Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;583253The whole word meaning/language argument comes off as stupid and trollish, to me.

Notice, too, that he ignores every other aspect of the conversation in order to obsessively focus on his S&M nonsense.

Pure trolling.

Quote from: mcbobbo;583276Going back to the OP for a minute - why? Why does a video game being strong at something necessarily mean that RPGs shouldn't use it?

I don't think it's a matter of "thou must not". But if you're talking about that kind of pure kick-down-the-door, hack 'n slash there's really no question that CRPGs deliver it in a vastly superior form: Faster resolution. Prettier graphics. Better soundtrack. And so forth.

So if you're a player looking for that kind of gameplay, you're going to be a lot more satisfied with a CRPG.

And the segment of the market that is looking exclusively for that kind of gameplay is, for all intents and purposes, lost to the tabletop RPG industry/hobby.

True story...when I first moved to New Orleans nigh 20 years ago, I went to the French Quarter.

"Alright, there's gaming here, a place called the Dungeon!"....I went in, and hilarity ensued, or would have had I not left once I saw that it, well, wasn't "that kind" of dungeon.

Quote from: mcbobbo;583276I'm sure there are other examples, so what are you seeing here that I'm not?

I was talking about level based challenge control there, I think the Pundit had a thread railing against the same concept recently. Players should have a pretty good idea whether or not they can take a trio of trolls without needing to look it up on a chart, or at least that's how I work it. Of course in my system player ingenuity can turn most combats on their head within the mechanics and without fate points, its pretty flexible that way. Also it makes the unknown that much more thrilling.

Quote from: Elfdart;583368I've always preferred Indoor and Outdoor, which are (a) relevant to the game: weapon/spell ranges (b) self-explanatory and (c) nearly impossible for even the pettifogging fucktards in this thread to waste bandwidth arguing over for several pages.

That's not (I think) the level of distinction that's being argued about here though.

The fun thing is that "RPG theory" tends towards theorywank so much that nearly 40 years after D&D was released it's still difficult to have this kind of conversation.

Anyway - there's a couple of camps arguing here, but at least one of them seems to be using "dungeon" as a synonym for "any mapped location that the exploration of can provide for an interesting RPG session". This comes back to Benoist's post in another thread that the three main times of "adventure models" (broadly - content the GM can generate to support the creation in play of an adventure) are dungeon/exploration zone, investigation, and relationship network.

There's another camp that I think is arguing that a "dungeon" is necessarily a walled environment, because it is a defining feature of a dungeon that any given location can be approached by a limited number of paths. Therefore a wilderness adventure is something different, even if it is purely presented as a "series of interesting locations on a map" in the way of a classic dungeon.

Quote from: daniel_ream;583326Erg.  I'm not sure I can, except to say "take a first-year course in graph theory".  I'm not being condescending; this is some fairly abstract theoretical stuff and can be hard to get your head around.

A dungeon[1] can be mapped as a graph, where "interesting locations" are the nodes and the not terribly interesting parts are the edges.  Note that in general this does not mean rooms == nodes, hallways == edges; a trap in a hallway is a node, but the thirty feet of empty corridor leading up to it is probably an edge.

I think this is pretty distinct from, say, a hexcrawl, and you can see this if you map a hexcrawl as a graph.  Rather than looking something like this, a hexcrawl looks like an even pattern of nodes all connected to the six adjacent nodes forever, like chainmail.

That distinction - the constraints on traversing the nodes due to the limited paths imposed by the edges connecting them - is the distinction between a dungeon and an open site plan like a ruined city or town, where something as simple as a Fly spell means you can go to any location you fancy.

That was actually pretty informative, thanks.

Now, do you feel graph theory has any tricks & tips to offer to the discerning dungeon-building DM?

Quote from: Grymbok;583413Anyway - there's a couple of camps arguing here, but at least one of them seems to be using "dungeon" as a synonym for "any mapped location that the exploration of can provide for an interesting RPG session". This comes back to Benoist's post in another thread that the three main times of "adventure models" (broadly - content the GM can generate to support the creation in play of an adventure) are dungeon/exploration zone, investigation, and relationship network.

And just to make things more complex, these types of adventures exist in the context of a larger campaign. So what happens in actual play are hybrid situations. For example the party launches an investigation because of their relationship with the locals and part of it involves exploring a underground dungeon and an unsettled forest, both involving various factions of the locals.

There is no clear dividing line. My advice is not to try to cram things into a particular box but look at the campaign as a place that actually exists. Then devire the individual elements you need to focus on. Then use the best tools to craft each individual element.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;583391I don't think it's a matter of "thou must not". But if you're talking about that kind of pure kick-down-the-door, hack 'n slash there's really no question that CRPGs deliver it in a vastly superior form: Faster resolution. Prettier graphics. Better soundtrack. And so forth.

So if you're a player looking for that kind of gameplay, you're going to be a lot more satisfied with a CRPG.

And the segment of the market that is looking exclusively for that kind of gameplay is, for all intents and purposes, lost to the tabletop RPG industry/hobby.

I find it tragic to exclude them, though.  RPGs aren't as good at action, but they are also more flexible, which means they can be action when they have to be and something else entirely when they don't.

I've put in a lot of time on Deus Ex lately (Steam had a sale...) and I find even that game's options rather lacking.  I'm playing this sneaky, 'don't kill anybody' guy mostly just for the challenge of it.  But there's no way to do the 'boss fights' that way.  I have to use ample lethal force until the cut scene kicks in, there's simply no other way to do it.

An RPG could satisfy me in that latter way, too, but the computer game can't.

Just for the lulz to provide an example, this is about what a complete graph of the board for Clue looks like.  Throw a couple of edges on the outside connecting two nodes on each side for the secret passages.  The labour intensive part is putting the weights for the edges in there.  Obviously, the secret passages would have weights of one each, while the others range from three to 27 or so.




That is a very simple nine-room layout.  Each vertex has a degree of 8, so there are 72 edges to deal with.  Even a minimally more complicated dungeon will quickly get out of hand, especially if there is the arbitrary insertion or removal of nodes (wandering monsters) and every action site is a node.

The better use of graphs would be to plot out the adventure overall, or NPC relations and interactions, national relations, keeping track of supply and demand for more accurate economics mini-games, or even the rivalries and associations between the denizens of a dungeon.

I have nothing against the basic dungeon, I love it in fact, but in both my Albion game and my Arrows of Indra setting, I made a point of having "no Dungeons", but what I mean by that is no "dungeons-for-dungeon's-sake".

In albion what you have are castles, catacombs, tombs, burial mounds, caves, even underground cities.

In Arrows of Indra there's lost temples, ruined cities, and the nearly-infinite cavern complexes of the Patala Underworld.

You just don't have anything that's a dungeon just because... dungeon!


RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;584024You just don't have anything that's a dungeon just because... dungeon!


RPGPundit

I would think that applies to any setting which is logically thought out and developed.

Quote from: RPGPundit;584024You just don't have anything that's a dungeon just because... dungeon!


RPGPundit

That's how the gelatinous cube came about, wasn't it?  They needed to have a reason for something that keeps the dungeon from looking like a macabre episode from Hoarders.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;584035I would think that applies to any setting which is logically thought out and developed.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;584041They needed to have a reason for something that keeps the dungeon from looking like a macabre episode from Hoarders.

Putting those two ideas together explains a random encounter from a dungeon I ran about twenty-five years ago, which consisted of two goblins with brooms, a toothless old wolf pulling a dog cart full of debris, and an orc overseer with a whip.

Quote from: The Traveller;582521As a video game, that works great, which would have been interesting if we didn't have video games. As an RPG, its a head scratcher.

...So what do dungeons mean to you, and why are they interesting as opposed to quest-like endeavours? Do you prefer to keep them theme based, how do you work them?

Back in 1970-71, there wasn't much in the way of video games. The dungeon adventure concept certainly influenced computer-game designers after D&D was published.

Just as D&D spun off from wargames, so further forms have spun off from it. The "role-playing" term was a bit irksome at first, borrowed as it was from psychotherapy. By the late '70s, some people were pretty insistent that their particular interpretation of what it means is central to "proper" or "good" RPGs.

The dungeon provides an easy focus for the start of a campaign. Remember that the campaign as Arneson and Gygax developed it was a "massively multi-player" affair with the strategic elements of a wargame campaign. Maybe World of Warcraft satisfies many people today, just as other video games have scratched other itches better than paper-and-pencil games did.

They remain, however, very different experiences to many others. We enjoy face-to-face dungeon games for reasons that include the reasons people get together to play card games and board games.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;584035I would think that applies to any setting which is logically thought out and developed.

I've seen plenty of D&D dungeons that really make no sense when you think about it. Just a big mess of corridors and rooms that go on for level after underground level with no better explanation of why they're there other than "a wizard did it" (which still doesn't explain WHY he would do it that particular way).
Which is all fine, if you decide in your setting that this is just something that happens; insane wizards making vast multi-level dungeons with no apparent coherent plan or concept.

But in Albion and AoI I wanted to do things different.

RPGPundit

The sources of my fascination with "dungeons" in RPGing, other than the great fun of the RPG dungeons themselves are:

- The movies Alien and Aliens
- Much of the Raiders of the Lost Ark franchise
- The invasion of the Death Star to free the Millennium Falcon
- the Mines of Moria
- numerous James Bond film segments
- parts of the myth of Perseus
- Labyrinth
- Hogwarts
- the hedge maze in Colonial Williamsburg
- ACC's Rama books
- many other mythical, literary and cinematic sources who's specifics I can't currently remember but that I'm sure exist (such as parts of the Thieves World and Fritz Leiber stories and the Beowulf saga).