Good question. I can't help. I have been playing since 1979 or 1980 and I don't like megadungeons. The Underdark, Undermountain, etc. I find them boring as I do with the normal dungeon of the week. However, I am definitely interested in why the people that like megadungeons do.
-
The VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
D&D 5E Help me grok mega-dungeons
- Thread starter Mouseferatu
- Start date
Good question. I can't help. I have been playing since 1979 or 1980 and I don't like megadungeons. The Underdark, Undermountain, etc. I find them boring as I do with the normal dungeon of the week. However, I am definitely interested in why the people that like megadungeons do.
Mouseferatu
Hero
pogre
Legend
Mouse,
With your play preferences you are not going to enjoy mega-dungeons. Although I have had great stories and numerous plots come out of megadungeons, usually it is more of a beer and pretzels take on the game for us. We find them fun from time-to-time - maybe once a year for some of these reasons:
- There is a fun element of exploration.
- PCs get to really kick some butt - they get to plow through some monsters.
- Some D&D monsters are really intended for the dungeon and that's pretty much it - you certainly can be creative with them to use for other purposes, but at their core they are dungeon monsters.
- Although it's very 'gamist' I still like the idea of dungeons getting more dangerous the lower you go. It's a silly, but fun concept.
- We love miniatures, props, scenery, and wargames - mega dungeons really let me fill the table with these things!
- There is an element of nostalgia, I started playing this way in the mid-1970s. Although I must say my boys love a big dungeon delve too.
I will note we usually use OD&D or a clone to run these dungeons. Folks understand there may be some plot hooks, but it most is about kicking down doors, killing, and stealing. PCs tend to die on a regular basis and with the older versions it only takes a couple minutes to whip-up a new character.
So, yeah, not your cup of tea. I get it. I certainly would not want to play this way all of the time either.
With your play preferences you are not going to enjoy mega-dungeons. Although I have had great stories and numerous plots come out of megadungeons, usually it is more of a beer and pretzels take on the game for us. We find them fun from time-to-time - maybe once a year for some of these reasons:
- There is a fun element of exploration.
- PCs get to really kick some butt - they get to plow through some monsters.
- Some D&D monsters are really intended for the dungeon and that's pretty much it - you certainly can be creative with them to use for other purposes, but at their core they are dungeon monsters.
- Although it's very 'gamist' I still like the idea of dungeons getting more dangerous the lower you go. It's a silly, but fun concept.
- We love miniatures, props, scenery, and wargames - mega dungeons really let me fill the table with these things!
- There is an element of nostalgia, I started playing this way in the mid-1970s. Although I must say my boys love a big dungeon delve too.
I will note we usually use OD&D or a clone to run these dungeons. Folks understand there may be some plot hooks, but it most is about kicking down doors, killing, and stealing. PCs tend to die on a regular basis and with the older versions it only takes a couple minutes to whip-up a new character.
So, yeah, not your cup of tea. I get it. I certainly would not want to play this way all of the time either.
RedShirtNo5.1
Explorer
I guess in my case a Jefferies Tube is similar to a dungeon corridor.I was raised by humans, though. I know little of my people's culture.
Hi,
It *can* be, but there are other campaign structures and other kinds of scenarios.
Most campaigns consist of linked scenarios, with "the campaign" being a quality that emerges after some number of sessions have been played.
Or, let's consider Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is *not* a megadungeon at all. Sunnydale is important only because the adventures have to happen *somewhere*. But Sunnydale as a place is so unimportant, that its nature changes every season. Season 1? It's a one-Starbuck town. By season 2 it has docks and a college. By season 3 it also has an airport and a major university. This is very much the opposite of a dungeon-driven campaign, in which *the place* drives the action. Even Sunnydale being in California doesn't matter much: The entire show would work exactly the same way were it set on Long Island, or South Podunk, Kansas.
Or maybe Forgotten Realms: FR *contains* dungeons, and can even be explored. But it is too big to constrain the action. Nor does it have exit conditions. Or victory conditions. It's a setting.
I might also note that this isn't a technical term. There is no formal dungeon test, and describing an adventure as dungeon delving might be reasonably accurate while missing the point, as in The Tombs of Atuan. (Or maybe it doesn't: A Wizard of Earthsea is *not* dungeonlike, but Tombs of Atuan is, and the two books feel quite different.)
Anyway,
Ken
Well, that's pretty important to the concept, even if the victory condition is to survive with maximal loot....
It *can* be, but there are other campaign structures and other kinds of scenarios.
Most campaigns consist of linked scenarios, with "the campaign" being a quality that emerges after some number of sessions have been played.
Or, let's consider Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is *not* a megadungeon at all. Sunnydale is important only because the adventures have to happen *somewhere*. But Sunnydale as a place is so unimportant, that its nature changes every season. Season 1? It's a one-Starbuck town. By season 2 it has docks and a college. By season 3 it also has an airport and a major university. This is very much the opposite of a dungeon-driven campaign, in which *the place* drives the action. Even Sunnydale being in California doesn't matter much: The entire show would work exactly the same way were it set on Long Island, or South Podunk, Kansas.
Or maybe Forgotten Realms: FR *contains* dungeons, and can even be explored. But it is too big to constrain the action. Nor does it have exit conditions. Or victory conditions. It's a setting.
I might also note that this isn't a technical term. There is no formal dungeon test, and describing an adventure as dungeon delving might be reasonably accurate while missing the point, as in The Tombs of Atuan. (Or maybe it doesn't: A Wizard of Earthsea is *not* dungeonlike, but Tombs of Atuan is, and the two books feel quite different.)
Anyway,
Ken
FormerlyHemlock
Hero
Pro: It's an excuse for mindless killing and treasure hunting decoupled from any real plot.
Con: It's just mindless killing and treasure hunting decoupled from any real plot.
In a properly-constructed megadungeon, the DM can totally get away with inexplicably placing a dracolich in close proximity to approximately a bajillion mind flayers and a nest of beholders, and the players can have fun testing themselves against both of these things in quick succession, without a lot of foreshadowing about political conflicts between the dracolich and its hierarchy vs. the mind flayers vs. the beholder hive queen vs. the PCs' faction. So, you tend to get a lot of stuff happening all at once, and you may walk out of the megadungeon with oodles and oodles of treasure and XP which empowers you to affect the plot outside the megadungeon in new ways. "Into the Woods/You go again/You have to every now and then/etc." The megadungeon, if you survive your foray into it, serves as a transformation catalyst; and the campaign proper serves as the motivation to seek empowering transformations.
I tend to think that a campaign which is all about a megadungeon is boring. But a campaign is often improved by having a megadungeon or three in it.
Let me add as an aside here that time travel and megadungeons go well together. If you want a good reason why nobody (except the PCs) ever goes into the megadungeon--well, maybe it's because nobody ever comes out! Or rather, people come out sometimes, but never quite the same ones that went in--and the underlying reason is because of temporal mechanics and the butterfly effect. If you go in, you wind up in the past, and the things you do there change events so that the future you return to is never quite the future you came from (maybe Ned the Milkman is now Ned the Mayor, and everybody thinks you're soft in the head for thinking he's a milkman and for no longer recognizing your own younger brother any more--and that keeps more people from ever entering the megadungeon). Depending on whether you want PCs to be tightly coupled to the outside world, or detached from it in kind of an episodic "Quantum Leap" fashion, you might or might not give PCs a way to find their way back to their original timeline a la "each time you venture into the megadungeon, you have twenty-four hours before your Potion of Temporal Anchoring runs out and the girl whose love you're trying to win (probably) ceases to have ever existed".
Sword of Spirit
Legend
I find my RPG tastes to be rather eclectic. I rarely run into a play style or game element that I don't enjoy in the right situation. Because that's how it works for me--I want different things at different times, just like cuisine. My own design (and overall system preferences) favor a combination of narrativism and explorationism (my rebranding of simulationism), but I don't like narrativism in my D&D. I generally don't care for gamism much, but in certain situations a game-like challenge is exactly what I'm looking for.
Enter the D&D (mega)dungeon. An opportunity to shift the focus away from everything else into a deadly game of survive or perish. Dungeons are the only times I play RPGs as a game, rather than as an exploration or a story.
Success or failure is more immediate and obvious in a typical dungeon than in other environments. Your character is on high alert, knowing that challenges are likely to be everywhere. And even if it is a little silly, I like it when my super-cautious nature proves necessary to save the PCs of my less risk-averse fellow players. In a sense, you can "win" a dungeon, and you can even "win" against the other players (without being on opposite sides) in a dungeon environment if you survive, prosper, and have more effective ideas to make sure the rest of the party does so than others do.
TL;DR
I like to make D&D a game every now and again, and dungeons are the ideal arena for that.
Enter the D&D (mega)dungeon. An opportunity to shift the focus away from everything else into a deadly game of survive or perish. Dungeons are the only times I play RPGs as a game, rather than as an exploration or a story.
Success or failure is more immediate and obvious in a typical dungeon than in other environments. Your character is on high alert, knowing that challenges are likely to be everywhere. And even if it is a little silly, I like it when my super-cautious nature proves necessary to save the PCs of my less risk-averse fellow players. In a sense, you can "win" a dungeon, and you can even "win" against the other players (without being on opposite sides) in a dungeon environment if you survive, prosper, and have more effective ideas to make sure the rest of the party does so than others do.
TL;DR
I like to make D&D a game every now and again, and dungeons are the ideal arena for that.
A properly designed mega-dungeon, which I rarely see, should be more of a "sandbox", where you can get around between different areas of it without needing to fight your way through it. That way, PCs with proper intel can themselves determine what sort of challenge/reward they want - do we go after the fairly easy goblinoids with their paltry treasures, or do we hit the well-defended earth cultists who coax wealth from the earth itself? Think something like the Caves of Chaos from Keep on the Borderlands, but on a larger scale. This, I guess, was a bigger issue back in the day when treasure equaled XP, so the fastest way to power would be to acquire the maximum amount of treasure with the minimum amount of risk/fighting.
Princes of the Apocalypse has some of this, because you can go at whatever part of the central dungeon you want due to multiple entrances. But only some: you mostly don't have the information needed to make an informed choice, and you kind of need to do all the parts eventually anyway.
But most of what I see are not so much mega-dungeons as upscaled regular dungeons. An example of this would be Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil (for 3e), where about 2/3 of the adventure is a single large dungeon, and a mostly linear (well, circular) one at that.
Princes of the Apocalypse has some of this, because you can go at whatever part of the central dungeon you want due to multiple entrances. But only some: you mostly don't have the information needed to make an informed choice, and you kind of need to do all the parts eventually anyway.
But most of what I see are not so much mega-dungeons as upscaled regular dungeons. An example of this would be Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil (for 3e), where about 2/3 of the adventure is a single large dungeon, and a mostly linear (well, circular) one at that.
It's just a D&D experience stripped of any RP requirement. I'd say the modern mega-dungeon has been largely replaced with elaborate Descent-style board games, but an argument could also be made that Adventure League is essentially just a mega-dungeon where the "rooms" are different encounter locations rather than actual dungeon rooms. AL certainly has the feel of an encounter treadmill with only token shopkeeper RP.
Similar Threads
