Wednesday 2 September 2020

Reddit Playing Games

I've never particularly dungeon delved into reddit nor subscribed to any of its community threads as it just seems like a longer version of twitter to me but to be fair the occasional amusing meme crosses my comms from time to time. Whilst I understand that there are corners for passionate posters as well as numerous community support areas that can be embraced the sheer immensity of prose presents a facade akin to the planetary archives of the Jedi. Its one thing to need a lifetime to read through a library but quite another to need several lifetimes just to tackle the contents section.

Oddly enough as I have been looking at some the old school systems of late I did have a quick reddit dive regarding on the fly dungeon generation. Specifically for GMs there has to be a quick method that spits out something authentic albeit in classic style and there are no shortage of approaches. Whilst I do have prize polyhedrals specifically for use with corridors, junctions and dead ends on, I have never used them as it's somewhat procedural from a single entry point. I presume this is broadly the same as drawing from a deck of dungeon tiles or indeed using a set of ordinary dice to determine layout however there is  risk that a lot of dead ends are generated inappropriately.

There is the narrative approach where the plot goes through the entrance/guardian -> puzzle/rp challenge -> red herring/trap -> boss/twist -> reward phases. The layout becomes somewhat arbitrary in this approach but whilst I like the focus on the player experience it's not really useful on the fly. Oddly and possibly appropriately enough I quite like the chaotic approach of grabbing a few dice and just rolling them onto a piece of A4. From where they land one can quickly draw around them to create rooms and from there its quick and easy to connect them up abstractly with corridors and doors. In addition with D4,6,8,10 and 12 dice available one can use these to correspond to something like the challenge ratings from the 5e monster manual... think I feel a one shot with lots of D12 coming on...

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