D&D 5E Do you like dungeon crawls?

[Henry]

Dungeon crawls hold a very sentimental place in my heart - it’s where it all started, with Keep on the Borderlands and White Plume Mountain, for me. No matter how many hexplorations, political intrigues, and mysteries I’ve been through, if a bunch of farmers need us to save them from a bunch of aggressive kobolds in an abandoned fort? I’m there!

 

[Henry]

Um... rot grubs, which are often found in doors of rotting wood...

I’m convinced Gary’s ecologies were based on someone’s nightmare version of Australian fauna...

wanna take a drink from that pond? THROAT LEECHES!
want to search that corpse for loot? ROT GRUBS!
wanna listen to that door to surprise an enemy? EAR SEEKERS!
wanna check out that treasure chest? MIMIC!
wanna lean against that moss? GREEN SLIME!
wanna just sit here and rest for a bit? LURKER ABOVE!

I’m just gonna take that starting 100 gold and start a shoe-shining business...

 

[abirdcall]

Since that day, in my own creations, I made a conscious effort to reduce underground/cavernous locations to a minimum. They are playable in a single evening and with only one level. I prefer using castles ruins, ancient druidic circles, lost towers, villages, cities, etc, as locations for adventures.

Do YOU like dungeon crawls?

Those can all be dungeon equivalents. Different wallpaper sure, but the idea of an environment with interlocking threats is the same. I don't make a distinction between the ground floor of a castle or its dungeon.

As to the question - I expect dungeons or their equivalents in my D&D. I believe the game is designed for them and is best played with them. The resting mechanics don't make sense outside of this paradigm (though variants exist for those who want them).

 

[Lanefan]

As others have noted, dungeon crawls are great but they need to be interspersed with other adventure types - wilderness exploration, or travel, or setting/based (e.g. maritime, desert, arctic), or city in order to not become repetitive.

And if you're going to dream up* a completely whacked-out dungeon crawl where the monsters can't fit through the doors of the rooms they're in and monsters that would normally eat each other on sight are living as happy neighbours, having even just a few shreds of underlying rationale behind it all can work wonders!

* - having the whole adventure just be someone's dream is in fact one such rationale...

 

[pogre]

Love, love, love dungeon crawls! Let's fill up that table with terrain and miniatures and kill stuff!

It can be a bit grindy if you let it. However, themes and interlaced clues and quests can make a dungeon pretty much like almost any other adventure.

Dungeons very much match our playstyle. I think most modern gamers are much closer to @Blue gaming style than ours.

When I run, if I'm doing dungeons it's more along the line of Five Room dungeons, which isn't even five encounters. (Thought: maybe that's one of the reasons I dislike the recommended 6-8 encounters per day - I never want to push for that many as that's likely 3-5 sessions.)

We really push the action. That's not a criticism of Blue's style at all. I readily concede it is much closer to the game most people want these days. It's just not our style. A 5-room dungeon is two hours of game play for us.

I start at least 50% of our sessions with "Roll for initiative!" We love exploration and combats and in a four hour session we usually have around ten combats.

Having said all of that, my newer campaign (6th level) is much more heterogeneous with lots of types of adventures. Players seem to enjoy that too.

 

[Quickleaf]

Few D&D adventure settings are as great as a well-written dungeon.

But few things are worst than a poorly-written one.

 

[Horwath]

5) Cities require very little book keeping. D&D dungeons require keeping track of time, lantern oil or torches, rations, and ammunition.

yeah, who needs all those pesky little details that come with gear selection and preparation.

In one dungeon we had to eat few defeated goblins, because no matter how good your Survival is, you cant find something if there is nothing.

but, praise all the gods for giving us prestidigitation. "everything tastes like chicken"

 

[Oofta]

I’m convinced Gary’s ecologies were based on someone’s nightmare version of Australian fauna...

wanna take a drink from that pond? THROAT LEECHES!
want to search that corpse for loot? ROT GRUBS!
wanna listen to that door to surprise an enemy? EAR SEEKERS!
wanna check out that treasure chest? MIMIC!
wanna lean against that moss? GREEN SLIME!
wanna just sit here and rest for a bit? LURKER ABOVE!

I’m just gonna take that starting 100 gold and start a shoe-shining business...

Yes, I can see it now. Set up a shoe-shine business under a shady tree
the tree is pissed your box comes from it's cousin. TREANT!
run away, barely escaping. Wait, is the floor moving? TRAPPER!
jump to the side hugging the wall, which tries to eat you. STUNJELLY!
finally get home, just decide to go to bed and hide beneath the covers. SHEET PHANTOM!
decide you're done and are just going to give up and not fight the next monster. FLUMPH!

 

[HarbingerX]

Having run a published mega-dungeon I would say that it takes work to make a good dungeon. It needs to be designed more like a city with distinct districts and factions as well as highways and multiple entrances that allow players to quickly reach an area they want to explore next. It should be coupled with a large town or city that has NPCs tied into the factions and features in the dungeon to provide reasons to delve other than killing things.

This is not as easy to do as a city campaign because we understand how cities work. Fantasy underground worlds are foreign and thus don't come naturally as a setting.

 

[atanakar]

A few comments:

Yes, if I don't enjoy dungeons, I certainly don't like mega-dungeons. B4 was a multi-layered zigurat mega dungeon. It cause a split in our group. Half the guys left to play Call of Cthuluh. I continued playing D&D but changed my approach. So did you second DM. I tried to do a «dungeon» came back with 4e, which is very tactical and suited to that style of play, but grew tired of dungeonnering very quickly.

It is reductionnist to say that a location (ruin, castle, etc) is the same as a dungeon. It's not just a different wall paper. They really don't fonction the same way. For exemple the number of entry points of a surface locations is one big distinction. Which means that escape routes, in case a big trouble, is much higher then in a dungeon. For the same reason you don't need to do all the accounting (light source, food supplies) that turns me off of longer dungeons.

I have dungeons in my campaigns but they are in the same vein of 5-room dungeons with a very focused mission and logical reason for being there. Most often they are natural carverns because the idea of stone work tunnel labyrinths with a BBEG hidding and waiting at the end destroys my suspension of disbelief.

I'm also an avid wargamer, which means that I already get my fair share of tactical combat outside D&D. When I play D&D I put the emphasis elsewhere. The social and exploration aspects come first. After that combat occurs if needed or unavoidable.