MCDM announced a new dungeon crawler game they've been working on, and even though I'm not much a fan of their previous project Draw Steel, I was initially interested in seeing their design for Crows. Admittedly, my primary interest was to see what inspiration they took from other dungeon crawlers for their own dungeon procedures, which could provide some innovative inspiration for my own game & scenario design. After all, my primary gripes with Draw Steel (other than the negotiations system) are about style, not the quality of the rules.
However, reading their pitch blurb, one rule immediately crushed that curiosity: measuring dungeon turns in real session time, rather than in-fiction increments.
It's easy to hear the procedural elements of dungeon turns and assume this is fine; it reduces book keeping, after all! Just cross off a torch & check for wandering monsters every 30 minutes, maybe update a clock behind the screen.
However, this design misses the primary purpose of dungeon turns on player decision making: providing consequences for actions that take significant time in the fiction but not at the table.
As an example that came up in a recent session I ran as part of a test of my own dungeon procedures, one player, noticing a secret door the party had missed after approaching it from the other side (as they hadn't spent the time to investigate the original room), stated "I'm going to run my hands along the wall of every room, checking for crevices and such that might indicate secret doors."
Now, you could just tell the player they'll need to describe that in every room (or tell them "no," which will have the same effect); with a session-time dungeon turn, that's the only way to make that action have consequences for the party.
The dungeon procedures I was testing, however, used in-fiction dungeon turns (as the party was aware), so my reply was "Ok; note that doing so means every room will cost an extra turn, then." The consequence of which would be doubled torch expense & more chances to encounter wandering monsters.
The player decided to just check specific rooms they were suspicious of, and would tell me when they wanted to do so.
Such is the design purpose of dungeon turns beyond resource tracking: providing consequences for the party to weigh with each exploration action they take in the dungeon. There are plenty of variations on the principle of the dungeon turn, such as the overloaded encounter die or the underclock, but they primarily strive to improve on that basic design structure of making exploration actions matter without weighing down session time.
I can hope that MCDM will at least learn that lesson in playtesting and come up with a better structure that properly innovates on the decades of dungeon crawl procedural design that exists.
