Quote from: daniel_ream;583262This causes all manner of problems when, as is frequently the case, the first dig site is not at all representative of the overall culture.

Do the problems you're describing have analogues in RPG settings, though?  I think outside of pedantry, everyone basically 'gets' what a dungeon is.  Is this not the case?

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.

Going 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?

E.g. hit points.  Video games are much better at tracking hit points, damage - really anything to do with numbers - because they're always, necessarily, tied into a really, really powerful calculator.

I'm sure there are other examples, so what are you seeing here that I'm not?

Quote from: mcbobbo;583250Ham-handed example -
I'm confident that, being on some form of broadband, you are aware of the word 'router'.  Base word, 'route', sounds like 'r-ow-t'.  Unless you're talking about a 'route', as in a highway, such as 'route 66' (or at Sonic 'route 44') - pronounced like 'root'.  Again, same base word, and when you analyze it just a tiny bit, same base meaning as well.  Yet you'll never, ever, ever hear anyone complaining about his internet 'rooter'.  Why?

Context.

As it happens, here in the UK we pronounce it "rooter". Unless we're talking carpentry, in which case it's a "rowter".

Quote from: Grymbok;583285As it happens, here in the UK we pronounce it "rooter". Unless we're talking carpentry, in which case it's a "rowter".

No shit?  That's hilarious, considering I just labeled it as impossible...  Oh well, learn something new every day.

If it helps, though, I did just have this same conversation with an Israeli coworker.  She's using the 'ow' pronunciation, but only in the internet appliance case.  It actually took some convincing to get her to believe that they were in fact the same word.  So I blame the English.

Quote from: mcbobbo;583274I think outside of pedantry, everyone basically 'gets' what a dungeon is.  Is this not the case?

It seems pretty clear to me that it's not.   I think that if you were to ask the vast majority of D&D players that don't hang out on OSR fora what a "dungeon" was, they'd tell you it was an underground structure of connected rooms filled with monsters and traps.  Whether the design and placement of such is arbitrary or nonsensical is irrelevant to the definition.  In fact, many of the early TSR modules explicitly refer to the ruined keep or castle or city and the dungeon underneath it.

The dungeon being an underground complex is, I would argue, an essential part of the definition for the vast majority of players.  The fact that a tower, a keep, a manor house, a ruined city, a necropolis, etc. can be designed and run the same way as a dungeon doesn't make those things "dungeons" in any useful sense of the word - it means that all those things and dungeons are examples of a specific class of game design that doesn't have a very good name yet.

Look at it this way: if people consistently used the word "Dragon" to mean "any monster" (the same way they mean "monster" to mean "anything not a PC"), don't you think there'd be a bit of understandable confusion?

Give up, people. The Traveller is argüing in bad faith and choosing not to engage actual responses.

Let's focus on avenues that can lead to actual, constructive outcomes. For instance:

Quote from: daniel_ream;583189Technically it's a graph, which is what distinguishes it from an open city, necropolis, besieged keep, etc.

I'm not sure this is an actual, valid distinction unique to dungeons. Dungeons aren't typically plotted as graphs, but as maps, with well-defined metrics; they can certainly be plotted as graphs (cf. Melan diagrams), but so can any map with features. Just about everything that can be mapped is a graph. The classic use of graphs in RPGs, for me, is V:tM's relationship diagrams.

But maybe I'm misunderstanding your point, so I'd be glad if you could elaborate.

Quote from: daniel_ream;583288Look at it this way: if people consistently used the word "Dragon" to mean "any monster" (the same way they mean "monster" to mean "anything not a PC"), don't you think there'd be a bit of understandable confusion?

No, actually, even in this extreme case I'd wager that people can figure it out.  Specifically because if/when the 'dragon' is an actual 'dragon' it gets described with a precedent 'type'.  So there are 'dragons' and there are 'Gold Dragons' which are two different things.

Not that I'm saying anyone actually does this.  I'm only saying that making 'dragon' functionally equivalent to 'monster' does and changes nothing.

Quotemon·ster/ˈmänstər/
Noun:   
An imaginary creature that is typically large, ugly, and frightening.

If it were a problem, you could object to it now, without changing it to 'dragon'.  In no way is a pony a 'monster'.  It is not imaginary, not typically large, nor ugly, nor frightening.  Yet, here it is in the same category as the 'Giant Bombardier Beetle' and the Tarrasque.

But since it is commonly assumed that we can move from the less specific 'monster' to the more specific 'pony' there is no objection.

And I only chose pony because it defies all three (edit - four, sorry) of the definition-criteria above.  Many of the other entries defy two and many more defy at least one.

So I'll have to assume the objection to 'dungeon' not adhering to 'underground European prison that probably never actually existed in the first place' isn't being made in good faith.

Quote from: daniel_ream;583288It seems pretty clear to me that it's not.   I think that if you were to ask the vast majority of D&D players that don't hang out on OSR fora what a "dungeon" was, they'd tell you it was an underground structure of connected rooms filled with monsters and traps.  Whether the design and placement of such is arbitrary or nonsensical is irrelevant to the definition.  In fact, many of the early TSR modules explicitly refer to the ruined keep or castle or city and the dungeon underneath it.

The dungeon being an underground complex is, I would argue, an essential part of the definition for the vast majority of players.  The fact that a tower, a keep, a manor house, a ruined city, a necropolis, etc. can be designed and run the same way as a dungeon doesn't make those things "dungeons" in any useful sense of the word - it means that all those things and dungeons are examples of a specific class of game design that doesn't have a very good name yet.

Look at it this way: if people consistently used the word "Dragon" to mean "any monster" (the same way they mean "monster" to mean "anything not a PC"), don't you think there'd be a bit of understandable confusion?

No, no doubt about the possible confusion. I do see your point that a dungeon has an 'outside of the RPG' connotation of underground.  While Tegel Manor and Under the Storm Giant's Castle certainly meet most of our criterion of an 'exploratoin site' and therefor, a Dungeon, I can understand your point that someone outside the industry may have some isues due to the connotation.

Quote from: The Traveller;583128I can pull sentences out of context of the comment and attack them too, folks. Although if you want to pointlessly quibble on semantics technically even a burglary is called a "home invasion", its a perfectly adequate use of the term, in particular with reference to the "de facto" qualifier.

A burglary as a "Home Invasion" doesn't fit your narrow definition either. You said an invasion is "Any situation where you can expect hostile organised resistance" which is hardly true of burglary. In fact, most burglars avoid burglaring anywhere they can expect hostile, organized resistance, choosing instead to burglar places where no one is present to offer hostile, organized resistance.

So your own example runs contrary to your stated definition.

Quote from: The Butcher;583291But maybe I'm misunderstanding your point, so I'd be glad if you could elaborate.

I would hazard a guess that a graph has nodes and edges (links), which are roughly analogous to rooms and corridors.  Rooms would be the 'action sites', and corridors would be the 'connections' between those actions.   It rather breaks down except in the broadest of terms, because a room can very well be a connection devoid of interactions, while a corridor can be the locus of a variety of different actions.

At 10,000ft, the physical structure of most dungeons can be said to look like a graph for the most part.  Once you get on the ground and start interacting with it, the similarities readily disappear.  Certainly, you could simply call a 'hallway' a 'node' if action takes place there, but the action is often unplanned (ie, random encounters).  Mathematical graphs are typically static, because you are trying to determine relationships among data points, if there is one.  Dynamic graphs are generally for representing physical systems, like a computer (or social) network where nodes are added or removed arbitrarily.

That said, graphs are not a terribly inappropriate way of visualizing a dungeon, or how players would possibly interact with it.  Certainly, it could demonstrate an unintended shortcut that allows the party to bypass much or all of the rest of the structure.  Over on Google+, there is an #rpgdevs group, and it was suggested using Tufts University's VUE software to map out adventures or dungeons, which I am experimenting with.

Quote from: LordVreeg;583298No, no doubt about the possible confusion. I do see your point that a dungeon has an 'outside of the RPG' connotation of underground.  While Tegel Manor and Under the Storm Giant's Castle certainly meet most of our criterion of an 'exploratoin site' and therefor, a Dungeon, I can understand your point that someone outside the industry may have some isues due to the connotation.

Castles would count as Dungeons, as Dungeon, in addition to a prison (often underground), has a dictionary definition of the keep or stronghold of a castle. The D&D definition is additive to the dictionary one.

The thing is you can have locations in a game that are dungeons in the techincal sense of the world without the playing it as a dungeon crawl, because said dungeons are free of monsters, traps or treasure. And you can run dungeon crawls in locations that aren't technically dungeons or even underground.

But we've sort of got to decide which of these we talking about otherwise this thread will keep going around in circles.

Quote from: The Butcher;583291I'm not sure this is an actual, valid distinction unique to dungeons. Dungeons aren't typically plotted as graphs, but as maps, with well-defined metrics; they can certainly be plotted as graphs[...], but so can any map with features. Just about everything that can be mapped is a graph. The classic use of graphs in RPGs, for me, is V:tM's relationship diagrams.

But maybe I'm misunderstanding your point, so I'd be glad if you could elaborate.

Erg.  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.

Note that I'm ignoring, obviously, the use of things like Dimension Door or Teleport or Passwall or a team of crack dwarven miners[3] that let you go wherever you want in a dungeon; leaving that aside for a moment, I think there is a very valid distinction between the way PCs are expected to traverse a typical dungeon, and the way they would be expected to traverse a hexcrawl, or a political negotiation, or something not so easily represented as a graph.


[1] Where I'm defining a dungeon as "an underground complex of connected rooms filled with monsters and/or treasure"[2]

[2] Which makes my earlier point: if I have to keep saying "what I mean by 'dungeon'", then the word "dungeon" has ceased to be a useful signifier of anything.

[3] ISTR someone defeating the Tomb of Horrors exactly this way, by using such to tunnel around all the traps without ever using magic.  This is an excellent example of someone realizing that the dungeon is a graph and deciding to break out of the implied restrictions.

Quote from: Grymbok;583175If you don't want to drift the definition of "dungeon", then "site-based adventure" is a reasonable if dull-sounding alternative term.

I'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.

If you can imbed a graph within a node then you can easily recreate a megadungeon, right?

Sort of relates to my mildly improper term usage of macro-micro matrices. But considering matrix is one of the two predominant methods to construct graphs, I don't feel I'm too off the mark. Considering some cool usage of graphing we saw in a topic here (Village of Hommlet, IIRC), and Venn diagraming for social relationships (spheres of influence), I'd say "graph" is the best term to use here. It avoids ambiguity by becoming a broader concept (with refined internal usage) that'll generally be understood by the largest amount of people, inside and outside the hobby.

Or we could continue a semantic war and compartmentalize shared game concepts to specialized community jargon. Either is fine with me. I like this place, but it isn't the be-all-end-all of my gaming, and I've learned to float between social circles before.