How much "dungeon crawl" do you like in a campaign?

[diaglo]

majority of the campaign is spent with mundane things. like training, resting, researching, looking for tombs/dungeons.

only when the party finds a tomb or dungeon do they do any crawling.

 

[Presto2112]

This also points out that I want a dungeon crawl to be varied. Room after room full of the Monster Du Jour gets real old, real fast. There need to be some puzzles, some traps, some interesting difficulties to get around ... just wandering from fight to fight is very dull.

I know exactly what you mean, and apparently so does my DM.

Our most recent dungeon crawl had in it a room which, at first glance, seemed to be a wide open room with one of the six objects we were questing for parked somewhere in the middle. Good thing we walked in slowly, having a "too good to be true" air about it, and it was; we walked headlong into a wall off force. A lot of Walls of force. In fact, our sadistic DM set up a Labyrinth of Force. Not only that, but three member of our adventuring party got caught in teleport traps that stuck them in Boxes of Force. Not Deadly per se, but easily the single most frustrating dungeon encounter in my history.

 

[Desdichado]

Admittedly, there were a few more twists and turns in the actual game, but if you break a game down into a series of challenges, it doesn't really matter whether it is a dungeon crawl or not.

Yeah, but that somewhat misses the point. If all you're doing is breaking the game down into a series of challenges, you'll be losing players, because that's no fun.

 

[Mystery Man]

Yep, that's about me. I picked 20%, but that's using a pretty liberal interpretation of the word dungeon; I considered the Baron's manor house to be a "dungeon" for instance.

I picked 50 for that very reason. Hard to assign a number to it any way.

 

[The_Gneech]

I know exactly what you mean, and apparently so does my DM.

Our most recent dungeon crawl had in it a room which, at first glance, seemed to be a wide open room with one of the six objects we were questing for parked somewhere in the middle. Good thing we walked in slowly, having a "too good to be true" air about it, and it was; we walked headlong into a wall off force. A lot of Walls of force. In fact, our sadistic DM set up a Labyrinth of Force. Not only that, but three member of our adventuring party got caught in teleport traps that stuck them in Boxes of Force. Not Deadly per se, but easily the single most frustrating dungeon encounter in my history.

The other DM in my group put us up against a maze of invisible walls ... filled with gelatinous cubes. Youch!

-The Gneech

 

[Doug McCrae]

Dungeons are great, they just work. They're what the DnD adventruing party was designed for - everyone has something to do. A political intrigue game OTOH favours diplomacy/bluff/sense motive monkeys to the exclusion of everything else.

That said, I voted 50% cause I value variety above all else in my roleplaying - a bit of exploration, some roleplaying, some arguing about what to do next, investigation, trap disarming, fighting, action-adventure. The lot. It's dificult to keep a big dungeon interesting. I'm finding I also have quite a lot of difficulty justifying traditional dungeons with their mixtures of monsters, traps and treasure.

 

[Desdichado]

I picked 50 for that very reason. Hard to assign a number to it any way.

Yes, it is. Using that very liberal interpretation of dungeon (site-based adventure) I might have significantly understated it. Using a stricter, traditional D&D definition of dungeon, I most definately overstated it.

 

[FireLance]

Yeah, but that somewhat misses the point. If all you're doing is breaking the game down into a series of challenges, you'll be losing players, because that's no fun.

A series of unrelated challenges, yes. But not if it's a series of related challenges linked by a plot. Saying that a game can be broken down into a series of challenges is like saying spaghetti bolognese can be broken down into pasta, beef, tomatos, cheese and herbs. It's the way you put the ingredients together that determines whether diners come back to your restaurant, or players come back to your game.

 

[Desdichado]

A series of unrelated challenges, yes. But not if it's a series of related challenges linked by a plot. Saying that a game can be broken down into a series of challenges is like saying spaghetti bolognese can be broken down into pasta, beef, tomatos, cheese and herbs. It's the way you put the ingredients together that determines whether diners come back to your restaurant, or players come back to your game.

Absolutely! Which is why I didn't think your earlier analogy really worked for me. To me there's a vast difference between the Eberron adventure you described and a dungeoncrawl using similar challenges, even if the same set of "ingredients" is more or less shared between them.

 

[FireLance]

Absolutely! Which is why I didn't think your earlier analogy really worked for me. To me there's a vast difference between the Eberron adventure you described and a dungeoncrawl using similar challenges, even if the same set of "ingredients" is more or less shared between them.

I see what you mean, although to me the difference is rather small, like making different dishes with the same ingredients. If you will, it's the difference between lasagna and spaghetti.