Quote from: Shipyard Locked;759855Then I ask again, to you and Vulmea and anyone else who is using this reductive line of thought:

Why are we playing anything other than Greyhawk D&D if that's all we really needed and our desire for novelty is an immature pursuit of meaningless window dressing?

What setting are you using and why did you waste time setting it up when all that matters are the basic building blocks?

You're misunderstanding what I'm saying.  I'll try an analogy.

Let's say you're cooking, and making steak, and it tastes bad.  The answer isn't to use weird exotic ingredients.  The answer is to learn how to cook a fucking steak properly.

If you know the basics of cooking, you can make awesome steak.  You can also make awesome all kinds of things, because variety ain't bad.

But you can't cover up fundamentally bad cooking with exotic ingredients.

Nobody is arguing that weird dungeons are bad.  Nobody.  Just like very few people, if anybody, would argue that exotic ingredients in food are bad.

The only argument you're hearing is that if you can't make a steak right, learn the damn fundamentals before you start screwing with exotic ingredients.  And if your dungeon isn't fun, then figure out how to make a dungeon fun first, then apply whatever weirdness you want on top of it.  Because if you don't have the basics of what makes a dungeon fun down right, then it doesn't matter if it's a dungeon or a tree or a spaceship or the inside of a decaying giant, it's going to be fucking boring.

Quote from: Black VulmeaSteerpike, do you actually understand what makes settings like Planet Motherfucker or The Metal Earth fun? It's that they are well-done pastiches of familiar tropes that put what the adventurers do front and center.

Of course that's absolutely part of it - but part of it is also that it's surreal and gonzo and bizarre, that it's smashing a lot of disparate pieces together in a really cool and strange and compelling way.

Black Vulmea, I thought you didn't want to go back and forth forever in a conversation that ends in a stalemate?

It's obvious you don't care about whether a setting or dungeon is weird/novel/unique and that your preferences are by and large more conservative and traditional, that you prefer the familiar because it's easier to run games with familiar tropes and for you dressing and cosmetics are essentially irrelevant to the actual fun - by your logic any effort made on doing something different is wasted effort because all the DM should care about is execution.  

OK.  That's fine!  I'm not trying to "convert" you to the weird.  I understand your point of view.  I don't agree, but that's OK; we don't have to agree.  But that doesn't mean others' preferences are illegitimate, and you're not going to magically convince me to give up designing or playing in unusual settings and dungeons.  If all you can contribute to the thread that's explicitly about novel dungeons is to keep crowing that novelty doesn't matter, don't act exasperated if the people actually interested in the concept disagree.

Quote from: Black VulmeaBut the thing is, the exact same thing is true of working with familiar tropes. Fun is fun, and boring is boring, no matter how you dress it up.

For me - and some others - part of the fun is the way it's dressed up.

But seriously... if you don't want to have this endless conversation, as you keep protesting, then stop having it.  If you do want to keep talking, then stop complaining about the conversation.  Maybe you could help come up with ways to overcome the common stumbling blocks that those designing unorthodox dungeons run into.

EDIT: robiswrong above has it exactly right IMO.  Fundamentals are absolutely essential, and weird ideas can't compensate for their lack.  I think we can probably consider that part of the discussion "settled."

Quote from: Steerpike;759872It's obvious you don't care about whether a setting or dungeon is weird/novel/unique and that your preferences are by and large more conservative and traditional, that you prefer the familiar because it's easier to run games with familiar tropes and for you dressing and cosmetics are essentially irrelevant to the actual fun - by your logic any effort made on doing something different is wasted effort because all the DM should care about is execution.  

Quote from: Black Vulmea;756741My favorite published D&D adventure, and one of the adventures which has a lasting impact on how I approach roleplaying game campaigns generally, is The Lost Abbey of Calthonwey, which features an abbey that is whisked away to another dimension for many years, then suddenly reappears. The inhabitants are not in stasis per se, but the conflict which set the abbey's disappearance in motion continues.

Most importantly, it offers an open-ended, dynamic situation which the adventurers can engage in different ways, and even leaves room for expansion and customisation by the referee.

Yeah, I don't quite think that's what Black Vulmea's saying.

I think that, much like me, he's saying that the basics of interaction, exploration, and decision-making are first and foremost, and that the setting is of secondary importance - good design + "bland" setting = fun, good design + gonzo setting = fun, bad design + any setting = no fun.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;759855Why are we playing anything other than Greyhawk D&D if that's all we really needed . . .

Dude, I hate to break this to you, but most gamers are playing familiar pastiche D&D and it's all they really need.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;759855What setting are you using and why did you waste time setting it up when all that matters are the basic building blocks?

I'm using 17th century France for one campaign and 1980s Cold War for another.

No magic. No monsters. No elves. No giant trees. Just mundane history.

Quote from: Steerpike;759872It's obvious you don't care about whether a setting or dungeon is weird/novel/unique and that your preferences are by and large more conservative and traditional, that you prefer the familiar because it's easier to run games with familiar tropes . . .

Either you don't really understand what me or anyone else wrote in this thread, or you really are just a wildly pretentious douchebag.

Either way, I'm done with you.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;759879I'm using 17th century France for one campaign and 1980s Cold War for another.

No magic. No monsters. No elves. No giant trees. Just mundane history.

But why bother when all the true player agency and conflict you need is covered by Greyhawk, right?

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;759893But why bother when all the true player agency and conflict you need is covered by Greyhawk, right?

And now you've gone full-frontal stupid.

I'm done with you as well.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;759893But why bother when all the true player agency and conflict you need is covered by Greyhawk, right?

At this point I'm pretty sure you're just trolling.  But for the sake of trying to have an actual conversation, I'll give it one last shot.

There's two situations here.

Situation 1:

Designer: "Hey, I've made a lot of dungeons, and know how to make them interesting.  I think I'll mix the next one up a bit by setting it inside of a living tree."
Me/Black Vulmea:  "Cool, sounds neat."

Situation 2:

Designer:  "Dungeons are boring.  So boring.  So I'm going to stick it in a tree."
Me/Black Vulmea:  "A boring dungeon in a tree is still fucking boring.  Why don't you figure out the basics of making stuff not suck rather than worrying about changing the wallpaper?"

Nobody's objecting to weird settings.  The only thing that anybody is saying is that if you're making boring-ass dungeons, you won't fix that by putting them in wacky settings.

And yeah, I think BV could probably run a great Greyhawk game.  Or 80s Cold War.  Or a great dungeon in a fucking tree.  The setting is *secondary* (but still worth considering) compared to the basics of having characters do interesting shit and make interesting decisions and having them deal with the consequences of those decisions.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;759894And now you've gone full-frontal stupid.

I'm done with you as well.

Evasion.

What can you do with your 17th Century France that you can't do with Greyhawk?

Is it the culture you want? That's just window dressing by the standards you've set up.

Is it courtly intrigue? Set up a couple of competing baronies in Greyhawk, human nature is the same all over.

Is the presence of elves bothersome? Sideline them, or just don't worry since they aren't that different from humans anyway. Window dressing again.

Is it the lack of magic? Just restrict classes at the start of the game and don't feature any caster NPCs. Although of course subjectively many players find that quite... what are the gifs for that again... ah yes:





Really, you've been playing this reductive and subjective game all thread long and now you you're going to shut it down when the shoe's on the other foot? You can dish it, but not take it?

Too bad, I actually did appreciate several of your insights despite the pointless nastiness attached to them.

Quote from: robsiwrongI think that, much like me, he's saying that the basics of interaction, exploration, and decision-making are first and foremost, and that the setting is of secondary importance - good design + "bland" setting = fun, good design + gonzo setting = fun, bad design + any setting = no fun.

I am completely on-board with this.  Black Vulmea, if this is what you're trying to communicate, yes, I agree.  I feel like I've said this a whole bunch and that people somehow don't believe me, but once more for the record: I fully concur that novelty is of secondary importance to basics!  I just feel that that doesn't mean that setting is totally unimportant, it's just of secondary importance.

Quote from: robiswrongNobody's objecting to weird settings. The only thing that anybody is saying is that if you're making boring-ass dungeons, you won't fix that by putting them in wacky settings.

It feels like Black Vulmea is kind of objecting when he says things like this...

Quote from: Black VulmeaDude, I hate to break this to you, but most gamers are playing familiar pastiche D&D and it's all they really need.

...but it can be surprisingly hard to get a straight answer out of him.  I'm going to go ahead and assume he's not actually objecting and that he's just being a bit of a dick because that's just how he rolls.

I really think we are all agreed that good basics/fundamentals are of primary importance.  Which means that we can all stop arguing about it!

What I'm trying to say is that a novel setting or dungeon can further enhance the experience, and make things even more fun for players: that even if the uniqueness of a dungeon isn't the most important element of fun, it is one element that can contribute to fun.

Rather than continue arguing about something we all agree on - that novelty doesn't compensate for bad design - why not work to think about ways to execute novel dungeons better?  Just because novelty isn't a requirement for a good dungeon doesn't mean it doesn't have value.

EDIT: Attempting an analogy here (well, it's barely an analogy, since it's so close to what we're talking about, but humour me).

Dungeons are like buildings.  If a building is poorly made but has great decorative elements and an inventive layout, it's still a shitty building.  Sound engineering needs to be priority 1.  Anyone who claims that ornamentation or inventive layouts are more important than the building staying up is just plain wrong.

But that doesn't mean that a building can't be enhanced through ornamentation or a cool layout, and if all the buildings being constructed are all homogenous and samey and traditional, it's not unfair to look at the situation and say "You know, we should try out some new things."  Sure, the old buildings still work just fine, but they could still be improved, or at least varied.  A hypothetical critic who says "we don't need any new buildings, the old style was fine and all that matters is engineering, why are you trying to fix what isn't broken?" would be missing the point.  The people arguing for new building designs aren't claiming that we should forget engineering or that the old buildings are badly made or don't function.  They just want to try something new to relieve the potential monotony.

Trying out new layouts and designs for buildings is hard, because you still need to get the engineering right for everything to stay up, and since you're not working with the familiar pattern, things can go wrong more easily.  But that doesn't mean that new, innovative designs shouldn't be attempted, right?

So let's talk about ways to implement ornamentation and innovation while still getting the engineering right.

Quote from: Steerpike;759901Rather than continue arguing about something we all agree on - that novelty doesn't compensate for bad design - why not work to think about ways to execute novel dungeons better?

The key is to think about player interaction first and foremost, and what the 'novelty' means at a fundamental level.

What does it mean to have a "dungeon" inside a tree?  Who lives there?  How do their societies interact?  What are the tensions and scarcities?  If it's just a regular dungeon with "tree innards" pasted on top of the typical "stone walls", then there's no real point.

Similarly, all the detail and other stuff only matters if the players interact with it.  How does this stuff impact what the players *do*, and how its denizens react?

A good dungeon isn't just a static list of enemies to kill.  It's a big machine, and pushing one of the parts will have reactions elsewhere - what 'parts' are there to push, and what reactions will that cause?

As I said, these are all, fundamentally, the *exact same things* you think about when building *any* dungeon.

Y'know, an example from Black Vulmea on how to take "tree dungeon" dressing and provide "adventuring fundamentals" meat and potatoes would be an interesting study on resolving where you two sides are not seeing eye to eye.

But then pages have gone by and I think another meta-conversation is going on.

It's like someone is arguing silhouette and fit, and another is arguing for new fabrics and colors.

Quote from: Opaopajr;759960Y'know, an example from Black Vulmea on how to take "tree dungeon" dressing and provide "adventuring fundamentals" meat and potatoes would be an interesting study on resolving where you two sides are not seeing eye to eye.

First, there's little I could say about what makes a good adventuring environment that Benoist didn't already cover in his thread about megadungeon design.

Second, it's not the kind of adventuring location that I'm likely to include in a fantasy game-world, because it's so obvious a geographic feature that it should have an extensive cultural and perhaps metaphysical presence as well, more akin to a fantasy town than a dungeon. A dungeon can be under your feet and completely unknown - a skyscraper-like tree isn't likely to go unnoticed.

So right from the giddyup there's nothing about 'giant tree' that screams dungeon adventure at all. As a fantasy town, there might be something there, a sort of vertical Erelhei-Cinlu - communities of wood elves in the trunk and gnomes near the roots, a green dragon mother and her young prowling high in the branches with whom they keep a precarious truce, colonies of giant ants that live off sap and in turn provide resources to the other dwellers in the tree, giant bats living in cavities in the tree, giant spiders which prowl the trunk and set their webs between limbs, wyverns that dodge the dragons among the branches, molds and mushrooms with various hallucinogenic and alchemical effects, myconids down among the roots with the gnomes, sylvan creatures such as sylphs, pixies, and a nymph in a cavity-grotto, an oracular dryad-like 'tree-mother,' external threats from hobgoblin and goblin raiders egged on by the dragons, and a circle of spaced-out - remember the mushrooms! - druids who see themselves as guardians of the tree, mostly to the annoyance of the xenophobic elves.

As to what the adventurers do, there's dragon treasure and trinkets gathered by the various and sundry predator lairs, and fungi to harvest for their magical properties, but ultimately this is about the relations between the communities in the tree, and that means power struggles, conflicts over resources, trade, and such. The gnomes in the base of the tree are the friendliest of the bunch, but they are also hard-pressed by threats from beyond the bark and beneath the roots. They trade with the elves, when the elves can be bothered, as the enigmatic and xenophobic elves trust no one very much. The dragons use the elves as a buffer but actively work to undermine - literally - the gnomes through their goblinoid allies, but never so much that the elves take a burgeoning interest. The druids are a thorn in everyone's sides, as they attempt to worm their way into the different communities, but their intelligence on what each of the communities is up to gives them a significant advantage.

As far as the tree itself, it suffers from the limitations of a dungeon-in-a-stovepipe; that said, there could be some fun 3D mapping challenges in the cavern-like system of cavities through the heartwood. This is an environment with a high degree of verticality, so rope ladders, pulley systems for elevators, and the like provide an interesting challenge for mobility, and as the adventurers gain access to more advanced magics, aerial movement among the branches presents a new and interesting opportunity as well.

And tree sap is a dangerously sticky hazard, not a pathway, in my conception of the fantasy tree. Crystalized sap blocks off cavities, hiding old elvish shrines containing mystical lore carved into the bark walls of the cavities.

As a town, there is external trade as well, and the politics which come with that, which means the closer to the tree they approach, the more rumors the adventurers should pick up. Neighboring treants treat the tree with reverence, but they post a threat to incautious forest travellers, and high and gray elves visit, despite their uncouth and unwelcoming kin.

So, factions, mysteries, intrigue, challenge - I could do something with this, I guess, if I was at all interested in plopping a giant fucking tree down somewhere in my setting.

Black Vulmea, that is really awesome and really gives me hope... I want to have conversations where we write stuff like that rather than bickering about things that really don't matter!

I think the Erelhei-Cinlu comparison is spot on - towns of that sort can totally function as "dungeons" of a certain kind.

It'd be fairly easy to "dungeon up" your write-up even more for those that preferred a classic crawl style scenario to a  town adventure - make the wood elves tree-huggers of the "protect the woodlands" extremist variety that kill all those who "pollute" the woods, the gnomes as flesh-eating tunnel-dwellers, that kind of thing.  There could be lots of reasons for adventurers to seek the tree - rescuing captives of the elves' (very Hobbit-ish) before they're ritually put to death, for example.  Or maybe an exiled Elf-prince wants vengeance against his traitorous brother who now rules the tree and hires the adventurers to help him, promising them fabled jewels from the royal trove.  Etc.

Though the tree is skyscraper-tall, magic and the forest itself could conceivably make it a lot harder to find.  There could also be lots of tunnels and burrows in amongst the roots, where things like giant earthworms, dire badgers, packs of ferrets, vermin swarms, and oozes could lurk.  They might include the Gnome burrows but also the cellars and vaults of the elves.

That reminds of this book that is all jungle Green World or something. Each tree being so large that they literally an ecosystem to itself.

Unoriginal themes for dungeons seem to me to be much less of a problem than dungeons that simply aren't good-or aren't any better than slinging random dungeon results at the wall.

It's like you hand 6 module writers 2 pieces of bread and a pot of jelly and a pot of peanut butter and you get:

Writer 1 stacks one piece of bread then the second piece of bread, then pb, then j
Writer 2-pb, j, bread, bread
Writer 3-j, pb, bread, bread
Writer 4-bread, bread, j, pb
Writer 5-j, bread bread, pb
Writer 6-pb, bread bread j

..and not one person thinks "Oh, right, it should go: Bread THEN peanut butter and jelly, then the OTHER piece of bread on top."

Once I see any dungeon of any substantial size which manages to nail down basics like "lay out the dungeon so you can use it", "don't split room descriptions in half", "don't include mundane information", "don't just make it monsters alone", "have complex tricks and traps", "don't have all the monsters be the same" then I might get bored and start asking for tree dungeons instead of underground stone ones.

But right now, man: baby steps. The art is in its infancy.