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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5657077" data-attributes="member: 4937">In my experience, it makes a better dungeon than about 90% of DMs can do on their own, and I certainly wish - looking back - that my first efforts to create a dungeon as a kid were using this as the basis of my imagination rather than what I did do.  I could have learned the art of dungeon design so much faster using these tables as a starting point.  I use to run a weekly open dungeon crawl at the FLGS.  Initially I did these as the sort of minidungeons that I would use as interludes in my own campaigning, but they were taking 10-20 hours to prep.  While I was doing this, I started generating a random dungeon using the DMG as a basis (because I was often using the tables to help inspire set design).  After a few weeks, I burned out and decided to just bring my notes for the random dungeon.  It was a smashing success with its vast crazy layout and wierd monsters (I expanded the lists of available monsters).  Changes in my schedule forced me to drop it, but it really did feel to me something like it must have felt to run the original megadungeons.  I could prep far far more material in a few hours than I could use, so the dungeon kept growing faster than it could be explored.  Groups would arrive and then indicate where they'd like to journey down to based on their notes and memories.  Group composition frequently changed, so there would be different targets depending on who had went where.  I'd also started creating the basics of a plot line involving the dungeon as the prison demi-plane for a trapped abomination and the adventurers were being tricked into destroying the 12 locks that held the doors shut, thus creating some structure to the dungeon.  I'd planned to create themed levels by using different lists of monsters.  For example, one level was to be undead themed and heavily skewed to undead inhabitants, and another level was to be vermin themed and would make use heavily of the vermin template (rule set was 3e).  Each level was to contain a boss monster consisting of the nastiest thing generated, and each boss I would assign as the guardian of one of the 'locks' which I was designing in a nonrandom fashion (the first was a massive grandfather clock).All of that inspired by a essentially a RNG.  It's essentially Nethack in book form.Some tinkering is necessary to get the best results.  The default table generates more passages and doors than you really need, so you have to pare away unnecessary or aestheticly displeasing corridor branching.  You also have to decide how big to make each level and pare off any corridors that branch outside of the intended map space.  Between pits, canyons, by-level rooms, chutes, stairs and waterfalls, close attention must be paid to the interconnections between levels as you map, as about 4-5 levels down you can end up in a very very tangled set of interconnections with upper and lower levels.  While this is good, and what it teaches about proper use of 3D space is something almost anyone can learn from, you also have to make sure that you don't create purely MC Escher levels made of mostly staircases unless that's the intention.  You'll need to decide when to go with the results and when rerolling might be a better idea.  I tend to mostly go with the flow, and do my best to make sense of the randomness, but you do have to steer a little.</blockquote>

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