Tuesday 14 September 2021

The Modern Dungeoneering Campaign Needs To Be Crunchy

Outside of my house there is what the locals nonchalantly call an old 'mine tap' - the entrance to a former mine. You wouldn't know it, as it is underneath the road and completely covered in tarmac. But it is there all the same, the mine itself having apparently been decommissioned in 1935. This worried us when we were first thinking of buying the place. Then we learned that the entire area is riddled with these old mines and, as the estate agent put it, if it was a problem for us it would be a problem for the approximately 10,000 other people who live around us too. I'm not sure why that reassured us, but it did.

In any event, it conjured up an image of an entire hillside (the town in which I live spills down the whole side of a steep escarpment) burrowed through with tunnels, the existence of which is at best at the fringes of the awareness of the locals, and which is accessible perhaps to a small circle of secret urban spelunkers. 

I was going to say that this screamed D&D to me, but that wouldn't be strictly accurate. It screamed 'modern dungeoneering', but D&D is a singularly bad system for modern settings. This is something I am sure have written about before, though I can't quite remember where, but the abstraction of D&D combat and the concept of hit points disintegrates once guns are involved, and the 'feel' in play of levels, XP and so on is all wrong for the real world; anyone who doubts this need only try to run d20 Modern, the game that time forgot. 

No: the closer an RPG setting is to our own experience, the more crunchy I think it needs to be. We can suspend disbelief about all manner of things when dragons and magic missiles are there to be imagined. When the game is set in our reality, in contemporary society, we are keenly aware of what is and is not possible. We want a system that reflects that - at least if action and derring-do are going to be involved. Our thoughts turn to GURPS, to CP:2020, to the Hero System, and so on. We want things to feel as though they matter, because to us the real world matters - we experience it not as imagination, but as 'lived experience', and loose approximation won't do. 

What lives in the old mines buried beneath a city? Ghosts, giant vermin, cultists, murderers? No doubt. A slumbering god? Quite likely. Demonic entities awakened by the sound of mining, Moria-like? For sure. But what is the PCs' aim? Not amassing gold, perhaps - not literally, anyway - but once one has access to the mines, the geography of the town is entirely rearranged; one is not bound by roads, walls, pavements, fences, but by the tunnels themselves, and the tunnels might go anywhere. The ability to appear and disappear as if from nowhere is surely a burglar's dream - not to mention an assassin's, paparazzo's, or private investigator's.

20 comments:

  1. Perhaps with Esoteric Enterprises?

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    1. I like the idea as a more gameable version of Unknown Armies.

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    2. EE has amazing world building options, but having run a 12 month campaign, fails badly at immersion in combat and magic situations---both parts essentially straight ports from D&D.

      Funny, because the idea of the straight up D&D party, but in the modern day, is extremely attractive on many levels.

      A worthwhile, but failed experiment.

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    3. I only ran it for maybe two sessions. I still like it, but the system felt a little flat to me. Probably because I was subconsciously trying to run it as an urban fantasy game using D&D rather than D&D set in a modern underworld.

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  2. How fascinating. I would immediately go in the opposite direction.

    If D&D were the starting point, I'd go towards something simpler, with a resource management system and combat more intuitive to the modern age.

    You lose dice from your Health pool and become wounded or hungry. In each case it would mean you are rolling fewer dice and/or the difficulty numbers are higher/more successes are needed.

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    1. I'd go even further and probably just use a storygame... maybe a Dungeon Bitches hack, or maybe something more streamlined and minimalist, at any rate. The allure of most of what the OSR offers over storygames-- resource management and logistics and shit-- is kinda lost for me when you strip away the fantasy layer, and as long as there are still robust exploration procedures to support immersive movement through shared imagined spaces then I can only imagine that a modern-set game, with characters who could conceivably exist next to us irl, would benefit tremendously from focus on interpersonal relationships.

      I absolutely disagree with the premise that we don't experience "real life" as narratives. we're constantly telling stories about ourselves TO ourselves, justifying our existence through personal mythologies. We reshape our memories to fit our conceptions of who we are, recontextualizing choices and selectively focusing on particular details. And then we're suddenly capable of feats we never dared to try when something we love is on the line, that's some shit. The one thing I know for sure about a game set in a "realistic" setting is that the answer shouldn't be on your character sheet. because real people don't have character sheets-- not static ones, anyway.

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    2. Who said we don't experience 'real life' as narratives? All I said was that we know it very well and have different expectations of it to fantasy settings.

      With that said, I do see where you're coming from, but I think the resource management/logistics/exploration elements would be really interesting, and actually feel more pertinent, in a modern setting.

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  3. d20 Modern was a great game, as long as you were playing it as "cinematic world" (like the film within the film world in Schwarzenegger's Last Action Hero) instead of the real world.

    I could see this city over a vast web of mines idea working really well for a dystopian near future game. Best way to avoid the patrols and surveillance cameras and strike out at the fascists in control, then disappear.

    For a more real-world setting, it's great for smugglers and criminals, if that's the type of game you want to run. Or maybe the smugglers and criminals already use the caves, and the PCs are John Q. Law and need to root them out.

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    1. I think Zak S's old post about the PCs being better off as rogues than police is an important one. I've always liked the idea of running a police (or law enforcement more broadly) campaign, but in practice it's hard to avoid it becoming a railroad.

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    2. Non sequitur: you could run a great police campaign in Judge Dredd... which worked as a classic Sandbox. Since everybody was a perp and crime was everywhere, choice was maintained... not to mention the city crawl aspects of MC1.

      Must run it again soon.

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    3. You just reminded me that I have the Judge Dredd RPG and was planning to read/review it for the blog.

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    4. I would say it flourishes with the Block Generation/citizen criminal record system from the floorplans supplement. I've never been able to lay my hands on the Companion, but it seems like it would be a decent add.

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  4. I am not sure I agree with your thesis, although I used to, once. Today, I am not so sure. To bring in a concrete example, Into the Odd is a surprisingly good game for modern dungeoneering, and it goes in the exact opposite direction as the crunchy modern systems. It is dirt simple and extremely deadly; guns will assuredly kill you if they should hit their mark (there is no to hit roll, you just roll damage if combat develops). We played its modern, Vietnam-era offshoot, Into the Jungle, and it did a bang-up job: it felt like playing a pack of expendable grunts in hostile territory.

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    1. You may be right, actually. I have played Into the Odd and could never quite reconcile myself to the 'hitting automatically' thing, but I recognise the rationale for it.

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    2. I wonder whether the crunch/rules lite dichotomy is actually all that useful, ultimately. I'm not sure whether I would call Feng Shui 1e (for example) crunchy (some might call it medium, whatever), but it's systems work for the genre it's supposed to be emulating.

      Specificity is the key to good magic. So it goes with systems, imho.

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  5. So I've seen modern games tack in both directions: hard crunchiness with a certain escalation in damage to reflect that lucky shot to the head, or fairly abstracted like one system where you were either able to fight or out of the fight, with no further delineation.

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    1. It's fairly common in wargames, too (even the "crunchy" wargames), so I'm not surprised.

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  6. You can go both ways: one can just as easily argue that the closer an RPG setting is to our own experience, the less crunchy it needs to be, since our experience and understanding enable us to make sensible decisions and rulings on the fly.

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    1. Yes, I think ultimately you and the others who have made that observation are probably right.

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