Dungeons?

[Umbran]

I have never bothered to count.

 

[DM Howard]

Try a sandbox. Ditch the stories, grand or not. Just create a setting, and ask the players what they want to do. Wing it depending on what they want. Don't try to nudge them a particular way, don't try to guide them into some complex plan, just let them go where they will and adjudicate how it goes from there.

Actually I think that you help me less. Reason being, I think the larger possible environment stresses me out because there are some many external factors that I need to describe and then have the PCs interact with. Usually throwing me way off any actual plans I might have laid. I think a pure dungeon environment would allow me to slowly work on my ability to run a sand box style game, or at least a much more open one.

 

[the Jester]

Roughly half.

 

[pemerton]

I chose 51-60 based on ad hoc recollection. I am assuming that anything indoors, and hence having reasonably defined boundaries and apertures (walls, doors/doorways etc) counts as a dungeon. I think this is in part system-dependent: I am GMing 4e, and 4e likes battlemaps, and battlemaps like boundaries.

For me this is also unrelated to dungeoncrawling as a style of adventure design. I don't particularly care for dungeon-crawling. (Nor hex-crawling, for that matter.) But that doesn't stop encounters taking place indoors a little more often than not.

 

[Aenghus]

It depends on lots of factors including the level range of the campaign, it's look and feel and whether the campaign has a strong theme or not. So I find it impossible to answer this pole, as the percentage will vary from campaign to campaign, tier to tier, even within a campaign as players can tire of dungeon crawls, or crave them for nostalgic reasons.

 

[Kinak]

Actually I think that you help me less. Reason being, I think the larger possible environment stresses me out because there are some many external factors that I need to describe and then have the PCs interact with. Usually throwing me way off any actual plans I might have laid. I think a pure dungeon environment would allow me to slowly work on my ability to run a sand box style game, or at least a much more open one.

A dungeon or even Adventure Path does sound more like what you're looking for. Low-level dungeons are fairly predictable and can really cut down on the amount of prep time you have to do.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[TerraDave]

Very hard to say. A haunted castle aboveground can look feel and function, while in play, just the same as an underground dungeon. A pocket of air deep underwater can function like a cavern...but isn't. And so on.

I have sort of the same issue. In the current game, its been years (real time) since they had a big multi session dungeon to explore. But their has been plenty of smaller dungeons and dungeonesque environments.

Broadly defined, about 60%, with wilderness and urban (also pretty loosely defined) splitting the rest.

 

[Storminator]

Heh. Yesterday's session had a trip to the dungeon! The local "king" had stashed his treasure chest in the dungeon of his newly acquired manor house. It had a central room with oubliette, and 7 cells. The group killed the guards, broke into the cell with the treasure chest, and activated it. Then they fought the various traps from the chest until they decided they'd stolen enough, and "escaped" to the single entrance, where they now get to fight off an army. It was quite possibly the shortest dungeon crawl in history.

PS

 

[Celebrim]

Defining dungeon as 'enclosed, with a map, and an encounter key', I'd say roughly 50%.

Less than that would feel lazy. More than that would be desirable, but in an urban setting its just not possible to always put in the work to define a building concretely, especially if the chance that it will be used as a dungeon as small. If almost all the potential encounters are expected to be friendly, I typically don't produce a map or an encounter key. Nonetheless, it always bothers me when I don't because if a building doesn't have an explicit map, it's a railroad. If you don't have a map, you've implicitly given the players only one way to interact with the evironment and you've shut down free exploration as an option. By not having a map, I'm essentially deciding the correct way to enteract with the scenario.

More than 60-70% would feel like I'm not using all the options available to me.

Less than 30-40% tend to be, if they aren't wilderness sandboxes (with a different kind of map and encounter key), pure 'open world' games. I find that a bit too railroady for my taste. I'm really uncomfortable high improv games as a player as not only are they almost all railroads, but the DMs tend to not even be conscious of their role as railroad conductors.

 

[gamerprinter]

I chose 51-60 based on ad hoc recollection. I am assuming that anything indoors, and hence having reasonably defined boundaries and apertures (walls, doors/doorways etc) counts as a dungeon. I think this is in part system-dependent: I am GMing 4e, and 4e likes battlemaps, and battlemaps like boundaries.

Which is why my percentage option was much lower, as I don't count anything indoors as counting as a dungeon. I'm a cartographer, and I have lots and lots of buildings (above ground) mapped, as well as villages, towns, cities, above ground ruins and all are ready to play in a campaign. If you add my 10 - 20% dungeon selection, and include towns and buildings above ground it might exceed 50%. Again to me, dungeons and indoor above ground locations as 'apples and oranges' - generally my dungeons/catacombs while including walls and chambers do not look anything like my above ground structures in design, layout and architecture, they're completely different animals. So I made my poll selection, based on dungeons and cavern systems only vs any other kind of terrain or structural design.

Some of my underground mapped locations are small lairs of only a few chambers, with an entrance close to the surface and not an entire dungeon nor cavern system, and I didn't count those locations as 'underground' either, since they encompass such a small area...