Rate the stereotype - do you raid dungeons?

[Kahuna Burger]

In a thread on morality of Domination, Thresher attempted to sidetrack things with the implication that D&D consists of

... kicking down someones door, smashing up their stuff, hacking them and their companions to death with swords, axes, flails, burning their pet hydra to death in a fireball, stealing everything of worth and then doing the same to their neighbours in the next dungeon room...

and thus all other ethical discussion is silly or at least secondary.

Now the main problem is that a) I doubt anyone who played that sort of game would be worried about domination anyway, and more importantly b) I've never played a game like this in my life! Seriously, not even in the depth of my newbie munchkin youth, have I played a game where the point was to find a 'dungeon' and charge through it killing things and taking their stuff... I've never run a game where the characters just heard about a dungeon and took off to raid it. I don't think I've ever even heard of dungeons being used unless -

A item or person of importance has been taken by force back to said dungeon...

The dungeon is the known lair of an individual or individuals who has already acted agaisnt the PCs multiple times...

The PCs are trapped in the area and trying to escape it...

The PCs are exploring and not killing everything they encounter after all.

So basicly I have to know, how many people actually play in "dungeons" where they are invading and killing everything they encounter for the sole purpose of taking its stuff?

Kahuna burger

 

[Nifft]

Not really. I do some site-based stuff, but the sites aren't typically full of unrelated critters with stuff to take.

-- N

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

That's the style of play I've used to introduce most people I know to D&D. It works well, since they're so used to computer games and such...and slowly, I bring in more and more RPing until they forget about the pointless raiding.

Though, to be truthful...every so often, its nice to just run a mindless hack-n-slash-take-all-treasure game. Sometimes its fun to be mindless.

 

[Nellisir]

My last campaign was a dungeon-crawl one. The players were based in a frontier town/fort. If they weren't in a dungeon, they were in town, getting drunk. If they weren't drunk, it meant they'd run out of money and needed to go defile another temple of despicable nasty things.

It was meant to be a fast-paced, fun, smash-the-doors-and-grab-the-loot sort of campaign, a change from the meandering "this is your life" sort of thing we'd been running.

Some of the players really got into it -- I pushed interesting characters over complex backgrounds and maudlin plotlines. The two best characters were a fearsome fighting bridge troll with a charisma so low no one was scared of him, and a half-hobgoblin rogue not quite clever enough to know the difference between a brothel and a nunnery (nothing bad happened -- the Book of Vile Darkness does NOT appear on the players' side of the table in my game!)

My enthusiasm was eventually ground down by the rules lawyer/munchkin power gamer (I have a 12th level cleric/1st level monk with spellfire. Why do I need a personality?) and the soap-opera plotline gamer (this is my last character's third cousin. His parents were killed by maurading vampiric orcs, and he was raised by good aligned drow, who were killed by a red dragon, that my character killed at first level, and now he's going to found a fighting school to oppose vampiric half-dragon orcs).

There's less hyperbole in that rant than you think.

I don't mind motivation, but some of the best adventures are spur-of-the-moment, what-the-hell-just-do-it affairs. Too many campaigns, IMO, revolve around unwilling characters forced into desperate situations, and too few around adventursome characters doing something fun!

OK, in real life killing monsters shouldn't be fun, but that's why D&D is a game.

Cheers
Nell.

 

[Protean]

It really depends on what you mean by 'dungeon'. In recent years it seems as if any enclosed area that forms the focus for a given adventure is referred to as a Dungeon. I really dislike the assumed amount of social responsibility in D&D 3.x, but I also prefer to use magic items as a war commodity in the vein that we treat M-16s and other automatic rifles, as a controlled power-broker quantity. Let's not get off-topic. Ramble...Ramble.

 

[Wombat]

That's so Old School that I have all but forgotten about running such sessions in my games. My players roll their eyes when such concepts are even mentioned.

 

[Hardhead]

My last campaign was a dungeon-crawl one. The players were based in a frontier town/fort. If they weren't in a dungeon, they were in town, getting drunk. If they weren't drunk, it meant they'd run out of money and needed to go defile another temple of despicable nasty things.

It was meant to be a fast-paced, fun, smash-the-doors-and-grab-the-loot sort of campaign, a change from the meandering "this is your life" sort of thing we'd been running.

Some of the players really got into it -- I pushed interesting characters over complex backgrounds and maudlin plotlines. The two best characters were a fearsome fighting bridge troll with a charisma so low no one was scared of him, and a half-hobgoblin rogue not quite clever enough to know the difference between a brothel and a nunnery (nothing bad happened -- the Book of Vile Darkness does NOT appear on the players' side of the table in my game!)

My enthusiasm was eventually ground down by the rules lawyer/munchkin power gamer (I have a 12th level cleric/1st level monk with spellfire. Why do I need a personality?) and the soap-opera plotline gamer (this is my last character's third cousin. His parents were killed by maurading vampiric orcs, and he was raised by good aligned drow, who were killed by a red dragon, that my character killed at first level, and now he's going to found a fighting school to oppose vampiric half-dragon orcs).

Though I'm sure most of it wasn't your fault, you shouldn't have given him the Spellfire feat in the first place.

 

[jrients]

Any D&D game I run involves plenty of dungeoneering, it's usually the main thrust of the campaign until we reach the build castles/play politics stage.

 

[Nellisir]

Though I'm sure most of it wasn't your fault, you shouldn't have given him the Spellfire feat in the first place.

In retrospect, no kidding.

I assumed I could compensate for any imbalance. I weakened it somewhat, but it just wasn't enough.

Cheers
Nell.

 

[hunter1828]

There's always a reason they are there, such as another adventuring company disappeared while expoloring the dungeon that PCs prime motivation is to find them/find out what happened to them or they stumble across ruins while deep in the wilderness and seek shelter from the elements/food for the provision bag. Also, on of the PCs in my Forgotten Realms game is a High Herald and he will enter a dungeon just to make copies of the runes around doorways and the frescoes on the walls.

hunter1828