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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5271293" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't have time to answer the question fully.  If someone could look up my 1st enworld post, it might explain my position more fully.A great dungeon has many elements.  Just off the top of my head:1) Creative.  When in doubt, to the novice, and to within a close approximation, creative means assymetrical.  It contains surprises and unexpected features.  In most cases, its enough to tell a bad dungeon from glancing at the map and seeing if there are rows of similarly sized rooms.  This sort of feature is logical (real buildings are often made that way), but is usually the mark of an inexperienced dungeon designer.2) Believable.  The dungeon exists for an understandable purpose and its possible for the players to see why it might have been built.   Traps exist only where such traps make sense. 3) Living.  The dungeon has a history.  It's inhabitants have a history that preexists the players.  If the players aren't clearly the first intelligent beings to find the dungeon, then the dungeon has clearly been modified by the presence of other inhabitants and explorers.   One shot, non-resettable traps are often sprung long before the players get there.  The dungeon has aged, and signs of the various uses it has been put through over time are discoverable.  If the dungeon inhabitants need food and water, some evidence of how they come by it is available.  If the dungeon is closed, some minimally plausible ecosystem exists.4) Interactive.  The dungeon is designed so that every room has some skill which is employable in the room to some advantage.  There should be something for the player to mentally play with in every room.5) The Map is Narrative.  All RPG designs are flowcharts of some sort.  Even the most complicated adventure reduces to a flowchart.  An event driven story is a flowchart.  A map is a flowchart.  How the players move through the map is the particular story that they tell.  The good dungeon designers make the map in such a way that the resulting narrative makes sense.  The great dungeon designers do that with a map that isn't linear, and which still has a climatic story if the players come in the back door.The best dungeon designers - Gygax, Hickman, Cook, etc. - succeed on those grounds to various extents.  If you look at some of the best modules ever written, in many cases they come down to having a great dungeon, and often that comes down to a combination of a great map and a good villain.</blockquote>

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