Dungeon Exploration Turns

Dungeon Exploration Turns

In my effort to bring various rules and procedures from ACKS and AD&D over to GURPS, I reached the dungeon exploration procedure. However, it hinges on two other sets of rules that are barely present in GURPS - encounter distance and dungeon exploration rate. How fast do you move in a dungeon? And why is this important?

In GURPS, a typical human has Move 5, which means that he can move 5 yards per second. This is not his maximum speed, however, as sprinting would allow him to move 6 yards per second. Now, do you walk at the highest speed possible without breaking into a run? There are people who actually do, but most people walk much more slowly (sometimes too slowly, especially in hallways, stairwells, or other narrow passages). Your Basic Move is your running speed as per p. B17 and p. B354. Per p. B354, paced running is half your sprinting speed. For a regular human described above, this is 3 yards per second. Even paced running drains your FP, so your normal movment rate is probably below that.

The hiking rules (p. B351) are generally considered way too optimistic, and it is preferred to use the rules from GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures. These say that under ideal circumstances, your hiking speed is your Move / 4. For a regular human, this is about 1.25 yards per second. If we google real world walking speed values, we'll see that the norm is about 1.42 meters per second or 1.55 yards per second, which is pretty close.

So, where am I even going with this? When the player characters are exploring a dungeon, they are usually running around at maximum Move without running out of FP. As a result, when they leave the dungeon, you may realize that only a few in-game minutes have passed. This is quite similar to a conventional D&D adventure that takes 3-4 in-game days and sees the characters advance from level 1 to level 7 in that timeframe. You'd think that GURPS Dungeon Fantasy or Dungeon Fantasy RPG would have more information about movement rates in the dungeon, but they don't (or I'm blind). This is doubly funny considering that they do talk about one of the character being a mapper. Imagine drawing a map while running.

However, there is the Tactical Looting article from Pyramid #4-1. It says that if you're actively searing for traps and concealed or secret doors, you move at Move 1. If you're passively searching for all of the above (your rolls are at -2), you move at Move 2. Paced running is impossible in a dungeon, but normal running is. To maintain group cohesion, running is done at the sprinting rate of the slowest member, and every 15 seconds you must roll against HT or Running to avoid losing 1 FP. You still can spot traps while running, but at -5.

In AD&D, dungeon exploration uses 10-minute turns and 1-minute rounds, with movement rate being 5 times greater than usual when following a known route or map, or 10 times greater when the party is fleeing from a danger. I'll be honest - the first time I was introduced to the concept of a "dungeon exploration turn" was the playtest of D&D 5e, back then known as D&D Next. I read that and thought that it's a great idea, but in the final version, it got dumbed down and reduced to a single sentence saying that in a dungeon environment movement happens on a scale of minutes. It was exactly the same in D&D 3.0/3.5 - the 1-minute movement was mentioned but nothing else.

So, why am I still going on about this inconsequential thing? Because, in my opinion, it isn't inconsequential. Using set time intervals, such as 10-minute turns and 1-minute rounds, makes timekeeping much easier, and keeping strict time records is important. For example, a torch burns for one hour, but do you really count the number of seconds your combat took and subtract it from every torch? Most buff spells and potions last either 3 minutes or 30 minutes. More often than not, it means that timekeeping is a chore and most GMs just handwave durations of spells and light sources, making them meaningless and/or arbitrary, and that takes away from one of the most important aspects of dungeon delving - resource management. How can you manage your resources if their expenditure is arbitrary?

Would introducing dungeon turns and rounds solve this? For example, ACKS II also uses 10-minute turns and 1-minute rounds for dungeon exploration. Most dungeon activities can be done either hastily in a single round or methodically in a single turn. This made me realize that GURPS supports this too. Everybody knows the Time Spent modifiers from p. B346. The only problem is that taking 8x the usual time gives a +3 bonus and the next step is taking 15x the usual time for a +4 bonus. This doesn't mesh well with transforming a one-minute action into a ten-minute action, but you can just round it up and say that taking 10x the usual time gives you a +3 bonus. Thus, instead of different activities taking different amounts of time, you can devise how big of a bonus or penalty a roll should have if performed in one minute or ten minutes. This would make the system less discrete, but in this situation it's for the best, in my opinion.

You can also see that this turn structure also would dovetail nicely with existing durations. Torches burn for 1 hour, and that's 6 turns. Most spells last for 3 minutes or 30 minutes - and that's 3 rounds or 3 turns. Lockpicking takes 1 minute without a penalty or at +3 if you take 10 minutes. Each turn of rest lets you recover 1 FP. Random encounter checks are done once every X turns. When the combat ends, you just round it up to a minute. Doesn't it all just make sense now? In other words, you have to start thinking not "how long does this activity take?" but "how much of this activity can be performed in 1 or 10 minutes?" Honestly, it feels like I'm reinventing the wheel and that this should've been the standard that for some reason isn't followed nowadays. Maybe I'm missing something - a couple of important but not obvious moments, or a couple of braincells. I'll have to try it out.