Have we lost the dungeon?

[S'mon]

A good dungeon grants players' choices as well as limiting them, though - that's why it's an inherently good format. A wilderness adventure that comprises a linear sequence of inevitable encounters grants far less real choice. The better wilderness scenarios tend to use the wilderness more like a dungeon, eg a forest with paths as corridors & clearings as rooms.

 

[philreed]

However, D&D is more than just the dungeon.

I hear there are also dragons.

 

[Quasqueton]

Evolution leads to an improved, stronger, and more sustainable system. D&D [current edition] is definitely evolved. 30 years of development has built up to this level of excellence.

Quasqueton

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

Let's not forget that the first adventures came out in 1978.

Certainly Judges Guild was publishing adventure modules in 1977 (e.g. Tegel Manor). I want to say they were publishing modules in 1976 too but I'm struggling to evidence that.

The big one was in 1981: The Isle of Dread.

Ah yes, you're correct. Wasn't a module that I personally enjoyed so it tends to slip my memory.

 

[Desdichado]

Evolution leads to an improved, stronger, and more sustainable system.

The dinosaurs might disagree with that statement ; in fact, evolution can lead to being too specialized for certain conditions, and in inability to sustain itself if those conditions change.

It might be possible to make a case that D&D was heading down that road in the later 1990s -- certainly it was losing market share dramatically to other games then. I think it was unlikely to ever "go extinct" but to ensure continued dominance of the market, it needed to make changes. Which 3e and the OGL most certainly did. Although the long-term effects of the OGL are still TBD, IMO. Whether or not it cements d20 as the permanent leader of the industry or not may or may not be true.

 

[S'mon]

Evolution leads to an improved, stronger, and more sustainable system. D&D [current edition] is definitely evolved. 30 years of development has built up to this level of excellence.

Quasqueton

I think the truth lies somewhere in between Quasqueton & Diaglo - species & games evolve to fit their environment in a competition of survival of the fittest - in this case, what sells, what's played - but can go extinct when environment changes or because the mutation turns out to be an evolutionary dead-end. Many people would say 2e AD&D lost much that was good in 1e, and that 3e lost good stuff from 2e, etc.

 

[Celebrim]

D&D circa 1978-1981 was almost entirely dungeon-based, and it was big business. Some modules had a wilderness area but the wilderness was basically a setting and framework for the dungeons.

I'm trying to remember the first module that didn't have a substantial ruins/underground setting as its centrepiece, and thinking the answer must be UK1 from around 1982. By this point the bigger selling dungeons had sold something like a quarter of a million copies.

As I have gotten older, I've come to realize that everything is a dungeon. The rooms don't have to be actual rooms, and the corridors don't actually have to exist as spatial objects, but the dungeon is there.

Basically, there are only four types of adventures: episodic, dungeons, extended, and mixed.

Episodic adventure is a series of encounters linked together one after the other. Episodic adentures typically don't appear to have dungeons at all, because the movement is often geographic or temporal in nature and they seldom have a map. Encounters are most firmly fixed in time rather than space (and often not even that). But in fact, all an episodic adventure is a dungeon in which all the corridors are traverseable only in one direction. Once you've left a room, you can only go forward to the next one. Episodic adventures tend to be rather linear, and in fact most are completely linear. You are expected to do one thing, and then after you've done that, then you do the next thing all the way through the module. Occassionally the more sophisticated ones have branching paths allowing you to choose between one or more rooms, but generally these have devices for bringing the paths back together again afterwards so that the only effect of the choice is to skip a room or two. If you were to draw a chart of the adventure with each episode as a room and each choice given to the players a path between them, then you'd see that you'd drawn a simple dungeon. In fact, once you see the chart of an episodic adventure, it should occur to you that some of the dungeons that you've seen are in fact episodic in nature. Many simple dungeons are simply nothing more than a series of challenges which follow one after the other in order, usually leading to

The driving goal of an episodic adventure is to tell a managable story. Under the big theory, the episodic adventure is narrativist in its goals. Choices are strictly managed at each point, and the adventure itself resembles something like a 'choose your own adventure' book. A properly managed and well written episodic adventure is compelling and logical enough that the characters, don't notice that the adventure is linear or nearly so. A good DM should be able to add rooms to the dungeon as needed to accomodate unexpected twists in the story created by the PC's, and yet still manage to provide the PC's choices which allow them to reconnect with latter rooms in the 'dungeon' in a way that seems natural. DM's typically get into trouble with episodic adventures in one of two ways. Either they can't accomodate the PC's actions into the story and they are forced to tell the PC's that 'they can't do that', or when they do so they become so hidebound to the episodic adventures temporal structure that they ruin the story. The first flaw is actually a 'gamist' flaw, in that the DM is looking at the episodic 'map' as if it was as fixed in stone as the walls of a dungeon. The second flaw is a 'simulationist' flaw, in that the DM is failing to realize that the story occurs by necessity when the PC's arrive (rather than necessarily according to the temporal structure set out initially), and that the structure should bend at least a little if the game is to be enjoyable. Sure, realisticly it is easy to make the 'wrong' decision and miss events that are transpiring, but the PC's are heroes and by definition heroes arrive at the scene just in the nick of time (at least most of the time).

The classic adventure is the 'true dungeon'. The true dungeon is defined by a map of an enclosed space. The map could be just about anything - a formal garden, a house, a cave, an mine, a canyon, a bridge, etc. The enclosed space has limited set of locations firmly bound in space such that it is difficult or impossible to go from point A to point C while bypassing point B if point B is between A and C. The purpose of the dungeon is to manage player choices is a logical fashion. A dungeon limits the scope of an adventure to things that occur on a finite map, containing a finite number of rooms with a finite number of connections between them. In fact, this is why most dungeons are underground - so as to manage the verticle space and prevent players flying unexpectedly from A to C. The driving goal of a dungeon adventure is to describe as nearly as possible everything that it is possible for the players to do. This is an expressly 'gamist' goal (for example, its the sort of goal you must have to program a computer game). The dungeon expands player freedom by allowing players to go from A to B, and then back to A, and then on through B to C and so forth. But they usually can't just decide to start with C and then try B, before moving on to Q. More complex episodic adventures begin to resemble dungeons, even if they don't occur in a single space. If you have an episodic adventure that allows a player to go back and forth between A, B, and C before assembling the clues and solving the puzzle that leads you on to D, then you are beginning to adopt a dungeon structure to your story.

A properly run dungeon adventure makes a story out of what happens. A good DM running a dungeon adventure lets the players create the meaning as they go. One of the biggest mistakes a DM can make running a dungeon adventure is to decide before hand what the story should be. This is a narrativist flaw. A DM that draws a dungeon map needs to understand that the story can occur in any order that the PC's could visit the rooms. If the DM doesn't want F to occur before A, then there shouldn't be a way to go directly to F and bypass A, and then come back to A. If there is, the DM needs to take into acount what A is like if the PC's first do F and then go into A from the way that the DM anticipated would be the exit. The other problem often seen in running dungeons is that too little thought was given to why the rooms were built, why they are attached, and why the things that are in them are there. Depending on how you look at things, this is inadequate simulation (huge dragons in 10'x10' rooms) or inadequate narration (what are we, and for that matter everyone else, doing in this place anyway?).

The third type of adventure is the extended adventure. In the extended adventure, the players are free to go to each encounter in any order to see what they find there. The goal of the extended adventure is to provide the players with the feeling of being in a real and living place in which they have full freedom of choice. Under the big theory, this is an inherently simulationist goal. Many wilderness adventures are designed as exploration and the players can visit any keyed encounter in any order that they wish, but the best example of an extended adventure is the city adventure in which the PC's know the basic description of locations ahead of time and simply choose between them in the order that they wish. In fact, a dungeon can be an extended adventure, all you have to do is draw the map such that every room is surrounded by corridors which connect it to every other room.

A properly run extended adventure fulfills the goal of creating a living and breathing world. This can mean alot of work. The DM must be able to modify what is found at location A, if what transpired at location B could in some way effect the location. The actors at the various locations need to take action on thier own to involve themselves in the story if it is reasonable that they do so. The biggest trap you can fall into in creating extended adventures is that since your goal doesn't explicitly have anything to do with managablity, you can end up create an adventure which is too complex to manage. It's simply not possible to detail the world completely out before you set it in motion. At some point, any DM no matter how imaginative will find that his locations suffer in detail compared to what he might have created had he limited the scope of the game. A DM who is always extemporaneously creating things to fulfill the needs of his freeform extended game, doesn't usually have time to prepare complex puzzles or elaborate and yet well balanced encounters. This is a failure to address gamist considerations. Another problem you can run into is having encounters which are so tenously connected to each other, that no real story develops. Each encounter occurs in complete isolation to every other, and your elaborate creation effectively comes off as no more sophisticated than a series of well played random encounters. This is a failure to address narativist considerations.

Lastly, an adventure can transition between the three types of adventures. For example, the overall structure of an adventure might be episodic, but each 'room' of the episode could in fact be a full dungeon map or an extended set of wilderness encounters. Or the overall structure could be extended, but going to certain locations triggers a series of episodes or reveals dungeons to explore. Or the overall structure could be a dungeon, but going to certain locations triggers a series of episodes as Monster #23 moves between certain locations in a specified way, or a certain room could be found within the dugeon which is large enough that the locations within it have an extended characteristic. Most dungeons are simply therefore primarily of one type or the other, and almost all mature adventures have mixed characteristics.

For example, the UK1 module that you mention begins as an explicit dungeon adventure - explore the Crystal Cave. However, the adventure becomes more complex when one of the 'rooms' in (using the preposition quite loosely) that Cave turns out to be so large that it must be explored in an extended fashion, and lastly once that room is explored and the way into the final chamber of the dungeon is then discovered, the final set of encounters becomes loosely episodic in nature. But while UK1 is in some ways definately way ahead of its time, one could argue that UK1's approach of requiring almost no combat to solve the adventure is an echo of the structure of S1 which also (in a very different way) is an adventure which can be resolved with little or no combat on the part of the PC's. UK1's sophisticated RP approach is no more or less mature than S1's sophisticated puzzle solving approach to the game. And UK1's mixed dungeon approach - while more complex than S1's near total dungeon based design (in fact, S1 is so linear as to be practically episodic) - is echoed in other early modules like X1. X1 begins with an episodic sea journey, turns into an exploration based extended adventure, and finally winds up in a pure dungeon crawl. The important point is that even though UK1 disguises the dungeon very carefully, it's still very much a dungeon from the time that the player's enter the cave. It is a very imaginative and very well realized dungeon, but its still a dungeon.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

As I have gotten older, I've come to realize that everything is a dungeon. The rooms don't have to be actual rooms, and the corridors don't actually have to exist as spatial objects, but the dungeon is there.

Basically, there are only four types of adventures: episodic, dungeons, extended, and mixed.

While I do see what you're saying, there's more to a dungeon than structure. Properly run, a dungeon has an atmosphere all of its own that is distinct from an adventure like Isle of Dread. The feel is unique.

The driving goal of an episodic adventure is to tell a managable story. Under the big theory, the episodic adventure is narrativist in its goals.

On the assumption that you're using "narrativist" in accordance with its natural/intuitive meaning rather than in the Edwards sense you're entirely correct. I don't personally see this version of narrativism as appealing because it denies the players any realistic level of control over events and thereby virtually eliminates any benefits that might be gained from superior play.

The same applies to the remainder of your post - I see your use of the terms "simulationist" and "gamist" as in accordance with their intuitive meanings and would concur with what you're saying.

Under this interpretation the first episodic adventure was A3 where the characters were forcibly and inescapably captured.

 

[Banshee16]

I don't miss the dungeon...in fact, haven't missed it since about 1993.

Generally, when things are a little more free flowing, and involving things more complex than which door to bash down, etc. the game is way more interesting. I can only take the dungeon in small amounts.

The fact that WotC has re-designed the game for the dungeon has been a disheartening aspect of 3E.

Banshee

 

[Desdichado]

Celebrim, while I think that's a pretty interesting take on things, it seems a bit too reductionist. According to that logic, any plan whatsoever is little more than a "dungeon."

While I don't disagree terribly with your analysis, I think it doesn't help matters to essentially say any type of roleplaying activity is little more than a dungeon, albeit a very linear one, or a very open one in the case of your episodic and extended "dungeons."

To me, a dungeon is a dungeon; it's a complex, usually underground, wherein PCs find treasure, traps and monsters. Despite the fact that methodology around playing non-dungeoncrawling campaigns doesn't differ (in many ways) from dungeoncrawling is moot, because its not the methodology of campaign management that I dislike, it is the specifics of dungeon interaction.

But other than quibbling about calling all of those methods of campaign management "dungeons," I think it's a nice breakdown of GMing styles. My own style more closely approximates the extended approach, but bringing it all together is usually based on setting in motion schedules and plans of NPCs (usually antagonists) which will start going on their own with or without PC intervention. That keeps the PCs from merely wandering around from one place to the other willy-nilly, because they often react to, or occasionally are even forced to react to, the actions of the NPCs. Or, when they're really on top of the game, they act independently to cut off the actions of the NPCs. Not that that happens very often...