Less Combat ... More Obstacles
Yet… I don’t see a lot of focus on the play style itself … especially in the adventures released. Perhaps dungeon crawling just feels old and boring compared to the popular subjects of “high level play”, “wilderness crawling”, or “mass combat” … but rather then complain about what people like at the moment, I suspect something more is at work. Just as you can’t bake much of a cake you can’t run much of an exploration based dungeon crawl without a dungeon that supports exploration.
As I’ve mentioned, writing good dungeons is hard, and this means too many dungeon based adventures, old and new, aren’t designed for dungeon crawling, instead they usually focus on combat encounters and sometimes complex puzzles … This won’t do it, not alone. Set piece combat and a complex room puzzle can’t make for a solid exploration adventure, because they so easily become a series of disconnected scenes. The core of Dungeon Crawling is players making informed choices about where to go in a location and “obstacles” to overcome to get there.
An obstacle is a relatively simple challenge that impedes further exploration or makes it risky in some other way. The obstacle can be something as simple as a locked door,because obstacles are smaller in scale, less complex, and less threatening then set piece puzzles or hidden traps. They aren’t intended to offer a serious threat or difficulty and likewise don’t protect significant treasure. Obstacles are a challenge that requires player intervention or resources to move past, but isn’t likely to create a permanent obstacle.
The function of obstacles is largely to root the adventure in the location and offer alternative challenges along the potential routes of exploration. For example … the party might head North in the dungeon and encounter a locked steel door. Not having one of the obvious tools to pass it (a thief with lockpicking skills or the knock spell) they have the options of retreat (returning next session with tools/spells), to search for a key, or to seek an alternate path through the dungeon that bypasses the door.
The first of these options (full retreat) is costly and discouraged by the risks of random encounters, including that of restocking between sessions and the equipment or supplies expended to reach the obstacle. Full retreat is of course undesirable, the reverse side of the long despised “15 minute adventuring day”. While this undesirable situation can happen when players fetishize caution but it is usually the result of problems in adventure design. If one’s players have decided to deal with risk by retreating after every encounter or to perfect thier approach to every puzzle and obstacle the best course as a referee is to increase the risk of delay and the cost of slow exploration … rival adventuring parties that sweep in and loot areas the party is “saving for latter”, rile up dungeon inhabitants or set traps for the party are an effective way of doing this.
In most cases a party will choose one of the other two options: to search for a solution to the obstacle or blaze an alternate route. This depends on the availability of either clues and suitable materials, or alternate routes, and makes obstacles an issue for designers even more then one for players. A well designed adventure must provide these alternative and tools, rather then offer a single linear path or insufficient tools. To put it another way - when the party finds a locked steel door they should also find clues as to where the key for the door can be found and/or have passed other potential routes.
Of course alternate routes will themselves lead to obstacles and tools may require over coming some challenge to obtain. Trying to bypass the locked door might mean taking another route past a guard post … or perhaps backtracking to one and obtaining a set of keys from the guards. Obstacles can have this interplay or remain independent, but collectively they make it useful for players to understand the dungeons layout and offer a variety of challenges that different parties may choose among to reach the same goals or locations within the adventure.
