Sorry about the double-post last week, I got my scheduling messed up… if you missed it, or only saw one, there were in fact two posts last Thursday, and I quite like both of them, so do go take a look if you wish.
Evidently, last week was just a week of struggles. I struggled with how to reflect on our Curse of Strahd session, partly because I think I keep encountering the same problems with adapting the story for the system, and I’m annoyed with myself that every time I think I’ve fixed them, I haven’t. We’re actually taking this week off, so I’ve had plenty of time to stew in my thoughts about what I found to be a very frustrating session from the GM side, even though my players all insisted they couldn’t tell things weren’t running smoothly.
One can never be reminded often enough that 90% of the things that seem catastrophic from the GM side are totally unnoticeable from the player side. As long as things are fun, the players have gotten what they came for. But obviously, I want to hold myself to a slightly higher standard than that, especially when it comes to really digging into what it takes to run Daggerheart well.
I’ve known since my first session that dungeon crawls and map-based exploration don’t work very well, or at least don’t work well in my style. Constant skill checks don’t flow smoothly in the system, and ‘check for traps’ as an action doesn’t gel well with the Hope and Fear mechanic (what happens on a success with fear, or a failure with hope? You find it and it goes off anyway?).
But when something unexpected happens, I find myself turning to the maps to guide me anyway because, well, they’re there. The best solution of course is to just do more prep, so I can translate the maps into a more useful form, like I did with the second half of the Death House and Wachterhaus. In both those cases, I had a list of potential Fear actions ready, which took the place of things like ‘you failed the perception check to notice the trap.’
Part of what I need to do, especially in really elaborate places like Castle Ravenloft (which is where we were, after that whole kidnapping thing last week) is just let myself let go of geography. The players aren’t holding a map in their heads, I don’t need the layout to make logical sense, I just need their rolls to either take them where they want to go, or not.
To that end, I think a useful exploration scale for complicated locations would be
Failure with fear: Dangerous place, farther from goal
Success with fear: Dangerous place, closer to goal
Failure with hope: Safe place, farther from goal
Success with hope: Goal, or reasonably close to it
The question then is how to quantify nearness or farness without slipping into trying to track things on the map and counting number of rooms and floors. In other words, I can’t make the map abstract for my players while it’s still literal for me, because that doesn’t actually solve the problem. But Daggerheart does actually provide the answer to that: countdowns. I tried out a version of using countdowns for exploration in Wachterhaus and it didn’t totally satisfy me, but I think the rest of the answer comes from another piece of advice the book offers: think in montages. Without the very precise skill checks of D&D, travel and exploration need to be treated more like a montage, with the rolls representing key moments where we zoom in to see what’s happening, before zooming back out again. That’s how the details of the geography don’t have to matter, because two scenes aren’t necessarily taking place in adjacent rooms anyway.
So, my no-prep experimental method for next time: have them state a goal for the next phase of travel through the castle, including their tactics and any precautions they’re taking. I’ll set a countdown based on how difficult that goal is, or how precise they want to be in their search. Then, I’ll use the rooms on the map not to represent their literal progress and locations, but as inspiration for interesting obstacles and challenges, wherever they happen to literally exist. If a wine cellar shows up right after they’re on the parapets, so be it. Okay, maybe not that—I’ll need to maintain some sense of physical continuity and progress. But if what the book says is in the wine cellar is instead in a storeroom on the second floor…
I’m still working with my players on thinking this way, especially the longest-term D&D players. They sometimes resist zooming out or summarising, and want to take things step by step even when the steps aren’t going to be interesting or pose a challenge. I’ve found that so far, the most effective method is just to be really direct about how I want something to work, and why I’m framing it that way, but it’s still proving to be a really different way of thinking from D&D. It’s useful to remember that translating the mechanics for myself is one thing, but I need to keep working on how to translate them—or at least explain what I’m looking for—for my players, too.