Weird Dimensions
I’ve been in an old school mood lately. Probably it has something to do with reading Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures from Chess to Role-Playing Games. All those stories of Blackmoor, Braunsteins, and the original Gen Cons put me in a roots-of-our-hobby sort of mood. Things were a bit more random in those days, a bit more fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, and (from the sound of it) all kinds of gonzo fun. Sometimes I worry that I’ve lost that sensibility.
To illustrate the point, let me tell you about the roots of my hobby. The very first session I ever ran was drawn on butcher paper in sharpie. I had a d20, an imagination, and a couple of dorm room buddies on a boring Friday night. My game system was, “Roll the die. Rolling high is good. Rolling low is bad. You can be anything you want.” I believe the party consisted of a wizard and a hedgehog knight riding a chicken. The final battle was against zombie Chuck Norris.
I remember very little else about that session, but what I do recall is the sense of goofy fun. We didn’t worry about coherent plots or carefully constructed story worlds. We only cared about what ridiculous trap lay beyond the next door; what bizarre randomly-summoned monster the wizard would come up with next (“Come on tyrannosaur! I’m sick of these dancing poodles!”) We laughed long and loud, and it was on that night that I fell in love with RPGs.
Freshman year is a long way in the rear-view now, and I doubt I’d enjoy that kind of session quite so much today. Certainly I won’t be adding any further Chuck Norrises (Norrisen?) to my campaigns. I still remember the wild hilarity and exuberance though, with made-up-on-the-spot rooms spread out on the common room floor. Maybe it’s just my nostalgia acting up, but I’ve got to wonder if those sorts of hijinks are still viable for more seasoned gamers.
Of course, this all has a lot to do with the idea of The Dungeon as a Mythic Underworld (see page 22). When I’ve spent hours laboring over a sane and orderly storyline, going back to a funhouse environment with nonsensical inhabitants sounds like a welcome relief. I mean, obviously dragons can’t fit in the broom closet. That would never make it into a published product! But sometimes I think it might be fun if—just this once—they actually did, popping out at the players like snakes from a can of peanuts. I’m pretty sure freshman year Colin would have found it hilarious.
What do you guys think? Do you need backstories and explanations, or are you OK with “a wizard did it?” Do you like dungeons that “make sense,” or are you alright with the occasional bout of silliness? Can both styles exist comfortably within the same campaign? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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I think that’s why so many gods and high level NPCs are described as being mad, deranged, demented, or otherwise cray-cray. It’s a convenient in-world explanation for why the dungeon layout makes no sense
I think you’re right. Strange how fun games demand insanity as an explanation.
Actually, now that I think of it that was (according to wikipedia) explicitly Gary Gygax’ explanation for the existence and character of the character Zagyg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Greyhawk_deities#Zagyg
My groups campaigns often end up with a mix of this. On the one hand, the players may be worried about the ramifications of their action, and have to consider how the consequence of their actions effect the world around them carefully. In the same campaign however, a conspiracy theorist character with 6 int may become the head of a cult and derail everything. Our current campaign also has a big mix of this, particularily in the tomb, where careful planning and thought may be required one moment, while in others you should just highfive the the mysterious faceless painting or cast light on your raven before feeding it to a door to unlock it without even realizing it.
So was it the light, the high five, or the raven that did the trick?
I’ve always enjoyed how wizards in these settings are nothing like PC wizards.
Player: “What the hell? I can’t make a faceless statue that eats mascots. How do these backstory wizards have all these powers that I don’t?”
DM: “Do you want to make a raven-eating door? You can invent a custom spell.”
Player: “What? No! Only a madman would do such a thing!”
I think it makes sense that PC and NPC wizards are so different. NPC wizards cause problems, PC wizards solve them. NPC wizards create things, PC wizards destroy them. They’re sort of like Jedi and Sith (using the same basic power in different ways for different ends)… though I honestly have no idea which type of wizard is Jedi and which one is Sith.
It would be interesting if “creation wizards” were actually driven insane by their unstructured magic. Spell casting wizards (read: PCs) use specific arcane formlae to keep that madness in check. Could be a neat setting detail, and an interesting way for PCs to retire.
“I believe in my astronomy research so much I’ll become an NPC to make sure my wacky observatory tower is completed.”
Obviously creation wizards go insane because geometry is a science of the Outer Gods of the cosmos, and falls under That Which Man Was Not Meant To Know.
A setting where “PC” (probably phrased along the lines of “Chosen” or something) was an actual thing would be interesting, probably with various characters (especially villains) trying to gain the power of PC and all that comes with it. However, being a PC is not as great as one may think – PCs live constant lives of adventuring, whether they want to or not. If they stay at home, orcs will burn down their village. If they get married to a non-PC, bad things will likely happen to him/her. PCs are often extremely powerful, very lucky and ludicrously hard to permanently kill, but their lives are full of hardships, violence and pain, and they cannot relinquish their status until Destiny says so.
Many PCs have a desire to cease being PCs (either to have a family, because they are a pacifist or because the Bard wants to actually MAKE MUSIC for a living instead of killing everything that hears it) while at the same time, many NPCs have been killed trying to gain PC status, either by hanging around PCs or trying to kill them. Some PCs (mostly murderhobos) have embraced adventuring but actively flee from their destiny, as they wish to keep their high-loot, semi-immortal lifestyle going for as long as possible. Others find what they believe their destiny to be to be horrifying, and actively put it off by focusing on sidequests (one guy in particular is destined to destroy the world, and adventures forever to keep himself from doing that). And, of course, crooks, kings and the gods themselves all strive to find and manipulate PCs whenever they can…
If you’ll excuse me, I have a campaign setting to go write.
I would very much like to see that campaign setting if you do write it.
The high five and the door eating the raven were for different doors, also both the light and the raven were required to open the door as apparently the door would have asked for light food to get it to open if anyone had actually approached and asked it. Instead it just ate my raven as i sent it scouting. Luckily i can reform it whenever i take a short rest, which is useful because i already made its head blow up by having it touch some weird unknown slime after we couldnt figure out how to get rid of it.
The Familiars Union is going to be all up in your business. Expect a subpoena.
Nah, he couldn’t join since he’s not actually a familiar, instead being a bit of the raven queen’s energy given physical form to aid me, so he doesn’t get those protections:). I am planning on maybe getting a pseudo dragon familiar in 2 levels. If I do, I will have it, my raven, a pegasus summoned by the find greater steed spell, a 4th level paladin spell that I can steal and cast before paladins can because bards in 5e are awesome, and a large constrictor snake that is also a staff that allows me to cast invisibility on my self as much as I want with no concentration because its possessed by a minor snake god like that rabbit trickster god I mentioned Zook was possessed by.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Familiars?
PETF never caught on due to the difficulty of pronunciation.
Personally, I prefer that dungeons make sense. Ofcourse, there is a downside being that the more realistic the dungeon is, the less likely that you will have varied encounters. This resulting in the dungeon being less a dungeon and more of an underground fortress for denizens of a single subtype.
That’s the struggle, you know? Cheeky fun on the one hand vs. interesting worldbuilding on the other.
My solution is to waggle my eyebrows at players who object and say, “Yes… How did they get that giant statue down the narrow stairs?” Pretend there’s a good explanation and there’s at least a 23% chance they the players will believe you.
That one’s easy. Shrink item.
I prefer that my dungeons ‘make sense’. Ofcourse, I also realize that by having logical dungeons, I am effectively making dungeons become underground fortresses inhabited mostly by denizens of a single creature type or subtype; But that is a sacrifice that I am willing to make.
For Example: If you invade a pyramid ruin, you will likely face nothing more than desiccated undead, but may come across a couple constructs or a swarm of scarab beetles. This may be boring, but it makes little or no sense to come across a living dire bear in a random room (whose only entrance is locked) with a trapped passageway.
Now see, I prefer unlikely explanations for this kind of game. You can still have a veneer of plausibility without consigning yourself to tedious encounters against yet another mummy.
— The bear was summoned by a summoning trap.
— The bear is immortal. The ancient not-Egyptians were obsessed with life after death. Any creature that stays in here will live forever.
— It’s a phase bear. It phased through the walls. Deal with it.
Im currently working on a campaign that I’m going to try and run my friends through. It was andprobably will still be heavily in the everything has an explanation camp, but thanks to you it shall now have a reoccurring phase bear and it will not be explained.
Now that I’m thinking about it I like the idea of purposefully inexplicable things, like the giant floating baby head in Phineous and ferb or how the joker originally had no backstory, any time it was revealed it would be changed or forgotten. They don’t fit in every scenario but if used right they can add something unique, like a sense of unease and uncertainty or a sense of wonder or just plain humor. On it’s own it can lead to a lot of carefree fun. But, if used just right it can add something to even the most detail oriented and fully explained world, like how no one cares how the flumpths always happen to be there untill they aren’t.
Thanks to you, I just remembered that a teleporting gelatinous cube exists in my campaign. It’s been something like 6 levels since my guys fought it last. I think it’s about time to upgrade this oozy magic sponge into some kind of advanced ebony cube with spell-like abilities. 🙂
I think it has to do with maturing. And no, not in a “adults can’t have fun, that’s kiddy stuff” way, but in how we percieve, approach and consume fun, and the difference that takes on as we grow.
As a child, we see things. Just things. Singular, in their definition and purpose. Things are seperate, and on their own. This thing, round and rubbery, is a ball. That’s it -simple.
Growing into a teen, we see things like a ball and a ring suspended from a pole, and we connect it. We realize that it’s not JUST. ball like every other ball – this ball is a basketball, and that is a hoop to throw it in. Now, at the earliest stage of this imagination is king. Suddenly ANY ball is a basketball, and anything can be your hoop. The linking isn’t ingrained yet, so we can more easily register this way.
Into the teen years we get a bit overloaded. We start to realize that everything is linked, in some way, and we resent that. More often than not, we regress, trying hard to un-link ourselves to everything, and only be linked to what we care about.
This age, this idea of trying to avoid being linked, a part of the world, of something bugger than us, is both the best and worst age to start an RPG. This is the age that, in trying to seperate and define ourselves, we start dressing in specific ways. We forn cliques, in a desperate attempt to define ourselves as an individual, rather than just another person. We are, in essence, fragile…
And never before in a human life has someone wanted so badly to be Grodtar, the half-ogre barbarian that slays giants and dines with kings. This age, the idea of self, is ripe for the opportunity to regress to make believe. With a rule set, we avoid things like “nuh uh, I blocked it.” since the dice tell us what does and doesn’t happen. Instead, we can roleplay without fear, we can imagine whole worlds where things AREN’T connected.
At the center, that’s why nost people have nonsense first games. Not because it’s too hard to make a connected world, but because no one WANTS one. We want to slay a dragon without thinking about consequense. We don’t care abiut why these kobolds share a dungeon with slimes and bugbears. We don’t mind that, after completing the dungeon, we never found a bathroom or cafeteria for these poor monsters. It doesn’t matter because we don’t want it to.
Now, this stage begins and ends for different people at different times. But after it, comes the intelectual stage. This is the time when, many people, want to be smarter. They percieve they have “outgrown childish things” and want to be taken seriously by their peers. Ironically, this stage often appears two to three times throughout any persons life.
Anyways, this stage is when people find themselves in college usually, or just out of it. Near the 25-28 age range. This point in time many people want fun that makes sense. It’s really a strange concept, when we thinj about it, considering fun and funny often are described by goofiness and subverted expectation, such in the way of a comedy sketch or irony.
Nonetheless, we want fun that makes sense. So we create elaborate wolrds, with consistent internal workings, calanders, holidays! Nevermind the fact these worlds, upon much real scrutiny, fall apart pretty quickly.
However, after that we often have many experiences to look back on. Now, through the “Nostalgia” filter, we see those things as wonderlands of fun we wish we could go back to. Ah, to be young again! However, what we often don’t realize until about this stage in life, is we CAN go back to it. As long as you find other, like or open minded afults who also are up for it, and you all understand that, while everything is connected, this game won’t care about that, or make sense. Then yay! Go for it! Unfortunately, that “this game won’t care or make sense” is where you hit a snag. Many people will, at this point in their lives, be too ingrained with seeing patterns and connections. They can try, but never really let it go. They’ll see patterns whether it’s there or not, and unlike the wonderlust child, any inconsistancy could be the catalyst that rips them out and KEEPS them out of the fun and immersion.
In the end, however, at a much later age, people are often more open to goofy, free-form fun. I just wish that age came before the adult diapers, but hey, at least we can all game while retired, right?
My senior center is going to be full of d20s, mountain dew, and heated rules arguments, I guarantee it.
The developmental angle is interesting, but I think there’s a bit of genre expectation going on too. I don’t care about the habits of the monsters in adventure board games like Descent as much as I do in RPGs. We form this ingrained expectation of “what RPGs are supposed to be like” (see the Style comic from a few weeks ago) and decide that things that don’t hit that expectation are somehow less valid.
The genre expectation is another can of worms. I was mostly going for how a single genre can be redefined simply by our experienve as humans. How that experience is acted upon by outside social stimuli is trpg psy 102, we’re still in 101 Mr. Stticklin. Tut tut.
“A game designer did it” hahahaha.
About the silliness, my two cents of wisdom is: “If between the fun and you there is a rulesbook, defenestreat the rules and enjoy the book”.
The more difficult trick is discarding your suspension of disbelief.
Believe in your suspension of disbelief, keep faith.
Don’t believe in your suspension of disbelieve. Believe in my suspension of disbelief, who disbelieves in you.
ERROR-404-USERNOTFOUND.
COMMENT-NOT-FOUND.
ERROR-000-USERDISBELIVED.
USER-NO-LONGER-EXISTS.
It’s Chuck Norii, I believe.
I’m actually more of a “consistent worldbuilding” kinda guy myself, but I’m okay with suspending disbelief just because something is fun. Honestly, hanging a lampshade usually fixes the problem for me: “There’s a dragon hiding in the broom closet! Yeah, it’s weird, and the dragon totally agrees with you about that. Roll initiative.”
Norii! Of course! My inner English major is ashamed.
Do you have a favorite well-thought-out setting?
Nah, that would be if it was Chuck Norrus. Since it’s Norris, then it’s Chuck Norrises (pronounced nor-iss-SEES). We must be precise when discussing frivolity, or what is this even all about?
😀
We were all born beneath the spreading branches of the pedant-tree.
Or it could be parisyllabic third declension i-stem “Norres”, full Latin declension table being:
Norris Norres
Norris Norrium
Norrem Norres
Norri Norribus
Norri Noribus
No time to explain. Get in the Norribus.
for my pimped Echo Wood and Emerald Spire campaign (work in progress) I have a character sheet for every single named NPC in the hand books (I did get bored some time ago)
There will also be Timelord Technology involved to make the dragon fit the cabinet, figuratively speaking(no spoilers in case of future players are reading)
If you start a selective breeding program to make them cube-shaped dragons, you could fit multiple dragons in the cabinet! It would be like the square pigs all over again!
https://misantropey.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/spacetruckers12.png
I don’t need to receive an explanation, but I need to know there is an explanation.
What if I just pretend real hard that an explanation exists?
Perhaps your dragon has regenerative properties similar to trolls? I remember a pc in one of my campaigns putting some troll goo into a ceramic vial and sealing its lid with wax. Later, on the night before a major battle, the player threw the aforementioned flask among the tents of an enemy encampment. Imagine the soldiers’ horror as a fully realized, maddened and slavering troll burst forth from the grenade, creating a raging swath of destruction.
This is why players should never have regeneration as an ability. They’d be all the time cutting off their toes and chucking their clones at enemy strongholds.
When it comes to dungeons specifically, especially if the game is described as a dungeon crawl, I don’t need them to make a ton of sense. It’s more fun to imagine a crazy wizard did it or that the dungeon is an extension of a hell dimension ala original Diablo than trying to figure out why on earth anyone would make anything remotely like a dungeon for any reason and try to conform to that. (Because I really can’t think of a justification for how you’d get anything similar. Even an arcane laboratory for monster testing would have a completely different design than what you get out of dungeon. And it certainly wouldn’t have traps designed to kill people rather than monsters specific traps.)
Can you think of any dungeons worthy of the name that also made sense architecturally? I had an actual aberrant laboratory in my mega dungeon, but I believe it’s origin was “shrouded in mystery” and that it was “probably built originally by ancient dwarves.”
I can think of a justification. The bizarre floorplan could serve some magical purpose, like the Winchester Mystery House, or the Spook Central building from Ghostbusters (which were designed to repel and attract ghosts, respectively)
I am reminded of my first “campaign” as a DM. I only had two players (always had to give them an GMPC assistant as backup), one of whom had 4e experience and a bit of Pathfinder (which was our system) and the other one had been at literally one session of Pathfinder from a campaign with another DM that fell apart. Both were more interested in combat than anything else, so I made the following setting: “There is this town. It is constantly menaced by all sorts of weird stuff, but the townspeople don’t worry that much, because adventurers always come around and deal with it. You guys are adventurers. Have fun.”
The first scene of the first session was as follows: “It is night and you are in the local tavern, doing whatever you feel like doing. Suddenly, the door bursts open and a breathless man in priest’s robes stumbles in. ‘Someone help!’ he shouts. ‘All the dead in the cemetery! They’re rising up and attacking people!’. From the back of the tavern, a large man stands up and shouts ‘NOT AGAIN!’.”
It was the “not again” line that I thought best encapsulated this world – the dead rising (due to a necromancer, as it happens) is not normal, but it’s happened before, and it’s more of an annoyance, like the water main breaking, than a potentially world-ending run-for-the-hills kind of thing. That really set the tone, and helped with the fact that it was really just a “monster of the week” campaign – the characters get free heals between missions. Over the course of several sessions, they dealt with the aforementioned zombies, an alien who just wanted someone to spar with, a pack of bugbears hunting a guy in the woods and DRRL, the Democratic Rat’s Republic of Lutharia, which had illegally annexed Mrs. Hingsley’s basement in the name of all ratkind. While I personally prefer playing in well-thought-out, logical consistent campaigns, it’s been a lot easier on me to make a nonsense one, and the players have liked it just as much.
Do you think maybe nonsense could shift into a coherent world over time? I mean, as you describe this campaign I’m getting a real Gravity Falls vibe. That was nothing but random shenanigans at first, but plot pieces slowly fell into place as it developed. I wonder if you could do something similar?
Well, my long-term plan was not so much to have a central explanation for everything, but rather to study the interactions between the different weird things. For example, instead of trying to explain why DRRL and the necromancer both exist in the same universe, just have them team up and execute a scheme as allies. I also plan to use a thing in one PC’s backstory (her evil mad scientist parents who augmented her magical abilities) to tie a bunch of threads together by having many of the events be connected (pre- or post-facto) to the schemes of the Evil Parents and their attempts to recapture their daughter.
I’m a bit reminded in this point of a world I created for one of my many I’ll-get-to-it-eventually novels, which I titled “Perfectly Normal.” That world’s theme is that everything is always normal, because crazy stuff happens all the time. So the protagonist is a teenage cyborg vampire and he regularly runs into fairies, aliens, werewolves, robots, ninjas, psychics, wizards whose magical power is dependent on how large and ridiculous their hat is, talking animals, ghosts, Lovecraft-style stuff and part-animal people (not just the common ones like catpeople, but also other ones like butterflypeople). “Mad Science” is actually a recognized discipline. The protagonists semi-accidentally killing a minor god is enough to get on the local news… for a day. Only the protagonist being sent back in time (and transformed into a girl) by Chad, the god of Toxic Masculinity, is enough to raise an eyebrow. But only one eyebrow.
In short, I really like wacky, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink worlds, but what I like the most about them (and what I often find people failing to do) is to actually mix the different elements together in a logical way. I can believe that robots, pirates and zombies all exist in the same world. What I can’t believe is that protagonists ONLY ever encounter robots, pirates and zombies in groups of robots, pirates and zombies, respectively.
Your jib. I like the cut of it.
Laurel and I were kicking around ideas for our next thing, and a mashup setting was high on the list. You wind up playing with a lot of genre expectations, so the tone of this sort of setting defaults to “quirky” rather than any other coherent theme. If you’re OK with something that looks like Adventure Time or Star vs. The Forces of Evil you’re golden.
I thought the whole point of “dungeons” was that they were hilariously-overdone deathtraps? I mean, how could anything actually live in home where you had to make 37 skill-checks just to get through the front door?
Or if the dungeon has an “employee entrance” so the goblins that you fight in sub-basement 7G can get in and out without losing half their number every time, how come our party never goes looking for that instead?
I’m half tempted to write that dungeon now.
Fun fact: In Richard Feynman’s autobiography he talks about how when he working on the Manhattan Project nobody liked going through the security checkpoint so when they wanted to go out for lunch they left and came back through some kind of hole that there was in the back of the facility’s fence (I forget the precise details of that anecdote, it was years ago when I read that book)
HA!
You could fit both in a campaign if you went the “Through th Loking Glass” approach.
I actually think this is how the Dream Realm should work in canon.
I actually want to do this in a campaign now.
Just some random reality-bending encounter where the only thing that matters is the roll of a single d20…
I eagerly await the battle report. 🙂
Personally I am far more interested in dungeons that make sense, and feel that there is plenty enough stuff in DnD that you can still make it varied,
Furthermore I believe that this gives more room rather than less for fun stuff, as things become more fun when it comes with some form of context.
A wizard with a backstory, motivation and personal sense of style simply produces better stuff, than one that’s merely a handwave.
Now that this bit of actual participation in the discussion is out of the way I hope you will forgive me for indulging briefly in a bit of nitpicking.
The dragon’s Acrobatic bonuses would not help it enter a closet. Squeezing into a tight space uses Escape Artist.
He had to get a running start.
Currently running a 5e game where this is one of the plot points. How did the dragons get in there? Why was the party attacked by a bunch of humans the moment they walked in? Nobody knows…
Is it a mythic underworld? I mean, does that feel like the rationale, or do you get the sense that there’s actually some reasoning buried behind all this?
I can go both ways on this one. But a nonsensical dungeon still needs to have the caveatof “a very demented wizard did it”.
. . .
On another topic, this reminds me of the time when I created a dragon lair precisely on the premise of an orphaned baby dragon living in a sea cave and then getting trapped as it grew too large to swim out. It could still feed on the fish and crabs that came into the sprawling cavern lair, but had spent centuries without any sight of the outside, or contact with sentient creatures. It had no knowledge of speech, and quite mad (making it agressive in spite of being a metallic dragon). It had a small hoard of rose pearls that it was content with, but that was the limit of its wealth. The bones of its parents were buried in the sand and mud outside, and if the players investigated the depths of the caven, they found its two siblings, petrified in infancy aeons ago by the same adventurers who had killed its parents.
It was a very sad business, but that didn’t stop the party killing it and cutting it up for spare parts.
Did you get the broom closet ending? The broom closet ending is my favourite
I prefer the non-Euclidian loop ending. Loved the frantic pacing and the little twinkly stars.
Have you ever seen the movie “Dave Made A Maze”?
A man’s attempt to build a maze out of boxes in his living room spirals out of control and he and his friends end up lost in a giant labyrinth full of cardboard death traps and haunted by a paper-mache minotaur.