Everything Is Dungeon
Since the dawn of time—or at least 1974—man has gazed into the stygian depths of his own soul and asked: "why are tabletop role playing games so focused on the dungeon as a setting for play?". Like many philosophers before me: I come bearing answers. Though they may be troubling, my dedication to the truth is such that I must speak them anyway.
Why is dungeon?
All who partake in tabletop role-playing games began their journey entranced by the Grand Promise: unlike board games and video games, in this medium anything is possible, entire worlds can be conjured over the table and lived within, there are gorgeous maps and you could climb every mountain on them, speak to every person, stab anything you want! The problem of course is this promise is a massive lie.
It turns out the real, actual world is a dizzying fractal of detail. It is stuffed to the gills with infinities of all shapes and sizes. Astonishingly, it runs all this with minimal glitches while maintaining plausible sequences of cause and effect. Any sliver of this if shoved into the confines of the human mind would pop it like a balloon.
Just as computer games are limited by their hardware, so TTRPGs are limited by our wetware. The RAM of the human brain is like... seven. Effectively there is a complexity budget that we can spend on our games where we pretend to be elves. We can increase this budget with experience, prep, and reference material, but we're getting nowhere close to infinity.
What then are we, little dreamers of infinity, to do? We must compromise with our dreams. Which compromise we choose depends on our objectives for play and which aspect of the Grand Promise we find most essential.
Storygames1 realize that, while it is beyond our reach to simulate an entire world, we are able to write a story. If the most exciting part of play is not the imaginary world itself, but the story resultant from that world then simply cut out the middle-man and operate directly on the narrative. The world just pops into existence as needed.
OSR games2 value the verisimilitude of the world too highly to make this compromise3. The goal of play is the sensation of interacting with a tangible imagined world. Therefore a different compromise must be made.
Imagine your brain is a big cup. You can fill it up with details about your world: all the hair colors of the NPCs and diplomatic relationships between kingdoms and tributary river systems. However, it has a static capacity. Every detail you add is another that will be missing somewhere else.
You can take your big brain-cup and spill it all over the playable area of your game. Since it's the same amount of brain liquid regardless: if the playable area is large the liquid will be shallow and if it is small the liquid will be deep. OSR games require this liquid to be a certain depth in order for the playstyle to function (about to the waist or so).
So, why is dungeon? Because when you pour your brain liquid into a playable area and then constrain it until it is the appropriate depth you end up with a box. To make it clear why the players can't leave this box you stick it in the ground.
When we leave the dungeon
Dungeons then are supremely useful for enabling play focused on concrete interaction with the game world. Sooner or later though players and GMs want to take their characters and stories to places other than dank holes in the ground. That's when the trouble starts.
OSR games have a pretty solid answer for how gameplay should proceed within the dungeon, but extra-dungeon play is far, far more diverse. This variety is, I think, representative of the difficulty of reconciling the stated goals of play4 with larger areas.
Since a dungeon is functionally a graph (in the discrete mathematics sense) one approach is to just redefine the nodes and edges within the fiction while keeping the underlying structure of a dungeon. This results in hexcrawls and point-crawls.
Is this the real life?
I'm about to start running a Delta Green campaign (the setting, not the rules; on which more at a later date). The conceit of Delta Green is that the characters return home between missions and continue to live their normal lives. The scenarios are then strung together over time and not a map that the party can walk around in a group. A lot of the ways I'm used to running a game from OSR systems do not neatly apply.
OSR play in general has struggled to leave the confines of the dungeon. Yes, thematically projects like Mothership and Liminal Horror take on non-medieval settings, but their modules (e.g. Gradient Descent, The Bureau) are still enclosed spaces that are explored contiguously, dungeons in the most literal sense.
What I've been trying to wrap my head around is if the sandbox-y, concrete, referee-impartial play mode I enjoy from OSR can be applied to other concepts.
With investigative horror there's perhaps a hint in the "clue summaries" provided in some Chaosium/Arc Dream supplements. Here's an example I won't embed because it has Masks of Nyarlathotep spoilers: link5.
It doesn't take much squinting to see this as a "point-crawl" but I find these tend to use the word "clue" too broadly. I'd argue there are two kinds of information players uncover in a mystery scenario:
Clues. These are evidence towards a conclusion. For example: a footprint that matches the boots worn by a suspect.
Leads. These are just indications to the players where they can go next. Example: The police chief says that the suspect's sister works at the bar across town and might know where he was last night.
This might seem somewhat pedantic but crucially only the latter is a connection between two nodes. Leads are hallways.
In this light what it might mean to play a mystery "the OSR way" begins to take on some coherence. For instance: we might begin to analyze if our leads have interesting cycles and paths or what the resource cost of following one lead over another might be.
This is distinct from mystery scenarios as typically written, which do not require interesting decision making in "what to do next". You experience every "scene" in an order (mostly) of your choosing, but that order is largely immaterial. Once all the "clue scenes" have been experienced the party then uses the knowledge they've gained to approach the "climax scene".
I'm working through some pre-written and original Delta Green scenarios and consciously mapping them as dungeons. We'll see what happens.
Maybe I'm forcing a square peg into a round hole, maybe OSR play only makes sense in a dungeon. But then, maybe everything is dungeon.
The definitions I'm using for various genres of TTRPG broadly align with those outlined in Six Cultures of Play from the Retired Adventurer. When I say "OSR" assume I mean also "POSR" or "NSR" or whatever acronym we come up with next.↩
I specifically refer to games here because people may of course play many types of games and desire different things at different times, in different campaigns, etc.↩
For further reading on this see The exquisite quality of blorbiness and New Simulationism↩
In e.g. the Principia Apocrypha↩