Thanks for the first hand experience! Pinning!

@@DungeonMasterpiece Np bud, keep up the good work, love what I have been seeing and specifically linked this video to a few younger new dungeon masters I know.

@@DungeonMasterpiece vgggg

shuttered lanterns allow just a sliver of light when required, esp if set to be dim.

Over the last 20 years night vision technology has advanced so far is almost night and day... Pun intended.

Ikea maybe?

@@Source_of_Sanctuary Ikea Murder mystery d&d one shot 👌😩

Fr, that expanded my brain cells

When I get stuck on a dungeon design I look up the layouts of random malls through my state and use them to shape my dungeons.

Definilty turning my local malls floorplan into a dungeon 😂

It was learning about 10 minute turns that brought dungeons to life for me.

They are kind of there, but I would emphasise that the turn is reduced from ten minutes to one minute which makes tracking time harder

@@davidmc8478 Time scale really depends on the scenario. Somewhere for instance where they aren't relying on a spell for their continued existence, Water Breathing for instance, can easily be taken more slowly than one where they are already on a timer. So a 10min schedule is borderline useless if you're counting your delve in turns.

Yup - its where the designers fell down on the ENTIRE exploration pillar unfortunately. Same for Wilderness exploration too. All of the ingredients are in place within the core rules, they just failed to provide any guidance to DMs on how to actually run exploration - which is why so much gets hand waved. People new to the hobby can't understand why its even important to track rations as another example

@@Gibbons3457 Yeah, as much as some people don't like "turns" (or at least in my experiences) it makes things feel more grounded than an abstract measuring of in-game time. If you can just rattle off an arbitrary number of tasks without any percievable consequence, it feels dull...

Very nice! That's something I had sometimes done in the past, but never really thought it through logically enough to put into words. I'm def making sure I do this with my party in the future.

@@DungeonMasterpiece Basically the old Take 20 rules, 20 times the time as you literally try everything until you succeed.

It's a good point. Unless their failure actually hinders their ability to perform the task - like breaking a lock after a bad lockpicking roll - there's no reason to give up after one attempt. Some people will object to re-rolling until the player succeeds, as it trivialises the skill check in question ... but the real issue is that there are no consequences for those additional attempts. Technically, the game already has something like this. When you're affected by a condition, you keep rolling until it's removed, but each time you fail, it costs you HP or otherwise continues to hinder you in some way.

@@Letham316 I think that’s definitely part of the art of gaming. Some tasks, a failure just means it takes longer (and maybe we should keep that in mind with successes too). And sometimes, a fail probably should be a fail. Some people might be able to pick locks and that one is just out of your league. On the other hand, I don’t see why someone couldn’t keep trying, so long as they don’t break anything. I suspect that (especially old) locks gradually get ruined if you pick at their innards too long. But how do you represent a skill roll where someone has the skill to open a type of lock and does it fairly easily, and someone who can open some locks but definitely isn’t up to the challenge posed by that lock? Linear scaling challenges won’t model that situation well, where a better thief just has a couple more pluses, representing maybe 10% better skill.

Check out my video on counterstrike and Metroid dungeon design!

@@DungeonMasterpiece I saw and liked those.

It's hard to quantify how weird and alien D&D was WITHOUT a dungeon. The dungeon was a relatively easy to manage piece of gaming conceit. D&D was centered around this, you had special gear to explore dungeons, you had henchmen who helped you fighting monsters and carry off the loot which often came in obscene amounts of coinage, often too much for anyone to carry unaided. Money was a reward, money generated XP. Going outside the dungeon was weird because it had no defined borders, you couldn't plan for people going as far east as possible or up the river. and the convoluted nature of dungeons was applied to everything, I've seen dungeons inside houses, ships etc complete with tunnels and solid areas in between as if everything was carved and dug out of solid wood or stone rather than built. People did learn to move on from dungeons and figure out how to run adventures in the wilderness and even then they were managed like dungeons, except that the confined nature kinda remained, like a dungeon, but with a landscape painted on the walls and instead of rooms you had points of interest, usually more dungeons in many cases. D&D was built around the dungeon ecosystem, other games did not and that's how we learned to make more sandbox style worlds, where things felt more open and unconstrained, less guided than the dungeon. As controversial as a dungeon can be, it's a useful tool for beginners, it avoids many surprises, it's a good crutch for inexperienced DM's to learn the trade and become more comfortable with D&D. I think they are part and parcel of D&D, just like meeting in a tavern. They may be cliché, but they work on a fundamental level. Not every campaign has to be a convoluted exercise in outdoing Critical Role level play with all-out acting, detailed plots, a million unique NPC's with memorable traits. Sometimes a good game isn't more than just meeting in a tavern, meet some NPC's, go down into the dungeon and have a good time clearing it.

@@rotwang2000 , I grew up on 1st Edition D&D and the BECMI version. I remember drawing dungeon and dungeon for my players, and most of our game were nothing more than ever bigger dungeon crawls. The outdoors simply existed to separate the dungeons. When we finally got the Expert book and the outdoors opened up to us, we still generally treated it as dungeon. That is, go in the forest; kill the goblins; go further in the forest; kill those goblins; go even further in the forest; kill the goblins and their ogre friends; now go in the dungeon they were guarding. I stopped advancing editions after 3x so I have very little idea how 5E works. However, I miss the days of basic dungeon crawls where even the door and floor might be a monster and 10% of your magic items were cursed.

@@DungeonMasterpiece why haven’t you replied to any comments on your critical role vs harmonquest video, but are all over the place here?

Been using this in stealth operations. Never thought about using it in normal dungeon delving.

And this is why I prefer older editions of D&D or other games altogether (like Hackmaster 5E which you should totally check out), simply because exploration in a dungeon is made trivial with unlimited use cantrips that can negate a lot of the dangers of exploration without proper preparation like you've stated.

Yep, this, this, and more this. Plentiful magic has killed exploration as one of the supposed pillars of the game. It's no wonder almost every discussion about creating characters you will ever see fall into two categories, min maxing combat builds and the occasional development of character backstory. You don't even have to have casters to do it either with just a few specific magic items to hand.

Goodberry Components: V S M (A sprig of mistletoe) First good berry is a 1st lvl spell ... Later levels it may not matter but early on that's a big deal. Also Unless your brought that mistletoe you are SOL. Players need to have components and need to keep track of them. Mistletoe is not readily available depending on where the adventure takes place. Additionally repeated handling of mistletoe can cause skin irritation. So get ready for that con save after a few days. Seriously. It's not hard to make good berry say good buy

@@Ashtor1337 If you have a spell component pouch you are assumed to always have all material components necessary to cast a spell so long as those components lack a listed gold price. Alternatively, you just take a spell focus item and that also counts as all required material components without a listed gold cost. Also, casting one 1st level spell to feed up to five people for two consecutive days is hardly a sacrifice, even at level 1.

@@Ashtor1337 components without gold cost can be handwaved by having either a component pouch or a spell focus, which most spellcaster classes can begin with as starter equipment

Given that D6's are fairly inexpensive to buy in bulk, I'd get a bunch of them and as they get used up I'd start to pile them up to make the players aware of how long they have been adventuring. Maybe even use 2 or 3 different colors to help illustrate how long they've been going since they last rested and apply penalties if it's been to long.

Check out the Hazard Die or Overloaded Encounter Die blogposts out there. Literally game-changing.

D12 for half days

A lot of games also don't account for bright/dim light, there either is light or there isn't. To be fair, though, fussing with light sources can be a pain in a lot of cases, and depending on the kind of game you're running it's not worth the extra hassle.

@@kevingriffith6011 Well, yeah. It's one of the things I find kind of baffling about 5e.

@@colbyboucher6391 The rules themselves in 5E breeds players that react badly to being told no or not getting their way completely. The mentality of point buys and no negative numbers or limitations regarding stats breeds a disbelief that dim light implies a restriction. I saw a player freak out and quit a campaign because the party was attacked at night and their character couldn't see what was happening where there wasn't light. He simply couldn't handle the mental stress of operating in a limited information environment. 5E is a superheroes game because with superheroes it is never a question of if they win, but a matter of the superhero deciding for themself how they win. Any opposition they encounter simply exists to reaffirm their total control by presenting a situation for the superhero to choose how to resolve. Superheroes don't encounter opposition that forces them into make consequential decisions on limited information, as that presses home a fundamental lack of control.

Stick a yellow poker chip under their mini, or if you use theater of the mind, put a big electric votive candle in front of the player who's character is holding the torch. Keeps it REALLY obvious.

it's disadvantage to widom(sight) checks, disadvantage to passive checks is a -5. but remember any enemies would have that malus too meaning PC's and monsters see each other about the same time.

Thank you so much for the compliment It means a lot!

Me too! I've been watching a lot of smaller channels lately, and I think that many of them are much higher quality than their subscriber count reflects. This one in particular!

Watch his chat with LegalKimchi (another must sub here) on Twitch! So much great insight!

Same. I'm a DM with almost 40 years of experience... So, impressing me takes a lot

Im in the same boat as Brad Wolf. This is a great channel!

I mean its not that hard to add up numbers on a calculator, its just people like being lazy, you really only need to sum everything up once then add or subtract from the total as you go along,

There are some good 3rd party rules that work on things like bulk. You can carry certain Items without a problem as long as you can stow them on your body by means of backpacks, scabbards, pouches etc. It's when the bulk exceeds your carrying capacity you start to notice the problems. For example a dungeoneer's set of equipment, is no problem, but try to put 5000 coin, an item with lots of bulk somewhere and you have to make choices.

@@Alex-sf5uz It's an objectively terrible game mechanic. It has so many issues - not limited to: - Keeping item weights consistent across unlisted items you have temporarily removed from your inventory - Adding items of varying weights in bulk - The fact that the GM has to assign a weight to any unlisted items they distribute There are so many better ways to do it that it's baffling that D&D hasn't innovated on this mechanic for literal *decades*. Anti-Hammerspace Inventory is a great one. _Lamentations of the Flame Princess_ has a great point-based system. _Mausritter_ has a great slot-based system. _Giffyglyph's Darker Dungeons_ does it really well as well.

That's not a Drow thing. It's an edition thing. Infravision was what all elves and dwarves received up until 3e when the mechanic was replaced entirely by Darkvision.

Started out as mostly OSR players watching, but I'm growing the 5e base. I've got a running joke/reputation of "converting" people to the OSR, yet I never set out to do that specifically. I started playing in AD&D when I was in grade school, and just carried those lessons learned into 5e. Outside of the crunchyness, cantrips, and death saves, there really isn't anything that's different to be frank. People just have to stop being wimps and ratchet up the tension on their 5e players. I have no qualms sending three CR5 cave giants up against a level 3 party. They will figure it out or they won't. Not my problem. lol.

@@DungeonMasterpiece Retreat is always an option. Especially when a character is downed. I once willingly took a bunch of arrows defending some villagers we had to rescue, dying so the group could retreat out a secondary passage while I fought as a diversion. Best character death I ever had, and the DM narrated an awesome scene of my character being welcomed into the hall of heroes and being set at the head table to drink with the all-father. I was so stoked, and I was happy to roll up a new character who happened to be one of the villagers we saved. He saw the heroism of my former character and it became his guiding principle.

@@TheLyricalCleric such great storytelling!

@@DungeonMasterpiece I think 5e has been around long enough that people are looking for something a bit different. And the osr is popular enough that the two are starting to blend and really interesting ways.

@@DungeonMasterpiece The big difference is in genre flexibility. 5e's inbuilt magic pervasiveness and extreme death adversity make it really unsuited to more grounded fantasy genres.

thanks youtube! Much appreciated!

KZfaq himself? Damn

I’m so confused

This is unexpected

It's playing with the limitations that's fun.

ok boomer

@@soulcleave2386 Generation X actually.

a very valid way to do it

Most environments will have the tiny bit of light required for a darkvision equipped character to see. I have been in truely dark environments several times, and without a light source it can take 5 min for the eyes to adjust enough to make out any information at all, but for a creature with mirrored eyes like a cat, seeing would be much easier. However, you still wouldn't be able to see much. Enough to see shapes and determine obstacles, but depth perception would be limited, and as in the PHB, no colour. For some environments, particularly deep dungeons with no light sources in nearby rooms, there might not be any light at all, but these would be rare, even in DnD.

@@matthewparker9276 In a wrecked castle there may be some light leaking in, but in the underdark? An ordinary cave away from the entrance? A dungeon underneath an abandoned castle? In all these cases and more, there will be zero photons. That is another thing to keep in mind: light is quantized. You can't keep dividing an amont of light to get dimmer and dimmer; eventually, there is no light at all. Fun fact: some frogs have vision so good that they see stars we can't... and to those frogs, those stars flicker. They flicker because the stars are so "dim" that photons are not always being emitted at their eyes. Mirrored eyes are a great evolutionary adaptation. They can as much as double your sensitivity to light. But 0 * 2 = 0. And the real reason that animals with better night vision are colorblind is because they have more or even all rods, and fewer or no cones. These are structures in our eyes for detecting light. Rods are more sensitive to any kind of light, but can't discern color. Cones can discern color (some versions of cones can even detect colors we can't normally see), but are less sensitive. Humans have a mix of both, with more rods in our peripheral vision. This means you have better night vision out of the corner of your vision, probably as a defensive mechanism against predators. Cats have more rods, but that necessarily means they have fewer cones. The importance of this distinction is that creatures with "dark vision" should never be able to see colors, even in bright light. At best, their color vision should be bad. Humans see fewer colors in dark areas because we have a mix, and our color-detecting cones stop transmitting as much useful data to our brains. But in zero light (which would be fairly common in D&D environments), vision won't work at all. That is why I think the vast majority of D&D races should have "low light vision" instead of "dark vision." Most of those are races that are predominantly evil in most settings. Then as a DM, I can just ban or provide rules for the few that are left. ;-) BTW Humans can actually detect as little as 3 photons (remembering from school, looking this up would probably suck), so our vision is actually pretty good. Sorry, I may have come off a bit aggressive there. That wasn't the intention. I am arguing that just hand-waving low-light vision into true dark vision is a mistake. Not only does it make no sense from a biological standpoint (which was most of the previous few paragraphs), but it is bad for tension and gameplay. With darkvision as stated in the PHB, darkness isn't really an obstacle. It just hinders your fighting and ability to notice details. You can still navigate safely. A character with darkvision doesn't have to worry that they will get stuck someplace, being unable to find and identify food or water, the accelerated onset of insanity from a lack of stimuli, or feeling helpless when their light source goes out. In fact, most characters with darkvision would usually prefer to NOT use torches for the benefit of stealth. This means that forays into dangerous places don't require preparation/planning, the party doesn't have to weigh risk and reward of delving a little too deep, getting minor treasure in the form of torches or glow rods is pointless, and finding new settlements to restock is also not strategically important. So that's why I think people need to be clear in distinguishing low light from true darkness.

@@tkc1129 there is more light in the environment than you would realise. You would get light diffusing from several rooms away, so long as there is a path for it to leak through, and then there is phosphorescent and luminescence, which would contribute small quantities of light to areas underground. Not enough for a human to see comfortably, but enough to activate dark vision. And areas like the underdark have residents that rely on dark vision. They would have their own light sources, either natural or artificial, to provide the low level of light required to see. You could have areas so devoid of light it is impossible to see, but they won't be as common as you are suggesting.

@@tkc1129 nice essay about trying to apply science to a high fantasy superhero game, dont care

D&D used to have multiple forms of "regular" darkvision but they were combined into just darkvision for simplicity.

It's a happy byproduct of script writing lol

If you are unaware, this concept has a name: it's the "Tyranny of Fun".

My uncle built it. #HouseBuxhöveden 🤣

Also, #HouseRopp founding member of the #LivonianSwordOrder

Tas ir lukss! (I'll stop before I hurt myself with more Latvian. 😂) Lived in eastern Europe for two years back in 2012-14 about a year and a half in Latvia, the rest mostly in Belarus and Estonia. Learned to speak solid Russian, as mostly spent time in more culturally Russian areas, like Daugavpils in Latvia, or Narva in Estonia, but picked up enough Latvian to get myself in trouble. :) That's super cool that you have that as part of your heritage! Did you happen to visit any other fortifications or castles while over there?

@@brianhansen9785 My family regularly tours all of the historical fortifications and palaces that we once owned before the Soviet invasion. Lielstraupe was built by my great-grandfather theodoricus, and is now an insane asylum.

That's super cool! I would live to go back there again someday. If you have not, but you get the chance, the fortress in Daugavpils is really interesting and with going to as well. (It's a star fort built in 19th century to fight Napoleon, so well after your ancestry was building Castles there, but still worth the visit in my opinion.) It's a really a interesting fortification that has a really facinating history, I won't bore you with it, but was used in the great wars, and during the cold war as well. I loved walking along, and especially inside the old walls. Admittedly at the time the walls were not in the best shape so exploring around inside them was probably not the smartest idea. That being said, exploring inside the super dark crumbling ruins with nothing but a single bad flashlight between the four of us is still the memory I always go back to when picturing how adventurers feel crawling through dungeons. That's what I try to recreate for my players. I remember finding a mostly dark room and all the light was from a small airhole in the ceiling that shined a beam of light to the middle of the otherwise black room. I could just imagining like a sword in the stone situation in the dusty sunbeam. They were starting a bunch of restoration work when I left back in 2014 so who knows if they even let you in now, but it was a super cool experience. (Tangentially related, a video on ways to help players better relate to/ make feel more engaged with the experience might be interesting. Example maybe if members of the party are able, (physically, financially, emotionally etc.) Have your group visit a cave, or a haunted house, corn maze, hike through forest or mountains, or old castle, etc (more for IRL groups and location depending of course). Vid could also be on things like ambiance (music lighting and such). I've done some group activities like that with my group (it is a friend group outside of just RPG's) and it really does help to be able to reference things from those types of experiences to help set tone and mood. Just recently found your channel so maybe your have a video like that already, I'm still working through your backlog, but just a thought for you.) Anyway did not mean to write an essay. Love your content though so far, keep it up!

caverns of thracia is Talmudic game scripture of dungeon design. I've been keeping my eye on ebay to swipe an original copy for less than $500 lol.

Glad you are finding it inspiring!

That could be something interesting to add to the list. Thanks for the idea.

Taking away all infravision and dark vision completely changes the game and makes everyone use torches. When you can only see 30 feet but the goblins can see in the dark if makes everything more challenging

Actually, it goes counter to how the ability is written. A monster/character with Darkvision can see in the dark as if it were dim light within a specific radius. Twilight, dawn, or a particularly brilliant full moon are all dim light. It's not as harsh as the pictures he showed, and his family of humans are an example of creatures that don't have darkvision, rather than 'how dark it is really'.

@@XenretheVague backing you up here, the ability says what it says. and dim light, so a full moon, is plenty bright to see perfectly well what you are doing. people think darkvision is "sees about as well as the sharpest sighted human" because they are so stuck in the human perspective they can't imagine anything else. and while in complete cave like darkness nothing will be able to see, we are talking about inhabited dungeons, ones occupied by creatures not adapted to total darkness. there is going to be some light down there; glowing fungus, magic lights, small fires lit by the denizens of the dungeon, occasional holes to the surface trickling in light, something. and that is going to let the darkvisioned PC's and creatures have their 60ft of dim light plus whatever light the sources give off. even human darkvision is better than people give it credit for. they dive from broad sunlight into some cellar and think oh that's total darkness but let you eyes adjust and if even the tiniest pinprick of light is getting into a room you can at least make your way around, now imagine it looked 8X brighter that's darkvision. with that you'd be able to see what you were doing with that pinprick on the other end of your house, light a match and it'd be practically daylight to you. so at best the darkvisioned PC's dont need torches, at worst they light up a birthday candle and see perfectly.

@@XenretheVague Ok I see what you mean with Monsters, but what we perceive as characters while seeing in the dark (no matter the race), tends to be clear as day. When the level of detail for figures let alone silhouettes, is not easily shown in game. Players act like they have ultrasonic sending of information coupled within clarity of vision in low light, let alone darkness. Which is difficult to express when others say at the table “but I have dark vision”

Glad you like them!

No way, they did it too! I thought I was first! Dang it there really are no original ideas

It's in the process of blowing up haha. I had 2k subs 3 weeks ago.

Thanks!!!

Btw how can we get you to pump out quality content I wish you had more videos lol

@@DungeonMasterpiece I need my real job to take it easy for a bit, being pulled in too many directions. I've got a new vid in the chamber, just need to find the time to finish editing. Thanks for the support!