D&D General Do You Use "Dungeons" In Your Game

[Li Shenron]

With a strict definition, regularly.
With a loose definition, always.

 

[Lanefan]

I take it you don't consider taking one of these camping?
View attachment 438291

I want one.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

The economy of D&D makes no sense, and I blame dungeons for it. In my world, dungeons are very much explicitly inspired by ARPG video games like diablo; even if I myself still design them by hand, the intent is for them to feel randomly generated with a mish-mash of creatures and no cohesive culture in them. That's because the dungeons in my setting are basically the backrooms and maintenance tunnels of the Gods; they're not "for" you, they keep physical reality running in the way you've become accustomed. That hunk of adamantine you pulled out of a mural? That was actually a mystical circuit board and thanks to you now there's no enchantment stopping typhoons from flooding an archipelago, you just killed millions.

 

[AlViking]

The economy of D&D makes no sense, and I blame dungeons for it. In my world, dungeons are very much explicitly inspired by ARPG video games like diablo; even if I myself still design them by hand, the intent is for them to feel randomly generated with a mish-mash of creatures and no cohesive culture in them. That's because the dungeons in my setting are basically the backrooms and maintenance tunnels of the Gods; they're not "for" you, they keep physical reality running in the way you've become accustomed. That hunk of adamantine you pulled out of a mural? That was actually a mystical circuit board and thanks to you now there's no enchantment stopping typhoons from flooding an archipelago, you just killed millions.

That's probably the most logical explanation for traditional dungeons I've ever heard.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

That's probably the most logical explanation for traditional dungeons I've ever heard.

I can't say I came up with it, I feel I've played so many video games with this "twist" (EDIT: I think my biggest influence were the Engwithans of Pillars of Eternity, which is also just an amazing setting that you can and should use for your D&D games). For my setting explicitly, the planet it is set on underwent partial terraforming, the "gods" are actually humans back on Earth in an otherwise hard sci-fi setting that don't know magic exists... but these humans don't have FTL communication so it took thousands of years for them to send probes to terraform the planet and it'll take thousands of years for them to find out not only did it fail, but also somehow their technology malfunctioned and ended up cloning dinosaurs with wings that breathe fire. My setting does that Numenera thing where people don't really differentiate between high tech and magic.

 

[rmcoen]

My campaigns tend to be "Stories", which are written across widespread locations. There's a lot of travel. There are a lot of "small locations" at the end of these outward journeys, which I wouldn't really call dungeons - especially since the party has a habit of turning them into one or two really long/conjoined encounters, even if I intended them to be "5 room dungeons". [Case in point, right now they are in a dragon lair that was designed as a half-dozen separated rooms, around a mild-danger-hazard hub in the center. Plus two extended tunnels to other subsections, one of which held the "sleeping" dragon. So of course they literally cannonballed into the center room, split up, and activated all the side rooms at once, and made so much noise and chaos they disturbed the dragon too!]

I think, across something like 50-60 sessions in this campaign, they have had six "real dungeon" experiences. An abandoned and buried research facility with factory wings. A partially submerged ruined castle at the center of a trapped labyrinth. Some lovely dwarven ruins. Oh, and a single-level repurposed dwarven mine filled with mushroom hazards and creepy bugs leading to a naptha factory run by goblins. Plus a couple "sure, call it a dungeon" locations like the Red Forest (distance-separated "rooms" of encounters, with a 5-story ruined tower in an irradiated lake in the center of the Forest) and massacred and reanimated goblin town of Essel-del-Urk.