I’ve talked in the past about how D&D 5th Edition doesn’t teach DMs how to run dungeons. In fact, it doesn’t even teach them how to key a dungeon map (or provide an example of a keyed dungeon map).

(To understand how weird this is, consider that the 5th Edition Starter Set includes a detailed explanation of exactly how a DM should use boxed text, but still doesn’t tell the DM how to run the dungeon that’s included in the sample adventure. Like, there was a perceived need to very specifically explain how you read text out loud, but not a perceived need to explain how you’re supposed to run a dungeon… the thing that’s actually unique to being a GM. But I digress.)

By contrast, the original edition of D&D in 1974 contains very specific instructions for both things: How to prep a dungeon and how to run the dungeon.

This is not some newfangled failure on the part of 5th Edition. It’s the end of a very long trend line (briefly interrupted, but only partially reversed by 3rd Edition) in which the D&D rulebooks have slowly stopped teaching DMs how to run the game at arguably its most fundamental level. 4th Edition, for example, still included instructions for keying a dungeon, but, like 5th Edition, failed to include any instruction for how a DM is supposed to run the dungeon.

Virtually the entire RPG hobby is built on three core structures:

1. Dungeoncrawl (often genericized to location-crawl)

2. Combat

3. Railroad

And virtually every published RPG has assumed that GMs already know to run a dungeon (because they learned it from D&D, right?).

So what happens when D&D stops teaching new DMs how to a run a dungeon?

Well, at that point all you have left is a railroad leading you from one combat encounter to the next.

PAYING THE PIPER

Although I’ve been talking about this problem for several years, it’s always been mostly theoretical and anecdotal: I would run into new GMs who were struggling because they’d never been taught a proper scenario structure; or I’d get e-mails from similar GMs who were thanking me for my essays on game structures or node-based scenario design or the like.

This is partly because, despite D&D no longer teaching these things, there was still a legacy of knowledge in the hobby: First, published scenarios were being designed by people who had learned how to prep and run dungeons decades ago, and new DMs could frequently intuit a lot from the published example. Second, many GMs were first players who learned to play from GMs who had, similarly, learned these things when they were younger.

Of course, these are basically oral traditions. And, like all oral traditions (particularly those which aren’t being deliberately passed on), they’ll degrade over time. Unsurprisingly, the first stuff to get lost are the procedures that were happening only behind the GM’s screen; players learning only from their actual play experiences only saw what those procedures created, not the procedures themselves, and therefore could not learn them.

Nonetheless, this legacy knowledge persisted.

Recently, though, I’ve been digging through stuff on the DM’s Guild and it’s become clear that the problem is no longer theoretical: It’s very real.

EXAMPLE 1: I’m reading through a module. The entire concept is that the PCs are exploring a ruined castle. But there’s no map of the castle. There are room-by-room descriptions of the castle, but no map to show how these areas relate to each other.

It should be noted that there ARE two other maps in the book: Encounter maps depicting specific rooms. So it’s not a budgetary issue. Cartography could have existed.

So I’m just confused, until I remember that… Oh, right. D&D doesn’t teach this any more.

EXAMPLE 2: This time it’s a whole collection of one-page scenarios. The creators have popped over to Dyson Logos’ website and grabbed his Creative Commons maps, and so every single scenario has a map.

None of the dungeon maps are keyed.

In some cases, this is because the locations aren’t designed for exploration (fair enough), but often the adventure features huge paragraphs of text trying to describe the contents of the dungeon room by room in a kind of narrative ramble.

The final kicker? These are 5-star rated products on the DM’s Guild. It’s not just that these particular creators didn’t know any better; the audience doesn’t know any better, either.

CONCLUSION

“How to prep and a run a room-by-room exploration of a place” is solved tech from literally Day 1 of RPGs.

But D&D hasn’t been teaching it in the rulebooks since 2008, and that legacy is really starting to have an impact.

Over the next decade, unless something reverses the trend, this is going to get much, much worse. The transmission decay across generations of oral tradition is getting rather long in the tooth at this point. You’ve got multiple generations of new players learning from rulebooks that don’t teach it at all. The next step is a whole generation of industry designers who don’t know this stuff, so people won’t even be able to learn this stuff intuitively from published scenarios.

UPDATE: This article was written primarily for the existing audience of the Alexandrian and it kind of assumes a shared framework of knowledge; it’s a “here’s an additional thought that builds on those other thoughts I’ve previously discussed” kind of thing. Based on the comments below, it appears that the article has somehow broken out into a MUCH wider audience. Although I did link to its immediate antecedent in the opening paragraph (Game Structures – Addendum: System Matters), that is clearly not getting the job done in terms of orienting new readers. If you’re feeling confused or angry or think I’m hating on 5th Edition here, I do encourage you to check out not only that addendum, but the entire Game Structures essay which discusses scenario structures in detail.

A few specific notes:

(1) A location-crawl structure (which is what the dungeoncrawl structure D&D used to teach is a specific example of) is not limited to old school dungeons. It’s not even limited to dungeons.

(2) Location-crawls are not the only scenario structure, but the argument that D&D has somehow grown beyond them doesn’t make a lot of sense: Every published D&D module from WotC features a dungeon. The fact they aren’t teaching new DMs how to effectively run the scenarios they’re publishing is clearly a problem. Beyond that, the basic skills of a location-crawl are also applied to other scenarios structures like raids and heists.

(3) Even if D&D had grown beyond location-crawls, the D&D core rulebooks don’t include instructions for designing or running any other scenario structures, either.

Where did the concept of “Session Zero” come from?

Open Query from Twitter: What social system makes sense in a magical world where monsters are very real? Because feudalism doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Nor do castles.

If monsters that cannot be defeated by non-magical means are so prevalent, feudalism arguably makes more sense, but it will be based on the strength of magic, not the ability to afford armor / horses.

If wizards are rare, expect lots of Wizard Kings. If they’re common, perhaps magical oligarchies or you end up with Merlin’s Pentagrammic Table instead of Arthur’s Round as foundational myth.

If magical puissance is not inherited, expect lines of succession through Apprentices to become common and then heavily formalized to prevent constant succession crises. If the gift of magic is randomly bestowed, this will also create more social mobility than was true in historical feudalism, but it will be largely driven by chance.

Castles can also make sense in this setting of constant dragon-scale threats. But expect the walls to be magically warded and the construction of vast underground vaults to which people can flee from aerial assaults.

Oh! Hey! We just got dungeons under the castle!

As population centers grow beyond the point where everyone can run into the castle protection, expect the city walls to be larger and more elaborate. The distinction between “inside the walls” and “outside the walls” will be more sharply defined.

Cities will be protected by powerful artifacts or ancient protective rites like the Dragonstaff of Ahghairon, which keeps dragons out of Waterdeep, will also be common if they are possible in this cosmology. Warfare may almost require sending in small strike teams (i.e. PCs) to sabotage these wards.

In the absence of such wards — or perhaps to accent them — expect the construction of “fallout shelters” in various places around the city. One can easily imagine these excavations breaking through into natural caverns, abandoned mineworks, or even ancient tunnels of similar purpose left by some elder civilization, and thus ultimately ending up tangled together into a maze which most likely also connects to the dungeons beneath the castle. (More disturbing would be the possibility of running into something digging up from the other direction.)

Despite all these preparations, expect that humans will fail to maintain sovereignty in many places. Dragon Kings and Abolethic Collectives and Demonic Hegemonies provide alternatives, not all of them necessarily dark lords.

City-states ruled over by demigods may also be common, or were common before the gods withdrew from this world in accordance with the terms of the Godspeace.

Speaking of which, expect the balance of power between Church and State to look very different, with divine magic the only counterbalancing power to the Wizard Kings. The result, though, would be heavily dependent on the nature of the contract between spellcasting clerics and their gods.

Called shots are a mechanic which seem to cause problems in a lot of game systems. They tend to combine poorly with abstract hit mechanics — like those found in D&D and most RPGs — since they frequently beg the question of why you wouldn’t aim for the bad guy’s head / other vital organs every single time. (The abstract hit mechanics, of course, are based on the idea that you are doing that, but that doesn’t always mean that you can or that you can succeed.) Even systems that ditch the abstract system and bake specific hit locations into their core combat mechanic will still frequently struggle with how to balance people’s desire to always aim for the most mechanically advantageous location (see choice vs. calculation).

In any case, there are a number of ways systems have found to try to deal with this issue. Here’s one that came to me in the shower that I don’t think I’ve seen before: When you declare your desire to make a called shot, there’s a percentage chance that you won’t be able to make an attack this round. Why? Because the shot you want isn’t available at the moment and you need to wait for it to line up. Think of all those movies where the sniper says, “I don’t have a shot!” Same thing applies in melee combat; if you’re specifically aiming to hit one specific location, then your focus on that will result in you missing or passing up on other opportunities to strike your foe.

You’d need to play with the exact probabilities involved depending on your system and the varied mechanical impact of the called shot. But I thought this was an interesting mechanical paradigm that a system designer or house ruler might play with.