Quote from: Larsdangly;970113The trouble is that lots of people in our hobby don't know how to play chess, so as often as not a dungeon crawl is one person playing checkers vs. someone else who thinks they are the stage manager for finger-puppet Macbeth.

"finger puppet Macbeth" made me chuckle.

I find dungeons don't have the appeal (for me or my players) that they had in the 1970s. When I switched from D&D to Runequest I stopped using large dungeons (we weren't anywhere near Pavis or the Rubble) and switched to predominantly a wilderness campaign with a sprinkling of purpose built underground areas (old tombs, scorpion-man cave lairs, solitary dwarf caves, and such). Like the OP I liked the less gonzo feel of the smaller purpose built areas.

Recently I included an underworld in 1624 Paris for my Honor+Intrigue campaign. For the underworld I used a mix of period sewers, old basement, church and monastery crypts, old Roman baths and other ruins, ghoul tunnels under large cemeteries, and the extant period below ground quarries (some of which later formed the current Paris catacombs).  The the players enjoyed it, but more as a change of pace than anything they would want to see much more of - and they never explored much of the total underground. To be fair, I don't think H+I is a particularly good system choice for dungeon crawling since it is fine tuned for rapier and cutlass duels.

All types have merit.  Dungeons are great for groups who are pressed for time.  It's easy to point to which room you left off at, which rooms were cleared and tracking your progress and such, at least for us.

Quote from: The Exploited.;970077I'm interested in other people's thoughts on the subject. Do you still go through the basic dungeon bash? Or have you changed your style over the years?

My style has changed back and forth over the years. From dungeon crawls, to... I want to say Storygame, but I don't think the term fits quite right. That adolescent phase where we were doing any crazy adventure idea. Starships in the hells, Mecha Hitler (I shit you not, one of our bad guys was cyborg Hitler) We made Rifts look bland. Most of our RPing that phase was comic book style drama.
Then we went to a more low key but still more RP focused phase. That was when I was GMing Earthdawn and Dark Sun. Very few dungeons, and short ones when they did show up. More about politics, factions and adventures centered around the PCs and NPCs.
Now I've got a new appreciation for Dungeons. I really want to make a Megadungeon in the style of Super Metroid, that's designed to be about exploration, and embedding a story in the discoveries about the location.

Quote from: Itachi;970100Your commentary on Symbaroum picked my interest. Care to talk some more about it?

Sure, what do you want to know?

In a nutshell... It's a lowish fantasy game. Set after a very bad war where the humans prevailed against some very nasty dark lords. However, it left their homeland scorched and devoid of life. So, they had to move off seeking newer pastures so to speak. This brought them into conflict with, not only barbarian tribes, but with Elves. The game has Dwarves, Elves Ogres, and Trolls. But they are all different to what what you'd normally associate with a traditional fantasy setting. It's humancentric but with a wide scope for playing those races (if you want to).

The mythos is very much Scandinavian in origin (as you'd expect as the creators are Swedish). Anyway, there's a huge forest called Davokar and it's the size of a country. There's a loose pact between the Elves and humans. The Elves were the protectors of the forest (or Nazis I should say). Symbaroum refers to an ancient lost civilization that has long since died. But humans (and others) constantly seek out its fortunes in Davokar (artifacts, ancient knowlege, etc). There's a town called 'Thistlehold' (and that's a great place for intrugue itself) where the adventures can stay before they go into the rather unsafe forest.

I don't want to give any spoilers away. Elves are really freaking nasty! Especially, the older ones. Ogres, goblins and Changelings all have an interesting intertwined history. Although, the ones that  mix with humans tend to be ghettoized or shunned.

Be careful using magic too! Less you are corrupted and turned into an abomination. Corruption is deadly in this game... Now only with magic but with other stuff as well (artifacts, locations).

Systems it is pretty simple. It uses a d20 but it's a fairly easy plus and minus affair. It's pretty quick to run.

However it's quite deadly, to be honest... I had to fudge a couple of roles otherwise the adventure would have been over rather quickly. Definitely one of my favorite games though I love the vibe.

There are definitely good dungeon crawls and bad ones.

I don't think the good ones are necessarily those that "make sense" or have some "clear purpose." This sort of preference is immediately suspect because how, as a player, would you ever know that the dungeon doesn't have a purpose? How do you know you just haven't figured it out yet?

Which brings me to what I think makes a good dungeon. It's got to have a lot of ambience and a sense of mystery. The former gives you reason to want to see what's next (exploration is the hook rather than loot and plunder). You don't mind if it goes on forever, because it always leaves you wanting more. The latter provides enough information to suggest that maybe something bigger is going on here that you haven't figured out yet. It suggests to the player he doesn't know enough to draw judgements such as whether or not the dungeon makes any sense.

You can hardly be faulted for saying you don't like dungeon crawls. I find so few meet these standards.

I don't mind some dungeon content, but in a campaign setting, I do tend to find it more interesting and satisfying when a world makes sense, including having some reason for the existence of things, and that does tend to rule out most dungeons, and/or lead to odd reasons why they exist. My first campaign is a huge thing which I still occasionally play with, and has many more dungeony places than game worlds I made later. I quickly started coming up with reasons to explain them, though that led to some peculiar ancient/powerful agents and so on, who I otherwise wouldn't tend to put in a world. But it is possible to make some dungeon-like places that do make sense, and I think those can be pretty interesting and fun.

I think I jettisoned dungeon-crawling-as-campaigning decades ago. I realized that dungeon-crawling became its own sub-genre and required specific skill-sets as D&D became more baroque with rules. At a certain point it became difficult to have "just any party" actually go DO a dungeon-crawl. I found I had PC's that didn't know how to swim, or climb, or didn't have survival. Conversely it forced myself to want to create more expansive games.

Now I like to trick players into a good ol' fashioned Dungeon Crawl - regardless if they have those skills or not. Often they won't even realize they're in one until they're in too deep. I do this sparingly, just to keep people on their toes. But as a "campaign"? Nah.

I'd play one if someone ran one. But it's not enough to feed my interest as a GM to use it as it's own thing alone.

Quote from: Dumarest;970112I never liked "dungeon crawls" even back in 1982, if by dungeon crawl you mean exploring dungeons and killing things and taking treasure and no real rhyme or reason for why I'm doing it. Even then I preferred to have a goal other than killing monsters and steal their shiny objects.

They got stale very quickly for me... Pretty much for the same reasons, you mentioned. That there was little or no logic involved with the game's design. It felt like an excuse our DM to come up with a wackier idea after wackier idea. The Isle of Dread was a breath of fresh air (at the time).

As I played more and more WFRP (1st e) I became less and less interested in levels, gold and magic items. I just loved the mayhem of going into a city or village and see what would happen. Especially, at the idea of killing cultists scum. Not that we were all that nice at all!

I had to be taught how to appreciate dungeoncrawls.

The first sparks of interest were kindled by this short, sweet article (which now has numerous broken links, but is a good read none the less)

I was a big fan of Zork back in the day; that article got me thinking about the atmosphere of that great game, and how I could recreate it at my table. I still feel like that is the best argument for "dungeon as atmosphere" I've ever read.

When it came to designing dungeons which were interesting to explore, this much, much longer but extremely interesting series of articles gave me lots of grist for reading and many things to ponder about dungeoncrawling.

Finally, as I was still struggling to develop my own dungeons consistently, I stumbled on this brief but very inspiring article which introduced me to the concept of "a plot" (current events) and "b plot" (ancient origin) with dungeons. This greatly helped me because it gave me a quick, reliable way to make a dungeon a living part of the milieu of my games.

Taken together, those above resources turned dungeons from "those places that are like a video game" to "the most atmospheric, characterful and strategically interesting architecture in my games". As you can probably collect, I was very pleased with this transformation.

One things that dungeons do, in meta-game terms, is limit player choices, and provide a ready made flow-chart type of environment for GMs.  They provide structure to the wide-open nature of RPGs.  It makes the world small - even in big dungeons.  Sure a GM can put whatever in the dungeon, but it is still a place of limited scope.  Its not like having the option to fill a world.  Players can still play open-ended and make what choices they want, but the number of reasonable choices is quite a bit smaller than in a wide open sandbox world.  In a dungeon, you can get the feel of open ended sandbox play in an easily manageable environment.  I think that is a big reason why dungeon crawls are so popular.

Your game system is an important piece to this puzzle. Someone above commented that they drifted away from dungeon crawls after switching to Runequest. RQ doesn't have a lot of things that make set-piece dungeon crawl games fun. Resource management is far less important in RQ than D&D. Combat is more likely to murder you off by dumb luck in RQ, which means you can't get in many scraps. D&D has an unusually gradual, sustained advancement in character power, which is well suited to games that focus on repeatedly overcoming challenges and/or digging deeper and deeper into an environment that gets more and more dangerous as you go. It lacks the 'role' elements of D&D classes. All in all RQ is a different sort of game that is better for other sorts of campaigns

I feel ya, Exploited.  I like Dungeons that 'make sense', as much as they do in the Conan short stories.  I like ruined, evil cultist filled or degenerate temples, sewers where necromancy happens because it used to be a giant mass grave where they city's nobility/rich tossed plague victims and corpses generations past, a city built upon another city, which is built on an older city, so ruined tunnels and sewers and ancient buildings abound underground, stuff like that.

Dungeons have never really inspired my imagination.  When I dream up a new idea for fantasy, endless corridors, doors, wandering monsters, and treasures are not the first things that come to mind.  I also did not start off dungeon crawling in my early years.  I was a wargamer, so I melded politics, mass conflict and roleplaying.  

That said, dungeon crawls manage to find a place in almost all of my campaigns - though I distinctly prefer short ones.  As an example, I really like what Goodman has done with the DCC modules.  The dungeons are small and epic, playable in a night.  They are the kind of dungeon that you can add to a campaign without it taking the campaign over.

Quote from: Lunamancer;970145There are definitely good dungeon crawls and bad ones.

You can hardly be faulted for saying you don't like dungeon crawls. I find so few meet these standards.

That's true... Unfortunately, I've had more bad experiences than good ones. But I think it's also down to me as well (and my mates). We tend to prefer gritty low fantasy settings. Which don't often suit fantastic dungeons.

I take the point that the characters don't necessarily have to understand how it works in essence. But for me, I need some sense of consistency.

However, you're spot on with getting that sense of 'wonder', it's critical regardless of the setting type. That's one of the reasons I bang on about Sybaroum so much (it gives me that feeling as a player and GM). Numenera is interesting in that way too, although it's pretty over the top which works for the type of settings it's supposed to be.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;970136My style has changed back and forth over the years. From dungeon crawls, to... I want to say Storygame, but I don't think the term fits quite right. That adolescent phase where we were doing any crazy adventure idea. Starships in the hells, Mecha Hitler (I shit you not, one of our bad guys was cyborg Hitler) We made Rifts look bland. Most of our RPing that phase was comic book style drama.
Then we went to a more low key but still more RP focused phase. That was when I was GMing Earthdawn and Dark Sun. Very few dungeons, and short ones when they did show up. More about politics, factions and adventures centered around the PCs and NPCs.
Now I've got a new appreciation for Dungeons. I really want to make a Megadungeon in the style of Super Metroid, that's designed to be about exploration, and embedding a story in the discoveries about the location.

That sounds wonderful.