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

[KB9JMQ]

Unless I'm going old school as a GM ala Necromancer Games, Goodman Games or the World's Largest Dungeon, I tend to stick with smaller ruins, temples, and tombs to get the players in and then back out again.

My thoughts exactly. I do use some city/wilderness encounters but mostly as filler to the next either tomb or dungeon.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

I voted 80%, and that goes for both as a player and as a DM. Not that 80% is what actually happens in our games, it's probably closer to 50/50 when it comes right down to it, but thats becasue the people I play with like different things. Personally, I really like dungeon crawls, with a little bit of stuff in between them just to shake things up a bit, then go back.

Now, I should clarify, I am also including site based things, not just big, long enless series of rooms with orcs in them. I'm including things like small ruins, temples, caverns, haunted houses, etc. I'd rather explore a site than sit around and deal with political intrigue any day.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

I like a lot of dungeon crawls (I marked 40%), but what I actually want is less homogeneity. For example, rather than doing three sessions of non-dungeon, followed by two sessions of dungeon, followed by two sessions of non-dungeon, followed by two more sessions of dungeon (whew!), I'd rather do a small dungeon every (or nearly every) session. "Small" so that there's a good amount of time to do other stuff.

For obvious reasons, that's very difficult to manage, but it would be my dream campaign.

The reason I think I like dungeon crawls, despite my self-proclaimed status as a "sophisticated RPer" -- is that the goal -- or at least a goal -- is usually very clear in dungeons. In less restrictive venues -- wilderness, city, intrigue -- the goal can be extremely hard to spot and extremely hard to hang on to once it's been spotted.

Many people say, "Well, the best games are those in which players choose and follow their own goals." To a limited extent, I agree with that ... as a DM, I'm willing to grant my players a small amount of individual attention for personal subplots and the like.

But I cannot stand those games in which everyone does their own thing for huge chunks of time, while everybody else sits around bored. Note that I'm not complaining about unfair distribution of the DM's attention ... I don't care if I get my allocated hour-fifteen of a five-hour session. I'm there to play a group activity, not an individual activity with a rotating audience.

Anyway, that problem rarely occurs in dungeon crawls, which is why I like them.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

The reason I think I like dungeon crawls, despite my self-proclaimed status as a "sophisticated RPer" -- is that the goal -- or at least a goal -- is usually very clear in dungeons. In less restrictive venues -- wilderness, city, intrigue -- the goal can be extremely hard to spot and extremely hard to hang on to once it's been spotted.

Many people say, "Well, the best games are those in which players choose and follow their own goals." To a limited extent, I agree with that ... as a DM, I'm willing to grant my players a small amount of individual attention for personal subplots and the like.

But I cannot stand those games in which everyone does their own thing for huge chunks of time, while everybody else sits around bored. Note that I'm not complaining about unfair distribution of the DM's attention ... I don't care if I get my allocated hour-fifteen of a five-hour session. I'm there to play a group activity, not an individual activity with a rotating audience.

Anyway, that problem rarely occurs in dungeon crawls, which is why I like them.

JW, I think you just hit the nail square on the head. Those are pretty much the exact reasons I like dungeon crawls so much.

 

[was]

...doubled....

 

[was]

We run our adventures about 40% in a dungeon, 45% above ground and 15% in a city.

 

[Staffan]

I voted 30%, but it's not like I've measured the perfect amount of dungeoneering in a campaign or anything. I do like to keep it to less than half, though.

Also, I like the dungeoneering to be short and to the point. Not so much "trundle through ten levels of dungeon to get to the big bad", more "we need this thing from the dungeon, so let's go in, get it, and get out."

 

[Savage Jim]

30%...

I much prefer a game heavy with elements of political intrigue, warfare, social interaction, long-distance travel and exploration. Where wilder_jw indicates that such non-site adventures make the goal difficult to identify, I find such puzzles to be the funnest part of the game; Indeed, the more difficult a GM can make it to discern the true goal from seemingly important side-treks that are really distractions, the more drawn in to the game I get.

 

[Captain Tagon]

The entire concepts of these massive underground dungeouns with ancient evils and marvelous treasures and traps at every turn just never made sense to me so I voted 0%.

 

[UniversalMonster]

IF by dungeon you mean site based , I'd say higher than I voted (60%). The game lives in the encounters (including battles, roleplaying encounters, skill-challenges, whatever).

And usually- the encounters live in site-based adventures where players can choose where to go and what to do.