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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6207762" data-attributes="member: 4937">I strongly advice against mega-dungeons unless you are explicitly doing one as a campaign... yet I've managed to get myself into two of them in succession in my storyline.My campaign is basically an adventure path with a narrow-broad-narrow-broad structure.  I have in mind particular encounters that will provide clues that lead to the next 'zone' of the story, but within each zone players are expected to be able to piece together where the zone boss is through any of a large number of paths, and come up with a solution from a number of possible options.The basic problem with mega-dungeons is that they are too big to prep.  My current one has encounter areas in the thousands, and probably 60 miles of passageways.  It's just too freaking big.  I'm forced to improvise, and dungeons above all other settings are better prepped than improvised.   That's why DM's that try to run improvisational style campaigns usually have encounters in a generic 'outdoors' that is largely wall-less and feature-less - an 'open world' as opposed to the closed world of a dungeon.  However, if you can focus on a classic dungeon (which sadly my current dungeon isn't) the big advantage of a dungeon is a relatively large pay off in play time relative to preparation time.    For my open dungeon crawl nights back when I was the 'house DM' for the local store, I started out doing mini-adventures to the standard I'd normally do for play.  But the preparation time was rough considering we were only playing 3 hours or so.   I moved to a mega-dungeon and not only was able to prep far more material than I'd ever use, but for the purposes of the game framework the mega-dungeon was more excitedly received because returning players had something of a continuing 'story-line', parts of the map that they wanted to revisit.   And yes, that mega-dungeon was based off the dungeon generator in the back of the 1st edition AD&D DMG.</blockquote>

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