In Which We Munch on Crunch

 Recently started reading the posts from A Knight at the Opera.  They've had a couple pretty good posts on crunch lately.  Well, not lately.  This one was back in 2021.  And this one last month.  Both of reasonable length but both good treatments of the topic.  

Y'all know I likes me some crunch.  But I like crunch for a reason.  And I like crunch on MY side of the screen.  Player facing crunch adds to the cognitive load and detracts from overall game play.  So if I add a bit of crunch for the players it's gotta be worth the walk.*  If I can add it to MY work load and it improves the game then I'm usually not even gonna question it.  Players don't usually even hafta know it's there!

And so it is with my newest concoction.  A year or so ago I experimented with The Angry GM's Tension Pool.  It worked OK but we weren't spending enough time crawling for it to matter so it slipped silently into thecloud of good intentions.  Then last month I discovered The Underclock.  And THIS I will implement.  Started last week.  As the party entered the dungeon I meticulously placed a d20 on the map with the "20" facing up.  All action ceased.  Dakora gave me the side-eye and said, quietly, "I hate it when you do stuff like that."  They got it down to 14 before the end of the session.  We'll see how Tuesday night goes.  Don't think I like it for overland travel, nor for urban exploring but it has definitely seemed to sharpen up their attention underground.

Pile this on top of my insanity rules,  spell slot rules and focus vs component rules and the crunch is all easy on the players but adds to the gameplay and decision making.  Do I risk madness to get this spell off?  Do I upcast a spell at the risk of losing it for 24 hours or more?  Do we keep making progress or fall back to that nice spot on the trail that offered the promise of a long rest (which is quite a commodity in our game.)  Cheese that CRunch!

Side story from last session.  Party is trying to elicit help from a local noble.  Their selling point was "we like to travel village to village doing good deeds."  The Lady inquired "what was your last one?"  What followed was about two minutes of backtracking through previous of adventures, NONE of which really involved "good deeds."

*Lengthy aside.  Back when I worked as a summer camp counselor I was usually in charge of our "special programing": opening and closing ceremonies, vespers, flag raising and lowering.  That kind of thing.  I enjoyed finding alternative sights for these.  And our campers usually appreciated the variety IF it made sense.  Had an aide once recommend using a sight that was a 15 minute walk from our home base.  For a five minute ceremony.  I nixed it and said the location had to be "worth the walk."  It had to be worth the half hour of evening rec time the campers would be giving up to get there.  And after that "making it worth the walk" became sort of our mantra.