This is a serious question. I'm that unique snowflake, the D&D grognard who loathes dungeons. But many people like 'em. Why?

What is it about a dungeon that wouldn't be better served by a boardgame? What's the RPG part of the dungeon? And I don't mean the trip to town to buy gear/get the next assignment. That's the before and after. What about the during?

Why not play HeroQuest, or whatever its current successors are? (Needless to say, I loved HeroQuest. But not as one loves an RPG.)

PS: I am still majorly annoyed that Cali's recent thread about the diff between dungeon and adventure turned into a pile of ideological shit. If you feel like sharing more of the same, post to that thread, kthx.

The dungeon, in-and-of-itself, is only one component I use.  It's usually a lair for a big bad, an ancient ruin, etc just to set the tone.  Alot goes on in an adventure and a dungeon compartmentalizes (is that a word) and puts constraints around a the game which can become, at times, too free form.

The rpg part of a dungeon has lead in my games to character development, interparty interaction, etc.  In the games I run there has to be some logical reason for a dungeon and not alot of true "dungeons", i.e. monster filled crypts that exist for no purpose other than to house beasties exist.

Later

Whatever the answer is, Pierce, I expect it doesn't make much sense.

A dungeon is an environment with continuing adversity. A good dungeon has enough structure so that you can use your spontaneous situational imagination, strategic intelligence, and/or social skills to 'game' it out in ways that reap substantial benefits beyond what the dice and standard exercises of abilities will get you.

So that's a highly creative kind of wargame that blends seamlessly into some kinds of roleplaying, though it will not provide them an environment with an underlying continuity of the type some folks crave.

But, sometimes really good roleplaying happens in them anyway. Is that an accident? Not as much so as it seems. People in extreme situations do interesting things, so if you want to treat the dungeon in those terms psychologically, it's got ready-made entrees for love and sex and honor and loyalty and treachery and heroism and all those kinds of things some people get off imagining that they're doing really intensely.

Just like a war story really.

There are few literary antecedents for this kind of tale, but it's arguably no more absurd than the locked-room mystery or other narrow genres.

Don't worry, you won't hear any theory mumbo-jumbo from me. I kinda agree with you, although I'm certainly no D&D grognard and don't particularly loathe dungeons. Never had a thing going for those multi-leveled contraptions, but every castle and manor counts as a "dungeon"...

I've made the observation that dungeons grow more interesting if your game heavily depends on archetypal characters, i.e. the default D&D classes. The different tasks presented by the usual underground structure make teamwork neccessary, turning the mold-ridden cavern walls into some kind of X-Men Danger Room.

Also it's a very focused decision-tree situation, as your choices in one room often influence neighbouring rooms. That way, a long trek through wilderness can be seen as a "dungeon", too, but when your encounter points are literally rooms separated by a few feet of stone and earth, the feeling of immediateness gets stronger. It also ties in more closely to the day-focused D&D style.

Also, there's the pure visual appeal. Old tombs, narrow corridors... The feeling of exploration is rather important. Especially if every door opened hasn't been touched by the living for centuries. In a more normal structure, this vanishes quickly and it gets more tactical -- which can be nice, too, but is much closer to wargaming and tile-based games...

Calithena, I coudn´t have put it better.

So let me trivialize:

There´s stuff to do down there.

EDIT: ...that requires constant decision making. The history of the decisions in face of hardships define the characters. They develop, take a life of their own. The continued exposure to pressure, that can be navigated, avoided or overcome acts as a catalyzer for character centered play (not game). What you do is more important than what you say. The primacy of action and consequences.
As the action is a bit limited in scope, the frame of reference is clear very quickly. There´s nearly perfect communication of the extrapolated situation: You know what is there and what you have at your disposal. So all people involved can focus on actually playing out decisions and consqeunces instead of clearing away communication obstacles.

I think the issue is that a bad dungeon is really, really bad, whether you're a story guy or a tactical gamer.

The story guy is left with nothing to care about. Room after room of monsters, and there's no interesting NPCs or stories to get into.

The tactical guy is bored, too. Open door. Melee guys stand in front and hold back monsters. Support guys stay in the back and use ranged attacks. Repeat ad nauseum.

Over on EN World, Hong made a comment that he designed outdoor adventures rather than dungeon ones. I've sort of taken that approach in my dungeons.

For instance, you'd never run an outdoor fight where the PCs have exactly one path into, say, a wooded glen, and all the monsters just run to the entrance and duke it out with the PCs. That would look really weird. Instead, you have all sorts of paths you can take into the fight, sneaky guys ducking into the trees to hide, people climbing up boulders for good views of the field, trolls rising out of a pool of swamp water to eat the mage who gets close, all sorts of interesting stuff.

Here's an example. I recently ran the old dungeon map from the 1e DMG. The same map was in the 3e DMG. If you have a copy of the map, look at the north south passage east of the entrance chamber. If you don't have the map, picture a long, N-S hall. A third of the way down on the west wall is a door into a small room. About half-way down is a side passage to a small chamber. There's another room at the south end of the hall.

Normally, a DM would make three encounters, one for each room. I did something a little different - I made up one encounter, put spread the monsters out over the three areas. A bugbear torturer/rogue was in the small room, taking a nap with the door locked. A bunch of goblins were in the southern room, the torture chamber. Two hobgoblin fighters were in the side room, as guards.

The encounter turned out to be a lot of fun. The party went down the passage, tried to sneak up on the hobgobs, and failed. The hobgoblins and goblins attaked them in the passage, catching them from two sides. The wizard stepped back to get away from the melee... just as the bugbear opened his "office" door, setting up a deadly sneak attack.

The scrum shifted up and down the hallway, as the PCs had to deal with attackers from three directions. It was a lot of fun. I didn't even use weird terrain or anything - the party simply had to deal with an enemy attacking from three directions.

As for story stuff, I think that DMs get too into stuffing as many rooms with monsters as possible. In my Undermountain campaign, I stocked an area with goblins. The PCs fought the gobbos at the gate to their area and took one goblin prisoner. Over night, I decided to turn several goblin chambers into one, huge area with a goblin village built in it. I fleshed out the goblin king, gave him some enemies (renegade cultists of Moander; the dwarf barbarian that the PCs are trying to collect a debt from), and now I have a small "town" in my dungeon where the PCs can interact with monsters, trade for stuff, and so on.

Really, it just comes down to taking lessons from other types of scenarios (urban, wilderness) and transporting them to the dungeon. You'd never design a thieves' guild safehouse where the PCs moved from room to room butchering thieves. Anyone who has lived in a house knows that noise from the kitchen makes it to the sitting room, and vice versa. By the same token, if the PCs are fighting the thieves, and out the window they see their Hated Rival running out the front door and down the alley, you've given them a tough decision - stand and fight, or run after that dude.

I think it comes down to a really simple explanation - we've all been outside, or in a city, but few people have been in a dungeon. That lack of familiarity leads a lot of us to rely on DMing advice and techniques, particularly older ones from early editions of D&D. IMNSHO, just as gaming tech advances, so too does our understanding of what makes a good dungeon. The thing is, that information hasn't filtered down to DMing advice.

I think that's the critical failure of the 3.x DMG. It seems to rely on old school, almost 1e, advice for dungeons. It doesn't give DMs a kick in the pants to make dungeons as exciting and interesting as everything else in gaming.

Quote from: SosthenesI've made the observation that dungeons grow more interesting if your game heavily depends on archetypal characters, i.e. the default D&D classes. The different tasks presented by the usual underground structure make teamwork neccessary, turning the mold-ridden cavern walls into some kind of X-Men Danger Room.

To generalise a bit: as soon as you are beyond "who am I?", the next question is invariably "so what do I do?", and that's always a lot more interesting.

Quote from: mearlsIMNSHO, just as gaming tech advances, so too does our understanding of what makes a good dungeon.

If that is the truth, where is today's Caverns of Thracia? Where is today's Dark Tower? And where is today's Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan? Because I'm not seeing them. Not from Goodman, not from Necromancer (their best dungeons tend to be updated 1e modules) and certainly not from Wizards.

But I guess that leads into my usual rant against games being viewed as analogous to technology, so I'll stop here and go have some sleep.

As for why I think dungeons are different, I think it comes down to the buffer between you and safety. The dungeon is dangerous and limited. You can't just step out to safety and call the guard. You have to navigate back through it. The dungeon also gives you an excuse to do all sorts of weird, scary, and strange things. It's a different place, separate from the mundane world, where a talking, stone skull on the wall is as normal as anything else you can find down there.

From a player's POV, I like the feel of going into the dungeon that no one has returned from. That feeling of discovery and danger is really fun. It's less abstract than, say, wandering across a forest or jungle.

I don't have much, if anything, to add.

You do understand that a dungeon can be many different things--from a series of more-or-less self-contained combats, to pure exploration like an analog version of Myst. Well, that's two things at least, and the continuum between them.

Essentially it's a very first-person experience, where the DM proposes and the player disposes. You have a sense of complete freedom in the sense that whatever constraints there are, are constraints which perfectly match the imagined space. There's very little need to "check in" with the other participants as to whether a contemplated action is either appropriate or outside the purview of the scenario.

And while many of these same qualities are found in boardgames--or especially in 1st-person shooters such as Bungie's old Marathon series--those can't compete with a GMed pen & paper experience for flexibility both in terms of variety of possible situation and options for interacting with the environment.

Aside from that, if you have a game which is primarily a "physics engine", then a dungeon is a great way to test the envelope. IMO a lot of bad, seemingly arbitrary play can be avoided by having the players develop a keen understanding of the "material substrate" of their fictional reality. It keeps people from acting impulsively on the belief that kewl poses and emo posturing will win out over the internal reality of the setting.

(On review that last paragraph slides into the political, so if you'd like to hold it up as a "Don't do that" example, I'd understand.)

Quote from: MelanIf that is the truth, where is today's Caverns of Thracia? Where is today's Dark Tower? And where is today's Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan? Because I'm not seeing them. Not from Goodman, not from Necromancer (their best dungeons tend to be updated 1e modules) and certainly not from Wizards.

But I guess that leads into my usual rant against games being viewed as analogous to technology, so I'll stop here and go have some sleep.

I think it's "tech" in the sense that we learn more, and in theory can apply that learning to make stuff better. I'd emphasize the "in theory" because, as you point out, we don't often see it pay off.

To be blunt, I think the older dungeons are better because the people writing them didn't worry so much about story, or logic, or ecosystems. All they really cared about was entertaining their players. Writers back then simply played more D&D, IMNSHO, and it shows in their work. Those adventures are fun, and that's something that's easy to lose sight of when you're grinding through word count to hit a deadline.

Tamoachan is a great example. When it was originally run at Origins, it had to be a fun adventure. The guys sitting down to play didn't care about poking holes in the backstory, or obsessing over details of how the dungeon was put together, or the logic of a slow-working, poison gas. They were too busy tackling the puzzles and monsters.

There's a tournament report for the G series in an old issue of Dragon, and it's really eye opening. The thief is using climb sheer surfaces to climb along the ceiling, drop down on to King Snurre from above, and hack him to death. There's a ton of stuff that was taking place "off the rules" that was lots of fun at the table. We've sort of lost that over the years. The emphasis today is on the text, rather than stuff at the table. At least, that's what you hear from reviewers and people talking about modules. You rarely hear people getting together to say, "This is how area B went when I ran it."

The things I like about dungeons:

Speakng as a GM or as a player? Well, I like them as both GM and player, I guess. Settembrini's quip "There's stuff to do down there" is about as good of an answer as there might be.

A dungeon is a dangerous environment where you can use all your powers.
Your guy just loaded up on holy water, antivenom, flasks of acid and snake bane arrows. You want to use that stuff, because it's fun.

You don't know what's coming up next or what the next room is going to be. Everything you see is a priveleged view of the underworld that few other people will share. In a well-designed dungeon there are often hidden areas that other dungeon explorers simply aren't going to find. Every new school jackass will tell you not to design areas that people probably won't find. But I do it anyway. Sometimes those get found!* It's like an easter egg or a secret level. And sometimes players do find them. This is the beauty of the multi-layered dungeon.

Sometimes a battle in a dungeon is a tactical gamble. Sometimes it's a strategic contest. Sometimes it's resource management. Sometimes it's puzzles. There are games within games.

A dungeon is a playground for adventure. There are things to do, places to discover, and you can win or lose depending on luck, skill, and choice.

Why are dungeons fun? Dungeons are fun for the exact same reasons that Super Mario 64 is fun.  And it's not because people like pressing buttons, either.

I like dungeons and many of the best D&D games I have played has us spending a good deal of time in them. Like Mike said though, a bad dungeon is really bad.

What makes them good to me is that they all have theor own personality. One may be a simple Orc camp, another may be a necrochemist's lab, or maybe a Evil wizards lair. They can be anything.  They can be larg as cities and as small as a simple tomb. They can be alive or mechanical. Heck, they don't always even need to make sense to be fun.

Quote from: mearlsTo be blunt, I think the older dungeons are better because the people writing them didn't worry so much about story, or logic, or ecosystems. All they really cared about was entertaining their players.

I totally agree with this analysis.  Nowadays we get bogged down trying to explain the why's and how's of an adventure.  In my experience player buy-in is very easy when the DM turns off the targeting computer.  Most players want to believe in your half-assed adventure.  That's why they're at the table in the first place.