Quote from: Krimson;938190That and over 100 other mods.

Yes I play skyrim with 237 mods running currently and would have more but am afraid eventually something will just implode!

I played in a handful of dungeocrawls.  Always found them pretty nonsensical and immersion-breaking.

The majority of my D&D gameplay involves some form of dungeons.

Just like my Warhammer games mostly involve both war and hammers and my Shadowrun games are full of shadows and running.

I guess I'm kind of literal.

Quote from: rgrove0172;938120When we first started playing D&D (1975 or so) we pretty much thought every adventure had to have a dungeon. It was the point of the game really. Sure, I quickly started enjoying fleshing out my fantasy world for the players to explore but honestly it was just a means to get them from one dungeon to another. That all changed after a couple years however and the actual 'dungeon delving' became less and less a part of our games. It was a conscious effort on my part as GM I guess, beginning to feel that we were somehow expanding the game and making it something unique to our group by actually avoiding the good ole dungeons everybody else was still using. (We weren't unique at all of course but in our secluded little group of geeks with no internet to connect with others we were oblivious)

Anyway, even after the foolish notions of 'doing it different' just for the sake of doing it different passed we never returned to the heavily dungeonified ways. Players came and went, I moved and picked up different groups several times but my games were still pretty void of traditional dungeon settings. Entire fantasy campaigns have been played without a classic dungeon included. Even now, 40 years later I can count on one hand the number of 'dungeons' Ive run in the last 10 years.

Reading through the posts here and on other sites it seems that Dungeons are still, at least in some games like D&D, very popular and the mainstay of many a campaign.

Do you feature them in your games regularly? Are they the heart and soul of your games around which the plots weave, or have you visited them less regularly in your games over the years?

Honestly, when I think about it, I miss the old Hack - I may have to work something up as a one shot or something for my current players.

Started the Hunter chron just finished now which started with a "dungeon" which was a bandit lair. Had several other "dungeons", including archaeotech ruins and a slaver's den.

Planning to involve some kinda Native American underground ruin patrolled by a Guardian for the upcoming Mage chron that they can get to as a sidequest. That and I'll probably do a warehouse meet redux. Both of those are "dungeons", I guess.

I think of dungeons, to be honest, as more like instances or mission zones. I imagine that doesn't agree with what I assume to be a more traditional definition of it being "enter cave, avoid traps, kill orcs, take their shit, bounce" but then that's kind of shitty and boring and one-dimensional for it to be JUST that. Yeah, mission zones is better (though by no means does it mean that isn't a valid way of RPG'ing!).

Seeing Butcher's links on the SOTDL thread, I'm now starting to understand the specific type of RPG experience like 80% of the guys on here pine for. Definitely something from another generation for me -- I mean, it's on some Traveller shit (and I can't understand the appeal of that either). It's a different mindset to RPGs, very explorer-driven (NOT combat, two very different things) and abstracting stuff away that gets in the way of that. I'm about character-driven stuff, an experience akin to a Vertigo or Dark Horse graphic novel such as Scalped or American Vampire or Solomon Kane or even a Heart of Darkness tale.

Quote from: Tristram Evans;938197I played in a handful of dungeocrawls.  Always found them pretty nonsensical and immersion-breaking.

The first time I ever ran D&D was a craptacular dungeon I made up that had no rhyme or reason... and that was the last time I ever designed such a thing.
Very few groups I've played with have featured them either.

Still, I've always like the idea of dungeons as secret lairs and enemy strongholds.
The dungeons in World of Warcraft made a big impression on me in that none of them are just random collections of creatures... they're all home to some faction (or factions), with a history and an agenda. They feel like living spaces rather than a collection of mooks just twiddling their thumbs waiting for adventurers to come by and kill them. Going into them feels to me like a commando raid with more important stakes than just XP and loot. I might be weird that way... but my motivation in WOW was always primarily about uncovering the story... and the dungeons seemed like concentrated doses of the plotline/atmosphere.
Not that any dungeon I'd design would be so linear or unchanging... but the ones I make nowadays aren't just zoos full of weird critters... unless one of them has an actual zoo in it.

Quote from: Simlasa;938206The first time I ever ran D&D was a craptacular dungeon I made up that had no rhyme or reason... and that was the last time I ever designed such a thing.
Very few groups I've played with have featured them either.

I have dungeon dice which I have used in the past, including a couple of adventures in Star Wars d20 RCR, where I used them for the ventilation system of a Imperial Star Destroyer.

Grove,
Dungeon is a place.
Hacking is something you do.
If one always means the other, that's just your self-imposed limitation.

"Dungeon" could mean...

• caves
• ruined city
• towers
• sewers of a living city
• the depths of Mirkwood forest
• fortified humanoid outposts
• the worst part of town

...or whatever.

In a "dungeon" you could be...

• questing to save the world (or the princess)
• killing shit and taking their stuff
• trying to find something for whatever purpose
• negotiating a truce between different warring humanoid tribes, bandit groups, cults so that you can do whatever
• trodding the jeweled thrones of the earth under your sandaled feet
• just exploring, Why? Because no one else has an equivalent level of stones and lack of self-preservation

...or whatever.

Bandits are living in an old fort they took over and built up a palisade, with moat and traps. Is that a dungeon?  Does it become a dungeon if you move it underground?  

Hallways, locked and trapped doors, undead guardians, an insane wizard in his lair...is it no longer a dungeon if it's an old bricked up mansion in the burned out part of the capital city, never renewed after a fire?

Hack and slash campaign, Us Against the Humanoids, fight after fight, week after week...as we house by house, street by street, block by block reclaim a city from the Horde that captured it.  Is that a dungeon?  Hell is that even Hack and Slash even though it's 100% combat?

Stop worrying about Genre and Tropes, forget coming up with your damn Plots, get roleplayers whose characters have goals and motivations and it won't matter if they decide they want to invade the Caves of Chaos to kill things and take their stuff, you still won't be running a "Dungeon Hack".

Yeah there's people that only do traditional DungeonCrawls, there's also people that go out of their way to avoid them.  There's people that play entire 1st-20th Pathfinder Adventure Paths, one after the other with different characters each time, never deviating from a single word on the page and there's people who have never looked at a prewritten adventure.

Different locations in the game function in the same manner as Dungeons, if you consider a "dungeon" to be a web of challenges and reactions. The nearby caves are a dungeon. The abandoned warehouses are a dungeon. Lill's tavern is a (social) dungeon. Now, if you're talking straight out crawls in underground spaces, then I haven't done that, just that, session after session, since I first started playing. Not so much into massive labyrinths, megadungeons and so on, but I assume they're still used, and used regularly, but gamers all over.

My DCC game tends to alternate back and forth between long overland-exploration or city-based hijinks on the one hand, and dungeon-type crawls on the other.

My Dark Albion game very reliably goes back and forth between political/RP-focused or investigative adventures and dungeon-esque adventures (not necessarily dungeons in the classic D&D sense, but ruins, temples, haunted manors, cave complexes, enemy fortresses, etc).