Roger the GS over at Roles, Rules, & Rolls posted some interesting thoughts regarding the use of the techniques I described in Xandering the Dungeon in small, one-shot scenarios. This, in turn, prompted me to ruminate on the application of xandering techniques on small scales.

Xandering isn’t a cure-all. But, in my experience, it does scale to almost any size and it’s almost always useful to at least consider xandering as a potential tool even if you ultimately decide against it. (I might even go so far as to say that you should default to it unless you have a really good reason not to. In no small part because, as I mentioned in the original essay, this is actually the way the real world works 99 times out of 100.)

To demonstrate what I mean about using xandering techniques at any scale, let me give you an example at an extremely small scale to emphasize the point: A two-room “dungeon” that I just got done designing for an Eclipse Phase scenario.

The “dungeon” in this case is actually a warehouse: The first room is a small security office. The second room is the big warehouse floor itself. Since it’s only two rooms, there’s really no way that we could apply xandering techniques, right?

(Spoilers: That’s a rhetorical question.)

Let’s take a look at a few xandering techniques:

First, multiple entrances: Skylight(s) on the roof of the warehouse. The loading dock. A door leading into the security office. (From a tactical standpoint, this is infinitely more interesting than just having a single door leading into the building.)

Second, multiple paths: Rather than just having one connector between the security office and the warehouse, what if we include several? There’s the door. A ladder leading to a trapdoor in the roof that gives you access to the skylights. Let’s toss in a trapdoor leading to a crawlspace that’s used for electrical wiring; it’ll let you pop up right in the middle of the warehouse (or maybe in multiple places). (If that crawlspace is actually a tunnel that leads over to the exterior generator we could also add that as yet another entrance to the complex.)

That crawlspace would also qualify as a secret or unusual path (another of our xandering techniques).

This obviously isn’t the only way to design a warehouse. (It might even be overkill.) But it does demonstrate how you can use xandering techniques even on the tiniest scales can organically create interesting tactical and strategic choices.

Back to Xandering the Dungeon

Seeing the development of the whole “friend-zone” concept is, in fact, enlightening about the pervasive misogyny that’s still culturally foundational in America despite decades of progress.

It started as an observation that once someone had placed you in the “friend zone” of their mind, it was difficult for them to consider a romantic relationship with you.

It then picked up negative connotations when it was applied to women who flirtatiously imply the potential of a future relationship in order to have men perform favors for them that they would not do for normal friends. This sort of thing probably wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the pervasive cultural assumption that it’s the man’s role in society to earn money and, therefore, the way to woo a female mate is to throw money at her in the form of gifts and so forth. But up to this point the term was at least describing an actual thing that actually happens.

But then the wheels come off the bus, because in the lightning-fast memetic chamber of the internet the term continued to expand: Now it was any woman who politely said “no” when you asked her out on a date. But, of course, the negative ethical connotations stuck to the term — so now the entire concept of “friend-zoning” implies that any woman who says “no” to a man’s sexual advances is doing something ethically wrong.

This also simultaneously expands the other side of the term: It now applies to any man who is friends with a woman. But here, too, the negative connotations stuck to the term. As a result, it implies that “just” being friends with a woman is somehow a punishment or a failure.

This rapid progression from useful concept to misogynist ideology is all built around the lingering cultural scaffolding in which women are objects of desire which are pursued like treasure. Although this scaffolding is slowly being demolished, it’s both interesting and depressing to note (from the sufficiently safe distance of being a white male) that, like any construction site, this transitional period can actually be more vile and misogynistic in some ways than what came before: Leave intact the “pursuit of the virgin” but strip away the idea of “no sex before marriage” and you replace Lord Wessex from Shakespeare in Love with pick-up artists who treat women like Super Mario Bros. power-ups and their sexual resumes like a Call of Duty leaderboard. Leave intact the idea of “no sex before marriage” as a moral imperative, on the other hand, and you end up with all women being “whores”. The jagged edges of these half-forgotten cultural memes can be dangerous. (Which doesn’t mean, of course, that we shouldn’t be getting rid of them. That would be like arguing that the slaves shouldn’t have been emancipated because they were more vulnerable to lynchings without the protection of their owners. It just means that you have to anticipate that it will be hard work and a tough slog before the light at the end of the tunnel completely banishes the darkness behind.)

A fellow named Caleb asked me in an e-mail recently why I’m not a fan of the way GUMSHOE handles clues. In writing a reply to him, I think I’ve found a better way of expressing my personal distaste for GUMSHOE’s approach than I have in the past.

Start by considering a scenario with locations A, B, and C.

First, let’s assume that each of these locations contains a clue which points to the next location. GUMSHOE says, “Oh no! What if they don’t find a clue? Then the adventure can’t continue!” And in order to solve this problem, GUMSHOE says, “It’s OK. We’ll just remove the resolution mechanic and we’ll simply assume that the PCs succeed.”

Investigative scenarios have been done wrong since the early days of roleplaying games. As a consequence, they’re hard to run and prone to grind to a halt. (…) You have to search for the clue that takes you to the next scene. If you roll well, you get the clue. If not, you don’t — and the story grinds to a halt. (…) GUMSHOE, therefore, makes the finding of clues all but automatic, as long as you get to the right place in the story and have the right ability. (Esoterrorists, pg. 26-27)

In other words, we’ll remove the chokepoint of failure by simply removing the possibility of failure.

So what’s the problem?

Well, now let’s assume that each of these locations contains a monster which you have to fight before you move to the next location.

Presented with this problem, we would expect GUMSHOE to say something like, “Oh no! What if they don’t defeat the monster? Then the adventure can’t continue!”

And in order to solve this problem, GUMSHOE would then say, “Well, that’s OK. We’ll just remove the combat system and we’ll simply assume that the PCs always defeat their foes.”

To be fair, GUMSHOE is right: If you make it so that the PCs automatically win, then they will never lose. It’s tautological and everything. And is there anything wrong with that?

Not necessarily: If the game wasn’t actually about fighting people, there might be little harm in skipping past the fights. But if the game was about combat, then you might have a problem.

And, in my opinion, the actual act of investigation is, in fact, a relatively major component of what a mystery story is about. GUMSHOE says it isn’t because you never see a fictional detective miss a clue. (But if they did miss a clue completely and entirely, how would the reader or viewer ever know? And, in point of fact, there are many mystery stories in which the detective does miss a clue and later goes back to find it or realizes that they missed it only after the crime has already been solved.)

In addition to this, as I’ve discussed in the past, GUMSHOE’s “solution” doesn’t actually solve the problem it claims to be solving: Failing to find a clue is only ONE of the ways in which the clue can fail. Since the problem hasn’t actually been solved, you still need to implement the ACTUAL solution to the problem (which is to not design your adventure around chokepoints in the first place). And once you’ve implemented the actual solution, you’ll discover that characters failing to find any particular clue is no longer any sort of problem… which means that the GUMSHOE “solution” isn’t required at all.

Here’s a common misunderstanding I often see voiced on messageboards: Choosing which direction you’re going to go in a dungeon isn’t a meaningful choice because the players have no way of distinguishing between the choices.

While this can be true, the reality is that it generally shouldn’t be true. And if you’re consistently finding it to be true, there’s probably something wrong with the way you’re either designing your dungeon or running your dungeon.

TWO TYPES OF CHOICE

Before we begin, I think it’s useful to remember that there are two types of meaningful geographic choice that can happen in a dungeon.

First, there’s the type most people talk about: Selecting which encounter you’re going to face next. (In other words, if you go left you’ll encounter the goblins and if you go right you’ll encounter the vampires.)

In many cases, this sort of choice is, in fact, a random number generator: If you have nothing to distinguish between the choice of going right or the choice of going left, you might as well flip a coin. With that being said, however, there are several ways you can deal with that it’s probably a good idea to explore them in your dungeons:

• Foreshadowing. The path to the left has tracks showing that it’s heavily traversed by small humanoids. The path to the right has been surrounded with crude goblin holy symbols and anyone familiar with goblin runes can read the word “NOSFERATU” spelled out in crude syllables.
• Interrogation. Either friendly or otherwise. For example, you revive the goblin scout you knocked out in this room and you force him to tell you that his tribe lives down the left path and that there are vampires living down the path to the right. But his people also pay tribute to the vampires, leaving them totally impoverished but suggesting that the vampires probably have a huge hoard of treasure. (He might be lying about that last bit.)
• Rumor Tables. Or similar rumor-gathering mechanics. The PCs end up with potentially valuable navigation information about the dungeon before they ever go into it.
• Arnesonian Megadungeon. In the Arnesonian megadungeon, lower levels are always more difficult. Which means that PCs always have a meaningful choice when confronted with the option of going down or continuing to explore their current level.

And so forth. The choice only needs to be blind if the GM and/or the players choose to leave it blind.

SECOND VERSE, COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM THE FIRST

With all that being said, it can be difficult to consistently avoid the “random number generator” with that first type of choice. And, in my opinion, that’s OK because that’s not the most interesting type of meaningful geographic choice in a dungeon environment. THAT choice happens when you revisit known terrain.

See, the first pass through a given chunk of dungeon is like the legwork in Shadowrun: You’re gathering information. You may not know how this information is going to be useful yet, but the more you can learn the better off you’ll be when it comes time to run the “heist”.

The heist, in this case, can take a lot of different forms.

For example, it’ll probably start small: “I think if we go this way, we’ll hook back up to these rooms we explored earlier. Or we can go down these stairs and go into completely virgin territory. Whaddya think?”

But it can escalate fast:

“Oh shit! We’ve pissed off the dark elves! Do we make a straight race for the surface? Do we try to lead them into an ambush amidst the grotto of dinosaur bones? Or do we try to hide out in that secret crypt we found?”

“Doubling back you discover a warband of ogres and orcs have moved into the cavern. It sounds like they’re heading for the surface. Do you try to sneak around through those side passages and warn your friends? Or just stay here where you’ll be safe?”

“Okay, we’ve made an alliance with the goblins. They’re saying they can help us secure the eastern stairs so that we’ll have a secure line of retreat when we fight those feral vampires down on level 3, but we’d need to pay them some sort of tribute.”

One of the key aspects to this second type of choice is to break away from the idea of “room = encounter”. In fact, it’s most useful to break away from the “encounter” mindset almost entirely. The dungeon has to be a strategic landscape and not just a collection of disconnected tactical challenges.

What can really emphasize this sort of thing is any dungeon complex large enough that the PCs will be visiting it multiple times. (Assuming, of course, that the situation in the dungeon changes and grows organically between visits.)

“Well, it looks like they’ve built barricades in the main hall. Do we send a magical missive to our goblin allies and try to coordinate a simultaneous assault on their flank? Or do we try to slip through the fungal arboretum and just circle around them?”

It’s in this second level of meaningful choice that xandering the dungeon becomes particularly useful. Without the tapestry of interconnections it provides it becomes much more difficult (or impossible) for these kinds of choices to evolve: In a linear dungeon, the bad guys have fortified the main hall and… well, that’s it. You can’t sneak around. And they must have trashed your goblin allies when they came through them. It reduces a rich strategic choice into a boring tactical one.

The challenge: Take three movies that aren’t actually related to each other and pretend that they’re a trilogy.

The outcome:

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off –> Fight Club –> Incredible Hulk

In the first movie, we see Cameron’s adolescent fantasies played out through his imaginary friend Ferris. In the second movie, Cameron is older and jaded and his new imaginary friend is a terrorist. In the third movie, Cameron is exposed to gamma radiation and periodically transforms into the “Other Guy” (who is, in fact, just the latest manifestation of his imaginary friend).