What’s the Point (Crawl)?

Here’s a tip for new GMs or those new to point crawls.

What’s a point crawl? I don’t know the official definition, but mine is an adventure you make based on story gates characters must get through. When the final obstacle’s been beaten and that gate traversed, the party’s won.

Creating a point crawl confused me at first. I was used to running a dungeon map. Points were too abstract for this mouth-breather to grasp. But rooms bursting with monsters and loot, connected by trapped corridors, made perfect sense.

If we consider any good story, it has a beginning, middle, and end.

And that’s the perfect way to plot a basic point crawl:

Beginning Encounter => Middle Encounter => End Encounter.

  • Beginning: The PCs are hired to find a missing child.
  • Middle: The party must find the house where the child’s being kept and get past the guards.
  • End: The heroes discover the secret room and rescue the child.

Each is a gate in that the previous encounter unlocks the next.

The characters don’t need to explore and find a house if they aren’t hired. And they can’t discover the secret room without first finding the correct house. Instant point crawl.

The Key is Connections

What baffled me most was how to connect the points conceptually, without a route map. The party could go anywhere in town on their quest. It could take months to search each building.

The missing ingredient was to add a connection to the beginning and middle encounters or nodes. Link them in clear, strong fashion, and players will figure it out without needing a map.

But what if your players don’t see these links? There’s no constraining dungeon map guiding them along preset paths. Then it’s GM adventure-agoraphobia time and the point crawl ends, broken.

This is where Justin Alexander’s Three Clue Rule and my 5 Actions Framework save the day.

Triple Redundancy

The best link or connection is a simple location clue. A bit of information that leads players to the site of the next node.

Our games are mostly location-based. The action must occur somewhere.

Therefore, the easiest type of clue to drop answers the question, Where do we go next?

And we add three such clues in or around each node to help players find what they need to keep going.

Player-Proofing the Gaps

Alas, no matter how much we prep, players will still surprise us. And like the herd of cats they are, they’ll miss all our clues and play instead with the boring cardboard box.

This is where my 5 Actions Framework comes in. It fortifies our nodes, encounters, and clues. It’s like a magic fail forward wand for GMs.

What if…

  • They attack the clue and destroy it before gleaning the location detail?
  • They offend the clue-bearer who now rejects pleas for the information?
  • They roll terribly and fail to collect the clue?
  • They still somehow manage to skip past all three clues?

With the 5 Actions, we quickly prep for these contingencies so we’re ready when the cats think a tavern brawl’s more fun than the annoying urchin trying to get their attention. Go away, kid, we’re on official business. Johnn, I swing at the bartender!

Whether the party’s looking for a fight, bungles the roleplay, pulls a clever stunt, or walks away entirely, we’ve already come up with our response. And it took only a few moments while building each node or encounter.

With this approach, we don’t need a dungeon map, railroad, or script. We only need a few strategic ideas jotted down in advance and we’re now prepared to improvise.

Here’s what our point crawl looks like now:

  • Beginning Encounter => 3 Clues => 5 Actions
  • Middle Encounter => 3 Clues => 5 Actions
  • End Encounter => 3 Clues => 5 Actions

Get the Framework Today

Instead of stressing about our point crawls or any type of crawls, we can respond during play, in the heat of the moment, with grace, cleverness, and confidence with just 5 minutes of additional prep.

I break it all down step-by-step with GM’s Log #7 that shows you how to use the 5 Actions Framework. And yesterday, I added a 5 Actions Cheat Sheet you can put in your GM Binder or screen for handy inspiration during prep and play.

Download GM’s Log #7 The 5 Actions: Player-Proof Your Encounters and the 5 Actions Cheat Sheet today to beat the cardboard box and keep your adventures alive.

Cheers,
Johnn
roleplayingtips.com
https://discord.gg/6MxTRAqQ76
Have more fun at every game!

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