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Hi! I’m currently planning a playthrough of The Flowers of Algorab, and I keep running into problems with one of the core themes in TGD: the delve. In my view, it detracts from the roleplaying and the players’ immersion, since the game suddenly shifts focus to time-consuming dungeon crawling instead.

I've noticed that at least some of you feel the same way, and I’m wondering how you’ve handled it. Have you picked one or two important delves and run them by the book? Or have you simplified delves and just roleplayed them, with maybe one or two important dice rolls? Or do you have other ideas for toning down the boardgame-like aspect of the delves and instead bringing the roleplaying to the forefront?

I’d be very grateful for any input!

One thing that helped us was pre-deciding the delve’s narrative purpose. For major delves tied to plot revelations, I used the full mechanics. For resource-gathering or transitional delves, I treated them like skill challenges. That balance worked well. It made delves feel intentional rather than following procedures.

I had a similar issue and ended up abstracting most delves unless they introduced something new or important. For the rest, I just summarized the exploration and focused on key moments so it didn’t slow everything down too much.