D&D (2024) What could One D&D do to bring the game back to the dungeon?

[Incenjucar]

What is good about dungeons that is not sufficiently supported?

 

[Desdichado]

Yeah, my own memories don't track with D&D actually being a dungeon crawler. Maybe in the very early OD&D days. But by the time I came to the game with BECMI we played long-term campaigns. I think we left dungeons behind at level 4 when we graduated to the blue Expert box. And that was almost 40 years ago.

My pet theory about the evolution of the player base has to do with what happened to D&D in the early 80s when it really "hit it big." For a time, D&D as an evolution out of the wargaming hobby with a bunch of wargamers as the target audience made D&D as it was written make some sense. But when a whole host of new players came into the game who'd never played a wargame and didn't really have any particular interest in one showed up, but who had read Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander, and Robert E. Howard, and whatever else they'd read (heck, even if all they'd read was Terry Brooks or David Eddings) they just wanted something else from D&D, and were never going to want D&D to focus on what it did back in the Wisconsin regional gaming culture of the mid 70s. And, like it or not, a lot of that wave of gamers is still here, and they're still—in my opinion—one of the biggest pluralities in the gamer population. And if there's a big wave that's come in in the last—I dunno, five years or so? they will have some similarities because they came in through a vector that was even more divorced from the wargaming experience of the mid 70s Wisconsin regional gaming culture. Playstyle preference, in my pet theory, correlates more with the vector that brought you into gaming than it does with anything else. For people who came to the game from fantasy fiction as opposed to wargaming, the dungeon was always a weird paradigm, and the classic 10-foot pole and lovingly and excruciating detail lavished on traps and descriptions of room dimensions and the traits of doors, or whatever else, was tedious and strange.

One of the things that I admit irritates me a bit is the big tent approach. The One D&D launch trailer tries really hard to push this big tent approach. This time the new edition isn't really a new edition, because all D&D is the SAME (which is clearly baloney), this edition will be all things to all people; no matter what you want, One D&D is the gaming nectar of the gods that will be better than whatever you're playing before! I just don't buy that kind of hype. Big tentism to me signals that the game ISN'T likely to appeal to me, or people who enjoy what I enjoy most about the game, because since the 80s at least, my preferred style hasn't been the mainstream, at least if the biggest selling products are any guide. I know, I know, it's their business to sell D&D as much as they can, but I think that there isn't any one thing that will do that. I think the player base is too fractured in nature, and the cause of the fracturing is just different expectations and wants from the game.

 

[payn]

My pet theory about the evolution of the player base has to do with what happened to D&D in the early 80s when it really "hit it big." For a time, D&D as an evolution out of the wargaming hobby with a bunch of wargamers as the target audience made D&D as it was written make some sense. But when a whole host of new players came into the game who'd never played a wargame and didn't really have any particular interest in one showed up, but who had read Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander, and Robert E. Howard, and whatever else they'd read (heck, even if all they'd read was Terry Brooks or David Eddings) they just wanted something else from D&D, and were never going to want D&D to focus on what it did back in the Wisconsin regional gaming culture of the mid 70s. And, like it or not, a lot of that wave of gamers is still here, and they're still—in my opinion—one of the biggest pluralities in the gamer population. And if there's a big wave that's come in in the last—I dunno, five years or so? they will have some similarities because they came in through a vector that was even more divorced from the wargaming experience of the mid 70s Wisconsin regional gaming culture. Playstyle preference, in my pet theory, correlates more with the vector that brought you into gaming than it does with anything else. For people who came to the game from fantasy fiction as opposed to wargaming, the dungeon was always a weird paradigm, and the classic 10-foot pole and lovingly and excruciating detail lavished on traps and descriptions of room dimensions and the traits of doors, or whatever else, was tedious and strange.

One of the things that I admit irritates me a bit is the big tent approach. The One D&D launch trailer tries really hard to push this big tent approach. This time the new edition isn't really a new edition, because all D&D is the SAME (which is clearly baloney), this edition will be all things to all people; no matter what you want, One D&D is the gaming nectar of the gods that will be better than whatever you're playing before! I just don't buy that kind of hype. Big tentism to me signals that the game ISN'T likely to appeal to me, or people who enjoy what I enjoy most about the game, because since the 80s at least, my preferred style hasn't been the mainstream, at least if the biggest selling products are any guide. I know, I know, it's their business to sell D&D as much as they can, but I think that there isn't any one thing that will do that. I think the player base is too fractured in nature, and the cause of the fracturing is just different expectations and wants from the game.

Well, the big tent was supposed to be backed up with modularity that would allow all kinds of D&D to work. Like, OSR dungeon crawling, 3E strategy and system mastery, 4E tactical, etc... Though, that was abandoned and never brought up again once 5E sold like hotcakes. It's up to folks to figure it all out now if it doesnt work for them out the box.

 

[tetrasodium]

What is good about dungeons that is not sufficiently supported?

Anything can be a "dungeon", a forest a treacherous ice mountain. the bad side of town, an entire plane, a bandit camp, a region in the world, a luxury cruise liner, the dragon's cave, the basilisk's lair, the cult temple, etc. They all share elements of a dungeon even if they aren't an actual "dungeon". T

he ways that 5e fails at dungeon crawling impacts all of them by limiting a GM who needs those elements for their players to be awesome. In doing so it turns those awesome PC's & fun adventures into well... captain marvel
.

 

[Incenjucar]

Anything can be a "dungeon", a forest a treacherous ice mountain. the bad side of town, an entire plane, a bandit camp, a region in the world, a luxury cruise liner, the dragon's cave, the basilisk's lair, the cult temple, etc. They all share elements of a dungeon even if they aren't an actual "dungeon". T

he ways that 5e fails at dungeon crawling impacts all of them by limiting a GM who needs those elements for their players to be awesome. In doing so it turns those awesome PC's & fun adventures into well... captain marvel
.

Okay. What are these ways, and why is "dungeon" relevant to the conversation at all, and not just "series of locations"?

 

[Shiroiken]

A focus on equipment could help. For example, having equipment (and proficiency in the equipment) modify DCs or even open up smaller exploration side quests.

I find this notion of equipment being useless rather odd. My group regularly carries misc. equipment. It started when someone used manacles (technically the chain) to tie the handles of a double door together. Then a player started combing over the adventuring equipment to see what they actually do. Now they regularly carry chains, manacles, caltrops, ball bearings, oil, a crowbar or portable ram, and we always keep any acid, alchemist fire, and holy water we come across. A lot of this stuff actually helps if you plan things out, rather than just going Leroy Jenkins.

Running my second 5e group through B2 and it doesn't feel massively different than the days of old... which makes me think I wasn't always paying attention to food and torches back in B/X and 1e as a DM (although I think I usually do/did as a player).

As a player, you are supposed to track these things, not the DM. If you don't or "overlook" it, then technically you're cheating (unless the DM has specifically stated otherwise). I know that my group doesn't do all the bookkeeping they're supposed to, but I'm not going to make a fuss about it. As a player I track everything, including container capacity (which is almost certainly the most overlooked rule in the game).

 

[Desdichado]

As a player, you are supposed to track these things, not the DM. If you don't or "overlook" it, then technically you're cheating (unless the DM has specifically stated otherwise). I know that my group doesn't do all the bookkeeping they're supposed to, but I'm not going to make a fuss about it. As a player I track everything, including container capacity (which is almost certainly the most overlooked rule in the game).

That's A play style, certainly.

 

[tetrasodium]

Okay. What are these ways,

darkvision is almost default to the point of being more unusual to not be there than to be there. Because of mechanics of how people interact at a table ensures that it never plays out like this if a small subset of the table is lacking it. Attrition has been downplayed to the point of being nearly nonexistent thanks to trivialized recovery. PCs don't actually need anything. Players never feel like their PCs are facing certain risk because getting killed is such a high bar that players will often fail at attempting to deliberately get their character killed in a fight. etc.

Matt Colevile did a great job of explaining it with much deeper levels of detail

Spoiler: What are dungeons for

and why is "dungeon" relevant to the conversation at all, and not just "series of locations"?

Because communities built around a particular subject tend to develop their own meaningful shorthand jargon & in the case of ttrpgs like d&d "dungeon" is a nebulous concept that generally represents some form of an area that usually contains monsters or similar & is usually somehow linked to a quest of some form along with a bunch of expectations that will vary based on the system being used but 5e takes great pains to avoid trying to even gesture towards making any of those expectations as Matt Coleville described in that video. That's not helpful for discussion though so the bit of jargon being used in this thread that simplifies it to "dungeon" allows for easier conversation.

 

[Incenjucar]

darkvision is almost default to the point of being more unusual to not be there than to be there. Because of mechanics of how people interact at a table ensures that it never plays out like this if a small subset of the table is lacking it. Attrition has been downplayed to the point of being nearly nonexistent thanks to trivialized recovery. PCs don't actually need anything. Players never feel like their PCs are facing certain risk because getting killed is such a high bar that players will often fail at attempting to deliberately get their character killed in a fight. etc.

Matt Colevile did a great job of explaining it with much deeper levels of detail

Spoiler: What are dungeons for

Because communities built around a particular subject tend to develop their own meaningful shorthand jargon & in the case of ttrpgs like d&d "dungeon" is a nebulous concept that generally represents some form of an area that usually contains monsters or similar & is usually somehow linked to a quest of some form along with a bunch of expectations that will vary based on the system being used but 5e takes great pains to avoid trying to even gesture towards making any of those expectations as Matt Coleville described in that video. That's not helpful for discussion though so the bit of jargon being used in this thread that simplifies it to "dungeon" allows for easier conversation.

...so this is actually about survival mechanics and resource countdowns, not dungeons? Bringing people back to inventory tracking?

 

[Reynard]

...so this is actually about survival mechanics and resource countdowns, not dungeons? Bringing people back to inventory tracking?

It's not an either/or. Meaningful exploration requires meaningful choices, and in one particular iteration of that it means counting torches. How far do we go? How close to the limit do we push it? Somewhere down there,there's a big haul in gold and XP and I don't know if we should quit or try again.

That's the inherent drama in the dungeon.