D&D General The senseless achitecture in most official products

[David Howery]

while you can make an argument for 'logical' dungeon layouts... none of that applies to natural caverns. Maps of real cave systems like Carlsbad abound online, and they are way chaotic. Adapting this to a FRPG Underdark is pretty neat. You can assume that the natural cave tunnels have been augmented by Underdark races digging their own accesses and rounding out irregular caves. Real cave systems have some features that would be sure to be frustrating to PCs.... tunnels that increase/decrease in height/width as you go along, others that just dead end in blank stone... or water, some that end in cliff walls that you have to scale to continue on, etc. The old 1E DSG had a lot of stuff on this...

 

[Hussar]

To me, I think that the bigger sin of dungeon maps is the lack of verticality. As you mention @David Howery , tunnels that increase or decrease in width, water hazards, that sort of thing. Adding verticality to a dungeon map - maybe ledges overlooking a room, slopes, that sort of thing, makes for a MUCH better adventure map.

 

[tetrasodium]

To me, I think that the bigger sin of dungeon maps is the lack of verticality. As you mention @David Howery , tunnels that increase or decrease in width, water hazards, that sort of thing. Adding verticality to a dungeon map - maybe ledges overlooking a room, slopes, that sort of thing, makes for a MUCH better adventure map.

I run my games on a TV box using arkenforge so can actually model it in play and tried it a couple of times thinking it would be fun... Instead brains were broken and there was an argument about overlapping space. Had I just put in a teleport trap I could accomplish the same and not had the debate between players trying to decide if they screwed up mapping or if I'd violated time and space. Humans don't think in 3d like that

 

[Bohandas]

Yeah. Once. But, imagine running a naval campaign where every single encounter is using the squeezing rules. It gets old really, really fast.

It's like adventures that use narrow, twisting corridors. You'd think that it would be fun to have all that strategy and tactics but, what actually happens is one player gets to do 99% of the action while the other players sit on their thumbs watching. Paizo AP's were especially egregious for this in the early days - things like Shackled City and Savage Tide had numerous adventure maps where you were locked into tight corridor encounters.

Again, it's always a balancing issue between what's plausible and what's fun.

Couldn't this be mitigated by having every person play a spallcaster (except for one fighter in the front of the group)

 

[Lanefan]

You want the "unrealistically large" boat, because an accurate-size ship is so cramped there is not enough room for the whole party to engage the enemy (unless they Squeeze).

Or unless you just reduce the square size to 3' and ban two-handed melee weapons, and-or abandon formal squares completely in favour of whatever positioning makes sense at the time by eyeball.

 

[Lanefan]

To me, I think that the bigger sin of dungeon maps is the lack of verticality. As you mention @David Howery , tunnels that increase or decrease in width, water hazards, that sort of thing. Adding verticality to a dungeon map - maybe ledges overlooking a room, slopes, that sort of thing, makes for a MUCH better adventure map.

I'll add to this by saying that even for those dungeons that do have some verticality - even if only via having multiple floors/levels - there's almost invariably not enough vertical connections or access points; leading to those that do exist always becoming chokepoints.

That said, for an excellent example of a multi-floor dungeon with ample vertical connections of different types see Dark Tower (yes, the old one, by Jacquays/Judges Guild).

 

[Samloyal23]

The game has always had great tools for designing dungeons (take a look at the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide), it is just lazy design work that leads to dungeons that do not make sense.

 

[Fenris-77]

Verticality is a design element that's often ignored in RPG maps. I find it's often the missing ingredient that'll turn a decent combat encounter into a great one, and a decent dungeon into a great one. The mapping thing is only a huge issue if people think that's they should actually be able to construct a scale map of a dungeon while they are exploring it, which we all know is not a terribly realistic goal despite it's sacred cow status at a lot of tables. Flowchart style maps work fine and don't suffer some of the same boondoggles that scale maps do.

When it comes to dungeons I like to organize vertical dungeons around some large vertical feature that makes it easier for the players to keep themselves oriented (large here = something between a grand staircase and the Balrog cavern from LoTR). As mentioned above, multiple vertical access points is also a big help keeping things spacially oriented.

On an unrelated note, cramped corridors and ships are the natural remedy for the the current domination of certain feats and types of weapons. They are also a marvelous way to deliver certain types of creature that would be much easier pickings in a big open room. Stuff like Black Pudding is meh in a big room and potentially bloody terrifying in a 3' wide corridor. OMG, it's on the ceiling...

 

[pogre]

I used to really worry about dungeon ecology. I used to concern myself over my campaign's geography, politics, and history. Then I realized:

My Players Don't Care!

I still fret about some of those things, but realize all of those efforts are purely for my own edification and sense of verisimilitude. Cool encounters is what I concentrate on these days.

 

[Coroc]

...
Oops, little goblin baby just died because we put acid above his bedroom door.
...

ROFL