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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Conaill" data-source="post: 2727341" data-attributes="member: 1264">Ah, dungeons... such a staple of fantasy roleplaying, right?And yet, when you look at classical fantasy fiction, where are the real dungeons? Sure, you get the abandoned dwarven mines in Tolkien's work, or the occasional cave complex, or the medieval prison the heroes need to escape from. But where are the underground complexes with corridors and rooms that need to be explored and searched one by one, with danger lurking around every corner? It seems like the standard D&D dungeon was hardly a strong theme in fantasy literature before D&D became on the scene. So why *is* it called Dungeons & Dragons, and not - say - Castles & Dragons, or at least Dragons & Lairs? My suspicion is that the dungeon is really a holdover of D&D's early origins in wargaming. A dungeon provides a nicely delimited area so the players aren't going tow wander "off the map", rectangular structures which are eminently adapted to drawing on a grid, a high density of encounters so the players can spend a lot of time on the same map layout, but convenient separations between the encounters so the players don't get overwhelmed by opponents and can somewhat choose their own pace. Notice how almost all doors in a dungeon are closed? Heck, you'd think they're even sound-proofed to judge by how some DM's play them...Now, whereas these are all still eminently practical reasons for having dungeons in a comabt-oriented roleplaying game, I would hope that the hobby has evolved far enough from its wargaming roots that we can start dealing with dungeons in a somewhat more believable manner. Why are the inhabitants of the dungeon where they are? Why would they even bother to keep *any* doors shut? What do they live off, what do they do all day, where do they live? Why are there so many traps everywhere, why haven't they been set off by those wandering monsters, and who comes by to reset the traps when the have? You know how much it *costs* to install one of those traps? In some dungeons, the traps are worth more than the treasure they guard. Which dungeon owner in their right mind would bother with such a costly an ineffective method to keep people out? Unless they get some perverse pleasure out of wasting lots of money to torture hapless adventurers, that is.Granted, modern-day dungeons like the WLD are getting a lot better at providing some sense of justification for the dungeon, its inhabitants and other features. But in the end, it's still largely a matter of "open the next door, defeat the monsters, loot stuff, rinse and repeat..." No thank you.[Edit: Steam & Steel, please! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />]</blockquote>

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