Have we lost the dungeon?

[diaglo]

(i think they were grumps MA was/is great)

moi, aussi.

j'aime le MA

 

[Desdichado]

Space:1999 isn't a dungeon and Logan's Run isn't either because they don't focus of the accuisition of power as motivators for the characters. Space 1999 is actually a homesteading western and Logan's Run is a retelling of the Oddessey.

That gets close to what I'm trying to say. "Dungeon" to me isn't just a campaign management tool, its a paradigm of what the game is about. And I know that these days, there's a big push for dungeons that "make sense" and "have a reason" and often that PCs have a better reason to go into them than "for adventure and profit." But classically, they did not. These improvements to the paradigm of the dungeon make it bearable, but it still is not my preferred play method.

Perhaps I'm still just rankled by all the bad games I played as a kid, and have developed a dislike of "the dungeon" all out of proportion to what it truly deserves. Perhaps that's why it seems to be difficult for me to express why it so dissatisfies me.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I see the communications problem - many people are using words like "evolved" in a teleological sense, so that "more evolved" = "better", the 'Ascent of Man' type idea (which leads to fantasies about humans 'evolving' into 'beings of pure energy' in supposedly scientific fiction) while Joshua is using it in a scientific sense of simply 'changed'. So eg Donjon is 'more evolved' than D&D, because Donjon has changed/deviated/progressed farther from the original roots of the RPG hobby. Doesn't mean Donjon is better (or worse) than D&D though, just different.

Donjon is the one true game. All others are just pale imitations.

 

[TerraDave]

That gets close to what I'm trying to say. "Dungeon" to me isn't just a campaign management tool, its a paradigm of what the game is about. And I know that these days, there's a big push for dungeons that "make sense" and "have a reason" and often that PCs have a better reason to go into them than "for adventure and profit." But classically, they did not. These improvements to the paradigm of the dungeon make it bearable, but it still is not my preferred play method.

Perhaps I'm still just rankled by all the bad games I played as a kid, and have developed a dislike of "the dungeon" all out of proportion to what it truly deserves. Perhaps that's why it seems to be difficult for me to express why it so dissatisfies me.

So was it bad play that happened to be in a dungeon, or the dungeon?

By the early 80's, when I really started playing, there where lots of alternatives...but they could be just as silly. I have went back to the dungeon more then once to restablish what the game was about, at least for myself.

 

[Desdichado]

So was it bad play that happened to be in a dungeon, or the dungeon?

By the early 80's, when I really started playing, there where lots of alternatives...but they could be just as silly. I have went back to the dungeon more then once to restablish what the game was about, at least for myself.

No, it was the dungeon itself. When I go back to the dungeon to reestablish what the game is about is when I start looking beyond D&D for other games.

 

[Celebrim]

Obviously Celebrim is correct that all detailed adventures can be presented as flowcharts, what he calls 'dungeons'. To me a dungeon though is that place beyond the threshold of adventure, separate from the everyday life of the mundane world - so the halls of the ruined keep, the paths of the Forest of Doom, or the goblin caverns count, but a murder mystery set in the PCs' home village doesn't.

What does 'beyond the threshold of adventure' mean?

In my campaign worlds, 'the halls of the ruined keep' and the 'paths of the Forest of Doom' and certainly the 'goblin caverns' are part of the everyday mundane world. People don't go there every day, but neither do murders occur in the PC's home village every day either. So I'm afraid I don't understand what you are trying to get at. Are you trying to say that its a dungeon if and only if it isn't mundane in this world? If so, how is a medieval village in which a murderous doppleganger is secretly on the rampage mundane in this world? Or, are you trying merely to say its only a dungeon if the majority of keyed encounters are with foes or potential foes? If so, in my campaign the goblin caverns are not really potentially any different than the dwarven city, since you could offend either one and find yourself in a 'dungeon'.

I think he's describing a "dungeon" as any adventure which is described in terms of maps, keyed locations, encounter tables and rosters rather than in terms of chapters and scenes.

Yes, but it goes beyond that. I'm saying that an adventure descripted in terms of chapters and scenes is isomorphic with a linear dungeon - especially a linear dungeon in which the PC's are expected to or must travel from room to room without turning back. In otherwords, an episodic adventure with chapters and scenes is only players moving from room to room in a predictable order ('running the gauntlet'), and if you draw a dungeon which is strictly linear then you are in a real sense creating an adventure/dungeon with an episodic story structure.

That gets close to what I'm trying to say. "Dungeon" to me isn't just a campaign management tool, its a paradigm of what the game is about.

I'm having as much trouble trying to parse what you mean by this as I have with 'beyond the threshold of adventure'. Is 'dungeon' to you merely the conventional window dressing of the game 'Dungeons and Dragons'?

And I know that these days, there's a big push for dungeons that "make sense" and "have a reason" and often that PCs have a better reason to go into them than "for adventure and profit." But classically, they did not. These improvements to the paradigm of the dungeon make it bearable, but it still is not my preferred play method.

And this is where you lose me with that assumption. I started playing in 1981, so I can't speak about what the real early years were like, but the way I remember things was that 'adventure and profit' were only part of the reasons for going into the dark and mysterious places of the world and that it was and is the mark of a poor DM that couldn't find suitable motivations other than greed for players. Amongst published modules of the period, there are all manner of motivations involved - appeals to the character's civic duty or patriotic spirit are particularly common, but you can appeal to the character's need for survival in the face of gathering apocalyptic evil, or to a good aligned characters desire to protect the weak, or a lawful character's sense of justice. And for some characters, 'let's go kill things and take thier stuff' is a reasoned motivation.

Other than S4, what published modules contained dungeons that didn't make sense or have a reason for existance and why do you consider those 'classic'?

Perhaps I'm still just rankled by all the bad games I played as a kid, and have developed a dislike of "the dungeon" all out of proportion to what it truly deserves. Perhaps that's why it seems to be difficult for me to express why it so dissatisfies me.

Perhaps. It seems to me that no matter how sophisticated the adventure story, at some point you are going to have good reason to appeal on the mythic power of entering the forbidden place. Is The Lord of the Rings a bad story because every once in a while the characters dive off into the Mines of Moria, hole up in the Glittering Caves of Aglarond, tread the Paths of the Dead, go through the tunnel in the haunted pass of Cirith Ungol, and are journeying toward the Cracks of Doom? How do you avoid doing a good fairy tale, if once and a while the heroes don't have to enter the magic castle or the house of the wicked witch?

And, as I'm arguing, most of that is just fluff. As a novel, LotR presents all the above journeys in an episodic structure, and there is no particular reason why it would be impossible to do the same for a dungeon in an RPG - its just that in doing so you've chosen to avoid some of the freedom the RPG genera provides to the storytellers. Ultimately, however you run the campaign you are just using a mentally modified form of dungeon, and if you are running a campaign an an Extended virtual dungeon in which locations are discontinious and disconnected and extemporaneously created as need demands, then arguably your campaign could benefit from apply to some location the same sort of detail and structure that the true dungeon provides. For example, I could run the 'Island Survival' adventure that I whipped up above using either an extended or episodic structure, but in doing so I would be giving up the advantages of having a fixed geography. Notably, without the dungeon structure that I gave the island in which the islands water and shelter are physically separated from the food by dangerous obstacles, there would be no need for the characters to clear the 'dragon' from hex 12. By shaping the dungeon how I did, I'm creating story. Sooner or latter, if the characters want to live on the island in safety, they are going to have to confront the 'dragon' even though initially this will seem to be the least desirable alternative. So, we can almost tell the story in chapters already (exploration, overcoming intial obstacles, discovery of the problem, attempts to circumvent the problem, resolution to confront the dragon, preparation for the fight, the big finale, safety and eventual rescue) even though I've created no explicit story - just a dungeon which happens to have had 'tropical island' scenary draped on it.

 

[Desdichado]

In my campaign worlds, 'the halls of the ruined keep' and the 'paths of the Forest of Doom' and certainly the 'goblin caverns' are part of the everyday mundane world. People don't go there every day, but neither do murders occur in the PC's home village every day either. So I'm afraid I don't understand what you are trying to get at. Are you trying to say that its a dungeon if and only if it isn't mundane in this world? If so, how is a medieval village in which a murderous doppleganger is secretly on the rampage mundane in this world? Or, are you trying merely to say its only a dungeon if the majority of keyed encounters are with foes or potential foes? If so, in my campaign the goblin caverns are not really potentially any different than the dwarven city, since you could offend either one and find yourself in a 'dungeon'.

The authors of the 3e DMG would disagree with you there, as they state categorically that "the dungeon" is somehow different than the rest of the game; it's where you go to have adventure; and it's separate and distinct from other aspects of the game. That's part of the paradigm I don't like, and I also think it's the root of our cognitive disconnection about what "the dungeon" is. Adventure isn't about "going to the dungeon" to me; it can happen right in your own house, and in my games, it often does. That's what makes "the dungeon" so different from, say, my urban political intrigue type games. Your idea that planning such an adventure is not much different than planning a dungeon is not a new one (I believe Ray Winninger published it in Dragon five years or so ago, and it wasn't new then either) but really the similarities are only very broadly applicable. My game is too malleable based on player actions, which are too open, for my "urban political intrigue dungeon" to be more than a barest skeleton of a flowchart, and much of it has to be generated on the spot. I also avoid many of the classic dungeon elements; I don't think traps are very interesting, for example.

Perhaps. It seems to me that no matter how sophisticated the adventure story, at some point you are going to have good reason to appeal on the mythic power of entering the forbidden place. Is The Lord of the Rings a bad story because every once in a while the characters dive off into the Mines of Moria, hole up in the Glittering Caves of Aglarond, tread the Paths of the Dead, go through the tunnel in the haunted pass of Cirith Ungol, and are journeying toward the Cracks of Doom? How do you avoid doing a good fairy tale, if once and a while the heroes don't have to enter the magic castle or the house of the wicked witch?

Well, for one, my games bear little resemblance to a fairy tale. More like a fantasy X-files, conspiracy theory and black ops type of game. And as I said earlier, I don't completely eschew "dungeons" either, but my use of them is sparse compared to the operating paradigm that dungeons are the raison d'etre of D&D.

 

[Dextolen]

I'm sooo sick of overland adventures. We've come off a two year long Midnight campaign that had to be 85% overland. Gimme a good year of boxed text describing rooms, please.

As a DM, running city based adventures is a very different beast from dungeons. Expect the party to be able to heal and replentish resources much more easily. You have to factor that into your challenges.

 

[S'mon]

What does 'beyond the threshold of adventure' mean?

You describe it yourself - "the mythic power of entering the forbidden place" - it's the Joseph Campbell idea, you have the protagonist start in the everyday world, then the call to adventure, then the crossing the threshold into the underworld - ie, the dungeon.

 

[Celebrim]

The authors of the 3e DMG would disagree with you there, as they state categorically that "the dungeon" is somehow different than the rest of the game; it's where you go to have adventure; and it's separate and distinct from other aspects of the game.

Well, they are wrong or at least have done a bad job of conveying their meaning. And that's yet another reason for me to never buy the DMG.

The dungeon is just the location where by definition the adventure happens, and since adventure can happen anywhere so can a dungeon. It's distinctly different from the rest of the game only in the sense that it generally needs to be described in more detail than the rest of the game world precisely because that is where the action is going to take place. Thus, at its heart, the dungeon is just a construct which serves the gamist need of having enough detail to provide firm challenges and sufficient information to meet those challenges.

That's part of the paradigm I don't like, and I also think it's the root of our cognitive disconnection about what "the dungeon" is. Adventure isn't about "going to the dungeon" to me; it can happen right in your own house, and in my games, it often does.

OK, I guess I understand where our definitions disagree. In my definition, the minute adventures start happening in your own house, then your own house becomes 'the dungeon' and your house - which might have existed only as an vague and discontinious space - suddenly needs to be fleshed out with details like whether the parlor is directly connected to the kitchen and whether the upper story windows have bars on them.

That's what makes "the dungeon" so different from, say, my urban political intrigue type games.

Only if you assume that urban environments aren't actually actual and potential dungeons. In fact, there is actually no reason why lots of intrigue can't go on in a classical dungeon, and in fact several early published modules certainly make allowances for this sort of thing should the DM want to go that way.

Well, for one, my games bear little resemblance to a fairy tale.

Ahh.. so you say.

More like a fantasy X-files...

You mean, the characters hear of an adventure in a distant place and go on a quest where they discover a conspiracy of some evil which they must thwart using only thier wits and courage, and in which one of the major characters is on a quest to rescue his sister these years past stolen away by the fairies.. .er I mean aliens, in which the stories are short usually self-contained epsisodes which serve as metaphorical warnings of various sorts, and which generally end with the villain dying or otherwise being punished in some ghastly way?

...and black ops type of game.

You mean, the characters must stealthy penetrate a hardened high value target of some sort which is currently being held and defended by agents of the enemy, possibly elimenating these agents as they go? And for that matter, what percentage of X-files episodes do you think ultimately have Mulder and Scully entering a dungeon of some sort (secret military base, the monsters house, etc.)?