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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Croesus" data-source="post: 7124369" data-attributes="member: 35019">Note: nothing that follows is terribly profound. I just think we need to figure out what we mean by the term megadungeon before we can discuss why we like/dislike them.What's a megadungeon? This is the question I've been asking myself since this thread started, since the term "megadungeon" appears to have quite a few assumptions behind it. For instance, when someone says "dungeon", we often envision: usually underground, has walls, has opponents, has loot. But (and this is not an original thought on my part), there's no reason a dungeon has to have walls. Walls are just an obvious, overt method of constraining player choice. One could just as easily have a valley with some monster lairs (rooms), and multiple overland features (rivers, cliffs) that limit how one reaches those lairs.Further, some of the early posts in this thread suggested a megadungeon could be fun because it can be a portal to other worlds (Sigil), it's so large it can have different factions one can interact with, it's a setting, not a single scenario. But those things can also define a campaign world. So what's a megadungeon?It appears, based on responses in this thread that a megadungeon in common parlance is an overtly contained world. It has walls, corridors, rooms - in other words, overtly constrained choices. It's so large, the concept of clearing the dungeon completely is ludicrous. But most of all, it emphasizes one pillar of play - Combat. Yes, Exploration can play a part, but only so far as it facilitates killing things and taking their stuff. As for Social Interaction, that's clearly the forgotten stepchild. At least, that's the common perception. And based on that, I can see why many folks (myself included) are turned off by the idea of megadungeons. So it seems that if one wants to make megadungeons interesting, the concept has to be expanded beyond 80% Combat, 20% Exploration, .000001% Social Interaction to a more even mix. In other words, the megadungeon needs to be more like a campaign world, less like a place to simply kill things and take their stuff. But then, if one does that, is it still a megadungeon? Who cares, as long as it's fun. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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