Have we lost the dungeon?

[TerraDave]

Yes. (You'll be hearing more about that really quite soon.)

very cool (both for the reply and that the adventure/s are coming)

 

[John Morrow]

You fell for the big McGuffin. The original game is about surviving the hazards of the ship. It is all about personal and group power, one of the PC ability scores is Leadership which is used to gain a body of followers (also a means for humans to gain mutnat powers by getting mutant subordinates). The ship is likely doomed (unless a Shipmaster decides otherwise).

Which suggests that the dungeon has less to do with the environment than what the characters do in it. Bill Armintrout's article doesn't talk about personal and group power (except how it might have to be limited to keep the game under control) but about building a campaign based on what you call the McGuffin. As such, it sure doesn't sound like a dungeon crawl at all to me.

It is huge. It is confined. Learning how to get from deck to deck and from section to section requires over coming hazards and accquiring tools to do so, simply learning where things are is not going to do the trick. Big dungeons are like that.

So are plenty of unconfined campaign settings, including science fiction settings where certain types of ships are needed to travel certain distances. Based on this criteria the entire Traveller universe could be described as one really big dungeon.

The occupants of moonbase alpha are aware of its capbilities and topography. What they are not aware of is the area it is passing through. Moonbase Alpha is a vessel a lost and wandering one full of hopeful individuals seeking a home, It is a wagon train type situation. It is not a "dungeon".

And the characters playing through the "Keep on the Borderlands" module might be well aware of the Keep, it's capabilities and topology but that doesn't mean that the Caves of Chaos, which the adventurers travel forth to explore, aren't dungeons. Many of the adventures that don't take place on Moonbase Alpha (and even a few that do) could easily be adapted into a Keep on the Borderlands type game as dungeons.

You could be on the mark with Logans Run. I could be focusing too muych on why the characters are doing what they are doing.

Which leads me to wonder, is the issue really just one of focus rather than trappings or structure? Could the Metamophosis Alpha setting, for example, be played like a dungeon or not like a dungeon, depending on how the GM runs their game? What seperates one from the other? Is simply giving the characters a comelling reason for doing what they are doing, other than power and profit, sufficient to change the feel?

 

[The Shaman]

Well, that was indeed the point of the piece that the quote was originally taken from. In the old days, TSR focused on modules and sold a boatload of them. Then they put less focus on them, and they stopped selling, and ever since "adventures don't sell."

"Y'know, ever since we stopped being good at this we haven't been successful. The problem must be that there's no market."

(Good) adventures are important in the grand scheme of the game. They encourage actual play in a way that a sourcebook does not. They don't allow for system creep or for broken or ill-conceived rules to slip into the game. They help show new DMs how the game can be played. They inspire through example.

In fact, even if I'm wrong, and adventures can never be made to sell well again, the values I just mentioned, from the point of view of the long-term health of the game, still make them worth doing in some fashion.

Absolutely.

Many years ago I framed a cartoon for my wife, an elementary school teacher. The cartoon shows a teacher sitting at her desk at the front of the classroom, her M.Ed. prominently displayed on the wall behind her, and two books on her desk: the first a massive tome called How to Teach, the second a skinny little volume titled What to Teach.

It seems to me that gamers are presented with volumes and volumes of settings, classes, feats, spells &c. with suggestions on how to incoporate them into a game, and a handful of often-sparse one-or-two page adventures that show how to bring those pieces together for actual game-play. As with the schoolteacher who is all technique and no substance, the proliferation of mechanics has come at the expense of game-play, creating a game where the proportion of time spent on character generation (and, more specifically, optimization) is much higher - arguably too high - to the time spent actually crawling through the dungeon, trekking through the lonely forest, or sneaking down the shadowy alley than it was in the past.

 

[rogueattorney]

"Y'know, ever since we stopped being good at this we haven't been successful. The problem must be that there's no market." Absolutely.

Another way to say it would be... "When TSR tripled adventure production, while also producing rule supplements and campaign settings at a never seen before clip in a shrinking market, adventures weren't profitable. No one's actually tried to make adventures in the same manner as when TSR was selling over a million copies of S1. We'll just assume it won't work."

And yet Goodman and Necro seem to stay in business... Yeah, yeah, big companies, overhead, blah, blah, blah. That's why Wal-Marts across the country are being pushed out of business by low-volume buying mom and pop stores. Truth is, WotC has basically admitted to not knowing how to make money selling adventures. Which is just really, really wierd.

R.A.