Creating Rooms 1: A Room is not a Room

What’s a room?

Space within a building separated by walls according to dictionary. And if you peruse a few popular  dungeons you’ll find plenty of these. But then, sometimes you get something interesting like caverns, rocky tunnels, or courtyards. Typically, they’re still referred to as ‘dungeon rooms’.

What we really need to know is: from a meta, dungeon-designey perspective, what is a room?

In Rules 1 & 2 we defined doors, not as the typically wooden and openable partitions, but as signals for players to alert them to their options for moving through the dungeon space. From there we translated that definition into one that works in an outdoor dungeon. Here, we’re going to do the same thing for rooms. But first, we’re going to a go on a little tangent. Rather I should say, you’re going to go on a little tangent. Click here.

What you just experienced is Zork, one of the precursor’s to many of the video game rpgs you’re probably familiar with. Taking obvious inspiration from D&D, the game was actually going to be called ‘Dungeon’ until TSR shut that down. If you didn’t get the chance to play it a bit, Zork is a text adventure game. They were usually played in a command prompt, wherein the system would tell you in a short paragraph what was around you, and you would enter in what your character did in response using a verb and noun. Not too far off of from ttrpgs, huh?

Zork holds the key to breaking down rooms into their true meta abstract form. See, Zork is situated as a grid of areas, or rooms, and using north, east, west, and south, you move from room to room. Eventually, you’ll probably run into something interesting. Something you can interact with. But you only get the prompt that there’s something to interact with when you’re in the right room to do so, the right room to see the interesting thing. In a nutshell, that’s what dungeon rooms are.

Rooms are devices that tell your players what they can interact with at a given point in time.

The versatility of rooms is that they communicate this info for both the present room, where players are, and all previous rooms through object permanence.

Room A with the red carpet holds a bookcase and a desk containing a bloody knife. Room B with the blue carpet holds a dead body. The players are in Room B. They know that the dead body is in front of them, and they can interact with it. If they want to interact with the bloody knife, they know they need to go back to the red carpet room. Room A.

Really, dungeon rooms are glorified rpg menus.

 

                                                     Anyone remember point and click adventure games?

And if that’s the case, what’s stopping you from having a ‘menu’ of options in an outdoor space instead of an enclosed area?

Well... a few things. In the next couple of posts, we’ll go into what those things are, and how I solve them.

A Reference Map: Outdoor Dungeon Sample Path

Hahaha wow has it been 3 months?

The good news is this 'project' is still alive (laboriously breathing) and kicking (giving out final, spasmodic death rattles). I even sort of have an excuse? I realized early on that being able to present what I'm thinking in a concise manner would require well-created maps, mainly because people won't be used to running traditional dungeon-crawling in the outdoors.

The problem?

I am no artist. Really, the last 3 months of stalling have been for this reason alone. But I may have finally found a solution. Let's hear it for...

*drumroll*

Dungeondraft! Here for all your rpg map needs! Outdoor maps! Indoor maps! And especially, dungeon maps!

Okay, enough shilling, they ain't paying me. Let's jump right into what I've been working on. 

~

Take a look at this section of hallway.

 

Think about how you'd run it in a dungeon-crawl. And I mean one of those real dungeon-crawls, where you're tracking turns and everything. You'd probably narrate the first straight section and tell the players the hallway turns up right up ahead. Then if they proceed and turn to the right, you'd narrate the next section and the left turn. In the next hallway there's an obvious pit trap, so you'd say there's a trap once the party is in a position to see it (depending on light, etc.). After they've navigated the trap, you'd probably pick up narration of the rest of the hallway and how it turns right, followed by right again. A little tedious if you're not used to this type of dungeon-crawl, but necessary because hallways are no different from rooms, containing traps, encounters, and various interesting things. 

Alight, now I'm about to show you essentially the same map. 

This is what I've been calling 'The Winding Path,' one of the earliest room concepts I've been toying with. Squint and tilt your head at the right angle and it is essentially no different from the map before, at least in terms of how you'd run it at the table. Upon entering at the bottom, you say the path runs straight then turns right around a bend up ahead. Another straight section and turn, then you get to the bit with the log bridge over the gorge, zooming in on that because it's a little more involved than walking down a straight path (also because there's an 'encounter' of sorts there). 

Let's see it again, this time labeling some of the concepts I've gone over in previous posts. 

Here we have the bends as doors, places where the path ahead disappears out of sight, thus inviting player interaction whether they want to 'step through' to the unknown. The log also a door, this one inviting player interaction more along the lines of how they want to interact with it. The gorge is an example of a hidden door, more specifically an implied door. It's not the obvious way forward. But maybe it gets your players thinking, 'Where'd this gorge come from?' 'Where does it lead?' It hints at the possibility that maybe they can follow it to interesting content. I'm setting up the first series of rooms as a sort of 'teaching dungeon' for players, aiming to demonstrate some of the ways they can move through an outside environment that they may not be used to. So, to double down on this, in the dungeon this gorge will also contain animal tracks leading one way, noticeable to anyone who sOmEHow ends up in the gorge. The log totally doesn't have a random chance of collapsing. Nope, not at all. 

So there you have it. This is basically another repeat of Rules 1 & 2, this time with visual examples. But I think understanding these concepts is key to running your outdoors as dungeon-crawls, and not having them inadvertently end up being point- or hex-crawls. 

But we can't dwell on the past forever. And eventually, if we're going to talk dungeons, we need to talk dungeon rooms. Yep, outdoor dungeons have them too, in certain senses. But there's quite a few things we're going to have to take into account to make them work. So that's what we'll be discussing next time. 

Apologies to previous readers, I really need to figure out how to get blogger to tell me when someone comments. So I don't go and disappear again, I'll say it now: next post by August 22.