Dungeoncrawling goes a little like this.
You descend into the stale crypt. The light of your torch reveals a room about yay big. On the north wall a passageway leads deeper into the gloom, and-
Pause. That right there.
Forget all that theoretical stuff from before. Role-playing games are about choices. Good rpgs are about informed choices with interesting outcomes. One of the first things you do when your players enter a new room is describe the general layout and mention any passages leading from it. Sometimes even before describing what’s in the room. To orient them, but also for a deeper reason.
The doors let players know upfront what their choices are.
The one thing that’ll stall out a rpg every time is when the players don’t know what’s next. They don’t know what they can do next, so they don’t know what to do next. In a dungeoncrawl, where the point is to move through it, to see what lies deeper in, when the players don’t know their options towards that goal (the next door/passageway), they look at you expectantly.
The most important choice the players will make in any given room is where to go from there. How will they progress the story. What’s in the room is important, yes. Most interesting, definitely. But most important? Nah. Unless you’re in the final room or something. And ignoring for now the obvious case where what you do in the room affects your options of where to go next.
So the first rule of terrain-crawling: Every ‘room’ must have a ‘door.’
You’re gonna hate quotation marks by the end of this.
I’m not going to spend much time right now defining ‘room’ beyond it being the space between two or more doors. The fact that it should be full of interesting things (traps, encounters, loot, lore) is normal dungeon stuff. We’ll also skim over the spatial construction of a room for now, because the doors are more important. Just picture any outdoor scene to follow along in your head.
The doors do two things. One, they make the players go, ‘Oh, I wonder what lies beyond that threshold.’ And most importantly two, they mark decision points for what the players do next. Even if the decision is obvious.
The door says, even if there’s nothing happening in this room, no random encounters were rolled, the room was picked clean, nothing interesting to observe up close, the players have a thing to do next. After you finish the room description, without prompting them they know to say, okay nothing to do here, we walk through the next door to see what’s on the other side.
Obviously, this can’t (usually) be a physical door. So what the heck do I mean?
Tell me you're not dying to see what lies beyond the bend. TELL ME.
“The stone-lined path curves gently back and forth before you, until in the distance, the path disappears around a sharp bend.”
“You push deeper into the suffocating jungle, swatting at bugs and tripping over brush, but a hundred feet in front of you, a thick tangle of vines obscures what lies ahead. To your left, the jungle vegetation continues on top of a moss-covered crag.”
“The sound of running water accompanies you as you make your way beneath the foliage, until suddenly in a sunny clearing up ahead you spot a bridge spanning a stream. A separate path continues past the bridge in the direction you’re going.”
~
Could you pick out some potential doors? I hope so, but remember I’m making this all up as I go :)
The biggest fear in trying to run the outdoors like a dungeon is imagining it going something like ‘ok you move forward through some trees and find more trees what do you do? Oh, you keep moving forward through the trees? Well, ok… now there’s more trees and a fallen tree isn’t that interesting? Oh, you want to keep going straight until you find something interesting…’ And suddenly it’s a pointcrawl.
Set up ‘doors’ and describe them, break your wilderness into tangible decision points for players to latch onto, even if it’s a decision as simple as ‘there’s a single door on the north wall the path disappears around a bend, what do you do? Make the players wonder, ‘what lies beyond/over there?’ Then the players can make the choice, Ok, I want to step through the ‘door.’
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