I played an excellent game run by GM Rondor tonight. We had a blast! However, we did come across an interesting question. To “dungeon crawl” do you take on a perilous journey, or do you have to describe rounding each and every corner, or is there some happy medium?
Perilous journey didn’t seem to cover the right things at first…but as I look at it, even if the “journey” is into the next room (where an encounter is about to happen) it does matter how long it takes you to get there, how many resources you use, and weather you get the drop on the people in the room or not…
Am I thinking about this right? How would you do it? We went room by room, and I was just wondering if there might be a more streamlined way of doing it.
I think if I did it, I’d do it as a perilous journey but have the roles be:
Scout- Get the drop
Leader- Determine time
Explorer- Notice any areas of interest.
Or something like that.
How would you do it?
It depends on if you want to zoom in or zoom out.
Generally, for a dungeon crawl, I like to zoom in, so I wouldn’t use the PJ move. I would let them describe their actions and I’d describe what they see.
I would zoom out and use PJ if they are actually making a journey. Doing that in a dungeon is certainly perilous, so that gets triggered.
I guess, for me, crawling and jouneying are mutually exclusive terms. Though, as I write this, I realize there could be exceptions.
Hey Matt Smith. I agree that two types of undertaking a perilous journey moves would help this. I am going to have to put some more time into how to crate a mechanic that only advance the party incrementally thru the crawl but keeps the fiction moving. This can certainly use some community input.
I don’t usually that move for the interesting bits, like Richard said – when you zoom in you just ask what everone is doing. Not saying you can’t use perilous journey for this, but in general we don’t. Just for when the heroes say I want to get from point A to steading B.
I see what you mean about zooming in and zooming out. I guess it was different for our group just a bit cause we had an end goal in mind.
My wizard had used a ritual and a ranger to get a map of the whole place that we were in. So in a way we did have a “Point A, Point B”
Just learning as we go.
Can’t describe how fun it all was!
It definitely was fun! The thing about dungeon crawling is that it’s incredibly more fun and entertaining to go through and be surprised as to what traps and creatures (and possibly treasures along the way) await us. What I believe slowed the game down a bit was, perhaps, relying a little too much on the map we were using. Maps are great as general place holders, but if the GM and players are able to get through and be on the same page as to where everything is via description and imagination, then that’ll leave more room to focus on the fiction. Otherwise, it was incredibly fun. Our telepathic conversation between your wizard and my druid were hilarious!
I thought so too!
Yeah, when you essentially downloaded the map from my brain to yours I knew we were playing an awesome game.
More than other games, the GM can say yes almost always in DW. It makes for a lot more fun!