#I didn't have any plan for like half of this art work

[anim-ttrpgs]

@gingerbreadbeholder

Thank you!

Yes, we use a virtual tabletop grid with little tokens for that kind of dungeon exploration and combat. We rotate GMs in the White Company AD&D2e campaign referenced in that post, and whatever virtual tabletop we’re using just sorta depends on the preference or convenience for that particular GM.

This time we were using Roll20 with a high-res remake of the dungeon from the actual adventure module. Here’s a few screenshots.

This screenshot is of a bit of a zoomed out view so you can see how many characters we’re working with. There’s 28 White Company&Allies(9 or which, the cynocephali, are enemy mercenaries that Herr Rike bribed to switch sides) and 16 enemy guys. That blue square is where the party's magician, Lady Serena Graves(drawn in white with a green border just above the green border token that uses Pentament art. ) cast her one spell of like the whole adventure and made the ceiling collapse on the guy with the purple robe, instantly ending what would have been a super deadly fight. The guy in the purple robes popped out from behind the corner during the negotiations and cast a spell of paralysis (and probably some other worse effects along with it) on Herr Rike before anyone could react. Against all odds, she passed a save that had a 90% chance to fail, the spell failed to take hold. We rationalized that this might be because she's already like 15% scar tissue and paralyzed muscles, so she's used to standing on bad legs, and so it just barely impeded her, enough to look like there was no effect at all. Then Serena Graves immediately brought the ceiling down on him, which was the plan all along. They had heard from the captured enemy fighters that this guy was such a deadly fighter and powerful magician that they were all terrified of him, so the party didn't take any chances. Rike getting hit by a spell wasn't part of the plan, but other than that, Serena Graves collapsed the ceiling on him as soon as she saw him, just as planned.

It's a good thing too, the DM told us some of his stats later and the captives were not fucking kidding. If this had come to an actual fight, he would have been one-shotting at least one party member per round, without even accounting for over a dozen other enemies.

The thing about magical characters in AD&D is that they will spend the whole adventure doing absolutely nothing until it comes time for them to snap their fingers and make one insurmountable problem instantly go away. The others surrendered after this, and under guard from the White Company&Allies, dug through the rubble to rescue the other half that had been trapped inside.

The token that uses Pentament art is one of the White Company Fighters, Chrysanthemum. Abigail is the one represented by the art from @ ironlily on twitter. Miles is the anime guy. Thistle the Witch is next to Chrysanthemum. Ceridwen is the other green token with a dog.

Here’s a more zoomed in picture where you can see the tokens more clearly. You can see Herr Rike(left, drawn in white with a green token border) and one of the sub-contracted mercenaries (Japanese warrior with a blue border token.) holding two previously-captured enemy soldiers (outlined in red right above them) at knife-point while negotiating with the rest of the enemy. Some of this is our own art, some of it is just whatever we can find, but a lot of it is from either HeroForge or Mordhau. Mordhau is great for quickly creating a bunch of unique historically accurate goons for this campaign, but you have to play a lot of that game to unlock a wide variety of armors. Luckily, I have over 500 hours in it.

And here’s a screenshot of the rooms where a lot of the above story took place. You can see the stairs where those two guys got slime attacked, the door where I drew a lock to indicate it was locked after Herr Rike couldn’t pick the lock, the room with Lubash in it, the door where Herr Rike propped up the jug of oil(drawn in yellow), the hallway with cells where the revenants came out, and the secret passage they eventually found.

We don’t always perfectly adhere to the grid itself, like in instances where it makes sense that the group should be able to stack up closer than the usual 5-foot squares would allow, but even then it is still useful for keeping track of relative positioning, so there is often some theater-of-the-mind going on, but for tactical combat games like every edition of D&D, I really can’t recommend a grid enough.

Also, use adventure modules. If you want a D&D dungeon crawl, play AD&D2e or earlier (I have also heard good things about Advanced Fantasy Dungeons, which is supposed to be a "modernization" of AD&D.) and use the dozens and dozens or even hundreds of adventure modules compatible with them that already come with great dungeons right out the box! The story above is from using an actual 1979 D&D adventure module, and the great thing about using some of the older and more famous ones is that man of them will have resources you can find online, such as fancy remakes of their maps and stuff. "Use adventure modules" and "create situations, not plots" are the two most important pieces of advice I can give to any GM.

"D&D can do anything" and "I don't like dungeon crawls, I enjoy real role-playing" are two statements that often go hand-in-hand and the ironic thing is that the latter statement betrays a very shallow understanding of role-playing while being really snobby. What's even more hilarious is that it's like baby's first RPG elitism, like yeah most people go through a "I like real role-playing" phase but to go through it while putting on airs about the dungeon game while at the same time dismissing dungeon games is real funny.

Anyway, wherever people pick up the idea that dungeon-crawling, the playstyle most supported by D&D, is somehow pedestrian, it very quickly leads to bargaining, like surely if dungeon-crawling is actually bad and for babies then D&D must be capable of so much more, right? Well, truth is, not really, D&D kind of sucks for things besides that.

Where a lot of people go wrong at this point is contending that therefore D&D must be flawed as a role-playing game: like, if it actually kind of sucks for most playstyles besides dungeon-crawling and we've already decided that dungeon-crawling isn't real role-playing, then surely D&D must be bad as a role-playing game?

The issue of course is that most people don't ever interrogate their starting assumption of dungeon-crawls being bad. And truth be told most people who claim to hate dungeon-crawls have never actually played a dungeon-crawl. At most they've played a dungeon-crawl themed linear succession of combat encounters. (I remember this: once when I posted about dungeon-crawls being good, actually, someone responded with a "well I can see the appeal but personally I couldn't enjoy a game that's just back-to-back combat" which is a whole misunderstanding of dungeon-crawls as a genre.)

Anyway so the great thing is that once you re-examine your assumptions about what counts as "real role-playing" and conclude that a dungeon-crawl is as much real role-playing as whatever the fuck Critical Role is doing then you find whole new vectors of being a snooty blowhard and it rules. You can make fun of D&D players in so many new ways,