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<blockquote data-quote="niklinna" data-source="post: 8936686" data-attributes="member: 71235">If a dungeon is designed such that you absolutely need to encounter the kobolds before the orcs (for whatever reason), and laid out so that it's up to chance whether you do, then that's a problem. But usually there's just some kobolds in one place and some orcs in another, so who cares what order you encounter them in? The decision to go left or right is not consequential. Especially when the most basic purpose of a simple dungeon crawl is to just clear the place out.If a dungeon is designed so that different but interesting things happen depending on the order you encounter things, even if one is &quot;worse&quot; than the other from some perspective, that at least makes things a bit more engaging.If a dungeon is designed to channel progress in meaningful ways by constraining and ordering what encounters happen when, and provide clues to inform players' decisions at branch points (whether in the dungeon itself or investigation that can be performed beforehand), then you're getting into fun adventures. The degenerate case here is a linear sequence of rooms, but even that is easily made more engaging by gradually building up challenge or offering clues to an unfolding story of why that thing was built or what happened there.But if you just slap a bunch of 10' wide corridors and 30'x30' rooms together with absolutely no rationale, then yeah, you've just got a random sequence of encounters (and/or nothing). Why assume the worst, though?None of these issues are exclusive to map and key, but they are definitely relevant to map and key.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="niklinna, post: 8936686, member: 71235"] If a dungeon is designed such that you absolutely need to encounter the kobolds before the orcs (for whatever reason), and laid out so that it's up to chance whether you do, then that's a problem. But usually there's just some kobolds in one place and some orcs in another, so who cares what order you encounter them in? The decision to go left or right is [I]not consequential[/I]. Especially when the most basic purpose of a simple dungeon crawl is to just clear the place out. If a dungeon is designed so that different but interesting things happen depending on the order you encounter things, even if one is "worse" than the other from some perspective, that at least makes things a bit more engaging. If a dungeon is designed to channel progress in meaningful ways by constraining and ordering what encounters happen when, and provide clues to inform players' decisions at branch points (whether in the dungeon itself or investigation that can be performed beforehand), then you're getting into fun adventures. The degenerate case here is a linear sequence of rooms, but even that is easily made more engaging by gradually building up challenge or offering clues to an unfolding story of why that thing was built or what happened there. But if you just slap a bunch of 10' wide corridors and 30'x30' rooms together with absolutely no rationale, then yeah, you've just got a random sequence of encounters (and/or nothing). Why assume the worst, though? None of these issues are exclusive to map and key, but they are definitely relevant to map and key. [/QUOTE]

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