Urban Gameplay Part 6: Concrete Jungle Gyms

I sure do talk a lot about the needs of "simulation," huh? Truly the least interesting approach to design. But my defense of simulationism is a topic for another day. Instead, I want to make sure we enter into this grand conclusion agreed on something more important: simulation isn't worth much without gameability. It doesn't matter if you've created a settlement that's accurate to some standard of "realism" if it isn't also fit for play. That is the theme of this final part of our long series.

To be honest, Part 5 wasn't exactly revolutionary. There's more than enough advice and resources out there to help you stock your settlements with detail.

To me, the far greater obstacle is getting your prep into action. It's all too easy to spend lots of time creating great material, only to watch it go unused during the session for reasons you don't quite understand. This is my attempt to systematically attack that problem and understand how to avoid it.

Urban Gameplay Part 5: Breaking Ground (without breaking your back)

Does this guy have any actual solutions for us? Of course I do! I'm not just here to poop parties! But first, we must once again return to the ancient wisdom: the difference between game design and level design.

Urban Gameplay Part 4: Megacities (aren't always the answer)

Ready for a major departure from everything I've been arguing in this series so far?

Blades in the Dark, Magical Industrial Revolution, Electric Bastionland, Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, Oz, Hex. Megacity campaigns. In each of these games / settings, there's a single, massive settlement that serves as the centerpiece of the whole campaign. That means the designers had the burden of ensuring that their city has a lot of depth and detail. Enough mileage to carry 20+ sessions all by itself. If you're reading this post right now because you also want to run a megacity campaign, then I recommend you read those books and plunder greedily. They are chock full of awesome ideas. I'm going to highlight some of them.

Urban Gameplay Part 3: Maps (usually aren't useful)

Credit: Mike Schley

Whether it's a pre-rendered map or a resource for creating your own, the idealized city map for D&D is usually assumed to be lushly illustrated, showing the exact layout of streets and buildings in meticulous and precise detail. This is, of course, based off of the flawed assumptions I addressed in Lesson 2: that cities are meant to be crawled.

But once you know that adjudicating movement street-by-street is a bad way to run the game in most circumstances, that also means that the level of detail in those maps isn't actually of much practical use to you.

Urban Gameplay Part 2: Crawling (is not the answer)

Credit: Ralph Horsley

So you're trying to make your ultimate citycrawl procedure anyway. And right there, you've already run into the second problem. You assumed that it should be a "crawl" procedure, one that's built around incremented movement decisions. The classic blunder.

Why is this a bad idea? Well, it could be for one of two reasons.

Urban Gameplay Part 1: the Search for the Holy Grail (is futile)

Alternative series title: My (Frequently Tested, Yet Still Dubious) Theory of Urban Gameplay

Apparently it's been too long since I last wrote about settlements in D&D (and similar games). I've certainly written a lot on the subject in the past, but the whippersnappers have been discussing it lately and, by golly, I have wisdom aplenty to share.

Anyway, the point is that I've spent a lot more time thinking about, researching, and experimenting with this topic than most folks, and I've come to some valuable conclusions. If you're interested, I'm here to share.

Urban Gameplay Bibliography

This is my best attempt at cataloguing all the sources I've read while trying to learn more about urban gameplay in D&D-like games. This is partly because it may interest you and partly because I don't want people recommending me stuff I've already read. Or if they are recommending me something new, they might read this list and realize "oh, wait, the thing I'm recommending won't actually add much to what this guy already knows." And you might also be interested in these things. A lot of ideas in here I ended up not agreeing with, but you might.