The Pillars of the OSR, Part II: Dungeons

In my last post, I started a project of breaking down what I see as the "pillars," the fundamental gameplay modes, of your typical OSR game, like how 5e claims its three pillars are exploration, socialization, and combat while only providing mechanical support for the last one. My goal is to identify:

• What are or should be the most common pillars of OSR?
• What core activities is each pillar founded on?
• What factors, in the fiction and at the table, usually do or should play into how these activities are resolved?

By breaking all this down, I hope to develop a clearer understanding of what a good OSR game should model through its mechanics and how different activities should function in the rules.

Last time, I talked about the first of my five pillars (or six, I'll get to that): journeys, a.k.a. overland travel, wilderness exploration, whatever. Today I'm talking about the next pillar:

Dungeons

Obviously.

I think 5e makes a big mistake in folding journey play and dungeon play under the same umbrella of "exploration." They're completely different. Where journey play is heavily abstracted, with days of travel often glossed over in a minute or two of play time, dungeon play is extremely concrete. With rare exception, every room is described in detail, every object in it is accounted for, and that level of detail is often critical to how the players will engage with the dungeon environment. Time can be somewhat abstracted--I've never been a fan of tracking turns by real time--but when minutes are glossed over, it's generally still pretty clear where exactly every character is and what they're doing during those minutes. All of this, I think, makes for huge differences in how activities should be resolved.

So what are we doing in here? I suspect this list will be very unsurprising.

Navigation and Mapping

When I broke down journey play, the first core activity I identified was hiking and riding, the most basic process of traversing the environment. In dungeon play, I don't think that same activity presents a meaningful challenge in the same way. A miles-long cross-country trek with a heavy pack is a difficult, dramatic process, something that'll grind you down and deplete your resources; the same can't be said of walking down a hallway. I know some games go hard on tracking exact movement speeds per dungeon turn, but I've never found that added anything to my games; I'm a lot more comfortable just estimating when the characters have been exploring for about ten minutes, however many rooms and corridors they get through in that time. So, for me, the basic process of moving through a dungeon, assuming no specific obstacles, doesn't really need an established procedure. Your taste, as always, might vary.

However, navigating a dungeon and remembering the way out is far more complicated. Every group needs a mapper. Here, we start to see the massive difference in how resolution can work between journey and dungeon play: because dungeons are described in such concrete detail, with the players aware of every room, exit, and passage, they can easily be expected to navigate using their own player situational awareness. They have all the same information as their characters; there's no need for character competence to matter here. Of course, that's assuming the characters have the equipment to make maps and are doing so. I generally assume whichever player is drawing the map, their character is doing the same, and I communicate that expectation to my players from the start.

Supply Management

This is one dungeons have in common with journeys, though usually the resources that matter are different. I rarely run the kind of game where the party will be trapped within a dungeon for days or weeks at a time, so food and water usually aren't as much of an issue. The big one that matters is light--running out of torches or lantern oil is one of the main time pressure risks.

Regardless, like with supply management in journeys, this is mainly a function of player foresight. The limiting factor within the fiction will be how much equipment the party can afford and how much they can physically carry into the dungeon (while hopefully leaving room in their packs for treasure). Like in journey play, scavenging might be able to make up for some planning mistakes, but here, I think this is more likely to implicate player creativity than character knowledge or skill--again, because the players have much more concrete information about what's around them, they're better positioned to come up with clever ideas. Character knowledge might help sometimes, though ("hey, I know that fungus--if you pour water on it, it glows like a torch!").

Terrain Obstacles

Bottomless chasms, crumbled passages, things that make traversal a challenge where it wouldn't be otherwise. I see equipment as probably the main factor in most of these cases--did you bring rope to scale the wall? Shovels to dig out the rubble? Lacking the right tools, again, we go to player creativity: how can you improvise a solution from what's available? Here, though, I see character skill becoming more relevant again. If you don't have the right gear to safely scale that wall, maybe the thief can free solo it.

Doors

This is really just a type of terrain obstacle, but it's so common and gets so much procedural attention in so many games that I think it deserves some special analysis. Here's another one where I see equipment being the number one question: if it's locked, do you have picks? If it's barred or stuck, do you have a crowbar to pry it open or an axe or a pick to break it down? Player creativity matters too, for the same reasons as above. When it comes to locks in particular, character skill can become relevant again, but otherwise, I usually don't see much specialized character training being relevant in getting through a door.

Mechanisms, Locks, and Traps

Now this one's interesting. You start with the most basic: a lock, as above. How is this solved? Usually you need lockpicks, of course, so that's equipment, and unless the game establishes that all adventurers can pick locks, you also need character skill. Can player skill come into it? In most games, I don't think so, because locks are usually one of the places where dungeon play gets more abstract again. I barely know anything about how locks work in real life, I don't have the energy to describe a locking mechanism in detail in a game. But what if that's not the case? What if the ref actually gives the players detailed information about how the mechanism works, all its moving parts, everything they can manipulate? Then it becomes about player problem-solving again--the lock becomes basically a puzzle. You can apply this to all kinds of mechanisms, traps, whatever.

But go back to that lock: all that assumes the lock is of a kind that's known and understood by people in the game world. The way a conventional, mechanical lock works isn't actually that complicated, it's just a question of having taken the time to practice fucking with them. But in some settings, you have more esoteric tech--what about an electronic lock? How many people in your milieu even understand the principles of how that works? If that's the kind of tech you're working with, I think it becomes less about character skill and more about character knowledge (see my previous post for discussion about the key difference between those). To put it one way, a thief can pick a mechanical lock, but in my mind, to deal with an electronic lock, you probably need a wizard, someone who's studied the lost technology of the ancients. So that creates an important difference between what I'm gonna call conventional mechanisms, which bring in character skill, and esoteric mechanisms, which bring in character knowledge. Both can implicate player problem-solving instead, if they're given sufficient detail for the players to engage with themselves, but I see this as less common in either case.

Where player creativity really comes into play is especially with traps. Mechanisms that are like puzzles or barriers usually require engaging with them in anticipated ways--slide the tiles into place to unlock the door, etc.--but traps are there to be bypassed by whatever dirty tricks the players can come up with. Equipment will often be highly relevant for these innovations.

Interpreting Records

This is a pretty niche thing, but I think it deserves consideration. You crack open a dusty tomb and find an ancient inscription in a dead tongue--what does it say? Is it warning of a terrible curse ready to strike down robbers? You probably want someone in the party with the character knowledge to figure it out, in case it's important. This also applies to more directly magical writings, spell scrolls and stuff.

Stealth and Pursuit

Probably more often important here than in journey play, and for once in this comparison, similar in how it plays out. Player creativity can get a foot in the door, if the environment doesn't present an obvious way of hiding or deterring pursuit, but once that's established, character skill usually becomes the main issue. Equipment is relevant mainly in the negative, in that the more shit you're carrying around, the slower and more conspicuous you're likely to be--although certain tools might be helpful.

The Factors

So, putting all this together, we find that what matters consistently in dungeon play is:

• Player situational awareness. Skill at maintaining a mental map of the dungeon environment, tracking where things are and what's useful to them.
• Player problem-solving. Interacting with presented obstacles on the obstacles' terms, like when solving a puzzle in the way the puzzle is designed to be solved.
• Player creativity. Solving problems in unexpected ways--looking at the environment and what's available to use and coming up with innovative ways to apply those tools.
• Player foresight. Knowing what tools to bring based on provided information about the obstacles to be expected.
• Equipment. What tools and supplies the characters have available to them thanks to their players' foresight.
• Character skill. Important for those activities that are more abstracted than most dungeon play--picking locks, disabling traps, sneaking, and the like.
• Character knowledge. Probably the least often important in this breakdown--useful if the milieu includes esoteric tech that requires more knowledge than skill to interact with, important for translating old texts, and maybe a component in some supply management challenges.

Notably absent this time is character endurance. I see dungeon play, outside of combat, as much less physically draining on PCs most of the time; there will be exceptions, of course, but again, in a long journey, you're expending a ton of effort from a limited pool just to haul your ass to your destination, while that doesn't tend to be nearly as much the case in dungeon play. The main endurance drain in dungeons tends to be combat, but I see the game shifting into a whole different mode when a fight starts, just one that then has significant implications for dungeon play once the focus shifts back.

Still, we can see that a system that handles dungeon play well should model the characters' relevant skills (picking locks and fucking with conventional technology, sneaking, traversing difficult terrain with minimal tools) and knowledge (ancient languages, esoteric tech, possibly edible or otherwise useful dungeon life).

Next time, I want to talk about social play.