So like… “prayer is ten minutes” and “flight goes at a normal speed and not like you’re the world’s slowest balloon” both seem like the correct ruling to me, even though they’re using different uses of turn

Because dnd was written… before consistent wording in rules was an understood as important thing.

I think it makes sense to be consistent with words when deciding what spells do (ruling flight and prayer the same way on the word “turn”), but I wouldn’t trust that od&d itself is being consistent. So I feel like it’s probably best to pick which turn they mean on a case by case basis.

I think with some stuff my feeling has always been “go with what makes the spell useful”

Honestly google sheet’s handling of randomness is generally pretty rough to implement, from seeing how someone had to do it for blades in the dark, so I’d at least heavily consider other options.

I feel like for rolling a die on dm-facing tables, really you just want an approachable language like python, since making a function that rolls over a table is simple to do with programming, and honestly is going to be easier to handle separately (though you could import tables from sheets or csv)

Every turn you’re in an old school dungeon is a chance to get into a dangerous encounter you usually don’t want, because it might drain resources, or someone might get injured or even killed. Not to mention your torches are always burning, always closer to running out.

So if someone does that, and there’s something to be found, as the DM, you reward them with the information there because they spent a resource (time) to get it. Skills are more of a backup method for when you don’t want to expend time.

Touching things, looking closely over a whole wall, listening to the sounds in the next room over an extended period, these are all actions that take time.

Where taking a dungeon turn to do something (search a wall by running your fingers over it, test how hot some springwater is by touching it, rifle through junk for valuables) is both a risk timewise and something you need to put your character *into* the situation to do.

I think a lot of it comes down to the removal of time as a resource and random encounters, as well as a lack of reactive dungeons.

Without time as a resource, you need some way to figure out if the players looked good enough at something. Which can be resolved fully without skills in old school,