The "Adventure Day" is a Dungeon: build and stock a Dungeon with the DMG guidelines, put a little plot pressure on clearing the obstacle in a timely manner and...the system sings. The character power attrition Dungeon of 5E is a bit different from the classic feel of an OD&D logistical challenge, in the same way that Star Wars is a different sort of action movie than The Dirty Dozen, but the 5E Dungeon experience when run RAW really sings.
Oh, there is no maybe about that, it was pretty explicit during the Next tests that the design structure if Encounters was about Dungeon raids: the part of the "Adventure Day" that people find tortured is that it is an attempt to apply the standard of a Dungeon to a more abstract set of possibilities, that may or may not be in a Dungeon. But build a 12-20 room Dungeon, have 5-8 combat wncoutners per DMG guidelines...that's cooking with oil.
They don't, but a "Dungeon" is a likely place to encounter that many opponents in a timely manner, and it is what AotC Adventure looks are full of: Dungeons that follow the DMG Encounter building guidelines.
I would LOVE to see someone run a 20 room (8 filled) engaging, fast, furious dungeon romp that can be completed in a session.
I wouldn’t say it’s hard coded for dungeon play. It’s flexible enough to work for other modes of play. But dungeon play is very much what the underlying math is built to facilitate. See, for example, the recent thread about boss monsters not working because the math assumes 20ish rounds of combat between long rests, and most groups aren’t doing that. The whole 6-8 encounter adventuring day structure 5e is built around only really makes sense in a dungeon context.
It was undoubtedly designed with that in mind. The system was built around feedback from open playtests using Keep on the Borderlands’ Caves of Chaos, the dungeoniest dungeon to ever dungeon.
