I’m having a bit of an epiphany. I think the players will do what the GM does. If the GM acts in the role of translating everything into mechanics, the players will start acting mechanically. (“I Scout the room.”)
I notice now that the Describe to Live section is advice to the GM, not to the players.
You need to present a setting worth engaging with fictionally. Allow the mechanics to be an afterthought in your own mind.
Like, this seems totally dysfunctional to me:
GM: You open the door, which opens into a corridor.
PC: We go through.
GM: Come on guys, how do you go through?
This seems better:
GM: You open the door, which opens very smoothly and quietly, despite the rusted hinges. Beyond, is a corridor, much like the one you are in, but with deep scrape marks along the floor.
PC: Weird, I look at the hinges.
PC2: What’s the scrape mark?
The next question is, as a GM, what are you describing? Are you producing vivid descriptions from your knowledge of natural and artificial caverns? Are you just rolling on a random dungeon room description table? (“The room is uh… brick… with uh… a sulfurous smell.”) No!
You are describing evidence of what has happened here! The players will learn to care because this information is vital to understanding the dungeon. That in turn is vital because the players are on a foray into a deadly place, and the question that’s on the top of their minds is, at all times, “When do we turn back?” When two of them are half dead, they will be desperate for any scrap of information for what’s coming next.
My conclusion is somewhat heretical, but it goes like this:
- During dungeon prep, the GM ignores the mechanics. Do not create ‘challenges’ and ‘obstacles’, except as emerge naturally from (say) a pack of orcs living there.
- Focus on creating a place with multiple layers of history, and consider what evidence each layer leaves. Do this over and over again - at least four eras with a major happening or pattern of behavior in each.
- During play, as GM, you have a ton of stuff to describe. Describe it, and let the players explore further or ignore things as they see fit. The evidence flows from an authentic history.
A pit trap is an obstacle. A pit trap that’s been jammed open with a rusted iron stake (but nonetheless still presents a challenging 8’ gap) is much more interesting obstacle. Who staked it open? Are they still here? Can I hear anything?
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In play, much as you would for BW, the players act by describing their actions in the fiction, interacting with the rich setting you’ve made. They must engage your dungeon narratively. It’s easy for you to respond narratively, because you have so much to say on it. Your pit trap isn’t an Ob 4 health obstacle, it’s an 8’ gap. This keeps mechanics out of your mind until such time as they settle, narratively, on a means of dealing with it. Only then, do you look up skill, then obstacle. (How hard is it to cross an 8’ gap? Let’s find out!)
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(This is the heresy part.) Let the players deal with party logistics much more mechanically.
The rules for adventuring logistics (food, camping, cooking, hunting) are long, quantitative, detailed, and interconnected. The most beautiful thing about them is that, in total, they represent a crisp opinion about how hard it is to adventure. I say let players master these rules as rules. This is a proxy for their characters’ real-world knowledge of how vulnerable they are, so they have to grasp how it works, quickly.
Party logistics is Torchbearer’s equivalent to D&D 3e’s battlegrid tactical combat minigame - it’s a baldly mechanical portion of the experience that’s fun in its own right. I love the discussions that emerge from them - do we camp now, and hunt? Hunting isn’t so easy here, we’re in mountains. Do we try to stretch the rations, or head back to town now and see if we can refill using this silver plate.
I think they generate fascinating choices and behavior without trying to pretend that adventurers are doing them for anything other than mechanical reasons. It seems counterproductive for a GM (who may well be inexperienced with the skill factors and all the ways that skills can be used) to try to master these on the players’ behalf and paint them with a fictional veneer. I think if you wrote the game, or have mastered it, you can do this.
But otherwise, embrace that this is not a fiction-first part of the game. Let the players become seasoned expeditionists, who are balancing a flinty-eyed assessment of the shit they are in with the risk of moving forward.