The Lost Dungeon Crawling Rules of DnD 

I am bringing back the concept of the choosing of your own adventure per character resulting in 3 - 100 variating & enforcing morality as is proper.

@@richmcgee434 you are right, it does have the same spirit.

Damn man, you've been playing for as long as I've been alive. Hat's off to you good sir.

@@Vyktym76 there were a few breaks, but yes, I started in 1976, but got serious about it when the Moldvay Basic D&D set was published. Made more sense to my 15 year old brain. When did you start?

I started playing in 1979. This brought back a lot of memories. On game nights the three big questions were: who is mapping? who is keeping track of loot? and what is the marching order?

@@richmcgee434 We used mini figs too. To simplify and keep combat moving quickly, we used party initiative. The player still conscious with the best initiative bonus rolled for the party. For surprise checks, every made their own roll though.

Acrophobia is a thing for your party eh? Did they defeat the spiders? Players can be very interesting.

The first thing I did in our OD&D campaign with me being a squishy mage was make a Molotov cocktail using oil flasks and strips of cloth. That began my mages obsession with fire and she's now running around as a fire elemental mage.

@@GiveMeYourEyes947 I love the consistent character progression!

Sounds like they succeeded in killing the spiders.

I assumed it was wisely known, but "munchkin" was an old derogatory term for a D&D player who would do every possible thing for one more coin, one more experience point, one more +1 to a roll, so the card game was about that. Boil an ant hill was one of my favorite cards from that game ("every ant must be worth 1 XP, so I level up, right?").

@@twentysides Oh, I know what munchkin is as a term, but I didn't know the connection :D

On this same concept, the Etrian Odyssey series is fantastic

​@@twentysides that is a favorite of mine as well XD I tried playing Munchkin with a group of friends who dont really play RPGs and they didnt like it much. They found it complicated if you can believe that! DnD just isnt for some people...

Last AD&D 1E game I ran went like this: Party of four (dwarf fighter, elf mage, human cleric, halfling thief) exploring a dungeon. Very first room they come across and the door is stuck (not locked, just stuck). Dwarf fighter begins shoulder-checking the door as he's a busy dwarf and doesn't have time for these things. He rolls and fails his check to open the door, and again the next time, and again. It wasn't until his 4th attempt that he actually succeeded in forcing the door open, giving the monsters on the other side ample time to strike. We check for surprise, monster's didn't need to roll because they already knew the party was there thanks to the fighter throwing himself literally at the door. Dice indicate the party will be surprised for two segments, giving the enemies basically two whole rounds of free attacks. Ouch. I describe it to my players as follows: "The door is knocked off its hinges and lands on the ground with a very loud THUD! In the chamber beyond, there is nothing but eerie silence and darkness. Suddenly, out of the darkness comes a flurry of dark shapes and a distinct chittering sound. Before you all know it, you're surrounded by giant centipedes whose nest you happen to stumble upon! Giant centipedes have a very weak bite attack (in fact it deals no damage), unfortunately it is poisonous and forces a Save vs Poison to not die (at a +4 bonus because of how weak their poison is). There were enough centipedes that everyone in the party got bit twice and had to roll two separate saves. Everyone except the dwarf failed their saves and died in the very first surprise round. Second round of surprise, the dwarf got bit 8 times and failed a saving throw so he too succumbed to the giant centipede venom. Yes, it was a total TPK from just the very first room of the dungeon! We all laughed and rolled up new characters lol.

@@FamousWolfe Amazing. Glad nobody wasnt a sourpuss about it. I have a feeling that Gary would have been proud.

Yeah, even if you just add turns and wandering monsters, dungeon crawls get so much better.

Some peoplw dislike the idea of stuff taking that long cause like "i don't need 10 minutes to look around the room"

@@Alex-cq1zr​ That’s true if the room is clean, its contents are labeled, and the characters are familiar with its layout or occupants. But this is a dungeon. Rubble and detritus litters the stone-and-mortar tiles under your boots. Tables and chairs are overturned, piled into corners as makeshift barricades from a struggle fought long ago. Chests are buried in years of old monster refuse. And it is hard to be hasty when even the littlest noise at the wrong time might attract your doom. It’s a miracle they can even find anything in the room after just 10-minutes, if you consider the typical environment where the search would occur. At least, this is how I imagine how they thought these things would work. It’s certainly how I prefer to think of it!

Truth!

Not me. Thanks :)

Kevin Sullivan I would hate to go through a dungeon stocked like toddlers rooms. The floor would be 100% LEGO caltrops covered with various food stuffs and puzzle peice debris and tiny plush golems. I’d much rather face an otyugh den.

Great observation nonetheless :)

Yeah, the dungeon was only hard focused post 1981 in the "return to the dungeon" 3E ads.

I've been Dm'ing since 1978 when I started at age 11 . I've given a few Dm's some tips on gaming and organizing things for both them and their players . I use the ultra pro 8X10 one pocket page in a folder to keep my house rules in and a folder for character creation rules that I hand out to new players so they don't have to take turns looking things up that also has a copy of my house rules so that if players want to kbow what a certain house rule is they have right in front of them that way play doesn't slow down while I explain a rule to them . I also have a DM binder filled with things I use in the game such as random encounter tables by terrain that includes weather and environmental encounters such as storms of earthquakes , it also includes random npc's with stats , class ( if any ) and other important info on them . It also has random dungeon and wilderness tables I can use to create a random dungeon or wilderness area if I need it . I showed it to a few Dm's at my local store and now they have their own versions of my DM binder . I also talked with 2 Dm's on how to run a sandbox campaign that not just filled with random rolls as the players explore but also has pre made sites to explore while still having room to add things they might want to add . Any time I can help another DM or player out to help expand their game and/or knowledge I do it . I had help as a kid back in 1978 at my local hobby store from a few sailors who used to run AD&D 1st edition went they seem me a my 3 friends playing basic d&d . I play a multitude of rpg's from fantasy to space opera including the very first Star Wars RPG from west end game . I've seen a few Dm's get burned out on Dm'ing d&d because it become repetitive over time because of their play style that they think they have to abide by because that's how wizards does things . Which goes back to the open word sandbox style of play that keeps things fresh and makes the campaign a living thing that grows along with the players

I think I've come around to preferring it above every other published edition of D&D. It's far from perfect, for example I dislike race as class with level caps. However, "not perfect" is a big improvement from 1e AD&D which is full of stupid and is basically not playable as written.

David M, the more I game, the more I see options as hindrances. At any rate, the Gazetteer series, gave us a ton of racial character classes, some of which were really interesting.

@@davidm6387 - Just a heads-up; the new compiled OSE set has rules for separating race & class along with removing racial level limits while still balancing out Humans. As with everything else in it's B/X/BECMI style rules, it's an easy adjustment.

I still have my old Rules Cyclopedia and I love it, but there are things that I prefer in OSE. Still, Mystara is my favourite campaign world and I am starting a solo game in Karameikos.

Where can I get a pdf of this?

One thing we did was to bring with us was a wagon or two along with heirling guards to watch over the camp as we went into the dungeon . We always had oil flasks on us and used them to escape tougher monsters by throwing them behind us to slow them down or we put the flasks and threw them in the 1st round if combat to damage the monsters before melee combat giving us a greater chance of survivability . My character kept a small bag of flour on him and if we were attacked by an unseen monster I would throw the bag at the ceiling breaking it causing the flour to coat everything making the unseen opponent seen and easier to combat

I have always wondered this. Whether Gary or Dave came up with the idea to stock shops with 10' poles, or whether the earliest players reqested them, and then they ended up in the published game. A chicken or egg question.

@@RabidHobbit Definitely the latter.

Thank you! Tell your friends!

A month of playing? So he just sat at the table listening to the rest of the party play dnd?

@@demongustavditters7150 Not exactly. He could still roll and kill things, he just couldn't make any decisions on his own. He had killed some of the other players with a failed will save to get out of berserk more than a handful of times before this happened, some were more than happy to get back at him. Also, I was using the CR chart exactly like the DMG says, with 8 players, so that adds +4 CR to every normal encounter, they really couldn't afford to leave him behind.

A berserker that got feebleminded? Who could tell the difference?

That is bussiness as usual for a barbarian.

The irony being that had the Barbarian been in a rage beforehand, he would've been immune to the Feeblemind trap lol

Thanks Kloro!

Yeah, D&D was massively influential in video games. Even the first popular FPS, Doom, was just D&D with guns. And the way that each environment in video games is called a "level" is straight out of D&D, where dungeons were divided into progressively harder levels, going down.

@@QuestingBeast Absolutely D&D was a huge influence, but I never really considered it past things like "here's some monsters from D&D" or "leveling up like D&D" or "We're going dungeon crawling like D&D." Things like the way levels are built in Nethack, EXP from treasure, wandering monsters and others I would've never considered, and it's fascinating to learn about them.

Games like "The Bard's Tale" and "HeroQuest"/"Quest for Glory", not to mention a mountain of actual D&D video games sanctioned by TSR, followed up by the likes of "Nethack" and "Rogue" and all sorts of MUDs and MUCKs, were kind of a staple for us computer geeks in the '80s and early '90s - I've still got some of my old Bard's Tale and D&D video games around. In addition to EXP from treasure, familiar-looking monsters and character races and classes, and the like, the video games would also include encumbrance rules built in, wandering monsters, hostile environments that prevented resting, undetectable teleportation squares and squares that messed with your compass and the like that would force you to map things carefully or just roll with getting lost in the dungeon, cursed equipment, poison and disease that wore down party resources, Iron Rations and tracking food and missiles, minimalist stories, a virtually disposable cast of party members, randomly-generated stats that limited what races and classes could be taken, and so on were all common in those vintage computer RPGs. Many of these mechanics would get abstracted out in later equivalents as "irrelevant" to the main game, or in favor of given players more investment in and freedom of choice over optimizing long-lived dedicated characters, or in favor of world-building (including weird and exotic overland settings) and (railroady) single-player scripted epic storytelling. D&D's inheritors have also become heavily invested in selling rules systems (e.g. D20) and in selling an endless series of new editions of libraries of books built on a disposable razor blade or planned obsolescence model (which is understandable as a business model, if not particularly desirable for us as customers!) I can see the attraction in that trade-off, and can understand the evolving role of computers in shaping the hobby along with the influences of e.g. Japanese computer RPGs in informing developer and gamer tastes, but the genre did lose a lot of the charm and flavor of the original D&D game in the process of making the trade-off.... I think that the result of the trade-off has been an identity crisis for pen-and-paper RPGs! The positive side of the OSR, I think, is its role in stepping in to try to ground the hobby in its forgotten past, by restoring the old Dungeon Crawl experience to the heart of the game, and reminding younger fans - who too often only know fantasy by Tolkien, by the current incarnation of D&D, and by generations of inbred computer games and countless tabletop RPG D&D imitators - of the game's origins in the literature catalogued in the old "Appendix N", including the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars (with its weird post-apocalyptic alien dungeons full of nameless Martian horrors), H.P. Lovecraft's weird fiction (see the wonderful and all too often ignored "dungeon crawl" segments in "At the Mountains of Madness", "The Mound", "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", "The Nameless City", or "The Statement of Randolph Carter"), and all the other countless early influences over the genre, of which the oft-cited and now almost cliched Tolkien is actually one of the more minor examples! The OSR thus both brings the hobby back to its roots, while expanding its palette with inspirations that today are often tragically forgotten and neglected....

I, too, was reminded of game mechanics from traditional (tile-based, turn-based) roguelikes - Nethack, but also Rogue (the original), Moria, Angband, TOME, and so on - not surprising, since Rogue and its (earlier) descendants were developed back when these dungeon-crawl rules were still in active use in D&D. Funny how D&D (and other tabletop RPGs) moved towards streamlining such rules _out,_ while roguelikes leaned into such rules _harder_ (at least, until the era of "roguelites").

I guess you can see it as the monsters use the money to buy and trade from each other within the tribe/group and from other allied tribes of monsters so having a party throw down coins slows the intelligent monsters down but it wouldn't work for animal intelligence monsters because they have no need for money and see the party as their next meal

​@@williamlee7482this is why you would drop rations. 😉

Not to mention the clickbaity titles....

Hard agree, Adam. Thanks for the killer content

I remember a Zee Bashew video where he suggested a simple rule change to make survival harder: just have Goodberry consume its material component.

Dark vision is essentially shades of grey, not perfect day light vision. This gives DA on perception/investigation checks due to less obvious detail that can be observed.

Great points. Shame on 5e.😊

Yeah, I think there's an argument to be made for that.

There might be an argument but I don't it's a strong argument. The rules overlap a lot, the core settings are almost identical, and the feel at the table is very similar. I took a 30 break and while the rules were better thought out really didn't really change that much. I love the greater variety of adventure type and more willingness to rp but that feels like evolution not revolution.

Classic roguelikes are closer to OD&D. Rogue itself seems to kave the same attitude of being a strategic slog continually on the edge of resource depletion.

@@SimonClarkstone That is a great point part of the reason that I think DnD has changed is that game experience that OD&D used to have is now available in video games. So now there is an emphasis on the things you can't get out of video game aka flexibility in story telling.

@Josh H. I could not agree more.

There was an old 3rd party dungeon generator called "Central Casting: Dungeons" from Task Force Games (makers of SFB) back in the '80s. It was the same kind of random dungeon generation, but on steroids. Picked it up back then, it was pretty amazing at the time and put the DMG one to shame by a long shot. Unfortunately it's been out of print for ages, and hasn't been re-published to digital by TFG, so even the old beat-up softcovers being sold on ebay go for a pretty penny. There are modern alternatives, some even more extravagant, but I don't think they quite retain the same old-school feel.

Is there a DL for those older books? Kids today don't have time to read and search for stuff. All I would have to do is go to the shelf though.

@@GeryonM Yeah, DriveThruRPG has all the old D&D books as PDFs.

I tried playing 3.5 but it was to much like playing an mmo in some ways due to feats turning characters into superheroes . I never touched 4th edition tabletop mmo d&d at all after reading the rules while I worked at a hobby shop . I now just play a mix of AD&D 1st and 2nd editions with house rules in my own campaign setting . D&D of today babies the players with all its 3 saves vs death , healing words non stop usage and the players relying upon feats for everything . To me it's become nothing more the feat rotation in combat , race and class combos to make the ultimate character builds ( another mmo aspect ) and way to much healing going on to make the game challenging in my opinion

I have been considering giving monsters feats and classes to even things out a bit but i am afraid of going too far

@@thekittenfreakify I do that all the time. I work under the philosophy that whatever the heroes get, the monsters have access to them too. It works pretty well, keeps the game on their toes.

@@williamlee7482 3.5 making you a superhero past Lv5 doesn't nullify the potential for super lethal dungeon crawls. 5e making you a superhero past Lv5 does nullify that potential. That may be fixed in time, but for the time being it's easier to just learn how to properly run 3.5 for the specific flavor you want. Something you should have already learned as you grasped the mechanics.

@@techstuff9198 3.5's mechanics was the start of wizards going the route of an MMO . 4th edition d&d was straight up a tabletop MMO with all its daily , at will and encounter powers plus is movement in squares and having to play on a gameboard . As I said I stoped playing 3.5 because of the MMO aspect of the game with all the feats and feat rotations that just about every player does . I've been playing D&D since 1978 at age 11 so I know how to create deadly dungeons , my point was why do you need to modify the rules to make dungeons deadly when it should be part of the mechanics themselves . D&D 5e holds the players hands and keeps them safe with their long rest ( 8 hours ) to regain all their hp's back plus their 3 easy saves vs death once they hit zero hp's and all the healing wards being thrown around non stop makes d&d into a kids rpg because you can't have the characters dying in a dungeon without some one crying ( I've seen a grown 23 year old guy cry because he failed his 3 death saves in a row and his character died and he got up and went outside to cry ) . That's why I play AD&D instead where my players know there is no hand holding going on and I don't need to make my dungeons super lethal because they are already lethal to begin with just playing by the mechanics . I couldn't stand 3.0 , 3.5 , especially 4.0 and now 5e because NONE of them feel like a challenge to myself or my players because of the overpowered feats , all the non stop healing that goes on , the 8 hours rest to regain all your hp's back and 3 easy saves vs death . Wizards won't fix it because players asked long ago for the game to be made more easy so that it can be more inclusive to new players and so their characters don't die so easy . It's just a generic fantasy superhero rpg any more and it's because wizards went woke

Word!

Which is why it's good that there are so many flavors to choose from. There isn't a "correct" DnD. The correct DnD is the version where the players and the DM get what they wanted out of it.

Survival is heroic. Duh.

@@nutbastard I disagree. Dnd after 3e is garbage and way too distant from the source material. Hence this video. 5e can't even get a standard dungeon crawl right. Modern doesn't mean better

@@blackstone777 amazing I use hexcrawls and dungeon crawls very effectively.

Yeah, everything was highly modular. All the parts had been built as they were needed to solve particular problems.

Using gold for XP was phased out after 1st edition because it was to easy to gain a level after just one encounter. Most all of the rules in this vid are from 1st edition and OD&D. There's even a system to randomly generate a dungeon in the first edition DMG that's useful all through 3.5 (including random monster encounter charts for dungeons and wilderness encounters).

@@BoonedaleSounds like you are talking about Monty Hall campaigns where gold was just thrown at players by the thousands . Here's how experience was handled in AD&D 2nd edition . Creature Experience Point Values Hit Dice or Level XP Value Less than 1-1= 7 1-1 to 1 = 15 1+1 to 2 = 35 2+1 to 3 = 65 3+1 to 4 = 120 4+1 to 5 = 175 5+1 to 6 = 270 6+1 to 7 = 420 7+1 to 8 = 650 8+1 to 9 = 975 9+1 to 10+ = 1,400 11 to 12+ = 2,000 13+ =3,000 + 1,000 per additional Hit Die over 13 Common Individual Awards Player has a clever idea 50-100 Player has an idea that saves the party 100-500 Player role-plays his character well* 100-200 Player encourages others to participate 100-200 Defeating a creature in a single combat XP value/creature Individual Class Awards Award Warrior Per Hit Die of creature defeated 10 XP/level Priest Per successful use of a granted power 100 XP Spells cast to further ethos 100 XP/spell level* Making potion or scroll XP value Making permanent magical item XP value Wizard Spells cast to overcome foes or problems 50 XP/spell level Spells successfully researched 500 XP/spell level Making potion or scroll XP value Making permanent magical item XP value Rogue Per successful use of a special ability 200 XP Per gold piece value of treasure obtained 2 XP Per Hit Die of creatures defeated (bard only) 5 XP Players still got 1 experience per gold piece . Players didn't walk out with thousands of peices of gold from a dungeon unless the DM was a Monty Hall DM and even if they did walk out with a few thousand gold pieces that experience would be divided by the number of party members so the odds of gaining 1 level just from gold experience wasn't normally something that would happen . At lower levels the total amount of gold in an entire dungeon was normally less then 2 thousand gold and for the lowest level i.e. 1st level the amount of gold in a dungeon was only in the hundreds total at most

I think I'll make a video just focusing on encumbrance later. There's lots of ways to do it, and it affects players from all editions.

Questing Beast I could absolutely use your perspective on encumbrance options, again because these can add tension and player choice.

On one hand, encumbrance kind of jams you into a game of Accountants and Attorneys, which was never to my taste. On the other hand, to its credit, encumbrance - combined with wandering monsters and the like - does force the players to carefully consider what treasure to drag along with them, and out of the dungeon, which changes the way the dungeon economy looks: even if one doesn't like the record-keeping and so on, there's that nagging sense that the characters are dragging world-breaking amounts of treasure out of the dungeon. With encumbrance and a hostile dungeon, there may be lots of wondrous magical treasure and heaps of gold to be found down in the dungeons, but only so much of it can be dragged out of the dungeon by the characters....

@@QuestingBeast I hope that you made that video, encumbrance is not that difficult of a thing to manage: you do it in detail at character creation, and you simply do not let it have any slack. Whether it is physics, cultures, or dungeons, the bottom line isn't so much what you could theoretically DO; the important thing is having limitations, boundaries and restrictions, and knowing that they are there.

"The horror. The horror."

That seemed almost self-evident to us back in my college 2nd Edition D&D days. By the 3rd and 4th Edition, it seems like the focus shifted to highlighting the combat as the game's point and its reward, with character optimization and jumping through the story hoops being price of admission to the main show of playing weird combat stunts and feats like CCG cards, and throwing dice at monster encounters that last hours and hours of slowly wearing down HP pools. I sometimes felt like I was talking to a hostile audience when trying to describe the "good old days" when combat was just one of the ways to clear obstacles so that you could explore an endless world of fantastic new discoveries... it would always set off a Holy War between people accusing me and each other of being "narrativists" or "simulationists" - whatever those mean - and trying to justify whatever their favorite edition of D&D is as the only version worth playing because of the game balance and mechanics and options and whatever: I don't think anyone arguing really "got it" about what I was missing, and why I was feeling increasingly dissatisfied with D&D rules systems in general.....

Thanks Jeremy!

I started playing in 1979, and I love 5e. But I also love older editions. I've been thinking for a while now that a third-party publisher should produce a supplement explicitly for 5e to make it more Old School in nature. As shown in this video, porting over a lot of that stuff to 5e should be rather simple.

@@Thomasritchard I like 5e being rules-light. It's exactly what I was looking for in a new edition. I loved complexity for almost four decades, but in the past few years I've craved the kind of elegance and flexibility 5e gave me. And I love the 5e DMG! I can't think of anything I'd replace in it, but tastes vary. So far, third-party material has been filling in the blanks for me.

@@Thomasritchard I think the 5e designers' goal of paring back the complexity of the previous couple of editions was a great idea. They made the game flexible enough to "bolt on" house rules or third-party material to add complexity for those who want it. And making 5e under the OGL after the misstep of 4e's more limited license was another great move, allowing a lot of good material to be developed that wasn't in keeping with the official design philosophy.