D&D General The senseless achitecture in most official products

[Coroc]

Inspired by @Kris thread about him trying out the rolled up random dungeon i want to start a discussion about the annoyance that many official products cause in me about the seemingly totally senseless architectural features of the dungeon maps.

With some absolutely marvelous exceptions so many dungeon maps presented in official products, be it PnP or also many computer games, have floor maps which commonly lack one thing: Any connection to realism purpose or aestethic.

A building or structure should be desigend to serve a purpose, even a mine has some regularity in it, although here you can argue that the diggers followed some ore vein. But how is it that every temple floor plan looks like it is dedicated to the gods of chaos?

I mean:

- Would even orcs like to inhabit those strange zig zag corridors?

- Is a normal building with one or two quirks so boring?

- Or is it so difficult to build some quirk into a normal building like a secret tunnel or chamber or a trapdoor?


I often rework or replace official maps, if they do not make sense to me.
And by that i mean sense in purpose, inhabitants and structure of a given dungeon map.

It is one of the things i really like when DMing PnP, that i can rectify the mad labyrinths.

If it would make sense like a madmans dungeon e.g. Undermountain then ok, and every now and then there might be another explanation to a highly unlinear structure, but it seems to be the rule and not the exception.

What are your opinions on that?

 

[Nebulous]

Can you give some examples of the ones that most annoy you? And the ones that don't? I haven't had any trouble with the 5e maps I've run, but it's only been Lost Mine, Princes and Tomb. I've seen people argue that the lost mine itself doesn't really look much like a mine. I guess not. I thought it was just part of a mine and the rest was sealed off somewhere. A real mine shaft probably wouldn't be much fun to adventure in anyway. I guess they try to make maps so you can fit 4-6 PCs and baddies and still maneuver.

Correction: I did run a chapter from Saltmarsh: Isle of the Abbey. And although the dungeon in the latter half was from an old Dungeon magazine, it was one of the worst dungeons I've seen in a long, long time. It had 17 traps of 3 different flavors, and a mish-mash of monsters that made no sense.

 

[Oofta]

The layout of most dungeons has always confused me. What possible reason would there be to excavate hundreds of tons of solid rock in order to create empty hallway? Do you really need 30 feet of solid stone between you and adjacent rooms?

Every once in a while you could have a dungeon that started out as a natural formation or the result of mining, but every single one? It's like all dungeons are created by "Wacky Wizards Construction Company - Our plans are crazier than our competition!"

Some of the more recent mods are better, but you still see plenty that look like this random dungeon drawing:

 

[Charlaquin]

Back in the day, dungeons looked like that because EGGman and friends wanted to challenge each other and didn’t want to waste graph paper. A lot of those wacky layouts make perfect sense if you consider that the design goals are to be as confounding as possible to people exploring it, and to utilize as much space as possible in an 85 by 110 square foot area. Later dungeons just imitated those early ones.

 

[Tony Vargas]

i want to start a discussion about the annoyance that many official products cause in me about the seemingly totally senseless architectural features of the dungeon maps. so many dungeon maps presented in official products, have floor maps which commonly lack one thing: Any connection to realism purpose or aestethic.

What are your opinions on that?

It's an immemorial tradition, AFAICT. Look at the maps in Temple of the Frog. Look at the maps in B1. Seems the first D in D&D has always been something of a purposeless, unrealistic labyrinth.
Sheer madness, indeed.

But not without an aesthetic, just a crazy one (surrealism? magical realism? psychedelic?).

 

[keynup]

Between magic and creatures that dig, excavating can be a lot easier than what we are used to.
If you can dig 100' tunnel just as easy as a 10', why not?

 

[Oofta]

Between magic and creatures that dig, excavating can be a lot easier than what we are used to.
If you can dig 100' tunnel just as easy as a 10', why not?

Unless you have a pet purple worm* I don't think it's that easy to dig through solid rock.

*purple worms leaving behind tunnels has always been weird too. It's not dirt. They can't just push it aside, they have to actually somehow destroy the rock or send it to another dimension. Maybe the purple dimension with purple rain?

 

[keynup]

While most creatures dont leave a tunnel, anything with a dig speed wont be leaving solid rock behind it, it'll be loose stone.

 

[Oofta]

While most creatures dont leave a tunnel, anything with a dig speed wont be leaving solid rock behind it, it'll be loose stone.

Which would still need to be carted away and disposed of. In addition, the stone is going to probably be tightly packed. So yes ... if you have a pet monster you can control (how?) it basically breaks up the stone like dynamite. But those are going to be crude tunnels and not rooms.

It's a fantasy world, if you just want to justify oddly shaped dungeons with wacky corridors because "magic" it's fine. It's common. It's just one of my many hangups, and something that isn't grounded enough in basic logic for me.

 

[Tony Vargas]

*purple worms leaving behind tunnels has always been weird too. It's not dirt. They can't just push it aside, they have to actually somehow destroy the rock or send it to another dimension. Maybe the purple dimension with purple rain?

A worm that big is impossible on a number of levels, as is it burrowing through solid rock, so, not really an issue on the grounds of weirdness.

(Speaking of, the defining thing about a purple worm is it's color?)

It's a fantasy world, if you just want to justify oddly shaped dungeons with wacky corridors

...you don't really need to justify them, I think, is a valid attitude.