main post in another comment, but LS, thank you.
VS, you don’t get to post a screed mocking the very idea of transpeople existing and then get to have a pleasant chat with a transwoman about how she draws her dungeon maps. Or at least, not with this transwoman you don’t.
Well done good Sir!
Good to see you blogging!
Hey! Iām reminded of the time I prepped 2 of your dungeons and one of Kielās!
My color coded dungeon notes belong in this chat, since I put them right on the map and use a key you introduced me to.
Green = treasure / loot
Highlighter Orange = ācreatureā or NPC or interaction possibilities
Red = Trap, damage, or danger signs
Highlighter Pink = āsecretā or read description closely for twists. Aka: donāt miss this part.
It seems wild to think that hallways, of all things, are generating this much discussion. So maybe it helps to think “what are we really talking about when we talk about hallways?”
I feel like on one level this is a question about whether our standard practices are in line with our standard goals. There are common ways of keying dungeons, and there are ways we want our own game-mastering to go, but do those two actually match up? And if not, is there any easy way to fix that?
I think there’s an almost inevitable tension between the desire to have “enough information” in the key and the desire to have “not too much text.” Really terse writing and minimal keying CAN be a way to get the information compact enough that you can actually use it. But it can ALSO limit the available information so much that it becomes “not enough.”
I think this is a really good summary of that contradiction: http://rolesrules.blogspot.com/2012/04/osr-contradiction-2-player-skill-vs.html
So far, the ways we’ve talked about to get that information where you need it are to key the hallway and put the clue in the key and to use the map art to communicate. I would add that descriptive room names, whether on the map or just in the key, might be really helpful, provided that the room name suggests an obvious clue. Writing good room names is probably a bit of a skill, as much as writing clear descriptions is. “Kitchen” tells you what a room is, but doesn’t necessarily help decide if there’s noise of clattering dishes, the smell of a baking cake, or if the room is long abandoned – which means you have to read into the key to find out.
There is also, like you said LS, a question of “what purpose do hallways serve?” And I think the answer is different for “big” and “small” dungeons. In “small” dungeons, you’re not necessarily going to be going back over the same space very much, so the halls mostly just get you from here to there. In a “big” dungeon, where you might retrace your steps several times, I think there’s something to Gus’s point that figuring out how the rooms are connected by the halls is a big part of the “exploration game” that you can only play in a “big” space. Without retracing your steps, there’s no way to use the information about the dungeon layout to your advantage.
I think the final point all this raises for me is a question about the roles of suspense and surprise. When should players have access to clues about their environment? Should the clue arrive automatically as they walk down the hall, should they get to listen at the door to receive a clue, or must they open each door with no idea what’s on the other side? There’s something powerful about the suspense of opening doors without knowing what’s behind them, which is something I think “Snowpiercer” captures pretty well. But players want their characters to stay alive, they want to play smart and experience the best parts of the dungeon while avoiding its worst dangers, and we also want them to have that opportunity. So those two are goals are also in tension with each other.
I can’t find it now, but I remember reading about the “language” of classical architecture, and how modern buildings have identical doors for rooms and closets, whereas classical architecture uses moldings and lintels to communicate the importance of the space you’re about to enter. You can tell a family room from a servants quarters from closet just by looking at the door frame. Even something as “simple” as that would help, although of course there’s nothing simple about implementing that idea.
My final thought, for now, is that maybe “clue hallways” should be reserved for really important choices. Like, if you’re approaching the lair of the mushroom people, or the cave of the giant spider queen (as in Diogo’s original example) then maybe the hall leading up to that space should show it. Think of that hall as an anteroom. Maybe lesser hallways don’t need the same treatment?
Descriptive room names could serve the same purpose as the doodled icons I’m suggesting, or compliment them if both were used in concert. In general I like the idea of most dungeons having a one-page version included somewhere that compresses all of the information down to the bare essentials.
The tension between enough information and not too much text is a big mood. I feel like the whole of my experience as a referee has been about trying to find the point of best balance between those two.
Likewise with the connected idea of when players should have access to clues about their environment. Personally, I aim to give my players the barest minimum indications of what exists in a space. “There’s a statue, an altar, a green creature, and two other doors.” feels short enough to hold a group’s attention while I say it. Then they can ask me “what is the statue of?” if they care.
If you find that essay on architectural language, please post it. This is a topic of great interest.