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Making the Dungeon World Real

I said earlier that making the world real is one of the fundamental jobs of the DM in the dungeon mastering approach that I’m trying to develop.*

Part of making the world real has to do with the consistency and believability of the dungeon and the imaginary world it inhabits. Part of this is about the immediate verisimilitude of what happens in the dungeon. Part of it is the bigger issue of a consistent believable world. I'm going to focus on the first of these.

Making the world real entails a host of immediately decisions on the dungeon master’s part concerning what happens. Consider a tactical situation:

The party has fled from a band of hungry ghouls and barricaded themselves in a room. What do the ghouls do next? Something ghoulish, obviously; could be any number of things. Maybe the start battering down the door for the food they can smell so close by; maybe in their mindlessness they wander off in search of other prey; maybe they go inform their wererat overlords in room #12.

Each of these options is tactically believable in some circumstances, but terribly different in how the PCs are impacted. In one case the ghouls directly threaten the characters, in another the characters get a lucky break, and in the third the reason for the ghoul’s behavior may be entirely hidden from the characters.

Choosing between these kinds of options is a big part of the dungeon master’s job, and the dungeon master might call upon any of a large number of tools to do this. There are books, blogs, and podcasts full of random tables and other techniques to help do this better. Making the dungeon real usually involves a mix of intuition, planning, and improvisation. It's an art, but it’s one you can improve at.

Making the world real has a really interesting relationship with being the eyes and ears of the characters. You’re often doing both at the same time, but with subtly different requirements. When you’re being the eyes and ears, you want to be very clear about the risks and challenges that the characters are investigating. But when you’re making the world real, you want to be disinterested about how it challenges the players.

Sometimes making the world real might mean visiting a really punishing challenge on the player characters. Maybe the demands of reality indicate that the player characters just blundered into an unfavorable encounter with an Ogre Magi who’s likely to kick their ass ten ways from Tuesday. As their eyes and ears you have the opportunity to make it clear to them what the parameters of this encounter are (i.e. they could very easily die). This opens up the floor for the players to look for options that don’t involve a drastically unfavorable fight (“is there an escape route? Maybe we can bribe him? Do we have a spell that would work here”). When the players ask one of these questions, that’s your cue to be their eyes and ears again. The idea here is NOT to remove the danger, it’s to make sure that it’s in the open and nobody’s surprised by it.

* I’m stealing this phrase almost directly from Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World, though as usual I’m adapting it a bit for my own purposes. Vincent's description of this job and how it works in his game is pretty brilliant.

When you Enter the Room, The Post is Sleeping...

I've been really busy this week with family and work-related stuff, so I don't have a post ready this morning. Sorry! I'm working on something, I really am.

Under the Volcano

A horrific legend, about to impose its terrible truth upon a frightened people

Three comrades on a desperate mission to right an injury that calls out for justice

A glowering idol full of dark intent and cruel machinations

A deed of bravery that lives on to inspire in song and story

Lost Maps

There's an awesome post over on io9 featuring maps from the show Lost, including links to some very nice fan-made maps.

Bookworm Dungeon

"Explain to me why we're on this mission again?"

The wizard chuckled. Long experience had taught him that abstract thought was beyond the fighting class, but he did not mind indulging them. He flattered himself that an easy condescension was among his virtues.

"Some years ago, the wizard Azxerkak foolishly allowed himself to be encaptured by a certain magical tome prepared as a prison by his rival. That rival, fearing discovery, stashed the book away in a library contained in this very dungeon until he could safely return at a later date."

"So this wizard's caught, like in a cage?"

"Yes."

"And the cage is a book."

"Exactly."

The fighter thought about this for a long moment. "So this wizard's caught in a prison, that's really a book in a library. So how do we know we're not caught in an even bigger book in some bigger wizard's library and he's reading that book right now?"

The wizard shook his head. "Tut, tut, my boy. The very idea is patently ridiculous."

The Eyes and Ears of the Player Characters

I'm trying to work out my own approach to running dungeon adventure RPGs. A big part of this is being the eyes and ears of the player characters. It’s the job of the dungeon master to be the eyes and ears of the players.

This idea is central to what I think of as dungeon mastering. It’s crucial to engaging the players and winning their buy-in to the game. If the players can’t see and hear the dungeon clearly, they can’t live in it or have adventures in it. The players also have a job here, which is to ask questions for the game master to answer. I’m not going to talk about that much now, but it’s important.

A lot of people equate being the eyes and ears with providing description of the dungeon and the things in it with a certain level of gleeful embellishment. This is part of it, but there’s more to ‘eyes and ears’ than a judicious use of adverbs. it’s at least equally important to be crystal clear and fair about how what they’re seeing and hearing intersects with the mechanics of the game you’re playing.

Here an illustration:

The party comes to an icy crevasse that blocks their way ahead. One of the party wants to try skirting the crevasse on foot.

How do you, the game master, indicate to the player the potential risks and rewards of this action? This is part of being the eyes and ears. There are a lot of answers to this question, and almost all of them are appropriate in some combination of system, group, and encounter.

So one answer to this suggested action, phrased in Dungeon Squad terms might be “It’s pretty slippery. You’ll need an explorer roll with a target of 6. If you fail, you run the risk of slipping into the crevasse.”

With this answer you’ve set some parameters. You’ve said what the player will have to roll. You’ve indicated that there’s a risk to failure, and described it in general terms. There’s some leeway here, and it should be set by the habits of the group. Should you also quantify the risk of falling into the crevasse on a failed roll? Do you need to tell the player how much damage that fall would cause? That’s a matter of taste.*

The point of all this is to give the players a very clear idea of where their characters stand in the fiction so they can act like heroes and adventurers and tackle the challenges of the dungeon or even fall victim to them confident that the system and the game master aren’t using underhanded techniques to trip them up.**

Probably some people are shaking their head right now, thinking that there are many times that a game master is compelled to withhold information from the players. That’s part of the being the eyes and ears as well!

Another illustration:

There’s a remhoraz lurking in the crevasse. Am I obligated to sow hints of this into my description of the crevasse somehow? In no way is the dungeon master compelled to warn the players of the threats and risks of the dungeon.

Now another consideration: a player asks if he can see into the crevasse, or asks how deep it is, or just tosses something in, waiting to hear it hit the bottom. This is clearly a way of asking the game master for more information about the crevasse. An appropriate response might be to say “you can’t see very far into it. You don’t know what’s in there”, or even, “there could be a monster in there for all you know.” This clearly indicates that there’s some risk associated with a crevasse you can’t see into, even if that risk is vaguely stated.

Being the eyes and ears is a conversation you have with the players. Like any conversation you’ve got to give and take, listen, and try to respond to the questions you hear fairly and clearly.

* I’m a strong believer in the idea of ‘free and clear’ declaration of actions. This means that before any action is taken, everyone at the table has a chance to talk about it, understand its potential consequences, take it back, suggest something else, and so on until everyone has decided what they’re doing. As far as I know, the term ‘free and clear’ comes from Ron Edwards’ Sorcerer RPG, but it’s something many game groups have done since long before Sorcerer.

** This whole idea is heavily informed by Eero Tuovinen’s discussion of challenge-based adventuring, although I’m adapting it somewhat to a more specifically dungeon-based approach.