Minecraft to craft dugeons??

[EvilDwarf]

I know I'm a little late to the Minecraft craze, but I've been looking at it and wondering if Minecraft could be used to build walk-thru RPG towns and/or dungeons?

Has anybody tried this or know whether this would work? If anyone has Minecraft, do you have some idea, if possible, of how labor intensive building some smallish dungeons might be?

Right now, I have set up for our gaming group a laptop connected to an HDTV, and we cover our maps with a fog of war layer that we erase as we explore. Crude, yes, but really simple and fast. My hope would be that I could build a Minecraft dungeon that we could actually walk through. The cool-factor of doing that would be worth some extra work.

And if not Minecraft, any other ideas for such a thing??

Thanks in advance!!

 

[Nytmare]

As someone who has not even thought about touching another video game since I first played Minecraft three years ago, I consider myself to be a somewhat accidental expert.

You definitely could build a dungeon or town in Minecraft (I spend almost all of my free time doing it), and though it could be labor intensive depending on what limits you put on yourself, there are already people who have rebuilt Middle Earth, Westeros, and the Starship Enterprise.

There are servers dedicated to varying degrees of Minecraft roleplay and downloadable "dungeon" maps with different kinds of puzzle solving and exploration.

But, as for using Minecraft as a D&D tool, I think that it would probably end up being more of a detriment than benefit for most groups. I think that you'd really have to have the right kind of group (ie a group already bitten by the Minecraft bug) for them to not be distracted by the style of the game. And at that point, you'd be better off running them through a Minecraft dungeon instead.

 

[Umbran]

Could you? Sure, I guess. But that's a *lot* of prep-work.

 

[Nytmare]

Could you? Sure, I guess. But that's a *lot* of prep-work.

Not really. If you're doing it in "creative" mode, where you basically have an inventory full of an infinite supply of every item, and you don't have to sweat fighting monsters or spending more than a mouse click to break a block, you can churn stuff out incredibly fast. I'd spend less time making a mock up of a dungeon in Minecraft than I'd spend on making a typical D&D map for one of my games. I guess it depends on how much time you're already putting into your game.

 

[Greylond]

Yes, it can, and has been done already. Don't have any links right now but if you google minecraft dungeons you should find some that have been created. My son and I were working on one last year but had to stop due to he had to catch up with his school work. I'm designing the adventure and he's the minecraft expert that knows how to translate what I want into the game.

 

[Stormonu]

Oh yeah, you can do some D&D dungeons in minecraft. For example, Ravenloft.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ_njMAVaqE

 

[EvilDwarf]

Thanks for the good info! The Ravenloft dungeon is way, way cool--too bad I have a job, lol.

Looks possible but a little labor intensive all round--googled minecraft dugneons and see some interesting stuff. Looks like I'll just have to make the jump and try it out.

Thanks again and if anyone has any more ideas, options, or advice, feel free!

(PS--why doesn't someone make an easy 3D walkthrough dungeon program and get rich quick??? Do any of the Neverwinter builders allow you to build such things??)

 

[Morrus]

Yeah, Neverwinter Nights sounds like the tool for the job. The first one (the second one I found much slower to use).

 

[Stormonu]

Yeah, Neverwinter has the Aurora toolset and it's fairly good, though it does have its limitations. And, if you want to do more than scenery, it takes a fair bit of programming knowledge.

Also, the AD&D Core Rules CD had a simple engine that let you take a map you made in 2D and turn into a doom-style map you could "walk" through, but it was fairly primative looking (I don't think you could include creature images or do maps that had higher than a 10' ceiling).

I'd say a given dungeon takes about a week of 4-6 hours work a day to finish. I've actually rebuilt that Ravenloft map about three times due to computer crashes (not the fault of minecraft, but bad hardware on my part).

Besides Ravenloft, I've also done some work on the Caves of Chaos, White Plume Mountain and the Tomb of Horrors. Oddly enough, despite Ravenloft's size, its actually easier to build and looks way better than the Tomb, White Plume or even the Caves (the last of which look horribly mundane and uninteresting going by the maps).

 

[Tav_Behemoth]

One of the bonus goals of the Dwimmermount Kickstarter was a Minecraft server on which we'd excavate the mega-dungeon. That's got parts of three levels, but one of the backers did a full dozen levels. It's amazing to walk through and has really helped identify places where the original maps need to be corrected to make stairs line up, etc.