Earlier this year I published a post on “Old School Movement” with a simple set of rules I could use when GMing converted old-school D&D and AD&D dungeons in Dungeon Fantasy. Recently, the Nature Kills blog has also published their own take on the same subject in a post titled “Dungeoncrawl Procedures”.

What I find most interesting on that post, and on the sources it links, is that they see the lack of this detailed procedure in recent D&D editions as a grave omission in that system. Having a canonical procedure to crawl a dungeon or to perform any other sort of exploration is a vital pre-requisite for properly designing these dungeons and other places.

The actual procedure outlined there is similar to mine in nature, but differs in some details and adds others I didn’t cover. The ones I found most interesting are:

  • This procedure should apply to all dungeon exploration, not just to AD&D adaptations.

  • Default movement speed is double what I guessed (encumbered Move x 20m per turn).

  • Traps are only sprung 2 out of 6 times. A direct translation of an old-school mechanic that’s perfect for use when you’re not constantly using a map and miniatures.

They have convinced me to apply this mechanic to all dungeon crawls, but I disagree with enough of their details that I feel I have to revise my own procedure. That will happen some other time.