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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8519255" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>I've always designed dungeons organically, I think because the first home-written adventure I was shown was organically designed, and I didn't even come across more game-y, tile-based or setpiece or similar types of design until later.</p><p></p><p>I don't think there's any real contradiction between organic and level-based, because what is organic is so flexible, and ultimately, you can simply change the dungeon so that it's still organic but doesn't demand the presence of the too-threatening being.</p><p></p><p>Usually it's pretty easy to signpost threatening beings even if they are present, and you can literally have NPCs warn PCs about them in a lot of situations - many threatening beings will be badass enough to be part of local myth and legend. There definitely needs to be more communication than with a standard "rooms full of monsters/traps" dungeon, but I think it tends to happen, well... organically and helps build the atmosphere of the dungeon.</p><p></p><p>In fact, this has always been one of my major bugbears with non-organic dungeons - they're often written in a way such that there's no way to anticipate what is coming, despite monsters having been there for decades or centuries in some cases. I'm sorry but 20 hobgoblins living in a barracks is going to have an impact on the local environment, and they're one of the neater enemy-types! Often you get the idea the dungeon was assembled in individual parts with little regard to the whole, or they just decided which monster goes in which room at the last moment. This absolutely includes professionally-developed and fairly recent dungeons too. 4E's official launch adventures were absolutely appalling for this, with very little consideration to the "ecology" of the dungeons, or why or how creatures would live there. A lot of basic questions like "how do they get food" or "where do they sleep?" were impossible to answer, and some bits of the design were actively contradictory to themselves even, because they were so poorly-considered (one even featured the classic "dragon in a not-very-big room" (I believe there was some dodgy figleaf of an excuse at least, but it wasn't great).</p><p></p><p>I don't think player trust is relevant unless you've somehow always used extremely artificial, video-game-y dungeons, and silently swap to a more organic/quasi-realist design. If you that is the case, it's probably worth flagging to them at the start of the dungeon, as an OOC/meta comment.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 8519255, member: 18"] I've always designed dungeons organically, I think because the first home-written adventure I was shown was organically designed, and I didn't even come across more game-y, tile-based or setpiece or similar types of design until later. I don't think there's any real contradiction between organic and level-based, because what is organic is so flexible, and ultimately, you can simply change the dungeon so that it's still organic but doesn't demand the presence of the too-threatening being. Usually it's pretty easy to signpost threatening beings even if they are present, and you can literally have NPCs warn PCs about them in a lot of situations - many threatening beings will be badass enough to be part of local myth and legend. There definitely needs to be more communication than with a standard "rooms full of monsters/traps" dungeon, but I think it tends to happen, well... organically and helps build the atmosphere of the dungeon. In fact, this has always been one of my major bugbears with non-organic dungeons - they're often written in a way such that there's no way to anticipate what is coming, despite monsters having been there for decades or centuries in some cases. I'm sorry but 20 hobgoblins living in a barracks is going to have an impact on the local environment, and they're one of the neater enemy-types! Often you get the idea the dungeon was assembled in individual parts with little regard to the whole, or they just decided which monster goes in which room at the last moment. This absolutely includes professionally-developed and fairly recent dungeons too. 4E's official launch adventures were absolutely appalling for this, with very little consideration to the "ecology" of the dungeons, or why or how creatures would live there. A lot of basic questions like "how do they get food" or "where do they sleep?" were impossible to answer, and some bits of the design were actively contradictory to themselves even, because they were so poorly-considered (one even featured the classic "dragon in a not-very-big room" (I believe there was some dodgy figleaf of an excuse at least, but it wasn't great). I don't think player trust is relevant unless you've somehow always used extremely artificial, video-game-y dungeons, and silently swap to a more organic/quasi-realist design. If you that is the case, it's probably worth flagging to them at the start of the dungeon, as an OOC/meta comment. [/QUOTE]
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