Quote from: Haffrung;970673The settings are often mundane and lack colour. Opportunities for roleplaying with dungeon denizens, factions, rival NPCs, etc. are usually absent.

To be honest, that has not been my experience.  Most of the old school published dungeons have all these in spades.  The problem is that they're arbitrary and nonsensical most  of the time, and lack any kind of consistent logic.  It makes it hard to interact with the dungeon environment when all of your natural assumptions are completely wrong.  One of my players was ex-light infantry and he pointed out that if we really wanted to "clear out a dungeon", cutting off food and supply was the best way to do it since there were never any food stores, supply routes, or indeed even latrines in most of the dungeons we played through.

Quote from: daniel_ream;970736One of my players was ex-light infantry and he pointed out that if we really wanted to "clear out a dungeon", cutting off food and supply was the best way to do it since there were never any food stores, supply routes, or indeed even latrines in most of the dungeons we played through.

It definitely matters who you play with.  I am not the least interested in RPGs as an alternate reality simulation so I don't care very much about these things.  There are absurdities, of course, such as a giant dragon with no way in or out.  But beyond those I don't want my DMs to spend precious time creating stuff I'm not going to interact with in the game.  I'd rather a DM said that every creature in the dungeon was magically sustained by the air alone than sit and plan out mundane logistical elements.

But that's me - I'm playing for shits and giggles with my buddies and have no great desire for immersive verisimilitude.  What I want to know is if your dungeon can inspire the guy to my left to crack a joke that makes all our sides ache.  Nothing else really matters.

Quote from: EOTB;970742It definitely matters who you play with.  I am not the least interested in RPGs as an alternate reality simulation so I don't care very much about these things.  There are absurdities, of course, such as a giant dragon with no way in or out.  

I just had that in my game - at the bottom of Dyson's Delve, in the Heart of Elemental Chaos, the Archmage Dyson Logos had turned into a gargantuan brass dragon, grown so huge over the centuries that his leaving ripped a big hole in the dungeon itself.

I retract - there are no true absurdities in a dungeon

Quote from: Haffrung;970673In my experience, most dungeons become a tedious grind. You need both strong source material and a DM adept at running them to bring out the best qualities of dungeons, and that's not common.

That's the same for me as well... The bigger they are the more I want to stop playing.

I think the three pillars are the things to aim for. But as you say, it takes a good DM to encompass all those in a singular dungeon. One of the things I get really bored is the constant combat. Luckily OSR games tend to resolve that pretty quickly at least. I like characters to have a sense of 'decompression' after a conflict. Otherwise you feel like that you are being hounded without any respite.

And generally, there are not too many interesting roleplaying opportunities in dungeons. Although, it depends on the GM/Game. I just haven't really found anything in one that has really inspired me so far.

Quote from: EOTB;970742It definitely matters who you play with.

I'm playing for shits and giggles with my buddies and have no great desire for immersive verisimilitude.  What I want to know is if your dungeon can inspire the guy to my left to crack a joke that makes all our sides ache.  Nothing else really matters.

Absolutely... It's very group dependant. My oldest group are all mates and we all like the same style of games. A crazy dungeon just wouldn't work for us at all. Not that it's bad, it's just not what we like. We play for a laugh as well and have a few beers etc.

As we've all got less time to play, we don't want the GMs to have to spend a long time creating elaborate dungeons or games in general. But you don't need to be really detailed for a semblance of verisimilitude. Something like a cultists cave is a hell of a lot easier to create than a large fantastical dungeon.

I think it's really about personal preference. Or from reading this thread, a healthy mix of RPing with a variety of different locations. The main this is, if you are enjoying it then it's all good.

Quote from: The Exploited.;970774I think the three pillars are the things to aim for. But as you say, it takes a good DM to encompass all those in a singular dungeon..

I really, really like what Torchbearer does there.  Dealing with the spelunking and resource management is more tension than the combat.

Quote from: EOTB;970742But beyond those I don't want my DMs to spend precious time creating stuff I'm not going to interact with in the game.

The point is that these things are what we would interact with in the game, if they bothered to exist.  There's a famous example of a castle siege being lifted when someone crawled up the jakes into the chapel and attacked the garrison from inside and opened the secondary gate.

I get it, if you just want a beer and pretzels game, this stuff isn't going to appeal.  But when we want to run sardonic sword & sorcery, knowing something about how ships work or hillforts tend to be constructed makes it feel like we've actually experienced something compelling.

I and most of the players I've played with tend to automatically notice things that don't make sense, to one degree or another. If you take a dungeon from the GM's perspective and imagine everything and everyone that's there, and imagine what they would do for an hour, a day, a week, a month, if you played it out, how much of it would be as it is described as a static set of things waiting for the PC party to waltz through?

If that makes sense and is interesting, consider that you can actually do that, if not by actually rolling dice for everything, using your intuition. The ending state of a crazy dungeon after considering what might happen to it after a month or year of the inhabitants actually doing something and having some visitors and needing to eat and so on, can turn a nonsense dungeon into an interesting one, even if it's just deciding who would kill whom and where the treasure would end up and who'd be in charge, or whatever.

Quote from: daniel_ream;970841The point is that these things are what we would interact with in the game, if they bothered to exist.  There's a famous example of a castle siege being lifted when someone crawled up the jakes into the chapel and attacked the garrison from inside and opened the secondary gate.

I get it, if you just want a beer and pretzels game, this stuff isn't going to appeal.  But when we want to run sardonic sword & sorcery, knowing something about how ships work or hillforts tend to be constructed makes it feel like we've actually experienced something compelling.

Even in a beer and pretzels game, logistics are important.  If I'm conducting a siege-and-sack campaign to take a half-dozen castles and towns away from a duke, or clearing out a series of monster lairs, I want that info - absolutely.  

Just not in a dungeon.  I'm going there because I want the Chinese food.  More mundane elements carried into that environment would feel to me like ordering the burger off the back of the menu.

I do think a DM should be pretty upfront about their style in this regard, because IME its one of the quadrant boundaries in the gaming hobby.  Everybody should get their respective itches scratched.

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?

I mix it up -- I'm currently running a dungeon-crawl space/sci-fi game (the characters are inter-planetary "archaeologists"), but right before this I ran a super-hero game that, while it did have a dungeon of sorts at one point in it was mostly not a crawl-type-thing.

I think dungeons represent great opportunities for roleplaying in a lot of ways -- they are intense, high-risk / high-energy areas. They offer opportunities for both tactical play and (at least to some degree) roleplaying interaction with NPCs (to some degree... mostly it's killing things). Because they're enclosed spaces, they tend to force conflict and resolution (it's hard to "go around" something risky in a lot of cases).

Wilderness games, though, have a lot of the same opportunities and more chances for roleplaying interactions (more likely to meet a non-combat encounter, in my estimation).

In my experience wilderness adventures tend to be less intense because if you're risk-averse and have adequate resources you can (sometimes) just avoid dangerous dangerous encounter... and, while dungeons aren't really linear, wilderness is way, way more open-ended.

But in my book, if you're exploring a map looking for treasure and dealing with pre-planned or wandering-from-a-table encounters, I'm not sure it's that big a difference.

When I think about game types I tend to contrast dungeons or wilderness crawls more with more social or political types of encounters like dealing with people in a city or running an army or whatever. Game of Thrones type stuff.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: The Exploited.;970774And generally, there are not too many interesting roleplaying opportunities in dungeons. Although, it depends on the GM/Game. I just haven't really found anything in one that has really inspired me so far.

The reaction table in B/X and modest levels of creativity tend to generate tons of roleplaying opportunities. Just requires DM and players not to go "roll for initiative!" at every encounter.

Quote from: daniel_ream;970841sardonic sword & sorcery

What makes it sardonic in your view?

Quote from: darthfozzywig;970910The reaction table in B/X and modest levels of creativity tend to generate tons of roleplaying opportunities. Just requires DM and players not to go "roll for initiative!" at every encounter.

I agree. I really had to go back and re-examine the assumptions and read a bunch of old-school Actual Play accounts, blogs like the Alexandrian, etc, before I started to understand how all those subsystems drive play in the dungeon.

For example, during exploration turns, I now ask for what the Party wants to do (not individual players, this isn't combat). They have to decide on a course of action and clearly communicate it to me (that's really what the "Caller" position is all about). If they waffle and can't decide, then they are burning precious in-game minutes and getting much closer to the Random Encounter check.

Another thing that I found really sped up dungeon play was to pre-roll a couple of lists of "Random Encounter" results. Then, when a RE check came up positive to just use the first thing on the pre-generated list for that dungeon level (crossing it out). That way, I could have an idea of the order of the random events, and get a chance to think about how to incorporate the next one as we play, but I never know _when_ that next event will happen. Will those 4 Gnoll guards show up now? Or when the party has packed up half the treasure? Oh, the next RE event is spooky noises and bats... ok, I'll foreshadow that with environment descriptions. Etc, etc.

Yeah, I liked dungeon crawls in my past, but am more prone to do overland and city adventuring more now with a few small dungeon crawls thrown in for that old feel, things like under mountain don't appeal to me anymore, unless you have a spell to take you to places like Skull port or such for a quick bash, I'm getting older now, so dungeon crawling is just too dusty for me, cough, cough!