The Campaign: The Dungeon Can Be Besieged Like Any Other City

(Following from yesterday's post.)

A typical dungeon expedition follows this pattern:

• Expedition party sets out from a base camp across a hostile wilderness to the dungeon.
• Party arrives at the dungeon.
• Party delves into the dungeon until their resources run low or their recovery capacity fills up.
• Party retreats from the dungeon back across said wilderness to base camp, takes stock of recovered treasure and begins post-sortie recovery.

It's A Military Operation

You will note that I did not say "town". That's because (a) towns function as base camps early on and (b) "towns" in any developed campaign are little more than fortified base camps and not actual centers of commerce and Civilization.

Expeditions of all sorts sortie from a base to a target and back. Logistics are the primary constraint. Shortening the line between base camp and operational area is a big deal that increases delving effectiveness. Failing to do this is incompetence.

The real problem is not the dungeon. It's the time (and risks) taken to get to and from the dungeon, meaning the wilderness travel that bookends the dungeon delving. In a real campaign, that is never hand-waived away; it is the first problem to be solved. Competent campaigners mitigate risk; moving the base camp as close to the dungeon as possible mitigates the risk of hostile wilderness encounters- which waste time, drain resources, and threaten to derail dungeon sorties.

Exploring, mapping, and pacifying the area around the dungeon's entrances is what competent delving operations do because it allows the delvers to move up their base camp to the closest viable point relative to the dungeon- think of it as encircling a city in the early stage of laying siege to it. (Fighters and sub-classes thereof, take note: participating in the ongoing pacification and encirclement of a dungeon makes it easy to justify raising and maintaining Hirelings and Henchmen- or commanding those of others temporarily.)

As more delving goes on, and the dungeon proves itself a place with plenty of action, there is demand for services from delvers. This is where ambitious campaigners find their niche. The base camp draws the attention of Expert Hirelings looking for work, and the delvers welcome them because their gear (and themselves) are put back into action faster by cutting down the time between handling logistics and where the action is.

This is no different than putting a city under siege and executing raids upon the defenders until you either bleed them out or make a breakthrough that allows the army to finish the job by conquering the city and seizing control of it.

Once a dungeon is cleared, it is conquered and the conqueror can repurpose it as the base for further action.

Why People Fuck This Up

Does any of this sounds like a casual camping trip into a cave to you? No, it's not. It's a matter of life and death, not to be taken lightly, and the rules reflect that.

This is what underlies the complaints of those who think it's not fun to play the game as-written. They ignore the reality of their man's circumstances, which the rules and procedures of play represent, and instead engage in solipstic thinking where their man is just a pawn on a board (or worse, a character in a MMO) and they think that anything but the dungeon is "not the game".

You'll see this line of thought continue in a lot of other objections or complaints about the game. AlchemicRazer had a thread on Twitter about this the other day; go read it and you'll see this pattern manifest. Until they realize that their perspective is the source of their disatisfaction with the game and the hobby, nothing they do will fix their problems with it. Not. One. Damned. Thing.

They can dress it up how they like, but it comes down to the fear of being caught out as someone that can't win so they avoid trying. That's not how this works.

This is the game that generated Rogue and thus the entire trend of "Rogue-like" games; you try, you die, you reroll and go again learning iteratively how to win at D&D until you do.

Learning how to win starts with accepting the reality of the scenario for your man. Doing that, and thus acknowledging that your man does life-threatening things for gold and glory, means that you come to think as if you were doing it. That is achieved by mastering the rules of the game, as this is the objective measuresurement of your performance against- and thus to measure your improvement as a player over time.

Some folks don't like being shown that they suck, even if it's just a phase that passes once they start getting good, and will do whatever they can to avoid that pain.

Until they accept that they too can pass through that phase, stuck they will remain and resentful of those that are good they shall ever be- and thus be vulnerable to the poz afflicting the hobby.