Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2258491" data-attributes="member: 4937">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'.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.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 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.  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.</blockquote>

Verification