In the old days almost every adventure included a dungeon. Sure some of us expanded the concept pretty early to include outdoors adventures and epic treks across fantasy worlds but let there be no mistake, it was about being in or getting to the next dungeon.

Things have changed however and I know Ive run a campaign for months before without a single dungeon crawl. So how often do they occur in your game?

A fair amount, or at least they do exist in the broad sense of the term, as underground complexes.  I enjoy them, but also enjoy a semi-plausible, "naturalized" world where they make at least some modest sense.  Thus, I tend to make settings that would have them, with plenty of dwarves or other races that would make and live in them, and usually with changes in the way magic works to allow for them.  

For example, I'll frequently use a sense of fantastical exaggeration to turn what in our world would probably be a single cave or maybe a few small caves into a bigger complex.  The mountains are taller, the seas deeper, the sky more blue, and the caves come along for the ride.

Depends enormously on the setting. A lot in my old D&D campaign in part because the characters were all 7th level or lower. Occasionally in Runequest Glorantha. Never in Pendragon or Star Trek except for an actual dungeon on some planet in Star Trek. Very rarely in Call of Cthulhu or Star Wars. Several times in a very long Honor+Intrigue 1620s France campaign.

My current AS&SH campaign started with a crawl through a small cave complex, then they broke into a manor with a small dungeon beneath it, then spent some time exploring a multilevel dungeon, then back in town were hired to clear a small dungeon beneath the tavern.  We've spent the last couple sessions on an overland trek.  The destination is another dungeon.

They're quite prevalent.

Fairly often.

It is far easier to hide your shenanigans from the hand of the Welcoming Earth than the eye of the Unconquered Sun or even the eye of the Wandering Moon.

More now than in the past; mostly because I've been going with the maxim "D&D is right (and Dungeons is right in the damn name)" rather than trying to make things "Make sense, and dungeons don't make sense they're dumb."

Don't get me wrong. I still have reasons for my dungeons to exist, but "A wizard did it." is perfectly cromulent in D&D.

It depends on the game. My D&D setting is chock-a-block full of dungeons; it is set up and run as a sandbox, but there are so damn many dungeons that players know they will stumble across something interesting in any direction. The only problem is figuring out whether your 2nd level characters just wandered into B1 or S1...

In other games, like classic Runequest, dungeons are more widely spread around and more than half the active gaming time is spent in cities, countryside, villages, feast halls, etc.

A decent amount of smaller ruins, tombs, and dungeons scattered over some wilderlands that border the edge of the human lands for the players to discover, and then explore or ignore as they see fit.  There is of course some wilderness exploration involved in getting to the various sites in question.  They also have the option for some city-based adventures, and more recently they've been drawn into some political machinations, as well.

Quote from: rgrove0172;1025725In the old days almost every adventure included a dungeon. Sure some of us expanded the concept pretty early to include outdoors adventures and epic treks across fantasy worlds but let there be no mistake, it was about being in or getting to the next dungeon.

Things have changed however and I know Ive run a campaign for months before without a single dungeon crawl. So how often do they occur in your game?

The woodgrain box had rules for outdoor adventuring. It's always been a significant dimension of the game.

On to your question; about as much as they factored into Conan stories like red nails, or about as much as Moria factored into the lord of the rings. Which is to say, as much as any other important staple of the genre (wizards, monsters, magic swords, etc.)

More numerically, I would say between a third and a half of all session time is spent dungeon crawling; some degree of this is due to the slow, cautious nature of dungeoncrawls, rather than their relative importance to the players and the game.

Non-existent.

My last game using a genuine D&D engine had no dragons, magic or monsters, either.

Depends on the campaign and the game world.

Most of my more recent gameworlds (er... hehe... "recent" as in, after my first decade making gameworlds, so after 1990) have no dungeons except places that if they are dungeon-like, have a reason to be the way they are that is not just an excuse for there to be something dungeon-like. That is, they're actual dungeons (prisons, torture chambers, pits to throw terminal convicts in and scare others with), or they're lairs of beasts or camps or forts or treasure vaults or mines or catacombs or sewers or natural caves, and what's in them is just naturally what's in them, or naturally not. Another way of looking at that is that the action takes place everywhere in the game world - the towns and roads and countryside are all "the dungeon" in the sense that that's where the gameplay happens.

My original campaign world has quite a few underground tunnel systems with elaborate traps and treasures and denizens and mysteries whose reasons for existing are fairly likely to be afterthoughts, retcons and/or rationalizations.

Quote from: Azraele;1025745The woodgrain box had rules for outdoor adventuring. It's always been a significant dimension of the game.

On to your question; about as much as they factored into Conan stories like red nails, or about as much as Moria factored into the lord of the rings. Which is to say, as much as any other important staple of the genre (wizards, monsters, magic swords, etc.)

More numerically, I would say between a third and a half of all session time is spent dungeon crawling; some degree of this is due to the slow, cautious nature of dungeoncrawls, rather than their relative importance to the players and the game.

For reference, each of the four books of The Hobbit and LotR contains about a dozen fights (defined as any situation where someone attempts an attack roll or hostile spell casting at someone else), including 1 or more pitched battles, and involves entering 1-3 spaces we would count as dungeons.

I use small dungeons (like lairs, crypts, caves, old mines) quite a bit, but never mega dungeons. They usually bore me. Anything more than two sessions worth of adventure is probably too much.

It's not like the characters have a shortage of things to do.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1025755For reference, each of the four books of The Hobbit and LotR contains about a dozen fights (defined as any situation where someone attempts an attack roll or hostile spell casting at someone else), including 1 or more pitched battles, and involves entering 1-3 spaces we would count as dungeons.

That brings up the question of what we mean by calling something a "dungeon", exactly. Would "we" necessarily count those as dungeons? Maybe not, depending on what we mean by dungeon. The only one that comes to mind in The Hobbit and LoTR that is actually a dungeon per se is when the Elves lock up the dwarves in The Hobbit. The others may be underground and have things to fight and discover/loot in them, but they have reasons to exist and go to other than generic underground adventure meta-theme-parks for genre-sanctioned mahem with near-zero social consequences (which is the first notion that comes to my mind for what the definition of "dungeon" tends to be in a conventional D&D-esque context).

Their frequency is entirely dependent upon the players choosing to explore them.

Which is very frequent.  So, I would say the majority of time spent playing is in dungeons.  But if the players wanted to do more wilderness exploration then that % could drop to very little.