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.

The reason that the question hasn't been answered is because it is unanswerable

One of the reasons a single true "city procedure" isn't going to work is because it's based on a faulty premise.

Look, I love procedures. I never shut up about them. So whenever someone asks, "how am I supposed to handle XYZ gameplay?" then people like me usually assume the answer is to apply a procedure to it somehow. In particular, the logic of this situation usually goes something like, "we've long relied on a procedure for dungeons and a procedure for the wilderness, so surely it only makes sense to also include a procedure for settlements (being the third major environment that the players find themselves in)."

But there's the problem: procedures don't map onto environments very well. They map onto activities.

This is already evident from the fact that there also still isn't a single wilderness procedure. There's definitely some major traditions that have evolved over time, like hexcrawling and pointcrawling, but there's also other methods that have nothing in common with those. That's because when people talk about "wilderness adventures," there's not actually a single specific activity that everyone has in mind. The various wilderness procedures that WotC has attempted for 5E more closely resemble a Skill Challenge, a process for resolving a linear sequence of rote obstacles and dice rolls to summarize the journey you take. You'll find something similar in Ryuutama, Ironsworn, and all sorts of other games.

A procedure designed for "traveling from point A to point B" often looks very different from a procedure designed for "exploring an open world, discovering interesting new sites." Likewise, survival challenges, tracking / hunting, and charting a frontier are all different modes of gameplay as well. You can try to design a "one size fits all" master procedure that accommodates all of these things (lord knows I've tried) but it's definitely way harder than trying to make a procedure for just one of those things. A good procedure is often a bit flexible, but how flexible can you get before the framework becomes meaningless?

We could even take it further. Let's imagine a hypothetical: you want to run or make a game where the players are rangers managing a wild ecosystem, trying to keep it in balance. A framework for how to model that ecosystem and how the players might affect it with their actions would be a smart thing, right? And such a procedure would definitely be a "wilderness procedure." Yet it would resemble domain management play a lot more than anything crawl-related.

I could even make this argument for dungeons. Yes, there definitely is a "default" activity for the dungeon environment. It's called "dungeoncrawling," duh. In fact, the gameplay activity kind of came first, and the concept of a "fantasy dungeon" was invented as a context to justify that procedure. It's loosely grounded in some pre-existing ideas like, y'know, the myth of the minotaur, the Fellowship traveling through the Mines of Moria, archaeologists exploring old ruins, etc. But the gameplay is what came first, with the fictional justification following it.

However, that idea of a "fantasy dungeon" invented by D&D has taken on a life of its own, and could plausibly host all sorts of different activities. While the classic D&D dungeon is an old tomb or maybe the ruins of a castle, we've seen dungeons come in all shapes and sizes over the years. Haunted houses, temples, sewer systems, libraries, museums, prisons, you name it. The most precise definition we can give for the word "dungeon" is kind of just "any location that is both hazardous and vaguely confined."

And while a location fitting that definition is ripe for a good crawl, it could also be interacted with in an entirely different way. For example, most of the time when you do a caper (e.g. a heist, rescue operation, assassination mission, etc.), the setting will fit that definition of "dungeon." And yet, I've argued that applying a dungeoncrawl procedure to such an activity would be inappropriate.

(The only codified model for an alternative that I know of comes from Justin Alexander, who offers us the "raid" scenario structure)

Credit: Jim Hall

Cities are the same way. You say you want to "solve" cities by finally making the one, true city procedure. But I ask you: what would we build this procedure to do? Yes, we know it's for "gameplay taking place in cities." But what kind of gameplay? Shopping? Investigating? Heists? Rooftop chases? These are all different activities with different relevant factors, and trying to consolidate all of them under one master procedure is not only difficult, it wouldn't even make much sense.

Like, Barkeep on the Borderlands technically has a "city procedure" in it. It's the barcrawl rules, which take place in a city! But would you use that same procedure to resolve everything that might take place in your game of Blades in the Dark or Call of Cthulhu? Probably not, because even though it's a procedure made for the city, it's more importantly a procedure that's made for the activity of bar hopping.

Similarly, His Majesty the Worm has ample material for "urban gameplay." However, it's basically all geared towards downtime activities. It is, after all, a game about delving the megadungeon. While it contains a robust procedure for what happens when the players return to town, it takes the form of "each player gets 1 city action, then you prep the next dungeon delve." Each action is a simple, singular cause + effect that handwaves the details. But what happens if the players want their next delve to be within the city, targeting the castle for a heist? What happens when they start asking about the individual towns and neighborhoods and NPCs that could be manipulated for their scheming? The "city procedure" won't be of much help for such a city adventure. Of course, that's fine for His Majesty the Worm. It's not that kind of game, so it doesn't need to support that kind of gameplay. But for you? The search for just the right one-size-fits-all perfect procedure goes on.

An idea I've seen many times over the years has been to build this hypothetical city procedure around "exploration" as the default activity of play. That the PCs get the experience of adventure by deciding to basically just fuck around and see how they can get into trouble. That all the things in town worth their attention must be discovered.

And like... no, I don't see it.

Something I've mentioned in a few previous posts is that I've done a lot of urban exploration as a hobby. I've literally just wandered the streets of cities until I found something cool or met someone interesting. If you're smart and you're safe, it's very fun and adventurous.

But let's try to keep some perspective: it's a weird and rare hobby done by very few people and on very rare occasion. To suggest that it's the "default activity of a city," or that it's the main way you expect your players to engage with an urban setting, is preposterous.

Don't get me wrong, your settlement absolutely should have some hidden stuff to discover! But I insist that the players should know about most of what there is to find in a settlement by default. It's not like a dungeon or a forest, where even the basic layout is a mystery. A settlement is an environment constructed entirely around meeting the needs of human beings. By design, it is an area of convenience and control.

Furthermore, the bulk of what any settlement contains is going to be stuff that all settlements contain. The players don't need to discover that there's a pub in this town. They can just assume that there are obviously pubs, ask a local where to get a drink, and then head there. Settlements are understood to have markets to shop at, taverns to drink and game at, temples to pray at, landmarks to check out, famous figures to brush elbows with, and factions to get work from. From the moment the players enter the city gates, even if it's their first time ever visiting, they already "know" enough about what they'll find inside that they can already form intentions and plans for how they'll be spending their time here.

Yes, your players may decide that they want to just start aimlessly wandering in hopes of stumbling across one of the non-obvious hidden gems of your town. But I just can't imagine that such an activity would be very common. When players are adventuring in the city, they usually have some specific goals in mind. Investigating a mystery? Planning a heist? Recruiting hirelings? They don't need a procedure built for uncovering secret locations while wandering. They have leads they're trying to follow, for pete's sake. Imagine if the only way you could plan that heist was by using a mechanic that simulates bumbling around and spotting random stuff. Sure would make it harder to case the joint, huh?

At this point, I think it makes more sense to create setting-agnostic procedures for different modes of gameplay, and then apply that procedure to whatever environment the players are in.

For example, when I run Tricks & Treats, I use the same basic procedure as when I run a dungeon, even though the adventure might take place in a suburban neighborhood or an amusement park or something. This is because the scenario that the players are placed into is functionally the same sort of thing as a dungeoncrawl. In fact, I just consider it a "localcrawl," a procedure appropriate whenever the players are closely exploring a local area while under pressure. If the circumstances would make sense for the players to be weighing the cost of time versus the chance to probe at things or engage with creatures they encounter, especially at a scale best measured in 10-15 minute chunks, then I'll use a localcrawl.

But if, say, my players were in that very same neighborhood, yet were just handling some downtime shopping, I wouldn't use a localcrawl. The setting may be the same, but the circumstances are different.

This is one of the reasons I like Flux Space so much. It's about the general type of activity, regardless of the setting in which it's taking place. Another familiar example is combat: it's a procedure we use for an activity, irrespective of any specific environment. It's probably never even occurred to you to fold combat into the dungeoncrawl rules or the hexcrawl rules. It's an activity so distinct from those things that it obviously demands a separate system to run.

HOWEVER

Having said all of that, I'll reel it back in a bit. Even though I like a procedure that's designed to be run in a variety of different environments, I actually do think it makes sense to include some extra bells and whistles on top of that procedure based on the specific environment that you're applying it to.

Yes, my localcrawl rules are good for dungeons, neighborhoods, amusement parks, and more. But when I am applying them to some old monster-infested ruins with cramped corridors, I also want to add in some rules for party formation, light and darkness, mapping, and traps.

Similar, the hexcrawling rules in Traveller retain all the basic elements you'd find in most hexcrawling systems, but they've been adjusted and expanded to account for the fact that you're using them to navigate a starship through space, rather than a wagon through the woods.

So yes, even if I argue that the baseline procedures ought to be designed for specific activities, I still think they should be modular enough for you to "urbanize" them. So our conversation about procedures isn't over yet.

-Dwiz

Posts in this series

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

Parts 2-6 forthcoming

Bibliography