How important is it that a dungeon makes sense?

[Jan van Leyden]

(snipped a lot of cool information about real world (underground) complexes ready to be used as dungeon)

Wow, thanks! A lot of new information for me! I bow before your extensive knowledge of real-world dungeons.

N1 would be a classic example of a low realism dungeon. And, at best, I confess that looking at an 'old school' dungeon like that I have the sort of condescending appreciation for it that an adult might have for the work of a child: "Oh isn't that nice. And you stayed inside the lines too." Given that it was a first attempt in a newly discovered artform, allowances must be made, but the entire thing looks so sloppy, amateurish, and ill-conceived to me now that I'm just entirely boggled. As a 12 year old DM in 1985, dungeon features like that bothered me then, and been beneath the standards I held myself too designing my own. (The map in X1: Isle of Dread has similar hydrology issues, and had to be redesigned.) And that was before I took college classes in speology.

That seems to be the difference between as (as far as dungeons are concerned): you are much more discerning than me. My suspension of disbelieve can stand such a thing - within limits.

On a tangent: we had a serious realism problem once in a SciFi game. The GM was a physicist, one player a mathematician, the rest physicists as well. It just didn't wok out. When we wanted to rescue a prisoner from a spaceship the train of thought went like this: "spaceships seem to have artificial gravity and judging by the ship's design, it can't possibly be introduced by rotation. So there should be some field generator. If field generators are used for the purpose, any technically minded adventurerer should know how they work. The position of the device should be central on the ship to keep the field as small as possible. OK, we get us some magnetical boots (should be available for emergencies) and go sabotage the generator to give us some minutes of surprise.

All efforts by the GM to wiggle free from this adventure-destroying predicament failed due to our concerted scientifical argumentation. We quickly learned the running a hard SciFi game with physicists isn't the brightest of ideas.

 

[Celebrim]

All efforts by the GM to wiggle free from this adventure-destroying predicament failed due to our concerted scientifical argumentation. We quickly learned the running a hard SciFi game with physicists isn't the brightest of ideas.

I once considered running a game of GURPS: War Against the Chtorr for my wife and her friends. Then I realized that I'd probably actually need to explain the biology to a bunch of people with Biology Ph.D's. Then I realized that the biology really didn't make sense.

 

[Sunseeker]

It depends on the presentation. If it's advertized as the "Caves of Chaos" I might be expecting less sense than the "Dungeons of the Dark Fortress" or even a more vague title like the "Bleak Depths".

As a geology nerd, I have a fairly high expectation for caves to adhere to some sort of geological ground.

I generally expect militaries and orderly lords of doom to build orderly prisons and castles.

Even the most fantastical dungeon still needs some sort of underpinning. "totally random" doesn't work for me. It feels forced.

 

[Elf Witch]

Since dungeon crawls are my least favorite aspect of the game unrealistic silly things just irritate me. It does not have to make total sense but some kind of logic makes it easier to accept. By that I mean the critters should at least be similar in what they need to survive down there. As someone else said you should not have lakes of molten lava and then caverns filled with ice not unless there is some magical reason that allows it to happen.

I also can't stand the design of all these threats just waiting for adventurers to come to them no matter how much noise they make or how many times they retreat.

 

[MJS]

The point being, there is really no excuse for having a dungeon that is nonsensical but lack of skill and knowledge. The real world doesn't constrain your imagination - it informs and expands it. There is no classic dungeon that you can't point to examples that would be of the type in the real world; all you have to do is move the monsters in.

Ha. Skill and knowledge at WHAT? Hydrology? Thats riveting adventure game material right there.
Indeed the real world inspires our games, but do remember that the skill in question is adventure design, which I doubt any sneering college boy can best any of the classic authors at.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Indeed the real world inspires our games, but do remember that the skill in question is adventure design, which I doubt any sneering college boy can best any of the classic authors at.

Really? I've seen plenty of cases where self-professed uncreative people, even dating back to my middle school gaming days, created characters and stories and challenges that blew anything I've ever seen in the published world.

I think it's because it's easier to create for a specific group of people and scenario rather than writing to a mass audience (as opposed to saying that published authors in this area are just astonishingly incompetent), but one way or another I see results varying from good to great from novices (let alone those of us who aren't novices), while I've never seen a published adventure that was remotely worth my time.

 

[Celebrim]

Ha. Skill and knowledge at WHAT? Hydrology? Thats riveting adventure game material right there.

How much time have you spent in caves? I guarantee you that there are caves more epic than anything in any published adventure. I suggest that if you want to write good cave adventures, you should spend more time in them.

Hydrology turns out to be pretty integral to riveting adventure material in the real world, much less what you can do with it in a fantasy game.

 

[Celebrim]

I also can't stand the design of all these threats just waiting for adventurers to come to them no matter how much noise they make or how many times they retreat.

In fairness, this isn't a complaint you can make against most of Gygax's material. If you look at typically Gygaxian works like B2 or WG4, a lot of the module is taken up with the precautions that the monsters are taking and how they'll organize and respond to repel threats.

I think the bigger question in much of Gygax's works is why these seemingly intelligent creatures have chosen to live and remain where they have in the first place. There is no real explanation for why the various tribes - all of whom hate each other and evidently are continually at the point of murdering each other - stay in the Caves of Chaos. If they are united by common purpose - say destroying the Keep - why isn't there evidence of war preparations - ladders, catapolts, battering rams, etc. This is a clear case to me where thinking out the logic of the setting would have made it richer and more interesting.

 

[Kinak]

I think [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] nails this one. The more a dungeon (and the world) is internally consistent, the more players can actually engage in meaningful decisions.

If all you know is that there's a right door and a left door, the choice isn't meaningful or interesting. If the left door looks more used (because the goblins pass through there), you have something. If the right door is made out of a special material you've seen before, you have something.

Dungeons can certainly be enjoyable hackfests, but if they're going to be more than that, they have to follow an internal logic. And it's not particularly hard, you just need to set up the dungeon with that in mind.

To me, it means that the players can make inferences about features in the dungeon (monsters/NPCs, tricks, traps, treasures, and layout) and make meaningful decisions based on those inferences. That is very important to me.

Well said.

I'll also add that the more the dungeon makes sense, the easier it is to describe what's going on outside the lines of the boxed text. If the party peer down a hallway that isn't a keyed encounter area, what do they see? If the dungeon makes sense, it's easy to figure out and describe. If it doesn't, you basically have to make it make sense or your answers can end up being inconsistent later in the dungeon.

Ha. Skill and knowledge at WHAT? Hydrology? Thats riveting adventure game material right there.

There's nothing quite like players asking what direction a river flows and only then realizing it goes from high point to high point. Or having players try to flood a dungeon and realizing it really should have been flooded in the first place, but not knowing why it hadn't been.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[Ratskinner]

Very. Just like everything else.

If there's some extended underground space with partitions, obstacles, and inhabitants, there had better be a good explanation for who built it and why it is this way now. Which is why I tend not to use dungeons; they're hard to justify (and they're huge time-wasters). I used to do dungeoncrawling where the need for kind of baic logic was not infrequently abrogated and it's not something I have any desire to return to.

I tend to agree.

As a player, if something doesn't make sense, I tend to take it as indicating that finding out additional information to make it make sense must be part of the adventure. So when its just a poorly though-out scenario...I tend to inadvertently start trouble by asking questions.

As a DM, I find it unusual to have a reason to have traditional dungeons around.

That being said, I've played in plenty of games (including my current one) where there is some kind of justification for the big dungeon...and it can work, for a certain kind of playstyle.