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Hey dude, grea video, what I was looking for, Pathfinder gone too woke time to run from tha crap. Can you tell some ganes with the exact play you mentioned in this video tha has lore too? Was AD&D like rhis? Great vid thx.PS> Old school essentials, great.
@@Vyktym76 there were a few breaks, but yes, I started in 1976, but got serious about it when the Moldvay Basic D&D set was published. Made more sense to my 15 year old brain. When did you start?
I started playing in 1979. This brought back a lot of memories. On game nights the three big questions were: who is mapping? who is keeping track of loot? and what is the marching order?
@@richmcgee434 We used mini figs too. To simplify and keep combat moving quickly, we used party initiative. The player still conscious with the best initiative bonus rolled for the party. For surprise checks, every made their own roll though.
A note on Movement being slow! Years ago, we had an adventure in Real Life using padded weapons. The adventurers geared up, and traipsed through a woody city park. Early on in the adventure, one of the villains needed to ask a question or something, and was moving about. She was spotted by the Party, and from then on, they advanced v-e-r-y cautiously, with two members facing backwards at all time! It was nearly dark when it was finished, and we had to scramble to get out before they closed! Later, the guy running the game said "no, no one was ever going to ambush you. You just saw her, and got paranoid."
Quibble: I use reaction rolls for most non-intelligent monsters as well. Are they hungry? Hurt? Already fed? Unless it's a life-hating undead, there's usually still a range of reactions from non-intelligent monsters.
"The Dungeon hates you!" OSR mantra. My wife when she watched this mentioned that it reminded her of the scene in Aliens with the platoon trying to rescue the colonists in the reactor chamber. Surprise by the xenomorphs, marines flatfooted, four marines out on the first round.
Last AD&D 1E game I ran went like this: Party of four (dwarf fighter, elf mage, human cleric, halfling thief) exploring a dungeon. Very first room they come across and the door is stuck (not locked, just stuck). Dwarf fighter begins shoulder-checking the door as he's a busy dwarf and doesn't have time for these things. He rolls and fails his check to open the door, and again the next time, and again. It wasn't until his 4th attempt that he actually succeeded in forcing the door open, giving the monsters on the other side ample time to strike. We check for surprise, monster's didn't need to roll because they already knew the party was there thanks to the fighter throwing himself literally at the door. Dice indicate the party will be surprised for two segments, giving the enemies basically two whole rounds of free attacks. Ouch. I describe it to my players as follows: "The door is knocked off its hinges and lands on the ground with a very loud THUD! In the chamber beyond, there is nothing but eerie silence and darkness. Suddenly, out of the darkness comes a flurry of dark shapes and a distinct chittering sound. Before you all know it, you're surrounded by giant centipedes whose nest you happen to stumble upon! Giant centipedes have a very weak bite attack (in fact it deals no damage), unfortunately it is poisonous and forces a Save vs Poison to not die (at a +4 bonus because of how weak their poison is). There were enough centipedes that everyone in the party got bit twice and had to roll two separate saves. Everyone except the dwarf failed their saves and died in the very first surprise round. Second round of surprise, the dwarf got bit 8 times and failed a saving throw so he too succumbed to the giant centipede venom. Yes, it was a total TPK from just the very first room of the dungeon! We all laughed and rolled up new characters lol.
Since I only started playing D&D with the playtest of 5th edition, I never noticed how close 'Munchkin' and 'Darkest Dungeon' are to older D&D versions
I assumed it was wisely known, but "munchkin" was an old derogatory term for a D&D player who would do every possible thing for one more coin, one more experience point, one more +1 to a roll, so the card game was about that. Boil an ant hill was one of my favorite cards from that game ("every ant must be worth 1 XP, so I level up, right?").
@@twentysides that is a favorite of mine as well XD I tried playing Munchkin with a group of friends who dont really play RPGs and they didnt like it much. They found it complicated if you can believe that! DnD just isnt for some people...
The first thing I did in our OD&D campaign with me being a squishy mage was make a Molotov cocktail using oil flasks and strips of cloth. That began my mages obsession with fire and she's now running around as a fire elemental mage.
Reminds me of how Shadowrun adventures start out. "No worries chummer. This missions is easy, In-and-Out." Shadowrun is also a prime example that even the best laid plans can go a stray.
The 10 minute turn is a carry over from war gaming, as is the fatigue for not resting. The original authors of D&D were war gamers after all, with Gygax’s Chainmail rules being a direct precursor to the original game. Lots of Iconic races, spells and mechanics have their origins in Chainmail and other pre-D&D works like the First Fantasy Campaign. The tendency of the past 2-3 decades to disparage the dungeon crawl and the feel of those early game sessions is exactly what is leading to the success of the OSR. But you guys knew that
Kevin Sullivan I would hate to go through a dungeon stocked like toddlers rooms. The floor would be 100% LEGO caltrops covered with various food stuffs and puzzle peice debris and tiny plush golems. I’d much rather face an otyugh den.
I feel like paizo tried to reimpliment some of this stuff in Pathfinder 2e with the exploration actions, but they didn't go far enough with some of it. This was a problem I personally had when running modern systems before discovering the OSR where I didn't have the concept of the "Dungeon Turn" where you just block things out in 10 minute chunks. It makes failures so much more meaningful during exploration periods when you tell your players "just so you know, this action is going to take 10 minutes. if you fail, you can try again, but it's going to take another 10 minutes, and something might find you in the mean time."
@@Alex-cq1zr That’s true if the room is clean, its contents are labeled, and the characters are familiar with its layout or occupants. But this is a dungeon. Rubble and detritus litters the stone-and-mortar tiles under your boots. Tables and chairs are overturned, piled into corners as makeshift barricades from a struggle fought long ago. Chests are buried in years of old monster refuse. And it is hard to be hasty when even the littlest noise at the wrong time might attract your doom. It’s a miracle they can even find anything in the room after just 10-minutes, if you consider the typical environment where the search would occur. At least, this is how I imagine how they thought these things would work. It’s certainly how I prefer to think of it!
'Resource Depletion' is a lot harder in D&D 5E. A surprising number of races (most) have dark vision, so light sources become moot. The light spell is a cantrip, so wizards don't need to worry about hoarding limited spell slots. Goodberry is a 1st level druid/ranger spell that provides a full days nourishment. A long rest restores all lost hit points, so characters aren't starting each new day sore and weak. My opinion: the dungeon crawl isn't a thing anymore because it's not a challenge anymore.
Dark vision is essentially shades of grey, not perfect day light vision. This gives DA on perception/investigation checks due to less obvious detail that can be observed.
This is awesome. I was literally just searching for this exact content - how to run a dungeon that’s more than players just walking from room to room. Thanks!
The reason for flasks of oil and 10' poles. These things came about as a result of dungeon crawls... Those rules are a result of experience. There was upon a time an "Random Dungeon Generator." A party had to come to a crawl prepared to survive and actually bring back treasure.
One thing we did was to bring with us was a wagon or two along with heirling guards to watch over the camp as we went into the dungeon . We always had oil flasks on us and used them to escape tougher monsters by throwing them behind us to slow them down or we put the flasks and threw them in the 1st round if combat to damage the monsters before melee combat giving us a greater chance of survivability . My character kept a small bag of flour on him and if we were attacked by an unseen monster I would throw the bag at the ceiling breaking it causing the flour to coat everything making the unseen opponent seen and easier to combat
I have always wondered this. Whether Gary or Dave came up with the idea to stock shops with 10' poles, or whether the earliest players reqested them, and then they ended up in the published game. A chicken or egg question.
Ok i just saw this video in my recommended and i was like “this video is way too long. But i think it would help me to improve my Dm Skills”. The time flied. +1 subscriber!
I would like to say: I get a lot of YT recommendations for DM Help Videos, and almost all of them are 2 minutes of material buried in 10+ minutes of annoying fluff, just so the creator can game the YT algorithm. They're all an incredible waste of my time. But your videos are not. You put real and helpful info into every vid I've seen of yours so far. And your newsletter is the only newsletter I'm still subscribed to at the moment, because it's so ridiculously full of REAL CONTENT. TL;DR: Thank you, and keep up the good work!
Just read the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide. Everybody that wants to be a Dungeon Master should have this book at their disposal. It doesn't tell you how to run a dungeon, but it is so full of so many tips and ideas on how things should be run
As someone who started D&D in 4th edition and plays a lot of video games, hearing about OSR D&D explains a lot of things. A lot of these rules sounded familiar as a longtime player of Nethack, and EXP from treasure is present in at least the D&D arcade games, and I'm tempted to say several others although nothing else is coming to mind.
Yeah, D&D was massively influential in video games. Even the first popular FPS, Doom, was just D&D with guns. And the way that each environment in video games is called a "level" is straight out of D&D, where dungeons were divided into progressively harder levels, going down.
@@QuestingBeast Absolutely D&D was a huge influence, but I never really considered it past things like "here's some monsters from D&D" or "leveling up like D&D" or "We're going dungeon crawling like D&D." Things like the way levels are built in Nethack, EXP from treasure, wandering monsters and others I would've never considered, and it's fascinating to learn about them.
Games like "The Bard's Tale" and "HeroQuest"/"Quest for Glory", not to mention a mountain of actual D&D video games sanctioned by TSR, followed up by the likes of "Nethack" and "Rogue" and all sorts of MUDs and MUCKs, were kind of a staple for us computer geeks in the '80s and early '90s - I've still got some of my old Bard's Tale and D&D video games around. In addition to EXP from treasure, familiar-looking monsters and character races and classes, and the like, the video games would also include encumbrance rules built in, wandering monsters, hostile environments that prevented resting, undetectable teleportation squares and squares that messed with your compass and the like that would force you to map things carefully or just roll with getting lost in the dungeon, cursed equipment, poison and disease that wore down party resources, Iron Rations and tracking food and missiles, minimalist stories, a virtually disposable cast of party members, randomly-generated stats that limited what races and classes could be taken, and so on were all common in those vintage computer RPGs. Many of these mechanics would get abstracted out in later equivalents as "irrelevant" to the main game, or in favor of given players more investment in and freedom of choice over optimizing long-lived dedicated characters, or in favor of world-building (including weird and exotic overland settings) and (railroady) single-player scripted epic storytelling. D&D's inheritors have also become heavily invested in selling rules systems (e.g. D20) and in selling an endless series of new editions of libraries of books built on a disposable razor blade or planned obsolescence model (which is understandable as a business model, if not particularly desirable for us as customers!) I can see the attraction in that trade-off, and can understand the evolving role of computers in shaping the hobby along with the influences of e.g. Japanese computer RPGs in informing developer and gamer tastes, but the genre did lose a lot of the charm and flavor of the original D&D game in the process of making the trade-off.... I think that the result of the trade-off has been an identity crisis for pen-and-paper RPGs! The positive side of the OSR, I think, is its role in stepping in to try to ground the hobby in its forgotten past, by restoring the old Dungeon Crawl experience to the heart of the game, and reminding younger fans - who too often only know fantasy by Tolkien, by the current incarnation of D&D, and by generations of inbred computer games and countless tabletop RPG D&D imitators - of the game's origins in the literature catalogued in the old "Appendix N", including the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars (with its weird post-apocalyptic alien dungeons full of nameless Martian horrors), H.P. Lovecraft's weird fiction (see the wonderful and all too often ignored "dungeon crawl" segments in "At the Mountains of Madness", "The Mound", "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", "The Nameless City", or "The Statement of Randolph Carter"), and all the other countless early influences over the genre, of which the oft-cited and now almost cliched Tolkien is actually one of the more minor examples! The OSR thus both brings the hobby back to its roots, while expanding its palette with inspirations that today are often tragically forgotten and neglected....
I, too, was reminded of game mechanics from traditional (tile-based, turn-based) roguelikes - Nethack, but also Rogue (the original), Moria, Angband, TOME, and so on - not surprising, since Rogue and its (earlier) descendants were developed back when these dungeon-crawl rules were still in active use in D&D. Funny how D&D (and other tabletop RPGs) moved towards streamlining such rules _out,_ while roguelikes leaned into such rules _harder_ (at least, until the era of "roguelites").
Rules Cyclopedia, still the best version of D&D. Dungeon exploration, world building and exploration, domain management, and mass combat. All the “mini games” of Dungeons and Dragons in one volume.
I think I've come around to preferring it above every other published edition of D&D. It's far from perfect, for example I dislike race as class with level caps. However, "not perfect" is a big improvement from 1e AD&D which is full of stupid and is basically not playable as written.
David M, the more I game, the more I see options as hindrances. At any rate, the Gazetteer series, gave us a ton of racial character classes, some of which were really interesting.
@@davidm6387 - Just a heads-up; the new compiled OSE set has rules for separating race & class along with removing racial level limits while still balancing out Humans. As with everything else in it's B/X/BECMI style rules, it's an easy adjustment.
I still have my old Rules Cyclopedia and I love it, but there are things that I prefer in OSE. Still, Mystara is my favourite campaign world and I am starting a solo game in Karameikos.
I know this is picky, but... 2d6 does not generate a bell curve distribution. It generates a triangular distribution. 3d6 begins to look somewhat bell-shaped. The more dice you add, the more closely it approximates a normal distribution.
Absolutely yes. People use the term "bell curve" because they haven't looked at the actual shape of the curves and how they represent the probabilities. Rolling d4+d10 or d6+d8 creates a truncated pyramid/flat topped triangle for example. Looking at said graphs one can see that a 3d6 rolls tends to ramp up smoothly; a 2d6 roll approaches the center sharply; a 4d+10 ramps up sharply but then levels out for a few rolls.
One of the funniest traps I had in a dungeon... It was a pressure plate that was set to go off when it was pressed 3 times. The theif goes forward looking for traps, then comes back, doesn't notice the pressure plate, didn't roll high enough. Party proceeds down the corridor, frenzied berserker in front, he triggers the feeblemind trap, being the 3rd person to press it. He was affected by the feeblemind for the next month before they could find a city with a cleric they could pay to remove it.
@@demongustavditters7150 Not exactly. He could still roll and kill things, he just couldn't make any decisions on his own. He had killed some of the other players with a failed will save to get out of berserk more than a handful of times before this happened, some were more than happy to get back at him. Also, I was using the CR chart exactly like the DMG says, with 8 players, so that adds +4 CR to every normal encounter, they really couldn't afford to leave him behind.
Ben: wandering monsters is a very interesting subsystem all by itself and when where why and how of wandering monsters has been somewhat lost. Encounter distance and the Monster reaction is very important. Yet there is a bit of leeway around sending them as essentially a turn or two has past so even taking into account encounter distance and reaction the "spawning" of these monsters as a new encounter has some very crucial emergent story properties which are some of the special sauce that is overlooked about the wandering monster. Indeed there is a lot in similar with the "fail forwards", "complication" "twist" etc idea as a ludic object i.e. you can generate the wandering monster turn it into an encounter (thus getting an idea of what's at hand) and then seed it into the dungeon environment ins a compelling way. Far too much of the objection from back in the day (i.e. '80s) was that the monsters spawned in like a video game because that was the model readily available to kids in the 80's, yet that is exactly what the don't do, they (monsters) don't magically appear and immediately attack. It's far more nuanced and interactive with the emergent story than might otherwise be at first apparent.
7:46 oh yes they will. Way back in the 90s, playing 2nd Ed... I don't remember if it was a dungeon or a castle, but we run into a door we can't open.... It wasn't magically sealed, it was just a really tough door, and we kept making bad rolls to break the door down... and we were making a lot of noise 😀. Just as we break the door down, we get attacked from the side were on, and as the door gets accessed, the bad guys are also waiting on the other side of the door 😀. Yeah we had a two-front fight going on there for a while 😊.
This channel is what introduced me to the OSR scene. I was running a 5E module that had a ton of traps and I couldn’t figure out how to incorporate them in a fair and fun manner. Had the characters simply followed the 5E procedures for rolling perception or investigation, there would have been a significant amount of unavoidable damage. I searched UA-cam for better methods of handling the traps and couldn’t find any good solution until I heard Ben Milton describe the old school style, which was to have players find the traps by asking lots of questions and scrutinizing the environment. It worked great and made the traps much more engaging! Fast forward 18 months and I’m now an OSR fanatic who owns Knave 2E, the full set of OSE, Into the Odd, Haunted Almanac, Mausritter, and Mothership.
Traps not functioning as they should is like one thing I never thought about that would make absolutely perfect sense for an old dungeon that's been forgotten, and this somehow just means it's more terrifying. I love it!!
I feel like people in the hobby are usually only used to one playstyle and unfortunately often disdain the other ones. I wish the old school and new school people would visit each other more often. I've learned so much from all the different camps in our hobby. This too was very an interesting insight. :)
I've been Dm'ing since 1978 when I started at age 11 . I've given a few Dm's some tips on gaming and organizing things for both them and their players . I use the ultra pro 8X10 one pocket page in a folder to keep my house rules in and a folder for character creation rules that I hand out to new players so they don't have to take turns looking things up that also has a copy of my house rules so that if players want to kbow what a certain house rule is they have right in front of them that way play doesn't slow down while I explain a rule to them . I also have a DM binder filled with things I use in the game such as random encounter tables by terrain that includes weather and environmental encounters such as storms of earthquakes , it also includes random npc's with stats , class ( if any ) and other important info on them . It also has random dungeon and wilderness tables I can use to create a random dungeon or wilderness area if I need it . I showed it to a few Dm's at my local store and now they have their own versions of my DM binder . I also talked with 2 Dm's on how to run a sandbox campaign that not just filled with random rolls as the players explore but also has pre made sites to explore while still having room to add things they might want to add . Any time I can help another DM or player out to help expand their game and/or knowledge I do it . I had help as a kid back in 1978 at my local hobby store from a few sailors who used to run AD&D 1st edition went they seem me a my 3 friends playing basic d&d . I play a multitude of rpg's from fantasy to space opera including the very first Star Wars RPG from west end game . I've seen a few Dm's get burned out on Dm'ing d&d because it become repetitive over time because of their play style that they think they have to abide by because that's how wizards does things . Which goes back to the open word sandbox style of play that keeps things fresh and makes the campaign a living thing that grows along with the players
I have the old Moldvay books (and pdfs as backups), but I've been looking for an excuse to get the OSE hardbacks. This video was the tipping point for me. Thanks!
I tried playing 3.5 but it was to much like playing an mmo in some ways due to feats turning characters into superheroes . I never touched 4th edition tabletop mmo d&d at all after reading the rules while I worked at a hobby shop . I now just play a mix of AD&D 1st and 2nd editions with house rules in my own campaign setting . D&D of today babies the players with all its 3 saves vs death , healing words non stop usage and the players relying upon feats for everything . To me it's become nothing more the feat rotation in combat , race and class combos to make the ultimate character builds ( another mmo aspect ) and way to much healing going on to make the game challenging in my opinion
@@thekittenfreakify I do that all the time. I work under the philosophy that whatever the heroes get, the monsters have access to them too. It works pretty well, keeps the game on their toes.
@@williamlee7482 3.5 making you a superhero past Lv5 doesn't nullify the potential for super lethal dungeon crawls. 5e making you a superhero past Lv5 does nullify that potential. That may be fixed in time, but for the time being it's easier to just learn how to properly run 3.5 for the specific flavor you want. Something you should have already learned as you grasped the mechanics.
@@techstuff9198 3.5's mechanics was the start of wizards going the route of an MMO . 4th edition d&d was straight up a tabletop MMO with all its daily , at will and encounter powers plus is movement in squares and having to play on a gameboard . As I said I stoped playing 3.5 because of the MMO aspect of the game with all the feats and feat rotations that just about every player does . I've been playing D&D since 1978 at age 11 so I know how to create deadly dungeons , my point was why do you need to modify the rules to make dungeons deadly when it should be part of the mechanics themselves . D&D 5e holds the players hands and keeps them safe with their long rest ( 8 hours ) to regain all their hp's back plus their 3 easy saves vs death once they hit zero hp's and all the healing wards being thrown around non stop makes d&d into a kids rpg because you can't have the characters dying in a dungeon without some one crying ( I've seen a grown 23 year old guy cry because he failed his 3 death saves in a row and his character died and he got up and went outside to cry ) . That's why I play AD&D instead where my players know there is no hand holding going on and I don't need to make my dungeons super lethal because they are already lethal to begin with just playing by the mechanics . I couldn't stand 3.0 , 3.5 , especially 4.0 and now 5e because NONE of them feel like a challenge to myself or my players because of the overpowered feats , all the non stop healing that goes on , the 8 hours rest to regain all your hp's back and 3 easy saves vs death . Wizards won't fix it because players asked long ago for the game to be made more easy so that it can be more inclusive to new players and so their characters don't die so easy . It's just a generic fantasy superhero rpg any more and it's because wizards went woke
I guess you can see it as the monsters use the money to buy and trade from each other within the tribe/group and from other allied tribes of monsters so having a party throw down coins slows the intelligent monsters down but it wouldn't work for animal intelligence monsters because they have no need for money and see the party as their next meal
The shift away from dungeon crawls and to more detailed combat just reflects the change in popular movies. Watch an "action" movie pre- Raiders of the Lost Ark and you'll see what I mean. There was a lot more focus on exploration and physical obstacles, and strategy, and less time spent on combat scenes. Modern action moves are descended from Warner Brothers cartoons, not John Wayne or Tarzan movies. Thing is, once you get over the power murder fantasy, combat in FRPGs is mostly dull. The best times I ever had in D&D were playing some thief who was sneaking around avoiding trouble. Sometimes the "dungeon" is a palace or a temple. That moment when you pop open the chest and take the treasure is a lot more satisfying than rolling dice until the monster dies.
Thanks for the trip into the dungeon of old. Another concept that was used "back in the day" was the Caller and the Mapper. The Caller would declare all of the actions of the party for the dungeon crawl until someone with special skills was required or monsters were encountered. The Mapper would take the DM's (or Moderator back then) descriptions and draw them out. Sometimes it did not take a locked door to make a party seek another way out.
Dang I love this, I really wish 5e had more rules and tools for dungeon crawls, definitely keeping these in mind for when I DM as combat and dungeons are still my favorite part of this game.
There might be an argument but I don't it's a strong argument. The rules overlap a lot, the core settings are almost identical, and the feel at the table is very similar. I took a 30 break and while the rules were better thought out really didn't really change that much. I love the greater variety of adventure type and more willingness to rp but that feels like evolution not revolution.
Classic roguelikes are closer to OD&D. Rogue itself seems to kave the same attitude of being a strategic slog continually on the edge of resource depletion.
@@SimonClarkstone That is a great point part of the reason that I think DnD has changed is that game experience that OD&D used to have is now available in video games. So now there is an emphasis on the things you can't get out of video game aka flexibility in story telling.
Another fun source to play around with is Appendix A in the AD&D DMG. You can generate a random dungeon in very little time and even run a quickly-generated party through it to test it out.
There was an old 3rd party dungeon generator called "Central Casting: Dungeons" from Task Force Games (makers of SFB) back in the '80s. It was the same kind of random dungeon generation, but on steroids. Picked it up back then, it was pretty amazing at the time and put the DMG one to shame by a long shot. Unfortunately it's been out of print for ages, and hasn't been re-published to digital by TFG, so even the old beat-up softcovers being sold on ebay go for a pretty penny. There are modern alternatives, some even more extravagant, but I don't think they quite retain the same old-school feel.
This video made me realize my players have been going on dungeon walkabouts, not dungeon crawls. Just got my copy of OSE in the mail today and I'm really excited to port these ideas into my 5e campaign. Thanks!
The way I like to play, the monster is a challenge. Overcoming that challenge by whatever means, which is not limited to combat, earns experience. This includes diplomacy, bluffing, or sneaking past the monster.
That seemed almost self-evident to us back in my college 2nd Edition D&D days. By the 3rd and 4th Edition, it seems like the focus shifted to highlighting the combat as the game's point and its reward, with character optimization and jumping through the story hoops being price of admission to the main show of playing weird combat stunts and feats like CCG cards, and throwing dice at monster encounters that last hours and hours of slowly wearing down HP pools. I sometimes felt like I was talking to a hostile audience when trying to describe the "good old days" when combat was just one of the ways to clear obstacles so that you could explore an endless world of fantastic new discoveries... it would always set off a Holy War between people accusing me and each other of being "narrativists" or "simulationists" - whatever those mean - and trying to justify whatever their favorite edition of D&D is as the only version worth playing because of the game balance and mechanics and options and whatever: I don't think anyone arguing really "got it" about what I was missing, and why I was feeling increasingly dissatisfied with D&D rules systems in general.....
I had actually been looking for EXACTLY this. I got into D&D with 4e and 5e and I was never really satisfied with how my dungeon explorations came out. It felt like everything I was doing as a DM was really arbitrary. Like when spells would wear off or when I'd put a random encounter in or how far the party moved in any given amount of time. It also never felt risky. Like I would feel like a jerk if the players went to cast a ritual Detect Magic and I threw a random encounter at them while they waited. It would just use up session time and when the encounter was over they would just cast it again. So I rarely included them for that reason. Making this into a psuedo-turn-based experience really alleviates a lot of the anxieties I was having. I love that you know as a player FOR CERTAIN how long your spells or abilities last. I don't understand why this isn't more of a thing! Like really, it kind of upsets me that this is the first I'm hearing about this stuff. It really feels like the designers of modern D&D, who have been playing a long time, are just taking for granted how to actually run a dungeon-based experience.
Awesome assessment of OSE dungeoneering. We just shot an episode of SplitScreen D&D discussing what elements of OSE could be tapped into for 5e tables. This is the video I will be pointing anyone to who is looking for info on old school dungeon crawls.
Heck back when we old people were playing in the early 80s, none of the rules were unified. Practically every task had its own sub-rules and often a special table. You might be asked to roll any type of dice from percentile to the d12 (which is these days pretty much only used for hit points on Barbarians).
This new bent of on camera explorations of the OSR is really rad. I'm really enjoying it. Now I've just got to convince my friends to be interested too!
I'm currently working this into my 5e campaign. Thank you so much for introducing me to this rule set, 5e is to barebones when it comes to dungeoneering in my personal opinion. I find players often get antsy when dungeoneering with 5e. 💙💜❤💙💜❤💙💜❤💙💜❤💙💜❤
Addendum to the treasure=XP rule: Note that magical treasure does _not_ count for this calculayion. Magical weapons, armor, etc. are very useful for their bonuses, but they do _nothing_ to increase your level. This prevents fighters from rapidly outpacing the rest of the group in levels, as OD&D was heavily weighted toward magical arms and armor. As another part of this, a step was added to treasure division, whereby the players negotiated to try and balance bonuses and XP gain.
I love the concept of the dungeon being a separate underworld, completely detached from ours. 5E is a lot of fun, but there's too many abilities that take the danger out of dungeon crawling, which is what makes dungeons fun in the first place!
I rank this as among your best and most useful vids! Thanks for this wealth of information and advice for a too often overlooked aspect of D&D gaming. As a big fan of the dungeon crawl, I found this video inspiring and I am hopeful other viewers will also be inspired by you to spend more game time exploring the underground!
It turns out 5e has dungeon turns. The playtest DM Guidelines had them consolidated in one place, under a heading called "The Dungeon Turn". The rules still exist, but now they decided to distribute them around the PHB at the last minute. You can find a consolidated version in the playtest or the ENWorld thread where there is also discussion: "B/X styled Dungeon Turn rules from the playtest are still in 5e but scattered" As a 5e DM, I had to get interested in the OSR and how to run tense dungeons, find this video, and finally wonder if there are 5e adaptations of the B/X or OSE rules in order to realize they were there all along. 🙄
Old School Essentials with the Advanced supplements is fantastic. I've found that Necrotic Gnome put out some truly flavourful, truly unique material (Dolmenwood has a special place on my bookshelf!).
Yep. Dungeon crawls interspersed with our first NPC encounters, the thief/bandit npc waiting at the dungeon exit to rob you blind. And then haggling for every spike, arrow, or potion vendor in town. There may also have been a temple and a thief's guild too.
That was awesome. I played D&D with friends back in the 1980's when I was 8 and it was quite different than the current 5th edition. I now own a hobby shop and I have a collection of old Dragon magazines from back in the 1980's. I didn't realize why the old dungeon maps had twists in them. thank you for bringing up the old dungeon crawl rules. i bookmarked this video for future reference in running 5th with my kids.
Early editions of D&D were ALL about the Dungeon. Somewhere along the line, (probably around 2nd Edition with all the "kits") the focus shifted to the character and the dungeon became more of an afterthought. Early D&D was more about survival and less about all of the heroic shit your character could do.
Which is why it's good that there are so many flavors to choose from. There isn't a "correct" DnD. The correct DnD is the version where the players and the DM get what they wanted out of it.
@@nutbastard I disagree. Dnd after 3e is garbage and way too distant from the source material. Hence this video. 5e can't even get a standard dungeon crawl right. Modern doesn't mean better
Okay been watching the channel for a while now, but this video did it, I just today bought the Old-School Essentials line of books.Thanks for the great video!
Excellent vídeo. Thanks. Since you have this video using OSE (B/X clone) as an example, I'd love to see a video using Dark Dungeons (BECMI clone, super underrated, almost unknown, but excellent book). I'll become a Patron right now to request that.😊 Thanks and congrats, V
Dungeoneers Survival Guide (along with Wilderness Survival Guide). Two great books. How to make a simple rock fall worse than any monster or trap. Sudden water-based perils, or running out of air. What would an underground realm look like? Things that can actually live underground. When you want to get past boring corridors and boring rooms with no reason at all.
This is very much like the kind of gameplay you get in oldschool traditional ascii-based roguelikes like Angband. These games were originally made back in the early days of D&D, and they continue to follow that old style of dungeon crawling.
As far as wandering monsters and encounters go, I like having a possibility of more than one wandering monster being encountered at a time. So the party may turn the corner and find two wandering monsters of different kinds possibly fighting with each other. Or a larger predator of the wandering monster may appear while the party if fighting it and the larger just wants to eat the smaller and may be indifferent to the party. Makes the environment seem more dynamic and not so focused on monster always wants to kill party.
It surprises me how many current DM's do not use wandering/random encounters. They add so much color and flavor to a scenario. Of course with the current rules a simple 5 minute encounter can now take 30 minutes.
Judges Guild’s City State of the Invincible Overlord, and the Wilderlands maps turned my campaign in 1978 from Dungeon crawls to travel between castles, temples, towers, and dungeons.
I recently have been having trouble with writing exciting dungeons so I kinda took a break from being the DM but this video makes me want to write adventures again which is pretty nice
It’s in the ad&d dms guide. There is even a die rolling random dungeon generator, which is pretty ingenious for a time before home computers. But basically dungeon crawling rules are simple: improv and notes. Create rooms on the fly, depending on what the last rooms were, what rooms should be in dungeon, and how the creatures came to live/dwell in said rooms. It doesn’t have to make total sense, but you can just fill a room with a bunch of sharks in one room and a bunch of apes in another, and call them bedrooms. Read an old TSR dungeon module (they are quick reads and usually like 20 pages of large font and pics.
the "doors swinging shut" thing is interesting to me, because I could have sworn the door rules in early versions of d&d were "players can try all they like to keep doors open or closed but nothing will work".
I notice that you didn't talk about encumbrance and treasure weight - which impacts speed, and therefore time spent in the dungeons (which impacts wandering monster rolls), and the ability to more readily escape from monsters. I can see why you wouldn't. Encumbrance has long been a contentious issue among players, and frankly most GMs, the vast majority of which hate the system. That's a shame, because B/X (and thus OSE) has one of the more workable systems, in which speed is based on armor worn and whether or not the individual is carrying 'significant' treasure. It's also the system that impacts dungeon play the most, if it is used, and perhaps more significantly than most of the other systems you explore in the video.
On one hand, encumbrance kind of jams you into a game of Accountants and Attorneys, which was never to my taste. On the other hand, to its credit, encumbrance - combined with wandering monsters and the like - does force the players to carefully consider what treasure to drag along with them, and out of the dungeon, which changes the way the dungeon economy looks: even if one doesn't like the record-keeping and so on, there's that nagging sense that the characters are dragging world-breaking amounts of treasure out of the dungeon. With encumbrance and a hostile dungeon, there may be lots of wondrous magical treasure and heaps of gold to be found down in the dungeons, but only so much of it can be dragged out of the dungeon by the characters....
@@QuestingBeast I hope that you made that video, encumbrance is not that difficult of a thing to manage: you do it in detail at character creation, and you simply do not let it have any slack. Whether it is physics, cultures, or dungeons, the bottom line isn't so much what you could theoretically DO; the important thing is having limitations, boundaries and restrictions, and knowing that they are there.
I love the comments about the “turn”. Back in the day, that was the single most important unit of everything! I haven’t played the more recent versions of the game. I suspect I wouldn’t like them!
This is the reason I started playing DCC. Using a semi-randomized sandbox Hexcrawl/Dungeon Crawl in the Hubris Setting. Still getting all of my Judge Supplies together. I haven't DM'd, or even roleplayed for that matter, in over 20 years. I have almost everything I need to start running games again. I DM'd AD&D 2nd Edition for moat of my teenage years. Then I got married & when I wanted to start playing again, 3.5 was the current edition. It was a slight breath of fresh air. Then I just gave it up. It was so difficult to get players together. Where I live in southeast Louisiana, there aren't many people who play RPG's & out of the few players I had, some moved away, some passed away & others just lost touch. I now have a few players who are interested in playing & the DCC deadliness wil begin in a few months. Before I start running games, I wamt to be sure that I'm familiar enough with the rules, and what I already know about Judging/DM'ing games, to keep a steady-flowing game without having to reference the book at all, except in very niche situations. I plan on using personalized constructed events in the overworld of Hubris to be catalysts for the PC's to enter semi-randomized massive Dungeons. All the while creating & connecting plot threads based on the rolled encounters that the PC's come across while in the Overworld & in dungeons. This way, I'll also stay entertained because I won't fully know what'll happen until it does. I'm actually excited to start running games again. This'll be a completely different style than how I used to DM. Thanks for all these videos. I'll also be borrowing a few generic rules from modern OSR's, the ones that are interchangeable & not tied to any one system. It'll still be DCC, to the fullest.
the 5th ed. DMG does actually have a table of encounter distance by various terrain types! So props to 5e for actually having that one thing, if little else for crawling.
We used to play these rules to allow a rest in a safe sealed room. If a wandering monster was rolled and it was unaligned/non-intelligent it would wander past the shut door. Even intelligent monsters may not come in, a random orc patrol would not enter a room if they knew it was usually occupied by skeletons. Just wanted to point out that even rolling random hostile monsters it is not necessarily fight after fight. There was a little bit of abusing the run around the corner rule too.
5e has issue with dungeons, you need to make your own rules. This is why I love the OSR community, there are so many resources to make the dungeon part of RPG great. Sometimes I don't have enough time to make my own rules.
I started playing in 1979, and I love 5e. But I also love older editions. I've been thinking for a while now that a third-party publisher should produce a supplement explicitly for 5e to make it more Old School in nature. As shown in this video, porting over a lot of that stuff to 5e should be rather simple.
@@Thomasritchard I like 5e being rules-light. It's exactly what I was looking for in a new edition. I loved complexity for almost four decades, but in the past few years I've craved the kind of elegance and flexibility 5e gave me. And I love the 5e DMG! I can't think of anything I'd replace in it, but tastes vary. So far, third-party material has been filling in the blanks for me.
@@Thomasritchard I think the 5e designers' goal of paring back the complexity of the previous couple of editions was a great idea. They made the game flexible enough to "bolt on" house rules or third-party material to add complexity for those who want it. And making 5e under the OGL after the misstep of 4e's more limited license was another great move, allowing a lot of good material to be developed that wasn't in keeping with the official design philosophy.
I think the 1/6 change of triggering a trap is also there to simulate the fact a trigger might be a single flagstone in a 10ft wide, 30ft long corridor and you might just not step on it while walking down it.
Amazing! First D&D UA-camr in a long time with ideas that aren't found elsewhere - or discussed by every other UA-camr who focuses on D&D. I see this is a year old - well, keep it up! lol
I really enjoyed this video, the concepts and the use of OSE as an example appealed to me greatly. It sparked memories of the way we used to play when I was young that I am not sure I would have re-connected with as quickly by just reading the rule books. The video was recently referenced on the OSE FB group as the type of content that would be useful for someone wanting to teach The game to new player who may be less proficient at reading due to youth or learning differences. I fully agree and would love to see more content from you dealing with specifically with OSE, perhaps even a series. I myself am a dyslexic and have an interest in serving that community. I also have an eleven year old son who, like many kids his age, does not see the vale in reading manuals and I would like to encourage to pick up this style of play. I am certain more videos like this that feature OSE would be helpful kickstarting his interest. 😀
Regarding "wandering" monsters, I like a dungeon to have a fixed an finite number of monsters at the beginning for precisely a reason you mention: It's a resource-management game. Monsters shouldn't "spawn" like in a video game. I also don't think a room description should say what monsters are in the room--rather the room description should describe the room itself, and the monster list should say where each monster is likely to be found. For example, a goblin might be at "location 24" 50% of the time, another location 10% of the time and another 40% of the time. Another monster might be designated as "wandering," and yes you can sort of encounter it at random--or when the referee thinks the party is getting too loud. But there's a finite number of monsters, and as the party kills them, the monster population is exhausted. Also, monsters don't exist in a vacuum. If the party has killed one or more tool-using monsters, say goblins, when the others find the bodies they are going to step up their situational awareness, gather in groups for common defense and try to surprise the PCs. I've played so many games where the room description says what monsters are in the room, you fight them in the room as if it existed in a vacuum, then move on to the adjacent room and fight the monsters there--didn't the fight in the first room make any noise? If it's a dungeon filled with kobolds or goblins, they'll sound the alarm and bring any nearby buddies. A wounded one might run and bring back friends. Here again, at the beginning of the dungeon text you should have a list of all the monsters in the dungeon and where each one is likely to be found.
I love this, and I’m planning to use a lot of this for a dungeon crawl my players are wanting to do. Although the ‘light’ cantrip kinda makes keeping up with torches useless since all of my players seem to have access to it.
Increase the wandering monster chance for using light in these cases. Especially if you're still using milestone levelling, players can figure out that attracting more random monsters isn't in their best interest. And/Or create things (clues, hidden doors, etc) that can only be seen in the dark. Dungeons created by monsters with senses like darkvision, blindsight, etc. aren't going to be designed with light in mind.
I just got done running Pathfinder 1e’s crimson throne adventure, and in it is a mega dungeon in the form of a haunted castle. This video woulda been fantastic for running it. If I ever run the campaign again, I’m using these rules
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I am bringing back the concept of the choosing of your own adventure per character resulting in 3 - 100 variating & enforcing morality as is proper.
Hey dude, grea video, what I was looking for, Pathfinder gone too woke time to run from tha crap. Can you tell some ganes with the exact play you mentioned in this video tha has lore too? Was AD&D like rhis? Great vid thx.PS> Old school essentials, great.
Best OD&D quote ever: “The dungeon hates you.” That simple line bought me back to my gaming table in 1976. Many thanks for that!
@@richmcgee434 you are right, it does have the same spirit.
Damn man, you've been playing for as long as I've been alive. Hat's off to you good sir.
@@Vyktym76 there were a few breaks, but yes, I started in 1976, but got serious about it when the Moldvay Basic D&D set was published. Made more sense to my 15 year old brain. When did you start?
I started playing in 1979. This brought back a lot of memories. On game nights the three big questions were: who is mapping? who is keeping track of loot? and what is the marching order?
@@richmcgee434 We used mini figs too. To simplify and keep combat moving quickly, we used party initiative. The player still conscious with the best initiative bonus rolled for the party. For surprise checks, every made their own roll though.
A note on Movement being slow!
Years ago, we had an adventure in Real Life using padded weapons. The adventurers geared up, and traipsed through a woody city park. Early on in the adventure, one of the villains needed to ask a question or something, and was moving about. She was spotted by the Party, and from then on, they advanced v-e-r-y cautiously, with two members facing backwards at all time! It was nearly dark when it was finished, and we had to scramble to get out before they closed!
Later, the guy running the game said "no, no one was ever going to ambush you. You just saw her, and got paranoid."
Dungeons have mandatory breaks, which automatically makes them better than working at a warehouse.
Or a warehouse is also a dungeon.
Quibble: I use reaction rolls for most non-intelligent monsters as well. Are they hungry? Hurt? Already fed? Unless it's a life-hating undead, there's usually still a range of reactions from non-intelligent monsters.
"The Dungeon hates you!" OSR mantra.
My wife when she watched this mentioned that it reminded her of the scene in Aliens with the platoon trying to rescue the colonists in the reactor chamber. Surprise by the xenomorphs, marines flatfooted, four marines out on the first round.
Last AD&D 1E game I ran went like this:
Party of four (dwarf fighter, elf mage, human cleric, halfling thief) exploring a dungeon. Very first room they come across and the door is stuck (not locked, just stuck). Dwarf fighter begins shoulder-checking the door as he's a busy dwarf and doesn't have time for these things. He rolls and fails his check to open the door, and again the next time, and again. It wasn't until his 4th attempt that he actually succeeded in forcing the door open, giving the monsters on the other side ample time to strike.
We check for surprise, monster's didn't need to roll because they already knew the party was there thanks to the fighter throwing himself literally at the door. Dice indicate the party will be surprised for two segments, giving the enemies basically two whole rounds of free attacks. Ouch.
I describe it to my players as follows: "The door is knocked off its hinges and lands on the ground with a very loud THUD! In the chamber beyond, there is nothing but eerie silence and darkness. Suddenly, out of the darkness comes a flurry of dark shapes and a distinct chittering sound. Before you all know it, you're surrounded by giant centipedes whose nest you happen to stumble upon!
Giant centipedes have a very weak bite attack (in fact it deals no damage), unfortunately it is poisonous and forces a Save vs Poison to not die (at a +4 bonus because of how weak their poison is). There were enough centipedes that everyone in the party got bit twice and had to roll two separate saves. Everyone except the dwarf failed their saves and died in the very first surprise round. Second round of surprise, the dwarf got bit 8 times and failed a saving throw so he too succumbed to the giant centipede venom.
Yes, it was a total TPK from just the very first room of the dungeon! We all laughed and rolled up new characters lol.
@@FamousWolfe Amazing. Glad nobody wasnt a sourpuss about it.
I have a feeling that Gary would have been proud.
Since I only started playing D&D with the playtest of 5th edition, I never noticed how close 'Munchkin' and 'Darkest Dungeon' are to older D&D versions
I assumed it was wisely known, but "munchkin" was an old derogatory term for a D&D player who would do every possible thing for one more coin, one more experience point, one more +1 to a roll, so the card game was about that. Boil an ant hill was one of my favorite cards from that game ("every ant must be worth 1 XP, so I level up, right?").
@@twentysides Oh, I know what munchkin is as a term, but I didn't know the connection :D
On this same concept, the Etrian Odyssey series is fantastic
@@twentysides that is a favorite of mine as well XD
I tried playing Munchkin with a group of friends who dont really play RPGs and they didnt like it much. They found it complicated if you can believe that! DnD just isnt for some people...
“Old D&D was more of a stealth game than modern editions.”
Depends on the party today really
"oil and fire, a staple of old D&D..." yeah tell that to my party. geniuses burned down a mansion to defeat a swarm of SPIDERS
Acrophobia is a thing for your party eh? Did they defeat the spiders? Players can be very interesting.
The first thing I did in our OD&D campaign with me being a squishy mage was make a Molotov cocktail using oil flasks and strips of cloth. That began my mages obsession with fire and she's now running around as a fire elemental mage.
@@GiveMeYourEyes947 I love the consistent character progression!
Sounds like they succeeded in killing the spiders.
Reminds me of how Shadowrun adventures start out. "No worries chummer. This missions is easy, In-and-Out." Shadowrun is also a prime example that even the best laid plans can go a stray.
The 10 minute turn is a carry over from war gaming, as is the fatigue for not resting. The original authors of D&D were war gamers after all, with Gygax’s Chainmail rules being a direct precursor to the original game. Lots of Iconic races, spells and mechanics have their origins in Chainmail and other pre-D&D works like the First Fantasy Campaign. The tendency of the past 2-3 decades to disparage the dungeon crawl and the feel of those early game sessions is exactly what is leading to the success of the OSR.
But you guys knew that
Truth!
Not me. Thanks :)
Kevin Sullivan I would hate to go through a dungeon stocked like toddlers rooms. The floor would be 100% LEGO caltrops covered with various food stuffs and puzzle peice debris and tiny plush golems. I’d much rather face an otyugh den.
Great observation nonetheless :)
Yeah, the dungeon was only hard focused post 1981 in the "return to the dungeon" 3E ads.
I feel like paizo tried to reimpliment some of this stuff in Pathfinder 2e with the exploration actions, but they didn't go far enough with some of it. This was a problem I personally had when running modern systems before discovering the OSR where I didn't have the concept of the "Dungeon Turn" where you just block things out in 10 minute chunks. It makes failures so much more meaningful during exploration periods when you tell your players "just so you know, this action is going to take 10 minutes. if you fail, you can try again, but it's going to take another 10 minutes, and something might find you in the mean time."
Yeah, even if you just add turns and wandering monsters, dungeon crawls get so much better.
Some peoplw dislike the idea of stuff taking that long cause like "i don't need 10 minutes to look around the room"
@@Alex-cq1zr That’s true if the room is clean, its contents are labeled, and the characters are familiar with its layout or occupants. But this is a dungeon. Rubble and detritus litters the stone-and-mortar tiles under your boots. Tables and chairs are overturned, piled into corners as makeshift barricades from a struggle fought long ago. Chests are buried in years of old monster refuse. And it is hard to be hasty when even the littlest noise at the wrong time might attract your doom. It’s a miracle they can even find anything in the room after just 10-minutes, if you consider the typical environment where the search would occur.
At least, this is how I imagine how they thought these things would work. It’s certainly how I prefer to think of it!
'Resource Depletion' is a lot harder in D&D 5E. A surprising number of races (most) have dark vision, so light sources become moot. The light spell is a cantrip, so wizards don't need to worry about hoarding limited spell slots. Goodberry is a 1st level druid/ranger spell that provides a full days nourishment. A long rest restores all lost hit points, so characters aren't starting each new day sore and weak.
My opinion: the dungeon crawl isn't a thing anymore because it's not a challenge anymore.
I remember a Zee Bashew video where he suggested a simple rule change to make survival harder: just have Goodberry consume its material component.
Dark vision is essentially shades of grey, not perfect day light vision. This gives DA on perception/investigation checks due to less obvious detail that can be observed.
Great points. Shame on 5e.😊
This is awesome. I was literally just searching for this exact content - how to run a dungeon that’s more than players just walking from room to room. Thanks!
Thank you! Tell your friends!
The reason for flasks of oil and 10' poles. These things came about as a result of dungeon crawls... Those rules are a result of experience. There was upon a time an "Random Dungeon Generator." A party had to come to a crawl prepared to survive and actually bring back treasure.
One thing we did was to bring with us was a wagon or two along with heirling guards to watch over the camp as we went into the dungeon .
We always had oil flasks on us and used them to escape tougher monsters by throwing them behind us to slow them down or we put the flasks and threw them in the 1st round if combat to damage the monsters before melee combat giving us a greater chance of survivability .
My character kept a small bag of flour on him and if we were attacked by an unseen monster I would throw the bag at the ceiling breaking it causing the flour to coat everything making the unseen opponent seen and easier to combat
I have always wondered this. Whether Gary or Dave came up with the idea to stock shops with 10' poles, or whether the earliest players reqested them, and then they ended up in the published game. A chicken or egg question.
@@RabidHobbit Definitely the latter.
Ok i just saw this video in my recommended and i was like “this video is way too long. But i think it would help me to improve my Dm Skills”. The time flied. +1 subscriber!
Thanks Kloro!
I would like to say: I get a lot of YT recommendations for DM Help Videos, and almost all of them are 2 minutes of material buried in 10+ minutes of annoying fluff, just so the creator can game the YT algorithm. They're all an incredible waste of my time.
But your videos are not. You put real and helpful info into every vid I've seen of yours so far. And your newsletter is the only newsletter I'm still subscribed to at the moment, because it's so ridiculously full of REAL CONTENT.
TL;DR: Thank you, and keep up the good work!
Not to mention the clickbaity titles....
Hard agree, Adam. Thanks for the killer content
Amen
Just read the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide. Everybody that wants to be a Dungeon Master should have this book at their disposal. It doesn't tell you how to run a dungeon, but it is so full of so many tips and ideas on how things should be run
As someone who started D&D in 4th edition and plays a lot of video games, hearing about OSR D&D explains a lot of things. A lot of these rules sounded familiar as a longtime player of Nethack, and EXP from treasure is present in at least the D&D arcade games, and I'm tempted to say several others although nothing else is coming to mind.
Yeah, D&D was massively influential in video games. Even the first popular FPS, Doom, was just D&D with guns. And the way that each environment in video games is called a "level" is straight out of D&D, where dungeons were divided into progressively harder levels, going down.
@@QuestingBeast Absolutely D&D was a huge influence, but I never really considered it past things like "here's some monsters from D&D" or "leveling up like D&D" or "We're going dungeon crawling like D&D."
Things like the way levels are built in Nethack, EXP from treasure, wandering monsters and others I would've never considered, and it's fascinating to learn about them.
Games like "The Bard's Tale" and "HeroQuest"/"Quest for Glory", not to mention a mountain of actual D&D video games sanctioned by TSR, followed up by the likes of "Nethack" and "Rogue" and all sorts of MUDs and MUCKs, were kind of a staple for us computer geeks in the '80s and early '90s - I've still got some of my old Bard's Tale and D&D video games around.
In addition to EXP from treasure, familiar-looking monsters and character races and classes, and the like, the video games would also include encumbrance rules built in, wandering monsters, hostile environments that prevented resting, undetectable teleportation squares and squares that messed with your compass and the like that would force you to map things carefully or just roll with getting lost in the dungeon, cursed equipment, poison and disease that wore down party resources, Iron Rations and tracking food and missiles, minimalist stories, a virtually disposable cast of party members, randomly-generated stats that limited what races and classes could be taken, and so on were all common in those vintage computer RPGs.
Many of these mechanics would get abstracted out in later equivalents as "irrelevant" to the main game, or in favor of given players more investment in and freedom of choice over optimizing long-lived dedicated characters, or in favor of world-building (including weird and exotic overland settings) and (railroady) single-player scripted epic storytelling. D&D's inheritors have also become heavily invested in selling rules systems (e.g. D20) and in selling an endless series of new editions of libraries of books built on a disposable razor blade or planned obsolescence model (which is understandable as a business model, if not particularly desirable for us as customers!)
I can see the attraction in that trade-off, and can understand the evolving role of computers in shaping the hobby along with the influences of e.g. Japanese computer RPGs in informing developer and gamer tastes, but the genre did lose a lot of the charm and flavor of the original D&D game in the process of making the trade-off....
I think that the result of the trade-off has been an identity crisis for pen-and-paper RPGs!
The positive side of the OSR, I think, is its role in stepping in to try to ground the hobby in its forgotten past, by restoring the old Dungeon Crawl experience to the heart of the game, and reminding younger fans - who too often only know fantasy by Tolkien, by the current incarnation of D&D, and by generations of inbred computer games and countless tabletop RPG D&D imitators - of the game's origins in the literature catalogued in the old "Appendix N", including the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars (with its weird post-apocalyptic alien dungeons full of nameless Martian horrors), H.P. Lovecraft's weird fiction (see the wonderful and all too often ignored "dungeon crawl" segments in "At the Mountains of Madness", "The Mound", "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", "The Nameless City", or "The Statement of Randolph Carter"), and all the other countless early influences over the genre, of which the oft-cited and now almost cliched Tolkien is actually one of the more minor examples! The OSR thus both brings the hobby back to its roots, while expanding its palette with inspirations that today are often tragically forgotten and neglected....
I, too, was reminded of game mechanics from traditional (tile-based, turn-based) roguelikes - Nethack, but also Rogue (the original), Moria, Angband, TOME, and so on - not surprising, since Rogue and its (earlier) descendants were developed back when these dungeon-crawl rules were still in active use in D&D. Funny how D&D (and other tabletop RPGs) moved towards streamlining such rules _out,_ while roguelikes leaned into such rules _harder_ (at least, until the era of "roguelites").
Rules Cyclopedia, still the best version of D&D. Dungeon exploration, world building and exploration, domain management, and mass combat. All the “mini games” of Dungeons and Dragons in one volume.
I think I've come around to preferring it above every other published edition of D&D. It's far from perfect, for example I dislike race as class with level caps. However, "not perfect" is a big improvement from 1e AD&D which is full of stupid and is basically not playable as written.
David M, the more I game, the more I see options as hindrances. At any rate, the Gazetteer series, gave us a ton of racial character classes, some of which were really interesting.
@@davidm6387 - Just a heads-up; the new compiled OSE set has rules for separating race & class along with removing racial level limits while still balancing out Humans. As with everything else in it's B/X/BECMI style rules, it's an easy adjustment.
I still have my old Rules Cyclopedia and I love it, but there are things that I prefer in OSE. Still, Mystara is my favourite campaign world and I am starting a solo game in Karameikos.
Where can I get a pdf of this?
Everywhere I turn on UA-cam, the consensus seems clear: Old School Essentials is the best, most clearly organized OSR game. I'm sold.
I know this is picky, but... 2d6 does not generate a bell curve distribution. It generates a triangular distribution. 3d6 begins to look somewhat bell-shaped. The more dice you add, the more closely it approximates a normal distribution.
Absolutely yes. People use the term "bell curve" because they haven't looked at the actual shape of the curves and how they represent the probabilities. Rolling d4+d10 or d6+d8 creates a truncated pyramid/flat topped triangle for example. Looking at said graphs one can see that a 3d6 rolls tends to ramp up smoothly; a 2d6 roll approaches the center sharply; a 4d+10 ramps up sharply but then levels out for a few rolls.
One of the funniest traps I had in a dungeon... It was a pressure plate that was set to go off when it was pressed 3 times.
The theif goes forward looking for traps, then comes back, doesn't notice the pressure plate, didn't roll high enough. Party proceeds down the corridor, frenzied berserker in front, he triggers the feeblemind trap, being the 3rd person to press it.
He was affected by the feeblemind for the next month before they could find a city with a cleric they could pay to remove it.
A month of playing? So he just sat at the table listening to the rest of the party play dnd?
@@demongustavditters7150 Not exactly. He could still roll and kill things, he just couldn't make any decisions on his own. He had killed some of the other players with a failed will save to get out of berserk more than a handful of times before this happened, some were more than happy to get back at him.
Also, I was using the CR chart exactly like the DMG says, with 8 players, so that adds +4 CR to every normal encounter, they really couldn't afford to leave him behind.
A berserker that got feebleminded? Who could tell the difference?
That is bussiness as usual for a barbarian.
The irony being that had the Barbarian been in a rage beforehand, he would've been immune to the Feeblemind trap lol
Ben: wandering monsters is a very interesting subsystem all by itself and when where why and how of wandering monsters has been somewhat lost. Encounter distance and the Monster reaction is very important. Yet there is a bit of leeway around sending them as essentially a turn or two has past so even taking into account encounter distance and reaction the "spawning" of these monsters as a new encounter has some very crucial emergent story properties which are some of the special sauce that is overlooked about the wandering monster. Indeed there is a lot in similar with the "fail forwards", "complication" "twist" etc idea as a ludic object i.e. you can generate the wandering monster turn it into an encounter (thus getting an idea of what's at hand) and then seed it into the dungeon environment ins a compelling way. Far too much of the objection from back in the day (i.e. '80s) was that the monsters spawned in like a video game because that was the model readily available to kids in the 80's, yet that is exactly what the don't do, they (monsters) don't magically appear and immediately attack. It's far more nuanced and interactive with the emergent story than might otherwise be at first apparent.
7:46 oh yes they will. Way back in the 90s, playing 2nd Ed... I don't remember if it was a dungeon or a castle, but we run into a door we can't open.... It wasn't magically sealed, it was just a really tough door, and we kept making bad rolls to break the door down... and we were making a lot of noise 😀. Just as we break the door down, we get attacked from the side were on, and as the door gets accessed, the bad guys are also waiting on the other side of the door 😀. Yeah we had a two-front fight going on there for a while 😊.
Bring door spikes. Doors love closing behind you but cant if you spike the things open. Learned that the hard way.
This channel is what introduced me to the OSR scene. I was running a 5E module that had a ton of traps and I couldn’t figure out how to incorporate them in a fair and fun manner. Had the characters simply followed the 5E procedures for rolling perception or investigation, there would have been a significant amount of unavoidable damage. I searched UA-cam for better methods of handling the traps and couldn’t find any good solution until I heard Ben Milton describe the old school style, which was to have players find the traps by asking lots of questions and scrutinizing the environment. It worked great and made the traps much more engaging!
Fast forward 18 months and I’m now an OSR fanatic who owns Knave 2E, the full set of OSE, Into the Odd, Haunted Almanac, Mausritter, and Mothership.
Traps not functioning as they should is like one thing I never thought about that would make absolutely perfect sense for an old dungeon that's been forgotten, and this somehow just means it's more terrifying. I love it!!
I feel like people in the hobby are usually only used to one playstyle and unfortunately often disdain the other ones. I wish the old school and new school people would visit each other more often. I've learned so much from all the different camps in our hobby.
This too was very an interesting insight. :)
I've been Dm'ing since 1978 when I started at age 11 .
I've given a few Dm's some tips on gaming and organizing things for both them and their players .
I use the ultra pro 8X10 one pocket page in a folder to keep my house rules in and a folder for character creation rules that I hand out to new players so they don't have to take turns looking things up that also has a copy of my house rules so that if players want to kbow what a certain house rule is they have right in front of them that way play doesn't slow down while I explain a rule to them .
I also have a DM binder filled with things I use in the game such as random encounter tables by terrain that includes weather and environmental encounters such as storms of earthquakes , it also includes random npc's with stats , class ( if any ) and other important info on them .
It also has random dungeon and wilderness tables I can use to create a random dungeon or wilderness area if I need it .
I showed it to a few Dm's at my local store and now they have their own versions of my DM binder .
I also talked with 2 Dm's on how to run a sandbox campaign that not just filled with random rolls as the players explore but also has pre made sites to explore while still having room to add things they might want to add .
Any time I can help another DM or player out to help expand their game and/or knowledge I do it .
I had help as a kid back in 1978 at my local hobby store from a few sailors who used to run AD&D 1st edition went they seem me a my 3 friends playing basic d&d .
I play a multitude of rpg's from fantasy to space opera including the very first Star Wars RPG from west end game .
I've seen a few Dm's get burned out on Dm'ing d&d because it become repetitive over time because of their play style that they think they have to abide by because that's how wizards does things .
Which goes back to the open word sandbox style of play that keeps things fresh and makes the campaign a living thing that grows along with the players
I have the old Moldvay books (and pdfs as backups), but I've been looking for an excuse to get the OSE hardbacks. This video was the tipping point for me. Thanks!
That is a great and extremely useful and nifty overview. All those individual unpackings in one place! Excellent.
This is the kind of DnD I miss. Something started to be progressively lost after Advanced DnD 2.0
I tried playing 3.5 but it was to much like playing an mmo in some ways due to feats turning characters into superheroes .
I never touched 4th edition tabletop mmo d&d at all after reading the rules while I worked at a hobby shop .
I now just play a mix of AD&D 1st and 2nd editions with house rules in my own campaign setting .
D&D of today babies the players with all its 3 saves vs death , healing words non stop usage and the players relying upon feats for everything .
To me it's become nothing more the feat rotation in combat , race and class combos to make the ultimate character builds ( another mmo aspect ) and way to much healing going on to make the game challenging in my opinion
I have been considering giving monsters feats and classes to even things out a bit but i am afraid of going too far
@@thekittenfreakify I do that all the time. I work under the philosophy that whatever the heroes get, the monsters have access to them too. It works pretty well, keeps the game on their toes.
@@williamlee7482 3.5 making you a superhero past Lv5 doesn't nullify the potential for super lethal dungeon crawls.
5e making you a superhero past Lv5 does nullify that potential.
That may be fixed in time, but for the time being it's easier to just learn how to properly run 3.5 for the specific flavor you want.
Something you should have already learned as you grasped the mechanics.
@@techstuff9198 3.5's mechanics was the start of wizards going the route of an MMO .
4th edition d&d was straight up a tabletop MMO with all its daily , at will and encounter powers plus is movement in squares and having to play on a gameboard .
As I said I stoped playing 3.5 because of the MMO aspect of the game with all the feats and feat rotations that just about every player does .
I've been playing D&D since 1978 at age 11 so I know how to create deadly dungeons , my point was why do you need to modify the rules to make dungeons deadly when it should be part of the mechanics themselves .
D&D 5e holds the players hands and keeps them safe with their long rest ( 8 hours ) to regain all their hp's back plus their 3 easy saves vs death once they hit zero hp's and all the healing wards being thrown around non stop makes d&d into a kids rpg because you can't have the characters dying in a dungeon without some one crying ( I've seen a grown 23 year old guy cry because he failed his 3 death saves in a row and his character died and he got up and went outside to cry ) .
That's why I play AD&D instead where my players know there is no hand holding going on and I don't need to make my dungeons super lethal because they are already lethal to begin with just playing by the mechanics .
I couldn't stand 3.0 , 3.5 , especially 4.0 and now 5e because NONE of them feel like a challenge to myself or my players because of the overpowered feats , all the non stop healing that goes on , the 8 hours rest to regain all your hp's back and 3 easy saves vs death .
Wizards won't fix it because players asked long ago for the game to be made more easy so that it can be more inclusive to new players and so their characters don't die so easy .
It's just a generic fantasy superhero rpg any more and it's because wizards went woke
This is the video that finally made me go look at OSE.
Old video game RPGs would often have you drop money when you run from fights. I never understood the logic behind that until now.
I guess you can see it as the monsters use the money to buy and trade from each other within the tribe/group and from other allied tribes of monsters so having a party throw down coins slows the intelligent monsters down but it wouldn't work for animal intelligence monsters because they have no need for money and see the party as their next meal
@@williamlee7482this is why you would drop rations. 😉
This is very useful for many of us who haven't play classic DnD in a long time!
The shift away from dungeon crawls and to more detailed combat just reflects the change in popular movies. Watch an "action" movie pre- Raiders of the Lost Ark and you'll see what I mean. There was a lot more focus on exploration and physical obstacles, and strategy, and less time spent on combat scenes. Modern action moves are descended from Warner Brothers cartoons, not John Wayne or Tarzan movies.
Thing is, once you get over the power murder fantasy, combat in FRPGs is mostly dull. The best times I ever had in D&D were playing some thief who was sneaking around avoiding trouble. Sometimes the "dungeon" is a palace or a temple. That moment when you pop open the chest and take the treasure is a lot more satisfying than rolling dice until the monster dies.
I love the idea that the goblin class has a 6 in 6 to open stuck doors
Thanks for the trip into the dungeon of old. Another concept that was used "back in the day" was the Caller and the Mapper. The Caller would declare all of the actions of the party for the dungeon crawl until someone with special skills was required or monsters were encountered. The Mapper would take the DM's (or Moderator back then) descriptions and draw them out. Sometimes it did not take a locked door to make a party seek another way out.
Dang I love this, I really wish 5e had more rules and tools for dungeon crawls, definitely keeping these in mind for when I DM as combat and dungeons are still my favorite part of this game.
This is a VERY underrated video.
Thank you for breathing new life back into my DMing!
Modern D&D is so far removed from the dungeon-crawling of early editions as to be a completely different game.
Yeah, I think there's an argument to be made for that.
There might be an argument but I don't it's a strong argument. The rules overlap a lot, the core settings are almost identical, and the feel at the table is very similar. I took a 30 break and while the rules were better thought out really didn't really change that much. I love the greater variety of adventure type and more willingness to rp but that feels like evolution not revolution.
Classic roguelikes are closer to OD&D. Rogue itself seems to kave the same attitude of being a strategic slog continually on the edge of resource depletion.
@@SimonClarkstone That is a great point part of the reason that I think DnD has changed is that game experience that OD&D used to have is now available in video games. So now there is an emphasis on the things you can't get out of video game aka flexibility in story telling.
@Josh H. I could not agree more.
I was really surprised when traps were detailed in OSE after reading all of 5E repeatedly and having nothing codified. It was shocking, and great.
Another fun source to play around with is Appendix A in the AD&D DMG. You can generate a random dungeon in very little time and even run a quickly-generated party through it to test it out.
There was an old 3rd party dungeon generator called "Central Casting: Dungeons" from Task Force Games (makers of SFB) back in the '80s. It was the same kind of random dungeon generation, but on steroids. Picked it up back then, it was pretty amazing at the time and put the DMG one to shame by a long shot. Unfortunately it's been out of print for ages, and hasn't been re-published to digital by TFG, so even the old beat-up softcovers being sold on ebay go for a pretty penny. There are modern alternatives, some even more extravagant, but I don't think they quite retain the same old-school feel.
Is there a DL for those older books? Kids today don't have time to read and search for stuff. All I would have to do is go to the shelf though.
@@GeryonM Yeah, DriveThruRPG has all the old D&D books as PDFs.
one of the best classic D&D exploration turns review in the internet
First Edition AD&D had an entire rules supplement book dedicated to dungeons.
{:o:O:}
This video made me realize my players have been going on dungeon walkabouts, not dungeon crawls. Just got my copy of OSE in the mail today and I'm really excited to port these ideas into my 5e campaign. Thanks!
The way I like to play, the monster is a challenge. Overcoming that challenge by whatever means, which is not limited to combat, earns experience. This includes diplomacy, bluffing, or sneaking past the monster.
That seemed almost self-evident to us back in my college 2nd Edition D&D days.
By the 3rd and 4th Edition, it seems like the focus shifted to highlighting the combat as the game's point and its reward, with character optimization and jumping through the story hoops being price of admission to the main show of playing weird combat stunts and feats like CCG cards, and throwing dice at monster encounters that last hours and hours of slowly wearing down HP pools.
I sometimes felt like I was talking to a hostile audience when trying to describe the "good old days" when combat was just one of the ways to clear obstacles so that you could explore an endless world of fantastic new discoveries... it would always set off a Holy War between people accusing me and each other of being "narrativists" or "simulationists" - whatever those mean - and trying to justify whatever their favorite edition of D&D is as the only version worth playing because of the game balance and mechanics and options and whatever: I don't think anyone arguing really "got it" about what I was missing, and why I was feeling increasingly dissatisfied with D&D rules systems in general.....
You're doing the Lord's work, Ben. Keep it up!
Word!
Listening to this video I couldn't stop thinking of OD&D as pretty much tabletop Darkest Dungeon.
Makes a whole lot of sense even. That's pretty cool.
I had actually been looking for EXACTLY this. I got into D&D with 4e and 5e and I was never really satisfied with how my dungeon explorations came out. It felt like everything I was doing as a DM was really arbitrary. Like when spells would wear off or when I'd put a random encounter in or how far the party moved in any given amount of time. It also never felt risky. Like I would feel like a jerk if the players went to cast a ritual Detect Magic and I threw a random encounter at them while they waited. It would just use up session time and when the encounter was over they would just cast it again. So I rarely included them for that reason.
Making this into a psuedo-turn-based experience really alleviates a lot of the anxieties I was having. I love that you know as a player FOR CERTAIN how long your spells or abilities last. I don't understand why this isn't more of a thing! Like really, it kind of upsets me that this is the first I'm hearing about this stuff. It really feels like the designers of modern D&D, who have been playing a long time, are just taking for granted how to actually run a dungeon-based experience.
Awesome assessment of OSE dungeoneering. We just shot an episode of SplitScreen D&D discussing what elements of OSE could be tapped into for 5e tables. This is the video I will be pointing anyone to who is looking for info on old school dungeon crawls.
Heck back when we old people were playing in the early 80s, none of the rules were unified. Practically every task had its own sub-rules and often a special table. You might be asked to roll any type of dice from percentile to the d12 (which is these days pretty much only used for hit points on Barbarians).
Yeah, everything was highly modular. All the parts had been built as they were needed to solve particular problems.
This new bent of on camera explorations of the OSR is really rad. I'm really enjoying it. Now I've just got to convince my friends to be interested too!
I'm currently working this into my 5e campaign. Thank you so much for introducing me to this rule set, 5e is to barebones when it comes to dungeoneering in my personal opinion.
I find players often get antsy when dungeoneering with 5e.
💙💜❤💙💜❤💙💜❤💙💜❤💙💜❤
Addendum to the treasure=XP rule: Note that magical treasure does _not_ count for this calculayion. Magical weapons, armor, etc. are very useful for their bonuses, but they do _nothing_ to increase your level. This prevents fighters from rapidly outpacing the rest of the group in levels, as OD&D was heavily weighted toward magical arms and armor. As another part of this, a step was added to treasure division, whereby the players negotiated to try and balance bonuses and XP gain.
I love the concept of the dungeon being a separate underworld, completely detached from ours. 5E is a lot of fun, but there's too many abilities that take the danger out of dungeon crawling, which is what makes dungeons fun in the first place!
DUDE WHY ISNT THIS IN THE 5E DM'S GUIDE!? THIS IS ALL FANTASTIC INFO!!!
Honestly this is all the stuff that I thought 5e was missing.
I rank this as among your best and most useful vids! Thanks for this wealth of information and advice for a too often overlooked aspect of D&D gaming. As a big fan of the dungeon crawl, I found this video inspiring and I am hopeful other viewers will also be inspired by you to spend more game time exploring the underground!
started AD&D 1981 never moved from it -- welcome back to the past.
It turns out 5e has dungeon turns. The playtest DM Guidelines had them consolidated in one place, under a heading called "The Dungeon Turn". The rules still exist, but now they decided to distribute them around the PHB at the last minute. You can find a consolidated version in the playtest or the ENWorld thread where there is also discussion: "B/X styled Dungeon Turn rules from the playtest are still in 5e but scattered"
As a 5e DM, I had to get interested in the OSR and how to run tense dungeons, find this video, and finally wonder if there are 5e adaptations of the B/X or OSE rules in order to realize they were there all along. 🙄
Old School Essentials with the Advanced supplements is fantastic. I've found that Necrotic Gnome put out some truly flavourful, truly unique material (Dolmenwood has a special place on my bookshelf!).
Old school D&D is essentially a heist game. And I love it.
Yep. Dungeon crawls interspersed with our first NPC encounters, the thief/bandit npc waiting at the dungeon exit to rob you blind. And then haggling for every spike, arrow, or potion vendor in town. There may also have been a temple and a thief's guild too.
One thing I would love to run is a fat dungeon crawl in like a darksoul esque setting
That was awesome. I played D&D with friends back in the 1980's when I was 8 and it was quite different than the current 5th edition. I now own a hobby shop and I have a collection of old Dragon magazines from back in the 1980's. I didn't realize why the old dungeon maps had twists in them. thank you for bringing up the old dungeon crawl rules. i bookmarked this video for future reference in running 5th with my kids.
This was a superb video, Ben. Shared with my players.
Thanks Jeremy!
Early editions of D&D were ALL about the Dungeon. Somewhere along the line, (probably around 2nd Edition with all the "kits") the focus shifted to the character and the dungeon became more of an afterthought. Early D&D was more about survival and less about all of the heroic shit your character could do.
Which is why it's good that there are so many flavors to choose from. There isn't a "correct" DnD. The correct DnD is the version where the players and the DM get what they wanted out of it.
Survival is heroic. Duh.
@@nutbastard I disagree. Dnd after 3e is garbage and way too distant from the source material. Hence this video. 5e can't even get a standard dungeon crawl right. Modern doesn't mean better
@@blackstone777 amazing I use hexcrawls and dungeon crawls very effectively.
Okay been watching the channel for a while now, but this video did it, I just today bought the Old-School Essentials line of books.Thanks for the great video!
Willard, 10th level Rogue/Assassin, "Neverwinter, shoot, I'm still only in Neverwinter. Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the dungeon."
"The horror. The horror."
Excellent vídeo. Thanks.
Since you have this video using OSE (B/X clone) as an example, I'd love to see a video using Dark Dungeons (BECMI clone, super underrated, almost unknown, but excellent book).
I'll become a Patron right now to request that.😊
Thanks and congrats,
V
This is an excellent summary delivered extremely eloquently!
So, in videogame terms - old school ttrpgs were what Darkest Dungeon is based on. That's awesome!
Great video. I'd love to see a hexcrawling video, and a video on BX vs BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia.
Dungeoneers Survival Guide (along with Wilderness Survival Guide). Two great books. How to make a simple rock fall worse than any monster or trap. Sudden water-based perils, or running out of air. What would an underground realm look like? Things that can actually live underground. When you want to get past boring corridors and boring rooms with no reason at all.
This is very much like the kind of gameplay you get in oldschool traditional ascii-based roguelikes like Angband. These games were originally made back in the early days of D&D, and they continue to follow that old style of dungeon crawling.
As far as wandering monsters and encounters go, I like having a possibility of more than one wandering monster being encountered at a time. So the party may turn the corner and find two wandering monsters of different kinds possibly fighting with each other. Or a larger predator of the wandering monster may appear while the party if fighting it and the larger just wants to eat the smaller and may be indifferent to the party. Makes the environment seem more dynamic and not so focused on monster always wants to kill party.
It surprises me how many current DM's do not use wandering/random encounters.
They add so much color and flavor to a scenario.
Of course with the current rules a simple 5 minute encounter can now take 30 minutes.
Its almost like they think that monsters don't move around at all and just sit in one place waiting for the Players group to find them
Judges Guild’s City State of the Invincible Overlord, and the Wilderlands maps turned my campaign in 1978 from Dungeon crawls to travel between castles, temples, towers, and dungeons.
I recently have been having trouble with writing exciting dungeons so I kinda took a break from being the DM but this video makes me want to write adventures again which is pretty nice
It’s in the ad&d dms guide. There is even a die rolling random dungeon generator, which is pretty ingenious for a time before home computers.
But basically dungeon crawling rules are simple: improv and notes.
Create rooms on the fly, depending on what the last rooms were, what rooms should be in dungeon, and how the creatures came to live/dwell in said rooms. It doesn’t have to make total sense, but you can just fill a room with a bunch of sharks in one room and a bunch of apes in another, and call them bedrooms.
Read an old TSR dungeon module (they are quick reads and usually like 20 pages of large font and pics.
the "doors swinging shut" thing is interesting to me, because I could have sworn the door rules in early versions of d&d were "players can try all they like to keep doors open or closed but nothing will work".
I notice that you didn't talk about encumbrance and treasure weight - which impacts speed, and therefore time spent in the dungeons (which impacts wandering monster rolls), and the ability to more readily escape from monsters.
I can see why you wouldn't. Encumbrance has long been a contentious issue among players, and frankly most GMs, the vast majority of which hate the system. That's a shame, because B/X (and thus OSE) has one of the more workable systems, in which speed is based on armor worn and whether or not the individual is carrying 'significant' treasure.
It's also the system that impacts dungeon play the most, if it is used, and perhaps more significantly than most of the other systems you explore in the video.
I think I'll make a video just focusing on encumbrance later. There's lots of ways to do it, and it affects players from all editions.
Questing Beast I could absolutely use your perspective on encumbrance options, again because these can add tension and player choice.
On one hand, encumbrance kind of jams you into a game of Accountants and Attorneys, which was never to my taste. On the other hand, to its credit, encumbrance - combined with wandering monsters and the like - does force the players to carefully consider what treasure to drag along with them, and out of the dungeon, which changes the way the dungeon economy looks: even if one doesn't like the record-keeping and so on, there's that nagging sense that the characters are dragging world-breaking amounts of treasure out of the dungeon. With encumbrance and a hostile dungeon, there may be lots of wondrous magical treasure and heaps of gold to be found down in the dungeons, but only so much of it can be dragged out of the dungeon by the characters....
@@QuestingBeast I hope that you made that video, encumbrance is not that difficult of a thing to manage: you do it in detail at character creation, and you simply do not let it have any slack.
Whether it is physics, cultures, or dungeons, the bottom line isn't so much what you could theoretically DO; the important thing is having limitations, boundaries and restrictions, and knowing that they are there.
This is very nice. I love the dungeon as an overworld of its own, an evil overworld.
I love the comments about the “turn”. Back in the day, that was the single most important unit of everything! I haven’t played the more recent versions of the game. I suspect I wouldn’t like them!
This is the reason I started playing DCC. Using a semi-randomized sandbox Hexcrawl/Dungeon Crawl in the Hubris Setting. Still getting all of my Judge Supplies together. I haven't DM'd, or even roleplayed for that matter, in over 20 years. I have almost everything I need to start running games again. I DM'd AD&D 2nd Edition for moat of my teenage years. Then I got married & when I wanted to start playing again, 3.5 was the current edition. It was a slight breath of fresh air. Then I just gave it up. It was so difficult to get players together. Where I live in southeast Louisiana, there aren't many people who play RPG's & out of the few players I had, some moved away, some passed away & others just lost touch. I now have a few players who are interested in playing & the DCC deadliness wil begin in a few months. Before I start running games, I wamt to be sure that I'm familiar enough with the rules, and what I already know about Judging/DM'ing games, to keep a steady-flowing game without having to reference the book at all, except in very niche situations. I plan on using personalized constructed events in the overworld of Hubris to be catalysts for the PC's to enter semi-randomized massive Dungeons. All the while creating & connecting plot threads based on the rolled encounters that the PC's come across while in the Overworld & in dungeons. This way, I'll also stay entertained because I won't fully know what'll happen until it does. I'm actually excited to start running games again. This'll be a completely different style than how I used to DM. Thanks for all these videos. I'll also be borrowing a few generic rules from modern OSR's, the ones that are interchangeable & not tied to any one system. It'll still be DCC, to the fullest.
the 5th ed. DMG does actually have a table of encounter distance by various terrain types! So props to 5e for actually having that one thing, if little else for crawling.
one of my favorite modern systems is "dungeon crawl classics" it feels like OG dnd but modern
The dungeon sounds like it is alive.
oh man now i want to run a 5th ed E6 dungeon crawl campaign where every xk gold extracted = added feat/class feature
We used to play these rules to allow a rest in a safe sealed room. If a wandering monster was rolled and it was unaligned/non-intelligent it would wander past the shut door. Even intelligent monsters may not come in, a random orc patrol would not enter a room if they knew it was usually occupied by skeletons. Just wanted to point out that even rolling random hostile monsters it is not necessarily fight after fight. There was a little bit of abusing the run around the corner rule too.
Great video. I particularly like the analysis on how certain rules incentivize a certain type of behavior from the players.
5e has issue with dungeons, you need to make your own rules. This is why I love the OSR community, there are so many resources to make the dungeon part of RPG great. Sometimes I don't have enough time to make my own rules.
I started playing in 1979, and I love 5e. But I also love older editions. I've been thinking for a while now that a third-party publisher should produce a supplement explicitly for 5e to make it more Old School in nature. As shown in this video, porting over a lot of that stuff to 5e should be rather simple.
@@Thomasritchard I like 5e being rules-light. It's exactly what I was looking for in a new edition. I loved complexity for almost four decades, but in the past few years I've craved the kind of elegance and flexibility 5e gave me. And I love the 5e DMG! I can't think of anything I'd replace in it, but tastes vary. So far, third-party material has been filling in the blanks for me.
@@Thomasritchard I think the 5e designers' goal of paring back the complexity of the previous couple of editions was a great idea. They made the game flexible enough to "bolt on" house rules or third-party material to add complexity for those who want it. And making 5e under the OGL after the misstep of 4e's more limited license was another great move, allowing a lot of good material to be developed that wasn't in keeping with the official design philosophy.
this video came out at the perfect time you are doing me a service my good man!
I think the 1/6 change of triggering a trap is also there to simulate the fact a trigger might be a single flagstone in a 10ft wide, 30ft long corridor and you might just not step on it while walking down it.
Old school essentials classic fantasy rules tome is recommended for proper dungeon crawling.
Amazing! First D&D UA-camr in a long time with ideas that aren't found elsewhere - or discussed by every other UA-camr who focuses on D&D. I see this is a year old - well, keep it up! lol
I really enjoyed this video, the concepts and the use of OSE as an example appealed to me greatly. It sparked memories of the way we used to play when I was young that I am not sure I would have re-connected with as quickly by just reading the rule books. The video was recently referenced on the OSE FB group as the type of content that would be useful for someone wanting to teach The game to new player who may be less proficient at reading due to youth or learning differences. I fully agree and would love to see more content from you dealing with specifically with OSE, perhaps even a series. I myself am a dyslexic and have an interest in serving that community. I also have an eleven year old son who, like many kids his age, does not see the vale in reading manuals and I would like to encourage to pick up this style of play. I am certain more videos like this that feature OSE would be helpful kickstarting his interest. 😀
Regarding "wandering" monsters, I like a dungeon to have a fixed an finite number of monsters at the beginning for precisely a reason you mention: It's a resource-management game. Monsters shouldn't "spawn" like in a video game.
I also don't think a room description should say what monsters are in the room--rather the room description should describe the room itself, and the monster list should say where each monster is likely to be found. For example, a goblin might be at "location 24" 50% of the time, another location 10% of the time and another 40% of the time. Another monster might be designated as "wandering," and yes you can sort of encounter it at random--or when the referee thinks the party is getting too loud. But there's a finite number of monsters, and as the party kills them, the monster population is exhausted.
Also, monsters don't exist in a vacuum. If the party has killed one or more tool-using monsters, say goblins, when the others find the bodies they are going to step up their situational awareness, gather in groups for common defense and try to surprise the PCs. I've played so many games where the room description says what monsters are in the room, you fight them in the room as if it existed in a vacuum, then move on to the adjacent room and fight the monsters there--didn't the fight in the first room make any noise? If it's a dungeon filled with kobolds or goblins, they'll sound the alarm and bring any nearby buddies. A wounded one might run and bring back friends. Here again, at the beginning of the dungeon text you should have a list of all the monsters in the dungeon and where each one is likely to be found.
@treeghettox Never had a problem with it in many years of gaming. Most groups just used common sense to get through, and players loved it.
I love this, and I’m planning to use a lot of this for a dungeon crawl my players are wanting to do. Although the ‘light’ cantrip kinda makes keeping up with torches useless since all of my players seem to have access to it.
Yeah in old school DnD light was a first level spell, so it was a resource like everything else.
Increase the wandering monster chance for using light in these cases. Especially if you're still using milestone levelling, players can figure out that attracting more random monsters isn't in their best interest.
And/Or create things (clues, hidden doors, etc) that can only be seen in the dark. Dungeons created by monsters with senses like darkvision, blindsight, etc. aren't going to be designed with light in mind.
I just got done running Pathfinder 1e’s crimson throne adventure, and in it is a mega dungeon in the form of a haunted castle. This video woulda been fantastic for running it. If I ever run the campaign again, I’m using these rules