D&D General Hot Take: Dungeon Exploration Requires Light Rules To Be Fun

[borringman]

Are there any particular examples you're thinking of?

Temple of Elemental Evil comes to mind. And to clarify I don't specifically mean traps but general layout. The Hommlet areas are fine, but the "dungeons" look less functional than more like he wanted to fill sheets of graph paper with interesting things. Which, fair approach, but they don't feel very "lived in" for me. So in terms of approach, you're not using reason as much as constantly checking for secret doors and traps.

 

[Mannahnin]

Temple of Elemental Evil comes to mind. And to clarify I don't specifically mean traps but general layout. The Hommlet areas are fine, but the "dungeons" look less functional than more like he wanted to fill sheets of graph paper with interesting things. Which, fair approach, but they don't feel very "lived in" for me. So in terms of approach, you're not using reason as much as constantly checking for secret doors and traps.

Ah, I'm not really familiar with TOEE. But didn't Frank Mentzer write that one based on some notes from Gary, after Gary sat on it/didn't make time to actually write it for several years, finally coming out five years after it was originally talked about?

Unnatural dungeon layouts I'm much more cool with than random trap placements. Weird layouts and hallway designs can make for interesting exploration. Rational real-world building designs tend not to.

 

[borringman]

Well the cover says "by Gary Gygax w/ Frank Mentzer" which might've just been a dick move by Gary, I don't know the meta-history. Not climbing that hill. There's also the tutorial map in the DMG (TBF: tutorial), Tomb of Horrors (TBF: killbox). . . after a while, we're saying "to be fair" a lot. He just happened to make a lot of obstacle courses. I will concede that some of his maps were far more diegetic, so he could do it when he wanted, so "never" was too strong of a word on my part.

But, zooming out from just the talk of traps, a lot of Gary's dungeon maps (like the Caves of Chaos) have distinctly rectangular shapes. He didn't go completely nuts, but he did have a habit of filling out whatever graph paper he was using. His overworld maps were consistently less creatively constrained.

 

[Mannahnin]

Well the cover says "by Gary Gygax w/ Frank Mentzer" which might've just been a dick move by Gary, I don't know the meta-history. Not climbing that hill.

Yes, several AD&D books famously had Gary's name on the cover regardless what percentage of them he actually wrote. TBF with ToEE it may have been as much a sales move as just bogarting credit. His name had even more cachet back then.

There's also the tutorial map in the DMG (TBF: tutorial), Tomb of Horrors (TBF: killbox). . . after a while, we're saying "to be fair" a lot. He just happened to make a lot of obstacle courses. I will concede that some of his maps were far more diegetic, so he could do it when he wanted, so "never" was too strong of a word on my part.

Yeah, Tomb of Horrors is diegetically a deathtrap maze. The sample dungeon in the DMG... It's kind of a mix.

But, zooming out from just the talk of traps, a lot of Gary's dungeon maps (like the Caves of Chaos) have distinctly rectangular shapes. He didn't go completely nuts, but he did have a habit of filling out whatever graph paper he was using. His overworld maps were consistently less creatively constrained.

Yes, this was really common in early designs. If you look at the original Dungeon Geomorphs you can see three main styles of dungeon- set 1 was this "use up the whole graph paper sheet" style of compact maze of nearly a hundred rooms on a single page (which very closely matches the style of his Greyhawk dungeon early levels people have seen), set 2 was the more sprawling, organic caves and caverns, and set three "lower dungeons" was less dense than set 1, but still busy, with interesting shapes and curves.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well I mean it depends on the "dungeon", right? If you're passing through the gatehouse of a ruined fortress, "randomly in the middle of high-traffic halls" is exactly where you'd put your traps, because the original builders would've wanted to create killzones right where invaders would go. However, most of them would've already been set off by whomever did the ruining. (A spiked pit with its cover collapsed is still a spiked pit, though.) On the other hand, a royal grave might have traps concentrated near the entrance, since any point beyond that the grave's already been desecrated. A paranoid noble would have traps guarding their prized possessions, but with mechanisms to disable them. Can't count your gold if you can't get to it.

Generally you won't put traps as such there, though, because people still go in and out too much and making the trap not trigger while they're doing that while reliably doing so when intruders come is--non-trivial. You're more likely to have that area set up with killzones (areas to drop boiling water and arrow slits) than traps per se.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Tomb of Horrors has them all over the place, but it's an advertised-on-the-tin deathtrap tomb. Pit traps in the entry hall make sense there.

Tombs are one of the few places where traps all over the place make sense. Almost no one is ever supposed to be there, let alone regular traffic.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yes, this was really common in early designs. If you look at the original Dungeon Geomorphs you can see three main styles of dungeon- set 1 was this "use up the whole graph paper sheet" style of compact maze of nearly a hundred rooms on a single page (which very closely matches the style of his Greyhawk dungeon early levels people have seen), set 2 was the more sprawling, organic caves and caverns, and set three "lower dungeons" was less dense than set 1, but still busy, with interesting shapes and curves.

There's a tendency toward this with dungeon geomorphs even now

 

[payn]

Tombs are one of the few places where traps all over the place make sense. Almost no one is ever supposed to be there, let alone regular traffic.

I love tossing in things like a tomb raider that met a grisly end a long time ago to set the scene. I had a lot of fun with Mummy Mask by Paizo which starts with state sanctioned tomb raiding in a necropolis!

Though yes, absolutely, the traps should match the environment. Very old and deadly to keep out grave robbers, or recent ones to stop trespassers that makes sense for high traffic areas.

 

[Mannahnin]

There's a tendency toward this with dungeon geomorphs even now

Absolutely. Though with geomorphs there's more practical reason. You want the entrances/exits to line up, and filling the space means you don't have odd-looking voids just around those connecting points.

I love tossing in things like a tomb raider that met a grisly end a long time ago to set the scene. I had a lot of fun with Mummy Mask by Paizo which starts with state sanctioned tomb raiding in a necropolis!

This is one of the great little details in B4 The Lost City, as I recall- the entrance being a secret door with a body stuck dead in it, pierced by an arrow from a trap.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Absolutely. Though with geomorphs there's more practical reason. You want the entrances/exits to line up, and filling the space means you don't have odd-looking voids just around those connecting points.

Though with underground places, the voids aren't that odd. With buildings, I agree they'd be a bit peculiar (with SF maps this can particularly stand out since there shouldn't be that much dead space in spacecraft).