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Transcript, Feb 3 - How to Run Illusions in a Dungeon (Without Gotchas)

Original Video: https://youtu.be/6ijRtEpQknk

The transcript is lightly edited from an auto-generated one. Expect typos and worse ;)

A viewer asked, how do you handle illusions in a dungeon, like a false wall or a false floor? And actually, I love that question because illusions can be brilliant, or they can turn your dungeon into a paranoid trap. Every stone slog where nobody trusts anything. So I'm going to give you how I run illusions in old school play. 

Scary. Useful. Most importantly, fair. Because the moment your players feel like the DM can just lie, whenever you don't have tension anymore, you've got distrust. 

So we got the question then. Like what is an illusion when illusion is not a gotcha? It's a problem of perception. So I'm always thinking three things when it comes to illusions. Is there something that feels off if the players pay attention? Can they test it in a way that makes sense in the world? The game world? And if they don't test it, is the consequence fair? Something that would follow naturally. If the only answer is you should have guessed. That's not clever. That's me being smug. 

And I can be smug, but that's not what we want. People generally say illusion and mean different things. And these are the big ones. First, a sensory illusion is something that isn't physically there. 

So it's like a wall that looks solid, but you can walk right through it. It doesn't block you with stone. It blocks you because you believe it does. 

Second, a real hazard that's disguised like a pit that's absolutely real. But it's covered by an illusion that looks like normal floor. See, that's a real threat. Wearing a fake face. 

And then you have the third type. Misdirection, fake exits, fake doors, Phantom treasure stuff meant to burn off time. Split the party or put you into a bad position. Once you know which one it is, making a ruling gets relatively simple. Now do I telegraph them? 

All right, so I don't announce. There's an illusion here. And hold up a sign. No, but I do give players something they can notice. 

Now, my favorite clues are practical, physical, and generally tied to how dungeons work. So dust behaves wrong. Or that part of the floor is just too clean, too undisturbed, or there's dust piled oddly along the edge of a wall. Aaron, smoke. Behave wrong. A draught from a sealed corridor. Torch. Smoke pulling sideways. Sound behaves wrong. Uh. Short hall that echoes like it's much deeper than it appears. Monster behavior can often give it away. Goblins vanishing in a dead end. Voices behind a solid wall. Patrol routes that don't make sense. And that last one. That last one is DM gold. Okay, because it makes the dungeon feel lived in. Like a place with routines. Not a trick box. 

So in old school play the player's best tools aren't skill checks. I know I say that a lot. Or a variation of that a lot. This is aimed at my 5e players. I know I have a 5e audience. I'm just going to remind you old school play the players best tools aren’t skill checks. It's time. Caution, interaction and gear. So when someone says, I checked the wall, I ask, how are you checking it? Because the how is the entire game. 

Here are the tests that matter most, especially when it comes to illusions. 

Touch and pressure. Right? If it's a walk through illusion, this should reveal it quickly, right? You press, you lean, you push. You touch the wall with your ten foot pole. You poke it with your sword. The wall's not there. You probe ahead. Okay. The ten foot pole earns its keep. 

If they probe a suspicious floor and it goes through the floor, they should get information before someone commits their weight to that location. Throw something. Toss a pebble, a coin, a torch, especially for false floors. The sound tells you plenty. The missing coin will tell you plenty. Dust. chalk, flour. A little puff of flour at a wool can tell you if air is moving through it, especially if the flour goes right through it. Um, attempting to mark a wall with chalk. There's no wall, there's no surface. You're not marking it. But this play is smart, it's simple. And essentially it feels earned. 

Mapping and logic. If the group maps carefully, illusions will get caught constantly. That's good. That's not a bad thing. That's what careful play buys you. And just to say it, if the players interact in a concrete way, I don't make them roll to earn reality. They did the test. They get the result. 

So Okay then. Well, when do you use saves or checks or when do you roll? I use saves when the illusion is acting like an attack on the mind. Panic images, phantom threats, disorientation, that sort of thing. But the player says I toss a copper on that suspicious tile. I'm not asking for a roll to see if they notice that the coin falls through the floor. The interaction is the answer. Player action first. Only when the magic is pushing back. Now illusions should have teeth, but the bite has to make sense. 

So what consequences are appropriate? Waste of time. Right. Or counter checks. Torch burning down. Bad positioning. Splitting the party up. Noise that wakes the place up the resource drain. Because you chose the wrong approach. 

And then there are some bad consequences or inappropriate instant death with no warning and no counterplay. I'm against that. When it comes to illusions or anything else, I don't like it. I'm not a fan of save or die out of the blue. What about there? There were no clues. But you should have known. And I think many of us have experienced that crap. If a party sprints down a dungeon hallway like it's a hotel corridor. I'm not advising that you run through the hotel corridor. Is that a convention? But if you do so, yeah, you might drop through a pit there because you're not looking for it. And that's fair play. But I still want something a cautious group could have noticed. 

So let me give you two examples. The way I would run it. False wall that you can walk through. I describe a normal wall, but I usually include one clue a draft torch, smoke that's pulling strangely muffled voices, footprints that don't add up, or monsters disappearing into a dead end if they test it, touch reveals it. If they don't, they miss an advantage, a shortcut, a stash, a safer route, a prisoner, something meaningful but not campaign ending and not session fashion ending. 

What about the popular false floor over a real pit. Same deal. Normal floor. Plus one detail that nags. To clean or the dust is undisturbed. Or there's a faint hollow note to the room. Stones are a little too perfect. Or there's a slight slope. Probe it. Toss something. Test it. Now they know. Ignore it and someone drops, takes damage, makes noise. And now the dungeon is awake. That's not mean. That's not arbitrary. Just cause and effect. 

Now, the biggest illusion mistake is using illusions as a substitute for dungeon design. If the content is just a trick, players learn the wrong reason. Distrust everything. Slow down forever. The best illusions exist for a reason. Guarding something important. Supporting a faction that uses the illusion tactically. Hiding a bypass or escape route or funneling intruders into a bad approach. See when it serves the place players respect it even when it bites them. If you can answer these questions, your illusion is solid. What's the subtle clue? What's the practical test? What's the fair consequence if they ignore it? And listen, that's the whole philosophy. 

Now, if you've got a favorite illusion, one that felt fair or one that felt like a cheap shot, drop it in the comments. I want to hear your war stories. Thank you for spending your time at the tavern and God bless.

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Transcript February 2nd - Committee Meetings Get You Killed (OSR Decision Paralysis Fixes)

Original Video: https://youtu.be/a3TtkSYi_zY

Transcript is lightly edited. Expect typos and worse ;)

This one comes straight from a viewer suggestion, and I'm actually glad it did, because decision paralysis is one of those table problems that can quietly kill a good RPG session. If you've ever sat there with a party staring at three doors, an intersection, a staircase, and a weird statue and nobody wants to pick one, well, yeah, that's the thing, right? That's the indecision. 

And today I'm talking player to player. How to stop freezing, start moving and still play smart, especially in old school games where time is a resource and the whole we all just think about it is how you get jumped by wandering monsters and other assorted miscreants. So now being careful is good. I'm not saying it isn't. Caution keeps you alive, but decision paralysis. That indecision is where the table gets stuck in a loop. You find yourself asking for info you cannot realistically get. Maybe you keep inventing new plans instead of choosing one. Or you keep waiting for the DM to confirm that it's safe. I got news for you. It probably isn't going to. You're stuck trying to find a perfect option or solution that simply doesn't exist, and paralysis has a real cost. Torches. Burns. Spells tick away. Noise travels. Wandering monsters happen. The dungeon doesn't pause because the party is having a committee meeting.

I'm sorry. Here's why this happens. Most of the time, this indecision comes from one of a few places. Fear of consequences, right? Old school play has teeth. Some choices bite. That is literally part of the game. That's what you're in for. Then there's trying to solve it in your head instead of in the game world. People start playing mental chess or checkers instead of exploring. And then there's waiting for permission. Players want the DM to validate the plan. In old school play, Like I said before, you generally don't get that. Too many choices. Too many options. Every hallway becomes a debate, and debate becomes, it becomes the game. 

So how do you fix that from the players side? Here's what works at real tables. Default to action, not discussion. And what do I mean by that? If the party is stuck, somebody has to be willing to say, alright, we're making a move. And not recklessly not Leroy Jenkins. No. Deliberately. If you want a simple mental rule. Movement creates information. You don't get certainty by thinking harder. You get it by probing the situation. So ask yourself, what's the smallest safe action we can take right now? What can we do that's reversible if it starts going wrong? You don't need a perfect plan. You do need the next move. So stop trying to pick the best plan and instead pick. It's actually good enough because most of the time you're chasing perfect. If you've got two or three decent options, arguing for ten minutes doesn't make choosing easier. It does burn time. It raises your party's risk, but doesn't make the decision making any easier. So use the good enough test. Does the decision keep us alive or move us towards the goal? Is the cost one that you're willing to pay? If yes, Have at it. 

Make scouting a procedure, not an argument. A lot of paralysis is. We don't know what's behind that door. So don't debate the door. Scout the door. Old school tables live and die on cheap info. Listen at the door. Check for drafts, smells, sounds. Look for tracks. Examine the lock. Examine the hinges. Probe the floor with a pole. Use a mirror. Check the ceiling. Line the cure to what if it's trapped? It's not a debate, it's literally a procedure. 

And if you want to be the player who saves the session, be the one who says, um, you know what? Before we argue and the DM rolls for a random encounter, let's gather a little info first. Assigned roles. So decisions don't require a committee if someone is steering the ship. Sorry, if everyone is steering the ship, then no one is steering the ship. Old school groups used roles for a reason. They kept the game moving forward. Now, what are some common roles? Caller or leader? It's not a dictator. It's he is a tiebreaker or she mapper. We've discussed that before. Now, if you're using a vdt, maybe mapping isn't an issue, but mapper scout generally a thief, maybe a halfling, maybe your elf quartermaster in charge of making sure there's enough light, managing the party's encumbrance, distributing the treasure. Who's the rear guard? So this reduces friction immediately because when there's a split, the table doesn't need to relitigate leadership every five minutes. Use a simple sixty second rule. When the table bogs down, somebody says, all right, 60 seconds And then we pick. Not to be rude, not to rush things along, maybe a little bit, but to prevent the session from becoming a debate club. See, in the fiction of the world that you're playing in, it's simply honest. Time is passing. The dungeon is alive 

Decide by risk category, not exact outcomes, because you don't know what the exact outcome is going to be. Paralysis comes from trying to predict the exact result. if we open it, the gas. Or maybe it's ghouls or goblins or a pit trap you can't know, so don't play that game. Think in three general buckets low risk, medium risk and high risk and then act accordingly. Low risk. Do it medium risk. Take some precautions and then likely do it. High risk. Only if it's absolutely necessary or if you can shift the odds in your favor. 

Keep the full moves in your pocket. That's another one, right? If you personally freeze, give yourself a cheat code. What do I mean when you're stuck? Default to one of the following and keep the game moving. Uh, I don't know what to do. Alright, you know what? I'll scout the next ten feet or I'll listen at the door. I checked the floor in front of the doorway. I look for tracks and notice there's a pattern to these things. Right? They create information without committing you to. What a huge decision. Force the plan into one sentence. If you can't say the plan in one sentence, it's not a plan. It may be brainstorming, but it's not a plan. For example, we wedge the door, listen, and fall back if we hear movement or conversation. That's a plan. You can execute that also. You know what you need to do. You need to accept that sometimes you'll be wrong. Keep things moving anyway, because that's the real fix. 

Old school play isn't about never making a mistake. It's about adapting after the mistake. It's about buying information because information saves hit points and you don't buy information necessarily. With gold. Sometimes it's with time. And asking the GM questions. If you pick the wrong hallway, fine. Back out. Change tactics. Learn the party that never chooses anything gets punished harder than the party that chooses imperfectly. 

Now let's remember the little thing I refer to as the the dungeon clock, right? It's always ticking. It doesn't stop. Tick tock. The dungeon clock. So what about a quick example? I'll throw this at you. The party reaches a T intersection, right? You can go left. You can go right. And then everybody starts arguing. And here's the smart play. Move! Stop! We're burning! Torch time. What is torch time mean? It means that we're burning time down to another random encounter. Check. So quick, Scout, I listen left. You listen right. If one sounds active, we take the quiet one. If both are quiet, we pick the right corridor and move. That's not perfect. Okay, but that is forward motion. So again, I want to thank the viewer who suggested this topic because decision paralysis It's common. It's fixable, and it's mostly fixed by players taking ownership of momentum. 

Now this is also a collab with D'Angelo. Catch his channel linked below. We are experimenting with doing collabs on Mondays now. If you've got a table trick that breaks paralysis, whether it's caller rules or timers or marching order, discipline, whatever it is, anything. Drop it in the comments. I want to hear what actually works at your tables. Current tables. Real tables. And if you want more practical on how to play it at the table videos, you know what to do, right? Subscribe. I'll keep you focused on what helps you run and play better. Thank you and God bless.

Transcript Feb 1st - Turn Your Hex Crawl Into a Real Game (Steal Dungeon Procedures)

Original Video: https://youtu.be/QaU9IJMJ-ig

Transcript is lightly edited. Expect typos and worse ;)

A viewer recently asked if you can steal dungeon procedures and use them for a hex crawl. Simple answer is yes. And once you do, wilderness travel stops being that blurry. We walk for a while montage and starts producing real decisions. 

Again, because dungeon procedure isn't about doors and corridors, it's about pressure, time passing, right? Risks showing up, resources draining, and the world reacting while the party debates what to do next. So here's the translation. In the dungeon, you've got turns. In the wilderness, you've got watches. That's it. That's the move. That's the swap. That's the switch. Pick a watch length that fits your table. If you want a gritty and granular, make it two hours. If you want. The classic pays for travel still matters, but doesn't eat up the whole session. Make it four hours if you want it loose and fast, go I guess a half day. I tend to stick to four hours because it gives you a rhythm without turning travel into homework. But what matters most is having a loop you can run without thinking. 

Same way with dungeon turns, right? They run smooth once everyone knows the routine, so every watch you do the same handful of things first, get the party to commit to a direction and a pace. Where are you heading? Are you moving normal, cautious, or fast? And that second question matters more than than people think, because it's how you turn, turn, travel into choices instead of simple movement. And then keep the roles Simple. One person is navigating. One person is scouting. You don't need a job fair. You don't need to debate it. You don't need to stress the whole crap out. If nobody wants to do it. Fine. Then the wilderness gets its own vote. 

Next, you pay the cost of the watch. See, the wilderness has a torch timer, too. But it doesn't look like torches. Don't look like torches at all. It's food and water. It's light. If you're traveling at night, fatigue if you're pushing it, wet gear, cold heat, whatever you actually care about in your game. And if your table has bookkeeping, don't get fancy. Make it blunt. Make it consistent. Mark it off and move on. The goal isn't realism. The goal is that time has teeth. 

And after that, handle navigation. Do you actually stay on course? See, in a dungeon, the walls do a lot of work for you. Outdoors navigation is well, it's the wall when it matters. Bad weather, no landmarks, unfamiliar terrain, night travel, moving fast in pursuit or being pursued. Make the navigation, checking if they fail. You don't need to play. Gotcha. Just add. Just add friction, right? Maybe. Maybe they drift into the wrong hex. Maybe they burn an extra watch getting their bearings. Maybe they hit a feature that slows them down a bar, a cliff. Deadfall washed out trail. Getting lost should feel like the wilderness pushing back. Not like the referee. Not like the DM trying to get a win. 

And then to your encounter. Check. One check per watch is usually enough. If it's a nasty region, a war zone, the cursed woods. I don't know. The dangerous swamps. Monster country sure bump up the, uh, the amount of checks. 

But here's the big thing. Wilderness encounters don't always have to be surprised. Wolves. No, no, that's not a lot of the time. The parties should get signs first. Smoke on the horizon. Vultures circling. Fresh tracks down the trail. Dense. Disenchanting. I don't know why. I have trouble saying that. A broken arrow in a tree. A corn that wasn't there last time. You see, that's what makes the wilderness feel Alive. It gives the players a choice. We always want the players to have a choice, right? Engage, avoid detours, set an ambush or slow down and scout. See? That's the actual play. 

Now, I suggest you give them one notable feature for the watch. Think of it like a dungeon room. Okay, not every room is a fight, but every room is still something. A hex crawl needs the same idea, just spaced out. So most watches should include at least one distinct thing. A creek crossing a ridge line with a view. An old road half swallowed by weeds. A ruined khan. A fork in the trail. Signs of people who shouldn't be here. Something of that sort. You don't need a paragraph. Okay, don't do that to yourself. You need one clear thing that makes this stretch of travel different from the last one. 

If your hexes are keyed like you're using Rob Conley's excellent works, um, pull it from the key. If they aren't, use a quick table and keep moving and then advance time and do it again. Update time of day updates applies. Update fatigue update what has changed? Once your table gets the rhythm, this runs just like dungeon turns. It stops feeling like I don't know, wilderness rules and starts feeling like the game. The game of D&D.  

Now let's talk about those three travel modes, because this is where the hex crawl stops being, well, that board game, Wilderness Survival. Yeah. No, we don't want to play that. Okay. 

Normal travel is the baseline. You cover standard distance, you make standard noise. Make take standard risk. 

Cautious travel means you're moving slower, but you're harder to surprise. You're less likely to wander off course. This is the choice for. We're in dangerous territory, and we don't want to blunder into something much more dangerous than we can deal with. Fast travel is the opposite. You cover more distance, but you're more likely to get lost, more likely to w

ear yourself down, and more likely to stumble into trouble before you see it coming. Generally speaking, you only use that in very safe areas. 

So now the wilderness is doing what dungeons do, right? It forces a trade off between speed and safety. And here's where many people miss a trick. What can you do in a wash besides just moving? See, in the dungeon you can spend turns listening, right? Searching, mapping, spiking doors, poking the statue, whatever those actions cost time and time invites and counter checks. Same thing outdoors. A watch can be spent foraging or hunting. Scouting ahead. Searching a feature. Mapping carefully. Traveling stealthily. Hiding your trail. Setting an ambush. Building shelter early because the weather is turning. And the important part is this those choices cost time. Time triggers Checks. Checks create pressure. That's why it works. Sounds familiar right? 

Camping works the same way. Don't treat camping as a free reset when nothing can touch them. Treat it like we bar the door in a dungeon, ask, are you camping safe, hidden or exposed? Who's on watch? What's the watchword? Is the fire visible? And then make a night and count the check. And again, you don't need it to be an instant attack. Every time signs are your friend, a guard hears something in a brush, sees torchlight far off, finds fresh tracks around camp in the morning. Now camping feels like a choice. It's not just a hey, he'll reset. 

Now let me give you a quick example so you can hear how this sounds at the table. The party is moving north through dense forest trying to reach a ruin. All right, next watch. What's the direction? North. Your pace. Normal. All right, Mark off food. Make a navigation check its day. They've got landmarks. They stay on course and count the check. Oh, okay. Yes, but it's not an ambush. They find fresh bootprints crossing the trail. Too organized to be hunters. What's the feature? To hit a creek. There's a rope bridge. Old and frayed. And now you've got decisions. Follow the tracks or avoid them. Cross here or look for a Ford. Spend the watch scouting the far bank. Push on and risk whatever comes next. That's dungeon. Making decisions just happening in the outdoors. 

See, most hex crawls fall apart because travel becomes a loading screen. And for those that are my age, you remember how long those loading screens were on your computer? RPGs. You travel, you travel, you travel. Okay. You arrive. Oh my God. I'm thinking of EverQuest and getting on the boat in any case. 

If you want wilderness to matter, you need a time unit, a risk role, navigation, consequences, resource pressure, and one distinct feature per chunk of travel. Same pressure system as the dungeon, just scaled up to hexes. So here's the quick takeaway. Pick a watch length, run the loop and don't handwave the boring parts. As tempting as it may be, because those boring parts are where the meaningful choices lie. Try it for one session and watch how fast your players start moving with purpose. Now, if you want, I can do a follow up. 

And if I do the follow up, I'll try to get a printable watch card and a the wilderness encounter table that's heavy on signs, omens, NPCs, weather the hazards. You know, the normal stuff that isn't just monsters and creatures, but stuff that makes a region feel like it has a pulse. Let me know in the comments. Also, let me know in the comments if you have topics you want me to cover. I'm trying to go through the videos to find out what people want me to cover. And yes, I am working on the one sheets. It's a bit time consuming when you're trying to dig your car out of about, I don't know, three, three and a half feet of, uh, snow plow ice that has packed it in. But for now. For now, uh, watch his navigation encounters features and repeat. That's how you make a hex crawl feel like an Aussie game instead of fast-forwarding to the next dungeon. Thank you for watching. God bless. I'll catch you tomorrow.