In his latest video, Matt Colville again discusses his low opinion of dungeon crawls. But there are good and bad dungeon crawls and good and bad politics and narrative campaigns. But there’s a fundamental problem with politics and narrative campaigns that he seems not to consider.

The heart of the problem, or at least Colville’s apparent misunderstanding, is that Gary Gygax didn’t really explain how to run an adventure or a campaign. You have to kind of piece together what he expected of a dungeon master from his various writings. He never really explained that his method was for different parties of heroes (whatever players showed up that night) started every session in town, delved into a megadungeon, and went back to town. He also never explained what to do with characters that reached 9th level and built a stronghold. In his and Arneson’s campaigns, play shifted into a wargame and politics, because all those players ended up wanting to fight each other—generating politics and narrative.

As a result of all this, early D&D players created numerous different play styles, some that were more combat oriented, others that were more about problem-solving, a few that incorporated politics and narrative. And most fell apart at high level, because at that point wizards are able to fight armies; why? because fighters could raise and command armies. Colville apparently encountered a play style he didn’t really care for and has been rebelling against it ever since. He loves politics and narrative, often referencing the quasi-game of Diplomacy.

But all is not lost. Most people settled into a play style in that balanced combat and problem-solving. Many tried to ensure that the players’ actions had consequences, which generates some basic politics and narrative. Colville seems to think that everyone who doesn’t burn the midnight oil creating diplomatic alliances and betrayals plays a hack-and-slash game of goblin-skinning, but there’s a whole world in between or the game would never have become popular in the first place.

GM Burnout

Worse, his solution may well doom his game. To the degree that Draw Steel GMs try to create the narratives and politics that Colville loves, they’re likely to have the same problem modern D&D has: GM burnout. It’s simply an awful lot of work to create and run a Critical-Role-style campaign of story and intrigue. And it’s led to a critical lack of DMs.

Dungeon-Crawls, Colville Style

Oddly, Colville is next producing a new game called Crows that’s all about dungeon crawls. It’s apparently the baby of his right-hand-guy James Introcaso, who describes it as “a chaotic post-apocalyptic dungeon survival RPG”.

This should work, in part because it will reuse some (but not all) Draw Steel rules, and one in particular fixes old-school dungeon crawls. As you adventure, you build up victories in the form of successful combat encounters, problems solved, and treasures won. Then, with each new combat, you gain a metacurrency that powers your abilities for each victory. But when you rest, you convert victories to experience points, resetting your victories to zero. As a result, players try to push on, because their characters get more powerful the longer they go between rests. Fighting that, of course, is the fact that they’re losing hit points, spells, and such, so there’s a limit to how long you can go without resting. This is a really neat mechanism, altho it’s a bit too combat-centric for my taste.

You could implement this in any old-school game by awarding a victory for certain events and, at the beginning of each encounter, awarding a point of luck for each victory. Luck can be used to re-roll a bad roll or add a +2 bonus to a roll. Victories and luck reset with a rest.