We Don’t Play Dungeons Like They Used To transcript

Your average 5e player thinks dungeons are boring as hell. To them, a dungeon is like this. There's a 60ft long corridor right in front of you and a door at the end. >> I open the door. >> Aha! You set off a trap. >> Oh, okay. You take 12 damage for daring to move forward, which teaches players to behave like this. 60 ft corridor door at the end. >> I search the square in front of me. 15. It's safe. >> I move forward and search the next square. 11. >> It's safe. >> I move forward and search the next square. >> Eight.

You think it's safe? Can you help me search the next square? Come on. Which makes us hate dungeons until inevitably big corridor. >> Are there traps? >> No, I can't be bothered. Just go through the door. >> No, I go through the door. Boss fight time. So, why not just skip the dungeon or handwave it? Only run the big battles. You know, the bit that's actually in the game system because all fights have now become battles where the heroes go nova and they use all their abilities.

So you make the fights tougher and now all the fights become slugfests which means you get tired of the monsters not doing enough damage. So you make new monsters and then you realize that your combats have the same pipe skirmish and the same objective deathmatch. And now you exclusively run one deadly all nova no holds bar spar deathmatch skirmmits to cap off every adventure in a 4-hour long combat session with massive stakes and no attention spans until you are eventually watching a video about 18 tricks to speed up combat by some babyfaced Icelander with a name you're uncomfortable saying out loud to strangers.

It's the And you think to yourself, where did this all go wrong? And you conclude it's the damn system or the damn players or this hobby isn't for you or it's something else entirely. And if every dungeon is run in initiative or run without any guard rails or structure, you will inevitably get lost in the sauce of what are we even doing here. Makes sense why new players hate dungeons. But Grogards love dungeons and they've always loved dungeons.

I think dungeons are awesome. They're the genesis of this entire hobby. Am I a Grognard? But why don't we like dungeons anymore? Because Dn D cut the dunge engineering rules. Somewhere along the way, they ditched the rules. They're no longer in these books. Even though rules for dungeon crawling, just simple ones like 10-minute dungeon turns, have always been a part of Dn D. Dungeon turns are older than Dn D itself. So, you and me, let's bring them back.

Welcome to Mystic Arts, where my last 3 years of reading OSR games has officially become your problem. My name is Davi. I'm professional writer and director, and I've been DMing for 11 years. When D and D removed the dungeon turns and stopped supporting dungeon crawls, the Grogunard switched to OSR games because OSR games kept the dungeon turn, which isn't anything complicated really. It's just a way to track time in 10minute increments while exploring a dungeon.

Depending on how many systems you've read, the existence of a system like this one might or might not surprise you. If you've ever looked into any OSR adjacent game, you'd have found something like Dungeon Turns. Doesn't matter if it's Taran Pound's Vagabond, Free League's Dragon Bane, Gavin Norman's OSE, or Dead People's Mortborg, or Kelsey Dion Shadow Dark. This is where I show you my Shadow Dark book. >> If I had one, that's because the OSR, Old School Renaissance, is reviving older ways of playing, parts that many have forgotten.

And once they're forgotten, it [music] becomes difficult to piece together what made dungeons special in the first place. Why the entire hobby came to exist [music] in the first place to explore dungeons and crawl procedures are among the oldest parts of the hobby, older than Dn D actually to the history corner. The three little brown books we now call original Dungeons and Dragons were published in 1974 by Gary Gyax and Dave Arnison.

But three years earlier, they had just invented D&D's [music] now historic and immediate predecessors, and they were fans of [snorts] each other. Gary Gyagax had co-written a miniature war game called Chain Mail, which got its own fantasy supplement for fighting mythical creatures. Dave Arnes had remixed the Brownstein, the world's first role- playinging game, into a fantasy game called Blackmore. And being fans of each other, they met and talked, sharing notes.

And in 1973, a full year before D and D [music] came out, Gary wrote down that discussion as a version of game rules to send to his friend. This draft letter was called Dungeons and Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Paper Board Miniature Figure Campaign Games. And on page 17, it said, "Movement is in segments of approximately 10 minutes in the underworld and in daily increments in the upper land." And there we have it.

Dungeon turns are older than Dn D. In later editions and in the OSR, these dungeon turns would be given different names. All rounds or exploration turns or something simpler. A scene, a stretch, a beat, a torch, a loop. I like stretch, like a stretch of time. That's what I'm going to call them. The OSR in general does a lot more with time increments like that one. A shift being a common denomination for six or sometimes 8 hour increments depending on your system.

I like it when we can say those mechanical terms in character without it sounding too odd. Okay, we'll spend the next stretch searching this room, but then we got to move on or we risk being ambushed. And that's the key, isn't it? Dungeon crawlers use tracking tools like stretches to make time in the dungeon meaningful to make players want to conserve resources and be careful. It's a great way to generate tension at the table.

For instance, how do you roll for wandering monsters in the dungeon? What method you use to generate the tension can massively change how deadly the dungeon feels or how hostile it feels. Here's a few examples from the newest issue of my digital magazine, The Broadhe. You could decide to roll for wandering monsters every 10 minutes, 30 minutes, or 60 minutes. You could decide that the odds of an encounter are about 16%, 33%, or 50%.

And you could decide that the resulting encounter is easy, moderate, or high difficulty. These three dials are a great way to hone in on the feeling of your dungeon. A lot of easy difficulty encounters will get difficult over time, but they might also be annoying. A rare but deadly encounter can invoke a completely different feeling entirely, like the xenomorph is slinking around somewhere in the dungeon. Let's hope it doesn't find us.

Use these guides to make one dungeon's wandering monsters feel different from the next. Why did they pick 10-minute turns? Well, I don't know. I wasn't there, but I can guess. Firstly, it's a round increment. It creates a simple truth. An hour is six stretches. Secondly, it's a longer time frame that makes it more believable that the party is moving cautiously, mapping their movement and the dungeon, spotting all the obvious stuff, and talking amongst themselves while not being so long that it strains believability that time stops mattering or we can't control how much we're dithering around.

All things I think help make the dungeon feel more dangerous. And again, it makes time a resource. When one player decides to go spend time to cast a ritual, well, now the whole party doesn't have to just wait around. The players will leap at the opportunity to each go do something valuable in the dungeon. Suddenly, the whole table is playing at a game where they're exploring the dungeon together. We can unstick this door, but it's going to take us 10 minutes, which might mean someone might come along and attack us.

Right. While Alton's doing the ritual, I'll be keeping watch. While you're looking at the furnace, I'll be clearing the rubble down here. All right, you spend a few minutes and Mave, could you make a perception check? Oh, no. For every adventure in the Broad Sheets, the Mystic Arts digital magazine on Patreon, we use dungeon turns to some degree. We include a time tracking mechanic where the dungeon moves even while the players don't, which is one of the main reasons to do this.

Yes, the standard use for dungeon turns is for wandering monsters at set intervals, but that's not the point. As soon as you track time, you can play around with it. By tracking something, you have open design space to play with. There are then countless ways to make [music] time matter. Here's a few examples I already played through, had a lot of fun with, and wrote down in these broad sheets on Patreon. On a 2-hour train ride, you can write down moments of rising tensions that occur every 10 minutes to make sure to raise the stakes as the train gets closer and closer to its destination to really make sure the players are on the edge of their seats.

In a haunted house, I roll for a haunting every 10 minutes. It's some kind of spooky moment. And if you roll repeats on the haunting table, you get a fantasm, something violent, a deathly whale, possession, animated objects, etc. If you're running a fantasy diehard bank heist, you could make the air vent crawling take 10 minutes. All while an air elemental is wandering through the vents, a ventimental. And in an especially scary dungeon, you could roll for a random event every 10 minutes.

Maybe every entry on the table is combat. But maybe not. Maybe it's just a bunch of things that bring the vibe together. >> Man, it really tied the room together. >> Like a fire giant and a genie bursting into the room and fighting one another. This is how time starts to matter inside the adventure. But when do you start tracking time in 10-minute segments, literally every dungeon? And when do you start tracking? When do you stop?

I see those questions asked every time I mention this concept. And to me, it sounds a lot like when do you roll for initiative? When combat starts, when do you mark a dungeon turn? When the crawl starts, but when does the crawl start? When the first torch is lit, or the first 10-minute activity starts. You're standing at the entry of the dungeon and they light a torch or head inside. Or [music] maybe someone says, "I want to search around the entrance." Okay, that sounds like the search area activity.

I listed seven examples of dungeon turns. They are casting a spell, helping out, interacting, keeping watch, loot everything, move quietly, search area, and take your time. If Church the Warlord wants to do one of those things, you could grab the tracking sheet, which might look like this, or this, or this, or this, and mark off one box. And then ask the rest of the party what they want to do while Church searches the area.

Those are their activities on their turn. Start the stretch by finding out what the players are doing, and end the stretch by resolving their actions and rolling for encounters. This should avoid skill dog piling where everyone wants to roll every check. You incentivize players by making the activities significant. Choosing to keep watch guarantees you won't be surprised and lets you get something done before your first turn in combat.

Choosing between a random skilled dog pile roll or keeping watch now is suddenly much easier. Keeping watch is very good. It's a powerful ability. And if the players decide to roll for everything as an action in the system, you need to kind of kill that behavior by making it tedious. Don't let them search an entire room in a few seconds by succeeding one check. You run it more rules as written. Make it be one check per item per 5ft square.

It's closer to the search action as it's written. Make things take time. Just say you can't find secret doors in 6 seconds. Get them used to the system by using the established activities and letting them be powerful and succeed easily. Some DMs might not want to let their players know they're running dungeon turns or stretches and using it as what? Justin Alexander would call a player unknown structure, but I think communication is key here.

A pre-established system with rules that players can point to and argue in their favor helps them get on board. Helps them understand what the agreed upon methods are. So, when they start crawling into the dungeon, just say, "As you enter the dungeon, we're going to track time in 10-minute segments called stretches. What do you want to do in these first 10 minutes?" I've also found that long dungeons risk becoming repetitive or slog fests without a few features.

So, I wrote them down. Things like getting the players marching order, clarifying who's carrying light and who's got dark vision, writing down passive perception, and most importantly for smaller fights, you know, the ones that are only meant to drain resources in a big dungeon, getting a default dungeonwide initiative. I wrote a little system on how you could do it, but you could also just try no initiative or going clockwise, which is basically what this system is.

The goal is to avoid you having to spend 15 minutes to figure out the initiative at the start of every minor fight. Now you can quickly do fun small fights. So when do you use these dungeon turns? When is it worth it? When it makes running the game easier. Simple as that. It's a bit of rules you need to look up. So if looking at them is more work than just winging the dungeon, then wing the dungeon. That's fine. But if you want time tracking to matter in a longer format, this is the way to go.

When you think time tracking becomes valuable or when you want the bad guys to move around or you want to introduce things like wandering monsters, all of these things when you track time, you can turn dungeon into a living area. Basically, I think you can run dungeon turns in any dungeon that has more than two combats. Mostly just because if it's two encounters, that means the first initiative and then there's this little bit where we explore and then the final initiative.

Probably don't need dungeon turns to track that. But you can run five room dungeons with or without dungeon turns. The question you should ask yourself is, should this dungeon take the heroes 10 minutes to clear or longer? If the answer is no, then maybe you do the whole thing in one initiative or as a pair of initiatives split by that bit of free roaming. But if there's multiple rooms, a whole floor, or multiple levels of a dungeon, a mega dungeon, you need a system like this to make it come alive, so that it doesn't just feel like all the monsters are frozen in place, waiting for the players to come open the door.

This video isn't sponsored, but it's brought to you by the lovely patrons who make videos like this one possible. All of these pages are on my Patreon as part of issue four of the broad sheet, which includes multiple chapters of new stuff that we've made that you can plop right into your next D and D game, like new magic items called Warp Residue, which when inhaled, you can do raw magic. There's also a chapter where characters explore the ruins of the City of Brass, which is a mega dungeon that you generate randomly as you play.

It's full of puzzles guaranteed to feel unique and memorable every time you run it. Perfect for a oneshot or a series of seven sessions that eventually have you facing off against two awesome bosses like this grotesque hyena salamander. It's also got the dunge engineering rules I've been talking about which are available separately in the shop. Links in the description to support us directly. Of course, if you wanted to know the rules, I basically just explained them in this video and they're in your head now.

So, you know, go write them down if you want. Once I started using some form of dungeon turns, even though it wasn't originally my dunge engineering system, it immediately made dungeons more engaging for me. It's a trick that clearly works because it continues to show up in OSR style games to this day, and people like dungeon crawls in those games, but a lot of 5e players don't like them in their current 5v game. I would suggest that even if you don't like my version of dunge engineering, give them a try.

Grab an index card and scribble lines on it and start tracking time and rolling 1d6 for random encounters every 30 minutes and suddenly you'll enjoy dungeons [music] more. This entire hobby exists because groggonards love dungeons. I don't think it's a controversial thing to say that those guys were on to something. Dungeons are awesome. Players love them because they're a play area where the players get to use their character sheet and character abilities a lot.

They create tension because every encounter increases tension as the players burn through resources while crawling through dungeons. And it kills the idea of players going nova. 10-minute turns also let you abstract out searching corridors. Don't roll per square, just roll once for the entire corridor. If you're willing to spend the time, that might mean one more random encounter down the line. And wandering monsters make resting in the dungeon possible, even if it's risky.

And now it's something of a game. It is possible that you can take a short rest without triggering a random encounter. It's just up to chance and not DM fiat. And it gets better. They're easy to make and they could take a while to play through. You can make, by the way, you you can make a decent dungeon in an afternoon and be good on prep for the next four sessions. I did that on stream and I entertained my friends for a month off the back of one 2-hour live stream.

So shorten prep, engage players, create tension, end the nova, make time matter, make exploration fun, and experience dungeons the way these Grognards at the dawn of the hobby did, and you will fall in love with dungeons in no time. I promise they're awesome, and that's where we'll pick it up next time. Thanks so much for watching this video. This channel is run by me and my girlfriend. And if you're a TT if you're a TTRPG content creator and you want to join a bunch of us other dungeon tubers in making five room dungeons in May 2026 for this year's dungeon jam, then go to our website mysticartsdm.com and send us an email with a link to your channel and I'll send you additional information.

If you're a viewer and you're feeling especially generous, you might like the video, comment, share, or subscribe and hit the bell to be notified when we release new videos. Until next time, keep studying the mystic arts.