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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rounser" data-source="post: 997212" data-attributes="member: 1106">I think that there's nothing wrong with that, and that there's little to prevent D&D doing much the same.  Guidelines in the DMG for handling the wilderness like a dungeon might lead to more use of the wilderness, more relevancy of the druid and ranger classes, and also more use of setting, in that the wilderness usually seems to represent the "road trip" side of the campaign in getting from A to B.  Assumedly, a campaign based almost solely on dungeoneering is unlikely to stray too far without extended romps through the underdark, portals, or skipping over travel bits.However, I think the DMG is right in that the dungeon is a flowchart which restricts PC options down to a choice of corridors and rooms which is easy for a newbie DM (and experienced DM alike, who surely likes to "switch off" sometimes) to handle.  This paradigm can be partially moved towards in the wilderness through the use of hex maps, which allow discrete parts of the wilderness map to be numbered with static encounters, taking a similar role to the numbering of rooms on dungeon maps.  The problem as I see it with the wilderness-as-dungeon is that it usually has no walls, and few other barriers (apart from impassable mountains, sea, perhaps swamps etc) which makes it difficult to channel PCs into areas which are appropriate for their CR and not go wandering at will all over the map, and bumping into status quo static encounters that will either lead to their deaths, or have to be either avoided after in-character hints from the DM that they're out of their depth, or fudged on the fly to something more appropriate to their level.  If anyone has any solutions for this I'd be interested to hear them.  Also, a clarification - I love well constructed dungeons which offer a good mix of different types of play, but have noted what is perhaps an overemphasis on combat in the 3E WotC dungeons.  "Back to the Dungeon" doesn't necessarily have to mean this, but it seems to have been borne out that way.</blockquote>

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