Corners

I agonized over the title for this one. It is difficult at this point of conception to succinctly condense my thoughts into something pithy though, hence the length of this post. I was mostly inspired by Dwiz's post Advanced Darkness; I recommend you read this first to understand the rationale behind the 10' light radius that will be used as a fundamental part of this new framework.

Corners

Anyone who has played Counter-Strike or similar games understands the tactical problem which going around a corner presents. A corner can be one of the biggest obstacles in that game because of a simple fact: the person who rounds a corner is at a severe disadvantage against anyone around that corner who is standing still and watching that corner. This is due in part to a couple of mechanical factors in Counter-Strike which I won't go into detail about here, but it is largely due to the fact that there is no easy way to perceive or interact favorably with potential enemies around a corner. Taking a risk and peeking around a corner means your mind now has to process a lot of new incoming visual information. Because of this, your reaction time is just a little bit slower than the person who sits in wait, staring at the same scene and waiting for something to disturb it with movement.

Given the potential for moments of dramatic tension that can be invoked by wondering what could be around the corner, corners have an inverse role within old school D&D systems. In FMC, Marcia B.'s adaptation of OD&D, monsters have a 2-in-6 chance of ceasing pursuit if the party rounds a corner. In Old School Essentials, monsters simply will not pursue the party if line of sight is broken. These structures assume random encounter checks at regular time intervals though, so it is entirely possible that by measuring distance traveled against rate of movement an encounter could occur at a corner, but I would imagine that infrequently happening. But, more importantly, I don't play FMC or OSE. The games I like to run typically use something like an overloaded encounter die, and they only roll that die if the party explores a new room, backtracks through several previously explored rooms, or they take a significant amount of time to accomplish a task (usually around 10 minutes). After running these systems for a while, a fact has been revealed to me.

These systems hardly utilize the hallways between rooms.

This is a major problem as far as I am concerned, as I like to run a mix of old and new published dungeon modules. I've come to notice that the older the dungeon, the more likely it contains mazes of corners. These serve the obvious function of breaking line of sight for fleeing parties, but they also take into account that a snaking hallway going from point a to point b is much longer than a straight hallway connecting those points. This produces more opportunities for encounters to occur outside of rooms. I think this is a good thing. 

But in the current games I run, I dislike tracking the distance the party has travelled and strict timekeeping in the dungeon. I draw the map for my party on a whiteboard app as they explore because we found the mini-game of my party trying to translate my verbal descriptions of a physical space into a flat 2D drawing of a physical space to be un-fun for all of us. So with those mapping procedures absent and by only checking for encounters on a room by room basis, I found I wasn't using the whole dungeon anymore. Corners only ever came up when the party was fleeing danger. This slowly started to bother me more and more, but I didn't have a good solution.

The other day I was listening to the Advanced Darkness episode of Blogs on Tape. It was inspiring to say the least. I kept thinking about an image: of a party creeping down a silent hallway, closely huddled around the bravest among them who holds a candle aloft in the pitch darkness. They have a 10' sphere of light in which they can see, beyond is the uncertainty of death. They know that everything which lives in this place that isn't human can see in the dark. As the hallway stretches on for a small eternity, a corner in the hallway reveals itself, going to the left. The party freezes as the edge of their sphere of candle-light slips just past the corner, illuminating the wall on their right and the floor in front of them. They all know that if anyone is waiting around that corner, they now have the jump on the party.

What would you do?

This moment is so filled with possibility and tension. It would be a colossal waste to not have this moment within the dungeon. And yet, with my current procedures, this moment can almost never occur. Firstly, I've been using torches as they are described in Knave 2e, which gives the party a comfortable 40' sphere of light. Secondly, I only ever check for encounters when the party reaches a room as per Arnold K's Underclock. This has still produced fun play, sure, but with my plans to implement the Advanced Darkness system, I need more out of hallways. A new procedure is required. One that is possibly ill advised.

This procedure should be used in addition to whichever system you are currently using to check for encounters.

Corners Checks

• When the party approaches a corner in the hallway of a dungeon, make a Corner Check. Roll 1d8. On a 1, an encounter occurs, and the party must now roll a d6. On a 1, the party is ambushed or surprised by the encounter. Make a 2d6 reaction roll for the encounter using your favorite reaction table.
• If not ambushed, the game master should telegraph a detail to the players signaling that something is waiting for them around the corner through sounds, smells, and sometimes sights. The party must also assume that the encounter has detected them if it can see their light on nearby surfaces or possibly hear them coming. If the party whispers to each other, the encounter can hear that they are whispering, but not what they are saying.
• Unintelligent encounters will always round the corner toward the party first. Things like constructs and zombies typically aren't motivated by self preservation and do not hesitate. 
• Intelligent creatures will typically not round the corner first, instead preferring to lie in wait.
• If a Corner Check is made, do not check for any corners within 20 ft (2 squares typically.)
• If an encounter occurs because of a Corner Check, do not make a check the next time the party rounds another corner regardless of distance.

This also opens up new quirks to map-making and brings new life to the layout of the dungeon. If you know corners within 20ft of each other won't trigger encounters, but corners within 30ft will, you can set up some very interesting level designs by contrasting long safe corridors with fraught twisting passageways. This will make your party have to decide whether they've got enough resources to navigate certain routes, and greatly changes the dynamic of navigating already traversed locations. And all of this is highly modular as well. You can consider doorways to be corners, you can change the size of the check die to adjust to the relative danger or safety of a given area, you can skip every other corner check, and probably much more. Also, there are new in-game procedures which the players will learn as they come to interact with corners so often. I imagine mirrors will likely be popping up in my players' inventories soon. Mirrors are fun because they're expensive and fragile, but very powerful when in use. Most importantly, I want to reinforce the identity of the dungeon as something malevolent and alive. An intelligence which has a penchant for the dramatic, waiting until the party is about to round the next corner before presenting its next surprise. 

Closing

Keep in mind that this is all conceptual at this point. I haven't tested any of this. I don't know if this will cause an absurd, unmanageable amount of encounters. It is likely that certain dungeons will be impossible to run due to the sheer number of corners contained within. Others will produce far too few checks because each corridor connects rooms with a straight line. I don't yet know how to account for this, nor how many corners is too many corners. I have no idea how this would work in a natural cave system. But I still think there's something here. Hopefully someone much more adept than me will take this idea and create something even better out of it.