Getting Systematic For That Dungeon

It has been a while since I wrote about my solo dungeon crawl project, and to be honest, I've not done a lot of work on it in the meantime, but neither have I been entirely idle, so here's a catch-up on where we are.

You may remember that I decided to try making a solo journalling roleplaying game based on a fantasy dungeon crawl. So you play a character on an adventure in an underground cave complex, the game provides prompts, challenges, and situations to overcome, and you write a record of what occurs in the developing story.

I've been trying to figure out a game system to handle this, and last time I wrote on the subject I had come to the conclusion that I wanted to be light on rules and light on detail, leaving room for the player to fill in details. 

Since then, I have been leaning even further into the light touch territory. So here is an outline of the game system as I am currently writing it up. This is going over a fair bit of stuff I talked about in the previous post, but it feels to me like it is getting more solid.

If I were to make a dungeon crawl game, I'd be very tempted
to go for an unoriginal (some might say classic)
"adventurer entering a dark cave" image for the cover.

As a player, you control a hero and their sidekick. The narrative conceit is that you are actually the sidekick, recording the exploits of your more mighty companion.

Character creation is essentially rolling for (or choosing) some broad skills from a couple of tables, which could result in, for example, the hero might have athletic prowess along with a quick mind and knowledge of natural things, while the sidekick might be good at armed melee combat and solving puzzles. I have tables for generating this, but I don't think I have them "right"; they are, however, something to get started with.

You also have a number of health points (run out of those and the hero dies) and fortune points (run out of those and you can't escape any consequences of things going wrong).

When something happens to your little team, you basically have to decide which of your characters' abilities could be used to overcome the problem and write this into your journal. I won't provide detailed guidance about what is and is not applicable - it's a matter of deciding for yourself. I was previously thinking that there would be a limit to the number of times you can use each thing, but for now, not so much. Each thing that you apply adds a +1 to your ability to overcome it. Then you roll a die, add those modifiers, and if you meet or beat a target number, you succeed and write this up as appropriate. If you fail, then failure by a small amount results in the loss of either health or fortune as you sustain an injury or ride your luck to get out in one piece, or if you fail by a lot, you lose both health and fortune. 

I reckon you can probably award yourself additional fortune if you use an ability you haven't used before, or if you are able to write in a thematic link to something that you had previously encountered - in particular, omens, which I'm planning to introduce as part of the journey to the dungeon.

Yes, this can easily be abused, but having decided that this is more about writing up an adventure than it is about detailed Old School style dungeoneering (there are plenty of very good options it that's your jam), I feel freed and able to just go with the flow. Of course, once I share a playable version with other people, feedback could completely blow my assumptions, but we'll see. 

Just as a little aside, in board game design I would always advise that it's a good idea to just get something, anything that is even remotely playable to the table as quickly as possible, even if it is just for a solo test, and not spend too long "theorycrafting" and thinking about how best to create everything in the game. So why am I not following that advice in this project? 

Well, it just feels like the style of game this is allows me to just think it through and gradually write more stuff down. I can even try rolling on tables I create and think about what I do with the results, so in a sense I am testing as I go, but if I am honest, I am not doing that very much. I feel that what I should be doing is settling down for an evening or two and blasting out a first draft that I can then try playing through, but I think my brain isn't really in the right place for that yet. So I plod onwards, and every entry in every table that I create is a step in the right direction. We'll get there eventually.

I was going to go further with this post, but I feel that I would be better off just posting smaller bites for now and try to get the momentum rolling. Next up: travelling to the dungeon, omens and stuff, and maybe the start of the dungeon itself. And I'd better also actually get my working document into a state that I can share.

Preparing For That Dungeon

I have thought about a bunch of things, read through the basic rules of another game, D100 Dungeon (hat tip to Andy J for the recommendation), and written a few more bits into my working document, but not made a huge amount of progress in the last month. I'll use this post to discuss some of the decisions I have made so far, and muse about a few of the other bits that are up in the air...

One of the key things I have noted from the games I have looked at in the solo dungeon crawl space is that they are almost exclusively pretty highly "statted" games with very much a D&D vibe to them with skills, attributes, equipment lists, classes, levels, and so on. This is not a bad thing - dungeon crawling as a genre feels to me like it should be a tactical challenge as much as anything, so rules for a game of this type will, of course, support this play style.

Let's not do that.

Stepping back a little, one of my favourite roleplaying systems is in Over The Edge by Jonathan Tweet (I'm basing this off the 1st edition). I admit that, while I really enjoyed reading the book, I have never played the actual game in its original setting. I have, however, used its core system in other settings (it worked well for me for a 7th Sea one-shot, for instance) and love its simplicity and flexibility. The basic concept is that you have four traits: one is a central trait (often a profession, trade, or similar), two are side traits (hobbies, interests, side-hustles, etc), and one is a flaw. The positive traits give you dice to roll to achieve things that fit within the scope of that trait (fuzzy definitions to be decided by the games master) and the flaw causes dice to be deducted from your rolls when it applies. 

I'm not proposing to do this myself, but using this as partial inspiration, I think character creation will effectively be to simply define some broadly applicable strengths. I may add in some sort of flaw later if it seems appropriate. The OTE system relies on agreement between the game moderator (as OTE expands GM) and the player on the interpretation of whether a trait or flaw is applicable at any given time. That won't work in a solo game without either heaps of lookup tables or challenges in the game being defined with a set of applicable traits. I'm reckoning on focusing on the journaling aspect of my game, so the important thing is more to provide interesting writing prompts rather than a tactical game, so it'll be mostly left to the player to decide. If you want to cheat, fine, this sort of game isn't really about winning or losing, it's more about having an engaging experience and creating an interesting story.

The idea is that you play a party of two characters: a renowned hero with mighty skills, and you, their sidekick, who can help out from time to time, and who will record the tale of the adventure for posterity.

How does this all fit together to actually make a game? To be honest, I'm not entirely sure yet, but what I am working on as a core mechanism is that an encounter in the dungeon has a description, including a suggestion of what sort of challenge it is...

"You enter a cavern with a pool of water in the middle and two other exits. There are a whole buttload of goblins, counting their saucepans. There is a boss goblin who looks angry. This could turn violent."

I mean, not Shakespeare (or even Gygax), and I need a way to generate that, but this is a problem for future me, who I'm sure can handle it.

As the player, you decide how you will use the skills and traits (as well as equipment, magic items, etc.) to deal with the situation. I currently think that each of the things you can bring into play may have a number of times you can use them (boxes to tick off), and each thing you use adds +1 to a die roll to resolve the encounter. The modified roll is checked against a results table (with other factors being taken into account) and you get an outcome from that which indicates how successful your efforts have been, so then it's down to you to turn that into some narrative in your journal. If things don't go perfectly, you are likely to lose some luck or health (two scores tracked on your character sheet), and maybe be forced to retreat or something.

I'm currently in the process of writing up the character generation element, which effectively takes place at the tavern in the village while getting the call to action. Then the idea is to have a "travel to the dungeon" section, where there can be some sort of encounter that could set the tone for the rest of the game. Finding a way to link encounters together thematically will be an interesting challenge; to a large extent this can be left to the player's narrative, but there should be some help or encouragement for this from the game mechanisms, maybe something like gaining a checkbox somewhere if you make a link between certain things.

One step at a time though. My aim for the next few weeks is to get the character generation and travel sections into a first draft form, so it can be played to that point. Oh, and also work on some other projects along the way.

Alone in the Dungeon

I've been tinkering around with yet another project, and one that is very different from others that I have worked on in recent years, and is one that I don't expect to ever pitch to a publisher, or even try to monetise. This is just something to play with and use as a learning experience. 

But I'll build in to that... First a little background...

As a teenager I played quite a lot of roleplaying games; mostly Middle-earth Role Playing, D&D, or AD&D (yes, at that time, Dungeons and Dragons and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons were separate products), but a few others here and there, including homebrews. One of the things that really interested me at that time was a few pages in the AD&D (1st edition) Dungeon Masters Guide: the first few appendices were for generating random dungeons, wilderness areas, monster encounters, etc., enabling you to play a D&D-based adventure game as a solo. It was kinda like a pencil-and-paper "Roguelike" game, and it was a fun thing to do when not playing "properly". 

There were also choose-your-own-adventure style books, like the Fighting Fantasy line, for your solo adventuring needs, if that fit your requirements.

Anyway, time passed and my engagement with roleplaying games varied. I've relatively recently been catching up a bit with developments (and playing a little), and one of the things that has been growing in popularity is "journaling RPGs". Whereas my old solo AD&D games involved drawing a map and then rolling dice for fights against monsters, and then rolling for loot acquired, this newer style is more about randomly generating events and writing prompts, which allow you to write a story about your character's exploits and develop their life through a series of journal entries. This was absolutely possible to do with the AD&D rules, but it didn't occur to me at the time, and the system was way more complicated that is necessary to provide the appropriate prompts.

A few solo dungeon delves and journaling RPGs: Notequest, 
Zimo's Getting Up, Apothecaria, 2D6 Dungeon, and Four Against Darkness

I was spurred into looking into this sort of gaming partly by my wife discovering them over the last couple of years or so, and then a bit more by a friend creating one about being a graffiti artist earlier this year, and as a result I developed an urge to try making a dungeon crawl game that leans into the journaling RPG form a bit more. 

I've done a little looking around for comparable games, and posted about the idea on Mastodon (my main is on tabletop.social, if you want to come and say hello) and got a few suggestions for things to look at too. Most of the clearly dungeon crawl games that I have seen (e.g. Notequest and Four Against Darkness) are effectively smoother versions of the solo AD&D: draw maps, battle monsters, acquire loot. There are some others (of those I have seen, Colostle is probably closest) that do something dungeon-crawl-adjacent, while being a proper journaling game. I've seen a few other games that are more or less adjacent to what I want to do, but nothing quite in the same zone - not that that would be a problem anyway. My searching hasn't been exhaustive though, so if you know of something that sounds a bit similar, please do let me know in the comments (or elsewhere).

So what am I planning and what have I done so far?

This is very much a background/side project for me to tinker with when I have any inspiration, and it is currently a document with some section headings and I am starting to fill in text and tables for randomly generating stuff. I've not got enough to actually play with yet, but there are odd bits and pieces that I'll start connecting up soon.

I'm not trying to come up with a flexible game system or a full campaign yet, instead creating a single adventure to play through, albeit one with some variation in how it can play out. The idea is that you, the player, are the companion and chronicler of a great protagonist or hero (think Watson to Holmes, or Ukko to Sláine), and you arrive together in a village and get sent to a nearby dungeon to deal with the evil wizard. You journey to the dungeon, work your way through a few levels of challenges, and eventually confront the wizard to, hopefully, save the day. All this time, you are creating a map to show the path of your adventure, and keeping a journal to record the daring deeds done in the dungeon. If the hero dies, maybe you escape to recount the tale; if you die, maybe the hero finishes the journal on your behalf.

I was originally planning to have a relatively lightweight combat/encounter system that would allow for some detail in how things work out, but on reflection I have decided to abstract out a load more, so that effectively there is a single die roll, applied to the situation, after which the hero and companion can apply special abilities to improve the result. This should effectively result in an outcome that could either simply be written down (if you aren't wanting to do creative writing), or could be used as a writing prompt. So, an example outcome could be: "3 orcs attack in the passageway. The hero uses her great axe to fight them but it looks like she will be seriously injured and have to retreat. The companion uses his stealth to help, and the hero uses her acrobatics skills. As a result, the orcs are slain and the hero only takes a minor wound." It's not exactly Shakespeare, but it's a basis to build a journal entry around, detailing how those skills are used to affect the outcome.

Remember how I said that I'm planning some variation in how the game plays out? One aspect of this is that you record certain events and encounters in an area of your character sheet, and some of these things affect the likelihood of other things happening. So, for instance, if you start encountering undead creatures, that increases the chances of meeting more undead, and makes it more likely that the wizard at the end is a necromancer or some sort of undead spellcaster. Again, this isn't crazy clever stuff, but it would be nice if things link together in some sort of a thematic way as it all plays out.

There will be a load of tables to roll dice against. This is a thing I used to love making, so we'll see if I still have the chops to do this sort of thing. In the meantime, I figure that at least writing a bit of this stuff down should solidify some of it in my head. 

Challenge to self: make some more progress and make another post on the subject next month.