Quote from: Skarg;1025761That 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).

The dungeons in The Hobbit and LotR:
The Hobbit: Goblin Gate, Thranduil's Halls, Erebor
Fellowship of the Ring: Moria (perhaps plus the 'mini dungeon' of the barrow on the barrow downs)
Two Towers: The Glittering Caves, Shelob's Lair (if you wanted to be pushy you could argue the caves of the Forbidden Pool are just a small friendly dungeon)
Return of the King: Paths of the Dead, and the interconnected system of tunnels including Shelob's Lair and the Tower of Cirith Ungol

In the most completely mapped area there are 9 dungeons spread over 1,292 square miles or 1 dungeon per 140 square miles. The players have spent around half the game time in dungeons. I find it interesting that the players as much as the characters need to spent the time in the civilized world to recover from the stress of dungeon crawling.

It depends how broadly you define "dungeon".

By actual dungeons which exist only to be explored for lootz - pretty rare.

But a lot of different places can fill a similar place in gameplay - though generally shorter.

Temples of evil gods, monster infested sewers, monster lair caves, prison levels during breakout?  Sure.  Depending upon the system, starships, space stations, paramilitary compounds, and gang-infested back alleys can all play similarly to a classic dungeon.  Just replace monsters with toughs/soldiers, and replace traps with auto-turrets or some such.

Rather rare in the sense of a traditional dungeon.  A shaft tomb of two or three rooms and a trap wouldn't qualify to my way of thinking, though, nor would a goblin lair in a natural cave complex, even if the goblins made some 'home improvement' when they set up housekeeping.   Those things seem different to my way of thinking and when I need them I drop them in there.

I tend towards short and functional, as in, they fulfil some other function as well as being an underground hall-of-pinatas. As my current D&D game is set in sort-of-the-real-world, I get a lot of mileage out of tourist maps, because where my guys are is lousy with barrows, fairy holes, underground crypts etc in real life. These are usually quite short though, so not full dungeons. The PCs are perilously close to the Caste Gargantua mega-dungeon by Kabuki Kaiser, and I have a few modern classics (like Stonehell) on the world map, so I'm not averse to having PCs plunge into the real thing, if they want.

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?

1: Not really. More often the dungeon was just part of a larger adventure. Or there was no dungeon at all. There are buildings, forests, castles, towers, etc. And if you are including exploring houses as being a dungeon then I am sorry but unless your adventures are all about camping then you've run some dungeons. Possibly alot of them. And if you dont consider them dungeons then guess what? Alot of modules lack a central dungeon. And what about cave exploration? Is someones basement a dungeon?

2: Things havent changed at all.

3: Depends on the campaign. For example in the 8+ year long Spelljammer campaign I think Ive been in all of maybee 4 dungeons and that is being generous and including things like tombs and temples with a trapped entry hall and a central room.

In the ongoing tandem party campaign we have encountered so far not a single dungeon at all. Its all been things like a giant tree/tower, a mansion, and most recently what I suspect was a crashed spelljammer ship. Everything else has been swamp and forestcrawls, and sneaking around a fort.

GMing Hoard of the dragon queen there are only 2 dungeons in it. And the first is not till act 3. The 2nd is a few chapters later and its part of a larger area rather than the centerpiece.

Quote from: Omega;1025782Is someones basement a dungeon?

Do the windows have bars? Are there rooms with locks on the outside? Manacles attached to the walls?

A lot.

Expanded caverns, sewer lairs, crypts, canyon/rift locations, underground/sealed away cities.  Those are often present in games I run.  Are these what the average ref describes as dungeons?  Some yes, some no.  They are that component in my campaigns, though.  The players I have ran games with like to move on to new locations regularly.  So, that is more the driving force behind the expansiveness of this type of location.

Quote from: Charon's Little Helper;1025774It depends how broadly you define "dungeon".

By actual dungeons which exist only to be explored for lootz - pretty rare.

But a lot of different places can fill a similar place in gameplay - though generally shorter.

Temples of evil gods, monster infested sewers, monster lair caves, prison levels during breakout?  Sure.  Depending upon the system, starships, space stations, paramilitary compounds, and gang-infested back alleys can all play similarly to a classic dungeon.  Just replace monsters with toughs/soldiers, and replace traps with auto-turrets or some such.

This.

I'm doing a lot of Star Wars lately and dungeons by definition are rare, but there are still a lot of crowded urban backalleys full of criminals who have grown up in the maze of buildings and utilities tunnels that the PCs must travel through and occasionally fight through.

Star Wars?  I would count Death Stars and star destroyers as dungeon locations.

It's not the location that is rare in my campaigns, it is the keyed over view map like Tegel Manor or Tomb of Horrors prep work that is rare.

My OD&D has both dungeons and dragons in great abundance.

If I'm playing D&D, I want to be in a dungeon most of the time. Otherwise, I'd play another fantasy RPG.

There's an old Dwarfen complex buried in the Westwood and the party that recently went through the Westwood went into the complex on their way back through. So they spent much more time above ground than in it. I have another group that went through a very short dungeon into an unmapped and unexplored (recently) outdoor area.

I run Wilderlands of High Fantasy in 5e D&D, so there is lots of wilderness, war and politics... but I'd say dungeons are still the heart of the game. Last night Hakeem the 20th level god emperor & his band went sewer crawling beneath Ahyf town to rescue a kidnapped coin girl... They killed a lot of ghouls, missed the one they were looking for, but found the underground Black Market, killed some more people, and rescued a different missing girl instead.

BTW D&D "dungeon" is IMO clearly a term of art. A location becomes a dungeon through the way it's engaged with procedurally in play (or similar literary/cinema approach). A city you dungeon-crawl through street by street, house by house, is a "dungeon". A Moria type vast ruined dwarf hold where the GM says "OK, you spend 3 days crossing through Moria" is not a D&D dungeon in any meaningful sense - in fact it sounds more like a D&D "Wilderness".

Khare, Cityport of Traps (Sorcery! #2) is a gamebook 'dungeon', whereas Moria or the Paths of the Dead as presented by Tolkien in LoTR barely are - there's just a tiny bit of 'crawl' in each.

Outside RPGs, D&D "dungeons" are rare - maybe in some Survival Horror stuff. In RPGs they vary from common to non-existent. The Escape the Death Star sequence in Star Wars notably had some dungeon elements, such as branching decision points via corridors & doors, and what looked like random Stormtrooper & garbage monster encounters.

So: Dungeon is a play mode or a means of engaging the player (or audience), not a physical thing in-world.