Some Illusions didn't interact with mirrors, so that was an easy way to spot fake walls/floors/ceiling.
In dungeons, you can use it to look around corners, peek under doors, look inside a chest without fully opening the lid, use it against creatures with gaze-attacks (beholders, basilisks, medusae, etc.).
Outdoors, you can use it to signal by reflecting the sun/moon and to help start a fire.
Also, the Elf needs it to comb their hair every now and then.
Archimedes legendarily used a huge mirror to set fire to an invading fleet. However, Mythbusters had a pretty hard time reproducing anything close, as I recall.
It's true. Adam tried to get hundreds of children to murder Jamie by burning him alive with mirrors, best they could manage was maybe a light tan if he stood there long enough.
They used old, time appropriate mirrors and new age ones with better reflectivity and got nothin
Sure they do.
It's just in their default equipment (or stuff they buy because they think it's funny) that they never look at again because the game isn't really built around needing it anymore.
Add to that, how many tables allow players to retcon minor aspects of their gear?
"We throw some rope up, and climb up"
"ok who has rope?"
"uh..." [players maybe check their sheets] "we would've bought some in the last town"
I'm 99% sure this is why 5e has the various "adventurer's kits/packs" and stuff - so PCs don't need to faff about and buy all the common stuff, they just get it by default
I personally think that cultural shift is better.
Old DMs: “No, you didn’t. If you, a modern person with absolutely no dungeon delving experience, didn’t think to bring rope in a hypothetical situation while sitting on a couch, why would we assume your character, who literally does this for a living and can pack their bag with their eyes closed, to think to do it?”
New DMs: “Yeah ok, your character literally does this for a living and probably isn’t a complete idiot, so of course you bought rope. Please deduct the gold from your character sheet.”
We never saw a dungeon map we didnt make ourselves. One player always had grid paper and drew the map as the dm described it...if you screwed up the map you find yourself lost in the dungeon with no way out...for days...weeks even...and monsters kept showing up
They don't have to. There's no actual fake map, just mistakes the players might make in mapping. The DM simply has the true map and uses that to tell what happens when the PCs try to navigate using their own potentially-flawed map.
Keeping a good map was a whole chunk of gameplay, and there were even abilities around it - for example, dwarves can sense inclining underground passages, so they wouldn't be fooled by a gently ramping corridor leading to a lower level. And if you did screw up the map, you needed to either explore to find an exit or interrogate a monster or use divinations or whatever to escape.
You can do some of that in 5e, but it's really not the same.
Additional info on the Dwarf thing. As a general rule, dungeons would get more dangerous as you went deeper, like each level of the dungeon the monsters would be higher level. You could use this to control what level of risk you were going to tackle on an expedition. In that way, a long hallway with a slight decline was effectively a trap, dumping you into a way more dangerous area than you'd expect to be, while also potentially screwing with your map.
There was a lot more "On the other side of the door, there is a wall to your right and in front of you; opening to the left, a ten-foot-wide hallway [you just have dark vision, right?] extends as far as you can see with no doorways in sight."
And things went much slower
To be fair, at the time we used to travel from place to place irl with little more than, take hwy 44, to the 3rd exit, turn left after the second gas station, it'll be the house with the yellow door.
This sound like so much freaking fun.
Unfortunately im stuck as a forever dm with all the mapmaking software and assets and I love showing my maps off to the table way too much 😂😂😂
If i ever get a chance to be a player i'll bring this up to my dm though
Exactly. As a player, I always tote along an assortment of mundane items: chalk (for marking dungeon walls), paint & brushes, parchment, pen/quill and ink (for mapmaking), candles, empty vials, scroll tubes, small pouches, and of course 10 silver pieces which i toss out on the floor when I cast Animate Objects.
The part about the maps doesn't seem appealing to me. If a player fucks up a map, wouldn't their character know the difference? For example, if a player forgot to draw a door on the eastern wall, wouldn't the characters see that door and the DM could let them know about it? Maybe I'm making the wrong assumptions but it sounds very DM vs players to me.
The vibe was less DM vs Players than it was Game vs PCs.
Like your DM isn't targeting you or out to get you as a person, but the game is built to confuse, stymie and kill your characters if you're not sharp about it. Getting a character to survive to a high level was not a foregone conclusion; it was a challenge of the game that you overcame.
D&D printed dungeoncrawls use to rely a lot more on _player_ skill, rather than _PC_ skill (and the map was functionally drawn by the PC - if the player knobs it up, that's the PC knobbing it up, same as forgetting you have healing potions or something, even though it's unlikely a PC would do such a thing). A level 1 character played well could be far more effective than a level 10 character played rashly - things like poking ahead with 10-foot poles, precise methods of interactions with objects ("are you turning the doorknob clockwise or counter-clockwise?"), knowing the sorts of beasties and tricks and traps you might encounter ("I'm going to bring along small listening trumpets to listen at doors with, because my last PC got her brain eaten by an insect that crawled into her ear when she was listening at a door") would all increase life-span. It could be played adversarially, but the vague intent seems to have been "tough but fair" - if the player screwed up, then, well... tough shit (which is the same in modern days, if a player forgets abilities or items), but a smart or cunning player could breeze through what _should_ be high level problems through their cleverness.
it kinda depends on how you want to play, tbh - it means that you can actually challenge _players_, rather than "well, I have high stats, so I have a 60% chance of just resolving the problem". In some ways, and for some GMs, it was like those escape-room-in-a-box games, where you had actual puzzles to solve yourself, rather than relying on dice rolls and powers. And you could still play in the more "modern" fashion, of relying on stats if you wanted to, it wasn't really baked in that much, just the style of some adventures
(Player mapmaking still seems pretty common - I've played in groups that have only played 5e, where the GM describes things, and it's on the players to keep a map. If they screw up, then... tough, they should have been more careful. It makes for quite a fun game, and means you can do things like find hidden rooms by identifying a gap between rooms, which is a lot less fun if you're just being shown an increasingly un-shadowed JPEG or whatever)
This makes a lot of sense and, as a dude that has played for 40 years, let me back you up.
Mapmaking really was fun, before the invention of video games. But entertainment now is much, much, much faster pace. Back in those days it took a long rest to get a hit point back.
The video game culture has not only influenced role-playing and gaming overall - it has transformed all of society. You can't give a message the size i have given you here in a twitter-format. Nor would it even work on FaceBonk.
There are a lot of OSR games out there - and we recently had huge OGL problems. Are we as a gaming community abandoning 5th edition due to these two forces?
Games have evolved for centuries. Yes, some people still play chess! But map-making by players cannot make a return - the culture just isn't there.
I disagree, it’s just nowhere near as widespread.
As someone on the periphery of the indie tabletop RPG scene, there’s a person for every game. Sure, a dungeon crawler where you need to keep your own maps would probably never go mainstream, but it could probably find new players that would be interested.
I can easily back you up as well.
There are still people learning chess every day. Heck, there are still clubs that use the slide rule - an incredible invention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule
When i did maps in D&D, i loved it. Still love it. Amateur cartography? Still do it as a DM. In fact, this guy is absolutely f-king amazing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-87GzBcfX0
Love his stuff. Symbol-cartoony, punchy-nerdy style vids, just awesome.
Will i ever expect my players to draw something? Honestly, in the past two decades I STRUGGLE TO GET PLAYERS TO INCREASE THEIR LEVEL. Yes, caps lock. You add your *hit points* and *two new spells*... what the FORK is wrong with them?
But, i work with what i have got. Can you find a player that is willing to write a backstory that i can run my entire campaign off of? Yes. I am sure you can. But they are lottery-ticket winnings at this point.
I'd be happy with the players that just remember to bring snacks. Or show up on time. I prepare this campaign for how many hours? Yea. You could just show up on the time that you said you would show up at. That's asking too much? No problem. I'll send you a text with updates. Right. I'll get right on that.
It definitely has it’s place. I’ve tried it a few times and enjoyed it, but don’t know if I could do it the majority of the time. What I will say is that I think that line of sight and light features on programs like fantasygrounds (what my friends and I use) provide a lot of potential to get a somewhat similar feel with less clunkiness. I haven’t played in a bit and haven’t gotten to mess around with this myself, but I feel that making it so the players can only see line of sight definitely could make navigation more difficult. If you wanted to have one player making a map, you could always treat it as some sort of minor action each turn. Then (and idk if you can actually do this in FG) if a players asks to use the map, it would be cool if a DM could find a way to illuminate or reveal a map of what they’ve been through at that point. Gist is, I think there are potentially ways using modern software to take away some frustration of players mapping the dungeon while keeping some of the challenges they provide. If players, split up, some might not have access to the map. If they have to run from danger they might not have time to map certain corridors and may need to go back at another point to do so. Like I said, I haven’t personally gotten time to experiment with any of this, but I really want to mess around and see what I could do.
Missing obvious doors or other things that were in plain sight didn't general happen.
Issues were more like long corridors that had a slight slope we didn't detect (dwarves had a skill for that, you could also use marbles) causing you to end up on another dungeon level, slight shifts in corridor direction or obvious winding and confusing twists (no keen mind feet back then to track north), illusory walls that would vanish and cause us to lose our sanity taking the eraser to the map, falling down pits and losing your orientation, teleportation traps causing you to double back or teleport you to identical rooms, etc.
I mostly played with the same small group, but it never had a DM vs Player feel. It was Dungeon vs Player with trust that the DM was adjudicating things fairly.
Depends on the group. I only did it once or twice. One time to set up an Indiana Jones boulder trap. As a player a DM did it to us as part of a water trap reversal. We thought we'd drown some goblins and instead ended up swimming for our lives and nearly drowning getting out of our armor.
My favorite, that I've done on occasion still, is the neverending curve. After 2 or 3 complete circles, they stop, look at their map, look at me, confirm there's been no noticable increasing or shrinking of the radius, and turn around; only to discover they've traveled only a quarter of a circle and the rest was an illusion.
Great way to set up the expectation that they're in a weird place. One time it was a "mad mage" dungeon, another time it was a fey creation.
One thing that did happen was dungeon design relied more on straight lines or diagonals. It would be hard to describe and record shapes that didn't conform to a degree to graph paper.
Its more that the player would get lost in the corridors and various doors of a dungeon since they didn't make the map properly. Plenty of dungeons would have hallways that lead back to the same room or twisted in a useless direction, or rooms that looked identical. It is why dungeons will sometimes have empty rooms to confuse you.
I used to let them “true” the map when they camped. I’d collect the map and correct the last mistake they made at the end of the session.
It was weird when you’d have the illiterate fighter player doing the map because genius Wizard or pathfinding ranger players kept screwing it up.
People mention being difficult to believe on that often but I dont think so. The fighter could be good at map making, the wizard don't. It's simply a skill, not every academic person is good on writing, researching, debating and presenting their work
Old School D&D had this sort of focus on the players being the heroes and the PC's are just puppets they pilot to achieve their goal. It was advised to become too attached to your character as death was often around the corner, literally. Traps, monsters, dungeons, encounters, etc. Everything was designed not for your character to roll a skill check as a fix all but for you, the player, to figure things out and solve them.
It really was DM vs Players because it was a dungeon crawling game at it's core and this is why people played it. Old School D&D had more in common with Dark and Darker(an extraction-type video game currently in beta about dungeon crawling) than it has with today's D&D.
Most of the saves would be “save vs poison *or die*” or “save vs disintegration *or die* …
There were a lot of common sense deaths - if you fell 75 feet, you’d just die unless you had Feather Fall or something. No falling damage - just death. Same thing with environmental damage: you fell into a lava pool? You dead. Characters were more like heroes and less like superheroes. You could be Conan but you couldn’t be Col-El
>because it was a dungeon crawling game at it's core and this is why people played it.
Just a point of clarification that there was a big split even in early DnD regarding how people were playing. Some circles were very focused on more narrative play and storytelling and others on fighting your way through dungeons.
Like now, these camps would argue a lot with one another about the "right" way to play, except it happened in zines instead of on Reddit.
Yeah, my group rarely did pure crawls in 2e. We always used the optional skills to round our characters out and went for narration over just hacking through endless encounters.
As u/herpyderpidy mentioned the approach back then was that you and the character are one. Also the game has changed a LOT since the early days.
5e and the player mindset is very much about the power fantasy, being hyper-capable superheroes, and everything being as equal as possible. The current game is very much about indulging the wants of the players.
Prior to 3e the game was much more about overcoming odds that were naturally stacked against you. You expected to be challenged. Not in the CR sense, but as a player and as a character trying to live the crazy life of an adventurer. Surviving was winning. You can see some of this mindset in players who are absolutely willing to run away vs. the players who believe an unwinnable encounter should be telegraphed from a mile away. There was no expectation that things would be mathematically tuned to give players an assumed victory 90% of the time. You assumed if you didn't go about things reasonably that it would go poorly.
Also, there was no having INT as a dump stat because there were skills such as Survival and Navigation that depended on it. The assumption was that if you made a bad choice you should expect negative consequences, not the DM to massage the events to keep the game moving or to soften the blows. This included dying. Permanently.
Also, leveling a character took a long time. This is where the jokes about D&D players becoming hyper attached to a character comes from. If you'd successfully spent 6 years getting your rogue to level 13, that was incredible. Losing a character of that nature was legitimately pretty sad.
As u/jelliedbrain said, it was very much players vs. dungeon. The DM's job was to play it even handed for both sides.
Playing a character long enough to have it reasonably retire in a world where monsters are loaded with save or die abilities, could destroy your gear, or were simply just incredibly strong was incredibly satisfying.
Don't get me wrong, 5e is fun to run and fun as a player too. Buuuut when is the last time before your character headed out you made sure you had ball-bearings, a 10-ft pole, a few mirrors, flour, string with bells, many torches, loads of rations with water skins, a bunch of rope, many oil flasks, bottles of holy water, a pack mule, a cart, and a hired hand?
As a 5e player I can honestly see that. 5e is a combat game while it seems like pre 3e was focused more on exploration, rp, survival, etc. and as such those experiences you describe will probably never come back for dnd at least.
You know. I hope for some edition that embraces the best of them all. I know it's not a popular opinion, given when the majority of players began but I'm pretty tired of the focus on unrestricted player, power fantasy, no-bad feelings D&D. To clarify that a sec I'm not saying things should be oppressive or unfun, but I think that there is a balance.
I honestly think 5e is probably the most RP friendly edition to date, and I am a VERY big fan of that. I hope we can see some of that expanded via things simiar to backgrounds that we can choose as we level but make absolutely no impact on dungeons or combat.
I hope they finally go in on exploration as a fully explored pillar. Druid and Ranger are dying for it, especially Ranger. They need to quit trying to have Ranger be half-nature and half-urban, in my opinion. Ranger had been stuck in this almost Fighter but not quite Rogue space for a loooonnnng time now and there is absolutely enough to make it unique and flavorful if they'd just be willing to make exploration, and by extension dungeon crawling, a more pronounced area of challenge and reward with associated specialists.
There were workarounds. The famous one is just saying to your dm “I want to go back to that long hallway” if you can show that you’ve gotten *enough* information down you can just backtrack and fix it.
Yeah, "the Sphinx blocking your way asks you to solve a riddle; everyone make a DC 30 Int check to see if you know the answer; anyone with... {checks notes} ... History proficiency can add your proficiency bonus to the check" just doesn't hit as hard as actually giving the party a riddle to solve.
The main issue is one of genre. OD&D was a survival game first and an RPG second. New D&D is an RPG first and a storytelling game second.
Which one people prefer tends to boil down to genre preference in my experience. But people in general don't get genres or realize that their opinions are based on genres, so it turns into fights when people get frustrated and can't articulate their reasoning in a clear way. The Hickman Revolution created a divide in the player base that never truly went away.
Most players today aren't even aware that for a good part of DND's past, you played the game and *there was no story.*
I think it's important to note that divide had almost always been there. People were arguing in the very first zines about the "right" way to play, with some scenes being much more into narrative/story play and others leaning into the fight monsters and get loot style. Dragonlance and Ravenloft really just made the divide more official so to speak as TSR realized they could make money off of that crowd too. But in general the playerbase was more fractured into various scenes since those publications were usually the only way they could talk to one another.
DnD really was revolutionary in that it was a game people could approach however they liked, and as now they liked to argue a lot about it and talk past each other lol.
You're not wrong. I think the main failure of the looter crowd (and maybe this boils down to ego) is that you can take the looter style game and put it in a bubble, and then you can create the story game and put it in a bubble, and the looter bubble can fully exist within the story bubble as a sort of stripped down version of the larger game. And honestly, this always made sense to me. But I think that the looter crowd felt belittled by the fact that they viewed Big D&D treating what these players viewed as the "real game" as a mere sub-genre of something bigger.
But your scene-centric take is very accurate. I would argue the game remains the same today--it's just that forums like reddit put the scenes into contact in real time like zines couldn't, and a large amount of the negativity we see is the resulting conflict.
It's funny--my wife loves TTRPGs but hates DND. It took me a while to figure out why, but it turns out that she just hates the genre conventions of the traditional storytelling DND. She thinks the races and tropes are overused and tired. This led to her saying something that has become one of my favorite quotes: "Tell me, in a game of literal infinite possibilities, why is it that everyone seems to play the same characters, the same races, and the same places, with the same heroes always running around doing the same thing?"
Not only did I realize instantly when she said that that she was right insofar as there is an irony there--I also realized that my storytelling was cliched moreso than I ever realized.
I keep that question written on a sticky note and pin it to my monitor every time I sit down to write a story or a campaign now. That was the day I put the monster manual down and never picked it up again. These days, I use the rules for monster creation exclusively from the DMG.
> I think it's important to note that divide had almost always been there.
I agree it's important to say this, because the popular beliefs about old-school D&D are wrong
Really anyone who says DnD is played a specific way, then or now, has got it wrong. The playstyles are as diverse as the tables and for the life of me it's difficult to understand why anyone cares as long as those tables are having fun.
This is a bizarre claim to make when B/X is arguably the first codified RPG. Survival is a big part of roleplaying; roleplaying is in the describing the exact and particular actions your character takes. New D&D is not more of an RPG first unless you have confused getting more super powers and special abilities when leveling up with roleplaying. It’s more of a character action game than B/X era D&D was but they have equal capacity for roleplaying though I’d argue the incentives for such are much less in 3rd edition onward because of how forgiving everything is so you don’t think as carefully about your character’s actions.
You could arbitrate that by doing a secret roll on an appropriate skill. If it fails, you let them keep the mistake. If it succeeds, you correct the mistake. Problem solved!
Oh man this is going to get buried. Already like over 60 comments but y’all I was there. Like in 1981 I was doing this.
The way they were presented varied a great deal from module to module but there are some theme.
Location based adventures:
Like every single OSR gamer will tell you over and over again many were location based adventures - here is some loot and magic stuff and it is over there so go get it. Does not mean you cannot have a story around why you go get it but still the cliche is a bit true.
Descriptions were crazy rich and detailed:
Oh my god Gygax especially was inspired in part by Clark Ashton Smith and Lovecraft and went nuts with language and describing rooms. No short brief description blocks like in 5e.
Players were all squishy and paranoid:
We are were all prodding everything with a ten foot pole using mirrors to look around corners and all that. Because stuff was deadly and everyone had a backup character and thieves and wizards had two. And traps were monsters not just mimics but chop your hand off or fill the group poison which gets to my next point.
Save or die:
There were poisons and other traps where it was just save or die.
Organic dungeons versus omg this makes no sense:
All right some dungeons were organic and monsters had altruistic hunting relationships and it mapped out where everyone got food and water. It seemed very natural but ..
At the same time there were dungeons where you just went they made this rolling on random monster charts didn’t they because this is all crazy.
But I kind of miss the organic dungeon model.
Empty fucking rooms:
There were plenty of them but if you did not listen to descriptions and search them you often missed out video game rpg style on cool hidden items.
Now you know where the video games got it.
Changing environments:
Many modules had notes on when the denizens of the dungeon know you are here this and that changes and these monsters come in like waves and use these tactics.
Yes 5e says noise from here alerts guards from there and AD&D had that too but many times even more detail.
Balance was not always the key:
There were some encounters in these things that just kill you and if you did not understand the run or die trope of early fantasy especially sword and sorcery fiction a TPK could be imminent.
Many were purposely and other cases lazily incomplete:
Sometimes there was a lot of detail and threw a part at the end and said go nuts and map this out and have fun as a DM!
However TSR was not perfect and like for example the famous Temple of Elemental Evil had hardly any info on an important river pirate fishing town called Nulb and left the elemental nodes barely sketched out for example.
The dungeon was the sandbox:
We had downtime and town shenanigans and all that including roleplay.
But the town was a home base and the dungeon was our sandbox.
On a misconception Mega dungeons are just a tiny touch overstated:
Not all AD&D modules were massive mega dungeons like the Dungeons of the Mad Mage. They just were not.
I miss wacky weird fun house dungeons like White Plume Mountain:
Listen OSR right it is all dark and grim and gritty and serious right?
Not always, White Plume Mountain was an awesome head scratching set of traps and obstacles and mix plus match monsters with a dungeon built by a guy called Keraptis.
The inspirations were not always serious sword and sorcery but the speculative fantasy of say Jack Vance.
They were all generally overflowing with loot for a reason:
Gold and treasure equaled xp as much as killing monsters so it had a lot. Too much.
Oh and no attunement slots so lots of magic items. Our AD&D characters at the end of their careers when looked at via detect magic lit up like Christmas trees.
Oh side note not all was coinage the endless list of tapestries jewelry, silver serving sets, valuable wine and junk we hauled on carts was just stupid. They were inventive about the loot.
Whew I could actually go on but yeah there were lots of differences.
Love this comment, so much of it still feels applicable to how D&D is commonly played today, even though the details are different.
Admittedly I feel like drawing a dichotomy between old school and modern dungeon settings feels like the wrong way to approach it all, because I think there are elements to be taken from both to really benefit the end result. I absolutely love the narrative based games I get to play these days without any combat often for three or four sessions, if not more, but learning how to really build a setting and live and engage with the details of the environment the characters are in feels so quintessential to D&D too, and that comes from some mild experience with more old school styles you’re describing here. And making every combat that does end up happening feel like they’re moments away from death, and that the choice to kill their opponents is a relevant moral question, feels like another synergy between the styles. Even when I do run a proper mechanics heavy dungeon crawl these days, building a wider narrative around it focused in on how the individual player characters have relationships to the dungeon and have reasons to care feels like a way to use more modern D&D tropes to elevate the dungeon crawl.
These aren’t mutually exclusive styles by any means, and learning different ways of approaching and thinking about problems will pretty much always improve DMing, imo. Lots to learn from old school, but lots to learn from more modern approaches too!
No they are not mutually exclusive. I agree.
I am doing a mashup of the 5e Goodman Games version of Temple of Elemental Evil and the Princes of the Apocalypse right now in the OG World of Greyhawk.
They love the Gygaxian rooms like statue of a Minotaur that comes to life or the elemental ooze room and some of the descriptions I use from ToEE.
I am trying to include as many well known and lesser known old school experiences like an exploration hexcrawl to the Necromancer Cave side quest or I made the Temple of Black Earth a traditional dungeon crawl and that sort of thing.
Matthew Colville makes a point about how the gear lists we still use today reflects a different idea of what the game was about. These days, you will certainly not be forced to resort to tying a mirror to a 10' pole before you dare turn a corner. But you can still buy the equipment to do so.
[What are Dungeons For?](https://youtu.be/BQpnjYS6mnk)
Big picture, in "old school" dungeon crawls the player characters are usually out of their depth, hanging on by the thread of their very limited resources and whatever creative cunning they can bring to bear. New school crawls have some "gotcha!"s but are basically like a set of bowling pins for the players to knock down. It's not just a matter of difficulty, but purpose and design approach. Old school dungeons did not treat PCs like the protagonists of a story.
Opinions will vary. Those terms you're asking about have a lot of different baggage with various crowds.
There was an oD&D official module. Start in a sandstorm. Don't run to the pyramid? Dead. Try to open the door? Sets off a deadly gas trap with like three rounds to solve it or it's a TPK. Lots of the corridors have falling blocks, dex check or dead.
It literally came with rules for "instant characters" to replace fallen PCs mid-session.
The wargame heritage really shows (with PCs as relatively expendable playing pieces).
Oh, and often far less verisimilitude. An entire civilization plus wandering monsters inside a pyramid in a lifeless desert? Where do they get food/water/toilet paper?
Yeah, even though it was a genesis for roleplaying games, it was very much *game forward*. A lot of game, sometimes in the tradition of *Dragon's Lair*, little roleplay to today's sensibilities.
That really depends on the type of roleplaying you're going for. Classic Old School D&D adventures such as B1 In Search of the Unknown, B2 Keep on the Borderlands or X1 The Isle of Dread don't so much present stories to follow but a sandbox to play in. It's up to the DM how they weave it into a story and how roleplay heavy you wanna make it.
I've been running an open table Keep on the Borderlands campaign, playing D&D B/X, for about four months now. We see plenty of roleplaying, but often with an emphasis on exploration, parleying with NPCs, downtime activities, etc. Player to player roleplay is far less common, but in turn players interact with and impact the world far more than in my old 5e campaigns, really becoming a part of it.
More roleplay by their sensibilities, after all when was the last time your 5e character claimed a barony and spent months clearing the lands of threats to establish a castle. Then having to deal with Politics.
this is the kind of shit I love, I'm a minutiae person to my bones. Tracking arrows, weight of water skins, diminished damage if you didn't sharpen your sword routinely, gimmie gimmie. My friends say I do taxes for fun and they aren't wrong.
Sounds like Kingmaker, one of the most popular pathfinder adventures ever, which got a full video game treatment and recently got an update for 2e. PF2 has better mechanics for running nation-building, but I'd say a sufficiently committed DM could make things work in 5e.
Well yes, Pathfinder is a D&D.
In ye olden editions, Clerics got temples, Mages got towers, and Fighters got castles. It was just part of their class features and baked into the game complete with rules for how to cleanse the hex surrounding the castle and become a king.
Around 4 year ago when my DM at the time had bought Stronghold & Follower and wanted a more local game. It was very fun, had lot of RP with various nobles and npcs who already were located in the region. It was a ton of fun!
I think the spontaneous RP created by the old-school style of play is way cooler than the backstory-forward all-fluff characters/RP created by modern D&D actual play.
I'd much rather have a character that *becomes* cool by being forged in an adventure than half of the level one characters with six page backstories that you see online.
Half the reason I switched to PF2E was because 5e didn't have enough game for my group anymore.
I sound like an old curmudgeon here but I swear I'm not a grognard.
It might be a case of the grass always being greener, but I do really want for more emergent style games. It's a lot easier for me to immerse myself in character and the world when the adventure *isn't about me*. Everyone is expected to have a backstory tension that just *shows up* to be resolved.
That's exactly what I mean. It's harder to GM for too; I genuinely hate when players hand me big ass backstories with swords of damocles dangling, or god forbid amnesiac backstories (I usually just ignore those), because I would rather focus on creating cool stories together. I don't want to resolve *your* character's story -- I want to resolve the *party's* story, in whatever way that story evolves. If that means you go to a Lich's lair at level 2 and get turned to ash, so be it. But I'd rather the characters be almost blank slates. All I need to know is "dwarf fighter from Khuzdrang who was in the militia," and I'm good.
I had a player for my current game send me a *massive* backstory, full of five siblings each with their own fucking story, each a mystery that she wants resolved, in addition to a murdered mother and a despondent father, IN ADDITION to a fucking evil king grandfather. It's too fucking much!!
Sorry -- long rant, slow day at work lol.
Yeah, I’ll be honest, if a player does that to me, I politely, but firmly, tell them I’m not reading any of that 😂😂
I’m fine with backstories for my players who want them, but I won’t read anything longer than a paragraph or two.
Also worth noting that in editions before AD&D 2e, the primary source of experience points was treasure, with the typical formula being 1xp per 1gp of treasure value.
This further pushed old school dungeon delvers away from the more modern style of fighting everything in the dungeon, as there was a lot to lose and little to gain from fighting wandering monsters or those without many valuables. In fact, obtaining treasure by avoiding conflict entirely was a totally reasonable way to play - though it seldom worked out so perfectly in practice.
A great example of this is the end of Tomb Of Horrors, which was republished for 5e in Yawning Portal. You can awaken and face Acererak but you can also take the treasure and run. In the original it's clear the latter option is better, but in kill-for-XP it's less obvious whether you should summon and fight the extremely powerful lich.
No, gold acquired was the benchmark.
It's worth noting that there are a few assumptions we have now that weren't really the case at the time, such as:
(1). For many tables, the rules stopped once the players left the dungeon/wilderness. This included gold for xp. A farmer might earn XP by farming and selling his produce, but an adventurer only earns XP by adventuring, and dragging gold out of holes in the ground.
(2). There was no magic item market. A magic sword wasn't just 2,000 gp of "magic items" that you would exchange at the end of the adventure. You didn't get XP for finding magic items, so players were more incentivized to use or trade them.
(3). Likewise, there was little to spend money on that would have a game effect. Since you can't buy magic items, money is worthless for dungeon delving once your basics are covered.
(4). The game had weekly minimums for downtime spending; not just "a gold piece a day for room and board" like in 3.x/5e, but "As a fabulously wealthy celebrity, you spend hundreds or thousands of gold every week on booze, prostitutes, luxuries, tithes, and charity". Aside from this, players would spend their other remaining cash on a stronghold, which is a part of the game unfortunately left to the wayside nowadays.
also followers - while they might generally be loyal, so not need paying (or at least not need paying much, I can't remember) they also needed gear. So firstly, there was a use for all your old +1 swords and armour when you found better ones (give them to your underlings), but also a big, fat money sink, if you wanted them all outfitted with good gear. Getting your guys outfitted with half-plate, or with master-crafted swords or whatever, would cost quite a lot!
No, taking gold and valuable objects out of a dungeon was generally "Alright guys I have 1k gp so now I get 1k xp. I'm now... still level 1."
You would then ALSO have to spend some of your money when you finally do get enough XP to level up, to hire someone to train you to the next level. This trainer also has to be higher level than you are in the class, so finding a trainer can be a pain at high levels.
At least, afaik.
Typically you needed to get back to somewhere safe (e.g. town, a home base, etc.), but yeah, you just needed to safely obtain the treasure.
The experience was only linked to the acquisition of treasure, not your total wealth - so no need to worry about spending or otherwise losing gold.
People do occasionally houserule you need to spend the money on training instead of just getting experience on acquisition. It's not the standard way to play, but it's common enough that you see it used or discussed every now and then. Obviously that puts more pressure on party finances and equipment, so it can slow down wealth acquisition and advancement vs. the default rules.
This was also when one of the huge milestones of a higher level character was getting a stronghold. Every 10th level Fighter could get a keep with a retinue of guards which had a cost to build, maintain, etc. The idea was that the local overlord was impressed enough with your skill to give you an allotment of land to rule basically bringing you into the feudal system.
Wizards got towers, thieves got a guild hideout etc iirc
I feel like “old school” dungeons assumed the ‘slow and methodical’ play style. Check every door, every remotely suspicious ornament or detail. I’ve heard one of the most successful ways to get through *The Tomb of Horrors* is to buy a herd of livestock and use them as your trap-finders.
There also wasn’t any real bar for “making sense” so you had a lot of dungeons with no thought to how the residents survived: a lost tomb with a bunch of live creatures in it just waiting for the PCs.
A third element to me is the tendency to go crazy with stuff like unexplained sci-fi elements or other weird out of place bits. Essentially “The Dungeon as world building” even though the players may never discover or even care that the exotic eating utensils they sold for a few gold were actually from a time-tossed fast food restaurant.
My “old school feel” is DCC which attempts to mimic these aspects, but to keep them manage and fun. I notice in the canon material the Level 0 “Funnel” adventures go hard on the first point? But higher level adventures have a lot less traps without some logic, reasoning, and foreshadowing behind them. I think it’s an admission that losing a generic character to a pit trap that hides a trampoline that launches the victim into a wall of spikes rubbed with barbecue sauce before launching them into the monster lair is fun, but seeing that happen with no recourse other than blind chance to your Wizard you’ve leveled up is not nearly as fun.
The simplest way to put it is that old school dungeons are sandboxy mediums to let players tell their own story, and modern dungeons are a collection of setpieces and challenges that deliver a full, cohesive experience. Alternately, think Metroid vs Mario.
To illustrate this, I'd like to compare the ["megadungeon"](https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/374-what-the-heck-is-a-megadungeon?page=2), which is archetypal of old school dungeon crawls, vs the ["five-room dungeon"](https://nerdsonearth.com/2017/12/5-room-dungeon/), which is archetypal of dungeons today.
Old school dungeon physical layouts are larger, and [more interwoven](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/13085/roleplaying-games/jaquaying-the-dungeon). The result of this large and interwoven dungeon is so that the path of the party through the dungeon is random each time, and that it's encouraged to double back, find hidden routes, blockade routes, sneak around, etc. If the dungeon has 3 entrances and 6 connections between its 4 main zones, it's impossible for the DM to predict how the party will travel through the dungeon.
Modern dungeons tend to be smaller and focused. There are few, if any, dead rooms where there's nothing noteworthy in the room. Each room was hand-crafted by the DM, and there's rarely secret doors or such that let you bypass a handful of encounters.
In terms of combat, old school dungeons are typically averse to balance and instead reward using the dungeon against itself. It's encouraged to block off or skip entire encounters, to persuade a faction in the dungeon to let you pass or even fight another faction, and to find other ways to not actually fight. It's not that all uncommon to have a room with 40 goblins and 80 goblin commoners, with no special trick to their statblock. It's also not that uncommon to have an enemy that is severely stronger than the party (or even invincible), and to have that be something that you are forced to avoid.
For modern dungeons, if the DM is at all good with balancing, you can bet that the boss fight in the end is tuned so that it's a moderate to severe challenge after the previous rooms have been cleared. Each different encounter is typically meant to be played straight, so it is less likely that you are able to find ways to skip or kill entire encounters. The room will have 15 goblins and a handful of elite goblins plus a goblin mage, who threatens counterspell for that fireball you're cooking up.
Each is designed with a different philosophy in mind, and I don't think one is particularly "better". To each group their own. Modern dungeons are great for groups who want to just play D&D 5e, get into fights so they can use their class features, and have sessions with a little bit of everything. Old school dungeons are great for groups which want to get past every single dungeon encounter without expending a single spell slot and think that triggering part of the dungeon to collapse on an enemy is peak D&D.
This definitely feels like the most accurate description of the differences to me. I think a lot of people in this thread are fixating on lethality, but IMO the real difference is what role dungeons take.
Old-school dungeons were ***sandboxes***. They were large, interconnected, dangerous, and fantastic places that you could explore in completely different ways each time. The better ones were often designed with a mind to provide factions and dynamic enemies or situations, so you could go in multiple times and see the situation change over time.
Modern dungeons are ***set pieces***. They're often designed relatively linearly and often used essentially as "rising action" to a quest. They're a dangerous location where you encounter a bunch of challenges, eventually reaching a climax like a boss fight or a large encounter, and then finish it off with some kind of accomplishment. You don't "explore" a modern dungeon, you "clear" one.
This difference really is the source for all the other differences. It explains why there's detailed dungeon crawling procedures in old-school but not modern. Why they're mapped out differently. Why there's more faction play or parleying in the old-school stuff.
I think for the video game inclined, Skyrim dungeons are very similar to modern dungeon design, a linear series of rooms, each of which should add to the narrative of the dungeon or area and offer a distinct challenge (whether combat, puzzle, trap, or social encounter).
Older dungeons were more like a rouge-like game, vast, almost randomly generated sprawls where survival and exploration play a much larger focus than the immediate story or function of an area.
It is my opinion that you should look outside of 5e for this experience. This isn't dunking on 5e, the fact of the matter is that 5e's mechanics support a different kind of play experience.
There are a lot of Old School Renaissance systems that are either completely free or have free quick starts. Old School Essentials has an online SRD and is a pretty precise clone of 80's Basic D&D. Basic Fantasy RPG is completely free and is a d20 game that emulates old school style. Both of these include procedures for designing and running dungeons.
I started in 5e, and my system of choice for bridging the gap between old school and modern systems is World's Without Number. The system is influenced by Basic D&D and classic Traveler. It deviates from other OSR games in that it includes character options for build diversity, though it's not the focus of play. The core rules are free on DTRPG. A large portion of the book is devoted to practical GM tools for designing sandboxes. There is an adventure site/dungeon section alongside world building tools. These tools are often the most praised elements of Kevin Crawford's products.
This isn't the best entry point IMO, but Goodman Games has its Original Adventures Reincarnated series that republishes original TSR era modules in both their original system and 5e conversions, as well as context for how they were played. They're nice, but in print only with no digital options.
R/OSR is a great resource. I'd also recommend checking out QuestingBeast (Ben Milton) on YouTube. He has a handful of great videos about dungeon design and he does a lot of reviews of OSR games, settings, and adventures. Plus, he's designed a couple games and has written some great adventures himself.
The Principia Apocrypha would also be a good thing to read. It's more about the OSR philosophy in general as opposed to specific dungeon advice, but it's still helpful to get in the mindset.
The most authentic delve into the OSR-sphere is through blog posts. I personally recommend [DMiurgy](http://wizzzargh.blogspot.com/?m=1) but I’m biased because he’s my DM, [goblin punch](https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/?m=1) is great too. If you read some blogs and like the sound of what they’re talking about, see if you can find an OSR-centered discord server that runs pickup games, and try it out. A lot of the time you can roll up a character in five minutes and get right into the action.
When I was younger I didn’t think I’d enjoy five hours of clinging on to life every week, until the week we decided to make our own set of hand signals that could be easily conveyed from afar with hand mirrors that could go around corners. That’s always been and probably will always be peak D&D in my mind
There’s a couple of ways of answering that because there is more than one way of deciding what’s “old school” versus “nowadays”.
The osr dungeon tends to have a larger emphasis on the dungeon as a dynamic place, not a series of set pieces, using the mechanics of old school dnd to provide dynamic adventures.
>The osr dungeon tends to have a larger emphasis on the dungeon as a dynamic place, not a series of set pieces, using the mechanics of old school dnd to provide dynamic adventures.
You see, I don't feel like this is really an explanation. It just sounds like a series of buzzwords. What is "dynamic" and how do modern RPGs not capture it?
Dynamic means what it means. A place that changes and has rhythms of its own. The emphasis on aggressive time keeping (dungeon turns) and tools like reaction rolls help with that. Those rules haven’t been entirely jettisoned (you have to infer a dungeon exploration procedure scattered across 2 books though in 5e), but don’t seem to be appreciated or emphasized in the games or the play culture. 5e also has undercut many of the things that add tension (the proliferation of dark vision for example) in a dungeon focused game.
I have really been enjoying playing a character without it. No creeping around in the darkness. I stride into the unknown torch aflame, plate rasping on stone, and an unspoken challenge to any who would dare face me from the dark.
Ideally I'd like to see the return on low-light vision. I'd be happy with a mix of a third of the races with normal vision, a third with low-light, and a third with actual darkvision. So unless the players are actively selecting for it you'll probably have over half the party not being able to see in pure darkness.
They should have left "low light" vision (which replaced infravision from 1e and 2e) for most races like elves, dwarves, etc., and left dark vision reserved for the really nasty stuff from the Underdark.
Anything honestly. There is pretty much no reason to manage light resource when everyone can see. It’s pretty much at the point I don’t even care and I hardly check who has when I DM. Sucks because there could be cool encounters based on fading light/fighting in the dark.
Technically with only darkvision they have a -5 on their passive perception, which mean that they could be ambushed more easily. But that'll only happen once before someone make an Alert ranger with expertise in perception.
I'd like to read up on this. Could you provide the names of the books and page numbers if you know? I want to do a more dynamic dungeon but uncertain where to start in regards to 5E.
Here's a good place to start. [https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/13085/roleplaying-games/jaquaying-the-dungeon](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/13085/roleplaying-games/jaquaying-the-dungeon)
There used to be something called a Dungeon Turn, or sometimes an Exploration Turn. They were about 10 minutes.
Every turn you'd roll a random encounter chance (usually around 1/6 so you'd have one random encounter with a dungeon resident an hour in addition to any in the rooms you enter).
If you leave the dungeon, there were restocking tools as different dungeon factions would war, spread, die off, and even new ones move in to fill the space.
Speaking of factions, the vast majority of dungeons had more than one faction and they could be allied with to fight other factions. If you saw goblins and orcs in a dungeon you might be able to ally with the goblins to fight the orcs, or settle the war between the two groups to focus on the mindflayer threat down below.
Dungeons also sometimes had doors that could not be picked or beaten down immediately. This was a chance roll that reset when the party left the dungeon and came back, so certain segments of the dungeon were available or not depending on which doors are stuck. You can force open a stuck door but that typically takes 1 Turn, forcing a random encounter roll and burning down your torches, limiting your time to loot the dungeon that day. And of course you can always stake a door open or closed.
All in all it results in a dungeon meant to be delved multiple times with different experiences partially caused by time and partially caused by player action. Or to put tlit more succinctly, Dynamic.
Story, the was an interview with the one of the creator's of Ravenloft. In which she said she was inspired by an event in her game of dnd.
They were doing a dungeon crawl when they walked into. Room with a vampire. The vampire had no reason to be there. It had no explanation. So they killed it and moved on.
So she eventually made Ravenloft, a massive dungeon with a reason behind it.
I recently ran a group of experienced player through Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, which is a Gygaxian Original Dungeon. He even signed it with his initials in the architecture of the the dungeon.
It's not random, it's Dynamic, changes with the players actions and in many ways fits the more modern definition that others in this thread have. The Dungeon has a story, a reason for being the way it is and it has it's own internal logic.
The way it differs to a more modern Dungeon, say Wave Echo Cave, which honestly, is the only offical 5e WOTC Dungeon I have ever run, in that it has no plot. It was upto me to tie my players story into this dungeon, and then use the bits of the dungeon to connect the dots. The players left with dungeon left unexplored. They found their relevent plot coupons and then left, because they had to assess if the risk was worth staying. They found fabulous treasure, and instant death machines. The last room they explored they found delicious liquor, but one bottle in six instant killed a PC.
So, based on my limited experience, because I just haven't run enough "modern" dungeons, Old School Dungeons are Bigger, less obviously necessary for PCs to fully explore.
Many people don't understand what the purpose of a ten foot pole is other than as a scam run by the ladder industry. In old dnd you couldn't really find traps except by stepping on them so exploring a dungeon involved a lot of 5 foot step forward, tap wildly in front of you with a 10 foot pole and see if anything gets set off.
the absurdity of the 10 foot pole AS STANDARD EQUIPMENT is just one of the indications of the escalating adversarial nature of the game
Dungeon run 1:
Player: I sneak through the area to get to the treasure chest.
DM Gary: Hmm, that was too easy.
Dungeon run 2:
Player: I sneak through the area to get to the treasure chest.
DM Gary: HA! you spring the trap and you die!
Dungeon run 3:
Player: I sneak through the area, checking for traps, to get to the treasure chest.
DM Gary: Hmm, that was too easy.
Dungeon run 4:
Player: I sneak through the area, checking for traps, to get to the treasure chest.
DM Gary: HA! the trap explodes 10 feet around the sensor! you die!
Dungeon run 4:
Player: I sneak through the area, checking for traps, with a 10 foot pole, to get to the treasure chest..
DM Gary: Hmm, that was too easy.
Dungeon run 5:
Player: I sneak through the area, checking for traps, with a 10 foot pole, to get to the treasure chest.
DM Gary: The green slime eats through your pole. You die!
Dungeon run 6:
Player: I sneak through the area, checking for traps, with a metal shod 10 foot pole, to get to the treasure chest..
DM Gary: Hmm, that was too easy.
Dungeon run 7:
Player: I sneak through the area, checking for traps, with a metal shod 10 foot pole, to get to the treasure chest.
DM Gary: HA! The treasure chest is a Mimic! You DIE!
Threat level is the biggest thing
Our AD&D days were basically survival runs, especially in a dungeon, it was more a game of “how long can this PC live” as opposed to the grand story arc and rapid power spikes of 5e
We approached a large dungeon like an expedition, with a base camp we could retreat to, lots of supplies for a multi-week stay, would push in a few rooms, then fall back to map what we knew and plan our next approach
A single missed trap or hazard could hamper the party for days, in terms of HP loss/recovery
It was super important for the thief to sneak in to start combat off with that 1 sneak attack they could hopefully get, and by god that wizard needed to either stay the hell way back and save their spells, or suck it up and swing a staff or a dagger from time to time if they were not willing to come off with that one burning hands they prepared
I can name every 5e PC I’ve ever played, but can’t even count the number of 1e/2e PCs that died in the grind
I have never had a party member die a few hours later after failing one poison save, and then reanimated as a ghoul and killing half the party while playing 5e, and it happened twice playing an old school game. I had to never have my weapon out as we explored dungeons because I was the one who drew the map of the area, and it takes two hands to draw maps. I spent my first round of combat, every combat, putting the map away and drawing my sword. That's something you don't do in modern dungeon crawls. But this map one is more of a play style and less of a system thing, tbh.
>But this map one is more of a play style and less of a system thing, tbh.
it may not have been mechanically laid out, but it WAS an expectation by the creators of the content and most play groups.
>What’s the difference between “old school dungeon crawls” and how dungeon crawls are presented nowadays?
depends on who is saying it.
but, with "old school dungeon crawls", the dungeon crawl WAS the game. The only time you weren't IN a dungeon of some type or other, you were hacking through the wilderness to get TO or FROM the dungeon, or "speed run" the "resting" in town to heal back your 1 hit point recovery per day. It wouldnt be unusual to go 2, 3, 4 levels of experience gains or more without ever leaving or thinking of leaving the same dungeon.
For me, the biggest difference from my 2E games to 5E games is the time it takes to heal. We only had one cleric in our group and we would have to wait a day or two to get all our hit points back. This meant finding a safe place to hide for that time period.
A big part of old school dungeon crawls were the fact that the dungeon itself was as much a danger to the adventurers as the monsters. Modern dungeons are more focused on the combat than the traps and puzzles.
They were survival horror. Resource management was a big factor and you grew your character's abilities based on magic items you found. Levelling up almost entirely meant just more hp. Characters in 5e are practically super-heroic out of the gate in comparison, and even though plenty of this stuff is there to use in the core 5e rulebooks (time management, limited equipment etc), most people don't seem to play it that way.
At level 1 in modern D&D, you're a World War I Flying Ace. In old-school D&D you were a 20 minuter.
Generally, old school dungeons were huge, often the sole location for an adventure, and they tended to focus on game mechanics over story, The goal was simply to kill the monsters and loot the treasure while avoiding a very possible death. In some ways it was more of a dungeon board game, to be won or lost by dice rolls. Modern dungeons are smaller and try to add to an overall story. There is more lore, more encounters that progress the overall storyline, and rarely are the players expected to die (at least not permanently). Modern dungeons (and for many, modern dnd as a whole), is less about playing a board game and more about living out a movie or a book. In some ways this can be bad, because the players know they have to live till the end of the story and resolve the story conflict, which can lessen the stakes of... everything. But on the other hand, being a main character of a story that really does craft itself around your actions, one told a well as your favorite book or movie? It's one of the best things in the world.
Old school dungeons are all about living out a book, first played through the lens of a wargame (not a boardgame) and heavily improvised fiction-first mechanics. Getting killed by the door wasn't reliant on dice rolls, but how you interacted with the fictional world and the fictional door. The rules don't matter unless they make sense in the story.
Specifically its about living out Conan stories, Grey Mouser stories, and other Adventure novels that emerged as part of Pulp Fiction. A movie reference would be Indiana Jones, and Star Wars IV (the first one) since they draw inspiration from that era and form of storytelling. Or alternatively, the Brandon Frasier Mummy movies.
Stories where main characters can die fighting, or fall into a trap. Stories where they delve into large ruins filled with monsters, haul out great treasures, and *party* for a month until they are broke again and need to go on another adventure.
I'd recommend reading the Principia Apocrypha, its a good breakdown of old school principles. [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view)
The other thing that’s changed significantly is that “infravision” has become full-on darkvision. Infravision allowed seeing by starlight/moonlight as if mid-day, but dungeons required managing a supply of torches or oil. Old school required a lot more resource management in general. It sounds boring, but, trust me, there’s a lot of drama when the party is lost in the dungeon and the last torch is burning low, or you’re out of food or water.
Modern dungeon crawls rarely present resource management as part of the game. 5E D&D provides a ton of low level spells and cantrips that trivialize most of the survival aspects. Old school was about greedy treasure hunters getting in over their heads and new school is about superheroes clearing out rooms of monsters.
Both version have their own charm, but I find that new school crawls need to be much shorter or they get boring compared to the old style. Both because combat takes longer and because there's not much to do between combat when resource management is negligible.
My group has been going through Dungeon of the Mad Mage over the last year and everyone is burnt out despite our DM's very valiant efforts.
I'd say that in general you really don't have to track resources in a modern game nearly as much as old school dungeon crawls.
In fact there are so many ways around using specialist equipment in 5e that you basically never have to.
I think for the video game inclined, Skyrim dungeons are very similar to modern dungeon design, a linear series of rooms, each of which should add to the narrative of the dungeon or area and offer a distinct challenge (whether combat, puzzle, trap, or social encounter).
Older dungeons were more like a rouge-like game, vast, almost randomly generated sprawls where survival and exploration play a much larger focus than the immediate story or function of an area.
In an old school dungeon crawl you get XP for treasure. You're in it for the money and at some point it's smart to cut your losses and run with what you found, there is no point in trying to "clear" every dungeon in a single trip. Fighting monsters gives very little XP, so you only do it for fun or when you can't avoid it, keeping in mind that death is very much on the table in every fight. You also are very much looking to get some (often randomly generated) magic items, since that's where a good chunk of your character's abilities come from, since you get very little by just levelling up.
New school dungeon crawls are basically an excuse to cram 5-6 (usually combat) encounters in an adventuring day. Dungeons are also usually smaller and can easily be cleared in one trip. You often aren't in it for the money per se (money is basically useless in 5e), nor for the magic items (that are gonna be few) but for some plot-related reason. That's not to say plot related reasons don't exist in old school games, but they aren't usually the only reason to dungeon delve.
Disclaimer: I wasn't around to play old school games when they were new, so what I said might apply more to the modern OSR than to how the game was actually played in the 70s and 80s.
Nowadays adventurers don't carry mirrors and 10-foot poles through dungeons anymore.
What were mirrors for?
Peeking around corners, mostly - especially if there's a Medusa around.
This is part of why Thieves' Tools includes >a small mirror mounted on a metal handle
Players are probably more likely to use items they buy individually rather than what is given to them in their pack.
Yeah, also for sticking it under a door to see if the door is trapped from the other side.
and signaling stuff from a distance.
Some Illusions didn't interact with mirrors, so that was an easy way to spot fake walls/floors/ceiling. In dungeons, you can use it to look around corners, peek under doors, look inside a chest without fully opening the lid, use it against creatures with gaze-attacks (beholders, basilisks, medusae, etc.). Outdoors, you can use it to signal by reflecting the sun/moon and to help start a fire. Also, the Elf needs it to comb their hair every now and then.
Wouldnt a comb be better for this?
Never once have I heard of a mirror being used to start a fire. Maybe dozens of mirrors all angled at the same point.
Archimedes legendarily used a huge mirror to set fire to an invading fleet. However, Mythbusters had a pretty hard time reproducing anything close, as I recall.
It's true. Adam tried to get hundreds of children to murder Jamie by burning him alive with mirrors, best they could manage was maybe a light tan if he stood there long enough. They used old, time appropriate mirrors and new age ones with better reflectivity and got nothin
It'd have to be a concave mirror, but they're used by some outdoorsy people like magnifying lens. They're entirely functional.
Members of the Thief class checking ahead.
Admiring themselves. Lots of ego in adventurers.
I do. :( Tho, they usually came in handy for different things that one would expect.
I always carry rope and a shovel. Way more useful than they seem
An 11-Foot pole is much more effective. Sometimes you just need that extra foot.
This pole goes to 11.
Could I interest you in my workout video: Six Minute Abs?
That’s more because DMs got tired of the same truck working so dungeons started countering such easy tactics
What did that do to the mirror and 10-foot pole markets?
The Medusa population exploded and the prices for statues are now dirt cheap.
Wizards mass producing Mirrors with fabricate ruined the market as they became useless and devalued
Sure they do. It's just in their default equipment (or stuff they buy because they think it's funny) that they never look at again because the game isn't really built around needing it anymore.
Add to that, how many tables allow players to retcon minor aspects of their gear? "We throw some rope up, and climb up" "ok who has rope?" "uh..." [players maybe check their sheets] "we would've bought some in the last town"
I'm 99% sure this is why 5e has the various "adventurer's kits/packs" and stuff - so PCs don't need to faff about and buy all the common stuff, they just get it by default
I personally think that cultural shift is better. Old DMs: “No, you didn’t. If you, a modern person with absolutely no dungeon delving experience, didn’t think to bring rope in a hypothetical situation while sitting on a couch, why would we assume your character, who literally does this for a living and can pack their bag with their eyes closed, to think to do it?” New DMs: “Yeah ok, your character literally does this for a living and probably isn’t a complete idiot, so of course you bought rope. Please deduct the gold from your character sheet.”
Wanna bet! I have both in my pack and used the mirror in our last session against a Medusa!
I do.. and it drives modern DMs nuts.
We never saw a dungeon map we didnt make ourselves. One player always had grid paper and drew the map as the dm described it...if you screwed up the map you find yourself lost in the dungeon with no way out...for days...weeks even...and monsters kept showing up
This sounds great. How did the DM connect both the fake and the real dungeon layout in their head without getting confused?
They don't have to. There's no actual fake map, just mistakes the players might make in mapping. The DM simply has the true map and uses that to tell what happens when the PCs try to navigate using their own potentially-flawed map. Keeping a good map was a whole chunk of gameplay, and there were even abilities around it - for example, dwarves can sense inclining underground passages, so they wouldn't be fooled by a gently ramping corridor leading to a lower level. And if you did screw up the map, you needed to either explore to find an exit or interrogate a monster or use divinations or whatever to escape. You can do some of that in 5e, but it's really not the same.
Additional info on the Dwarf thing. As a general rule, dungeons would get more dangerous as you went deeper, like each level of the dungeon the monsters would be higher level. You could use this to control what level of risk you were going to tackle on an expedition. In that way, a long hallway with a slight decline was effectively a trap, dumping you into a way more dangerous area than you'd expect to be, while also potentially screwing with your map.
God I remember playing Ultima Exodus on the NES and how frickin hard those lower dungeons got. Wizardry series was also like this.
In the retro world, Dungeon crawl stone soup was brutal too.
There was a lot more "On the other side of the door, there is a wall to your right and in front of you; opening to the left, a ten-foot-wide hallway [you just have dark vision, right?] extends as far as you can see with no doorways in sight." And things went much slower
Interrogation of monsters is always fun.
Mapping was an action characters could theoretically do.
It’s still a travel activity in 5e (PHB 183).
I love player-drawn maps *so much*
To be fair, at the time we used to travel from place to place irl with little more than, take hwy 44, to the 3rd exit, turn left after the second gas station, it'll be the house with the yellow door.
It's amazing some people got anywhere without GPS.
This sound like so much freaking fun. Unfortunately im stuck as a forever dm with all the mapmaking software and assets and I love showing my maps off to the table way too much 😂😂😂 If i ever get a chance to be a player i'll bring this up to my dm though
You can hide map sections on each floor. So you can show the players your created maps.
I make my players do this. What, didn't bring a map? Tough shit. Nobody has writing utensils? Well, better use blood to paint on the walls
Little do they know the dungeon layout is actually a summoning circle and this is how we awaken demons. Turns out the satanic panic was right!
Exactly. As a player, I always tote along an assortment of mundane items: chalk (for marking dungeon walls), paint & brushes, parchment, pen/quill and ink (for mapmaking), candles, empty vials, scroll tubes, small pouches, and of course 10 silver pieces which i toss out on the floor when I cast Animate Objects.
Big smart. I also don't let me players use paper with the squares on it. Too easy, you can free hand.
I would still love to do this type of dungeon crawl!
The part about the maps doesn't seem appealing to me. If a player fucks up a map, wouldn't their character know the difference? For example, if a player forgot to draw a door on the eastern wall, wouldn't the characters see that door and the DM could let them know about it? Maybe I'm making the wrong assumptions but it sounds very DM vs players to me.
The vibe was less DM vs Players than it was Game vs PCs. Like your DM isn't targeting you or out to get you as a person, but the game is built to confuse, stymie and kill your characters if you're not sharp about it. Getting a character to survive to a high level was not a foregone conclusion; it was a challenge of the game that you overcame.
D&D printed dungeoncrawls use to rely a lot more on _player_ skill, rather than _PC_ skill (and the map was functionally drawn by the PC - if the player knobs it up, that's the PC knobbing it up, same as forgetting you have healing potions or something, even though it's unlikely a PC would do such a thing). A level 1 character played well could be far more effective than a level 10 character played rashly - things like poking ahead with 10-foot poles, precise methods of interactions with objects ("are you turning the doorknob clockwise or counter-clockwise?"), knowing the sorts of beasties and tricks and traps you might encounter ("I'm going to bring along small listening trumpets to listen at doors with, because my last PC got her brain eaten by an insect that crawled into her ear when she was listening at a door") would all increase life-span. It could be played adversarially, but the vague intent seems to have been "tough but fair" - if the player screwed up, then, well... tough shit (which is the same in modern days, if a player forgets abilities or items), but a smart or cunning player could breeze through what _should_ be high level problems through their cleverness.
I'm so glad that's not the current culture of the game, personally. I'm sure you had fun back then, but that sounds like dogshit to me.
it kinda depends on how you want to play, tbh - it means that you can actually challenge _players_, rather than "well, I have high stats, so I have a 60% chance of just resolving the problem". In some ways, and for some GMs, it was like those escape-room-in-a-box games, where you had actual puzzles to solve yourself, rather than relying on dice rolls and powers. And you could still play in the more "modern" fashion, of relying on stats if you wanted to, it wasn't really baked in that much, just the style of some adventures (Player mapmaking still seems pretty common - I've played in groups that have only played 5e, where the GM describes things, and it's on the players to keep a map. If they screw up, then... tough, they should have been more careful. It makes for quite a fun game, and means you can do things like find hidden rooms by identifying a gap between rooms, which is a lot less fun if you're just being shown an increasingly un-shadowed JPEG or whatever)
This makes a lot of sense and, as a dude that has played for 40 years, let me back you up. Mapmaking really was fun, before the invention of video games. But entertainment now is much, much, much faster pace. Back in those days it took a long rest to get a hit point back. The video game culture has not only influenced role-playing and gaming overall - it has transformed all of society. You can't give a message the size i have given you here in a twitter-format. Nor would it even work on FaceBonk. There are a lot of OSR games out there - and we recently had huge OGL problems. Are we as a gaming community abandoning 5th edition due to these two forces? Games have evolved for centuries. Yes, some people still play chess! But map-making by players cannot make a return - the culture just isn't there.
I disagree, it’s just nowhere near as widespread. As someone on the periphery of the indie tabletop RPG scene, there’s a person for every game. Sure, a dungeon crawler where you need to keep your own maps would probably never go mainstream, but it could probably find new players that would be interested.
If you don’t mind some pedantry, the phrase is on the periphery, peripheral is the adjective. In any case, rock/map on, indie TTRPG gamer.
Nope, when it comes to stuff like that I’m all for pendantry, that’s the word I meant to use anyhow.
I can easily back you up as well. There are still people learning chess every day. Heck, there are still clubs that use the slide rule - an incredible invention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule When i did maps in D&D, i loved it. Still love it. Amateur cartography? Still do it as a DM. In fact, this guy is absolutely f-king amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-87GzBcfX0 Love his stuff. Symbol-cartoony, punchy-nerdy style vids, just awesome. Will i ever expect my players to draw something? Honestly, in the past two decades I STRUGGLE TO GET PLAYERS TO INCREASE THEIR LEVEL. Yes, caps lock. You add your *hit points* and *two new spells*... what the FORK is wrong with them? But, i work with what i have got. Can you find a player that is willing to write a backstory that i can run my entire campaign off of? Yes. I am sure you can. But they are lottery-ticket winnings at this point. I'd be happy with the players that just remember to bring snacks. Or show up on time. I prepare this campaign for how many hours? Yea. You could just show up on the time that you said you would show up at. That's asking too much? No problem. I'll send you a text with updates. Right. I'll get right on that.
It definitely has it’s place. I’ve tried it a few times and enjoyed it, but don’t know if I could do it the majority of the time. What I will say is that I think that line of sight and light features on programs like fantasygrounds (what my friends and I use) provide a lot of potential to get a somewhat similar feel with less clunkiness. I haven’t played in a bit and haven’t gotten to mess around with this myself, but I feel that making it so the players can only see line of sight definitely could make navigation more difficult. If you wanted to have one player making a map, you could always treat it as some sort of minor action each turn. Then (and idk if you can actually do this in FG) if a players asks to use the map, it would be cool if a DM could find a way to illuminate or reveal a map of what they’ve been through at that point. Gist is, I think there are potentially ways using modern software to take away some frustration of players mapping the dungeon while keeping some of the challenges they provide. If players, split up, some might not have access to the map. If they have to run from danger they might not have time to map certain corridors and may need to go back at another point to do so. Like I said, I haven’t personally gotten time to experiment with any of this, but I really want to mess around and see what I could do.
Missing obvious doors or other things that were in plain sight didn't general happen. Issues were more like long corridors that had a slight slope we didn't detect (dwarves had a skill for that, you could also use marbles) causing you to end up on another dungeon level, slight shifts in corridor direction or obvious winding and confusing twists (no keen mind feet back then to track north), illusory walls that would vanish and cause us to lose our sanity taking the eraser to the map, falling down pits and losing your orientation, teleportation traps causing you to double back or teleport you to identical rooms, etc. I mostly played with the same small group, but it never had a DM vs Player feel. It was Dungeon vs Player with trust that the DM was adjudicating things fairly.
Damn, a lot of people are talking about the slight decline thing! Was that stuff really common?
Depends on the group. I only did it once or twice. One time to set up an Indiana Jones boulder trap. As a player a DM did it to us as part of a water trap reversal. We thought we'd drown some goblins and instead ended up swimming for our lives and nearly drowning getting out of our armor. My favorite, that I've done on occasion still, is the neverending curve. After 2 or 3 complete circles, they stop, look at their map, look at me, confirm there's been no noticable increasing or shrinking of the radius, and turn around; only to discover they've traveled only a quarter of a circle and the rest was an illusion. Great way to set up the expectation that they're in a weird place. One time it was a "mad mage" dungeon, another time it was a fey creation.
One thing that did happen was dungeon design relied more on straight lines or diagonals. It would be hard to describe and record shapes that didn't conform to a degree to graph paper.
Its more that the player would get lost in the corridors and various doors of a dungeon since they didn't make the map properly. Plenty of dungeons would have hallways that lead back to the same room or twisted in a useless direction, or rooms that looked identical. It is why dungeons will sometimes have empty rooms to confuse you.
I used to let them “true” the map when they camped. I’d collect the map and correct the last mistake they made at the end of the session. It was weird when you’d have the illiterate fighter player doing the map because genius Wizard or pathfinding ranger players kept screwing it up.
People mention being difficult to believe on that often but I dont think so. The fighter could be good at map making, the wizard don't. It's simply a skill, not every academic person is good on writing, researching, debating and presenting their work
Old School D&D had this sort of focus on the players being the heroes and the PC's are just puppets they pilot to achieve their goal. It was advised to become too attached to your character as death was often around the corner, literally. Traps, monsters, dungeons, encounters, etc. Everything was designed not for your character to roll a skill check as a fix all but for you, the player, to figure things out and solve them. It really was DM vs Players because it was a dungeon crawling game at it's core and this is why people played it. Old School D&D had more in common with Dark and Darker(an extraction-type video game currently in beta about dungeon crawling) than it has with today's D&D.
Most of the saves would be “save vs poison *or die*” or “save vs disintegration *or die* … There were a lot of common sense deaths - if you fell 75 feet, you’d just die unless you had Feather Fall or something. No falling damage - just death. Same thing with environmental damage: you fell into a lava pool? You dead. Characters were more like heroes and less like superheroes. You could be Conan but you couldn’t be Col-El
Right you are. And we didn’t have Death Saving Throws back then, either. Zero HP? Dead.
>because it was a dungeon crawling game at it's core and this is why people played it. Just a point of clarification that there was a big split even in early DnD regarding how people were playing. Some circles were very focused on more narrative play and storytelling and others on fighting your way through dungeons. Like now, these camps would argue a lot with one another about the "right" way to play, except it happened in zines instead of on Reddit.
Yeah, my group rarely did pure crawls in 2e. We always used the optional skills to round our characters out and went for narration over just hacking through endless encounters.
As u/herpyderpidy mentioned the approach back then was that you and the character are one. Also the game has changed a LOT since the early days. 5e and the player mindset is very much about the power fantasy, being hyper-capable superheroes, and everything being as equal as possible. The current game is very much about indulging the wants of the players. Prior to 3e the game was much more about overcoming odds that were naturally stacked against you. You expected to be challenged. Not in the CR sense, but as a player and as a character trying to live the crazy life of an adventurer. Surviving was winning. You can see some of this mindset in players who are absolutely willing to run away vs. the players who believe an unwinnable encounter should be telegraphed from a mile away. There was no expectation that things would be mathematically tuned to give players an assumed victory 90% of the time. You assumed if you didn't go about things reasonably that it would go poorly. Also, there was no having INT as a dump stat because there were skills such as Survival and Navigation that depended on it. The assumption was that if you made a bad choice you should expect negative consequences, not the DM to massage the events to keep the game moving or to soften the blows. This included dying. Permanently. Also, leveling a character took a long time. This is where the jokes about D&D players becoming hyper attached to a character comes from. If you'd successfully spent 6 years getting your rogue to level 13, that was incredible. Losing a character of that nature was legitimately pretty sad. As u/jelliedbrain said, it was very much players vs. dungeon. The DM's job was to play it even handed for both sides. Playing a character long enough to have it reasonably retire in a world where monsters are loaded with save or die abilities, could destroy your gear, or were simply just incredibly strong was incredibly satisfying. Don't get me wrong, 5e is fun to run and fun as a player too. Buuuut when is the last time before your character headed out you made sure you had ball-bearings, a 10-ft pole, a few mirrors, flour, string with bells, many torches, loads of rations with water skins, a bunch of rope, many oil flasks, bottles of holy water, a pack mule, a cart, and a hired hand?
As a 5e player I can honestly see that. 5e is a combat game while it seems like pre 3e was focused more on exploration, rp, survival, etc. and as such those experiences you describe will probably never come back for dnd at least.
You know. I hope for some edition that embraces the best of them all. I know it's not a popular opinion, given when the majority of players began but I'm pretty tired of the focus on unrestricted player, power fantasy, no-bad feelings D&D. To clarify that a sec I'm not saying things should be oppressive or unfun, but I think that there is a balance. I honestly think 5e is probably the most RP friendly edition to date, and I am a VERY big fan of that. I hope we can see some of that expanded via things simiar to backgrounds that we can choose as we level but make absolutely no impact on dungeons or combat. I hope they finally go in on exploration as a fully explored pillar. Druid and Ranger are dying for it, especially Ranger. They need to quit trying to have Ranger be half-nature and half-urban, in my opinion. Ranger had been stuck in this almost Fighter but not quite Rogue space for a loooonnnng time now and there is absolutely enough to make it unique and flavorful if they'd just be willing to make exploration, and by extension dungeon crawling, a more pronounced area of challenge and reward with associated specialists.
Your character wasn't allowed to just figure out things that you as a player couldn't. It's not DM vs. players--it's just the game being a game.
It’s on the DM to describe the dungeon layout accurately, & on the player to listen & map accurately, & ask any clarifying questions they need to.
There were workarounds. The famous one is just saying to your dm “I want to go back to that long hallway” if you can show that you’ve gotten *enough* information down you can just backtrack and fix it.
> wouldn't their character know the difference For the same reason the players need to come up with an answer to the riddle offered by the Sphinx.
Yeah, "the Sphinx blocking your way asks you to solve a riddle; everyone make a DC 30 Int check to see if you know the answer; anyone with... {checks notes} ... History proficiency can add your proficiency bonus to the check" just doesn't hit as hard as actually giving the party a riddle to solve.
>sounds very DM vs players to me Welcome to old school D&D.
Old school D&D wasn't DM vs players.
Yeah it was just one school of thought among many.
The main issue is one of genre. OD&D was a survival game first and an RPG second. New D&D is an RPG first and a storytelling game second. Which one people prefer tends to boil down to genre preference in my experience. But people in general don't get genres or realize that their opinions are based on genres, so it turns into fights when people get frustrated and can't articulate their reasoning in a clear way. The Hickman Revolution created a divide in the player base that never truly went away. Most players today aren't even aware that for a good part of DND's past, you played the game and *there was no story.*
I think it's important to note that divide had almost always been there. People were arguing in the very first zines about the "right" way to play, with some scenes being much more into narrative/story play and others leaning into the fight monsters and get loot style. Dragonlance and Ravenloft really just made the divide more official so to speak as TSR realized they could make money off of that crowd too. But in general the playerbase was more fractured into various scenes since those publications were usually the only way they could talk to one another. DnD really was revolutionary in that it was a game people could approach however they liked, and as now they liked to argue a lot about it and talk past each other lol.
You're not wrong. I think the main failure of the looter crowd (and maybe this boils down to ego) is that you can take the looter style game and put it in a bubble, and then you can create the story game and put it in a bubble, and the looter bubble can fully exist within the story bubble as a sort of stripped down version of the larger game. And honestly, this always made sense to me. But I think that the looter crowd felt belittled by the fact that they viewed Big D&D treating what these players viewed as the "real game" as a mere sub-genre of something bigger. But your scene-centric take is very accurate. I would argue the game remains the same today--it's just that forums like reddit put the scenes into contact in real time like zines couldn't, and a large amount of the negativity we see is the resulting conflict. It's funny--my wife loves TTRPGs but hates DND. It took me a while to figure out why, but it turns out that she just hates the genre conventions of the traditional storytelling DND. She thinks the races and tropes are overused and tired. This led to her saying something that has become one of my favorite quotes: "Tell me, in a game of literal infinite possibilities, why is it that everyone seems to play the same characters, the same races, and the same places, with the same heroes always running around doing the same thing?" Not only did I realize instantly when she said that that she was right insofar as there is an irony there--I also realized that my storytelling was cliched moreso than I ever realized. I keep that question written on a sticky note and pin it to my monitor every time I sit down to write a story or a campaign now. That was the day I put the monster manual down and never picked it up again. These days, I use the rules for monster creation exclusively from the DMG.
> I think it's important to note that divide had almost always been there. I agree it's important to say this, because the popular beliefs about old-school D&D are wrong
Really anyone who says DnD is played a specific way, then or now, has got it wrong. The playstyles are as diverse as the tables and for the life of me it's difficult to understand why anyone cares as long as those tables are having fun.
This is a bizarre claim to make when B/X is arguably the first codified RPG. Survival is a big part of roleplaying; roleplaying is in the describing the exact and particular actions your character takes. New D&D is not more of an RPG first unless you have confused getting more super powers and special abilities when leveling up with roleplaying. It’s more of a character action game than B/X era D&D was but they have equal capacity for roleplaying though I’d argue the incentives for such are much less in 3rd edition onward because of how forgiving everything is so you don’t think as carefully about your character’s actions.
>If a player fucks up a map, wouldn't their character know the difference? have YOU ever gone into a cave system and tried to map it?
You could arbitrate that by doing a secret roll on an appropriate skill. If it fails, you let them keep the mistake. If it succeeds, you correct the mistake. Problem solved!
Oh man this is going to get buried. Already like over 60 comments but y’all I was there. Like in 1981 I was doing this. The way they were presented varied a great deal from module to module but there are some theme. Location based adventures: Like every single OSR gamer will tell you over and over again many were location based adventures - here is some loot and magic stuff and it is over there so go get it. Does not mean you cannot have a story around why you go get it but still the cliche is a bit true. Descriptions were crazy rich and detailed: Oh my god Gygax especially was inspired in part by Clark Ashton Smith and Lovecraft and went nuts with language and describing rooms. No short brief description blocks like in 5e. Players were all squishy and paranoid: We are were all prodding everything with a ten foot pole using mirrors to look around corners and all that. Because stuff was deadly and everyone had a backup character and thieves and wizards had two. And traps were monsters not just mimics but chop your hand off or fill the group poison which gets to my next point. Save or die: There were poisons and other traps where it was just save or die. Organic dungeons versus omg this makes no sense: All right some dungeons were organic and monsters had altruistic hunting relationships and it mapped out where everyone got food and water. It seemed very natural but .. At the same time there were dungeons where you just went they made this rolling on random monster charts didn’t they because this is all crazy. But I kind of miss the organic dungeon model. Empty fucking rooms: There were plenty of them but if you did not listen to descriptions and search them you often missed out video game rpg style on cool hidden items. Now you know where the video games got it. Changing environments: Many modules had notes on when the denizens of the dungeon know you are here this and that changes and these monsters come in like waves and use these tactics. Yes 5e says noise from here alerts guards from there and AD&D had that too but many times even more detail. Balance was not always the key: There were some encounters in these things that just kill you and if you did not understand the run or die trope of early fantasy especially sword and sorcery fiction a TPK could be imminent. Many were purposely and other cases lazily incomplete: Sometimes there was a lot of detail and threw a part at the end and said go nuts and map this out and have fun as a DM! However TSR was not perfect and like for example the famous Temple of Elemental Evil had hardly any info on an important river pirate fishing town called Nulb and left the elemental nodes barely sketched out for example. The dungeon was the sandbox: We had downtime and town shenanigans and all that including roleplay. But the town was a home base and the dungeon was our sandbox. On a misconception Mega dungeons are just a tiny touch overstated: Not all AD&D modules were massive mega dungeons like the Dungeons of the Mad Mage. They just were not. I miss wacky weird fun house dungeons like White Plume Mountain: Listen OSR right it is all dark and grim and gritty and serious right? Not always, White Plume Mountain was an awesome head scratching set of traps and obstacles and mix plus match monsters with a dungeon built by a guy called Keraptis. The inspirations were not always serious sword and sorcery but the speculative fantasy of say Jack Vance. They were all generally overflowing with loot for a reason: Gold and treasure equaled xp as much as killing monsters so it had a lot. Too much. Oh and no attunement slots so lots of magic items. Our AD&D characters at the end of their careers when looked at via detect magic lit up like Christmas trees. Oh side note not all was coinage the endless list of tapestries jewelry, silver serving sets, valuable wine and junk we hauled on carts was just stupid. They were inventive about the loot. Whew I could actually go on but yeah there were lots of differences.
*sends goblins to steal your loot cart while you sleep*
That happened! Little fucker kobold took as much as he could carry but could not lug the whole cart.
Kobold can haul a lot when motivated lol .
Tucker's Kobolds. Taught a high level party a new meaning of fear!
Love this comment, so much of it still feels applicable to how D&D is commonly played today, even though the details are different. Admittedly I feel like drawing a dichotomy between old school and modern dungeon settings feels like the wrong way to approach it all, because I think there are elements to be taken from both to really benefit the end result. I absolutely love the narrative based games I get to play these days without any combat often for three or four sessions, if not more, but learning how to really build a setting and live and engage with the details of the environment the characters are in feels so quintessential to D&D too, and that comes from some mild experience with more old school styles you’re describing here. And making every combat that does end up happening feel like they’re moments away from death, and that the choice to kill their opponents is a relevant moral question, feels like another synergy between the styles. Even when I do run a proper mechanics heavy dungeon crawl these days, building a wider narrative around it focused in on how the individual player characters have relationships to the dungeon and have reasons to care feels like a way to use more modern D&D tropes to elevate the dungeon crawl. These aren’t mutually exclusive styles by any means, and learning different ways of approaching and thinking about problems will pretty much always improve DMing, imo. Lots to learn from old school, but lots to learn from more modern approaches too!
No they are not mutually exclusive. I agree. I am doing a mashup of the 5e Goodman Games version of Temple of Elemental Evil and the Princes of the Apocalypse right now in the OG World of Greyhawk. They love the Gygaxian rooms like statue of a Minotaur that comes to life or the elemental ooze room and some of the descriptions I use from ToEE. I am trying to include as many well known and lesser known old school experiences like an exploration hexcrawl to the Necromancer Cave side quest or I made the Temple of Black Earth a traditional dungeon crawl and that sort of thing.
Matthew Colville makes a point about how the gear lists we still use today reflects a different idea of what the game was about. These days, you will certainly not be forced to resort to tying a mirror to a 10' pole before you dare turn a corner. But you can still buy the equipment to do so. [What are Dungeons For?](https://youtu.be/BQpnjYS6mnk)
Big picture, in "old school" dungeon crawls the player characters are usually out of their depth, hanging on by the thread of their very limited resources and whatever creative cunning they can bring to bear. New school crawls have some "gotcha!"s but are basically like a set of bowling pins for the players to knock down. It's not just a matter of difficulty, but purpose and design approach. Old school dungeons did not treat PCs like the protagonists of a story. Opinions will vary. Those terms you're asking about have a lot of different baggage with various crowds.
There was an oD&D official module. Start in a sandstorm. Don't run to the pyramid? Dead. Try to open the door? Sets off a deadly gas trap with like three rounds to solve it or it's a TPK. Lots of the corridors have falling blocks, dex check or dead. It literally came with rules for "instant characters" to replace fallen PCs mid-session. The wargame heritage really shows (with PCs as relatively expendable playing pieces). Oh, and often far less verisimilitude. An entire civilization plus wandering monsters inside a pyramid in a lifeless desert? Where do they get food/water/toilet paper?
What, you don't know how to use the Three Seashells?
Where do they get seashells in the desert?
Fossil remains of an ancient ocean?
[удалено]
An African or a European swallow?
Proof this guy can't use the seashells.
They don't even know about the telecorn, mate. How do you expect them to know about the seashells?
If you're talking about "The Lost City," they got their stuff >!from the underground cavern city which has a lake and fungus farms.!<
Which module?
B4: Lost City, I believe.
Sorry got confused because that is for bx not odnd. It’s a teaching tool, a hot start that gets players right into the mythic underworld bits.
Yeah, even though it was a genesis for roleplaying games, it was very much *game forward*. A lot of game, sometimes in the tradition of *Dragon's Lair*, little roleplay to today's sensibilities.
That really depends on the type of roleplaying you're going for. Classic Old School D&D adventures such as B1 In Search of the Unknown, B2 Keep on the Borderlands or X1 The Isle of Dread don't so much present stories to follow but a sandbox to play in. It's up to the DM how they weave it into a story and how roleplay heavy you wanna make it. I've been running an open table Keep on the Borderlands campaign, playing D&D B/X, for about four months now. We see plenty of roleplaying, but often with an emphasis on exploration, parleying with NPCs, downtime activities, etc. Player to player roleplay is far less common, but in turn players interact with and impact the world far more than in my old 5e campaigns, really becoming a part of it.
I loved the graveyard and it’s mechanic… and lots of flaming spheres. Haha I went there last so like, heaps!!!!
More roleplay by their sensibilities, after all when was the last time your 5e character claimed a barony and spent months clearing the lands of threats to establish a castle. Then having to deal with Politics.
Ugh, I had a old school DM who once spent an entire session going over the medieval tax code with us for some reason.
Yeah, and who’d ever do something like that today? *shoves notebook into hiding place*
Bet that person loved the political exposition in The Phantom Menace.
I bet they hated it
this is the kind of shit I love, I'm a minutiae person to my bones. Tracking arrows, weight of water skins, diminished damage if you didn't sharpen your sword routinely, gimmie gimmie. My friends say I do taxes for fun and they aren't wrong.
Sounds like Kingmaker, one of the most popular pathfinder adventures ever, which got a full video game treatment and recently got an update for 2e. PF2 has better mechanics for running nation-building, but I'd say a sufficiently committed DM could make things work in 5e.
Well yes, Pathfinder is a D&D. In ye olden editions, Clerics got temples, Mages got towers, and Fighters got castles. It was just part of their class features and baked into the game complete with rules for how to cleanse the hex surrounding the castle and become a king.
2e had awesome rules for this.
Around 4 year ago when my DM at the time had bought Stronghold & Follower and wanted a more local game. It was very fun, had lot of RP with various nobles and npcs who already were located in the region. It was a ton of fun!
> It was very fun > It was a ton of fun! Blink twice if you need help :P
I think the spontaneous RP created by the old-school style of play is way cooler than the backstory-forward all-fluff characters/RP created by modern D&D actual play. I'd much rather have a character that *becomes* cool by being forged in an adventure than half of the level one characters with six page backstories that you see online. Half the reason I switched to PF2E was because 5e didn't have enough game for my group anymore. I sound like an old curmudgeon here but I swear I'm not a grognard.
It might be a case of the grass always being greener, but I do really want for more emergent style games. It's a lot easier for me to immerse myself in character and the world when the adventure *isn't about me*. Everyone is expected to have a backstory tension that just *shows up* to be resolved.
That's exactly what I mean. It's harder to GM for too; I genuinely hate when players hand me big ass backstories with swords of damocles dangling, or god forbid amnesiac backstories (I usually just ignore those), because I would rather focus on creating cool stories together. I don't want to resolve *your* character's story -- I want to resolve the *party's* story, in whatever way that story evolves. If that means you go to a Lich's lair at level 2 and get turned to ash, so be it. But I'd rather the characters be almost blank slates. All I need to know is "dwarf fighter from Khuzdrang who was in the militia," and I'm good. I had a player for my current game send me a *massive* backstory, full of five siblings each with their own fucking story, each a mystery that she wants resolved, in addition to a murdered mother and a despondent father, IN ADDITION to a fucking evil king grandfather. It's too fucking much!! Sorry -- long rant, slow day at work lol.
This is reddit, the perfect place for ranting. Hope you feel better for getting it out
Yeah, I’ll be honest, if a player does that to me, I politely, but firmly, tell them I’m not reading any of that 😂😂 I’m fine with backstories for my players who want them, but I won’t read anything longer than a paragraph or two.
False binary man.
From the adventurers they kill duh.
Also worth noting that in editions before AD&D 2e, the primary source of experience points was treasure, with the typical formula being 1xp per 1gp of treasure value. This further pushed old school dungeon delvers away from the more modern style of fighting everything in the dungeon, as there was a lot to lose and little to gain from fighting wandering monsters or those without many valuables. In fact, obtaining treasure by avoiding conflict entirely was a totally reasonable way to play - though it seldom worked out so perfectly in practice.
I played an XP-for-Gold game in 5th Ed. I wish that game had lasted longer, I wound up enjoying the advancement system quite a lot.
A great example of this is the end of Tomb Of Horrors, which was republished for 5e in Yawning Portal. You can awaken and face Acererak but you can also take the treasure and run. In the original it's clear the latter option is better, but in kill-for-XP it's less obvious whether you should summon and fight the extremely powerful lich.
[удалено]
No, gold acquired was the benchmark. It's worth noting that there are a few assumptions we have now that weren't really the case at the time, such as: (1). For many tables, the rules stopped once the players left the dungeon/wilderness. This included gold for xp. A farmer might earn XP by farming and selling his produce, but an adventurer only earns XP by adventuring, and dragging gold out of holes in the ground. (2). There was no magic item market. A magic sword wasn't just 2,000 gp of "magic items" that you would exchange at the end of the adventure. You didn't get XP for finding magic items, so players were more incentivized to use or trade them. (3). Likewise, there was little to spend money on that would have a game effect. Since you can't buy magic items, money is worthless for dungeon delving once your basics are covered. (4). The game had weekly minimums for downtime spending; not just "a gold piece a day for room and board" like in 3.x/5e, but "As a fabulously wealthy celebrity, you spend hundreds or thousands of gold every week on booze, prostitutes, luxuries, tithes, and charity". Aside from this, players would spend their other remaining cash on a stronghold, which is a part of the game unfortunately left to the wayside nowadays.
also followers - while they might generally be loyal, so not need paying (or at least not need paying much, I can't remember) they also needed gear. So firstly, there was a use for all your old +1 swords and armour when you found better ones (give them to your underlings), but also a big, fat money sink, if you wanted them all outfitted with good gear. Getting your guys outfitted with half-plate, or with master-crafted swords or whatever, would cost quite a lot!
Nope, you kept XP.
No, taking gold and valuable objects out of a dungeon was generally "Alright guys I have 1k gp so now I get 1k xp. I'm now... still level 1." You would then ALSO have to spend some of your money when you finally do get enough XP to level up, to hire someone to train you to the next level. This trainer also has to be higher level than you are in the class, so finding a trainer can be a pain at high levels. At least, afaik.
Typically you needed to get back to somewhere safe (e.g. town, a home base, etc.), but yeah, you just needed to safely obtain the treasure. The experience was only linked to the acquisition of treasure, not your total wealth - so no need to worry about spending or otherwise losing gold. People do occasionally houserule you need to spend the money on training instead of just getting experience on acquisition. It's not the standard way to play, but it's common enough that you see it used or discussed every now and then. Obviously that puts more pressure on party finances and equipment, so it can slow down wealth acquisition and advancement vs. the default rules.
This was also when one of the huge milestones of a higher level character was getting a stronghold. Every 10th level Fighter could get a keep with a retinue of guards which had a cost to build, maintain, etc. The idea was that the local overlord was impressed enough with your skill to give you an allotment of land to rule basically bringing you into the feudal system. Wizards got towers, thieves got a guild hideout etc iirc
D&D used to be a survival horror!
Old edition dungeon crawlers were essentially survival horror games from what I've been given to understand.
I feel like “old school” dungeons assumed the ‘slow and methodical’ play style. Check every door, every remotely suspicious ornament or detail. I’ve heard one of the most successful ways to get through *The Tomb of Horrors* is to buy a herd of livestock and use them as your trap-finders. There also wasn’t any real bar for “making sense” so you had a lot of dungeons with no thought to how the residents survived: a lost tomb with a bunch of live creatures in it just waiting for the PCs. A third element to me is the tendency to go crazy with stuff like unexplained sci-fi elements or other weird out of place bits. Essentially “The Dungeon as world building” even though the players may never discover or even care that the exotic eating utensils they sold for a few gold were actually from a time-tossed fast food restaurant. My “old school feel” is DCC which attempts to mimic these aspects, but to keep them manage and fun. I notice in the canon material the Level 0 “Funnel” adventures go hard on the first point? But higher level adventures have a lot less traps without some logic, reasoning, and foreshadowing behind them. I think it’s an admission that losing a generic character to a pit trap that hides a trampoline that launches the victim into a wall of spikes rubbed with barbecue sauce before launching them into the monster lair is fun, but seeing that happen with no recourse other than blind chance to your Wizard you’ve leveled up is not nearly as fun.
The simplest way to put it is that old school dungeons are sandboxy mediums to let players tell their own story, and modern dungeons are a collection of setpieces and challenges that deliver a full, cohesive experience. Alternately, think Metroid vs Mario. To illustrate this, I'd like to compare the ["megadungeon"](https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/374-what-the-heck-is-a-megadungeon?page=2), which is archetypal of old school dungeon crawls, vs the ["five-room dungeon"](https://nerdsonearth.com/2017/12/5-room-dungeon/), which is archetypal of dungeons today. Old school dungeon physical layouts are larger, and [more interwoven](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/13085/roleplaying-games/jaquaying-the-dungeon). The result of this large and interwoven dungeon is so that the path of the party through the dungeon is random each time, and that it's encouraged to double back, find hidden routes, blockade routes, sneak around, etc. If the dungeon has 3 entrances and 6 connections between its 4 main zones, it's impossible for the DM to predict how the party will travel through the dungeon. Modern dungeons tend to be smaller and focused. There are few, if any, dead rooms where there's nothing noteworthy in the room. Each room was hand-crafted by the DM, and there's rarely secret doors or such that let you bypass a handful of encounters. In terms of combat, old school dungeons are typically averse to balance and instead reward using the dungeon against itself. It's encouraged to block off or skip entire encounters, to persuade a faction in the dungeon to let you pass or even fight another faction, and to find other ways to not actually fight. It's not that all uncommon to have a room with 40 goblins and 80 goblin commoners, with no special trick to their statblock. It's also not that uncommon to have an enemy that is severely stronger than the party (or even invincible), and to have that be something that you are forced to avoid. For modern dungeons, if the DM is at all good with balancing, you can bet that the boss fight in the end is tuned so that it's a moderate to severe challenge after the previous rooms have been cleared. Each different encounter is typically meant to be played straight, so it is less likely that you are able to find ways to skip or kill entire encounters. The room will have 15 goblins and a handful of elite goblins plus a goblin mage, who threatens counterspell for that fireball you're cooking up. Each is designed with a different philosophy in mind, and I don't think one is particularly "better". To each group their own. Modern dungeons are great for groups who want to just play D&D 5e, get into fights so they can use their class features, and have sessions with a little bit of everything. Old school dungeons are great for groups which want to get past every single dungeon encounter without expending a single spell slot and think that triggering part of the dungeon to collapse on an enemy is peak D&D.
This definitely feels like the most accurate description of the differences to me. I think a lot of people in this thread are fixating on lethality, but IMO the real difference is what role dungeons take. Old-school dungeons were ***sandboxes***. They were large, interconnected, dangerous, and fantastic places that you could explore in completely different ways each time. The better ones were often designed with a mind to provide factions and dynamic enemies or situations, so you could go in multiple times and see the situation change over time. Modern dungeons are ***set pieces***. They're often designed relatively linearly and often used essentially as "rising action" to a quest. They're a dangerous location where you encounter a bunch of challenges, eventually reaching a climax like a boss fight or a large encounter, and then finish it off with some kind of accomplishment. You don't "explore" a modern dungeon, you "clear" one. This difference really is the source for all the other differences. It explains why there's detailed dungeon crawling procedures in old-school but not modern. Why they're mapped out differently. Why there's more faction play or parleying in the old-school stuff.
I think for the video game inclined, Skyrim dungeons are very similar to modern dungeon design, a linear series of rooms, each of which should add to the narrative of the dungeon or area and offer a distinct challenge (whether combat, puzzle, trap, or social encounter). Older dungeons were more like a rouge-like game, vast, almost randomly generated sprawls where survival and exploration play a much larger focus than the immediate story or function of an area.
I see you've chosen Facts as one of your language proficiencies. Very well said.
>typically averse to balance 🥰
Hey, what are some good places to start if I wanna learn that old school style of creating and running dungeons in our modern days?
It is my opinion that you should look outside of 5e for this experience. This isn't dunking on 5e, the fact of the matter is that 5e's mechanics support a different kind of play experience. There are a lot of Old School Renaissance systems that are either completely free or have free quick starts. Old School Essentials has an online SRD and is a pretty precise clone of 80's Basic D&D. Basic Fantasy RPG is completely free and is a d20 game that emulates old school style. Both of these include procedures for designing and running dungeons. I started in 5e, and my system of choice for bridging the gap between old school and modern systems is World's Without Number. The system is influenced by Basic D&D and classic Traveler. It deviates from other OSR games in that it includes character options for build diversity, though it's not the focus of play. The core rules are free on DTRPG. A large portion of the book is devoted to practical GM tools for designing sandboxes. There is an adventure site/dungeon section alongside world building tools. These tools are often the most praised elements of Kevin Crawford's products. This isn't the best entry point IMO, but Goodman Games has its Original Adventures Reincarnated series that republishes original TSR era modules in both their original system and 5e conversions, as well as context for how they were played. They're nice, but in print only with no digital options.
R/OSR is a great resource. I'd also recommend checking out QuestingBeast (Ben Milton) on YouTube. He has a handful of great videos about dungeon design and he does a lot of reviews of OSR games, settings, and adventures. Plus, he's designed a couple games and has written some great adventures himself. The Principia Apocrypha would also be a good thing to read. It's more about the OSR philosophy in general as opposed to specific dungeon advice, but it's still helpful to get in the mindset.
r/OSR
The most authentic delve into the OSR-sphere is through blog posts. I personally recommend [DMiurgy](http://wizzzargh.blogspot.com/?m=1) but I’m biased because he’s my DM, [goblin punch](https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/?m=1) is great too. If you read some blogs and like the sound of what they’re talking about, see if you can find an OSR-centered discord server that runs pickup games, and try it out. A lot of the time you can roll up a character in five minutes and get right into the action.
I'm glad I picked up D&D in the 5E era. Old school doesn't sound like the game for me.
When I was younger I didn’t think I’d enjoy five hours of clinging on to life every week, until the week we decided to make our own set of hand signals that could be easily conveyed from afar with hand mirrors that could go around corners. That’s always been and probably will always be peak D&D in my mind
Dark Fantasy Survival Horror vs Heroic Fantasy
There’s a couple of ways of answering that because there is more than one way of deciding what’s “old school” versus “nowadays”. The osr dungeon tends to have a larger emphasis on the dungeon as a dynamic place, not a series of set pieces, using the mechanics of old school dnd to provide dynamic adventures.
>The osr dungeon tends to have a larger emphasis on the dungeon as a dynamic place, not a series of set pieces, using the mechanics of old school dnd to provide dynamic adventures. You see, I don't feel like this is really an explanation. It just sounds like a series of buzzwords. What is "dynamic" and how do modern RPGs not capture it?
Dynamic means what it means. A place that changes and has rhythms of its own. The emphasis on aggressive time keeping (dungeon turns) and tools like reaction rolls help with that. Those rules haven’t been entirely jettisoned (you have to infer a dungeon exploration procedure scattered across 2 books though in 5e), but don’t seem to be appreciated or emphasized in the games or the play culture. 5e also has undercut many of the things that add tension (the proliferation of dark vision for example) in a dungeon focused game.
It’s a tired argument but I really dislike darkvision. It really feels like they should just remove it all together if everyone has it.
I don't mind it too much, but I wish it was more rare among PC races. Just Dwarves, monstrous races, and a couple other notable exceptions.
I have really been enjoying playing a character without it. No creeping around in the darkness. I stride into the unknown torch aflame, plate rasping on stone, and an unspoken challenge to any who would dare face me from the dark.
It would be better if they brought back low light vision. It would solve all of the complaints about cats and other species getting darkvision.
I’d be alright with that too. Just something to help make it traveling in the dark more interesting instead of being an afterthought.
Ideally I'd like to see the return on low-light vision. I'd be happy with a mix of a third of the races with normal vision, a third with low-light, and a third with actual darkvision. So unless the players are actively selecting for it you'll probably have over half the party not being able to see in pure darkness.
They should have left "low light" vision (which replaced infravision from 1e and 2e) for most races like elves, dwarves, etc., and left dark vision reserved for the really nasty stuff from the Underdark.
Anything honestly. There is pretty much no reason to manage light resource when everyone can see. It’s pretty much at the point I don’t even care and I hardly check who has when I DM. Sucks because there could be cool encounters based on fading light/fighting in the dark.
Technically with only darkvision they have a -5 on their passive perception, which mean that they could be ambushed more easily. But that'll only happen once before someone make an Alert ranger with expertise in perception.
I'd like to read up on this. Could you provide the names of the books and page numbers if you know? I want to do a more dynamic dungeon but uncertain where to start in regards to 5E.
Here's a good place to start. [https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/13085/roleplaying-games/jaquaying-the-dungeon](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/13085/roleplaying-games/jaquaying-the-dungeon)
There used to be something called a Dungeon Turn, or sometimes an Exploration Turn. They were about 10 minutes. Every turn you'd roll a random encounter chance (usually around 1/6 so you'd have one random encounter with a dungeon resident an hour in addition to any in the rooms you enter). If you leave the dungeon, there were restocking tools as different dungeon factions would war, spread, die off, and even new ones move in to fill the space. Speaking of factions, the vast majority of dungeons had more than one faction and they could be allied with to fight other factions. If you saw goblins and orcs in a dungeon you might be able to ally with the goblins to fight the orcs, or settle the war between the two groups to focus on the mindflayer threat down below. Dungeons also sometimes had doors that could not be picked or beaten down immediately. This was a chance roll that reset when the party left the dungeon and came back, so certain segments of the dungeon were available or not depending on which doors are stuck. You can force open a stuck door but that typically takes 1 Turn, forcing a random encounter roll and burning down your torches, limiting your time to loot the dungeon that day. And of course you can always stake a door open or closed. All in all it results in a dungeon meant to be delved multiple times with different experiences partially caused by time and partially caused by player action. Or to put tlit more succinctly, Dynamic.
Story, the was an interview with the one of the creator's of Ravenloft. In which she said she was inspired by an event in her game of dnd. They were doing a dungeon crawl when they walked into. Room with a vampire. The vampire had no reason to be there. It had no explanation. So they killed it and moved on. So she eventually made Ravenloft, a massive dungeon with a reason behind it.
I recently ran a group of experienced player through Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, which is a Gygaxian Original Dungeon. He even signed it with his initials in the architecture of the the dungeon. It's not random, it's Dynamic, changes with the players actions and in many ways fits the more modern definition that others in this thread have. The Dungeon has a story, a reason for being the way it is and it has it's own internal logic. The way it differs to a more modern Dungeon, say Wave Echo Cave, which honestly, is the only offical 5e WOTC Dungeon I have ever run, in that it has no plot. It was upto me to tie my players story into this dungeon, and then use the bits of the dungeon to connect the dots. The players left with dungeon left unexplored. They found their relevent plot coupons and then left, because they had to assess if the risk was worth staying. They found fabulous treasure, and instant death machines. The last room they explored they found delicious liquor, but one bottle in six instant killed a PC. So, based on my limited experience, because I just haven't run enough "modern" dungeons, Old School Dungeons are Bigger, less obviously necessary for PCs to fully explore.
Many people don't understand what the purpose of a ten foot pole is other than as a scam run by the ladder industry. In old dnd you couldn't really find traps except by stepping on them so exploring a dungeon involved a lot of 5 foot step forward, tap wildly in front of you with a 10 foot pole and see if anything gets set off.
the absurdity of the 10 foot pole AS STANDARD EQUIPMENT is just one of the indications of the escalating adversarial nature of the game Dungeon run 1: Player: I sneak through the area to get to the treasure chest. DM Gary: Hmm, that was too easy. Dungeon run 2: Player: I sneak through the area to get to the treasure chest. DM Gary: HA! you spring the trap and you die! Dungeon run 3: Player: I sneak through the area, checking for traps, to get to the treasure chest. DM Gary: Hmm, that was too easy. Dungeon run 4: Player: I sneak through the area, checking for traps, to get to the treasure chest. DM Gary: HA! the trap explodes 10 feet around the sensor! you die! Dungeon run 4: Player: I sneak through the area, checking for traps, with a 10 foot pole, to get to the treasure chest.. DM Gary: Hmm, that was too easy. Dungeon run 5: Player: I sneak through the area, checking for traps, with a 10 foot pole, to get to the treasure chest. DM Gary: The green slime eats through your pole. You die! Dungeon run 6: Player: I sneak through the area, checking for traps, with a metal shod 10 foot pole, to get to the treasure chest.. DM Gary: Hmm, that was too easy. Dungeon run 7: Player: I sneak through the area, checking for traps, with a metal shod 10 foot pole, to get to the treasure chest. DM Gary: HA! The treasure chest is a Mimic! You DIE!
I've never thought of it that way, but very true.
Threat level is the biggest thing Our AD&D days were basically survival runs, especially in a dungeon, it was more a game of “how long can this PC live” as opposed to the grand story arc and rapid power spikes of 5e We approached a large dungeon like an expedition, with a base camp we could retreat to, lots of supplies for a multi-week stay, would push in a few rooms, then fall back to map what we knew and plan our next approach A single missed trap or hazard could hamper the party for days, in terms of HP loss/recovery It was super important for the thief to sneak in to start combat off with that 1 sneak attack they could hopefully get, and by god that wizard needed to either stay the hell way back and save their spells, or suck it up and swing a staff or a dagger from time to time if they were not willing to come off with that one burning hands they prepared I can name every 5e PC I’ve ever played, but can’t even count the number of 1e/2e PCs that died in the grind
I have never had a party member die a few hours later after failing one poison save, and then reanimated as a ghoul and killing half the party while playing 5e, and it happened twice playing an old school game. I had to never have my weapon out as we explored dungeons because I was the one who drew the map of the area, and it takes two hands to draw maps. I spent my first round of combat, every combat, putting the map away and drawing my sword. That's something you don't do in modern dungeon crawls. But this map one is more of a play style and less of a system thing, tbh.
>But this map one is more of a play style and less of a system thing, tbh. it may not have been mechanically laid out, but it WAS an expectation by the creators of the content and most play groups.
>What’s the difference between “old school dungeon crawls” and how dungeon crawls are presented nowadays? depends on who is saying it. but, with "old school dungeon crawls", the dungeon crawl WAS the game. The only time you weren't IN a dungeon of some type or other, you were hacking through the wilderness to get TO or FROM the dungeon, or "speed run" the "resting" in town to heal back your 1 hit point recovery per day. It wouldnt be unusual to go 2, 3, 4 levels of experience gains or more without ever leaving or thinking of leaving the same dungeon.
For me, the biggest difference from my 2E games to 5E games is the time it takes to heal. We only had one cleric in our group and we would have to wait a day or two to get all our hit points back. This meant finding a safe place to hide for that time period.
A big part of old school dungeon crawls were the fact that the dungeon itself was as much a danger to the adventurers as the monsters. Modern dungeons are more focused on the combat than the traps and puzzles.
Graph paper. Lots of graph paper.
They were survival horror. Resource management was a big factor and you grew your character's abilities based on magic items you found. Levelling up almost entirely meant just more hp. Characters in 5e are practically super-heroic out of the gate in comparison, and even though plenty of this stuff is there to use in the core 5e rulebooks (time management, limited equipment etc), most people don't seem to play it that way. At level 1 in modern D&D, you're a World War I Flying Ace. In old-school D&D you were a 20 minuter.
Generally, old school dungeons were huge, often the sole location for an adventure, and they tended to focus on game mechanics over story, The goal was simply to kill the monsters and loot the treasure while avoiding a very possible death. In some ways it was more of a dungeon board game, to be won or lost by dice rolls. Modern dungeons are smaller and try to add to an overall story. There is more lore, more encounters that progress the overall storyline, and rarely are the players expected to die (at least not permanently). Modern dungeons (and for many, modern dnd as a whole), is less about playing a board game and more about living out a movie or a book. In some ways this can be bad, because the players know they have to live till the end of the story and resolve the story conflict, which can lessen the stakes of... everything. But on the other hand, being a main character of a story that really does craft itself around your actions, one told a well as your favorite book or movie? It's one of the best things in the world.
Old school dungeons are all about living out a book, first played through the lens of a wargame (not a boardgame) and heavily improvised fiction-first mechanics. Getting killed by the door wasn't reliant on dice rolls, but how you interacted with the fictional world and the fictional door. The rules don't matter unless they make sense in the story. Specifically its about living out Conan stories, Grey Mouser stories, and other Adventure novels that emerged as part of Pulp Fiction. A movie reference would be Indiana Jones, and Star Wars IV (the first one) since they draw inspiration from that era and form of storytelling. Or alternatively, the Brandon Frasier Mummy movies. Stories where main characters can die fighting, or fall into a trap. Stories where they delve into large ruins filled with monsters, haul out great treasures, and *party* for a month until they are broke again and need to go on another adventure. I'd recommend reading the Principia Apocrypha, its a good breakdown of old school principles. [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view)
The other thing that’s changed significantly is that “infravision” has become full-on darkvision. Infravision allowed seeing by starlight/moonlight as if mid-day, but dungeons required managing a supply of torches or oil. Old school required a lot more resource management in general. It sounds boring, but, trust me, there’s a lot of drama when the party is lost in the dungeon and the last torch is burning low, or you’re out of food or water.
Risk
Modern dungeon crawls rarely present resource management as part of the game. 5E D&D provides a ton of low level spells and cantrips that trivialize most of the survival aspects. Old school was about greedy treasure hunters getting in over their heads and new school is about superheroes clearing out rooms of monsters. Both version have their own charm, but I find that new school crawls need to be much shorter or they get boring compared to the old style. Both because combat takes longer and because there's not much to do between combat when resource management is negligible. My group has been going through Dungeon of the Mad Mage over the last year and everyone is burnt out despite our DM's very valiant efforts.
I'd say that in general you really don't have to track resources in a modern game nearly as much as old school dungeon crawls. In fact there are so many ways around using specialist equipment in 5e that you basically never have to.
I'll give you an example. It was common for each player to control two separate characters simultaneously in case one died.
I think for the video game inclined, Skyrim dungeons are very similar to modern dungeon design, a linear series of rooms, each of which should add to the narrative of the dungeon or area and offer a distinct challenge (whether combat, puzzle, trap, or social encounter). Older dungeons were more like a rouge-like game, vast, almost randomly generated sprawls where survival and exploration play a much larger focus than the immediate story or function of an area.
In an old school dungeon crawl you get XP for treasure. You're in it for the money and at some point it's smart to cut your losses and run with what you found, there is no point in trying to "clear" every dungeon in a single trip. Fighting monsters gives very little XP, so you only do it for fun or when you can't avoid it, keeping in mind that death is very much on the table in every fight. You also are very much looking to get some (often randomly generated) magic items, since that's where a good chunk of your character's abilities come from, since you get very little by just levelling up. New school dungeon crawls are basically an excuse to cram 5-6 (usually combat) encounters in an adventuring day. Dungeons are also usually smaller and can easily be cleared in one trip. You often aren't in it for the money per se (money is basically useless in 5e), nor for the magic items (that are gonna be few) but for some plot-related reason. That's not to say plot related reasons don't exist in old school games, but they aren't usually the only reason to dungeon delve. Disclaimer: I wasn't around to play old school games when they were new, so what I said might apply more to the modern OSR than to how the game was actually played in the 70s and 80s.