Getting Away from Dungeons
Mar. 25th, 2021 01:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerI've been playing various versions of the fantasy roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons since the 1980s. Since the 1990s most of my play has been as a game master, or GM; the person who crafts & "runs" the campaign for the other players. If GM is a new term for you, maybe you've heard it as DM. GMs used to be called dungeon masters (DMs). The terminology shifted from DM to GM back in the 1990s as fantasy roleplaying games broadened beyond the genre of medieval swords and sorcery. Ironically around that time I was actually shifting my personal style of game design away from dungeons, too.
It's important to understand that the game Dungeons & Dragons has always been about dungeons. "Dungeons" is literally its first name! The game centers around the trope of the dungeon crawl.The player characters (PCs) are exploring some vast underground complex, avoiding its many traps and trying to find and defeat the villainous monsters (maybe even dragons!) that lurk within. The rule books are written for dungeon crawls; industry magazines and company blogs constantly reinforce the idea of dungeon crawling; and most published adventures are basically just dungeon crawls.
The trope of dungeon crawling has always struck me as uncreative. ...Uncreative, because after the first decision— "Let's have a huge dungeon!"— critical thought stopped. Who built all these dungeons? Why? Who's kept them up? How do all these monsters live underground? What are they doing? And why are the living in close proximity with other hostile carnivores instead of just eating each other?
"Don't think too hard about why dungeons exist," the publishers and respected elders of the industry frequently admonished us years ago. "The game involves magic, so clearly any attempt to apply real-world logic to it is foolish."
Yeah, magic, but here's the thing. Fantasy roleplaying is a creative art. Creating a game is similar to writing a fantasy novel or screenplay. They're not identical in all ways, obviously, but one key way in which they are alike is that they've got to maintain suspension of disbelief. Key to that is internal consistency and logic. Within the art of fantasy writing it's well understood by successful practitioners that a writer gets a very small number of fantasy "freebies"— things that are different from the real world, like the presence of magic and monsters in a medieval fantasy setting, or the presence of warp drives and alien races in a scifi setting. Good writers understand they get 1-2 freebie fantasy elements then must justify the rest based on logical construction from those bases.
So for me, yeah, there's magic and monsters. But dungeons under every town and mountain is a bridge too far. Fortunately it's not too hard to get away from the trope of dungeon adventures. Basically, just put your monsters outside! It opens up a lot more creativity and widens the range of challenges players can enjoy solving, too.
More next time on my approach for designing outdoors, aka non-dungeon, adventures.
It's important to understand that the game Dungeons & Dragons has always been about dungeons. "Dungeons" is literally its first name! The game centers around the trope of the dungeon crawl.The player characters (PCs) are exploring some vast underground complex, avoiding its many traps and trying to find and defeat the villainous monsters (maybe even dragons!) that lurk within. The rule books are written for dungeon crawls; industry magazines and company blogs constantly reinforce the idea of dungeon crawling; and most published adventures are basically just dungeon crawls.
The trope of dungeon crawling has always struck me as uncreative. ...Uncreative, because after the first decision— "Let's have a huge dungeon!"— critical thought stopped. Who built all these dungeons? Why? Who's kept them up? How do all these monsters live underground? What are they doing? And why are the living in close proximity with other hostile carnivores instead of just eating each other?
"Don't think too hard about why dungeons exist," the publishers and respected elders of the industry frequently admonished us years ago. "The game involves magic, so clearly any attempt to apply real-world logic to it is foolish."
Yeah, magic, but here's the thing. Fantasy roleplaying is a creative art. Creating a game is similar to writing a fantasy novel or screenplay. They're not identical in all ways, obviously, but one key way in which they are alike is that they've got to maintain suspension of disbelief. Key to that is internal consistency and logic. Within the art of fantasy writing it's well understood by successful practitioners that a writer gets a very small number of fantasy "freebies"— things that are different from the real world, like the presence of magic and monsters in a medieval fantasy setting, or the presence of warp drives and alien races in a scifi setting. Good writers understand they get 1-2 freebie fantasy elements then must justify the rest based on logical construction from those bases.
So for me, yeah, there's magic and monsters. But dungeons under every town and mountain is a bridge too far. Fortunately it's not too hard to get away from the trope of dungeon adventures. Basically, just put your monsters outside! It opens up a lot more creativity and widens the range of challenges players can enjoy solving, too.
More next time on my approach for designing outdoors, aka non-dungeon, adventures.
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Date: 2021-03-25 08:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-26 01:08 am (UTC)Occasionally caverns are bigger— and exotic. I've designed two adventures that were in volcanoes. In one the PCs had to enter through a natural lava tube. Beyond that they found a series of chambers that were partly natural and partly monster-made. And it was HOT inside from natural lava fissures.
A cenote would make a great setting. I haven't used one, though from having swam through one in Mexico several years ago I'm already starting to imagine how novel it could be. To make it suitably challenging for PCs, not tourists, there could be a family of shocker eels in the water and stirges, not bats, in the cave.