Congratulations, Frienemy Eblair, your persistence has paid off. Your topic finally won the vote. Good on you. Prepare to be disappointed. Because I can probably cover this in a thousand words. Or less.
But first, for the benefit of the rest of you, let me explain. Almost every month, I let my loyal, higher tier supporters choose a topic for one feature article. I call it Fanservice BS. That’s what you’re reading now. In case you’re new here.
This month’s topic has been suggested by Frienemy-level support eblair every month for at least the last four months. Maybe longer. I don’t know. And every time, someone else’s topic won the unofficial and barely-democratic voting procedure I employ to let my supporters think that they actually have some influence. Except for the one month in which I suspended all voting and chose randomly. That was the month of the Dwarven Bear Cavalry article. NO ONE won that month.
But, finally, by a narrow margin, eblair’s topic won. So, we’re discussing: how to make a dungeon out of a wilderness. That is, how do you make exploring a forest feel like exploring a dungeon. How do you control the flow and the pacing? How do you provide structure? How do you design encounters?
Frankly, I’m glad this won. Because this one is easy. And I’ve got a lot going on this week. I’ve got to go scout apartments in another state, I’m doing interviews about my upcoming book on several podcasts, I have to write that stupid book, and I’m still losing hours a week to this stupid physical therapy thing. So, I’m really glad for something I can answer in one paragraph.
So, how do you make exploring a wilderness area feel like exploring a dungeon? You design it like a dungeon. How do you provide structure? The same way you provide structure to a dungeon. How do you design encounters? You design them the way you’d design them for a dungeon. If you want a forest to be a dungeon, you design it like a dungeon.
Well, that’s it. Glad that’s finally cleared up. Now, I’ve got s$&% to do. Bye.
Yeah. You can scroll down all you want. That’s really it.
Seriously. Why do you think there’s any more to it than that?
Why are you still here?!
I don’t know what else you’re expecting.
There isn’t anything more to say.
It isn’t any different. Really.
Why do you THINK it’s different?
I mean, I already explained how every adventure is a dungeon anyway.
What, exactly, is screwing you up here?
Because it doesn’t have walls? That’s it, isn’t it? It doesn’t have walls. That’s what’s breaking your f$&%ing brain about this. Well, news flash, dungeons don’t have walls either. I mean, how often do you even mention the walls? Sure, you MIGHT spend a few minutes describing the masonry in the first room of the dungeon or something. But after that, you don’t mention walls at all. You mention rooms, sure. And you talk about doorways and halls and doors and passages and openings and tunnels. But you don’t really describe the walls. You describe the spaces between the walls and the paths between those spaces.
And if it seems like I’m being needlessly pedantic and nitpicky and semantic and all that crap, just keep in mind, you’re the one with the problem. I’ve never had a problem running forests-as-dungeons or jungles-as-dungeons or mountain-paths-as-dungeons or even giant-ruined-cities-as-dungeons.
You can break down any space into a series of encounters and the paths between those encounters. And I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean that literally. Take one of those young, dense, overgrown forests. The kind that is all deciduous trees and all of the spaces between are filled with thickets and bushes and brambles and brush. The kind with roots and vines and rough ground constantly tripping you. Heck, they don’t even have to be that thick.
Those sorts of forests are usually shot-through with space between the trees and brush called trails. What happens is, as animals move through the brush, they tend to choose the easiest paths. And, over time, the passage of said animals wears down the brush along those paths. And that’s where game trails come from. And that’s notwithstanding the paths that are cut by seasonal streams that flow in the early spring and maybe dry out in hot summers. Meanwhile, there are all sorts of thinner areas. That’s what the word “clearing” means. A clearing is an open space in forest terrain. Sometimes they happen at the tops of hills. Sometimes they happen around ponds. Sometimes they happen because of a small fire, flood, mudslide, or another natural occurrence. Sometimes they happen because the land was cleared around a building and then the building collapsed, and the foundation got buried. Sometimes they happen because there’s a structure still in the clearing.
The point is, you can literally map a section of particularly dense forest shot through with trails connecting various points of interest as a dungeon. Not in the flowchart sense, but in the very literal sense that there are “rooms” and “halls.”
Now, you can’t always get away with this. Massive, old-growth forests tend to be very clear of ground cover. They are just huge, open spaces with massive trees and a carpet of pine needles or dried leaves. And it’d be hard to create a desert dungeon. But formidable mountains and craggy hills are often shot through with trails, passes, canyons, gullies, whatever you want. I once had a really neat mountaintop dungeon that was a series of passes, cliffside paths, an old rope bridge over a ravine, winding trails, canyons, and caves and tunnels.
Such a natural dungeon usually represents a dense and forbidding subsection of a larger feature. For example, the Faerie Forest Dungeon is a particularly dense little section of overgrown, dense forest spiderwebbed with confusing paths and narrow streams and little clearings and strange structures in the heart of a much larger forest. Hell, the map of a forest dungeon like that looks pretty much like a dungeon map of a cave. It’s just the walls represent the tree-line and the underbrush.
And that’s why I say that designing such a space works the same as designing any dungeon. You figure out where the clearings and points of interest are, map them, and then connect them with trails and paths through the brush. Then, you put your encounters where they need to be, plan your wandering encounters, and so on. The only real difference is that the paths can be a lot longer. It might take a minute or two to walk between rooms in a “real” dungeon, whereas you might note that a forest path is long enough to take a half-hour. Or more. But, just like in a dungeon, the exact amount of time probably doesn’t matter THAT much.
Now, how do you get your players to buy into this? How do you get them to drop the overland travel crap and accept that they are exploring a dungeon? By presenting it as a dungeon. If you stop narrating hours of marching overland and suddenly describe how the party has been following a trail through the forest and that trail suddenly spills them into a broad clearing surrounded by dense underbrush and the clearing has a strange statue and a little pond and also their trail continues into the brush on the other side of the clearing, but a broad path also winds into the trees to the east, cutting a broad swatch through the dense thickets of forest growth, they are going to start saying things like “I’ll go check out that statue” or “can I see anything down the trail to the east?”
Players are primed for this sort of minute-by-minute, room-by-room, scene-by-scene style of gameplay because the whole game is based around it. Players act in the rooms. They act in the scenes. In between, the GM provides transitions. That’s how the whole game is structured. If you lead with that sort of gameplay, the players will follow.
If you think about it, video games have also primed players for this sort of thing. Think of the Lost Woods in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past or Darkroot Garden and Darkroot Basin in Dark Souls. We’re used to exploring scenes and encounters connected by paths. We crave that structure.
Now, I have explained this before. And, often, I get the response “but what if the players walk off the paths? What if they climb the ravines? Or fly out of the canyons? Or force their way through the underbrush?” They probably won’t. They usually won’t. I mean, I’ve been doing this sort of s$&% for thirty years, and I can’t really recall the last time that happened. I’m sure it has. I know it has. But I can’t remember the actual last instance of it happening. But I can remember a lot of “wilderness” dungeons because I like doing that s$&%.
The thing is, most players will follow the paths you give them. The game primes them to accept the transitions you offer. And if you sink into “room-by-room and minute-by-minute” they will follow along. Unconsciously. Habitually. They won’t even think anything is odd or weird. It’s the game’s natural structure. And most players adhere to it because it’s the easiest and most natural way to play.
GMs are a remarkably paranoid lot. I know they are. Because I offer real, practical advice like this all the time. And I always get one inane e-mail or comment like “what if the players hack through the wall” or “what keeps the players from flying out of the dungeon” or “what if a party of four druids all shapeshifts into field mice?” Those are f$&%ing corner cases. They are so rare that they aren’t worth worrying over. I’ve watched lots of GMs tie themselves in knots trying to thwart those sorts of corner cases. They assume if they leave any crack in their game, a player will shove a stick of dynamite into it and blow the whole f$&%ing thing up. They really don’t. I mean, seriously, have you ever run a game where all four players have chosen the exact same class and abilities just to thwart a specific plot-point they suspect is coming?
Here’s the reality: players will generally play the easiest game you let them play. I’ve been counting on that for a long time, and it has almost never let me down.
But, what if the players really do walk off the path? What if they really, really do? It is possible, right? What if they break the dungeon.
Fine. There are some contrarian players out there. And there are some players who will sense that you’ve tricked them into a “dungeon,” and they will try to break out. They will blaze their own trail. And there are some players who think exploration is doing the last thing the GM expects, like ignoring the paths and going their own way. Yes, it can happen.
So, let’s say it does. Let’s say the players take out their hatchets and machetes and head over to the clearing’s edge and start cutting their own way through or out of the dungeon. Well, you’re the GM: resolve it.
I don’t mean “fix it.” I mean, “the players are taking an action; resolve the action.” What happens? Overland travel assumes the players are, to some extent, traveling with the terrain. They are not moving a dead-straight line as the crow flies. Ask any cross-country hiker. They have to adapt to the terrain to some extent. They move generally in one direction, not exactly. If the players decide to be contrarian about it, fine, they are moving slow. Make sure they know it. It’s slow, hard going. But they can make progress. But where do they end up?
Uh huh. No one ever thinks about that when they say, “what if the players start mining through the dungeon walls.” They can pick a direction and start digging or hacking or trailblazing or whatever, but what’s IN that direction? Will they eventually plow into some other room or hallway or clearing or trail or whatever? Or will they just pass right off the edge of the graph paper and into the unmapped space beyond? I mean, it doesn’t really work as a shortcut unless you know exactly where you’re trying to go.
So, figure out where they are going and figure out how long it takes them to get there. If they pass beyond the Forest of the Fairies, eventually, the underbrush thins, and they find themselves somewhere in the less dense Great Forest. And then you can use the navigation rules to figure out if they get lost or where they go from there. And they have dug themselves right out of the fun adventure. Good for them. You can even say that. I would. Because I’m not afraid to be an a%&hole.
There’s an important lesson here about how lots of GMs operate. GM’s have two major mental defects. Most GMs, anyway. Not me.
First, GMs assume that players are always out to break the game. Now, I just said that players will burrow themselves right out of the fun if you let them. But that’s NOT because they are out to break the game. It’s because they are always looking for the easiest way to play. And win. Oh sure, there are a few folks of the chaotic-a$&hole alignment who will try to break the game to break it. But they are few and far between. But, what players will do is to get a sudden, clever idea and decided to try it out. “Maybe we COULD just push through this brush and not keep wandering into encounters.” And how you handle that is very important. If it works, they will keep doing it. Because it’s the easiest way to play. But, if you put up a fight, well, then you’re going to run into another side of the player psyche: players hate being blocked.
Players play RPGs because of the freedom they offer. If they try something clever, they want a payoff. And they expect a fair payoff. They can handle it if the payoff is costly or if it has unintended consequences. But if there is no payoff or the payoff seems too punitive, they are going to get mad. Fighting your way through the dense forest and then getting lost or wandering out of the adventure space? That’s a fair payoff. If you just treat it like any other action. Getting ambushed by small, maneuverable forest predators while you’re off the beaten path and can’t get a clean line of sight or move anywhere because of difficult terrain? That’s also a fair payoff. If you treat it like any other action.
But, if you put up a fight first, if you resist the action in any other way, and then say “okay, fine, here’s what happens…”, then those payoffs and unintended consequences seem like a punishment. A polite warning is one thing. But resistance followed by punishment is just spite. At least to the players.
Alternatively, if you just present the space like a dungeon and drop into minute-by-minute, room-by-room resolution, the players will go along with it. It’s the easiest, most natural thing to do. Oh, sure, you might have a player try to jump into the trees to conceal themselves, maybe to make a Sneak Attack or ambush. That’s fine. That’s clever. Resolve it. That’s your job. But the players generally won’t try to break the space.
Second, GMs assume that if the players manage to skip things or do things out of order or kill the boss without having to roll initiative or bypass an encounter or, do literally anything other than confronting each planned encounter in exactly the way they are “supposed to,” the players are cheating themselves out of challenge and fun and the game is ruined. And, to be fair, the GM who gets upset about that usually isn’t upset because their hard work went unused. For example, if that brilliant encounter didn’t play out as a combat because the players lured the boss into an ambush and killed him outside of combat, all of the planning and statistics and everything just gets thrown into the trash. That’s not what bothers GMs. What bothers them is the idea that the players somehow bypassed the challenge and, therefore, the victory isn’t as sweet.
Well, that’s just f$&%ing stupid. Look at the players when they pull something like that off. Do they LOOK disappointed? Hell no, they don’t. They’re usually proud. Elated. High-fiving and laughing. Remember: proper challenge isn’t some objective thing. It’s actually about how the players feel. A well-designed challenge is one in which the players felt they could have lost and earned their win. Challenges fail when they are boring or frustrating. So, what does that mean? Well, a boring challenge is one in which the players know that no choice they made was going to lead them anywhere close to defeat. They could just spam basic weapon attacks and cantrips and walk away fine. And a frustrating challenge is one that feels unwinnable. One in which the players think that nothing they do will turn the tide from defeat to victory. THAT is how you define challenge. And if that’s the definition, avoiding an encounter and pulling a victory out of a clever plan is perfectly in line with that.
So, if the players are infiltrating the Lost Woods searching for the Master Sword and they DO decide to hack through the dense undergrowth and skip the paths, and they somehow plow right into the clearing where the sword has been embedded in the stone, good for them, they won. Huzzah. And they’ll be happy with that. Yes, it means all of your hard work was for nothing. And it means your next dungeon better have harder walls or better defenses because the players will need more of a challenge next time. But it’s no different than that time when the encounter you built was underpowered, and you realized you need to up your encounter game.
What’s the point of all this?
You build an outdoor dungeon and present an outdoor dungeon exactly like you’d build and present an indoor dungeon. And 99% of the time, the players will fall in line. That means you have to map it like a dungeon. But that also means you have to transition into it like a dungeon. That is, the outdoor space that IS the dungeon has to be special. It has to be distinct from the wilderness around it. It has to be a particular chunk of forest that is unique, different from the forest around it. And I don’t mean that it has to be dense enough to have walls. Realistically, you can make the walls as soft as you want. With the right presentation, your dungeon could be a series of roads and paths across, say, a bunch of hills. You know, like the Barrow Downs in Lord of the Rings.
But narratively, you have to mark the transition. The easiest way to do it is to establish it beforehand. The adventure is ABOUT finding a specific tomb in the Barrow Downs or tracking down the Faerie Queen in the Forest of the Faeries. Then, you can have a nice, descriptive transition that says “okay, now you’re at the entrance to the adventure part of the adventure. Here’s the obvious paths.” That transition is what helps the players’ brains shift from overland travel to room-by-room gameplay.
And after that? Well, design a dungeon. You know how to do that. Make it fun and interesting and keep the players engaged and they will probably never consider breaking through the soft walls. And if they do? Well, resolve it. And then treasure the lesson you’ve learned: you can’t trust your players with a soft-walled dungeon. Oh well.
I recently ran an outdoor dungeon and it went fairly well. I had a large section of land as fens that became flooded to the point of being a swamp. The swamp had quite a few spots where there was a sizable amount of raised land which became the ‘rooms’. There were narrow land bridges between these that the group could cross and I implied there were things in the water. There was little interest in swimming and they explored the sections in a relatively normal order.
The bonus I gave them was that the land nearby and in the swamp was fairly flat, so they were able to see distant tall features. One of which was a raised island that they headed for first. After traversing some bubbling, acidic geysers, the group had a few fights and made the high ground. I then showed them the map (without details) so they could plan out the trip to the objective. Session went well and they told me that they had a blast.
An excellent and very different take is available on The Alexandrian, which is a resource every GM should know about. That site’s series on hex crawls here: http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/17308/roleplaying-games/hexcrawl
Currently the author is doing a series on alternate gaming structures, and while it’s still early in the series, it’s already fantastic.
I never even thought to run an outdoor “dungeon” before. I guess it just didn’t seem possible to me, but you’re right, there is actually very little reason it wouldn’t work! I may need to make one for my table’s next adventure!
I think it would be funny if, when players manage to hack through an outdoor dungeon, the GM describes it like they broke a video game. Something like “you stand at the edge of the forest and you can see the ground abruptly ends, with nothing below or beyond it but the sky. You find that you can step on the ‘air’ as if you’re walking on glass.” And if they insist on keeping going, they could either hit an invisible wall after a few hours and have to turn back, or the characters wander off and are never seen again.
That could work especially well if the adventure takes place in a simulation of some sort (Magical or Digital, depending on the setting).
And now I’m trying to figure out how I’d design a dungeon with defined rooms on a completely flat barren wasteland, with no actual physical walls or hazards to keep them from walking off specifically defined paths between rooms.
You could have quicksand or mud of some kind, with narrow islands of hard earth or sand the players can jump between, or even just an elevated plane. Maybe the ruins of an old castle or wall created an outline of raised earth where rooms and corridors used to be.
I think the idea is to not use hazards though. For that, you could map the entire dungeon as one massive encounter space, but find ways to make all the land except for a few paths tactically undesirable. Think about being in enemy trenches in WW1. You COULD jump out and make a run for it, but that’s a really bad idea, and it’s safe to stick to the trenches/hallways.
Now you’re just making up rules. There’s no reason you can’t use hazards just as well as anything else.
I don’t think trenches really qualify as “a completely flat barren wasteland”.
Although a trench-based dungeon does sound interesting.
Perhaps a dragon constantly strafes the area and anyone caught topside gets incinerated after 1d4 rounds?
And once you progress far enough in the dungeon you manage to kill or drive off the dragon, so now you can explore topside at your leisure? 🙂
What about the desert Ocarina of Time? Sandstorm, following a ghost guide that won’t wait for you, obstacles you have to work through.
Personally, I’d use destinctive landmarks. A strangely narled dead tree, a pillar atop a jagged pile of rock, a half buried bulette corpse etc. But I can see that feeling a little video-gamey, so there could be “rooms” in the straight line paths between those points of interest.
The players are naturally going to gravitate to and navigate by any landmarks you place, so why not use them? Who cares if it’s “video game-,” when video games cribbed a ton of design ideas from D&D anyways?
Think about it from the player’s perspective. They’ll remember the place where the dead bulette lies among smashed-up wagons, or the place where the cliffs drop off suddenly and they could hear strange sounds drifting up from below. It’s really no different from “the room with the big statue” or “the corridor of dungeon cells where we fought that gelatinous cube,” which is how they navigate any other dungeon.
Good point, I thought it might have felt too artificial, but as Angry pointed out in his wilderness travel rules, people often gave directions in terms of landmarks rather than distances anyway. In that case having the players hit a bunch of landmarks they know will take them to where they want to go and some other interesting places off the critical path would model a dungeon and overland travel.
You… wouldn’t. That’s like asking how do I make a painting without a canvas, brush or paints.
No, YOU wouldn’t. And that is why you fail. The world is made up of two kinds of people: those who tell you why something can’t be done and those who are too busy doing things to listen to you.
There are lots of ways to steer people to rooms (which seems the only challenge in doing so here).
Trails left by animals and enemies. (Especially those leading to water).
Towers, hills and other vantage points to orientate from.
The advice of npcs (some of whom might need persuaded to part with their knowledge).
Magical items that “call” to each other.
Maps.
Play Dragon Age Inquisition and go to the Hissing Wastes. You will know what NOT to do
DA:I’s quests weren’t alsways unspiring, but nacigating the Hissing Wastes was as easy for me as any other region. I *wanted* to get to those weird mountains on the horizon. I wanted to get to the bottom of that canyon, to the foot of that giant statue, whatever. You might not be able to completely control the order in which certain landmarks are visited, but who standing on an empty plain would not move towards anything that breaks up the landscape?
I also completed it and while I agree the landmarks were pretty inciting, I think the payoff of the journey was pretty bland. The curiosity was bigger than the discovery. It also lacked any structure at all, it just dropped you in the middle of it all and pointed at things that looked interesting
When I’m navigating in a strange place, I always think of that place as a series of boxes bounded on all sides by known major thoroughfares. So I’m in town, and I’m maybe a little lost, but I still know I’m south of 610, north of 10 east of… Etc etc.
You can apply that idea to a graph of nodes (the encounters) and lines (the paths). Any time a party leaves the paths, they become ‘lost’ in the area bounded by paths, and will wander around until they encounter another path, or come close enough to a node to see it from a distance. Characters proficient in the environment have advantages in finding paths or nodes from further away, spending less time ‘lost’, etc.
You can add to this by defining different random encounters in every area, including nodes that aren’t joined to the graph.
Fwiw, I think it’s completely fair to rule that anyone intentionally leaving the naturally paths behind becomes generally lost. There’what navigation is, following the landmarks and trails and stuff. My .02
Zargy, this is a pretty interesting mental challenge. I think one important factor you would need to figure out first is sight range. Assuming you are on the surface of a sphere, your visibility is related to height, and is between 2-3 miles for humans. On a plane, the visibility could range between 2-50 miles depending on atmospheric conditions.
For the purposes of your plane, I’m assuming many of the “rooms” would involve creatures, small buildings, etc. I think if you want to make navigation significant, you could have ranges of distance with different difficulty levels for perception. Even with just a “vague image” and “distinct picture” level of success based on ranges, it could be interesting. From there, you would need to populate your plane and see which direction players head in, keeping track of their location on your map. It could be fun to give the players a blank sheet of paper and have them try to keep track of the locations too.
This type of mapping could work for something like a Planescape adventure in which you are dropped onto a plane of hell and are surrounded by encounters and vignettes of eternal suffering. Or y’know, law, chaos or bliss, ooh the abyss seems like it work really well, actually.
Take a page from Silent Hill, and have thick fog limit visibility to a few dozen yards.
Maybe there are “things” lurking deep in the fog that devour the unwary.
Maybe the “rooms” center around magic items that keep the fog or “things” at bay.
Maybe there are portable versions of these magic items that are consumable and only last a few rounds.
I’m just spitballing here. 🙂
Two words: Sand worms. Maybe if they step off the rock path, their rhythmic steps attract some unspeakable horror. That swallows them whole. Thanks, Frank Herbert.
Easy, mark a bunch of points on the wasteland that function as “points of interest” these points of interest function as the rooms of the dungeon that is the barren wasteland, you have to go to one to ‘arrive’ in a room, design things that the players can stumble into on a chart while they move through the wasteland to fill the same role as whatever it is that’s so important about dungeon corridors in the first place (traps and such?), and run down the list of events in accordance to your mental pacing (or roll if you’re into that $=!+) as they do, design the objective of the dungeon such that they know they *want* to go to points of interest (the Master Sword is hidden in the wasteland, they’ll pick up on the fact that it’s supposed to be in one of the interesting spots.)
You could actually even take this a step further, present them a map of the wasteland, with known points of interest marked, let them know meandering without direction into the desert is suicidal, and ask them which places they’d like to go to. In your DM notes, have “corridors” between them that represent the act of traveling from one to another to design encounters and traps in (or simplify that “x happens on the way to y”) and design the dungeon otherwise as normal.
The only real difference with the latter method, is that depending on how you frame the routes, you have to design a specific ‘corridor’ between any two points, some of which can be uneventful. But then again, video games don’t always do that, they just route you through waypoints based on where the road is supposed to be, or the necessary method for surviving the desert. if you design a penalty for heading out into the desert, you can even make it a choice that might have consequences if they figure out something is going down in one of the rooms they could try to avoid.
How about the sunlight and heat are so harsh that characters take damage/get exhausted when exposed, so they need to navigate by hiding in what little shadow there is. Of course, the angle of the sun would change over time… And you’d need some sort of reason why they’re not just waiting for night time (maybe twhatever they’re looking for is only visible when exposed to sunlight?).
I once ran a ‘dungeon’ that was a corn field with various bits trampled by scarecrows. The only thing stopping them wading through was the poor visibility and difficult terrain. You’re 100% right, prexisting paths of least resistance are much more attractive than trailblazing most of the time.
For a further discussion of this topic, listen to the Digressions and Dragons podcast. Unfortunately, I can’t remember in which episode outdoor dungeons were discussed, but I think it was 34 or 35.
Yes, it’s in the last twelve minutes of episode 35, as part of a discussion beginning roughly an hour into he episode.
Did we discuss that? Crap, I’m repeating myself. I don’t even remember that.
This is called a “pointcrawl”. Google it and there are lots of resources.
There is another, older structure called a “hexcrawl”, which can be useful for certain kinds of scenarios but probably isn’t of interest to most of the people who read this site. You can find a discussion of when to use one, and when to use the other, here: http://hillcantons.blogspot.com/2016/02/hexcrawls-vs-pointcrawls.html.
I tend to use both. More-or-less populated areas with established roads are clearly pointcrawls, but truly unexplored wilderness tends to be a hexcrawl. However, you can make some directions in a hex more likely to be chosen than others (due to trails, or landmarks visible in another hex, or terrain that obstructs or facilitates travel to one degree or another), so it will act as a pointcrawl for players who choose the path of least resistance.
I believe they are significantly differents depending on how you use pointcrawl. Some pointcrawl look more like a simplemap or a flowchart. While you can abstract a dungeon into a flowchart not all flowcharts are a dungeon. Same goes for pointcrawl.
The wilderness dungeon would includes considerations for encounters, scene, pacing etc it’s a dungeon adventure in itself, not only map of and area or of interesting locations.
If that is the way you use pointcrawl well I agree it’s the same or quite similar. But pointcrawls are often more concerned about exploration and location. So I would think it’s different.
My current game is basically this. It’s set on a desert island full of beaches and jungles and jagged cliffs and a volcano, which seems like an overland map. In practice, though, the island is just a megadungeon that’s designed basically the same as any other dungeon I do.
The only time you really have to do anything differently is when the terrain is mainly flat (grasslands, deserts, moors, etc). The only differences there are that 1) the players can take shortcuts through the “walls”, and 2) instead of carefully sealed spaces, the encounter zones are simple points of interest that can be approached from any direction.
” They assume if they leave any crack in their game, a player will shove a stick of dynamite into it and blow the whole f$&%ing thing up”. Last Saturday I DMed for the first time, the previous DM literally blew up the only way into or out of a besieged city with a stick of dynamite. I figured, sure that’s something they could do, but obviously this is a great opportunity to coordinate with forces inside and outside the city, and maybe evacuate some civilians, and even to set a trap if more goblins try to come through. And the players were agreed that that’s what they were going to do. But no, this guy’s Chaotic, he has to blow up everything.
Sounds like it’s time to have a talk with him about expectations for teamwork.
Well, you did put a literal stick of dynamite in your game … Did you expect your players to not use it?
I love open “dungeons”.
I tend to run a lot more forests, cities, towns and even circuses as my adventure locations, than traditional dungeon crawls and the absolute best is when the players go off-script and force me to think of what to do next.
A few years ago we had a city, and a portion of the city contained a few areas of interest that weren’t fully fleshed out. They were labeled in single characters just as reminders for me to add detail later. Of course that is exactly where the party decided to explore. They encountered what I knew to be a witch’s hut, but had not generated the witch character yet or detailed the hut.
I tried to discourage exploration and get them back on task. “You see four tall walls but no door, there is no way in. Perhaps you’d like to explore {Insert place you were sent here to explore by the king, here.}” But the place was too compelling. “No door? This is something!” they cry, and send up their cat-man to scale the walls.
Sure, the place could have been empty, or had a magic barrier or whatever, but that’s no fun, so again I try to gently discourage them. “Atop the walls you see a hut and a hideous old hag nude sunbathing.” I say. In my heart knowing this should repulse any sane person. But an RPG player is not sane. “My Cat person charms her with my good looks, and convincing demeanor.” says the player, who proceeds to roll a critical success.
A table full of people simultaneously face palm.
Suffice to say the rest of the adventure went way off the rails, a lot of craziness ensued, and the witch became an integral NPC in the game world.
We talk about that adventure quite often. It resounds in the lore for our table, all because they just had to go off the map.
For me, this kind of experience, where the players can do whatever they can think of, is why I play pen and paper RPGs.
Felt like I was reading that book where Grover tells you stop turning the pages.
There’s a Monster at the End of This Book. A classic. Classic Grover.
After a few pages of scrolling I started to suspect he might not be joking.
You actually had me for a second there. 🙂
Ah! Once I asked if you were going to publish a book but u didn’t reply me… and I was right !!!!!
I read the question and thought “Angry GM has already answered this question”. So I thought it was funny that you stopped the paragraph and left all the space.
I was happy to see that you went into more detail on the subject.
Anyone got any ideas for how to navigate an ocean in an interesting way? Since there’s no walls whatsoever (besides the occasional island-side reef) I’m not sure how I would manage it. Maybe just like Wind Waker?
Break your ocean areas into regions that have traits: the Sea Lane has steady winds that blow west, but are much more likely to have pirates and are patrolled by Bad Guy’s navy; the High Doldrums are safer but much, much slower; the Dagger Rocks are a channel of reefs that shortcut between Bad Guyland and Spooky Shores but are likely to tear out the bottom of your boat, etc. Give each region winds and currents, require checks at different intervals and difficulties, and help the players make maps that reflect the world and require them to make choices based on their current goals. Add in seasonal changes, tides and supernatural changes, and anything else that makes the world more interesting. Read up on some real-world explorers to see what they faced back in the day and that might also give you some inspirations.
Maybe combine what Daniel above me said with the stuff angry write about making a good exploration mechanic.
Are you making a sea dungeon or sea exploration thing?
To be honest, Wind Waker is actually a pretty good example of how this could work in general, not just for sea-faring campaigns.
Essentially, if the destination is more important than the journey, then the journey can be whatever you want narratively.
That said, Wind Waker did get complaints about the sea-faring being a bit dull (which is why they added the Swift Sail in the HD remake), and Daniel’s advice seems pretty solid in that regard.
Also, I forgot the article was about dungeons and not overland travel. 😛