How important is it that a dungeon makes sense?

[Mishihari Lord]

For me, it's really important that a dungeon make sense. These are the things that make an RPG fun for me: exploration, immersion, method acting, verisimilitude, tactical puzzles. Most of these are enhanced by an adventure setting that makes sense.

When I started DMing I created a huge, silly megadungeon that we played for a couple of years. Great fun, but it started to feel cartoonish to me. After that I started trying to do dungeons that made sense, and it turns out that it wasn't all that hard. Mainly it's answering just a few questions and using the answers to inform your design. Questions such as "Who made the physical building/whatever?", "What is the purpose?", "Who originally lived there?", "What's the history of the place?", "Who's there now?" I actually found that addressing these issues first made the rest of the adventure design go much quicker.

This approach also made for a greater variety in adventures. I still sometimes used generic underground passages, but more common were things like mines, ghost towns, bandit camps, wizard's towers, islands, etc, etc.

 

[Libramarian]

My answer: Not at all. Dungeons don't have to make sense. They need to be fun. If, by making sense they are made not fun, there's no point.

Conversely, if by not making sense, they're made not fun, there's no point either.

To me, it means that the players can make inferences about features in the dungeon (monsters/NPCs, tricks, traps, treasures, and layout) and make meaningful decisions based on those inferences. That is very important to me.

I think these comments sum up my opinion. Dungeon sensibleness is important, but only inasmuch as it pertains to the players being able to make inferences and plans about the adventure environment. I'm not interested in geological or ecological nerdery when dungeoncrawling (nerdery meaning exploration of these topics for its own sake beyond their direct applicability to the game adventure).

I value an evocative atmosphere in a dungeon, and I think if anything allowing the dungeon to make sense in more of a symbolic or expressive way can help with that. I definitely don't think that non-realistic dungeons are necessarily goofy.

It can definitely help with the creative process of writing a dungeon to start with the backstory of how and why the dungeon was created. But I think when sharing/publishing a dungeon it's important to keep in mind that what information was useful when writing it is not necessarily useful when running it. Published dungeons usually start with an infodump of backstory that is not necessary for play.

 

[MJS]

There's nothing quite like players asking what direction a river flows and only then realizing it goes from high point to high point. Or having players try to flood a dungeon and realizing it really should have been flooded in the first place, but not knowing why it hadn't been.


Cheers!
Kinak

I've never had a problem making sure the river flows downhill. If you did discover such a gaffe, you just change it on the fly. It's good to leave some detail vauge for these kinds of reasons as well. It's just not all that important to have that fine a level of maps for adventure games. The imagination thrives on broad strokes as well as finer ones IMO - Cheers indeed! I had opporuntiy to play some OD&D w/ Chainmail this morning. There was a room containing a longboat with an animated dragon's head on it, a funerary offering to a dead King further in the dungeon.

How much time have you spent in caves? I guarantee you that there are caves more epic than anything in any published adventure. I suggest that if you want to write good cave adventures, you should spend more time in them.


Hydrology turns out to be pretty integral to riveting adventure material in the real world, much less what you can do with it in a fantasy game.

And I suggest to you that if you want to write good adventures of any setting, you spend more time developing your creative writing skills, and understanding adventure game design. Science is there, but its not very high on the list.
Certainly, my experiences in real caves inform my adventure design, just as other experiences inform other parts of adventuring, such as flying soar planes when relating to flying with giant eagles and the like. But again, the science of it is more of a backdrop element if you are fighting a dragon from eagle's back.

I will also point out TEMPLE OF THE FROG as an example of an absolutely brilliant published adventure, one which I highly doubt anyone in this thread has written the better of.

 

[Hussar]

I think it does get down to a point where a little (or sometimes a lot) of knowledge is a bad thing. I'm the same way with published setting maps, most of which are downright silly - rivers flowing into mountains, away from the ocean, that sort of thing. I know in Scarred Lands, my favorite setting, the trading city of Shelzar flat out doesn't work - there's no way for it to actually be the hub of trade that it's described as. ((One cannot be a hub when the setting is largely a circle and you're on the rim of that circle.))

So, I get where Celebrim is coming from. Particularly with a mega-dungeon where likely the entire campaign is going to be set here. If it's some six room lair that the group will be spending two sessions in (maybe), then who really cares? It's not like they are going to spend enough time here to start poking the scenery and revealing the flaws. But, in a mega-dungeon, these flaws can get really amplified because once the players do start poking the scenery, it's revealed as being the cardboard cut outs that it is.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Well, check out this module (free pdf download from here at EN World) and let me know how much your dungeon should make sense ...

 

[Piston Honda]

I think it’s partially important, a straight up dungeon I do try to ensure everything has functionality, the bad guy has escape plans, any residents living there have an ecology, sentient beings try to separate themselves from monsters and animals (or use them if possible), generally staying near the entrances and fortifying those. And my players have looked for uses for rooms, sometimes they’d come up with their own since I would never outright say “this is what this room was for”. This also let them get more into the dungeons heavily touched by magic that would generally start out normal and make less and less sense as they got closer to the source.

Why did the builder invest in complicated traps to secure, e.g., just one room or corridor?

I’m not big on traps, but generally an integrated trap is to keep a treasure protected. Sometimes traps are simply set to catch a meal, whether it be manmade or a natural trap by one of the predators in the dungeon. Sometimes they might be manmade to protect against those predators.

Why are most of the inhabitants not doing anyhting remotely usefull, not even maintaining a modicum of guard duty?

Depends. Sometimes bad GMing, maybe bad HR skill on behalf of the big bad for hiring slackers, let him turn one or two into a toad, they’ll shape up quick.

Why does the BBEG insist on staying in the last room with no alternative way out?

That’s a design flaw, I’ve had two big bads die in a dungeon, one was a pair of spirits responsible for the absolute warping of a tower, there was no escape plan, they were insane and simply connected to the place, nothing had maintained their sanity long enough to find them anyway. The other, it wasn’t his dungeon, he couldn’t find his way in, but the heroes did, he tailed them hoping to pick them off if they survived, or pick up where they failed. He tried to run, but was trapped by a puzzle. It was satisfying for the players. Any other battle with a big bad in a dungeon they knew ended with their escape, often at the cost of their henchmen’s lives. But I also try not to have important big bads just hanging out in a dungeon to begin with. They’ve got evil to do.

for me, as a player, fun trumps 'makes sense'. If you can come up with something that both makes sense and is fun, then great. If not, I'll take the fun.

This.

 

[Jester David]

Personally, I need dungeons to make sense. My players are less concerned but weirdness can cause problems, as they mock the gelatinous cube that was ignoring the gobins living in the next room.

Making a logical dungeon seldom means worrying about load bearing walls or if the building is scaled correctly for the time period. It's mostly avoiding design that brings you out of the game, which is really dependant on your ability to suspend belief (or how much you get into the game in the first place).

As an example, there was this terrible dungeon in one of the later Dragonlance modules (Zebulah’s Refuge).
It was meant to be set in an air-filled pocket of the remnants of a sunken city. Which is a cool visual. But it was designed as a bunch of solitary rooms connected by giant winding walkways creating huge negative space and giant gaps unlike, well, every building ever made since the history of time. There were aquatic ogres invading yet no one else was fighting (and when you get to the owners, they make no mention of the ogres). There's no place to cook, store food, eat, sleep, or actually live despite being a wizard's home.