On Doors

One of the weirdest things about old school Dungeons and Dragons is how doors work. 

From Book III: The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures:

Generally, doors will not open by turning the handle or by a push. Doors must be forced open by strength, a roll of a 1 or 2 indicating the door opens, although smaller and lighter characters may be required to roll a 1 to open doors. There can be up to three characters attempting to force open a door, but this will disallow them rapid reaction to anything awaiting them on the other side. Most doors will automatically close, despite the difficulty in opening them. Doors will automatically open for monsters, unless they are held shut against them by characters. Doors can be wedged open by means of spikes, but there is a one-third chance (die 5–6) that the spike will slip and the door will shut.

 

From this we learn 3 things: 

1. Doors in the dungeon are usually stuck, requiring a die roll to force them open.

2. Doors automatically close behind the characters.

3. Doors automatically open for monsters.

Point 3 is especially strange and many have debated why this is. Consensus seems to be it’s just part of the “mythic underworld” in the same way that monsters can see in the dark but characters cannot, and a monster that joins the party instantly loses this ability. The rules are just different down here.

But leaving aside the “why”, let’s look at how these oddities affect game play.

Stuck Doors

First, stuck doors create barriers within the maze, reducing the number of available paths or discouraging certain paths. This makes discovering secret doors, alternate paths, and mapping the layout of the dungeon valuable, especially when the party must evade a powerful monster.

This rule also interacts interestingly with the rules for listening and surprise. Characters may attempt to hear noise behind doors to avoid being surprised. But characters have to roll a die to force open a door, and failing to open it will automatically alert monsters on the other side, eliminating the chance for surprise. This presents a choice between attempting to open doors that sound quiet (presumably unoccupied) or trying to force doors to occupied areas in hope of earning surprise.

Up to three characters can attempt to force a door, but will then be unable to immediately react. The choice here is between increasing the likelihood of opening the door, or having more characters ready to face what is on the other side. Worst of all, if the characters fail to hear monsters on the other side (such as silent undead) and fail to open the door on the first try, now the monsters are alerted and have a chance to surprise the characters.

Doors Automatically Close

Second, doors automatically close behind the characters, presumably becoming stuck again. This cuts off avenues of escape if the party finds themselves fleeing a powerful monster, and creates tension as the party desperately tries to force the door while fending off the monster. The choice for each character is clear: help try to force the door, or fight? This conundrum is extra delightful when the tanky characters have the best chance of opening the door. Again mapping the dungeon layout accurately, locating secret doors, and having many known alternate paths becomes extremely valuable. In addition we have two other strategies for dealing with closed doors: spikes and the Knock spell.

Once a door is open, characters may attempt to keep it open by wedging it with spikes, but there is a chance the wedge will fail and it will close again anyway. Is it worth the time and noise to wedge it open? May we need to quickly flee back this way?

Alternatively, the only guaranteed way to open a door is the Magic User spell Knock. At first blush Knock doesn’t have the combat utility of Sleep or Charm Person, but when a stuck, locked, or held door stands between the party and escape from a particularly nasty foe, its value in this game becomes immediately apparent.

Doors Automatically Open for Monsters

Finally, the strangest thing is that doors do not hinder the monsters - they open automatically unless held shut by the characters. The rules for physically holding a door closed against monsters are left up to the referee but should the party wish to continue fleeing and leave barriers behind them, one option is the Magic User spell Hold Portal. This spell keeps a door, gate, etc. magically held closed for 2d6 turns.

Hold Portal also lacks some of the combat utility of other spells but should the party become trapped or require a turn or two of rest (another oft-overlooked rule of dungeon exploration), they will be grateful indeed that the Magic User memorized this spell.

Knock and Hold Portal as Spells

As an aside, while Knock clearly has utility in locating secret doors and forcing open locked doors or gates, I believe its value is drastically increased and the need for a Hold Portal spell is altogether borne out of dungeon doors behaving in this very strange fashion. I’ve yet to see Magic Users memorize either in my own games but I imagine more stuck doors of this kind in my dungeons might quickly change that.

Conclusion

Though odd, the implications of stuck doors on game play are significant if wholly embraced. They create barriers that offer the exploring party interesting choices, enhance and reward good mapping as a mini-game, create tension as the party flees dangerous monsters for whom they are no obstacle, and birth two spells to tempt the Magic User that would otherwise be of suspect utility.

Adventurers of the Uknown

If you like minimal old school rules and haven't run across Searchers of the Unknown - you're welcome. This is a collection of rules and hacks based on the idea that a PC doesn't need to be any more mechanically complex than an old school monster stat black.

Here is my personal edit of the original, plus supplements for spell casters and demi-humans that I've named Adventurers of the Unknown. Teaser: 

 

If a Goblin stat block is

AC13 MV12 HD1-1 4hp #AT1 1d6

Why make PCs more complex? Character comes from role play, deeds, and loot acquired, not character building.

Clerics heal in temples. Wizards study magic in towers. Only Adventurers fight monsters and loot treasure from dungeons.

Short Term Goals

The Problem with Hoard of the Dragon Queen (Spoilers!)

One of the problems of the D&D 5E adventure module Hoard of the Dragon Queen is the goal is too grand at the outset. The adventure is slightly unclear when it should be revealed to the players that the ultimate goal is to stop the dragon cult from raising Tiamat from hell, but it seems to be no later than chapter 3 of the first book when the players are about third level. Yet, the resolution of that goal is not until the end of the second book, Rise of Tiamat, when the PCs are around fifteenth level.

Not knowing that, any reasonable party asks themselves - how do we stop the cult from raising Tiamat? Shockingly the adventure assumes the party will be content to spend the first eight levels of play simply tracking the treasure to find out where it goes and what the cult intends to do with it, but never finding the answer.

It's also unclear whether preventing some amount of treasure from reaching its ultimate destination will slow or stop the cult, or what the PCs could possibly do besides follow the treasure to find out more. It also assumes that the PCs are more motivated to stop the cult than to take a large amount of treasure for themselves and leave.

What I Learned

Running this module taught me a few things about adventure writing and what the word "adventure" should mean.

Most adventures should reach a satisfying conclusion within a few sessions.

Players need to feel a sense of progress. Don't put a goal in front of the players that they cannot do anything meaningful about within a reasonable amount of time. A major milestone or satisfying conclusion should be attainable within a few sessions of play, certainly every character level.

Plot threads should vary in length.

Players should feel natural oscillations between tension and resolution in every session. In addition to 1-2 session adventures, sprinkle in more wandering monsters and random encounters - challenges unrelated to the adventure that can be resolved or circumvented immediately.

I don't mean to fuel edition wars, but when even simple combats started taking 30+ minutes to resolve, we sacrificed wandering monsters and random encounters. We compromised short plot threads and fast oscillations between tension and resolution. When D&D leans heavily into the narrative journey of the heroes, we need to cram the whole Campbellian Monomyth into a reasonable amount of time. The result is we prune anything not immediately pertaining to the main story, and lose all of the shorter plot threads.

What's worse, when we prune the shorter threads and the un-related random encounters, everything feels critically linked to the plot - like the PCs are at the center of a vast conspiracy. That can be fun, but it can also feel like both a quantum ogre and slog. No matter where the PCs go they encounter the main plot and over 15 levels of play every milestone is a baby step in a swamp.

Wait on campaign-level villains.

Don't reveal campaign-level villains or plots too early. In fact, don't even develop them. Many GMs have brilliant, intricate plots fit for an epic fantasy novel. But in an RPG you don't control the protagonists, so you can't control what they're interested in. It's very difficult to keep up the machinations of an ultimate villain in the background of a campaign and the payoff the GM is hoping for ("He was there all along pulling invisible strings and making your lives miserable - the shadow lurking behind every villain you've faced!") is rarely worth the effort.

It's far better to play a sequence of loosely linked adventures and let a grand villain emerge. You could never have foreseen how much the party would despise that NPC, nor how frequently they would reappear and escape again. When your campaign is mature and you're ready for one final adventure, only then do you choose the final dastardly villain.

Conclusion

In short, HotDQ is one, long, linear adventure that offers little in the way of milestones or satisfying resolution. Both it and your adventures could be vastly improved by discrete, non-linear locations and events and seasoned with variable-length plot threads and random encounters. The movements of the cult make an excellent backdrop for an otherwise unrelated game that the party could choose to involve themselves in. Save the campaign-level plots and villains for when the game has actually progressed into something resembling a campaign and the characters are high enough level to do something meaningful about them.

Random Encounters

Go deep enough for meaning and wide enough to be surprised and inspired.
Determine number appearing, leaders, special items, and activity in advance.
Determine surprise and distance during play.
Don't improvise encounters with monsters you've never used before - they deserve a fantastic, memorable encounter demonstrating how they're unique.
The world can be generated/discovered during play, but the players must believe it exists prior to perceiving it, and what they discover must remain established. Locations shouldn't move.

Re-focusing on the Characters

As a DM I find myself spending far too much time tinkering with rules and reading or writing about adventures that have no players. This is of limited use. Adventures written in a vacuum have to assume a very bland, typical, balanced party and table - they must satisfy the lowest common denominator.

Instead, harvest these raw materials and use them to prepare a small sandbox area of your game world as it exists before the players get involved. Stop there and go no further until you find some players and have them make characters. That is the target audience for your work. Tailor it to them.

If you have one or more ongoing games, check yourself. How much of this dabbling will actually see play? Are you fantasizing about a hypothetical table instead of delighting your real one?

Think about the players and characters you do have. Siphon your RPG daydreaming away from these black holes and pour it into fancies too tempting to resist. You know your players and their characters. What possibilities could the next session hold?

How long does looting take?

The old trope - "I loot the body!" But how long does it actually take to pick a dead man's pockets, relieve him of his weapons and armor, and assess their value? How long does it take to gather up piles of scattered coins? Why can PCs instantly sort, count, and store coins of mixed denominations with no repercussions? Convenience?

Usually the tension in a dungeon crawl is the decision between exploring for more treasure, and retreating with what you have before you run out of light or food or run into a nasty wandering monster. Surely that tension is magnified significantly if it's between looting a hoard and fleeing?

I would like to see looting take some amount of time akin to a "turn" in an old-school dungeon crawl. Perhaps in a single "turn" (~5-10 minutes) each PC can examine and assess a single piece of armor or weaponry, sort through a pile of treasure for a gem or piece of jewelry, briskly scoop up some quantity of unsorted coins, or extract a smaller quantity of sorted ones. At the end of each of these turns the DM checks for wandering monsters.

Perhaps the perfect encounter is a treasure guarded by a trap that alerts nearby monsters.

The Escape Encounter

A common problem with Open Table or West Marches style play is that each session needs to end in a safe "base" so any new combination of players (and therefore PCs) can venture out together in the next session with no continuity errors. But if part of the game is navigating a dungeon or wilderness, the PCs need to leave themselves enough time to do so and that's hard to estimate if there's a risk of random encounters or getting lost. We also don't want to overly trivialize this travel. So what options are there?

1. Trivialize the Travel

You don't want to. But you could. If they're not in the middle of an encounter, this is the simplest option.

2. Escape the Dungeon Table

You could roll on a table to determine the fate of the party. The Alexandrian has a good post on this.

3. Escape the Dungeon Encounter

What if, in the event that the PCs are not already safely back in town near the end of the session, the DM mandates that there will be one final random encounter? Leave enough time to resolve that encounter - probably 30 minutes in newer editions, less in OSR or pre-3rd Edition games. Then do the following:

1. Roll on the Random Encounter table. If there are multiple routes back to town, perhaps the PC's choice of route affects what table is rolled on or what encounters are possible.
2. The DM places the encounter anywhere that makes sense on the chosen route - probably a choke point that requires the PCs to sneak past, or fight past and then retreat. This encounter should be basically impossible to avoid. (If there was a room that had some neat terrain features or a trap that went undiscovered, that's great. If the DM chooses to place the encounter in the wilderness, be sure to factor in any mounts, wagons, and hirelings left outside the dungeon.)
3. Set up and resolve the encounter as normal.
4. Once the PCs have snuck past, spoken peaceably with, bribed, fled, or killed the monster(s), whoever escapes automatically arrives safely back in town with whatever treasure and XP they brought with them.

There's a ton of reasons why this would be awesome.

1. End the session on an intense high-note. Great climax.
2. Speed and stealth become super important. Do the PCs risk taking off heavy armor? What type of mounts/wagons/hirelings did they bring?
3. It's an encounter where the default goal is not kill the monster and take its treasure. In fact, as it's a wandering monster, it shouldn't have any treasure.
4. If you can talk or bribe your way past the monster, high-charisma PCs and having treasure is super important.
5. If you have to fight, Morale becomes super important. You may not need to kill them, just scare them off. Undead, oozes, and constructs become really scary.
6. If you can't scare them off, positioning becomes super important. Charge through, use crowd control Spells, and execute that Fighting Retreat (a rule that affected attacks and AC in older editions).
7. Once you have an opening, flee! Use chase rules if your system has them. For once your speed matters and fast monsters are really scary. You might have to drop treasure, caltrops, flaming oil, or equipment to lighten the load!
8. Getting lost matters. Idk - I'm just making shit up now but perhaps if you're lost before the encounter or somehow get lost fleeing from the encounter something else bad happens!
9. If an ally goes down or gets stuck behind enemy lines - will you really stay and fight to the death?

All. Good. Shit.