17 hours ago, Jedaii said:The whole purpose of dungeon-crawling is exploration, which isn't about knowing where to go - it's about the journey. With TSR-era D&D the group had a Mapper (who makes a map so the party doesn't get lost) and a Caller (who makes decisions for the group to avoid arguments). I'm running an AD&D 1e one-shot on MW now and it works great 😃
I like rules over rulings for a key reason: "Mother-May-I" gaming. Rules-lite systems tend to put players in the position of asking the GM what the PCs can do and when can they do it. That kills pace and immersion playing RPGs when GMs have to do that. Instead, I like it when rules are clear enough that the players know exactly what they can do with their PCs and when they can do it without GM-Mommy granting permission for everything. Even if I'm running a rules-lite system, I'll let players know what their PCs can do so they won't have to ask permission - just doing crazy stuff with your character is the real fun of RPGs.
Without getting into that latter part which deserves its very own thread (and is also painting many games with a single brush, in not very friendly terms either), I do still want to tackle that first half. "Exploration is the point of a dungeon crawl" is a bold statement. Exploration is a part of a dungeon crawl feels more realistic to me, as I don't really enjoy dealing in absolutes like that (something something Sith). But I'd also like to dive even deeper into the question: what is the point of exploration in turn? I do not think it is of inherent value, but instead a vehicle for something else: Discovery.
You explore to discover things. Those things can be anything, from loot to scenery to story to just small moments or exciting encounters with hostile denizens. Our characters also typically explore to discover things (often loot), and combining the wants of the players and their characters often leads to the best results in terms of motivation. I personally value the idea of discovering a story greatly, as it's something that builds a lot of context and immersion in a game: the idea that we aren't the first people here and we're discovering things that others left behind, thus learning both the story of the place and of those who came before. But loot is a lot more obvious and an easy choice.
Discovery itself consists of several factors, the three most apparent and important to me are anticipation, tension and payoff.
Anticipation is, as the name implies, the expectation of something. It's easy to get excited when you think of what might be beyond the horizon. To get anticipation, you also need to provide enough context for a decision to provoke anticipation. If there are two identical doors with corridors behind them, one going left and the other right, it's hard to build any anticipation as there is nothing to latch onto. There's no reason to pick one over the other, so it's an arbitrary choice. And to me, anticipation in discovery is built by choice: the players choose to do something, go somewhere because they think there's something worth looking for there. The players go after the dragon because they anticipate a large hoard of gold in its lair, even if they don't know it's there.
Tension is important in all narratives, the idea of uncertainty and danger. Is what they're going to find worth it? Can we risk going further or do we retreat? This is very often helped by the mechanics of a game, resource attrition and risks of danger and loss. Not sure there's too much to talk about here, this is where a lot of the gameplay happens and helps (or hinders!) build tension. Not every game is as good at building tension for these situations, though each game also does discovery a bit differently and with different values, and thus must approach the building of tension differently. Know your tools etc.
Finally, we get the Payoff. This is the moment where we reach our goal and reap our rewards. We stash the gold, we learn the secrets, we find that epic vista that the GM so proficiently narrates for us. The moment of catharsis, where our anticipation is rewarded and our tension releases, and everyone breathes out. Ideally. Not always. Payoff can very easily be subverted too. Maybe the villain got to the ancient treasure first. Maybe the dragon didn't have a lot of gold after all. Maybe there was no secret of Monkey Island™. Subverting the payoff can be powerful, but also risky, and like any plot twist needs to be set up well beforehand so that the natural reaction is less "well this sucks" and more "we should have seen that one coming".
This is the end of the journey to discover, but it can easily set up more anticipation. One instance of Discovery can contain several sub-Discoveries in it as well, smaller moments of anticipations, tensions and payoffs that all build towards the larger one. You can also have several of them happening at once, where people anticipate different things, though typically the tension mostly remains the same for everyone (though of course a character's internal challenges can affect the tension - not all PCs are aligned or going through the same troubles).
Edit: It's important, I feel, to note that Discovery doesn't require a dungeon. Discovery can be done anywhere. Dungeons are, however, a convenient and closed environment to deliver Tension. They're easy to plan for, have a limited amount of things to interact with and generally laid out in a way that allows the players to progress at a good pace in an environment that is rife with potential danger. But discovery happens in the wilderness as well, it happens in plots of intrigue and social conflicts. You just need to set the anticipation and payoff accordingly, and if there isn't an easy way to deliver any of the three main points of anticipation, tension and payoff, then maybe that particular scene shouldn't have discovery in it, and instead consist of something else. Travel montages can be made pretty fun, for example. You don't discover so much as collaborate on the narrative, delivering character moments that are built around Fellowship instead of Discovery. What's that? Fellowship? I don't know, maybe a topic for another thread.
/Edit
I would also like to contest the idea that having someone obsess over a sheet of graph paper to build the dungeon floor and hope they don't mishear what the DM said about the dimensions. To me this is far too prescriptive in how dungeons can be built: verticality, unusual shapes, etc all are hindered by the need to fit a dungeon onto a sheet of paper. Pointcrawls (perhaps supplemented by evocative drawings of certain areas), to me, are much more poignant, not to mention easier to handle. Maps can be cool, but I wouldn't want to put a player in charge of them. Certainly could put a character in charge, but not a player. YMMV.