Have we lost the dungeon?

[S'mon]

Now there are ways to speed things up, but the main observation I have is that classic style dungeon crawling is slow, and thus tends to be less fun. I can get more gaming in running through the woods or city. Once the dungeon comes out, suddenly we've got to go walking in 5' intervals.

As GM I draw the map on players' behalf, I assume they're routinely moving 5'/round & using Search, but I only make them roll (trap)/assume take-10 (secret door) if there's something to find. That doesn't go too slow.

Or else I make them roll Search in advance and apply it to the next findable thing.

 

[diaglo]

I do agree with Joshua that some of the "back to the dungeon" mindset was ill considered and made for some design decisions that compromised the flexibility of the game.

quoted for truth

 

[S'mon]

quoted for truth

Well, a lot of Monte's DM advice kinda sucks IMO. Just not my play style. He's still worth reading though, even when wrong it gives a useful perspective.

 

[Desdichado]

Well then why the hell didn't you just say that to begin with!!!!!

j/k of course. Poor J.D. he's so misunderstood.

I thought I had said so to begin with. But, naturally, I couldn't play up my "I'm so misunderstood" card if I had said so clearly and succintly, now, could I?

 

[JoeGKushner]

I like dungeons in very small and edible doses both as a GM and a player.

As a GM, I can't really imagine too many Undermountains or other lairs of that size and as a player, I find them a little... trite at times but if GMed with enthusism and not simply out to kill the players, enjoyable.

 

[Mallus]

What gets me is roleplaying games seemingly touted as some major intellectual exercise. This is not why I get together with my friends every other weekend. It is just a game.

Are you implying that any attempt to move away from dungeoncrawling is tantamount to overintellectualizing the game? If anything, the move away from the dungeon seems a move toward the freeform "let's pretend" games played by little children, whose imaginations take them anywhere and everywhere. Continuing with that motif, every game of Cowboys and Indians doesn't have to be set in the OK Corral...

Besides, why is it neccessarily wrong to turn the game in a "major intellectual excercise", if that's what you enjoy? Would you criticize Tolkien for inventing whole languages, histories, and cultures for his little story about elves and magic rings? I'd say there's a well-established precendant in fantasy for going overboard. And don't get me started on gamings other antecedent; historical wargames. Do we really need all those charts and rules just to play with toy soldiers?

 

[JoeGKushner]

Considering that neither dungeons nor kingdoms are crunch, I don't even know what you're trying to say.

Man, you've never fought a 10th level kingdom with the PrC "Better than U?" What type of games have you been playing Joshua...

 

[TerraDave]

(we are debating dungeons now, I guess it was inevitable)

My players just found another dungeon, their back! But they never really left, except when we stopped playing.

We are living in a dungeon renaissance. Third edition was very much back to the dungeon (though the D20 elements did allow for more). Goodman games and Necromancer make lots of dungeons, as do other companies. WotC best selling recent modules—Sunless Citadel, Forge of Fury, RtToEE—are dungeons. Classic dungeons are available as pdfs, and conversions are on the boards here, WotC even went to the trouble of coming up with a policy for this. We now have the World Largest Dungeon. You never had so much dungeon before!

The dungeon is a useful game construct, allowing the DM to prepare a range of encounters while leaving the PCs a lot of choice on how to move through them. In terms of purchased adventures, they are often the ones that work best, less dungeon oriented ones seem to rely too much on the old railroad.

Using dungeons doesn’t exclude having an interesting world (which I focused on as soon as I realized what the game was about), doesn’t exclude role-playing, and doesn’t exclude developing interesting stories with the players. Some might even say it makes those things easier.

More importantly, not using dungeons does not prevent the campaign from being a tedious and meaningless series of encounters, or worse non-encounters that lead to nothing. Only the DM and players can prevent that, wherever the adventure takes place.

 

[T. Foster]

The notion of 'maturity' or 'sophistication' in D&D/rpgs is oxymoronic, and anyone who thinks otherwise is either very naive or delusional. If anything, devoting countless hours to detailing fictional worlds, characters, and adventures in a 'realistic' or 'sophicticated' manner is generally a sign of less maturity than someone hacking his way through a randomly-generated dungeon, because the person doing the latter has much more free-time available to devote to other, truly mature and sophisticated, activities than the person wasting his time and efforts on the former. The rpg experience can serve a legitimate educational/theapeutic role, for adults as well as children, in that rpgs enable people to reenact the archetypal mythical cycle (as detailed by Campbell et al.-- cross the threshhold to the otherworld, battle the guardian, outwit the villain, achieve the reward, and return home wiser) on their own terms, but this archetypal pattern is present just as much (if not moreso) in even the simplest and most arbitrary of dungeon-crawls than in the most carefully-crafted and ostensibly sophisticated roleplaying-based scenario.

 

[Desdichado]

sigh.

I should just edit my first post.