Celebrim said:
you can reach the same logic beginning with a simulationist stance and moving in reverse. Monsters need a certain amount of space to live in, and a certain amount of space to fight in. So monsters will seek to dwell in locations that accomodate them, and seek to do battle in locations that are suited to them. So, twenty kobolds won't do battle in a 10'x10' room unless they think its advantageous of them to do so. Lone Ilithiads 'lurkers' won't choose to give battle in large feast halls if they have any choice in the matter. People designing thier strongholds will make consideration of defensive aspects of the construction, and that will include allowing minions to concentrate thier attacks on heroic foes, and will provide rooms accordingly.
Very true. This is exactly how I see it.
Kobolds like tight quarters. It lets them swarm their bigger foes and minimized the mobility and combat ability of the larger foes, too.
Lone Illithids won't choose battle in a giant feast hall, but they might get ambushed there, or taken by surprise when they were passing through, or serching for something.
I don't always expect my monsters to be in their ideal environment. Some encounters I devise give the monsters advantageous terrain/environment, but some give the advantage to the players. And some are fairly neutral in that regard.
But when I do put an encounter in an advantageous setting, one that that particular monster or bad guy selected for "home turf" advantage to maximize its/his chance of survival, then yes, that encounter goes into a space well suited to it.
Which means the huge dragon chooses to fight in the feast hall with the collapsed roof (for easy escape if it goes bad), the illithid finds a long corridor tht funnels the invading heroes into a narrow line for maximum effect of its psionics (and preferably one with a pit in the middle to catch the foolish charging paladin and slow down the rest of the heroes), and the kobolds lurk in a small, dark room with lots of furnigure and impediments to the heroes movement - all assuming they can pick their battlefield.
Celebrim said:
I cannot even imagine designing an encounter without giving some consideration to the size of the room and accessways that the dungeon provides. I'm not randomly going to toss creatures into rooms. But if I have some prior notion of some of the inhabitants I want to put in the dungeon, I'm going to design the dungeon such that there are logical rooms logically suited to those inhabitants. This thread is about how you'd go about deciding what a necessary minimum size would be to achieve certain goals regarding the free flowing nature of the combat of that encounter.
I guess I take a different approach.
I determine what the structure is, what purpose it serves, and then what rooms are in it and what purpose they serve. I imagine the dungeon, castle, tower, etc., as if it were currently being used for the purpose for which it was designed.
Then I fast forward to today. Maybe I work out why the original inhabitants left, maybe I don't. But today the structure is inhabited by monsters (or, sometimes, it's a new structure inhabited by whoever built it).
Then I put the monsters/bad guys in it. I put most of them into rooms that they would prefer to be in (not necessarily a combat preference - their preference might be a private place to sleep, or an interesting place they are searching for treasure, or whatever suits their immediate purpose).
If that monster's immediate purpose is inhabiting a good defensive position according to its preferred environment for combat, then I select a room in the dungeon that best suits that purpose, is accessible to the monster, and is not contested by the uncooperative mean monster in the next room. You won't find the human assassin setting up an ambush in the bedroom closet if the bedroom is inhabited by giant venemous spiders - unless they chased him into the closet.
Sometimes I get a neat idea for a monster, or even a prior notion of some of the inhabitants I want to put in the dungeon. Then I look around my map and decide that this particular monster wouldn't be suitable for any available map location, so I pick a different monster and save my neat idea for the next dungeon.
