When You Delve...

Not abstract (done well, in this case by the wonderful Dyson Logos)

Maps and Not Maps

Here's a phrase that gnaws at my brain during the day and seeps into my dreams at night like water from a leaky ceiling: "abstract dungeoneering".

It's the name of an article by one Angry GM, and it's been approached in various ways by others, including Jason Cordova of The Gauntlet RPG community. Abstract wilderness exploration is its close cousin. The idea is that some adventure spaces are too big and mostly empty to be worth mapping. We draw a conventional representational map of such an area and when we get to the table find ourselves at a loss as to how to actually run it without it devolving into an extremely long, extremely dull conversation about t-junctions and empty rooms. Absent a better way of running such an adventure, we just avoid these kind of spaces.

For a while I've been using point maps for this, a technique I was made aware of by Chris Kutalik. You still have a map, it just looks like a flow chart. The nodes on the chart are the "rooms", that is the points of interest, the places where player characters make choices. The lines connecting the nodes are corridors, tunnels, roads, game trails or just the quickest route overland. This is helpful. It gives you a good, clear distinction between the parts where the players interact with the world meaningfully and the parts where you just give them a one-sentence description confirming that they do, in fact, walk.

But abstraction is a powerful drug, and soon enough this wasn't enough for me. I still had to draw maps. I still had to think about how the locations are connected. Most of all, with any kind of map at all I find myself trying to reconcile the structuring of a game session with the representation of an imaginary space. And do we really need to represent that space at all? No one is actually going to navigate it; what they're going to do is have a conversation with us about navigating it. Which bits of that conversation are important, really? Can we take the next step and do away with maps entirely?

Half abstract

The Move

So my take on abstract dungeoneering, presented in case you could make use of something like this, is this special move for Dungeon World and similar games - but it should be easy enough to adapt to D&D 5E and whatever else.

Delve
When you lead the party in exploring the dungeon or the wilderness, roll+INT or +WIS. On a 10+, mark 1 progress, or mark 2 progress and encounter a danger. On a 7-9, mark 1 progress and encounter a danger. On a 6-, encounter a danger. 

The GM's side is a matter of deploying locations and dangers from a list or random table. Here are some important terms:

progress: This is how far the players have penetrated into the dungeon or wilderness, or how much of it they have explored. It's an abstraction. The players keep a tally.

location: This is a place the players may stumble upon. They come to a new location every time they make the move, regardless of the result (0 progress doesn't mean they went nowhere, it means they didn't get any closer to their goal). Which location? Just choose, or roll on a random table. A location is like an entry on a key that comes with a conventional map. Tick it off once it's discovered.

special location: These are the locations that lie deeper in the dungeon or wilderness. It might be the specific place the party are looking for. It might be the exit, or the stairs to the next level. In a wilderness area it might be the entrance to a dungeon. (Use these "transitional" special locations to link together different sections of a dungeon). Each special location has a progress number associated with it. When the players reach this amount of progress, they discover this special location instead of a normal one.

danger: Obstacles, hazards, bad weather, and of course wandering monsters. These are what make the exploration difficult. For obstacles and bad weather you can dock progress if it makes sense: they can figure out a way past a caved in tunnel or unexpected canyon or river, or they can just backtrack and lose 1 progress (you maybe you shade in a section of a clock as well). Also, you can put the danger wherever it seems most interesting: they might get ambushed in a corridor between two locations, or the danger might be lurking at the location to complicate things when they get there.

Super mega abstract 9000

I've tested this exactly once, in a one-to-one game with a single player, but it seemed to go really well. A few thoughts:

The fact that the players find a location regardless of the result of the move is really important: this move is a method for navigating between locations, it doesn't replace exploration and it's not here to turn the adventure into a dice-rolling mini-game. Also, don't fall into the trap of thinking of "locations" as rewards and "dangers" as punishments for rolling badly. Dangers are obstacles and nuisances, and locations might well have some treasure or other boon stashed away, but it's all just loosely organised Content (tm). In fact, in general don't feel too beholden to the system. Its job is to help you structure an adventure without having to reconcile that structure with an actual representation of an imaginary place. If your players have come through three locations and two dangers and there's half an hour left before everyone has to go back to reality, just arrive them at the special location they're looking for regardless of what the move and the dice say. This is just like skipping over a section of a representational map to speed things up, except it feels less like cheating because you weren't thinking of your dungeon as an actual place to begin with. Your prep is a set of tools with which to run the game. The map is not the territory and all that.

This won't be for everyone. I'm sure there are many GMs and players who derive great pleasure from representational mapping, playing out navigation, and the sense that the game space is a fixed space. Certainly there's a style of play (at least one) where this kind of trick doesn't belong. But if it belongs in your game, I hope you get some use or inspiration from this. Happy delving.