ironregime said:
I pretty much agree with arscott and Vrecknidj.
What if I designed a really awesome, multi-dimensional dungeon map with lots of ways the players could go, and then instead of making a key of encounters, I just sat down and made a list of all the fun and important encounters that the PCs should experience before they got to the end?
That's exactly how I run dungeons. I admit I don't do many dungeons, but when I do, it seems to work out pretty well. Linear dungeons (depending on the scenario) just don't make sense. Real complex structures have many ways to go from one place to another. Think of the Pentagon, one of the largest office buildings in the world. It is 0.25 square miles floorspace, 17.5 miles of hallway, yet you can get from any one place to any other pace in the building in a matter of minutes.
But, having the players meander around aimlessly describing hallway after hallway and room after room and running incidental encounter after incidental encounter is booooooring.
On the other hand, if a dungeon is being used for multiple scenarios, I have the following suggestions.
First you can have the layered approach. Each section of the dungeon has only one or two entrances into it that must be reached by moving through other sections. This progression should be linear. Section 1 comes before section 2, etc. But within the sections, the map can be complex but the scope should be small so as to avoid confusion or too much wandering.
The spoke approach is similar, except that one section (the hub) is connected to all other sections. The other sections should not connected. Preferably, the hub is the entrance to the dungeon, but this is not necessary.
Secret doors, in my experience, are a terrible idea unless used VERY sparingly. Drop an incidental secret door somewhere and suddenly you have a party that must stop in every room to take 20 on search checks. There should be no more than 1 or 2 secret doors per dungeon and they should be in "obvious" places. The secret door in the back of the wardrobe in the King's Quarters makes sense, giving the king a way to escape in case of emergency. The secret door leading from the kitchen to the conservatory does not and will spark your players into a plethora of search checks.
More specifically, linear is ok if it's riddled with good encounters and good story. The detour approach (sidetracks) is not so good. It is either not rewarding (great we wasted all that time going down this way, now we have to turn around) or (if rewards are given) rewards players who "comb the desert" looking in every little corner to make sure they found everything (a common trope in video games that should be avoided in RPGs). Branching is the simplest to run and works well for natural cave structures. Works especially well for chase or search and destroy. This can fall to the same problems as sidetracks though, so be careful to make encounters promote the idea that by forging on ahead the players will not only find their goal, but will get there in the least amount of time and be rewarded for such. Complex mazes (circular design) are the most realistic for a manufactured structure. They are great for many types of adventures, but can suffer from player overload if they do not have a good grasp of object visualization (they will get lost or turned in circles). This will only lead to chalk arrows on the wall which, again, slows down the game. This is the hardest to design right. The rooms should be logical and follow a natural progression that gives clues as to their purpose and how they fit into the scheme of things. Players should be able to make a very good guess as to which direction to travel to reach the throne room, for instace.
The Sunless Citadel map looks pretty good. The branch goblin/kobold idea is good, but would probably be better served by choosing which you wanted them to fight (kobolds or goblins) and making that whatever path the players take. The one they don't take could be filled with some sort of reward or "extra" encounter (a single big creature would be best rather than a bunch of little opponents) for those players who decide to be thorough. There are a few too many branches, though except for the crypt one, they appear to be short and insignificant.
The main problems I see with Forge of Fury is that it has secret doors that (seem) pointless and the mix of motifs. It switches from linear to branch to sidetrack to circular with too much frequency. This causes players to avoid getting into a single mindset of how to approach the dungeon.
Keep on the Borderlands is fantastic. My one complaint is there might be a few too many secret doors. If they are presented to the players in such a way that they KNOW they are simply shortcuts, it should be alright. Wonderful use of branching to present the hub concept.
In Search of the Unknown looks ok, but as I mentioned before, a good circular dungeon structure must be backed up by good logical design. It is probably too complex for neophyte players (in terms of dungeon-crawling at least) or those who are horrible at keeping track of objects in their head. May be inappropriate for many parties. Remember that if only one person can handle the map complexity, then that pushes the other players into second class citizen roles, so most of the party has to be ready for something like this.
Hommlet looks to me like it might have too many branches (or at least the branches are too large in comparison to the rest). It also suffers from secret door anxiety. Actually if you removed all the secret door and placed one in front of the crayfish with a big reward it would probably be a great dungeon.
I had intended to finish this, but someone just arrived to visit, so I will have to cut it short.
