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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="PapersAndPaychecks" data-source="post: 2260668" data-attributes="member: 28854">I'd characterise the issues being described in this thread as follows: 1.  Dungeons -v- other adventures.  Here the discussion focuses around the specific setting of a dungeon and the specific mechanics of dungeoneering; some dungeons have come under fire for seemingly arbitrary placement of traps, tricks and monsters, and also for a perceived repetitive nature.  As far as I can see the broad conclusion is that dungeon-based adventures are good and can work provided there's a certain minimum amount of rhyme and reason to the dungeon population and the placement of obstacles.  Nevertheless, dungeons as a setting have attracted some hostility. 2.  Location-based adventures -v- event-based adventures.  Here the discussion has focused around the role of the adventure designer, and I could paraphrase the central question thus:  "Is the role of the adventure designer to create an interesting and challenging environment for the player characters to explore, or is it to tell a story?"  (NB:  A few minutes' careful thought will suffice to show that the AD can't do both without compromising on one or the other.)  Here, event-based adventures have attracted some hostility and dungeons (which have been associated with location-based adventures, particularly by Celebrim) have come out on top, probably because event-based encounters leave so little room for player choice or player skill to affect the outcome... personally I never want to bother with event-based adventures, we might as well all just sit around drinking beer while the DM tells us what happened and then hands out the xp. I don't feel that the dichotomy between world design and dungeon design is worth examining.  Analysis will show that D&D has always been about world design.  In D&D's early history, some campaigns had dungeons that were effectively bigger than the surface world, but that doesn't change the fact.</blockquote>

Verification