Quasqueton said:
I like/prefer dungeon adventures, both as a DM and as a Player. As a DM because it is generally easier for me – fewer options for direction, less to keep track of and juggle, easier to “plot”. As a Player because it takes me back to the reason I fell in love with D&D – exploring strange, unknown places, meeting monsters and killing them, and discovering treasure.
I would love to adventure through a mega-dungeon. These maps look like my early experiences with D&D. But something struck me about them – all the maze-like corridors of 3 of them (top, fifth, and sixth) with no encounters (maybe some wandering monsters) and dead ends that just waste time. 20 years ago, I would have thoroughly enjoyed such dungeons. Finding our way through the labyrinth, hoping (or fearing) running into wandering monsters, and generally just fooling around in the dungeon would have been fun.
Now, though, those labyrinthine dungeons would annoy me. I don’t think I’d enjoy the “plotless” navigating and mapping. The second, third, and fourth maps look like they’d be more fun – plenty of actual rooms with potential encounters (monsters, or traps, or tricks, or something other than just empty dead-end tunnels).
Quasqueton
There are a few questions I ask myself as a DM when I design an "adventure". These are the two that seem relevant in this case. "What am I trying to accomplish with this
section?" The other one that dovetails off is, "Does this
section accomplish that effectively?" The second question is much more important.
In your example you mentioned there are many dead-ends, empty areas, etc. If what I'm trying to accomplish is to make an underground trek a long and arduous event, then that does accomplish it. However, does it accomplish it effectively? I'd have to say no.
The game is really only propelled forward by action. Action on the part of the DM or on the part of the players. If as a player I spent a substantial amount of real time just dragging on through an
empty dungeon, I'd probably get pissed. Why not just say, you've gone through the dungeon for 7 days and you found nothing? That would take 15 seconds and then we can move on to more "adventuresome" things. There is no sense of wonder in empty tombs.
So the action could be "encounters", "natural hazards", "traps", etc. If there are little, or worse no, encounters in a whole section of map then I've wasted a lot of real time and not propelled the game forward one bit. For sections like that I can create the same sense of long arduous travel by my simple statement above, having the players decrease rations for that period and maybe applying some circumstance modifiers like fatigue, etc.
As a DM I would not spend any significant (over 15 minutes) amount of time in empty rooms. Just state that the adventuring party explored the caves of doom and found nothing. Be generous, give them a map of the area, as it would be assumed that they explored it, and move on. In the empty caves of doom they found a note leading them to the real action, the caves of chaos, just a few miles north, near the Keep...
For a player, what does spending 4 hours or more just stumbling around in the dark and finding nothing but dead-ends accomplish? Probably just frustration.
It doesn't take much rhyme or reason ... I'm willing to stretch my imagination for the sake of the game, after all. But the more of it there is I generally find the more I enjoy the game - again as either the player or the DM.
