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.

Reason 1: "Realism"

The first reason is if the settlement in question is created from pre-industrial conditions. That is to say, if it's "pre-modern" or something analogous. This is a niche argument that I have multiple posts about, but in summation: human settlements used to be very, very small in physical area. Rarely bigger than a college campus, able to be traversed on foot in 10 minutes or less. Even the largest cities in the world, up until a couple centuries ago, weren't much bigger than that.

See that picture up there? That's a map of the city of Paris, France, in the year 1300 (delineated by parish tax boundaries). It's a fraction of the size of modern Paris, about a mile and a half across. But in the year 1300, that small, baby Paris was the largest city in all of Europe. And it would only take you about 30-40 minutes to walk across, with average traffic.

In short, if your game is set in a pre-industrial society and you want it to be anywhere even remotely in the ballpark of "realistic," then travel time within a settlement is functionally negligible for most activities.

And yeah, we're used to bending realism a bit for our games, but there's gotta be a line somewhere. I need you to appreciate just how utterly ridiculous it would be to force the players to spend 10+ minutes traversing a district that may be only a couple hundred feet across. If you've ever rejected the inclusion of firearms in your setting because it felt "too modern," then keep in mind that "large settlements" are a more recent development than firearms by literally centuries.

Reason 2: Fun

The second (and more important) reason is that, even if your settlement is large enough for movement to consume meaningful amounts of time, you still don't want to resort to street-crawling during the game because it sucks.

Yes, yes, movement at that scale adds up. But it's in the framing, you see. Navigating the city street-by-street is a terrible way of resolving gameplay.

When the players are in a dungeon and they want to move, they'll say something like "we head through the north door and down the corridor." Makes perfect sense, right? But that doesn't mean that they should likewise say "we move up three blocks and turn left at the intersection" when they want to move through a city.  Instead, movement in a settlement should sound something like, "we go to the local guild hall" and... that's about it. Yes, really. Why, you ask?

Dungeons and wilderness areas are navigated room-by-room or hex-by-hex because they're hostile and tricky and you aren't always sure where you're going and you can't guess what's around the next corner and there's a significant risk of fucking up and getting killed and you probably need to make a map. Moment-to-moment navigation is full of interesting choices and lots of pressure. That's why the players can't just say "we go to the treasure vault" when they're in a dungeon even though they can say "we go to the local guild hall" when in town. Different conditions call for different ways of resolving the action.

Forcing players to make choices one street at a time is monotonous and asinine. City streets and intersections, tending to be more uniform than dungeon corridors and rooms, almost never present a meaningful choice to be made. "We walk two blocks south, turn east and walk one block, cross the street, turn south and walk three blocks..."

Pretending that settlements are functionally the same as dungeons and forcing your players to "crawl" through them accordingly is overkill. What do you gain by forcing the players to specify the exact route they take through the city? What do you lose by handwaving it? Even if you don't have a map and you've never been in this city before in your life, you can always just ask locals, follow road signs, and make enough inferences based on your surroundings in order to reliably get anywhere you want to "just by the mere intention."

So yes, I advise you to accept statements from the players like, "with the info we get from the detective, we head to the murder victim's house to talk to his wife," or, like, "If there's an apothecary in town, I'd like to go to it," and not expect anything further of the player. You don't ask, "okay, how do you get to the murder victim's house?" because that's not really reasonable. What are they supposed to say? Would an answer to that question really make a difference at all?

This is the main reason I dislike City State of the Invincible Overlord, and why I unfortunately don't care for my colleague Nael's recent citycrawling procedure. I'll say that it has a slightly different flavor than most approaches to urban gameplay I've seen, but I'd hardly consider that "fixing" the problem.

Getting the players to say stuff like "we take Garden Avenue to The Plaza of Ringing Bells, then take a left on The Great Boulevard and follow it past Market Square, then take a right onto Smoke Street before we reach Drover's Square" sounds kind of immersive, but from a gameplay perspective that just seems wretched to me. All we're doing is just looking at the same map and I'm reading out to you the sequence of streets connecting Point A to Point B, which you can already see for yourself anyway. Why? Is there a risk that I might misspeak when I describe my route, and now I have to deal with the consequences?

[Side note: don't mistake my disagreement of opinion for some kind of derision towards Nael. He is good and smart, and has also already anticipated my challenge to his post with an admirably sporting attitude]

Likewise, in Part 1 when I shared my example from Tricks & Treats, I even included a map of a downtown urban area that my players adventured in, and I claimed that I ran it as a localcrawl. Am I just a hypocrite or something? Well, as I said before, even if it's an urban setting, the circumstances are different. Tricks & Treats is a game about playing as a bunch of kids trapped in a very (very!) small chunk of the city, who have only a few hours to complete their trick-or-treating, are surrounded by other wandering trick-or-treaters, and also end up fighting monsters. That's a highly specific context which justifies crawl gameplay, but I wouldn't normally run a city like that in D&D. The entire point of Tricks & Treats is that an environment that's normally safe, familiar, and routine is being temporarily subjected to very urgent, dungeon-like conditions for one night. But do you plan on every settlement in your game being subject to such conditions every night?

But Dwiz, what about pointcrawls?

Credit: drawn by Jared Blando for 5E, pointcrawl added by Justin Alexander

A compromise I've also encountered frequently is to instead advocate the pointcrawl as a suitable model for implementing crawl gameplay into an urban environment. "Yes, it's true, modeling every individual street and alleyway would be far too granular. But why not just simplify it down to a few streets and alleyways? And with only some of the locations the players would want to visit in a settlement?"

Before Yochai stops me, I want to pause and acknowledge that "pointcrawls" are actually an extremely flexible framework that has a gazillion different possible implementations. Hexcrawls are technically just a pointcrawl, y'know? So is Nael's "thoroughfare" framework I was interrogating just a moment ago, once you cut through the details.

But in general, what I almost always see people advocating is the "classic pointcrawl" structure: each building you want to include is a node, there are paths connecting some of them that represent the streets, and players get to the building they want to visit by following those paths from node to node. Maybe there are random encounters rolled each time you go to another node. Just prep every settlement like that image above and you'll be golden, right?

And look, I get it. Pointcrawls are nice. They're easy to prep, easy to draw, easy to run. I recommend them frequently. I think I probably prefer them over hexcrawls, overall. But again, the context matters.

There are situations where a classic pointcrawl makes perfect sense, like modeling rails, highways, massive cave networks, and so on. But a city is, like, the opposite of a classic pointcrawl. There are dozens, hundreds, thousands of destinations the players might want to visit, but they can't all be "points." And between any two sites in a settlement, there are probably dozens of possible routes connecting them. Because they have all those buildings clogging things up, you may think that a city is far more constricted than open countryside. But for the purpose of getting where you need to go, basically any city is going to have enough streets that movement can be functionally freeform.

In my personal experience, players are often very receptive to classic pointcrawls... until it heavily clashes with the fiction. "Why do we have to pass through Point B on our way from Point A to Point C? Why can't we just go around or cut across that gap right there? Why are we constrained to this path?" I don't like punishing my players for using fiction-first thinking. I may not like it when they whine, but in this case I think they make a very fair point. "Why can't we just go down two streets and then get to the pub that way instead?" Gee, that's a damn good question.

Of course, some pointcrawl procedures also allow for the players to instead go "off-trail" and just skip the paths entirely. Off the top of my head, I know that the "forestcrawl" rules in the Cairn 2E Warden's Guide include this. But if players can just ignore the paths and go from any point to any other point freely, then what was the point of having the paths? Cairn creates a mechanical distinction between the two options, a tradeoff that gives you a reason to follow the paths instead of bypassing them. But what would an appropriate tradeoff for urban streets be? Speed? Less risk of danger? No risk of getting lost? We're not in the woods! We're just trying to walk to the library for crying out loud!

Stop focusing on streets and paths

Source: "The Wings of Yag," an adventure for the Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of RPG

If you really want to think about the space in between locations, better to consider them as big, nebulous, zones that contain the points of interest. Knowing how the party gets from the butcher to the baker is less valuable than, say, knowing that the butcher and the baker are both in the slums.

I'm a big proponent of defining the geography of a settlement by its districts rather than its roads or individual buildings. I think this also better matches how we usually conceive of a settlement, too. "We can't enter the rich people neighborhood" or "watch out, he's from the West side," or "she was last seen down on the wharfs." The picture above shows off the elegance of this framing compared to the convoluted mess of streets you'd normally see. And all the major landmark sites of the city that you've described in your key? Their location is defined simply as "in the merchant district" or "in Chinatown" or whatever.

Like I said before, I think the best way to adjudicate players moving to a location is to just have them say, "we go to the courthouse" and that's that. But if you insist on adding an extra step to that process, like if the players are trying to go to a site whose location is secret or it'll take a lot of time to find or whatever, then even then I still think it makes more sense to abstract the search. If you've ever read my post, "How Do You Handle the 'Inside' of a Hex?" then you should be familiar with this idea. Sure, maybe we can track movement from one district to the next on the macro scale, but when it comes to finding and going to the individual sites within a district, then just use a die roll or a time cost or something like that. Simply keep the interior of the district abstracted rather than "zooming in" and adjudicating it street-by-street.

[For the sticklers in the crowd: yes, yes, again, this is also still technically just a "pointcrawl" topologically. But the district-based "zonecrawl" I describe is not how people usually conceive of or use pointcrawls. The "points" are not the individual sites you visit, but rather the neighborhoods containing them.]

What is there in life without crawling?

Look, I know that crawling is your comfort zone. Like little worm babies, you all just love crawling around in dungeons and hexagonally-tiled forests. This isn't an accident. "Dungeons" in fantasy fiction are an invention of D&D, a contrivance of its gameplay needs, designed specifically to facilitate gameplay and with only the lightest fictional justification offered as an afterthought. The structure of "rooms and hallways, walls and doors" provides both the GM and the players with convenient guardrails for engaging with goals, problems, and solutions.

But settlements are not a contrivance of fantasy gaming. They're a real thing, and that means that they have the burden of simulation. We compromise on accuracy all the time, of course. But if you compromise too much, if the simulation strays too far from reality, the players won't be able to continue believing in the fiction. They'll be at a loss for how to engage with it, since all they'll see is the artifice of the game.

Because crawling is a method of running the game that you've got down pretty well, it's tempting to use it as the solution to all problems. But when it comes to adventuring in settlements, I believe that movement-based decision making is probably not where you want to focus play. The environment doesn't lend itself nearly as well to it as a dungeon, and pretending that it does just won't make it so.

Let go of the guardrails you've grown comfortable with. Together, we can build new ones, both compliant with city code and better suited for the chaotic urban environment. We'll discuss how to impose structure on the gameplay here, but we're just going to need an open mind.

-Dwiz

Posts in this series

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

Part 2: Crawling (is not the answer)

Part 3: Maps (usually aren't useful)

Parts 4-6 forthcoming

Bibliography