Two of the recent games I have run are “travel” games. In one, the premise is that the characters wake up on a train without their memories. The train moves from place to place, and as they explore each stop on the train’s journey, they uncover clues related to their predicament. In the other game, the players are afflicted with a mysterious magical condition that causes them to Plane Shift randomly through the multiverse, encountering dangerous and unexpected situations.
I’ve enjoyed running both of these games, and I don’t regret pitching them to the players… but they had the unexpected side-effect of making me miss location-based play.
You won’t typically see it printed on the label, but “location-based play” is important to old-school D&D and similar games. The dungeon is not just an abstraction, or the place where the monsters are, but also a literal constraint around the possible actions the characters can take. The location where the adventure takes place creates time pressure, facilitates antagonist action, and intrinsically offers a series of risks and rewards.
The traveling games I ran were more scene-based. The scope of action is less constrained, if at all. Pressure and conflict have to be induced more deliberately.
Running these scene-based games made me appreciate how much location-based play does some of the work on the GM’s behalf. Listening to 3d6 Down the Line’s excellent Adren Vul podcast also drove the point home. A fixed location like a megadungeon organically induces factions, monsters, NPCs, traps, hazards, treasure, and other “game objects” to bounce off each other.
One of the best aspects of location-based play is that this occurs organically. The GM barely needs to think about it; these interactions intuitively descend from the character of the location itself.
A scene-based game can and often should re-introduce known concepts periodically, yes. But it takes more work. How did they get there? Why have they shown up again in such a different context? Embracing serendipity as a law of the universe can help, but it will also tax verisimilitude more heavily than simple physical proximity.
A rich location can create its own intrigue and adventure -- illustration by Artur Skizhali-Veys
The difference between location-based and scene-based scenarios may seem obvious, but it’s quite common to see people mix them up. Take, for example, the five-room dungeon concept, created by Johnn Four. The five-room dungeon idea is a preparation shortcut for a TTRPG session. At a glance, “five-room dungeon” sounds like a location-based style of play; it’s a way to make a dungeon, right?
Not really; reading in more detail, it’s clear this is actually a scene-based approach. Four cites Joseph Campbell of “Hero With a Thousand Faces” fame and says “It's the story framework that matters most for great gaming.” That statement likely sounds fine to trad or modern gamers, but is antithetical to OSR gamers, i.e., those who most promote location-based situations.
Four seems to recognize that the name is a misnomer, clarifying that it is not limited to fantasy games. To the degree five-room dungeons involve locations, they are essentially a way of building what old-school games would call a “lair”; a small dangerous place, perhaps waiting to be discovered while exploring a hex. The lair may have one or more monsters, and the possibility of treasure, hazards, and challenges. It’s probably enough to fill a single session of play. But it fundamentally lacks the promise of exploration that characterizes dungeons, and it is expressly linear.
There’s enough confusion out there that I saw someone in one instance trying to create a megadungeon by clustering five-room dungeons together! Could that work? Well, maybe. But I think it would have to be done very carefully and deliberately, as it’s a matter of combining two scenario design techniques from diametrically different schools of play.
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