Celebrim
Legend
DonTadow said:
Since you've taken to arguing what I meant, and neither of you are quite getting it, I thought I'd try to step in an clarify - though in all likelihood I'll just end up confusing you more.
Yes, DonTadow just said about what I said is true, but it doesn't go far enough. It's not enough to put in a mere description and think you've rendered the room non-generic. That would be fine if RPG's were merely novels, but they aren't. Your job as a DM is to create a shared imaginary space which is non-linear and two dimensional. To do that, you have to flesh out the things in that space. A description is a 2D image of the space, but its flat and the player's can't really interact with it. If you create a room and just put in the room a 2D image of the room, you haven't yet finished your job and you haven't yet significantly changed the room from being an empty room. A player entering the room will quickly discover that the room is featureless, in much the same way that a character might discover that something is an illusion. It's not enough to give the player something to see, you have to give the player something to do.
Which brings us to the point that Sado is confused on:
Sado said:
My point differs from what you think my point is in exactly one word - 'the'. In actuality, my point is that you shouldn't include anything in a dungeon not related to a story. In this context, the article 'the' is very different than the article 'a', precisely because you are right the DM can never be completely sure exactly what the story is going to be. But it is a very different thing to suggest that nowhere the player's go should be devoid of story, and to suggest that nowhere the players go should be devoid of the story that I want them to do. Sure, not everything that the player's find in the abandoned temple might directly relate to the particular quest that they are on at the moment. In fact, like a good mystery story, its often worth it to develop subplots and red herrings - provided you can actually think of some subplots and red herrings that are reasonably interesting. Truly 'empty' areas don't serve that purpose, and in fact they don't really serve any purpose at all.
Even if making everywhere interesting is unrealistic (and to begin with, I'd argue that most everywhere in the real world is more interesting than an empty room), I think that at some point you need to realize that fiction is by definition the illusion of life which is larger and more interesting than life is. That fiction occurs and generally only occurs during that portion of the life of the characters which is more interesting than ordinary life. The characters adventures should be similarly rich and interesting, and not a tedious crawl through empty rooms looking for where the DM hid the things of importance.
As an example, one of the worst habits I had to break as a dungeon designer was the desire to make dungeons symmetrical. In real life, most buildings are symmetrical or nearly symmetrical, because most buildings are designed to be functional and symmetrical is often an aid to functionality. But symmetrical dungeons have a tendency to be redundant and redundancy is a literary sin of no small magnitude. You map should not contain numerous rooms of roughly identical contents. (The most common sin of this sort that annoys me are rows of gaurd rooms keyed to the same encounter and contain 2d4 Gnolls or whatever.) Realistic or not, this is bad design in a dungeon. Again, I keep mentioning this map, but take a look at the map to Castle Ravenloft in I6. Notice all the broken symmetries? Notice the relative lack of featureless rooms? Notice the high degree of 3D structure, and the subtle channeling that occurs in the map even though its not linear. I'm not saying the map is perfect, because we could probably quibble over whether the Crypt level is too maze-like and tedious in actual play and whether a couple of rooms should be give abit more detail, but it is nonetheless a fabulous example of good dungeon design.
