QuoteAfter all, to my mind, the soul of strategy is the "indirect approach": defeating challenges by attacking them at their weakest point, not their strongest.

Great Captains for the win!

I fear, though, there´s a lot of people not into anticlimactic resolution of situations.

That Mearls-Cal exchange was one of the more interesting things I've read on these boards.  Good stuff.  Thanks!
:cool:

This has been a very enlightening thread, so thanks for posting. While I also like the tactical elements of D&D (and in fact never had a problem with grid-based combat or even Attacks of Opportunity), it is the strategic dimension which fascinates me. In the scenario I am preparing for WoAdWriMo, there are multiple tactical challenges feeding into a global strategic challenge via an (informal) escalation mechanic. Without going into specifics, it is possible for PCs to successfully complete every tactical problem they come across but eventually push themselves into a corner. While this structure wasn't an outcome of conscious design decisions (more on the matter below), it is neverthless an intriguing concept.

I believe dungeons are ripe ground for similar decisionmaking dilemmas (for the record, my WoAdWriMo submission isn't a dungeon). Under the traditional paradigm, the PCs engage a complex environment according to their priorities and risk taking behaviour. It is, for example, fairly easy to weigh the consequences of engaging individual encounters. There are potential losses of equipment, spells, hit points and so forth, but little unpredictability at first. By descending deeper into potentially lucrative zones, the players start pushing their luck. Every subsequent encounter after the first has a higher risk content (this is also known as the ,,one more room" syndrome), generating a feeling of tension and uncertainty which grows as play progresses towards total resource depletion. It is very possible to blast through challenges but end up deep underground, lost, and so low on resources that getting back to the surface will have to be in the form of a suicide run. Consequently, I believe that orthodox dungeon expeditions tend to self-structure if done right, and often lead to satisfactory ,,story arcs" and denounements. However, these structures need a specific kind of setup to emerge from; suitably large and spatially complex megadungeons (whose desirable physical layout was discussed in my cited essay, although this didn't address the also relevant question of content) are one possible solution to the dilemma.

Yet I must also offer a skeptical note. There is a lot more to the appeal of dungeons, or games, than design theory. Theory is an useful framework to think and increase our understanding of how games function, but it has to be kept in mind that genuinely fruitful creative process is too unregulated and fuzzy to simply rely on what is essentially an abstraction. It would be entirely possible to follow every bit of good advice in this thread and still come up with a dungeon which would lack that special appeal which makes people all enthusiastic and excited. I, for example, sometimes look at my output with an eye towards what works and what doesn't, and try to find out why it is so. But when I am actually making something, I don't think in terms of theory; merely in the terms of what I think awesome and what makes me enthusiastic. Every time I sat down cold-hearted with theory on the mind, the end result ended up flat and colourless. This is also why I am skeptical about the Forge; their discussions have been turned from useful analytical tools into a prescriptive ideology, and it shows in the output (this countryman of mine is a prime example: has the theory down pat, writes his own, debates it on online forums but doesn't actually play enjoyable games all that much*). Mike, your essay on rust monsters is the same deal. Every step in the design process is logical and follows from the philosophy fashionable in the WotC design culture, but your conclusion and the attempted fix is nevertheless erroneous. It bothered me when I read it, and solidified my complete alienation with what is ,,in" in gaming right now. I think this was because I look at games through the lens of ,,A wild and untamed thing instead of Engineered to be fun, and likely have different priorities than the people 3.* was designed for. But that's okay, too: if what I do is liked by six people around my table, it will be plenty enough.

But I ramble. Onwards, to work!

*In truth, statements like ,,Last year I put an ad on the Internet: GM is looking for players. (One of the causes was to get a practical view on play for designing games.)" are scary as hell when you think them through.

I thought this might be an interesting follow-up to this thread, particularly in light of the discussion on strategic vs. tactical play.

There are spoilers below for the new Undermountain book. I've put the text in white, so just select it to read.

Anyway, I'm running an off the cuff Undermountain campaign, 2nd (now 3rd) level PCs, a mix of stuff in the new Undermountain hardcover and things I made up.

In tonight's session, the players managed to get completely lost, ambushed and almost killed by a grick, attacked and beaten up pretty bad by a swarm of tiny beholder monsters, and almost overwhelmed by an endless stream of spiders summoned by a monster hiding beneath an illusory web cast over a well. The sessione ended with the PCs running away from the spiders and escaping. They think they're supposed to keep going south after the dwarf they've been hired to track down, but they're no longer 100% sure that's the best idea. OTOH, going back through the spider room doesn't seem like a better option.

The players never figured out that the spiders were summoned, so they hung around the well, fighting spiders as they came up. Eventually, the fighter was down to a few hit points and they ran for it. They got away, but now:

1. They have no idea where they are.
2. They likely have to go back through the well room to get out.
3. They're about half-way through their food.
4. They don't have a map.

It's interesting watching them react to the environment and plot out stuff. Undermountain is very good at the strategic thing, with the players trying to string together the landmarks they've passed into some sort of map. They came across a small village of goblins who traded with them, so if they can get there they can rest and buy food. However, there's a ton of monsters between them and safety. I can see the wheels turning as they talked over their options after the game, and it's definitely interesting.

As a DM, I'm having a ton of fun. It's really a joy to watch them wrestle with this stuff. We'll see what happens next week.

Melan - I'll post a follow-up to your comments tomorrow. I'm a bit too tired and coming off the rush of a fun session to really think things through.

Quote from: mearlsI thought this might be an interesting follow-up to this thread, particularly in light of the discussion on strategic vs. tactical play.

...

It's interesting watching them react to the environment and plot out stuff. Undermountain is very good at the strategic thing, with the players trying to string together the landmarks they've passed into some sort of map. They

That's the beauty of the big dungeon and playing without a map. You can get lost!

I managed to get a group seperated one time, when one of the players fell through a spiralling slide that went to a completely different level.

They ended up rappelling down the slide to rescue the other character.

Mike; take your time, I am offline the entire weekend anyhow. The play report about Undermountain highlights some of the fun aspects of big non-linear dungeons. Undermountain (probably the best 2e product I know of outside the original Dark Sun box) is one of those which lend themselves to spontaneous adventures emerging from the complex environment.* When I was running the dungeon around 1994 or 1995, it was very different from how you describe the experience. Although I had a notebook with my own room descriptions that managed to flesh out about a third of Level One, the rest forever remained empty. So instead of the proper and methodical strategy&tactics dungeon exploration thing, what we had instead was fly-by-your-pants improvisation, PCs getting into crazy situations (ambushed by mind flayers and diving through a water tunnel into a wizard's lab who promptly started lobbing fireballs and fleeing when the mind flayers caught up with them; charming a bullette and taking it up the Yawning Portal via telekinesis to assault Durnan and his cronies, etc.), usually with a lot of running, chaos and being lost. Despite being set in a dungeon, it was completely disorganised and not at all efficient. But it perfectly demonstrates the possibilities you can get out of a dungeon, even if it isn't treated "right".

(It may or may not be interesting that problem solving wasn't thought of in the tactical or strategic dimension, but in the dimension of creative thinking. So as long as it was a creative solution, it had a chance to work. It was, for example, a perfectly valid tactic to bullshit your way out of a tight situation with a lich, for example. It sometimes had the logics of a computer adventure game, and I wonder if those had an indirect effect on our behaviour.)

* The same concept is a very "in" thing in computer gaming today. The Sims, Thief 1-2., Deus Ex and the upcoming Bioshock all address these ideas in the framework of digital entertainment.

Hi Melan,

'Wild and untamed' is a good thing, I agree. And there are no 'laws of dungeon design' in the sense that there probably are laws of physics.

Your objection is pretty general and philosophical. What seems the right approach with respect to these little bits we've gleaned about dungeon design is this: don't follow the rules and then make your dungeon; make your dungeon, and when your muse fails you, look to the cool metatactical and strategic observations we've gleaned so far to develop them.

In this context the 'theory' becomes a useful tool, one that helps you see connections between the elements of your design and take them closer to where you want to go.

Dungeons are like plants. A good gardener who knows something about botany or the practical lore of gardening can help them grow into a desired form. But the plant itself can't be erected on even a perfect scaffolding of such principles.

We have no such perfect scaffolding for dungeon design, but even if we did, we couldn't build a good dungeon from it alone. The seed has to be growing inside your mind; then a knowledge of these useful principles is the way to guide it to grow into a healthier, more unified and beautiful organism.

Quote from: Pierce InverarityThis 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.)

Seriously? It's probably familiarity more than anything. If instead it were the kind of "story games" like the girls I knew growing up used to do - pretty much fanfic, where they passed a notebook around and each added a paragraph or two to a story - then that would be seen as normal and dungeon-type adventures or games would be marginalized. In fact, my first girlfriend and her friends did this and they pretty much had a rudimentary roleplaying system down when I met her to help define characters and what was or wasn't possible.