Tower Theory: Running Collapsing Sessions
Adding momentum to both floor-to-floor or town-to-town conflicts
Developing the Tower
Towers aren’t just structures—they’re a method to visualize layered design. Whether you're running a crumbling wizard spire, a crystal labyrinth, or a busy market street, each space can be treated like a tower floor: modular, interconnected, and responsive to player action. The vertical metaphor becomes useful when you consider how scenes stack, how elements fall into each other, and how choices made at one level cascade into consequences elsewhere. Give every location the same sense of gravity as when a stone tower starts to fall.
Listing Functions
Every key object in the room is now a Chekov’s Gun.
The players enter. Like many DMs, you may find yourself spending three minutes describing the environment—only to realize near the end that you forgot to mention there’s a dead body in the middle of the floor.
Let’s break down the objects in the room and consider how each could function in a combat encounter:
Dead Body
Gross (comedy), Lore, and Loot.
The body can be moved around the space by player actions, enemies, or environmental effects like explosions or floor shifts. The wizard’s body may hold specific items or body parts that players want to preserve or interact with.
Lantern
Timer, Danger, and Light.
Suspended from the ceiling, the lantern serves as the room’s only light source. Its position makes it difficult to reach. It reveals targets but also exposes players to danger. If it breaks and fire spreads, it introduces a time constraint.
Ladder
Difficult Transportation, Scene Change, Improvised Weapon
A player is climbing up it, or hanging on for dear life as it falls and becomes a bridge between here and the other tower. Other creatures follow, or emerge down to push the plot along, and the rungs themselves can be broken fairly easy to knock down the potion smith’s cauldron backpack.
You don’t need a detailed plan for every dungeon room—just a clear understanding of what the objects in the space can do. Give players time to discover those possibilities on their own. But when the pacing slows or a player’s approach becomes repetitive, use these objects to shift the momentum. Show that the environment offers more than static decoration—each element can serve multiple purposes beyond what typical game systems may expect.
Additionally, at the end of scenes keep a small note of the state of each object. Everybody loves a well-placed callback, so if the BBEG falls on the already-knocked-down ladder, it just helps make the piece feel that much more connective.
Creatures with Functions
"So, the characters in your old-school D&D game go somewhere you haven’t yet prepared and you describe some cool, weird-ass monster that you don’t actually have stats for. (...) In situations likes these, I just use the stats for a bear and no one is the wiser. Re-skin appearance, methods of attack, and add special abilities on the fly if you absolutely must...but when in doubt, just use bears."
Check out Dice Goblin Games’ Just Use Bears, which provides 12 stat archetypes you can adapt to nearly any creature. Explorers Design expands on this idea by replacing hit points with functionality-based mechanics, encouraging GMs to think of monsters in terms of how they affect the scene rather than just what numbers they hit with.
Join the conversation:
On May 18th, 2025 at 11:15am, I will be hosting a panel at FAN EXPO Philadelphia on how we can combine science with tabletop games in nuanced ways. One of the panelists, Tony Vasinda of Plus One Exp, will contribute insight on functional design and how it shapes better play experiences.
Spatial Consequences
Whatever state your dungeon is in, picture it like a tower. When players crash through a floor, they’re not just moving downward—they’re merging one scenario into another. It’s unrealistic to expect a GM to track every object and detail in play at once. Ideally, your players will have a clear direction, but when in doubt, just grab an element from your function list and use it in a new, unexpected way.
If you're literally using a tower, falling through a floor might drop a slime into a room with fire (something that can harden or harm it), a body (a food source), and a ladder (a terrain obstacle). For maximum effect, include something the players had control over earlier—like placing the body or breaking the ladder—so the environment feels like it responds to their choices. That sense of ownership deepens engagement.
This technique isn’t limited to towers. It applies just as well in towns, ships, caves—any layered or modular setting. Have them fall through the floor boards, out a wall, down a staircase, and into the crows nesting grounds by the river. When a player gets knocked out, have an enemy grab them and pull them towards the ravine. Push your players around so they end up doing just the same to their enemies.
Don’t stress about everything in play if it gets too overwhelming. Focus on where the players are right now. If you’ve prepped maps, great. If not, everyone’s operating in a shared imagination anyway—so exact placement can generally be flexible.
Lastly, when spaces start to feel built-up and familiar, players get to “defend the tower”. The players know this terrain better than any newcomers. Let them leverage that knowledge—reward their exploration and turn it into a home-field advantage.
Read more below on how to evoke a sense of environmental physicality below:
Timekeeping
Managing the pacing of a game does not need to be an opaque or labor-intensive process. In fact, integrating timekeeping systems into gameplay can serve dual purposes: first, as a tool for the game master to maintain narrative momentum; and second, as a visible mechanic that allows players to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to rising tension with autonomy. When time-based events are structured rather than arbitrary, they create a more cohesive and intentional game experience.
One compelling example of a transparent pacing mechanic appears in Skeleton Code Machine’s analysis of the dice game Pig. In this game, players roll a die after each action, with the results contributing to a running total. Once a predetermined threshold is reached, the game ends. This simple mechanic introduces a clear, escalating tension, as players weigh the risk of continued actions against the looming end of the phase.
Pig additionally has potential for mechanical modifiers—either positive (delays, boons) or negative (penalties, acceleration)—that can be applied to the die roll or the cumulative total. These modifiers can be earned, discovered, or triggered through play, giving players a sense of further agency over the pacing itself.
In Summary
List and track the potential functions of environmental elements, so players interact with them meaningfully rather than passively.
Reframe creatures not as stat blocks, but as contributors to scene dynamics.
Keep track of the physical space, utilizing strategies that don’t add to much strain into your workload.
Apply time as a visible mechanic rather than a background constraint, letting players interact with pacing directly.