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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6218372" data-attributes="member: 4937">And a story is just a collection of words and punctuations marks by the same sarcastic definition.  I simply disagree.  'Tomb of Horrors' does have an internal consistency and provides the setting for a story.  Temple of Elemental Evil goes even further and provides the framework of a narrative of what that story is about.  It's interesting that you seem to think Undermountain - the dungeon that most fits your stereotype - is the one with the most background justification.   I would have picked it as the one with the thinnest justification.Look, at one level Castle Ravenloft is just a collection of monsters and traps.  Are you saying Ravenloft has no theme or narrative that holds the whole thing together?   Pyramid is just a collection of monsters and traps.  Are you saying that the Desert of Desolation series isn't trying to tell a story?   At that level, even the 'Against the Giants' modules have a theme and narrative.  U1 Sinister Secret of Salt Marsh has a narrative in mind and intends to be interesting, but it is also just at one level a collection of monsters and traps.  UK1 Through the Crystal Cave has lots of story pretensions and doesn't intend to paint a purely arbitrary setting.  Ditto Temple of the Frog.   Ditto Sabre River.   Ditto well, lots and lots of published modules.  You can argue, and in some cases I'd agree, that the theme or narrative isn't well done or that the narrative is or something of a railroad (perhaps an inevitability in a published scenario having a 32 page count), but I don't see how you can argue that narrative and theme isn't there at all.   Even in the case of a module like The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan which was explicitly created to be a dungeon designed solely to trick, trap, and kill the PC's (because its a tournament scenario) there is a lot of attention paid to creating a coherent setting, narrative, and theme and making it interesting.  I completely disagree that most D&D adventures - and even published D&D adventures - are based around just acquiring gold, killing monsters, and not getting killed by traps.  These are often components of a D&D story in the way that words are a component of a novel, but even in published material this isn't just what adventure is made out of.  Acquiring gold, killing monsters, and avoiding traps (arbitrary or not) are things that happen in most if not all D&D adventures, but they aren't the sole substance of most D&D adventures and certainly not most published in the last 30 years or so.  We've come along way from Alice's Adventures in Dungeonland.But even if I did allow what you claim, that doesn't negate the truth of what I said.  You aren't in fact arguing against having dungeons in your campaign.  You are only arguing against having particular sorts of dungeons in your campaign.  Ok fine, but your particular criticism might only be leveled against D&D during the era when 'Explore Castle Greyhawk' was the only thing going, and so far as I can tell - probably not even then.Laugh how you like.  You said it yourself; you create dungeons in the service of your stories.  I would argue that this makes you no different than 99% of the DM's and published scenarios out there.  Sorry to burst your bubble.</blockquote>

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