I mean you can focus on specific events, like you could ask “How does your character feel about being lost in the darkness of the dungeon” if they were lost in the darkness of the dungeon, you wouldn’t want to use Referee power to force the situation to ask the question though.
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It’s also been a while since our Original Poster started the topic – Sage, I’m curious if your thoughts or feelings on dungeons have evolved much since November?
I’ve recently come upon the conclusion that I was never really meant to be an OSR gamer. I’m all for ‘Renaissance’, but looking back into what got me into the OSR wasn’t really the deadliness or even player ingenuity (though I do love that part). It was the lack of rules and structure. So, when an OSR game re-introduces the structure through the narrative instead of the mechanics (that being a dungeon), it makes sense that it has lost its novelty, given that the lack of such a thing was its main draw to me.
I really think if story games framed their advice and guidance more concisely, as well as, really, everything more concisely, I would’ve easily been swayed to the side of story games over the OSR. However, the OSR then allowed me to get into the NSR and FKR, so I don’t look at it as a loss.
To answer your question, though, I have about “the problem with dungeons” since then. I haven’t come up with a solution to dungeons, though, and still enjoy them when in moderation.
I’m going to try to run @JasonT’s 2400 Data Loss in Play-By-Post soon, and that’ll be a good space to explore more freeform dungeons, and maybe from there I’ll have a better solution than just not including them.
That being said, I think Gradient Descent’s dungeon structure is closer to what I’d want out of a dungeon module for me. I’m going to be making a couple dungeons for Discordantopia, so we’ll see by then if I can come up with a way to make dungeons I’m happy with.
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I have had some similar experiences - we may have discussed this on discord already 
I have found that Point Crawls work so much better for my group than Dungeons.
Something I plan to try is to follow Chris McDowall’s advice in his article “Expose Your Prep” (found both in Knock #1 and on his blog at BASTIONLAND: Expose your Prep) and just expose the map to the players, as well as info about some factions they may already be aware of.
I assume this would work well with The Iron Coral, but not sure!
A quote from the article:
If your environments are so lame that having the map negates all challenge then it’s time to crank up your adventure location design.
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I’ve practiced “exposing the prep” a few times. It is very interesting and, with open-minded groups, quite liberating. I don’t need to do this for every game, but I definitely will do it more in the future.
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Curious if you are using the full array of exploration mechanics?
While I think abstracted movement and time are easy enough to adapt, I find it very hard to get a decent room by room dungeon crawl experience without: encumbrance, supply depletion, and random encounters. With infinite time to explore there’s no need for closely tracked navigation and no risk v. reward calculation really sticks to the exploration part of the game.
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I’m not, my group would lynch me and go play something else if I ran them through a fully procedural crawl with exploration turns and light source resources etc. They aren’t interested in that kind of game. They call that kind of thing a “pixel hunt”.
Point crawls let them explore the space more abstractly, talk to lots of NPCs, and move on to the next location when it makes sense narratively.
Background: my group has primarily played PbtA games, improv-heavy story games, etc. and they humor me when we play some OSR/NSR games, but they want to focus on a story about these characters, they’re not super motivated to “put themselves into a puzzle” and think their way out.
Clarification: they do like solving puzzles in character, they just don’t want the game to be all puzzle, all the time. Especially down hallways and through doors.
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Sounds good - I was mostly curious, I find it interesting how ultralights get played and how they contextualize the dungeon. It’s also funny that since the ultralight style of play has become more common how much more dedicated I’ve gotten to procedural exploration. Obviously adventure design fundamentally changes based on play style, so its interesting that if I understand correctly you are using even point crawls, which are still directional, and less zonal then say Trophy Gold or the more interesting 5E design. I suspect this sort of thing works well with Emmy Allen style depth crawls, which are an adventure design I’m trying to wrap my head around, or with Luka’s more zonal point crawls.
I do wonder sometimes if there’s a way to frame (I suspect the mechanical simplifications are out there, heck I suspect I know them) the play style in a way that would make it more popular with players like yours.
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If feel like the procedural dungeon crawl is an interesting game, but plays more like a resource gathering/depleting euro-game style board game instead of a roleplaying game. This is not a bad thing at all, I love those, but it’s a totally different game at that point, and I feel like I’d have need of meeples and colored cubes or cards to represent these resources.
Add to list of ideas to work out: Make a dungeon-crawl into a euro-style board game. Playing your character is optional.
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A core problem in the procedural crawl, the one that early D&D sort of assumes you’ll not only be okay with, but also do the work to implement is the book keeping for supply. Not just how many torches you’ve used but how much time has passed and how many feet one’s moved. Being a game designed by people who’s prior game focus was rather complex war games (Don’t Give up the Ship – requiring protractors, model ships and a lot of space) I think there’s an assumption that this book keeping is the fun, giving the thrill of realism, and you’ll want to design or already have a system/procedures for tracking and implementing logistics. From very early on, non-wargamers didn’t like it and wargamers kept trying to cheese it (see every magic item and spell list ever produced since OD&D). Plus it really does suck up referee brain power better spent of description.
There’s been two broad OSR era innovations to include it: Tokenization and Abstraction.
So tokenization (my own term, for want of a better one) involves supplementing logistics with play aides. Paperdoll inventories, handing out poker chips to represent torch time etc. It borrows a fair bit from video and board games. It’s not bad, but I don’t think it really helps much, and instead simply reminds the table of the logistics part of play – which is very much an issue. It also often includes simplification of some kind, but on the other end it requires its own infrastructure of sorts making it somewhat harder to play online, and using up prep time.
Personally I prefer the abstraction method of dealing with supply. Abstraction here is largely accomplished with tools like simple slot encumbrance, a hazard die to force depletion without book keeping and turn keeping as opposed to time keeping. Basically doing what early D&D does to combat to exploration - cutting away the fussy parts and replacing them with randomization and generalization.
However … in both cases I think one needs a referee that is both willing to “attack” character supply and equipment rather then HP, to restrict resupply/recovery, and to utilize both simple combat and the combat alternative techniques (reaction and morale specifically) from early games - especially as random encounters become so important. It becomes necessary to have adventures written with exploration and procedure in mind, and on the smaller time scale of the modern online session with some attention to the often shorter length of the modern campaign.
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What is this?
Could I get some links?
I tried searching a bit, but came up empty handed 
(I found her blog but no clear mention of the “depth crawl” technique)
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These would be showcased in things like The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library. I tend to refer to them as “flux crawls” but depth crawl works too 
Here’s a post where the author sketches out the procedure.
I did a review of Ynn a while back here that also goes into a little detail on how they work. It’s an interesting “hybrid” of point crawling and procedural generation, with the caveat that running it “on the fly” requires a slightly higher comfort level with improvisation of course.
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Gardens of Ynn, Stygian Library. It’s a popular style of POSR dungeon design based on procedural generation via tables. The idea as I understand it is that using some sort of somewhat loose navigation mechanics (usually you can climb down from each “room” to a new level) the referee creates a procedurally generated set of locations, perhaps as prep, perhaps on the fly that the party delves into. Space is largely ancillary to scene and there’s little navigation as puzzle, but you get an effectively infinite dungeon.
My own suspicion of the technique is that the necessity of interpretable “pieces” of dungeon that the referee and dice can combine into a more cohesive whole limits the detail and offloads much of the design work onto the referee. Second that there’s little or no ability to use this sort of design for procedural dungeon crawling as navigation is simply between areas that are effectively discrete scenes. It seems highly functional for 5E/contemporary trad and similar encounter based design, but it’s not something that makes sense to me for level based classic style adventure design.
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