Rate the stereotype - do you raid dungeons?

[kirinke]

lol

My last campaign was a dungeon-crawl one. The players were based in a frontier town/fort. If they weren't in a dungeon, they were in town, getting drunk. If they weren't drunk, it meant they'd run out of money and needed to go defile another temple of despicable nasty things.

It was meant to be a fast-paced, fun, smash-the-doors-and-grab-the-loot sort of campaign, a change from the meandering "this is your life" sort of thing we'd been running.

Some of the players really got into it -- I pushed interesting characters over complex backgrounds and maudlin plotlines. The two best characters were a fearsome fighting bridge troll with a charisma so low no one was scared of him, and a half-hobgoblin rogue not quite clever enough to know the difference between a brothel and a nunnery (nothing bad happened -- the Book of Vile Darkness does NOT appear on the players' side of the table in my game!)

My enthusiasm was eventually ground down by the rules lawyer/munchkin power gamer (I have a 12th level cleric/1st level monk with spellfire. Why do I need a personality?) and the soap-opera plotline gamer (this is my last character's third cousin. His parents were killed by maurading vampiric orcs, and he was raised by good aligned drow, who were killed by a red dragon, that my character killed at first level, and now he's going to found a fighting school to oppose vampiric half-dragon orcs).

There's less hyperbole in that rant than you think.

I don't mind motivation, but some of the best adventures are spur-of-the-moment, what-the-hell-just-do-it affairs. Too many campaigns, IMO, revolve around unwilling characters forced into desperate situations, and too few around adventursome characters doing something fun!

OK, in real life killing monsters shouldn't be fun, but that's why D&D is a game.

Cheers
Nell.

lol the first 'serious' character i've ever done, ie: the one that wasn't munchkined to, muchkin land, i went completely against the stereotypical reasons to go adventuring. here's her back-story:

Aenilaen is the first born daughter of two elven nobles whose territory ranges along the edges of the Sapphire Mountains and the Blue-Ridge fog-forests near the kingdom of Galadin. Like all of her family, Aenilaen has been trained in warfare and woodcraft.

After they receive their training and are considered adult, it is a tradition among elvish nobles to send their children out in the world with the bare minimum to survive so they can get practical experience in leading and other such things. It also tends to weed out the ones not capable of interacting with other-races in a positive manner as they typically die quickly. (which is why her people have held onto their lands for so long, survival of the more intelligent and all that)

Aenilaen's parents are no exception to this rule. They do expect her to visit as often as possible and send many letters in the meantime.

 

[Philomel III]

Heheh; good question. I too am not too fond of the term "Hack-n-Slash", therefore I refer to such play as "Loot-n-Scoot". Sounds more fun, and is!

This game can be played on so many levels; I've seen games were the charm and dominate spell lines are useless, but again, those were Loot-n-Scoot. Such games I play onyl to test the XP and Treasure tables (which are slightly skewed, IMHO).

 

[Geoff Watson]

Do you mean 'Go into random caves and slaughter everything mindlessly', as the anti-dungeon-crawlers would have it, or 'have adventure locations that happen to be underground', which would also be dungeon-crawling?

Geoff.

 

[s/LaSH]

I've never run a session where the goal was to go to a dangerous place and take whatever you can find.

I have run dungeons along the following plots:
- Vengeance/pre-emptive strike
- Teleport spell gone wrong segues into rescue-the-princess
- Get out and find where you actually are, then go back to get something important
- Find employment (there wasn't any combat in that one)
- Recover the dead body of someone very important and kill bad people at the same time

I've used places like these:
- The labyrinthine cave of an ancient oracle, still flooded with hallucinogenic gas
- A sunken funeral barge
- A mine/barracks littered with Roman memories
- A volcano
- What looks like a temple but is actually closer in purpose to a spaceship without actually being able to move

Then again, by overtly omitting things like gp totals and xp measuring of any kind, I've certainly shifted the emphasis from killing stuff to killing important stuff. Thus we have dungeons, dragons, and story-oriented goals to supplement those that are completely irrelevant.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

To put it briefly, rarely if ever.

Even in computer games, it rarely occurs these days. (I don't know about old school ones like Wizardry although the gold box SSI games usually provided some semblance of a plot). To take one common example of "hack&slash" gameplay, Diablo provided a rather good reason for kicking the door to the old temple in and killing everything inside: there was a demon there that had killed a bunch of townspeople and they thought that the king's son had been kidnapped and taken down there. Now, it turns out that everything in there is some kind of demon or undead which needs killing and, after they're dead, they don't need their treasure so it goes from there but there's a reason behind kicking in the door. The same is true for Diablo II. It starts out that demons have overrun the old monastery in act I and in act II you're pursuing a demon who's looking for the tomb of Tal Rasha to free another demon. Etc. Etc. You may kick in the door and kill everything in sight but you have a reason to kick in the door.

That's true of nearly every pen and paper game I've played too.

 

[shadow]

Well, my group pretty much raids dungeons all the time. At first I tried to have detailed plots, epic stories, and a lot of realistic role-playing. The players hated it. Then I realized that they enjoyed the "kick in the door" style of play. I adjusted my DMing accordingly.

 

[Viktyr Gehrig]

My current game is a thoroughly mixed-alignment game, with some of the PCs being strongly morally opposed to each other's tactics and general behavior.

At some point, when the tension gets high enough, I'm going to give them a nice, morally unambiguous dungeon crawl to give the good players the chance to cut loose and the evil characters things they can kill horribly without the good characters needing to lecture them.

Generally, it's not hard to come up with reasons for a bunch of adventurers to go into a dungeon and kill things. Having a reason for it doesn't really make a difference to the fundamentals of the dungeon crawl.

 

[Agback]

That's so Old School that I have all but forgotten about running such sessions in my games. My players roll their eyes when such concepts are even mentioned.

I am in the same category as Wombat.

Regards,


Brett

 

[Henry]

My group has been adventuring in the Forgotten Realms this year; the "forgotten bolthole of evil" is what this campaign is KNOWN for!

Even still, put my group in the "Once in a while" category.

Most of the time, there's a town to destabilize, an evil plot to uncover, or a weird encounter in the wilderness. However, every once in a while, the adventurers get a "wild hair," as the phrase goes, to visit someplace nameworthy and test their mettle against things that should be left alone.

There are: half a dozen cities with "myth" in their names; dungeons of long-forgotten undead necromancers; decayed towers, keeps, and steadings; and little thickets of nastiness everywhere you turn.

We love to once in a while find a dungeon that's purported loaded with treasure, and dig in, kicking the doors, decimating long-dead abominations or aberrant beasties of weird pallors and colors and appendages, and preferably caving the dump in, once we are done.

THEN we go back to the mayors who have problems, the NPC's that have missions, and the impending civil dooms.

 

[Grayswandir]

I don't run the Forgotten Realms, but I'm pretty much with Henry on this one. The party is around level 25 right now, and usually the sessions are pretty RP insensive, but every so often they'll decide they're running low on funds and start looking around for a dungeon to raid or a dragon to slay. Then they complain when the dragon who's ravaging the countryside on some obscure alternate Prime turns out to be a Force Dragon studying under an Enlightened Master (epic monk prestige class from Dragon). But that's life in the epic levels.