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Everyone will handle this differently. I can't be given to care about why someone makes particular decisions for their characters. If they want to limit themselves based on establishing some kind of baseline of knowledge, that's fine. Or not, also fine. What was seemingly asserted, however, was...

I've not struggled with it either, but that's chiefly because I don't make it my business to judge why a character does a thing. As DM, I only need to know what they are trying to accomplish and how so I can decide whether it succeeds or fails or there's a roll. As a player, I only need to know...

I believe it's nobody's business but the player of that character. If they do or don't want to do that, it's not my concern. But anyway the assertion is that this happens more in dungeons than elsewhere, and I disagree. There's nothing about dungeons that makes this more prevalent in my view.

The tricky bit here is that particular knowledge isn't really necessary to take action, and the DM is only tasked with adjudicating action, so we really can't sit in judgment of what a character "wouldn't" or "shouldn't" know. It's really more like "might" or "could" know anyway since anything...

What is "meta play?"

I'm using how roleplaying is defined in the rules of D&D 5e. It's just the player deciding what their character does, thinks, and says. Whether or not that aligns with somebody's notion of what the character might reasonably do given the context is irrelevant, particularly as anything can be...

Roleplaying is when the player decides what their character does, so dungeons involve a lot of it since there's lots to do. If you mean social interaction, that's up to the players to attempt it and the DM to roll with it (or initiate it on their own). Even old school versions of D&D had...

The lesson here is don't prepare linear plots and dungeons, or do so but get the players' buy-in on following it so you're not railroading. It doesn't change my point though that when I'm playing a non-linear dungeon, it feels to me a heckuvalot better than playing someone's plot. I get to do...

A plot in the context of my post is a predetermined sequence of events the players are expected to follow. The story is everything that happens as the PCs follow that plot. Same as the story is whatever the PCs do in the dungeon. The difference is that, unless the dungeon is linear, they have...

You may be conflating "plot" and "story" here.

What I have seen is players moving their tokens all over the place and getting separated. I addressed that by having players put a status icon on their token with a color that represents a general ongoing task (keeping watch for danger, searching for secret doors, etc.) and a number to indicate...

Well put. I have the same sense as a player when playing either campaign. With a dungeon, I'm in charge and "the story" is whatever my party does. With a plot, I feel like I'm playing a guessing game of what I'm supposed to do to get to the next part of the DM's story and I don't like it as much.

I believe there was a shift sometime after their introduction to focus more on "realistic" dungeons but really they are just stand-ins symbolically for The Underworld, which explains a lot of their fever dream qualities, particularly in the early days of the game. While they aren't meant to be...

:unsure: Here I was thinking dungeons are pretty famous for including riddles and puzzles. Those are the parts I don't like as a player, but they are definitely there.

I suspect that prep time has caused the dungeon to fall out of favor for many DMs. There are a lot of tools out there now, however, that greatly reduce that time. DMs making it into a plodding exercise is a separate matter and one that I imagine turned a lot of players off over the years.

I see you have chosen violence.

So you've decided to play this game called Dungeons & Dragons. But, perhaps after some experience with the game, you've decided you don't like dungeons. I feel like I see this a lot in various online discussions and I find it unusual to take a stance against the very thing the game was seemingly...

Except for the mini-dungeons that dot the landscape and that huge dungeon at the end.

I've used all of these recently in my Dungeons & Dragons games and played in an adventure involving a tarrasque only a couple years ago. (There was a bio-dungeon inside the tarrasque.) The displacer beast was on a random wilderness encounter chart and more than one of them were encountered for a...

I should probably note that I can almost see doing surprise as a save, but as I said I don't really like saves in general, and there may be some unintended rules interactions that would just create more work I wouldn't want to do. I'm at least open to that idea. For exploration challenges, the...