At first I thought this was kind of dumb but after reading the article on Gaming Report, I think this might be very cool!
But they should do several things:
First avoid unnecessary rooms. The thing about Dragon Mountain and even Undermountain is the sheer number of repetitive and boring empty rooms. A couple here and there are ok, but generally if a room serves no purpose other than wasting the parties' time, it should not be in the dungeon.
Second, I expect the whole dungeon to be completely statted out with realistic story reasons for monsters to be where they are. No monsters just hanging out in rooms with nothing to do but wait for adventurers. I expect a realistic dungeon ecology where monsters live, hunt, and sleep. And they don't necessarily get along with each other unless there are story reasons for that. The same goes with traps. Intelligent monsters are not going to build random traps in every hallway unless there are specific story reasons why they might do so. Do you boobytrap your house? Stepping ever so gingerly across the pit trap when you go to the bathroom in the night? I didn't think so. So why would monsters?
Third, I don't want a product that expects me to do all the work. Undermountain only statted out a small section of dungeon and expected you to populate the rest. No thanks. This 800 page monster dungeon better have done all the work for me.
Fourth, no fair nerfing PC abilities unless there are good story reasons to do so. For example, Dragon Mountain had several spells blocked for contrived reasons that basically amounted to the designer being too lazy to actually think of challenges allowing for PC party's full range of abilities. If my high level sorcerer has teleport, I expect to be able to use it without half the dungeon suddenly developing an anti-teleport field. And from the DM side, its more fun to challenge players without nerfing their hard-earned abilities.
Now that being said, the reverse also applies. If one area of a dungeon is ruled by some ancient lich, then I do expect him to have anticipated and countered possible enemy spellcasting. If the encounter is written such that the lich would be taken completely off guard by the characters doing something any enemy wizard would conceivably do, its poorly written. For example, in a world with teleport, bad guys should anticipate PC teleporters suddenly appearing in their throne room with hostile intent. Like Monte Cook said in the DMG, in a world with Invisibility, shopkeeper are not going to be surprised by the concept of an invisible thief.
Now, if AEG has taken all those into consideration, then consider me a customer! And I don't think those are unreasonable requests at all. Just common sense and good design.
