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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 2248148" data-attributes="member: 26473">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.</blockquote>

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