As someone who used to have to use NVG's I can tell you for a fact that you do not get a clear picture, sure it's better than being straight up blind or giving your position away with a light source, but you do not have a clarity of vision, and you damn sure can't read with it. I dunno though, maybe the technology has gotten better since the late 90s. If dark vision is that, then yea your assesment of it makes a lot of sense, having someone with dark vision do your scouting is probably a good idea but they are going to need a light source for any kind of precision work.
@@DungeonMasterpiece Np bud, keep up the good work, love what I have been seeing and specifically linked this video to a few younger new dungeon masters I know.
*YES.* The lack of procedure in modern D&D for dungeon crawling, despite it's implied prevalence, is such a huge source of problems. "Don't let them try the lock more than once!" Don't need to be that artificial if you're tracking time in 10-minute chunks and there's a potential consequence for taking too long. "How do I distinguish between perception rolls and people specifically looking for things?" Perception roll is for *immediately noticing* things and if that doesn't work they can spend time looking in more specific spots. "Randomly walking into traps is annoying, but constantly saying "I check for traps" is also annoying!" Assume the party is moving slow enough to check for traps (if they have the right equipment) and they *will* notice them. Slow enough that the timer ticks as they traverse the dungeon. If they want to get a move on to avoid encounter rolls, THEN passive perception comes into play and you can get "Click! What do you do?" moments. This way the party actually has a choice to make rather than just being *subjected to* traps regardless of their input. "Why are times always expressed in 10 minute chunks, and who cares how long a torch burns for?" This is why. There's still this weird vestige of dungeon procedure in the 5e books but the procedures themselves are gone.
@@davidmc8478 Time scale really depends on the scenario. Somewhere for instance where they aren't relying on a spell for their continued existence, Water Breathing for instance, can easily be taken more slowly than one where they are already on a timer. So a 10min schedule is borderline useless if you're counting your delve in turns.
Yup - its where the designers fell down on the ENTIRE exploration pillar unfortunately. Same for Wilderness exploration too. All of the ingredients are in place within the core rules, they just failed to provide any guidance to DMs on how to actually run exploration - which is why so much gets hand waved. People new to the hobby can't understand why its even important to track rations as another example
@@Gibbons3457 Yeah, as much as some people don't like "turns" (or at least in my experiences) it makes things feel more grounded than an abstract measuring of in-game time. If you can just rattle off an arbitrary number of tasks without any percievable consequence, it feels dull...
This is good. As someone who entered the hobby in 2017, dungeons feel like a weird appendage, and much DM advice either tries to make the dungeon trivial, or exploration meaningless. I really liked the advice about the layout, and would love more on that topic, as well as a step by step procedure for making a proper dungeon.
It's hard to quantify how weird and alien D&D was WITHOUT a dungeon. The dungeon was a relatively easy to manage piece of gaming conceit. D&D was centered around this, you had special gear to explore dungeons, you had henchmen who helped you fighting monsters and carry off the loot which often came in obscene amounts of coinage, often too much for anyone to carry unaided. Money was a reward, money generated XP. Going outside the dungeon was weird because it had no defined borders, you couldn't plan for people going as far east as possible or up the river. and the convoluted nature of dungeons was applied to everything, I've seen dungeons inside houses, ships etc complete with tunnels and solid areas in between as if everything was carved and dug out of solid wood or stone rather than built. People did learn to move on from dungeons and figure out how to run adventures in the wilderness and even then they were managed like dungeons, except that the confined nature kinda remained, like a dungeon, but with a landscape painted on the walls and instead of rooms you had points of interest, usually more dungeons in many cases. D&D was built around the dungeon ecosystem, other games did not and that's how we learned to make more sandbox style worlds, where things felt more open and unconstrained, less guided than the dungeon. As controversial as a dungeon can be, it's a useful tool for beginners, it avoids many surprises, it's a good crutch for inexperienced DM's to learn the trade and become more comfortable with D&D. I think they are part and parcel of D&D, just like meeting in a tavern. They may be cliché, but they work on a fundamental level. Not every campaign has to be a convoluted exercise in outdoing Critical Role level play with all-out acting, detailed plots, a million unique NPC's with memorable traits. Sometimes a good game isn't more than just meeting in a tavern, meet some NPC's, go down into the dungeon and have a good time clearing it.
@@rotwang2000 , I grew up on 1st Edition D&D and the BECMI version. I remember drawing dungeon and dungeon for my players, and most of our game were nothing more than ever bigger dungeon crawls. The outdoors simply existed to separate the dungeons. When we finally got the Expert book and the outdoors opened up to us, we still generally treated it as dungeon. That is, go in the forest; kill the goblins; go further in the forest; kill those goblins; go even further in the forest; kill the goblins and their ogre friends; now go in the dungeon they were guarding. I stopped advancing editions after 3x so I have very little idea how 5E works. However, I miss the days of basic dungeon crawls where even the door and floor might be a monster and 10% of your magic items were cursed.
Time cost is another way to make sure that failed rolls punish the players without derailing your campaign. If the party rolls poorly on their investigation checks that would lead them to a critical plot element then maybe instead of "you don't find it" the result of the investigation check simply determines how long they have to search the room before they find it... when left unattended in any space for long enough, even the least perceptive person will eventually find everything in the room. The same can be done with lockpicking, survival for tracking, and other tasks that could lead the character to just keep trying until they succeed. It's also valuable for working with monsters that are intelligent and have a sense of self-preservation. Monsters that retreat from the party can short rest just like the party can and come back rejuvinated and ready for round two. They can get reinforcements, loop around to get behind the party or flee the dungeon with a portion of the treasure, assuming the party is taking too long.
Very nice! That's something I had sometimes done in the past, but never really thought it through logically enough to put into words. I'm def making sure I do this with my party in the future.
It's a good point. Unless their failure actually hinders their ability to perform the task - like breaking a lock after a bad lockpicking roll - there's no reason to give up after one attempt. Some people will object to re-rolling until the player succeeds, as it trivialises the skill check in question ... but the real issue is that there are no consequences for those additional attempts. Technically, the game already has something like this. When you're affected by a condition, you keep rolling until it's removed, but each time you fail, it costs you HP or otherwise continues to hinder you in some way.
@@Letham316 I think that’s definitely part of the art of gaming. Some tasks, a failure just means it takes longer (and maybe we should keep that in mind with successes too). And sometimes, a fail probably should be a fail. Some people might be able to pick locks and that one is just out of your league. On the other hand, I don’t see why someone couldn’t keep trying, so long as they don’t break anything. I suspect that (especially old) locks gradually get ruined if you pick at their innards too long. But how do you represent a skill roll where someone has the skill to open a type of lock and does it fairly easily, and someone who can open some locks but definitely isn’t up to the challenge posed by that lock? Linear scaling challenges won’t model that situation well, where a better thief just has a couple more pluses, representing maybe 10% better skill.
Thumbs up for the encumbrance love. I've been a strong proponent of how encumbrance is a balancing mechanic to keep the classes in check and it's refreshing to see someone else recognize that too.
This sounds like good advice. The one fatal flaw is that even low-level magic renders resource use and hostile conditions trivial. Light cantrips have unlimited use, and goodberry can be cast day after day. Prestidigitation or Create Bonfire can keep characters warm, and Alarm can warn of approaching danger. With a couple full casters in the party, exploring a dungeon is no more dangerous than checking out a house under construction.
And this is why I prefer older editions of D&D or other games altogether (like Hackmaster 5E which you should totally check out), simply because exploration in a dungeon is made trivial with unlimited use cantrips that can negate a lot of the dangers of exploration without proper preparation like you've stated.
Yep, this, this, and more this. Plentiful magic has killed exploration as one of the supposed pillars of the game. It's no wonder almost every discussion about creating characters you will ever see fall into two categories, min maxing combat builds and the occasional development of character backstory. You don't even have to have casters to do it either with just a few specific magic items to hand.
Goodberry Components: V S M (A sprig of mistletoe) First good berry is a 1st lvl spell ... Later levels it may not matter but early on that's a big deal. Also Unless your brought that mistletoe you are SOL. Players need to have components and need to keep track of them. Mistletoe is not readily available depending on where the adventure takes place. Additionally repeated handling of mistletoe can cause skin irritation. So get ready for that con save after a few days. Seriously. It's not hard to make good berry say good buy
@@Ashtor1337 If you have a spell component pouch you are assumed to always have all material components necessary to cast a spell so long as those components lack a listed gold price. Alternatively, you just take a spell focus item and that also counts as all required material components without a listed gold cost. Also, casting one 1st level spell to feed up to five people for two consecutive days is hardly a sacrifice, even at level 1.
@@Ashtor1337 components without gold cost can be handwaved by having either a component pouch or a spell focus, which most spellcaster classes can begin with as starter equipment
Yes! The idea of using a D6 to tell time, ticking it down for every ten minutes is such a good idea! Then you could also have another D6 allocated for hours, love it
Given that D6's are fairly inexpensive to buy in bulk, I'd get a bunch of them and as they get used up I'd start to pile them up to make the players aware of how long they have been adventuring. Maybe even use 2 or 3 different colors to help illustrate how long they've been going since they last rested and apply penalties if it's been to long.
5:55 Just to clarify this statement if anyone doesn't know, the rules for darkvision are scattered *all over* the 5e player's manual, and it turns out that things being "lightly obscured" in dim light (what darkvision gets you) equates to a huge hit to your passive perception score. Off the top of my head I think it's -10? But since the book doesn't contain that information in one place most people don't notice, so we get demihumans with NVGs.
A lot of games also don't account for bright/dim light, there either is light or there isn't. To be fair, though, fussing with light sources can be a pain in a lot of cases, and depending on the kind of game you're running it's not worth the extra hassle.
@@colbyboucher6391 The rules themselves in 5E breeds players that react badly to being told no or not getting their way completely. The mentality of point buys and no negative numbers or limitations regarding stats breeds a disbelief that dim light implies a restriction. I saw a player freak out and quit a campaign because the party was attacked at night and their character couldn't see what was happening where there wasn't light. He simply couldn't handle the mental stress of operating in a limited information environment. 5E is a superheroes game because with superheroes it is never a question of if they win, but a matter of the superhero deciding for themself how they win. Any opposition they encounter simply exists to reaffirm their total control by presenting a situation for the superhero to choose how to resolve. Superheroes don't encounter opposition that forces them into make consequential decisions on limited information, as that presses home a fundamental lack of control.
Stick a yellow poker chip under their mini, or if you use theater of the mind, put a big electric votive candle in front of the player who's character is holding the torch. Keeps it REALLY obvious.
it's disadvantage to widom(sight) checks, disadvantage to passive checks is a -5. but remember any enemies would have that malus too meaning PC's and monsters see each other about the same time.
Yep, that is exactly how I used to do it in the early 80s. Thanks for the d6 clocks suggestion. Very good visual idea. Haven't done a large and layered dungeon in a very long time. I'm currently reading Castles & Crusades (8th printing). Feels like the right time to return to the dungeon.
I'm a recent subscriber after finding one of your videos--I've binged just about the whole lot. Love your content and your explanations. Hope you do real well on UA-cam.
Me too! I've been watching a lot of smaller channels lately, and I think that many of them are much higher quality than their subscriber count reflects. This one in particular!
I love this! The oft-hated encumbrance rules really are the entry fee for epic exploration and survival. I don't know if you're familiar with the Angry GM, but he also uses a die system that I'm fond of for keeping time. I also appreciated the mall/dungeon comparison. Great video! I've been looking forward to it.
I mean its not that hard to add up numbers on a calculator, its just people like being lazy, you really only need to sum everything up once then add or subtract from the total as you go along,
There are some good 3rd party rules that work on things like bulk. You can carry certain Items without a problem as long as you can stow them on your body by means of backpacks, scabbards, pouches etc. It's when the bulk exceeds your carrying capacity you start to notice the problems. For example a dungeoneer's set of equipment, is no problem, but try to put 5000 coin, an item with lots of bulk somewhere and you have to make choices.
@@Alex-sf5uz It's an objectively terrible game mechanic. It has so many issues - not limited to: - Keeping item weights consistent across unlisted items you have temporarily removed from your inventory - Adding items of varying weights in bulk - The fact that the GM has to assign a weight to any unlisted items they distribute There are so many better ways to do it that it's baffling that D&D hasn't innovated on this mechanic for literal *decades*. Anti-Hammerspace Inventory is a great one. _Lamentations of the Flame Princess_ has a great point-based system. _Mausritter_ has a great slot-based system. _Giffyglyph's Darker Dungeons_ does it really well as well.
You should definitely look to the dritz books when thinking about more advanced darkvision. The drow don't have what we would consider darkvision, but instead a version of infrared vision. This allows them to see their surroundings as they are heated instead of as white outlines. This helps them read, not by torch, but by having the text itself be warmer than their surroundings. It's an interesting system and would allow someone to heat up dungeon walls if there was text on it in order to read it, but he process would become complicated if you haven't done something like that before. Most elves on the surface have no real use for their dark vision as they are not nocturnal, so the average elf wouldn't really be used to this system of reading. A dwarf on the other hand lives in an underground tunnel and could use stonecraft knowledge built up over his life to read runes the same way someone would read braille. This all still makes an interesting and fun way to turn the idea of darkvision on it's head in ways the players wouldn't expect
That's not a Drow thing. It's an edition thing. Infravision was what all elves and dwarves received up until 3e when the mechanic was replaced entirely by Darkvision.
Thank you, this gives me a lot of ideas of how to make a dungeon module a lot more interesting. I'm new to DMing, and it's been really fun, but I don't know enough to get really creative on my own yet. This helps a LOT!
The aspects of light, sight, breathing, hunger, thirst and even gravity are often overlooked...unless you played the original Saltmarsh series in the 80s. I promise you, meaningful underwater dungeons will change your outlook.
There is a Japanese Manga called "Dungeon Meshi", meaning "Dungeon food". The adventuring party, for the purpose of cutting provision fees and encumbrance, would cook and eat the monsters they would kill inside the dungeon as they venture through it. It's a comedy with good laughs. The author has totally ignored "Lighting Conditions" inside the dungeon though, as the rooms seem to be always brightly lit by some unknown light source.
I love that manga and have always wanted to run a game around the idea of cooking with monsters. I believe a lot of the time either the dungeon has built-in torches or fungus and fauna that glow light it up. also constantly being in the dark is kinda boring and I think is one of the main reasons people don't like going into dungeons.
You are taking a lot of info from the osr systems, and applying it toward the 5e scene with the mechanics you are referring. It really is great to see those two mend. I wonder if you are pulling more views from the 5e crowd, the osr community, or those in both like myself.
Started out as mostly OSR players watching, but I'm growing the 5e base. I've got a running joke/reputation of "converting" people to the OSR, yet I never set out to do that specifically. I started playing in AD&D when I was in grade school, and just carried those lessons learned into 5e. Outside of the crunchyness, cantrips, and death saves, there really isn't anything that's different to be frank. People just have to stop being wimps and ratchet up the tension on their 5e players. I have no qualms sending three CR5 cave giants up against a level 3 party. They will figure it out or they won't. Not my problem. lol.
@@DungeonMasterpiece Retreat is always an option. Especially when a character is downed. I once willingly took a bunch of arrows defending some villagers we had to rescue, dying so the group could retreat out a secondary passage while I fought as a diversion. Best character death I ever had, and the DM narrated an awesome scene of my character being welcomed into the hall of heroes and being set at the head table to drink with the all-father. I was so stoked, and I was happy to roll up a new character who happened to be one of the villagers we saved. He saw the heroism of my former character and it became his guiding principle.
@@DungeonMasterpiece I think 5e has been around long enough that people are looking for something a bit different. And the osr is popular enough that the two are starting to blend and really interesting ways.
@@DungeonMasterpiece The big difference is in genre flexibility. 5e's inbuilt magic pervasiveness and extreme death adversity make it really unsuited to more grounded fantasy genres.
This one of the best approaches to dungeon crawling I've seen in along time, its really nice to see someone talk about the relevance of time, resources, and exhaustion. Most just ignore them to great detriment of the game IMO
Well presented. I can see how theses ideas can seem new to DMs who only played 5e. To old timers like me (been Dming for 37 years), this is old news...
Service tunnels in dungeons. Drew Hayes's book, NPCs uses them to great effect. It's a fun read that takes tired tropes and tinkers with them just enough to make an enjoyable story.
I've recently come across your videos, and I must say, I really enjoy them! And I appreciate that everything is subtitled too - that takes some effort to achieve.
I’ve just recently found your content a few weeks ago. I’m starting up a new arc of a continuing campaign soon and I will definitely be implementing points from this video and your hexcrawl video! Excellent stuff!
This analysis is truly amazing. Listening to this has really changed the way I think of, not just a dungeon setting, but really any dark and eery setting in an RPG. I've already started to implement some of these ideas and this is my second time through this video.
10 minute increments for activity sounds like a good system. What might also be a really good idea is increasing the party's loudness the more players that are simultaneously performing actions. If the party tries to min-max every hour by making sure everyone is active during those 6 increments, maybe they are far more likely to draw attention to their activity and force a other encounter from previously-wandering monsters, and the monsters are more likely to get a surprise round. I will say that we have different ideas about darkvision. Darkvision as most players understand it is literally impossible. You cannot see in an environment without any light, no matter how good your eyes are. Infravision could be a thing if you want to increase the sciency-ness of the game, but when everything is the same temperature, you shouldn't be able to discern anything. Pressing your hand to cold stone might let you see where that wall is, but only until that hand print cools down again, so just a few rounds. Maybe just a single round for a metal door. On the other hand, one thing I learned when I moved out of the city/suburbs is that moonlight is actually pretty bright sometimes. I can see pretty well during a full moon. I can (cautiously) navigate a room even with the charging LED of an electronic device. That is what I would call dim light. But I certainly couldn't fight anyone like that if they were not similarly impaired. True darkness, though... you would need magical means or a non-sight sense to "see" through.
Most environments will have the tiny bit of light required for a darkvision equipped character to see. I have been in truely dark environments several times, and without a light source it can take 5 min for the eyes to adjust enough to make out any information at all, but for a creature with mirrored eyes like a cat, seeing would be much easier. However, you still wouldn't be able to see much. Enough to see shapes and determine obstacles, but depth perception would be limited, and as in the PHB, no colour. For some environments, particularly deep dungeons with no light sources in nearby rooms, there might not be any light at all, but these would be rare, even in DnD.
@@matthewparker9276 In a wrecked castle there may be some light leaking in, but in the underdark? An ordinary cave away from the entrance? A dungeon underneath an abandoned castle? In all these cases and more, there will be zero photons. That is another thing to keep in mind: light is quantized. You can't keep dividing an amont of light to get dimmer and dimmer; eventually, there is no light at all. Fun fact: some frogs have vision so good that they see stars we can't... and to those frogs, those stars flicker. They flicker because the stars are so "dim" that photons are not always being emitted at their eyes. Mirrored eyes are a great evolutionary adaptation. They can as much as double your sensitivity to light. But 0 * 2 = 0. And the real reason that animals with better night vision are colorblind is because they have more or even all rods, and fewer or no cones. These are structures in our eyes for detecting light. Rods are more sensitive to any kind of light, but can't discern color. Cones can discern color (some versions of cones can even detect colors we can't normally see), but are less sensitive. Humans have a mix of both, with more rods in our peripheral vision. This means you have better night vision out of the corner of your vision, probably as a defensive mechanism against predators. Cats have more rods, but that necessarily means they have fewer cones. The importance of this distinction is that creatures with "dark vision" should never be able to see colors, even in bright light. At best, their color vision should be bad. Humans see fewer colors in dark areas because we have a mix, and our color-detecting cones stop transmitting as much useful data to our brains. But in zero light (which would be fairly common in D&D environments), vision won't work at all. That is why I think the vast majority of D&D races should have "low light vision" instead of "dark vision." Most of those are races that are predominantly evil in most settings. Then as a DM, I can just ban or provide rules for the few that are left. ;-) BTW Humans can actually detect as little as 3 photons (remembering from school, looking this up would probably suck), so our vision is actually pretty good. Sorry, I may have come off a bit aggressive there. That wasn't the intention. I am arguing that just hand-waving low-light vision into true dark vision is a mistake. Not only does it make no sense from a biological standpoint (which was most of the previous few paragraphs), but it is bad for tension and gameplay. With darkvision as stated in the PHB, darkness isn't really an obstacle. It just hinders your fighting and ability to notice details. You can still navigate safely. A character with darkvision doesn't have to worry that they will get stuck someplace, being unable to find and identify food or water, the accelerated onset of insanity from a lack of stimuli, or feeling helpless when their light source goes out. In fact, most characters with darkvision would usually prefer to NOT use torches for the benefit of stealth. This means that forays into dangerous places don't require preparation/planning, the party doesn't have to weigh risk and reward of delving a little too deep, getting minor treasure in the form of torches or glow rods is pointless, and finding new settlements to restock is also not strategically important. So that's why I think people need to be clear in distinguishing low light from true darkness.
@@tkc1129 there is more light in the environment than you would realise. You would get light diffusing from several rooms away, so long as there is a path for it to leak through, and then there is phosphorescent and luminescence, which would contribute small quantities of light to areas underground. Not enough for a human to see comfortably, but enough to activate dark vision. And areas like the underdark have residents that rely on dark vision. They would have their own light sources, either natural or artificial, to provide the low level of light required to see. You could have areas so devoid of light it is impossible to see, but they won't be as common as you are suggesting.
Great video! Another thing I'll mention is that players often seem to believe that long rests are "free"; that is, free of consequences. Any moderately lived-in dungeon is going to have creatures roaming around, who might not cotton to "upworlders" camping in their territory. Not to mention, factions the party has bumped into might well spend that downtime building barricades, sending runners to nearby allies, and generally preparing for Round 2.
I'm pretty sure to Tabaxi don't get dark vision. Which is weird because out of all of the playable races, with the exception of maybe dwarf, they're the only ones that it makes sense to have.
Question for you: I recently found out about a RPG system called Lancer, which is designed based around Mecha, and while I haven't done any reading of the game's rules just yet, I did find their character creator online and I was very impressed at how well it manages to land a theme in the character creation process. If you haven't heard of it or if it sounds interesting, check it out for yourself. My question for you is, do you have a preferred method of character creation? Myself I tend to go through character classes and abilities before even starting, and I usually create a large number of sample characters with simple combinations of class and background before deciding on one of those to flesh out, but I know I'm not the majority.
Took me long enough to come across this...but thanks for the shout out on the Time Tracker! My design stands on the shoulder of giants in OSR, but it was very fun updating it to 5E and "proceduralizing" the otherwise chaotic and disorganized dungeoncrawl tips in 5E.
The game Darkest Dungeon does a good job with the feeling of dungeons imo. Lack of torch light increases difficulty and sanity loss and food can be a problem if you're not careful.
A trick I started using in the 90's for dealing with encumbrance was to substitute 'weight a character can carry' for slots. i.e., the amount of 'stuff' - weapons, gear, supplies, 10-foot poles, a given PC could carry. Let's say an average human can carry 20 items easily, not including worn armor, clothes, belts, packs, and pouches. I then assigned 'slots' to such things such as a pack and pouch. The average pouch 3 slots, a pack 15 slots, that sort of thing. Then, the PC could carry an additional 5 'slots' with a -1 for actions, combat, movement, etc. This would accumulate. 10 extra items? -2, and so on. We noted things like carried bags, which could be dropped (and lost, forgotten, or stolen in the heat of combat) and time for 'shrugging out of my pack'. Each item was considered something that you needed a hand to handle. A torch is an item, a bundle is 'a number of items bundled'. Smaller items, such as caltrops (which usually come in a bag) would be a single item - i.e. 5 caltrops held in one hand. Regular Rations - 1 slot or item per day per person; iron Rations - 5 days per 'slot' because they're supposed to be condensed and meant for survival, not flavor. Potions are usually in vials, so same as caltrops, a mirror, string, etc, same thing, so a single slot could hold different, small items. To further help the Players, I'd made custom character sheets with 'slots'. Bags and Packs would have a separate, smaller sheet which would remind them of what 'could' be lost if you set it aside and forget to grab it. Trust me, it only takes once or twice for a party to slog back to that last site of combat to fetch a badly needed pack or two before they become more aware of such things. That also opens up the possibility for another encounter. After all, the dead and debris of a battle are rarely left alone for long, eh? Tiny items, like those commonly used as spell components, would be 25 per slot for simplicity. Arrow heads, coins, gems, spell components, spices, and so on. Then we'd adjust for size. Smaller characters like Halflings can carry 25% less than a human, so 15 slots, where as a large character, like a Dragonborn for example, can carry 25 and so on.
Two things I always felt help me become a better DM was my time in the NSS when I was in high school and going through a little over half dozen different caves which varied from 1/4 mile mud crawl to an almost literal "Mines of Moria". Then being stationed aboard a ship in the USN really gave me perspective on traveling and living in close quarters.
I LOVE that you actually wear a suit and tie for these videos. It legit adds an aura of professionalism that makes me take note of your DMing lessons more than other videos. Is that dumb? Probably. But it’s how my brain works.
I tend to break down dungeons by scenes I’d like to have play out to elicit specific moods or emotions I want the players to have. Like an Indiana Jones movie versus a video game layout.
good video you hit all the points to making dungeons tense. Its a great way to play the game and leads to some great moments, trying to manovour a mule through a dungeon full of pit traps to haul off the treasure hoard was probably the most intense experience I've had playing the game.
As Someone that enjoys role-playing gameplay, I agree with this. Too often many want only positive choices for the player or remove parts they think add only make the make slower and break away from the story. For example, many remove weight limits and then do not understand why their player's character always has a huge amount of good items and gold.
Wanna say that I found your channel the other day, and your videos have provided valuable insight to me. I'm a new DM roughly 17 sessions deep into my first proper campaign (Pathfinder 1e), and I've still got a ton of stuff I'm trying to work out. Dungeons in particular are one that I struggle with, and most other videos on them haven't been quite satisfactory for me, but this has helped me think about how I'd run and make dungeons for future sessions.
short rant about darkvision; there is not such a thing as "under moonlight" thats not a thing thats at least 10 different things that can range from "see perfectly clear because somehow the moon is shining nicely bright like a night-sun" to "the full moon is out but everything 50 centimeter above ground is a black void where i can only stumble while I can see the outlines from anything above it"
This is the best dnd video I have ever seen on UA-cam. Your explanations were on point, you gave great advice on how to design a living environment, and you gave me some much needed inspiration to work on my campaign. Truly a fantastic video!
5E Darkvision in darkness is lightly obscured. That means disadvantage on perception, which is a 5 point hit to passive perception. Hiding only requires not being seen clearly, so any monster seen with dark vision is a dexterity check away from being invisible. A monster could literally be hidden 5 feet away from a character using dark vision, and the character would be at a disadvantage to find it. Characters using dark vision are only seeing well enough to walk into trouble. With dungeons, I think it is worth remembering the defining trait of medieval warfare: castles. Military power was about the ability to withstand attack in a fortified location. Sure attackers might burn some crops, kill some peasants, and loot some farms for small potatoes, but attackers would generally just stare at the fortified manor and couldn't do much about it unless they were very well supplied and patient or willing to take huge losses. Sieges took a long time and left the forces laying siege vulnerable to superior force assembling and catching them out in the open. Or defenders would launch horse mounted raiding forces out of their castle and pick apart the force laying siege piecemeal in hit and run engagements. Gates had airlocks filled with murder holes for a reason, any enemy rushing inside when the outer gate is open would be massacred. Fighting close to the walls is going to be like fighting under a hail of thrown rocks and arrows launched from elevation, which is to say totalhelldeath. Residents of a dungeon should have similar situations, with lairs being fortified strongholds that are very difficult to attack, and surrounding territory that is much more vulnerable to attack. Under this sort of ecology, having most dungeons that are cave systems with larger caves works a bit better. Some "room" are like peasant areas where the inhabitants are either hunting and gathering or growing/tending food/resources that they give a portion of as tribute to a more central and fortified cave where stronger monsters reside. Other caves might have monsters and are more like the lord's woods where the stronger monsters hunt and the other weaker monsters know not to poach. Adventurers in such a dungeon are more like a raiding force, and the local ruling monsters will be safe in their fortified location and will collect information from fleeing monsters attacked by the characters or send out scouts to assess their strength, and then potentially sally forth to defend their territory when they think they can catch the characters with a counter attack once enough information is collect. The "boss" encounter is literally the local boss and their retinue. Or the one I like is just saying dungeons make no sense logically, and then just pointing to medieval art depicting hell and saying to the players: yeah, dungeons are basically magical in this world and think of these locations like delving into the medieval conception of hell or other trip into the mythological underworld. It is a location that makes no sense in the most primal and terrifying way possible, and you don't get to use logic to defeat that inherently supernatural horror.
I was not expecting a reference to an obscure Latvian Castle (Cēsis Castle) in a DnD video. I've been there before as well, and agree it would be terrifying in a combat situation to be running around someplace like that.
Tas ir lukss! (I'll stop before I hurt myself with more Latvian. 😂) Lived in eastern Europe for two years back in 2012-14 about a year and a half in Latvia, the rest mostly in Belarus and Estonia. Learned to speak solid Russian, as mostly spent time in more culturally Russian areas, like Daugavpils in Latvia, or Narva in Estonia, but picked up enough Latvian to get myself in trouble. :) That's super cool that you have that as part of your heritage! Did you happen to visit any other fortifications or castles while over there?
@@brianhansen9785 My family regularly tours all of the historical fortifications and palaces that we once owned before the Soviet invasion. Lielstraupe was built by my great-grandfather theodoricus, and is now an insane asylum.
That's super cool! I would live to go back there again someday. If you have not, but you get the chance, the fortress in Daugavpils is really interesting and with going to as well. (It's a star fort built in 19th century to fight Napoleon, so well after your ancestry was building Castles there, but still worth the visit in my opinion.) It's a really a interesting fortification that has a really facinating history, I won't bore you with it, but was used in the great wars, and during the cold war as well. I loved walking along, and especially inside the old walls. Admittedly at the time the walls were not in the best shape so exploring around inside them was probably not the smartest idea. That being said, exploring inside the super dark crumbling ruins with nothing but a single bad flashlight between the four of us is still the memory I always go back to when picturing how adventurers feel crawling through dungeons. That's what I try to recreate for my players. I remember finding a mostly dark room and all the light was from a small airhole in the ceiling that shined a beam of light to the middle of the otherwise black room. I could just imagining like a sword in the stone situation in the dusty sunbeam. They were starting a bunch of restoration work when I left back in 2014 so who knows if they even let you in now, but it was a super cool experience. (Tangentially related, a video on ways to help players better relate to/ make feel more engaged with the experience might be interesting. Example maybe if members of the party are able, (physically, financially, emotionally etc.) Have your group visit a cave, or a haunted house, corn maze, hike through forest or mountains, or old castle, etc (more for IRL groups and location depending of course). Vid could also be on things like ambiance (music lighting and such). I've done some group activities like that with my group (it is a friend group outside of just RPG's) and it really does help to be able to reference things from those types of experiences to help set tone and mood. Just recently found your channel so maybe your have a video like that already, I'm still working through your backlog, but just a thought for you.) Anyway did not mean to write an essay. Love your content though so far, keep it up!
As a newer DM only having started well after 5E's establishment, these are very good pointers and tips. I will confess, I am guilty of negating time, and overlooking enemy-on-enemy interactions... I'll take this video to heart and certainly make some changes going forward!
GREAT EPISODE!! I love how you break down the realities of/experience of being underground or in a dungeon. One of the best real life experiences like this is when my family took a trip to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky back in the 1980s. At one point they tell a ghost story and then kill all of the lights in that part of the cave and it is truly pitch black except for the "ghost" 100-200 feet away with a dim lantern. That experience set the tone for when I would run a D&D game underground and start sweating the players with the realities of dungeon crawling/spelunking caves!
After watching this, I'd like to take a moment to thank the Create Water and Purify Food and Drink Orisons (0-Level Divine Spells) the Fruitful Sash belt item, and every other magical aid that has ensured that no Pathfinder group I have ever played in these past 10 or so years has ever actually had to worry about dwindling rations and water supplies.
I wish I'd seen this before creating and running my own dungeon. Then again, I'd probably not really appreciate it without having the experience behind me. Many of the solutions you suggest would fix problem in my homebrew dungeon. Thanks!
TheAngryGM has a great way of tracking both time and wandering monsters: Threat dice. It's basically the same as your time die, except you add one d6 to a pool each time the party does something. At the end of each hour, the pool is rolled and resets, and if one of the d6s shows up on a one, a random encounter happens. Whenever the party is doing something stupid (like making a lot of noise), the pool is rolled immediately, but doesn't reset.
I did something very similar but it was also a crappy on how I did it. I made a Starwars Campaign based off of Dead Space 1 and would roll 2d6 whenever the players did something if the number equaled to 10 or higher and random enemy would come out of a vent or from broken walls. They eventually learned to maintain a tight group formation and have players looking everywhere. One of my favorite moments is when the players came across a T junction and they had each player take a position and used a delayed reaction to move all at once. It was so good to see my players not only work together but also come up with a strategy on their own with no input. I had no choice but to reward with not only a good amount of XP but also have them some much needed healing items and a few explosives. That was fun......even if I scared the hell out of them on my description of a flesh covered room
Many of the things you say are reflected very well on the Sunday Labyrinth Lord games i partake in, alongside with the Caverns of Thracia that i DM on Wednesday. It's nice to have fresh reminders of the things Old School DMs should do to make more atmospheric pressure and immersion for the party to make quick witted choices and / or try to take their time to discover a secret, among other things. On my personal opinion i believe Stonehell Dungeon and Caverns of Thracia can be some of the best dungeons for both starting DMs and Veteran DMs to keep the active mind muscle of all that is mentioned in this video. Great job, man. Regards from Caracas Venezuela.
Been binge watching your videos since I found your channel. Honestly surprised that you're so underrated. Your videos are clear, interesting, get to the point and are just very pleasing to watch. Can't wait for more videos!
Wow, that mall analogy worked really well for me. I have no idea how you came up with that connection but well done! Also, bonus points for that Mall Rats slide.
One of those things that players and GMs avoid early on (and hopefully, begin to embrace later when they're seeking a deeper, more immersive experience). Darkness and light, as well as resource management. They race and are granted magical means to see in the dark; to produce food and water on demand; etc. So many lost opportunities.
I LOVE THIS the idea of using a d6 to track events in the dungeon every a ction being 10 min then a few more d6bto track the # of hpurs is genius. I will be usong this concept in my next dungeon crawl especally to track time of spells that cast light that have levels
Totally hit the mail on the head about the “dark vision” concept. Having been in plenty of caves here is no Vision without a source. If you have not already please do a video on Vision
Taking away all infravision and dark vision completely changes the game and makes everyone use torches. When you can only see 30 feet but the goblins can see in the dark if makes everything more challenging
Actually, it goes counter to how the ability is written. A monster/character with Darkvision can see in the dark as if it were dim light within a specific radius. Twilight, dawn, or a particularly brilliant full moon are all dim light. It's not as harsh as the pictures he showed, and his family of humans are an example of creatures that don't have darkvision, rather than 'how dark it is really'.
@@XenretheVague backing you up here, the ability says what it says. and dim light, so a full moon, is plenty bright to see perfectly well what you are doing. people think darkvision is "sees about as well as the sharpest sighted human" because they are so stuck in the human perspective they can't imagine anything else. and while in complete cave like darkness nothing will be able to see, we are talking about inhabited dungeons, ones occupied by creatures not adapted to total darkness. there is going to be some light down there; glowing fungus, magic lights, small fires lit by the denizens of the dungeon, occasional holes to the surface trickling in light, something. and that is going to let the darkvisioned PC's and creatures have their 60ft of dim light plus whatever light the sources give off. even human darkvision is better than people give it credit for. they dive from broad sunlight into some cellar and think oh that's total darkness but let you eyes adjust and if even the tiniest pinprick of light is getting into a room you can at least make your way around, now imagine it looked 8X brighter that's darkvision. with that you'd be able to see what you were doing with that pinprick on the other end of your house, light a match and it'd be practically daylight to you. so at best the darkvisioned PC's dont need torches, at worst they light up a birthday candle and see perfectly.
@@XenretheVague Ok I see what you mean with Monsters, but what we perceive as characters while seeing in the dark (no matter the race), tends to be clear as day. When the level of detail for figures let alone silhouettes, is not easily shown in game. Players act like they have ultrasonic sending of information coupled within clarity of vision in low light, let alone darkness. Which is difficult to express when others say at the table “but I have dark vision”
Really great Baron! I like the dice counter idea for succinct tracking of time. IF, I can remember to flip the die. For a long time I've used 15min for investigation checks and the like, but 10 min increments might be best. Gotta give it a try. Though my party has recently been in a drawn out dungeon crawl. It will be some time before they are crawling around another dungeon any time soon.
Very nice video! As someone who started playing in the late 70s, the "dungeon crawl" is a very important type of adventure to me personally. To add to your already great content in this video, one of the things that I also think that has become lost about dungeon crawls is that at their heart, they are all about human's fear of the dark and the unknown. This is certainly campaign specific, but especially back in the 70s and 80s, we played dungeons very differently than they are conceived of now. They were dark, dangerous, confusing places infested with monsters and not just "underground" versions of the surface. They were their own locals with their own laws of physics. So, for example, time did not pass in the same way in a dungeon as it did on the surface. The whole "why does it take my character 10 minutes to move 60 feet?!" issue is only an "issue" if one assumes that the underground and the above ground operate the same way. Once you accept that the underground is different, including how time passes, you start to appreciate that your PC in a town is not at ALL in the same type of environment as when they are underground in a dungeon. Making them very different in this regard actually made them feel much more alive to us as players. The dungeon is the place of monsters, fear, and psychological stress. It's not simply a "dark above world." Your advice about the importance of tracking time, food and water, encumbrance, and light is EXTREMELY important in making a dungeon crawl meaningful and more fun for players, I couldn't agree more. While the PCs need not worry for the most part about food, water, light, time, and encumbrance while in a town, they do in a dungeon and this just makes the dungeon more bizarre and highlights the danger for the players. The PCs are literally "in another world" and it is not their "world" at all. The only thing I would add to your list is the use of hirelings and, if the PCs are of higher level, retainers in a dungeon crawl. Hirelings in particular are often vital for a successful dungeon crawl as they can carry treasure, be torchbearers, and other tasks that free up the PCs to cast spells, fight, turn undead, etc. However, they are also not nearly as competent as the PCs in the dungeon environment, so hirelings essentially become another resource the players must manage as the hirelings panic and drop a torch or lantern, run away, become paralyzed in fear, wander off and get lost, betray the PCs, etc. This also brings the importance of Charisma as an attribute into play which is nice for game play as well IMHO. To try and represent psychological stress, back in the early days of AD&D we instituted a new mechanic we called "Panic Points" (yes, a parallel with "Hit Points") that represented when the PC (or NPC) would suffer a psychological break while in a dungeon. Every class had 1d6 per level (NPCs like hirelings had 1d4) and you used either Strength of Intelligence as the adjustment to these points. We had certain situations that would inflict PP damage, such as running out of light, water, or food (points suffered each hour without one or more of these), the first time losing hit points in the dungeon, seeing a particularly gruesome sight or horrible/terrifying monster (obviously this is relative to the level of the PC), losing a fellow PC, becoming lost or teleported to an unknown location in the dungeon, etc. Each had a die roll associated with it for the number of points lost (ranging I think from 1d3 to 1d8) and the PC was allowed a saving throw vs. Paralysis (seemed appropriate to us) and if this was successful the PC lost half the rolled number of PPs, rounding down. At zero PP the PC became panicked and suffered a -2 adjustment to all d20 rolls and a -1 adjustment to all other die rolls. Negative PP caused the PC to become broken and the player and the DM worked together to determine what that looked like given the PC and the situation. The broken PC became an NPC controlled by the DM until the PC was healed back to at least 0 PP. The player could provide suggestions but the DM ran the PC while they were broken, which just further highlighted the psychological distress of the PC. Regular cure spells/potions healed both lost HPs and PPs and the PC regained 1 PC per each 8 hours resting. We also used a mechanic similar to binding wounds where if the PCs spent 1 turn after an encounter that caused PP loss they could heal back 1d4 lost PP if another PC supported them (a PC providing support for the turn could not heal back lost PP). An adjustment equal to the supporting PC's Charisma adjustment for morale checks was added to this 1d4 roll. It worked pretty well for dungeons and it was our attempt to try and include psychological stress in some meaningful way in the game. As a long-time dungeon crawler, and someone who appreciates that type of an adventure, I really appreciate the thought and effort you put into this video. Well done!
Your videos are so evocative I've played D&D for 12 years on and off, and somehow, I've never actually thought about how interesting and cool yet claustrophobic and scary it'd be to actually personally traverse a dungeon. I've kinda avoided dungeons (and dreaded encountering them in even my favorite modules) because they feel like the old school gameplay in a bad way, and the way I think of them, they really don't mesh with my playstyle. But I think you've made me actually wanna run a dungeon. Immediate subscribe.
Discovered this channel from a the tab "gaming" spotlight, featuring you as a rising content creator. This is really good stuff -- great analysis, high quality editing and production, professional diction, and one of those voices made for radio (not to worry, the face isn't!). Wish you the best of luck moving forward and hope your channel continues to grow. *Edit* Also, the upside-down glasses bit was great haha.
This has been a concern of mine for a while, upping the tension in a dungeon environment. One of the tricks I started to use is simple. When the PCs in my game roll to detect something, I 1) do not tell them the difficulty, 2) Have them roll it where they can't see the roll, and 3) if they fail or there is no danger, I say "You do not SEE any traps..." My players are now paranoid... Great video by the way.
I do like your tips on using dice to track time because it is easy to use and its reusable without having to print new time track pages or wasting an eraser to reuse the page thus saving time and not having a eraser shavings littering the table.
As a DM I hate random encounters in 5th edition. We get to play for 3 hours once a week. A random encounter can eat 0.5-1 hour of that time for no story gain or level progression. I've gotten to the point where I only track time with long rests, each one marks a new day. I have a year long calendar for the whole world with events marked on different days: assassinations, invasions, festivals and other events that happen even if the characters aren't there. So if they want to spend two weeks in a dungeon they can. But they might find that the quest giver is dead by the time they get out with the McGuffin they wanted. If you want the type of dungeon crawl that he describes you have to also remove the spell Goodberry from the acceptable spell list.
Great job! Really enjoy your content. I’m definitely not a fan of micromanaging torches and rations, but the whole concept of a dungeon as a giant taxing experience is a useful one.
Oo, I really like the part about using dice to track time. Way more elegant than what I've always done, which is to only make checkmarks every for every 10 min or so. Might I also ask where you find those exquisite old school black & white artworks? I really want to use something similar for my games, but it can be really hard to find good sources for them
That mall example is a great way to explain the exploration of old ruins. EDIT: To add, I always use a couple abacus to keep track of time and similar. It's a surprisingly quick and efficient way to track things.
Small addition: Always remember that a shopping mall want's to have visitors as much as possible and as deep inside as possible and make each location as accessible as possible. A Dungeon on the other hand in most of the cases is created to keep people out/away and make it as hard as possible for them to enter the inner rooms and progress on deeper levels.
As someone who used to have to use NVG's I can tell you for a fact that you do not get a clear picture, sure it's better than being straight up blind or giving your position away with a light source, but you do not have a clarity of vision, and you damn sure can't read with it. I dunno though, maybe the technology has gotten better since the late 90s. If dark vision is that, then yea your assesment of it makes a lot of sense, having someone with dark vision do your scouting is probably a good idea but they are going to need a light source for any kind of precision work.
Thanks for the first hand experience! Pinning!
@@DungeonMasterpiece Np bud, keep up the good work, love what I have been seeing and specifically linked this video to a few younger new dungeon masters I know.
@@DungeonMasterpiece vgggg
shuttered lanterns allow just a sliver of light when required, esp if set to be dim.
Over the last 20 years night vision technology has advanced so far is almost night and day... Pun intended.
Oh man. The mall to dungeon comparison is sweet.
Ikea maybe?
@@Source_of_Sanctuary Ikea Murder mystery d&d one shot 👌😩
Fr, that expanded my brain cells
When I get stuck on a dungeon design I look up the layouts of random malls through my state and use them to shape my dungeons.
Definilty turning my local malls floorplan into a dungeon 😂
just here to comment on how professional your setup looks!
thanks youtube! Much appreciated!
UA-cam himself? Damn
I’m so confused
This is unexpected
Just here to comment that I’ve literally never seen UA-cam comment before
*YES.* The lack of procedure in modern D&D for dungeon crawling, despite it's implied prevalence, is such a huge source of problems.
"Don't let them try the lock more than once!" Don't need to be that artificial if you're tracking time in 10-minute chunks and there's a potential consequence for taking too long.
"How do I distinguish between perception rolls and people specifically looking for things?" Perception roll is for *immediately noticing* things and if that doesn't work they can spend time looking in more specific spots.
"Randomly walking into traps is annoying, but constantly saying "I check for traps" is also annoying!" Assume the party is moving slow enough to check for traps (if they have the right equipment) and they *will* notice them. Slow enough that the timer ticks as they traverse the dungeon. If they want to get a move on to avoid encounter rolls, THEN passive perception comes into play and you can get "Click! What do you do?" moments. This way the party actually has a choice to make rather than just being *subjected to* traps regardless of their input.
"Why are times always expressed in 10 minute chunks, and who cares how long a torch burns for?" This is why. There's still this weird vestige of dungeon procedure in the 5e books but the procedures themselves are gone.
It was learning about 10 minute turns that brought dungeons to life for me.
They are kind of there, but I would
emphasise that the turn is reduced from ten minutes to one minute which makes tracking time harder
@@davidmc8478 Time scale really depends on the scenario. Somewhere for instance where they aren't relying on a spell for their continued existence, Water Breathing for instance, can easily be taken more slowly than one where they are already on a timer. So a 10min schedule is borderline useless if you're counting your delve in turns.
Yup - its where the designers fell down on the ENTIRE exploration pillar unfortunately. Same for Wilderness exploration too. All of the ingredients are in place within the core rules, they just failed to provide any guidance to DMs on how to actually run exploration - which is why so much gets hand waved. People new to the hobby can't understand why its even important to track rations as another example
@@Gibbons3457 Yeah, as much as some people don't like "turns" (or at least in my experiences) it makes things feel more grounded than an abstract measuring of in-game time. If you can just rattle off an arbitrary number of tasks without any percievable consequence, it feels dull...
This is good. As someone who entered the hobby in 2017, dungeons feel like a weird appendage, and much DM advice either tries to make the dungeon trivial, or exploration meaningless. I really liked the advice about the layout, and would love more on that topic, as well as a step by step procedure for making a proper dungeon.
Check out my video on counterstrike and Metroid dungeon design!
@@DungeonMasterpiece I saw and liked those.
It's hard to quantify how weird and alien D&D was WITHOUT a dungeon. The dungeon was a relatively easy to manage piece of gaming conceit. D&D was centered around this, you had special gear to explore dungeons, you had henchmen who helped you fighting monsters and carry off the loot which often came in obscene amounts of coinage, often too much for anyone to carry unaided. Money was a reward, money generated XP. Going outside the dungeon was weird because it had no defined borders, you couldn't plan for people going as far east as possible or up the river. and the convoluted nature of dungeons was applied to everything, I've seen dungeons inside houses, ships etc complete with tunnels and solid areas in between as if everything was carved and dug out of solid wood or stone rather than built.
People did learn to move on from dungeons and figure out how to run adventures in the wilderness and even then they were managed like dungeons, except that the confined nature kinda remained, like a dungeon, but with a landscape painted on the walls and instead of rooms you had points of interest, usually more dungeons in many cases.
D&D was built around the dungeon ecosystem, other games did not and that's how we learned to make more sandbox style worlds, where things felt more open and unconstrained, less guided than the dungeon.
As controversial as a dungeon can be, it's a useful tool for beginners, it avoids many surprises, it's a good crutch for inexperienced DM's to learn the trade and become more comfortable with D&D.
I think they are part and parcel of D&D, just like meeting in a tavern. They may be cliché, but they work on a fundamental level. Not every campaign has to be a convoluted exercise in outdoing Critical Role level play with all-out acting, detailed plots, a million unique NPC's with memorable traits. Sometimes a good game isn't more than just meeting in a tavern, meet some NPC's, go down into the dungeon and have a good time clearing it.
@@rotwang2000 , I grew up on 1st Edition D&D and the BECMI version. I remember drawing dungeon and dungeon for my players, and most of our game were nothing more than ever bigger dungeon crawls. The outdoors simply existed to separate the dungeons. When we finally got the Expert book and the outdoors opened up to us, we still generally treated it as dungeon. That is, go in the forest; kill the goblins; go further in the forest; kill those goblins; go even further in the forest; kill the goblins and their ogre friends; now go in the dungeon they were guarding.
I stopped advancing editions after 3x so I have very little idea how 5E works. However, I miss the days of basic dungeon crawls where even the door and floor might be a monster and 10% of your magic items were cursed.
@@DungeonMasterpiece why haven’t you replied to any comments on your critical role vs harmonquest video, but are all over the place here?
Time cost is another way to make sure that failed rolls punish the players without derailing your campaign. If the party rolls poorly on their investigation checks that would lead them to a critical plot element then maybe instead of "you don't find it" the result of the investigation check simply determines how long they have to search the room before they find it... when left unattended in any space for long enough, even the least perceptive person will eventually find everything in the room. The same can be done with lockpicking, survival for tracking, and other tasks that could lead the character to just keep trying until they succeed.
It's also valuable for working with monsters that are intelligent and have a sense of self-preservation. Monsters that retreat from the party can short rest just like the party can and come back rejuvinated and ready for round two. They can get reinforcements, loop around to get behind the party or flee the dungeon with a portion of the treasure, assuming the party is taking too long.
Very nice! That's something I had sometimes done in the past, but never really thought it through logically enough to put into words. I'm def making sure I do this with my party in the future.
@@DungeonMasterpiece Basically the old Take 20 rules, 20 times the time as you literally try everything until you succeed.
It's a good point. Unless their failure actually hinders their ability to perform the task - like breaking a lock after a bad lockpicking roll - there's no reason to give up after one attempt. Some people will object to re-rolling until the player succeeds, as it trivialises the skill check in question ... but the real issue is that there are no consequences for those additional attempts.
Technically, the game already has something like this. When you're affected by a condition, you keep rolling until it's removed, but each time you fail, it costs you HP or otherwise continues to hinder you in some way.
@@Letham316 I think that’s definitely part of the art of gaming. Some tasks, a failure just means it takes longer (and maybe we should keep that in mind with successes too). And sometimes, a fail probably should be a fail. Some people might be able to pick locks and that one is just out of your league. On the other hand, I don’t see why someone couldn’t keep trying, so long as they don’t break anything. I suspect that (especially old) locks gradually get ruined if you pick at their innards too long. But how do you represent a skill roll where someone has the skill to open a type of lock and does it fairly easily, and someone who can open some locks but definitely isn’t up to the challenge posed by that lock? Linear scaling challenges won’t model that situation well, where a better thief just has a couple more pluses, representing maybe 10% better skill.
The dice clock is such a simple idea that I am in awe that I never thought of it before. I will absolutely implement this in the future.
Been using this in stealth operations. Never thought about using it in normal dungeon delving.
Thumbs up for the encumbrance love. I've been a strong proponent of how encumbrance is a balancing mechanic to keep the classes in check and it's refreshing to see someone else recognize that too.
This sounds like good advice. The one fatal flaw is that even low-level magic renders resource use and hostile conditions trivial. Light cantrips have unlimited use, and goodberry can be cast day after day. Prestidigitation or Create Bonfire can keep characters warm, and Alarm can warn of approaching danger.
With a couple full casters in the party, exploring a dungeon is no more dangerous than checking out a house under construction.
And this is why I prefer older editions of D&D or other games altogether (like Hackmaster 5E which you should totally check out), simply because exploration in a dungeon is made trivial with unlimited use cantrips that can negate a lot of the dangers of exploration without proper preparation like you've stated.
Yep, this, this, and more this. Plentiful magic has killed exploration as one of the supposed pillars of the game. It's no wonder almost every discussion about creating characters you will ever see fall into two categories, min maxing combat builds and the occasional development of character backstory. You don't even have to have casters to do it either with just a few specific magic items to hand.
Goodberry
Components: V S M (A sprig of mistletoe)
First good berry is a 1st lvl spell ... Later levels it may not matter but early on that's a big deal. Also Unless your brought that mistletoe you are SOL. Players need to have components and need to keep track of them. Mistletoe is not readily available depending on where the adventure takes place. Additionally repeated handling of mistletoe can cause skin irritation. So get ready for that con save after a few days. Seriously. It's not hard to make good berry say good buy
@@Ashtor1337 If you have a spell component pouch you are assumed to always have all material components necessary to cast a spell so long as those components lack a listed gold price. Alternatively, you just take a spell focus item and that also counts as all required material components without a listed gold cost.
Also, casting one 1st level spell to feed up to five people for two consecutive days is hardly a sacrifice, even at level 1.
@@Ashtor1337 components without gold cost can be handwaved by having either a component pouch or a spell focus, which most spellcaster classes can begin with as starter equipment
Yes! The idea of using a D6 to tell time, ticking it down for every ten minutes is such a good idea! Then you could also have another D6 allocated for hours, love it
Given that D6's are fairly inexpensive to buy in bulk, I'd get a bunch of them and as they get used up I'd start to pile them up to make the players aware of how long they have been adventuring. Maybe even use 2 or 3 different colors to help illustrate how long they've been going since they last rested and apply penalties if it's been to long.
Check out the Hazard Die or Overloaded Encounter Die blogposts out there. Literally game-changing.
D12 for half days
5:55 Just to clarify this statement if anyone doesn't know, the rules for darkvision are scattered *all over* the 5e player's manual, and it turns out that things being "lightly obscured" in dim light (what darkvision gets you) equates to a huge hit to your passive perception score. Off the top of my head I think it's -10? But since the book doesn't contain that information in one place most people don't notice, so we get demihumans with NVGs.
A lot of games also don't account for bright/dim light, there either is light or there isn't. To be fair, though, fussing with light sources can be a pain in a lot of cases, and depending on the kind of game you're running it's not worth the extra hassle.
@@kevingriffith6011 Well, yeah. It's one of the things I find kind of baffling about 5e.
@@colbyboucher6391 The rules themselves in 5E breeds players that react badly to being told no or not getting their way completely. The mentality of point buys and no negative numbers or limitations regarding stats breeds a disbelief that dim light implies a restriction. I saw a player freak out and quit a campaign because the party was attacked at night and their character couldn't see what was happening where there wasn't light. He simply couldn't handle the mental stress of operating in a limited information environment.
5E is a superheroes game because with superheroes it is never a question of if they win, but a matter of the superhero deciding for themself how they win. Any opposition they encounter simply exists to reaffirm their total control by presenting a situation for the superhero to choose how to resolve. Superheroes don't encounter opposition that forces them into make consequential decisions on limited information, as that presses home a fundamental lack of control.
Stick a yellow poker chip under their mini, or if you use theater of the mind, put a big electric votive candle in front of the player who's character is holding the torch. Keeps it REALLY obvious.
it's disadvantage to widom(sight) checks, disadvantage to passive checks is a -5. but remember any enemies would have that malus too meaning PC's and monsters see each other about the same time.
Yep, that is exactly how I used to do it in the early 80s. Thanks for the d6 clocks suggestion. Very good visual idea. Haven't done a large and layered dungeon in a very long time. I'm currently reading Castles & Crusades (8th printing). Feels like the right time to return to the dungeon.
I'm a recent subscriber after finding one of your videos--I've binged just about the whole lot. Love your content and your explanations. Hope you do real well on UA-cam.
Thank you so much for the compliment It means a lot!
Me too! I've been watching a lot of smaller channels lately, and I think that many of them are much higher quality than their subscriber count reflects. This one in particular!
Watch his chat with LegalKimchi (another must sub here) on Twitch! So much great insight!
Same.
I'm a DM with almost 40 years of experience...
So, impressing me takes a lot
Im in the same boat as Brad Wolf. This is a great channel!
These were the exact procedures for dungeon crawling in all D&D editions prior to 3E. Great to see them being adopted again by the 5e community
I love this! The oft-hated encumbrance rules really are the entry fee for epic exploration and survival. I don't know if you're familiar with the Angry GM, but he also uses a die system that I'm fond of for keeping time. I also appreciated the mall/dungeon comparison. Great video! I've been looking forward to it.
I mean its not that hard to add up numbers on a calculator, its just people like being lazy, you really only need to sum everything up once then add or subtract from the total as you go along,
There are some good 3rd party rules that work on things like bulk. You can carry certain Items without a problem as long as you can stow them on your body by means of backpacks, scabbards, pouches etc. It's when the bulk exceeds your carrying capacity you start to notice the problems. For example a dungeoneer's set of equipment, is no problem, but try to put 5000 coin, an item with lots of bulk somewhere and you have to make choices.
@@Alex-sf5uz It's an objectively terrible game mechanic. It has so many issues - not limited to:
- Keeping item weights consistent across unlisted items you have temporarily removed from your inventory
- Adding items of varying weights in bulk
- The fact that the GM has to assign a weight to any unlisted items they distribute
There are so many better ways to do it that it's baffling that D&D hasn't innovated on this mechanic for literal *decades*.
Anti-Hammerspace Inventory is a great one. _Lamentations of the Flame Princess_ has a great point-based system. _Mausritter_ has a great slot-based system. _Giffyglyph's Darker Dungeons_ does it really well as well.
You should definitely look to the dritz books when thinking about more advanced darkvision. The drow don't have what we would consider darkvision, but instead a version of infrared vision. This allows them to see their surroundings as they are heated instead of as white outlines. This helps them read, not by torch, but by having the text itself be warmer than their surroundings. It's an interesting system and would allow someone to heat up dungeon walls if there was text on it in order to read it, but he process would become complicated if you haven't done something like that before. Most elves on the surface have no real use for their dark vision as they are not nocturnal, so the average elf wouldn't really be used to this system of reading. A dwarf on the other hand lives in an underground tunnel and could use stonecraft knowledge built up over his life to read runes the same way someone would read braille.
This all still makes an interesting and fun way to turn the idea of darkvision on it's head in ways the players wouldn't expect
That's not a Drow thing. It's an edition thing. Infravision was what all elves and dwarves received up until 3e when the mechanic was replaced entirely by Darkvision.
Thank you, this gives me a lot of ideas of how to make a dungeon module a lot more interesting. I'm new to DMing, and it's been really fun, but I don't know enough to get really creative on my own yet. This helps a LOT!
The whiplash of watching this and Linkeding learning training videos for work is impressive. Love the quality of your videos
The AngryDM has a good time system called tension pool that's worth looking up if you want to add time pressure to your dungeon crawls.
The funniest analogy I've heard for darkvision was saying it's basically the same as watching a live feed from a '90s security camera at 1am.
The aspects of light, sight, breathing, hunger, thirst and even gravity are often overlooked...unless you played the original Saltmarsh series in the 80s. I promise you, meaningful underwater dungeons will change your outlook.
There is a Japanese Manga called "Dungeon Meshi", meaning "Dungeon food".
The adventuring party, for the purpose of cutting provision fees and encumbrance, would cook and eat the monsters they would kill inside the dungeon as they venture through it. It's a comedy with good laughs.
The author has totally ignored "Lighting Conditions" inside the dungeon though, as the rooms seem to be always brightly lit by some unknown light source.
Based reference
I love that manga and have always wanted to run a game around the idea of cooking with monsters. I believe a lot of the time either the dungeon has built-in torches or fungus and fauna that glow light it up. also constantly being in the dark is kinda boring and I think is one of the main reasons people don't like going into dungeons.
Marcille casts light constantly around the party, preventing a need for torches (at least most of the time).
You are taking a lot of info from the osr systems, and applying it toward the 5e scene with the mechanics you are referring. It really is great to see those two mend. I wonder if you are pulling more views from the 5e crowd, the osr community, or those in both like myself.
Started out as mostly OSR players watching, but I'm growing the 5e base. I've got a running joke/reputation of "converting" people to the OSR, yet I never set out to do that specifically. I started playing in AD&D when I was in grade school, and just carried those lessons learned into 5e. Outside of the crunchyness, cantrips, and death saves, there really isn't anything that's different to be frank. People just have to stop being wimps and ratchet up the tension on their 5e players. I have no qualms sending three CR5 cave giants up against a level 3 party. They will figure it out or they won't. Not my problem. lol.
@@DungeonMasterpiece Retreat is always an option. Especially when a character is downed. I once willingly took a bunch of arrows defending some villagers we had to rescue, dying so the group could retreat out a secondary passage while I fought as a diversion. Best character death I ever had, and the DM narrated an awesome scene of my character being welcomed into the hall of heroes and being set at the head table to drink with the all-father. I was so stoked, and I was happy to roll up a new character who happened to be one of the villagers we saved. He saw the heroism of my former character and it became his guiding principle.
@@TheLyricalCleric such great storytelling!
@@DungeonMasterpiece I think 5e has been around long enough that people are looking for something a bit different. And the osr is popular enough that the two are starting to blend and really interesting ways.
@@DungeonMasterpiece The big difference is in genre flexibility. 5e's inbuilt magic pervasiveness and extreme death adversity make it really unsuited to more grounded fantasy genres.
This guy drops just the best DnD advice. I always come back to de Ropp for his no-nonsense straight-to-the-point DnD talks.
This one of the best approaches to dungeon crawling I've seen in along time, its really nice to see someone talk about the relevance of time, resources, and exhaustion. Most just ignore them to great detriment of the game IMO
Well presented. I can see how theses ideas can seem new to DMs who only played 5e. To old timers like me (been Dming for 37 years), this is old news...
It's playing with the limitations that's fun.
ok boomer
@@soulcleave2386 Generation X actually.
Service tunnels in dungeons. Drew Hayes's book, NPCs uses them to great effect. It's a fun read that takes tired tropes and tinkers with them just enough to make an enjoyable story.
I've recently come across your videos, and I must say, I really enjoy them! And I appreciate that everything is subtitled too - that takes some effort to achieve.
It's a happy byproduct of script writing lol
I’ve just recently found your content a few weeks ago. I’m starting up a new arc of a continuing campaign soon and I will definitely be implementing points from this video and your hexcrawl video! Excellent stuff!
Glad you are finding it inspiring!
Loving the simple time d6 tracker.
Kudos to you sir
I had an errant thought: ditch the random encounter table, and replace it with a series of escalating encounters which the party experiences in order.
The use of the term Anchor Store just got you a subscriber.
This analysis is truly amazing. Listening to this has really changed the way I think of, not just a dungeon setting, but really any dark and eery setting in an RPG. I've already started to implement some of these ideas and this is my second time through this video.
The D6 clock is tremendous, what a simple and elegant solution!
10 minute increments for activity sounds like a good system. What might also be a really good idea is increasing the party's loudness the more players that are simultaneously performing actions. If the party tries to min-max every hour by making sure everyone is active during those 6 increments, maybe they are far more likely to draw attention to their activity and force a other encounter from previously-wandering monsters, and the monsters are more likely to get a surprise round.
I will say that we have different ideas about darkvision. Darkvision as most players understand it is literally impossible. You cannot see in an environment without any light, no matter how good your eyes are. Infravision could be a thing if you want to increase the sciency-ness of the game, but when everything is the same temperature, you shouldn't be able to discern anything. Pressing your hand to cold stone might let you see where that wall is, but only until that hand print cools down again, so just a few rounds. Maybe just a single round for a metal door. On the other hand, one thing I learned when I moved out of the city/suburbs is that moonlight is actually pretty bright sometimes. I can see pretty well during a full moon. I can (cautiously) navigate a room even with the charging LED of an electronic device. That is what I would call dim light. But I certainly couldn't fight anyone like that if they were not similarly impaired. True darkness, though... you would need magical means or a non-sight sense to "see" through.
Most environments will have the tiny bit of light required for a darkvision equipped character to see. I have been in truely dark environments several times, and without a light source it can take 5 min for the eyes to adjust enough to make out any information at all, but for a creature with mirrored eyes like a cat, seeing would be much easier.
However, you still wouldn't be able to see much. Enough to see shapes and determine obstacles, but depth perception would be limited, and as in the PHB, no colour.
For some environments, particularly deep dungeons with no light sources in nearby rooms, there might not be any light at all, but these would be rare, even in DnD.
@@matthewparker9276 In a wrecked castle there may be some light leaking in, but in the underdark? An ordinary cave away from the entrance? A dungeon underneath an abandoned castle? In all these cases and more, there will be zero photons. That is another thing to keep in mind: light is quantized. You can't keep dividing an amont of light to get dimmer and dimmer; eventually, there is no light at all. Fun fact: some frogs have vision so good that they see stars we can't... and to those frogs, those stars flicker. They flicker because the stars are so "dim" that photons are not always being emitted at their eyes.
Mirrored eyes are a great evolutionary adaptation. They can as much as double your sensitivity to light. But 0 * 2 = 0. And the real reason that animals with better night vision are colorblind is because they have more or even all rods, and fewer or no cones. These are structures in our eyes for detecting light. Rods are more sensitive to any kind of light, but can't discern color. Cones can discern color (some versions of cones can even detect colors we can't normally see), but are less sensitive. Humans have a mix of both, with more rods in our peripheral vision. This means you have better night vision out of the corner of your vision, probably as a defensive mechanism against predators. Cats have more rods, but that necessarily means they have fewer cones. The importance of this distinction is that creatures with "dark vision" should never be able to see colors, even in bright light. At best, their color vision should be bad. Humans see fewer colors in dark areas because we have a mix, and our color-detecting cones stop transmitting as much useful data to our brains.
But in zero light (which would be fairly common in D&D environments), vision won't work at all. That is why I think the vast majority of D&D races should have "low light vision" instead of "dark vision." Most of those are races that are predominantly evil in most settings. Then as a DM, I can just ban or provide rules for the few that are left. ;-)
BTW Humans can actually detect as little as 3 photons (remembering from school, looking this up would probably suck), so our vision is actually pretty good.
Sorry, I may have come off a bit aggressive there. That wasn't the intention. I am arguing that just hand-waving low-light vision into true dark vision is a mistake. Not only does it make no sense from a biological standpoint (which was most of the previous few paragraphs), but it is bad for tension and gameplay. With darkvision as stated in the PHB, darkness isn't really an obstacle. It just hinders your fighting and ability to notice details. You can still navigate safely. A character with darkvision doesn't have to worry that they will get stuck someplace, being unable to find and identify food or water, the accelerated onset of insanity from a lack of stimuli, or feeling helpless when their light source goes out. In fact, most characters with darkvision would usually prefer to NOT use torches for the benefit of stealth. This means that forays into dangerous places don't require preparation/planning, the party doesn't have to weigh risk and reward of delving a little too deep, getting minor treasure in the form of torches or glow rods is pointless, and finding new settlements to restock is also not strategically important.
So that's why I think people need to be clear in distinguishing low light from true darkness.
@@tkc1129 there is more light in the environment than you would realise. You would get light diffusing from several rooms away, so long as there is a path for it to leak through, and then there is phosphorescent and luminescence, which would contribute small quantities of light to areas underground. Not enough for a human to see comfortably, but enough to activate dark vision.
And areas like the underdark have residents that rely on dark vision. They would have their own light sources, either natural or artificial, to provide the low level of light required to see.
You could have areas so devoid of light it is impossible to see, but they won't be as common as you are suggesting.
@@tkc1129 nice essay about trying to apply science to a high fantasy superhero game, dont care
D&D used to have multiple forms of "regular" darkvision but they were combined into just darkvision for simplicity.
Great video! Another thing I'll mention is that players often seem to believe that long rests are "free"; that is, free of consequences. Any moderately lived-in dungeon is going to have creatures roaming around, who might not cotton to "upworlders" camping in their territory. Not to mention, factions the party has bumped into might well spend that downtime building barricades, sending runners to nearby allies, and generally preparing for Round 2.
thanks D&D legal eagle, my meg-dungeon campaign planning is coming together now.
These videos are excellent. You do a great job of succinctly summing up a lot of the things that I think about when planning my game.
Glad you like them!
I'm pretty sure to Tabaxi don't get dark vision. Which is weird because out of all of the playable races, with the exception of maybe dwarf, they're the only ones that it makes sense to have.
Question for you: I recently found out about a RPG system called Lancer, which is designed based around Mecha, and while I haven't done any reading of the game's rules just yet, I did find their character creator online and I was very impressed at how well it manages to land a theme in the character creation process. If you haven't heard of it or if it sounds interesting, check it out for yourself.
My question for you is, do you have a preferred method of character creation?
Myself I tend to go through character classes and abilities before even starting, and I usually create a large number of sample characters with simple combinations of class and background before deciding on one of those to flesh out, but I know I'm not the majority.
Took me long enough to come across this...but thanks for the shout out on the Time Tracker! My design stands on the shoulder of giants in OSR, but it was very fun updating it to 5E and "proceduralizing" the otherwise chaotic and disorganized dungeoncrawl tips in 5E.
The game Darkest Dungeon does a good job with the feeling of dungeons imo. Lack of torch light increases difficulty and sanity loss and food can be a problem if you're not careful.
A trick I started using in the 90's for dealing with encumbrance was to substitute 'weight a character can carry' for slots. i.e., the amount of 'stuff' - weapons, gear, supplies, 10-foot poles, a given PC could carry. Let's say an average human can carry 20 items easily, not including worn armor, clothes, belts, packs, and pouches. I then assigned 'slots' to such things such as a pack and pouch. The average pouch 3 slots, a pack 15 slots, that sort of thing. Then, the PC could carry an additional 5 'slots' with a -1 for actions, combat, movement, etc. This would accumulate. 10 extra items? -2, and so on. We noted things like carried bags, which could be dropped (and lost, forgotten, or stolen in the heat of combat) and time for 'shrugging out of my pack'.
Each item was considered something that you needed a hand to handle. A torch is an item, a bundle is 'a number of items bundled'. Smaller items, such as caltrops (which usually come in a bag) would be a single item - i.e. 5 caltrops held in one hand. Regular Rations - 1 slot or item per day per person; iron Rations - 5 days per 'slot' because they're supposed to be condensed and meant for survival, not flavor.
Potions are usually in vials, so same as caltrops, a mirror, string, etc, same thing, so a single slot could hold different, small items. To further help the Players, I'd made custom character sheets with 'slots'. Bags and Packs would have a separate, smaller sheet which would remind them of what 'could' be lost if you set it aside and forget to grab it. Trust me, it only takes once or twice for a party to slog back to that last site of combat to fetch a badly needed pack or two before they become more aware of such things. That also opens up the possibility for another encounter. After all, the dead and debris of a battle are rarely left alone for long, eh?
Tiny items, like those commonly used as spell components, would be 25 per slot for simplicity. Arrow heads, coins, gems, spell components, spices, and so on.
Then we'd adjust for size. Smaller characters like Halflings can carry 25% less than a human, so 15 slots, where as a large character, like a Dragonborn for example, can carry 25 and so on.
Two things I always felt help me become a better DM was my time in the NSS when I was in high school and going through a little over half dozen different caves which varied from 1/4 mile mud crawl to an almost literal "Mines of Moria". Then being stationed aboard a ship in the USN really gave me perspective on traveling and living in close quarters.
I come back to each of your videos so often! You're a hidden gem of a Dungeon UA-camr!
I LOVE that you actually wear a suit and tie for these videos. It legit adds an aura of professionalism that makes me take note of your DMing lessons more than other videos. Is that dumb? Probably. But it’s how my brain works.
I tend to break down dungeons by scenes I’d like to have play out to elicit specific moods or emotions I want the players to have. Like an Indiana Jones movie versus a video game layout.
a very valid way to do it
I always wanted to make a darkest dungeon and fear and hunger style dungeon crawl campaign and this is the perfect guide. Thank you
good video you hit all the points to making dungeons tense. Its a great way to play the game and leads to some great moments, trying to manovour a mule through a dungeon full of pit traps to haul off the treasure hoard was probably the most intense experience I've had playing the game.
Gearing up to run my first REAL dungeon crawl. This was the advice I was looking for! Thank you!
As Someone that enjoys role-playing gameplay, I agree with this. Too often many want only positive choices for the player or remove parts they think add only make the make slower and break away from the story.
For example, many remove weight limits and then do not understand why their player's character always has a huge amount of good items and gold.
If you are unaware, this concept has a name: it's the "Tyranny of Fun".
This is soooo good. Great video and concepts. Fantastic presentation.
Wanna say that I found your channel the other day, and your videos have provided valuable insight to me. I'm a new DM roughly 17 sessions deep into my first proper campaign (Pathfinder 1e), and I've still got a ton of stuff I'm trying to work out. Dungeons in particular are one that I struggle with, and most other videos on them haven't been quite satisfactory for me, but this has helped me think about how I'd run and make dungeons for future sessions.
Good call on the d6 turn-down die, the visual helps with the tension.
short rant about darkvision;
there is not such a thing as "under moonlight"
thats not a thing
thats at least 10 different things
that can range from
"see perfectly clear because somehow the moon is shining nicely bright like a night-sun"
to
"the full moon is out but everything 50 centimeter above ground is a black void where i can only stumble while I can see the outlines from anything above it"
I would just like to appriciate the reference to Miniac, the mini painter, with the pointy ear skit. Good on you Baron.
Jegus, I must've been in the perfect mood, but everything here made sense, and immediately inspired me!
Great ideas! I love the torch d6 tracker. I am totally going to use that in my game.
🤠
This is the best dnd video I have ever seen on UA-cam. Your explanations were on point, you gave great advice on how to design a living environment, and you gave me some much needed inspiration to work on my campaign. Truly a fantastic video!
5E Darkvision in darkness is lightly obscured. That means disadvantage on perception, which is a 5 point hit to passive perception. Hiding only requires not being seen clearly, so any monster seen with dark vision is a dexterity check away from being invisible. A monster could literally be hidden 5 feet away from a character using dark vision, and the character would be at a disadvantage to find it. Characters using dark vision are only seeing well enough to walk into trouble.
With dungeons, I think it is worth remembering the defining trait of medieval warfare: castles. Military power was about the ability to withstand attack in a fortified location. Sure attackers might burn some crops, kill some peasants, and loot some farms for small potatoes, but attackers would generally just stare at the fortified manor and couldn't do much about it unless they were very well supplied and patient or willing to take huge losses. Sieges took a long time and left the forces laying siege vulnerable to superior force assembling and catching them out in the open. Or defenders would launch horse mounted raiding forces out of their castle and pick apart the force laying siege piecemeal in hit and run engagements. Gates had airlocks filled with murder holes for a reason, any enemy rushing inside when the outer gate is open would be massacred. Fighting close to the walls is going to be like fighting under a hail of thrown rocks and arrows launched from elevation, which is to say totalhelldeath. Residents of a dungeon should have similar situations, with lairs being fortified strongholds that are very difficult to attack, and surrounding territory that is much more vulnerable to attack. Under this sort of ecology, having most dungeons that are cave systems with larger caves works a bit better. Some "room" are like peasant areas where the inhabitants are either hunting and gathering or growing/tending food/resources that they give a portion of as tribute to a more central and fortified cave where stronger monsters reside. Other caves might have monsters and are more like the lord's woods where the stronger monsters hunt and the other weaker monsters know not to poach. Adventurers in such a dungeon are more like a raiding force, and the local ruling monsters will be safe in their fortified location and will collect information from fleeing monsters attacked by the characters or send out scouts to assess their strength, and then potentially sally forth to defend their territory when they think they can catch the characters with a counter attack once enough information is collect. The "boss" encounter is literally the local boss and their retinue.
Or the one I like is just saying dungeons make no sense logically, and then just pointing to medieval art depicting hell and saying to the players: yeah, dungeons are basically magical in this world and think of these locations like delving into the medieval conception of hell or other trip into the mythological underworld. It is a location that makes no sense in the most primal and terrifying way possible, and you don't get to use logic to defeat that inherently supernatural horror.
I was not expecting a reference to an obscure Latvian Castle (Cēsis Castle) in a DnD video. I've been there before as well, and agree it would be terrifying in a combat situation to be running around someplace like that.
My uncle built it. #HouseBuxhöveden 🤣
Also, #HouseRopp founding member of the #LivonianSwordOrder
Tas ir lukss! (I'll stop before I hurt myself with more Latvian. 😂) Lived in eastern Europe for two years back in 2012-14 about a year and a half in Latvia, the rest mostly in Belarus and Estonia. Learned to speak solid Russian, as mostly spent time in more culturally Russian areas, like Daugavpils in Latvia, or Narva in Estonia, but picked up enough Latvian to get myself in trouble. :)
That's super cool that you have that as part of your heritage! Did you happen to visit any other fortifications or castles while over there?
@@brianhansen9785 My family regularly tours all of the historical fortifications and palaces that we once owned before the Soviet invasion. Lielstraupe was built by my great-grandfather theodoricus, and is now an insane asylum.
That's super cool! I would live to go back there again someday. If you have not, but you get the chance, the fortress in Daugavpils is really interesting and with going to as well. (It's a star fort built in 19th century to fight Napoleon, so well after your ancestry was building Castles there, but still worth the visit in my opinion.)
It's a really a interesting fortification that has a really facinating history, I won't bore you with it, but was used in the great wars, and during the cold war as well.
I loved walking along, and especially inside the old walls. Admittedly at the time the walls were not in the best shape so exploring around inside them was probably not the smartest idea. That being said, exploring inside the super dark crumbling ruins with nothing but a single bad flashlight between the four of us is still the memory I always go back to when picturing how adventurers feel crawling through dungeons. That's what I try to recreate for my players. I remember finding a mostly dark room and all the light was from a small airhole in the ceiling that shined a beam of light to the middle of the otherwise black room. I could just imagining like a sword in the stone situation in the dusty sunbeam.
They were starting a bunch of restoration work when I left back in 2014 so who knows if they even let you in now, but it was a super cool experience.
(Tangentially related, a video on ways to help players better relate to/ make feel more engaged with the experience might be interesting. Example maybe if members of the party are able, (physically, financially, emotionally etc.) Have your group visit a cave, or a haunted house, corn maze, hike through forest or mountains, or old castle, etc (more for IRL groups and location depending of course). Vid could also be on things like ambiance (music lighting and such). I've done some group activities like that with my group (it is a friend group outside of just RPG's) and it really does help to be able to reference things from those types of experiences to help set tone and mood.
Just recently found your channel so maybe your have a video like that already, I'm still working through your backlog, but just a thought for you.)
Anyway did not mean to write an essay. Love your content though so far, keep it up!
As a newer DM only having started well after 5E's establishment, these are very good pointers and tips. I will confess, I am guilty of negating time, and overlooking enemy-on-enemy interactions... I'll take this video to heart and certainly make some changes going forward!
GREAT EPISODE!! I love how you break down the realities of/experience of being underground or in a dungeon. One of the best real life experiences like this is when my family took a trip to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky back in the 1980s. At one point they tell a ghost story and then kill all of the lights in that part of the cave and it is truly pitch black except for the "ghost" 100-200 feet away with a dim lantern. That experience set the tone for when I would run a D&D game underground and start sweating the players with the realities of dungeon crawling/spelunking caves!
I may have to try this the next time I run a dungeon crawl.
After watching this, I'd like to take a moment to thank the Create Water and Purify Food and Drink Orisons (0-Level Divine Spells) the Fruitful Sash belt item, and every other magical aid that has ensured that no Pathfinder group I have ever played in these past 10 or so years has ever actually had to worry about dwindling rations and water supplies.
The use of a d6 and d8 (or d12) to determine time dungeon crawling was very useful. Thanks.
This feeling of all around danger is present in some board games as well (Space Hulk for example) and makes them all the more of a great experience
Great video. It also inspired me to build a dungeon mall and I don't mean to treat my dungeon as if it were all but literally use a mall as a dungeon
Man, you are the person who finally explained to me why DnDs aren't so bad game as I thought , thank you, awesome material
I wish I'd seen this before creating and running my own dungeon. Then again, I'd probably not really appreciate it without having the experience behind me. Many of the solutions you suggest would fix problem in my homebrew dungeon. Thanks!
TheAngryGM has a great way of tracking both time and wandering monsters: Threat dice.
It's basically the same as your time die, except you add one d6 to a pool each time the party does something.
At the end of each hour, the pool is rolled and resets, and if one of the d6s shows up on a one, a random encounter happens.
Whenever the party is doing something stupid (like making a lot of noise), the pool is rolled immediately, but doesn't reset.
I did something very similar but it was also a crappy on how I did it.
I made a Starwars Campaign based off of Dead Space 1 and would roll 2d6 whenever the players did something if the number equaled to 10 or higher and random enemy would come out of a vent or from broken walls. They eventually learned to maintain a tight group formation and have players looking everywhere.
One of my favorite moments is when the players came across a T junction and they had each player take a position and used a delayed reaction to move all at once.
It was so good to see my players not only work together but also come up with a strategy on their own with no input. I had no choice but to reward with not only a good amount of XP but also have them some much needed healing items and a few explosives.
That was fun......even if I scared the hell out of them on my description of a flesh covered room
Many of the things you say are reflected very well on the Sunday Labyrinth Lord games i partake in, alongside with the Caverns of Thracia that i DM on Wednesday.
It's nice to have fresh reminders of the things Old School DMs should do to make more atmospheric pressure and immersion for the party to make quick witted choices and / or try to take their time to discover a secret, among other things. On my personal opinion i believe Stonehell Dungeon and Caverns of Thracia can be some of the best dungeons for both starting DMs and Veteran DMs to keep the active mind muscle of all that is mentioned in this video. Great job, man. Regards from Caracas Venezuela.
caverns of thracia is Talmudic game scripture of dungeon design. I've been keeping my eye on ebay to swipe an original copy for less than $500 lol.
Been binge watching your videos since I found your channel. Honestly surprised that you're so underrated. Your videos are clear, interesting, get to the point and are just very pleasing to watch. Can't wait for more videos!
This is so good. I'm in the introductory sessions of a new campaign and can't wait to get on with the dungeon crawling!
Wow, that mall analogy worked really well for me. I have no idea how you came up with that connection but well done!
Also, bonus points for that Mall Rats slide.
One of those things that players and GMs avoid early on (and hopefully, begin to embrace later when they're seeking a deeper, more immersive experience). Darkness and light, as well as resource management. They race and are granted magical means to see in the dark; to produce food and water on demand; etc. So many lost opportunities.
I love using the d6 to track 10 minute intervals, I'm stealing that.
I LOVE THIS the idea of using a d6 to track events in the dungeon every a ction being 10 min then a few more d6bto track the # of hpurs is genius. I will be usong this concept in my next dungeon crawl especally to track time of spells that cast light that have levels
Totally hit the mail on the head about the “dark vision” concept. Having been in plenty of caves here is no Vision without a source. If you have not already please do a video on Vision
That could be something interesting to add to the list. Thanks for the idea.
Taking away all infravision and dark vision completely changes the game and makes everyone use torches. When you can only see 30 feet but the goblins can see in the dark if makes everything more challenging
Actually, it goes counter to how the ability is written. A monster/character with Darkvision can see in the dark as if it were dim light within a specific radius. Twilight, dawn, or a particularly brilliant full moon are all dim light. It's not as harsh as the pictures he showed, and his family of humans are an example of creatures that don't have darkvision, rather than 'how dark it is really'.
@@XenretheVague backing you up here, the ability says what it says. and dim light, so a full moon, is plenty bright to see perfectly well what you are doing. people think darkvision is "sees about as well as the sharpest sighted human" because they are so stuck in the human perspective they can't imagine anything else. and while in complete cave like darkness nothing will be able to see, we are talking about inhabited dungeons, ones occupied by creatures not adapted to total darkness. there is going to be some light down there; glowing fungus, magic lights, small fires lit by the denizens of the dungeon, occasional holes to the surface trickling in light, something. and that is going to let the darkvisioned PC's and creatures have their 60ft of dim light plus whatever light the sources give off.
even human darkvision is better than people give it credit for. they dive from broad sunlight into some cellar and think oh that's total darkness but let you eyes adjust and if even the tiniest pinprick of light is getting into a room you can at least make your way around, now imagine it looked 8X brighter that's darkvision. with that you'd be able to see what you were doing with that pinprick on the other end of your house, light a match and it'd be practically daylight to you. so at best the darkvisioned PC's dont need torches, at worst they light up a birthday candle and see perfectly.
@@XenretheVague Ok I see what you mean with Monsters, but what we perceive as characters while seeing in the dark (no matter the race), tends to be clear as day. When the level of detail for figures let alone silhouettes, is not easily shown in game. Players act like they have ultrasonic sending of information coupled within clarity of vision in low light, let alone darkness. Which is difficult to express when others say at the table “but I have dark vision”
Really great Baron! I like the dice counter idea for succinct tracking of time. IF, I can remember to flip the die. For a long time I've used 15min for investigation checks and the like, but 10 min increments might be best. Gotta give it a try. Though my party has recently been in a drawn out dungeon crawl. It will be some time before they are crawling around another dungeon any time soon.
Very nice video! As someone who started playing in the late 70s, the "dungeon crawl" is a very important type of adventure to me personally.
To add to your already great content in this video, one of the things that I also think that has become lost about dungeon crawls is that at their heart, they are all about human's fear of the dark and the unknown. This is certainly campaign specific, but especially back in the 70s and 80s, we played dungeons very differently than they are conceived of now. They were dark, dangerous, confusing places infested with monsters and not just "underground" versions of the surface. They were their own locals with their own laws of physics. So, for example, time did not pass in the same way in a dungeon as it did on the surface. The whole "why does it take my character 10 minutes to move 60 feet?!" issue is only an "issue" if one assumes that the underground and the above ground operate the same way. Once you accept that the underground is different, including how time passes, you start to appreciate that your PC in a town is not at ALL in the same type of environment as when they are underground in a dungeon. Making them very different in this regard actually made them feel much more alive to us as players. The dungeon is the place of monsters, fear, and psychological stress. It's not simply a "dark above world."
Your advice about the importance of tracking time, food and water, encumbrance, and light is EXTREMELY important in making a dungeon crawl meaningful and more fun for players, I couldn't agree more. While the PCs need not worry for the most part about food, water, light, time, and encumbrance while in a town, they do in a dungeon and this just makes the dungeon more bizarre and highlights the danger for the players. The PCs are literally "in another world" and it is not their "world" at all.
The only thing I would add to your list is the use of hirelings and, if the PCs are of higher level, retainers in a dungeon crawl. Hirelings in particular are often vital for a successful dungeon crawl as they can carry treasure, be torchbearers, and other tasks that free up the PCs to cast spells, fight, turn undead, etc. However, they are also not nearly as competent as the PCs in the dungeon environment, so hirelings essentially become another resource the players must manage as the hirelings panic and drop a torch or lantern, run away, become paralyzed in fear, wander off and get lost, betray the PCs, etc. This also brings the importance of Charisma as an attribute into play which is nice for game play as well IMHO.
To try and represent psychological stress, back in the early days of AD&D we instituted a new mechanic we called "Panic Points" (yes, a parallel with "Hit Points") that represented when the PC (or NPC) would suffer a psychological break while in a dungeon. Every class had 1d6 per level (NPCs like hirelings had 1d4) and you used either Strength of Intelligence as the adjustment to these points. We had certain situations that would inflict PP damage, such as running out of light, water, or food (points suffered each hour without one or more of these), the first time losing hit points in the dungeon, seeing a particularly gruesome sight or horrible/terrifying monster (obviously this is relative to the level of the PC), losing a fellow PC, becoming lost or teleported to an unknown location in the dungeon, etc. Each had a die roll associated with it for the number of points lost (ranging I think from 1d3 to 1d8) and the PC was allowed a saving throw vs. Paralysis (seemed appropriate to us) and if this was successful the PC lost half the rolled number of PPs, rounding down. At zero PP the PC became panicked and suffered a -2 adjustment to all d20 rolls and a -1 adjustment to all other die rolls. Negative PP caused the PC to become broken and the player and the DM worked together to determine what that looked like given the PC and the situation. The broken PC became an NPC controlled by the DM until the PC was healed back to at least 0 PP. The player could provide suggestions but the DM ran the PC while they were broken, which just further highlighted the psychological distress of the PC. Regular cure spells/potions healed both lost HPs and PPs and the PC regained 1 PC per each 8 hours resting. We also used a mechanic similar to binding wounds where if the PCs spent 1 turn after an encounter that caused PP loss they could heal back 1d4 lost PP if another PC supported them (a PC providing support for the turn could not heal back lost PP). An adjustment equal to the supporting PC's Charisma adjustment for morale checks was added to this 1d4 roll. It worked pretty well for dungeons and it was our attempt to try and include psychological stress in some meaningful way in the game.
As a long-time dungeon crawler, and someone who appreciates that type of an adventure, I really appreciate the thought and effort you put into this video. Well done!
Your videos are so evocative
I've played D&D for 12 years on and off, and somehow, I've never actually thought about how interesting and cool yet claustrophobic and scary it'd be to actually personally traverse a dungeon. I've kinda avoided dungeons (and dreaded encountering them in even my favorite modules) because they feel like the old school gameplay in a bad way, and the way I think of them, they really don't mesh with my playstyle. But I think you've made me actually wanna run a dungeon. Immediate subscribe.
Discovered this channel from a the tab "gaming" spotlight, featuring you as a rising content creator. This is really good stuff -- great analysis, high quality editing and production, professional diction, and one of those voices made for radio (not to worry, the face isn't!). Wish you the best of luck moving forward and hope your channel continues to grow. *Edit* Also, the upside-down glasses bit was great haha.
I'm astounded how good this video was. I cannot put it into words, but good job.
I believe I first heard the mall map idea from WebDM, but I don't hear it being used much. It's such a good idea
No way, they did it too! I thought I was first! Dang it there really are no original ideas
It’s been awhile since I’ve actually done a proper classic dungeon crawl in my dnd game. I need a refresher.
This has been a concern of mine for a while, upping the tension in a dungeon environment. One of the tricks I started to use is simple. When the PCs in my game roll to detect something, I 1) do not tell them the difficulty, 2) Have them roll it where they can't see the roll, and 3) if they fail or there is no danger, I say "You do not SEE any traps..."
My players are now paranoid...
Great video by the way.
Gods, this video is great! I try to explain this stuff to my local play group regularly.
I do like your tips on using dice to track time because it is easy to use and its reusable without having to print new time track pages or wasting an eraser to reuse the page thus saving time and not having a eraser shavings littering the table.
Just found your channel and well done!! Your videos look crisp and professional.
(Especially with the suit)
As a DM I hate random encounters in 5th edition.
We get to play for 3 hours once a week. A random encounter can eat 0.5-1 hour of that time for no story gain or level progression.
I've gotten to the point where I only track time with long rests, each one marks a new day. I have a year long calendar for the whole world with events marked on different days: assassinations, invasions, festivals and other events that happen even if the characters aren't there. So if they want to spend two weeks in a dungeon they can. But they might find that the quest giver is dead by the time they get out with the McGuffin they wanted.
If you want the type of dungeon crawl that he describes you have to also remove the spell Goodberry from the acceptable spell list.
Great job! Really enjoy your content. I’m definitely not a fan of micromanaging torches and rations, but the whole concept of a dungeon as a giant taxing experience is a useful one.
Same here, I agree with what Mr Baron says but most players I meet don't want this attrition style game
This was a great video. I especially enjoyed the description of darkvision and the time tracking tips.
Very informative, and well stated. I fully agree with the light, dark vision and need to make the dungeon scarry.
Whoa, I really like the idea of using shopping mall maps as dungeon maps.
Oo, I really like the part about using dice to track time. Way more elegant than what I've always done, which is to only make checkmarks every for every 10 min or so.
Might I also ask where you find those exquisite old school black & white artworks? I really want to use something similar for my games, but it can be really hard to find good sources for them
This was very inciteful. Really loved this concept for Dungeon crawling.
That mall example is a great way to explain the exploration of old ruins.
EDIT: To add, I always use a couple abacus to keep track of time and similar. It's a surprisingly quick and efficient way to track things.
Small addition: Always remember that a shopping mall want's to have visitors as much as possible and as deep inside as possible and make each location as accessible as possible. A Dungeon on the other hand in most of the cases is created to keep people out/away and make it as hard as possible for them to enter the inner rooms and progress on deeper levels.