Inside

Back to running the game.  We had last discussed players crossing the threshold into a dungeon, with emphasis on a distinction between what the players believe and what is so.  I haven't covered this fully, so let's pause and consider perception.

Having run a number of games and parties, and watched others run, there's no question that many players don't feel hesitation before committing their characters into a dungeon or other challenge.  This is most likely because no real danger has asserted itself.  If the characters are used to walking in and walking out, then the practice of entering the dungeon becomes a routine.  At best, we might get something akin to the Halloween House that's set up in October, to provide thrills to guests.

Of course, such places are used to visitors pooh-poohing the show, despite all the quick-scare design and atmosphere.  This has led to some places asking that you, before entering, sign a liability waiver to participate.  That idea originated with a place called McKamey Manor, an "extreme" haunted house located in San Diego.  The waiver is quite specific about things the Manor can do to you if you enter.  Other manors, less ludicrously staged, have adopted the waiver (but not McKamey's sadistic practices) because it builds the tension for the visitor.

As a people, knowing that safety laws and what else protects us in the public domain, blissfully subject ourselves to outrageous dangers while having a scoffing, frankly contemptuous manner.  I've seen many a D&D player respond like this to a dungeon, presuming that obviously it can't be that dark, or dangerous, otherwise "we'd all lose our characters and where's the fun in that?"

What, I ask, has "fun" to do with it?  "This is Omaha Beach, soldier!  Get your knickers up that hill or I'll kick your dick up your arsehole!"  Going into a dungeon ought to incorporate at least some of the experience of jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft with your chute and gear, or "going over the top."  Thinking that a dungeon won't kill you, because it oughtn't, is anathema to the game.  Adventure is meant to be dangerous.

Lewis & Clark took birch canoes down rivers no European had ever seen; even with guides to reassure them, imagine what it was like to find themselves pulled into strange rapids, when suddenly it was too late to paddle out.  Instead, they had to commit themselves, to life or death — the same commitment they made when they left St. Louis.  People died on that trip.  Everyone involved expected that they'd be the one to die next.  The reason people went, however, was that it was exhilirating to know they might die ... and the reason they were celebrated so highly was that they did something most stay-at-homes were too cowardly to do.

When a player carps that the dungeon isn't really dangerous, that's a coward talking.  That's someone who wants reassurances and legalese of some kind to prove that it only looks dangerous.  Not that it is.

As can be seen, belief vs. reality cuts both ways.  Players can drastically overestimate the danger of a dungeon and resist going inside ... they can also drastically underestimate it and all die.  Where's the solution?

There isn't one.  There absolutely shouldn't be one.  This is not a bug.  It's a condition of play.  Players need to correctly assess a danger and be completely prepared for it, as much as they can be, the same way that soldiers and explorers were prepared.  There is no way to be entirely prepared.  Sgt. Charles Floyd of the Lewis and Clark expedition was as prepared as anyone else, but three months after departure he contracted appendicitis and there was nothing to be done.  This is life.  No one gets out alive.

But, as I've said, the player characters have crossed and they're inside.  Now what?

As a DM building the dungeon, we have two general courses of action: have a monster of some kind at the start of the adventure, inside the door or nearly so, or don't have a monster.  The original Keep on the Borderlands favoured plenty of monsters inside and outside various entrances.  Many later dungeons considered this quite gauche and began to "build the tension" for players by having them enter into the underground space, to find clues and suggestions that something is somewhere up ahead, like wandering around in the game Myst, solving puzzles and shuffling, shuffling, shuffling.

The argument is, again, "less is more."  Supposedly, since the players know there must be something here, the longer we make them wait for it, the more impressive and exciting it will be.  This is an extension of the dungeon's threshold that we've discussed.  The players must find the nerve to enter the dungeon; then they must find the nerve to cross this room to the next room; where they must find the nerve to examine the pool that might potentially grab them and swallow them down.  And when it leads to the puzzle, the players must find the nerve to so solve it, and when the do, then must find the nerve to move through the door the puzzle protected, where they must find the NERVE to open the next door, and the next, and the next ...

Oh, for the love of crispy jeebus, fuck the fuck off.

It's quite possible to milk the players' nerve dry as a bone, as Death Frost Doom did to my players back in 2010.  They were used to facing an enemy, being personally, directly threatened, that the idea that their imaginations could produce enough "scare" to make them feel tension was a joke for them.  For example, I can think of a number of ex-military friends who could take McKamey's Mansion to heart and break a few bones of their own, as some of them spent time in really horrific places.  Once a party is tempered to the point where surviving monsters and near death are the stakes, "surviving" a room with squiggly lines, pools of water and random noises seems ... kinda childish.  It turned out to be quite easy to wade through Raggi's dungeon.  Don't touch anything.  Done.

This is why I'm not a fan of the "empty dungeon."  Or the megadungeon either, since it must be empty to justify the scale on which it occurs.  The wilderness is empty enough.  It's bigger and more threatening as well, for like I said, the farther one gets from civilisation, the larger problems like finding enough food or a new axe to replace a lost one becomes important.  Scale and emptiness fit the wilderness motif brilliantly.

Dungeons ought to be compressed experiential pockets in the game world.  If some group of creatures hasn't taken one over, then it's just a hole in the ground.  And what makes a hole scary?  The notion that there's something down there.  That if you stick your hand in, some unseen creature inside will bite it off.  This is demonstrably true.  In the last five years, I've seen Netflix steal this scene twice.

It matters in the plot that both characters are in the process of lying to each other.  It may also spoil the scene to mention that Audrey Hepburn didn't know that Gregory Peck was going to do the trick with the hand.  Her reaction is real.

So, take the route of putting a monster in the dungeon, right up front.  We'll need to talk about what kind of monster in the next post.