D&D General How often do the adventures you run include a "dungeon" element?

[Ath'kethin]

Definitely not every session, but definitely every adventure.

Though I'm using the concept of "dungeon" fairly loosely here, as in "building/structure with numbered rooms full of traps, monsters, and treasure." Which may or may not be the intended definition for the question.

 

[Marc_C]

I got tired of dungeons after running the double-sided ziggurat in B4 The Lost City in 1983.

I try to stay clear of large underground dungeons as much as I can. I mostly use small cavern complexes, that may have been modified by current or past inhabitants.

I prefer wilderness locations, surface ruins.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

THe majority of sessions I run have nothing like a dungeon, as do the majority of adventures overall.

 

[Oofta]

I don't remember the last time I ran anything in what I would consider a dungeon. Abandoned buildings now and then. I don't do location based scenarios, everything is event driven.

So unless you count the occasional basement (I don't) then it's never.

 

[el-remmen]

I prefer wilderness locations, surface ruins.

Me too.

 

[robus]

Sure there are dungeons in my adventures, but I generally plan on adventuring days where the action will be exciting and relentless medium/hard encounters (backing off if things get out of hand). When traveling, for example, I plan days where multiple challenges will occur over the course of a day. Out of the frying pan into the fire kind of thing.

 

[Jack Daniel]

I run open-world, open-table sandbox campaigns, so the definition of "adventure" for one of my games is "one game session, in which the player characters leave their home base, travel to somewhere dangerous, and then return." Whether a given party decides to delve the dungeon or brave the wilderness is going to vary wildly from party to party, even within the same campaign, with lower-level parties favoring the relative predictability of those upper dungeon levels. A party typically needs to have at least a few 4th or 5th level characters in it—either that, or a whole company of men-at-arms—before striking out into the wilderness becomes truly feasible.

And to be clear, the entire adventure does not need to involve a dungeon, but has a dungeon aspect. Thus, while the classic adventure, N1 - Against the Cult of the Reptile God, mostly takes place in the town of Orlane, the finale does involving raiding the a swamp-located dungeon lair. Something like X1 - Isle of Dread (if I remember correctly) does not have a dungeon aspect.

X1 most definitely has a dungeon: the temple and caves on Taboo Island. (I also like to place the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth elsewhere on the Isle of Dread, since the aesthetics line up so well, but that's just a personal choice.)

 

[Scott Christian]

I really wish adventure was defined. I mean, you mention N1 which takes about two to five, 4 hour, sessions to run. If you are talking about my own creations, and a quest that spans two to five sessions, then there is almost always at least one "dungeon."

I will say this though, my dungeons are almost always small. I have a hard time actualizing a goblin filled cave that has 25 rooms and only holds 20 to 30 goblins. I keep my dungeon designs from 5-10 rooms.

 

[TwoSix]

If you treat scenes as rooms and transitions as halls, any adventure can be a dungeon

Flowcharts and Dragons.

 

[jgsugden]

I don't know how to answer - but I guess all of them involve dungeons.

The general progression is a railroady adventure for levels 1 to 4, and then sandbox for levels 5 to 16, then a railroad towards the end of the campaign (somewhere between 17 and 20th level).

Levels 1 to 4 tend to feature a couple short dungeons (with a time pressure), then the end of the campaign tends to be a huge gauntlet style dungeon adventure.

From levels 5 to 16, however, there are dozens of story hooks out there and the PCs get to choose which ones they want to follow. Some are dungeons, and some are urban/political, and some are travel games, and some are other things entirely.