Have we lost the dungeon?

[takyris]

Ditto J-Z-Jazzy-Dyal. If other folks want to adventure in dungeons, I'm not hurt or offended, but I don't have a real need for one myself. In the campaign that took my PCs from 1st to 20th level over three years, we used two actual dungeons.

There are other complexes, of course -- big altar rooms and dragon's lairs and enemy hideouts and such -- but in terms of giant underground places connected by doors with challenges and traps and things to loot and more than a few things placed down with little regard for the local ecology, we only had two. The first was an ancient site where heroes were tested and which had been corrupted over the centuries (hence the lack of any real coherence to why stuff was the way it was) and the second was the stronghold of the big bad enemies of the campaign, which had enough weird deathtrappyness to qualify as a dungeon.

It was a fun diversion, but when each ended, people were quite happy to go back to the normal game.

 

[philreed]

(a goblin hiding behind a tree is not an encounter).

BOO!

 

[Dagger75]

I don't really use them. A dungeon has to be a living breathing thing for me. I never understood why someone would build a hung 150 room place just to fill it with monsters and traps. If I have a trap, its ther for a reason, same with rooms and what not.

 

[gizmo33]

BOO!

I thought you were boooing me because of what I said. I thought that perhaps you had worked for a game company that just released the Slayer's Guide to Goblins behind Trees. I see now that you were perhaps just giving me the flavor text behind the encounter.

 

[gizmo33]

I don't really use them. A dungeon has to be a living breathing thing for me. I never understood why someone would build a hung 150 room place just to fill it with monsters and traps. If I have a trap, its ther for a reason, same with rooms and what not.

Eccentricty seems the most common reason for the 150 room dungeon. I guess it's an extension of the real world examples of eccentrics (is it always Britain?) who build sprawling mansions and then add on them over their lifetimes. Replace sprawling mansion with dungeon and eccentric with insane wizard and it's possible that there would be at least a few dungeons in any given world.

 

[scrubkai]

We use dungeons when they make sense....

An abandoned dwarf mine that the clan needs cleaned out, A small tomb that some ancient evil built to guard the high priest of a deposed god, Even a small cave complex that was taken by some hobgoblins as a lair.

But gone are the days when we lock the players in a dungon and say find your way out. Normally the dungeon is just one of the locations that allows us to drive the plot on.

To me an underground dungeon is not much different then a ruined city... It's just another location in which to chalange the characters.

 

[Hammerhead]

Don't use "dungeons." My site based adventurers are generally only a few encounters.

 

[The Shaman]

There's something I find a bit confusing in some of the posts.

A number of folks have decried dungeons as places where 'the ecology doesn't make sense' or 'the rooms don't make sense or 'the traps don't make sense,' &c.

From the time I read the Temple of the Frog in Blackmoor, my dungeons 'made sense.' For most dungeons this meant that each room has a purpose - an armory, a barracks, a store room, a torture chamber, &c.. Traps are placed to aid the defense and can be bypassed by the residents (if they are careful). Once the original purpose of the dungeon is determined, I then populate it based on one of two things: the dungeon is in active use by the original builder (such as the dungeon beneath a wizard's tower) or was converted to some other use after the original residents were gone (such as thedungeon beneath the ruined evil temple subsequently occupied by battling bands of orcs and lizardfolk).

However, I have dungeons that, on first glance, don't 'make sense.' Classic labyrinths of winding passages, dungeons that feel 'random' without apparent utility. Why? Because people do strange things with architecture sometimes. Mazes are built as entertainment, complexes built as proving grounds - there's no reason that every dungeon has to be 100% 'explainable' to be interesting or 'make sense' in the context of the game, nor do the players need to always understand the motivations of the original builders.

I strive to arrive at some sort of working ecology for dungeons, but again, I don't feel constrained by food chains and local habitat all the time, not in a world with planar gates and magical stasis and undead. While the majority of my dungeon complexes would pass the sniff test, once in a while I'll pull out a White Plume Mountain-type dungeon crawl out of my quiver, just because it can be fun to create an environment where anything is possible without the limits of 'making sense.' In my experience it's fun for the players as well - if you define fun as, "Holy crap, how'd that get here?!?" that is.

 

[Ourph]

As a player, yes I have lost the dungeon. My characters keep looking for them. They go up to random NPCs in a town and ask,"Hey buddy. Where's the nearest abandoned castle built by a crazy wizard several centuries ago which is now overrun with strange and terrifying monsters but still full of treasures beyond the ken of mere mortals?". The NPCs give my character weird looks and walk away, then the DM throws a book at me and tells me to get back to writing my 15 page character backstory due by the end of the session.

Of course, I make up for that by putting lots of extra dungeons in my campaigns. The PCs in my campaign can barely walk around without tripping over or falling into a dungeon entrance.

Despite the fact that my players seem to really enjoy the dungeon-ful campaigns I run, they never seem to create the same type of campaign when they GM the games. IMO it's a culture thing. There's so much anti-dungeon prejudice out there that people who would otherwise hearken back to the good old days of 10x10 rooms choose not to because they're afraid the "real roleplayers" will mock them as unevolved, rollplaying boobs.

Terms like "mindless hack-n-slash" just prove my point.

The only "mindless" thing about the play in my campaign are the undead who will kill your character and eat his brains if you're not paying attention, playing smart and treating combat as a last resort option.

 

[DarrenGMiller]

As a player, yes I have lost the dungeon. My characters keep looking for them. They go up to random NPCs in a town and ask,"Hey buddy. Where's the nearest abandoned castle built by a crazy wizard several centuries ago which is now overrun with strange and terrifying monsters but still full of treasures beyond the ken of mere mortals?". The NPCs give my character weird looks and walk away, then the DM throws a book at me and tells me to get back to writing my 15 page character backstory due by the end of the session.

Of course, I make up for that by putting lots of extra dungeons in my campaigns. The PCs in my campaign can barely walk around without tripping over or falling into a dungeon entrance.

Despite the fact that my players seem to really enjoy the dungeon-ful campaigns I run, they never seem to create the same type of campaign when they GM the games. IMO it's a culture thing. There's so much anti-dungeon prejudice out there that people who would otherwise hearken back to the good old days of 10x10 rooms choose not to because they're afraid the "real roleplayers" will mock them as unevolved, rollplaying boobs.

Terms like "mindless hack-n-slash" just prove my point.

The only "mindless" thing about the play in my campaign are the undead who will kill your character and eat his brains if you're not paying attention, playing smart and treating combat as a last resort option.

best.post.evar... okay, so maybe not, but I laughed pretty hard.

Very nice work.

DM