Preserving the Mundane Peril of Dungeons at Higher Levels

Lower level parties sally forth to the dungeon with a healthy concern for logistics - food, shelter, water, light, etc. Failing to stock up can mean their doom. Later, advanced magic easily makes up for a lack of preparation - or is outright superior! This can make for an unwelcome switch in play style for those who enjoyed the tension of their earlier forays. 

In most dungeon games this change in play style is inevitable. Like it or not, it is part of the experience. It allows the party to take on a grander scale of adventure after proving themselves in the muck. Still, it feels like a sad error to abandon the grim lessons of earlier adventures entirely. Players who took these  to heart do not want to see them drift into obsolescence. Those who did not may fail to even respect the threat of the dungeon.

To this point, I have assembled some methods to keep dungeons dangerous. The point here is not to turn a dungeon into the Tomb of Horrors but to show how a dungeon can be drawn up in a way that preserves its aura of mundane peril despite level.

Silent But Deadly

The flame of torches and lanterns can reveal deadly oxygen-displacing gases. Make their light flicker  when they get close to an otherwise undetectable pool of suffocating or poisonous gas. Have it snuff out when they would need to make saves. Infravision and light spells have no flame to reveal this, so parties reliant on such powers find themselves doomed by their own superiority.

Obviously, this gets tricky if the pool of gas happens to be flammable. Consider that it is still better to find that out at its edge rather than while casting a fire spell within it later. A torch or lantern that merely bursts or changes color near a concentration of flammable gas can be a lifesaver for an observant party.

Lurkers in the Darkness

It is dark. You have been eaten by a grue. An antidote to all the fancy races with dark vision and their annoying players who have to tell you about it every time. Sure, they can see the grue, but will wish they hadn’t. A hazard easily fixed by a torch or lantern, but also amenable to light spells. Bold and greedy merchants in town could mark up their torches and advertise them as “grue repellent.”

This doesn't need to be as exotic as a grue. Animals and primitive monsters may be repelled by fire itself, to the point they avoid parties carrying open flame. This is not so easily outclassed by light spells.

The Tight Squeeze

They call it a dungeon crawl, so why aren't they crawling? Heavy armor and huge weapons are great until you have to squeeze through a tiny cave tunnel. Then, it is time for the lowly, skinny, flexible goblin to shine. A party that would beat the gods themselves on the field of battle is just a wiggly, screaming meal when pinned between two solid stone cave surfaces. 

Just getting stuck may arguably be just as bad - the recent Nutty Putty cave incident being an example. This awful fate should bring a little tremor to the heart of the bravest adventurer, and at the very least make them consider hiring a local guide to keep them out of the worst passages.

This is an unglamorous way to go and it makes sense to give warnings. The tooth-marked skeletons of an early party, trapped in their rusting armor should do. I'm sure you can think of something better.

Spells like passwall and stone to mud, divination, etc. can avoid this, but this is at least a cost.

Perils to Avoid

There's a fine line here in that if you overdo these techniques it may ruin the feeling of immersion and fairness. Plan these out beforehand instead of adding them on the fly. Make them a real part of the world. Otherwise, the players may feel that you are just placing arbitrary obstacles in their way, and they will have a good point. 

 

Give them ample warnings, and use the carrot instead of the stick: show that the more earthly methods of dealing with dungeon danger still have their advantages.

 

Got your own special methods? Tell us about them below!

A Modest Procedure

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay  

Seeing all the discourse about how games do not support something if they do not have rules for it, I had a revelation. There is a glaring omission - no games support the veritable act of gaming itself! Therefore, no games actually support the gaming experience and the entire holy mission of role-playing games is a failure. 

So sad!

But, there is a cure - simply close the loop and use the system itself. When you are thinking of running a game, just roll:

For D&D-alikes

• Critical Success: You played the best game and everyone cheered at the end.
• Success: You had a good session and your players want more.
• Failure: You had a frustrating session full of boredom and arguments.
• Critical Failure: You had the worst session ever and everyone quit.

For PBTAs:

Run the Game: think about your players and roll+run. 

• On a 10+ you had a good game. 
• On a 7-10 you had a good game but payed so dearly for it you wish you hadn't even tried. 
• On a miss (6-), you had a terrible game and look stupid.

Best part is the experience of gaming is so well supported it elides every inconvenience!

SHQUART CHART

 Presented with little fanfare, and largely self-explanatory.

Hopefully, this helps someone.

METTLE Core 1.5 Revision Notes

 The 1.5 edition of METTLE Core marked a long period of reconsidering prior versions and is the most drastic revision since publication. The three major changes I want to ramble on about for a while are the Attack Check, Montages, and Drain.

Attack Check Changes:

The Attack Check originally used in METTLE Core was a sort of grand sum of offensive factors and defensive factors for the target: NATURE + FRAME - target's FRAME. This was nice because it lumped everything together and allowed for any number of damage between one and the maximum. It was also final, in that you handed it off to the target to be applied as damage with no further conversation. This called for front-loaded knowledge of both the attacker's and defender's stats but was no more convoluted than something like THACO in early D&D.

     In practice however this front-loading of all the info into a single roll stilted the conversational flow of combat at the table. It no longer felt intuitive and, worst of all, was different than a standard check. For example, a typical Attack went like this:

Attacker: Ok 5 for NATURE and 4 for damage, I've got 8 dice. Wait what was your POISE and FRAME again?

Defender:  4 for POISE and 3 for FRAME

Attacker: Ok 5 dice then, Difficulty 4... <Checks> Take 2 damage.

     The attacker here has to ask for multiple pieces of info from the defender. It also robs them of the feeling that they can soak any of the damage after the fact (they already did, but this is about the feeling rather than the process).

     The new method was the same as any other check, just NATURE vs. POISE to hit. The Attacker need only know the defender's POISE, and even then they don't really need to know this - as long as the Score ends up being over it they are good. I know that some tables like to conceal defensive values and this preserves that as an option.

Attacker: Ok 5 for NATURE, what is your POISE?

Defender: 4

Attacker: Ok, that hits, 2 Edge plus my weapon damage, take 6!

Defender: Ok I'm soaking 3 with my FRAME so just 3 gets through.

     Long story short, this just feels more like a natural conversation in play to me. Each side concerns themselves with the things that matter to them rather than loading everything onto the attacker's side.

Nixing Montages

I've played all sorts of games with different takes on downtime. Long story short: "No Sir I don't Like it." I have had many bad experiences with waiting for my character to heal up while the others go on a little side adventure without them. Whenever the GM asks "Ok, what is everyone else doing while X gets treatment and Y fixes the tank?" it always leads to a boring interlude or leaves players out. I hate that question.

 

To avoid this, I thought I would include some rules and procedures to streamline downtime so I could make a game that didn't dwell on it. Unfortunately, setting some Actions aside as long Montages had the opposite effect and made them even more intrusive. Instead of glossing over them, they became a necessity for things like healing drain or resources or whatever. 

 

This was supposed to be an Action-Adventure game, not a vacation simulator!

So it's goodbye to Montages. Some Actions may still be quite long (Travel, Use for big projects, etc.), so I put in the option for a Downtime Voucher. Instead of boring everyone else to death by describing how they spend their leisure time, you can just spend your voucher later during actual play to have gotten something done. For example, if the party is fleeing the cops on the docks, one of the players could spend their Downtime Voucher to say they bought a speedboat while their buddies were healing up. Convenient and hassle-free.

 

Nixing Drain

The prior version of METTLE Core had Draining an Attribute as the default Twist. This sort of idea has a good pedigree in similar games and is sensible at first glance. I stopped using it because it lead to an annoying sort of death spiral in play where characters just got worse and worse until they took some required downtime, which I hate anyway. Why make a central, default mechanic insist upon something I didn't want to focus on in the first place?

So it's goodbye to Drain as well. The default Twist is now a consequence that eats up your next Action. This is superior because it is how most games I have been in dealt with botches, informally. It is a solution that is well-accepted by players, and feels much more immediate than kicking a consequence down the road by lowering an Attribute temporarily. This way, the consequence is good and immediate.

 

Other Notable Changes:

 

Characters

 FOCUS changed to CONCEPT.

• Avoids the word "FOCI" as a plural.
• Is more evocative of who the player is rather than just a career or interest.
• Some people thought it meant perception.

 Backgrounds changed to Backstories

• Backgrounds was a leftover from an earlier version where they were like sub-concepts.
• These short phrases satisfy the desire for a backstory while keeping tight limits on it.
  

Backstory (nee Background) selection changed. No more points to distribute, just take a number of them equal to highest Attribute (usually 5).

• Avoids a bug where low-die level Backstories were actually worse than just defaulting to an unrelated Concept.
• Gives a more satisfying number of Backstories overall.

Mettle is now highest Attribute + Motive.

• Basing METTLE only on Motive lead to fairly flimsy adventurers, which is both a bit frustrating for players and not exactly high adventure. 
• Having a low Mettle is now reserved for poor nameless extras and such.

Mettle Surges now apply to any sort of Check during Initiative, not just Attacks.

• There are lots of things adrenaline and impending doom could feasibly fuel.

 

Engine

Twists now default to Delay instead of Attribute Strain.

• Strain to attributes was a lot of tracking on the sheet, demands a way to relieve it via rules, affects some attributes more than others, overlapped too much with deprivation, and most importantly - puts off consequences for too long.

Teamwork now adds a simple bonus for having a competent leader in a task.

• This replaces a complicated and non-intuitive roll & keep system.
• Players like to make their own Checks, as it turns out. 

Got rid of modifier stacking rules.

• They were interesting but in the end there were so many exceptions that it never really applied. A solution in search of a problem, basically.

 

Scenes

Montages removed and important montages (travel, recovery/aid) moved into Actions.

• Montages were an interesting experiment but in the end I didn't want an action/adventure game to focus too much on downtime and recovery.

Free Move given its own paragraph header to make it easier to find.
Split Actions extended to all types of actions, not just Attack.

Grapple folded in as a type of Attack

Block and Dodge combined as Defend.

Aid added to account for recovery after 0 or negative mettle status

Hustle, Recover, Relax removed as they are nuisance moves related to downtime.

Perform removed as sort of an edge case rarely related to pulp adventures.

• I have faith you can work out this sort of thing on your own if it comes up.
  

Persuade is now Parley

• Parley just sounds more fun and emphasizes this is used for tense situations not just yakking.

Rallies can be used on any Action instead of only when passed to.

• The pass-only requirement added a confusing complication to use them that really didn't add much. Being passed to by an ally is now the source of a possible advantage instead.

Rallies now rely on Motive instead of Nature.

• I have no goddamn idea why I based Rallies on Nature in the first place.

Rallies do 1 on fail, 2+ on success.

• nothing on a failure was too harsh, especially if rattled.

Rallies clear the effects of a Rattle

• It was a little depressing to have them stick regardless of personal revelations, courage, etc. This allows them to go away while giving more incentive for teamwork.

Rattles affect Rally Difficulty, +1 on a failure, +2 or more on success.

 

Resources

Armor Soaks instead of adding to Mettle.

• Matches the intended feel of having armor during play and in the source media.

Vehicle rules overhauled.

Simplified weapon ranges and rules for burst and full auto.

Half damage for "Soft" (less-lethal) attacks like hand to hand, whips, nets, etc.

 

Guidance 

Factions now use Resources instead of Influence

• No point introducing something entirely new when it was so highly correlated with Resources anyway.

Volitional Wounds

Here I'm going to explain the wounds system I favor in tabletop RPGs and use in Eldritch Gambit and METTLE Core. The idea is that a player chooses for their character to take an injury in exchange for ignoring damage. This can be any amount of damage from a single blow, as long as the character still has HP left. Discretion to use it is entirely left to the player.

For example, Bob the Fighter has 12 HP and suffers 10 HP damage from an orc. Instead of dropping to 2 HP, they can choose to forego the damage and suffer a wound penalty instead. There's not a lot to it other than deciding what a "wound" is in your favorite system. You could even swap in a roll on one of those oft-maligned critical hit tables, which would be well-used in this case.

This idea mutated from the procedural advice given in Eldritch Gambit, which recommends that players should be left to describe injuries and other misfortunes that happen to their character. This was in turn inspired by the etiquette of Dragonball Z internet forums for how members should describe fights between their characters. It will seem familiar to those who know how FATE handles Consequences and Voidheart Symphony handles wounds.

Advantages:

• It is voluntary and does not impose itself on the Players or GM. It is not another thing you have to deal with when the dice tell you.
• It is consistent, working the same for PCs and NPCs. You can expect the GM to use it only rarely and for important NPCs.
• It is an "interesting decision." If you suffer the wound, you get to fight on impaired. If you do not, you remain perilously close to incapacitation or death. The choice is thus between impairment or imperilment.
• It clarifies what HP are in these games - mere flesh wounds or positioning. Serious meat consequences are faced when you lose all HP or take wounds.
• It is adaptable, slotting in easily to just about any game that uses some variant of HP.
  

That's all there is to it.

Knightly Factions from the Devil's Dictionary

Working my way slowly through The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, it struck me that some of this is pretty gameable. His entry for Regalia reads like a list of weird knightly factions or Troika backgrounds. I particularly love the "Affectionate Fraternity of Men Similarly Warted."

 I have edited these slightly as they were originally in a long wall-of-text paragraph.

REGALIA, n. Distinguishing insignia, jewels and costume of such ancient and honorable orders as:

• Knights of Adam
• Visionaries of Detectable Bosh
• Ancient Order of Modern Troglodytes
• League of Holy Humbug
• Golden Phalanx of Phalangers
• Genteel Society of Expurgated Hoodlums
• Mystic Alliances of Gorgeous Regalians
• Knights and Ladies of the Yellow Dog
• Oriental Order of Sons of the West
• Blatherhood of Insufferable Stuff
• Warriors of the Long Bow
• Guardians of the Great Horn Spoon
• Band of Brutes
• Impenitent Order of Wife-Beaters
• Sublime Legion of Flamboyant Conspicuants
• Worshipers at the Electroplated Shrine
• Shining Inaccessibles
• Fee-Faw-Fummers of the Inimitable Grip
• Jannissaries of the Broad-Blown Peacock
• Plumed Increscencies of the Magic Temple
• Grand Cabal of Able-Bodied Sedentarians
• Associated Deities of the Butter Trade
• Garden of Galoots
• Affectionate Fraternity of Men Similarly Warted
• Flashing Astonishers
• Ladies of Horror
• Cooperative Association for Breaking into the Spotlight
• Dukes of Eden
• Disciples Militant of the Hidden Faith
• Knights-Champions of the Domestic Dog
• Holy Gregarians
• Resolute Optimists
• Ancient Sodality of Inhospitable Hogs
• Associated Sovereigns of Mendacity
• Dukes-Guardian of the Mystic Cess-Pool
• Society for Prevention of Prevalence
• Kings of Drink
• Polite Federation of Gents-Consequential
• Mysterious Order of the Undecipherable Scroll
• Uniformed Rank of Lousy Cats
• Monarchs of Worth and Hunger
• Sons of the South Star
• Prelates of the Tub-and-Sword

Eldritch Gambit: Why?

 

Portrait of the author bloviating. At least I didn't put it in the book.

There is very little explanation of why I made Eldritch Gambit in the book itself, which is intentional. I am one of apparently few people who don't find author editorializing in core books enjoyable. That said, this is a blog post, and editorializing is great for a blog.

The primary reason I wrote Eldritch Gambit was to have a skeleton (pun intended) system for BONED. In this game, you play as amnesiac skeletons trying to recover their memories and escape from an inter-dimensional oubliette. BONED is in playtests right now and coming out soon enough. We are having a lot of fun - Eldritch Gambit shines in this setting!

In this very specific context, the problem with using most existing D&D-alikes is that you start out with a class or other array of abilities. This gives you a "niche," and a defined power set right from the start. But what if you don't know who you are and only find out during play? It would ruin regaining memories if you already knew you were a Rogue or Magic-user. You can't just hide it either, because so many of their features are dependent on this initial choice

So, I made most things very dependent on Attributes instead, and magic largely dependent on items. You can discover your class and such later - it only affects the die used for non-combat Checks. While it was tailor-made to a specific setting, I started to feel like this was an optimal way to play.

• One nice thing about the Attribute-dependency of your "build" in this game is that it meshes well with the design philosophy of Dark Souls style games, making it easy for that ilk of players to grasp.
• So-called "niche protection" is weakened, but I think that was always overrated. Making your character mechanically different from others is a matter of choosing the right attributes, class, skills, gear, and in-game advantages.
• It's also more difficult for a new player to pick who they want to be out of a lineup. You can get around this by offering starting setups of gear and attributes. I'm honestly just not a fan of strict classes and find it aggravating to shoehorn my character concepts into them.
  

The other reason I made Eldritch Gambit is that I really liked the idea of push-your-luck mini-games and got to focus the system around that (Gambits). It was also a perfect receptacle for many other ideas I had or ran across in other games at the time, like freeform backgrounds, volleyball initiative, non-incentive highlights XP, armor as HP, gambling with XP, etc. It went from being just a design experiment to support a particular weird setting to a celebration of how I just like to do things in fantasy RPGs.

To be blunt, it has not been a commercial success. I'm a failure as a designer I guess, but at least I got to make the game I wanted to play.

I've played and game mastered a wide variety of systems since the mid-80s, starting with Basic D&D. This has definitely given me a specific set of experiences that informed what I do and do not like. Maybe these tastes are not for everyone, but they're definitely for me. I already did positives in the book and above, so what follows is a list of gripes I have had playing other systems and what I did differently in Eldritch Gambit. 

So if you don't like griping, bail out now.

You encounter 1d6 Gripes.

- my Gaming Gripes, and my Solutions in Eldritch Gambit -

• HP bloat: Tracking massive pools of HP is tedious and so are the lengthy battles of attrition it demands. I made sure EG kept HP fairly low, reworked armor so that it added HP instead, and introduced Rallies that restore some HP by sacrificing an action.
  
• 5-minute workday: It felt unheroic to nap after every battle to get back Spells, and this really hurt the flow of a few adventures I was in. I'm all for resource tracking for material things, but the snooze loop for regaining Spells is just aggravating. In EG I got rid of resource costs for Spells entirely. As a side bonus, this also means no more keeping track of enemy magic user Spell slots or magic points for the GM.
  
• Initiative tracking: I dislike players tuning out between fore-ordained turns or keeping track of all those initiative numbers. Popcorn initiative was very appealing, but I found it too easy to engineer a one-sided slaughter with it, especially in low HP games. EG solves this with Volleyball Initiative, where the target of the last action gets the next. It also neatly follows the "spotlight" flow of a battle.
  
• XP Incentives: I was always uncomfortable with advancement as a morality tale or scooby snacks from the GM. In EG the players themselves just decide what the most worthy highlights of their last game were and get XP for those. This was playtested for a long time when I DMed D&D 3.5, and players really enjoyed it.
  
• Perception: I had bad experiences on both sides of the table with this. As a DM players would start throwing the dice while I was describing the room. As a player I'd fail perception checks for unbelievably mundane things. Probably the most OSR thing about EG is the elimination of perception - just tell them what is there and stop gating it behind a check. It retains an Insight action, but that is for knowing something extra about what you see, rather than just seeing it.
• Whiff factor: I'm not really against misses, especially for ranged weapons. BUT I still feel like it is rare to really miss in melee combat. In Eldritch Gambit, when you don't get a clean hit, melee becomes an exchange of blows or slugfest. Specifically, a melee failure is a Clash, which means the highest damage roll wins, dealing the excess or margin to the loser. Possibly taking damage on failures also means you have to rely on good clean hits if the target is more powerful than you. Combat feels risky and messy, which was intentional. You can also throw your damage die at the same time as your Check, since you will use it either way.
  

More later as I think of them.