My thanks to all who read my recent thoughts on procedures for light and darkness in dungeons. An unfortunate illness kept half my gaming group out of action last weekend, but the cancellation of our normal game opened space for a little dungeon crawl to play-test those procedures with a couple other available players.
Playtesting is funny business. Sometimes you discover that something has really clicked; more often, of course, you find in practice the holes and problems that you missed in design. This time around — I got a bit of both! Before I summarize what worked well and what didn’t click for my players, I’ll confess that I’m not a very scientific play tester. My tendency is to be ambitious, and to use my limited play-testing opportunities to try out a bunch of things at once. Any lab scientists out there will know, of course, that this means (too) many variables all competing for analysis. If all my games were play tests, I’d try to evaluate just one rule change at a time.
If wishes were fishes... Anyway, some of the problems we encountered have little to do with the light/darkness rules, so I can isolate those out, but it’s worth noting that the session ended with a TPK — for two reasons. First, I was trying out some tweaks to combat rules that made fighting deadlier; second, we had freakish luck - I rolled really well for the monsters, the players rolled really poorly for the first half of the night (though one player did get back-to-back Nat 20s later in the evening), and the random encounter rolls were off the hook frequent! So, combat was deadly and we had more combats than I expected.
Anyway, on to the darkness/light feedback.
If you’ve read my last post, you know that one part of my philosophy here is to move away from the ubiquitous OSR emphasis on inventory management. My rules for managing dungeon illumination aimed to create decisions around encounter risk and trap vulnerability without relying on logistical bean-counting. I also wanted to focus on the more emotionally satisfying (to me) narratives of danger looming in the darkness.
All that was validated strongly by my players. In short, they said that they, too, are tired of fiddling with inventory slots; one particularly hates the numerical resource management micro-game. That feedback was validating for my approach, though it certainly pushes against many widespread OSR principles. To be clear, these aren’t players who hate old-school play style and who just want the world handed to them on a bed of 24-times-per-short-rest superpowers. They’ve amply demonstrated their willingness to think creatively while solving problems, or to die horribly while fighting monsters.
So, for what it’s worth, here is one local group’s plea to the indie-OSR-NSR-whattheheckSR design community: Knave, Cairn, Mausritter, etc. are dope, but please keep designing things that don’t rely on micromanaging inventory, too.
Ok, what about the light/darkness thing?
The players enjoyed my greater attention to lighting limits. They endorsed my enhanced narration of the uncertain darkness. Having light sources really only illuminate part of each new room led to more atmospheric play and — in a few instances — extra decision points about which risks to accept. So all that was a win.
However, the players advised against the ways I’d mechanized illumination. The setup for the playtest probably didn’t show my rules in their best light (uh, sorry for that one): to save time, I used a free online dungeon with fairly small rooms, and missile combat played almost no role in the session (those factors muted a few of the tradeoffs of the dungeon crawling stances + light states). The fact that bright light made a random encounter much likelier rankled a bit because of the aforementioned wacky dice rolls, which produced far too many encounters for such a small dungeon. Nonetheless, I did agree (with some chagrin) that my formalized attention to mechanical triggers didn’t match the perceived usefulness of the different light states in play.
Where does this leave me? Honest, thoughtful feedback about rules remains helpful, even when pointed against “my babies.” Although the playtest revealed some issues, it also was paradoxically somewhat liberating. My players and I agreed that without implementing my full-blown procedures as described in my last post, we should add the following to our games:
+ pay more attention to who is holding the light - monsters may try to extinguish it
+ assume lights illuminate much smaller dungeon areas, to heighten narrative drama and reframe exploratory choices
+ minimize inventory management where feasible
Additionally, I think I may still include the option to shine much brighter light that does call for an immediate, higher-risk encounter roll — but I may not make the modifier as punitive. (Think Gandalf, again: “perhaps we can risk a bit more light…”).
What is freeing to me is that my musing about the experience of dungeon crawling has led me to some new resolutions about play, but these are resolutions we hope to implement through fewer rules, instead of more procedures. There’s something refreshing about a freeform solution to a problem. How will it work in future sessions? Dunno. I’d better keep playing to find out.
Good on you for being willing to slaughter a sacred cow. Tinkering with the game to the delight of yourself and the other players is always a worthy process.
ReplyDeleteThanks! :D
DeleteIn my recent Dolmenwood sessions I've been trying to track the party's torches properly, but it just doesn't matter enough - the juice just ain't worth the squeeze. Attrition of HP, spell slots and more active-use items has been absolutely enough to give players limited range and a sense of mounting tension as they push their luck going deeper.
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear your focus on sensory deprivation and exploring by a flickering island of light was well received! These 'soft' rules are just as impactful as more numerical/procedural elements of play, in my opinion.
That's roughly my experience with low level dungeon crawling 'expeditions'. What matters is who is holding what kind of light source and who is carrying spares. I sometimes align the lifetimes of torches and lanterns to 'mandatory' rest turns. Then there's only one timer that has to be tracked for the whole party (until someone casts a spell). A properly organised expedition running out of light is seldom a consideration, unless you somehow lose the one character that was carrying all the spare light.
DeleteTracking torch life matters much more when the expedition is impromptu, e.g. hot pursuit of an enemy into an underground complex armed only with whatever you grabbed on the way out of the farmhouse.
That "juice ain't worth the squeeze" analogy sums up my current feelings quite evocatively.
DeleteThe OSR obsession with inventory management seems to reflect a contemporary game design consciousness, perhaps influenced by CRPGs and other kinds of games, rather than early D&D editions.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to see you experimenting. Whatever works for the experience you want to create in play makes sense to me.
I think the thing that really stood out to me in your previous post was the value of low-fi 'dim light' descriptions. I can see how introducing vague shapes, uncertain distances, unidentifiable movements, and partial information in general can add a lot of excitement, interest and focus to the exploration process. For my games I think I would handle this as a general property of low tech illumination at anything except very short distances.
A binary low-light/ high-light mechanic, like the one you described, strikes me as a bit too abstract and gamified for my purposes. You would need a LOT of individually dim light sources to produce bright illumination in a significant radius.
I think your +3 to encounter chance for bright light might have been a bit harsh. I suppose the underlying thinking was wanting something like an average 2-in-12, so dim light gets a mostly used 1-in-12 and bright light gets a less used 4-in-12. Apart from anything, it seems to me that many 'monsters' would be more likely to approach and interact with a low light party than a high light party. So the effect might work better as influencing which kinds of encounters prevail, and bright light as a 'raise the alarm in the lair' type effect rather than an immediate 'bring on a random monster right now' type effect. I guess this partly depends on how you play out the results of the roll.
I'd also like to say that I think that LBB D&D & B/X RAW both cover the three points your group agreed after the play test:
1) Who holds the light (in which hand)? (always an important question in both games);
2) Illuminate small areas (30' torch/ lantern radius is less than a single move, inside short range for most missiles, much less than the typical random encounter distance, effectively reduced unless you force a front-rank character to 'waste' a hand on it; a Light spell gives you only 15'...)
3) minimise inventory management. Both games abstract the weight of 'miscellaneous equipment' in a fixed size pool.
(1) is absolutely standard. (2) depends on how you design your interior spaces, but a room 40' across looks the same as a room 140' across when your light only extends 30' from the entrance. (3) might be contentious, but I think it's quite defensible where light sources are concerned. Encumbrance is optional in B/X...
Something I'd like to consider is natural variability in light output from the kinds of low tech sources involved. The light (and smoke) output and burn duration of a torch likely varies considerably over the life span of the torch, depending on wind conditions, angle held, user motions, precipitation etc. And this is without considering differences between individual instances hand-made from naturally variable raw materials. Or, for that matter, the effects of shadows and the movements of the light bearer and other party members and their gear. The idea that everything in the game produces a steady, uniform glow over a 30' radius is a vast abstraction.
Time keeping, is a separate question!
Thanks for that extended engagement. LBB are probably the classic rules that I'm least familiar with, so those are interesting points. Re: your last point about variable light output - if one wanted to head back into the wastes of mechanizing everything :-D, perhaps this would be an interesting application for the Torch Usage Die or, alternately, the Overloaded Encounter Die - but instead of tracking when the torches run out, it might dictacte how far you can see from round to round as your torch gutters and flares. Hmm. That idea would be too granular for me but who knows!
DeleteThanks again for your thoughts!
'Deep in the Wastes of Mechanisation' or 'Return to the Mechanised Depths' would make quite good blog names.
DeleteI thought your 'dim light' descriptions made a fair fist of representing the effects of that variability without requiring a mechanic.
If I were to do something mechanical, I think it would involve spot checks rather than (or in addition to) a routine roll. Light variability could be regarded (as no doubt many have previously thought) built in to search, surprise, hide in shadows, initiative rolls, to hit rolls, saving throws etc. But a lot of this material serves the combat phase and doesn't address information acquisition during exploration.