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.
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.
A lot. But I classify castles, buildings, forest, and many other things as functionally the same as dungeons.
Quote from: Omega;10257821: 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.
Yes, I would have thought that obvious but to clarify - any large structure, bit it a cave, castle, temple, crypt, factory or whatever that the PCs wander though exploring and facing dangers is included for purposes of this discussion. Wandering through the woods would not be a dungeon, working your way through the maze of streets in an abandoned city probably would be.
Much dungeons here.
Granted, pouring money into Dwarven Forge kickstarters gives me strong motivation, but even pre-DF, there bulk of adventures occurred in underground environments, or in places that may as well have been underground (eg, the Hill Giant Stockade is pretty much a dungeon--most of the rooms in the stockade have no windows, even).
People bitch about dungeons for various reasons, but the fact remains that they are a basically perfect organizing concept for any roleplaying game that involves exploration and mindless violence, which is pretty nearly all of them.
Quote from: Ulairi;1025853A lot. But I classify castles, buildings, forest, and many other things as functionally the same as dungeons.
I use the dungeon structure for a lot of things. It starts to bleed into location based structures, but the idea of "exits" and "rooms" is pretty flexible when you realize what it's doing. (Providing structure for the adventure)
In my sci-fi gaming, basically any setting for adventure where you can't leave easily or see the outside world is pretty much a dungeon: long lost research facilities, asteroid bases, underground ruins, etc. So I end up with a lot of "dungeons" in that sense.
But actual tombs/crypts? A little rarer, but not unheard of.
Quote from: Ratman_tf;1025873I use the dungeon structure for a lot of things. It starts to bleed into location based structures, but the idea of "exits" and "rooms" is pretty flexible when you realize what it's doing. (Providing structure for the adventure)
Yeah, the D&D dungeon is a flow chart structure. If you're not using that structure you're not* running a dungeon. If you are running a woodland adventure with paths = corridors, clearings = rooms, and going off the trail is NOT DONE (get lost, thick brambles, etc) you are running a Dungeon in any meaningful sense. Examples include B5 Horror on the Hill, and various Fighting Fantasy gamebooks such as Forest of Doom, Scorpion Swamp, The Shamutanti Hills etc.
*Hence why 4e D&D, with its "only the encounter matters" paradigm, is commonly accused of "not feeling like D&D".
Quote from: Heavy Josh;1025876In my sci-fi gaming, basically any setting for adventure where you can't leave easily or see the outside world is pretty much a dungeon: long lost research facilities, asteroid bases, underground ruins, etc. So I end up with a lot of "dungeons" in that sense.
Yes, if you go through them room by room. No, if you say "You trek through the abandoned research facility, until..."
I learned this from Justin Alexander's blog - structure matters, and using the right structure matters. Eg in a play by email game the "D&D Dungeon" structure is a terrible, terrible choice. If the environment is basically empty/threatless, it's also a terrible choice. My attempts to use it in 4e D&D did not go well, either. Running tabletop 5e D&D, it's fantastic.
Use the right structure for the right game.
Edit: See here - http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/15126/roleplaying-games/game-structures
I have run very few dungeon modules. I find creating dungeons boring so I seldom have any in my own stuff. I like dungeons as a player but find it boring running them myself.
Quote from: S'mon;1025899Yes, if you go through them room by room. No, if you say "You trek through the abandoned research facility, until..."
I learned this from Justin Alexander's blog - structure matters, and using the right structure matters. Eg in a play by email game the "D&D Dungeon" structure is a terrible, terrible choice. If the environment is basically empty/threatless, it's also a terrible choice. My attempts to use it in 4e D&D did not go well, either. Running tabletop 5e D&D, it's fantastic.
Use the right structure for the right game.
Edit: See here - http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/15126/roleplaying-games/game-structures
Oh, I agree. I almost never do a "room by room" style dungeon crawl, even when the party is neck deep in a long lost underground research facility. They do go from "interesting place" to "interesting place" however. Because I tend to avoid dungeon crawls, and my players know that I'm not going to make them say "we check for traps". I don't want standard operating procedures to slow down the game.
But that's not what the question in the thread topic; it is, however, the question in the OP. So I guess I should have said that I rarely run dungeon crawls, even in science fiction settings underground in ancient facilities with mutant monsters. :D
Quote from: rgrove0172;1025860Yes, I would have thought that obvious but to clarify - any large structure, bit it a cave, castle, temple, crypt, factory or whatever that the PCs wander though exploring and facing dangers is included for purposes of this discussion. Wandering through the woods would not be a dungeon, working your way through the maze of streets in an abandoned city probably would be.
Using this definition, they might vary from occasional to nonexistent;).
Lots of dungeons, towers, temples, ruins etc on offer. I consider the wilderness trek to get to/from the dungeon part of the same adventure, however.
More fluid faction based city scenarios are rarer I think because (i) they're simply harder to do, and (ii) often yield less reliable/concrete loot (instead offering benefits as fame/reputation, loyalty, favours, political clout, etc).
They are there in my GURPS fantasy gameworld, as it started out as a AD&D campaign world and got moved when I switched to GURPS. Dungeon crawling's seldom been a campaign focus, though, and on at least two occasions PC groups entered a dungeon, got pasted in the first couple of rooms, and never went back (or, in one case, went back to one after a 15 year real-time gap between visits.)
It's interesting that the current zeitgeist around dungeons (judging by published adventures and forum topics) are small dungeons (15 or fewer rooms) peppered through a larger adventure path or sandbox setting, or megadungeons. Nothing in between. All of the mindspace around dungeons has shifted to megadungeons.
What ever happened to the 2 to 5 level dungeon? Caverns of Thracia and the Dark Tower are praised to the heavens, but nobody is even trying to create dungeons of that scale that anymore. The only ones that come to mind are the Tomb of Abysthor and Lost City of Barakus, and those are both 15 years old. Even the Dungeon Crawl Classics game eschews dungeons. What's up with that?
Quote from: Haffrung;1026102What's up with that?
Preferences on campaign pacing, maybe? That is, a mega-dungeon is a campaign. That's what the campaign is about, and almost all the focus. A small complex is one that you do as part of a single adventure, most likely. The intermediate dungeons are either a short-campaign, or a multi-adventure thing within a larger campaign. I can see why that might not be appealing to anyone outside a sandbox. With a sandbox, go do something now, then go away and do something else, then come back later and try again--that's great. It's variety in the sandbox and rewards decision making, but it is still possible to eventually clear the thing out. For another campaign, it could feel a little strange.
If you think of table top rpg's as a DIY hobby, then you mostly make your own dungeons, and in that case I doubt much of anyone just sits down and creates a megadungeon. You sit down and START a megadungeon, but it spends a few weeks as a little dungeon with some unfinished passages, and after a year or so it is a medium sized dungeon with some unfinished routes to greater depths, and a few years after that it is a megadungeon.
Quote from: Haffrung;1026102It's interesting that the current zeitgeist around dungeons (judging by published adventures and forum topics) are small dungeons (15 or fewer rooms) peppered through a larger adventure path or sandbox setting
That's my preference because then it makes sense for them to all be (mostly) one faction. If there are only a few rooms, then PCs busting through and taking them down piecemeal makes sense. One of my world-building pet peeves is the massive dungeon of faction X where virtually none of the various rooms of foes make any attempt to help one-another out and let the PCs go from room to room and take them down piecemeal.
Now - you can come up with in-setting reasons for the bigger dungeons, but they tend to feel like rationalizations more often than not.
It's the point of the game in D&D, so yeah I have dungeons a plenty. Big ones. Small ones. Ones you go down. Ones you go up. Ones that are indoors. Ones that are outdoors. All of the lore and other arcana in my setting is found/answered in the dungeons (because knowledge is treasure, and treasure is in dungeons).
I have quite a few, but they tend to be smaller dungeons (a crypt here, an ancient temple or a secret chamber complex beneath a manor there). In my current campaign manuals are often found inside dungeon-like areas (and the players are often chasing after them).
For the most part, a significant portion of my games are and have always been explore an unknown environment, interacting with environmental challenges, 'traps', 'opponents'/'potential allies,' and seeking various forms of treasure. Whether everything qualifies as a dungeon or not is often up to interpretation. Many times the thing keeping both players and monsters inside the 'dungeon' are not walls, but the fact that that is where the objects of interest happen to be. But since I mostly play D&D or analogues, it really helps to have choke-points and the like, so walls or the equivalent are common as well. Since (re-)discovering hillforts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillfort) being a thing, I have made a campaign where entire careers are spent delving mostly through above-ground dungeons which still have topology and effective walls, just not ceilings (and then the occasional cairn, catacomb, mine or monastery).
I adopted the concept of living dungeons from 13th Age. My design is generally informed by Dungeons, Dungeon Keeper, Overlord: Raising Hell and Malazan. Every dungeon is centered on a dungeon core/heart and produces or summons the architecture and creatures it requires. Why the dungeon exists and what it wants, if anything, is variable.
Dungeons-style dungeons live to lure adventurers and heroes in order to feed on their satisfaction at overcoming the challenge of the dungeon. The danger to the dungeon comes from the dungeon needing to balance between fattening the hero and having enough forces left over to kill and eat them.
Dungeon Keeper-style dungeons and Overlord-style dark towers are essentially RTS-style bases that expand in an attempt to conquer the land. To defeat them utterly requires killing the dungeon keeper/overlord and breaking the dungeon core/tower heart.
Malazan-style dungeons are prisons for powerful archfiends, archons, etc.
As in ACKS, PC wizards may build dungeon cores in order to lure/recruit mystical creatures for spell components.
As in the cartoon Tower of Druaga, shantytowns may appear around some dungeons with economies based on adventurers' guilds farming the less dangerous levels in a satire of MMOs.
Dungeons are everywhere under the ground ... or maybe it's just one dungeon?
Currently? Not very prevalent. Once every many sessions.