D&D 5E Do You Delve?

[prabe]

As a player, not if I can help it. It's never been a type of adventure/scenario that's appealed to me.

As a GM, I try to avoid it (because I very much tend to run games to my own preferences as a player) but sometimes events take things into something that looks like a delve. I don't do anything super map-intensive, if I can help it.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I use a mix. There tend to be regular dungeons that can take a session or two to clear, but I alternate with mysteries, travel sessions between locations, pure city RP episodes and the occasional TotM sessions.

 

[Yora]

As a GM, I never really understood how you're supposed to make rooms interesting. There are plenty of published sample dungeons that lots of people love, but none of them look to me like they would be fun for players or make any sense to spend time on when pursuing a goal. So I pretty much gave up on attempting such dungeons and instead provide the kind of interesting interactive content I am good at, like people to talk to and guards to get past.

 

[el-remmen]

As a GM, I never really understood how you're supposed to make rooms interesting. There are plenty of published sample dungeons that lots of people love, but none of them look to me like they would be fun for players or make any sense to spend time on when pursuing a goal. So I pretty much gave up on attempting such dungeons and instead provide the kind of interesting interactive content I am good at, like people to talk to and guards to get past.

I am confused by this. I can understand not preferring the dungeon environment (as capacious as it is) but it (and its "rooms") often has people to talk to or get past, puzzles to solve, information to discover, and a variety of interactive content?

 

[Voadam]

I run a lot of heavily modified modules so it comes up a bunch. I am running Iron Gods so the Black Hill caves definitely counts. When I was running Carrion Crown the crypts and the "of course its not haunted" abandoned underground prison that burned down 50 years ago count. Also the basement of the burned down asylum.

Sometimes they are small single room things like a crypt, or a massive multilevel prison.

I generally avoid adventurer and dungeoneer as in game professions and guilds (its too meta for me), but adventuring in dungeons like Indiana Jones going after a legendary artefact in newly uncovered pyramid is a thing that PCs do.

 

[Malmuria]

The "crawl" aspect of dungeons can become tedious, so as a dm you really need to manage the pace. I try to create dungeons (or towers/caves/etc) that are 5-10 rooms or zones, have lots of interactive features, and have creatures that can be, but don't need to be, fought. Ideally, the players would finish the whole thing in one session.

 

[Yora]

I am confused by this. I can understand not preferring the dungeon environment (as capacious as it is) but it (and its "rooms") often has people to talk to or get past, puzzles to solve, information to discover, and a variety of interactive content?

Going into a house, fortress, or lair to get something is easy. But making clusters of rooms that each have a toy to play with for 15 to 30 minutes is something that escapes my grasp.
You can of course also fill them with monsters that automatically attack to spend some time with a fight, but these also seem like a waste of time when you could instead just not open that door and continue with the thing you actually came for.

 

[Charlaquin]

A dungeon is just a place where the structure of an adventure lines up with an actual physical structure. Scenes line up with rooms and transitions line up with hallways. In that sense, every adventure is a delve. But yes, I frequently do run adventures in such places.

 

[Charlaquin]

As a GM, I never really understood how you're supposed to make rooms interesting. There are plenty of published sample dungeons that lots of people love, but none of them look to me like they would be fun for players or make any sense to spend time on when pursuing a goal. So I pretty much gave up on attempting such dungeons and instead provide the kind of interesting interactive content I am good at, like people to talk to and guards to get past.

Rooms aren’t interesting. Scenes are interesting. If your room isn’t also a scene, it should just be a transition.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

A dungeon is just a place where the structure of an adventure lines up with an actual physical structure. Scenes line up with rooms and transitions line up with hallways. In that sense, every adventure is a delve. But yes, I frequently do run adventures in such places.

See, I disagree that every adventure is a delve, even in that sense.