Dungeon Crawl Difficulties

[Super Squirrel]

Almost all of you have done at least one in your life. You go into the dungeon, kill stuff, avoid traps, get treasure, defeat the evil bad guy and return to the surface.

Just how challenging to you like your Dungeon Crawls?

[teh bunneh]

If I'm doing a dungeon crawl these days, I'm doing it for nostalgic laughs. I want it to be silly and stupid and making fun of the tropes that we all used to love so much (but which make absolutely no sense in hindsight). So I vote "cakewalk."

[Spence]

I picked 3, but as a general rule I don't run "Dungeon Crawls". Of course my definition for dungeon crawl is entering a a complex stuffed with things to kill and treasue to steal, but no real reason to exist. The closest thing I have is the occasional tomb.

[Midas]

As a storyteller, I prefer 2. Not because it is "easy" but because the whole idea is to give protagonists experience, not experience points.

The idea would be to teach the characters how to deal with the situation, not to inflict casualties on a party. Someone could get killed, but it will be in a way that benefits the party, or is dramatic. I don't do CofC "First two characters die, rest may react" stuff.

Of course, when you get to the climax of the campaign, facing the Final Antagonist, that is a diff story. Everyone could go out in a blaze of glory taking him down (think Aragorn's intent at the battle of the Morennon), or worse die failing to defeat the Antagonist (Frodo: "Oh, this ring? Sure, it's yours anyway. Here."), but the prior challenges were to prepare the characters for the final confrontation, not whittle them down.

(Of course, I am talking literary here. No normal FA would be planning to give his enemies the means to defeat him ;) ).

Midas

[Killer Shrike]

I wish it was multiple choice, because my answer varies.

[Super Squirrel]

I seriously thought about making it multiple choice.

Me, I like to play them fairly lethal but run them fairly balanced. I voted lethal because I find it easier to make a module less kill happy than the other way around.

[katal3]

I haven’t played/run many Crawls, but I voted 3. My reasoning is that the Dungeon should challenge the characters ability to survive not just in combat, but logistically as well. Plus Crawls usually give the players the option to go back and prepare better or find something else if its just too difficult.

[OddHat]

Dungeon crawls are goofy, nostalgic fun. I'd run one today mostly for comedic effect, but it could be very deadly, with a rod of resurrection in the Cleric's pack.

Exception: I might just run a serious dungeon crawl if it were something like a short trip through the sewers as part of a larger adventure.

[Eosin]

I don't do dungeons, so my answer is none at all. If I had to say anything it would be that I had great fun trying to out think the Mud Sorcerers Tomb in an old dragon --- which they recently redid. Amazingly cunning but deadly as all get out. Still, I would not play in a game more than a night or two that featured heavy dungeon stuff.

[Killer Shrike]

Dungeons have their place. Its just like anything else; in the hands of a good GM and player group it can provide a grand stage for a fantastic adventure, and in the hands of a bad GM or player group it can take the form of the very worst of "role"playing.

My preference leans more towards urban and mixed campaigns, but I've run and played in many adventures that were rich, well told, had great roleplaying, and were a lot of fun that were nonetheless essentially dungeon crawls under the hood, and Ive run and played in dungeon crawls that were absolutely mindless trash from beginning to end, or devolved into it in short order.


It has a lot to do w/ premise and character motivation, and level of in-character interaction, as so many things do in RPGs.

[Curufea]

I voted impossible.
There is only one viable "dungeon" in the entire world of the Westen Shores.
Unless you are a God or a wannabe-God, forget about even approaching it.
It has a specific purpose.

As the best and most easily accessible magic is above ground, there is no way for a race to ever evolve to live underground. The amount effort to build, keep watertight and grow food - just doesn't work.

Dwarves are of course, a separate matter as they are almost the equivalent to stone golems and do not require many of the basic essentials that would kill organic beings in months.

[Markdoc]

Again, I am forced to agree with KS. It all depends on how the setting is handled.

We played a Runequest game set in Pavis for two+ years which was a total blast. A great deal of the game involved ferreting around in ruins and underground passages, filled with traps and monsters, but the difference was that rather than randomly killing things, we were looking for specific items/people. The surface interludes involved politics and personal interactions, which gave the dungeon-bash aspect the meaning necessary to make it more than "just" a dungeon bash.

cheers, Mark

[Hugh Neilson]

I agree that these depend a lot on how the game is handled. The game itself will evolve based on GM style. If you adopt a "only the careful and lucky survive" approach, it has results like:

- characters become statistics rather than personalities, since there's no point putting a lot of work into a character who will likely only survive a few game sessions.

- mechanics take over from role playing since the characters aren't worth developing personalities for and won't be around long enough to really be role played.

- two schools of play develop, the abundance of caution ("check for traps again, then push the door open from a distance with a 10' pole") and the reckless abandon ("the lucky get powerful and the unlucky die - if he's unlucky, I'll just make a new character").

If the dungeoneering is part of the overall campaign, serves a purpose (some good examples above), and isn't an exercise in building PC kill statistics, the players are far more likely to build rounded characters with personalities and be interested in interacting with the world as a whole, underground complexes included, than in a game that feels like an arcade game ("what random threat lurks around the next corner").

[Eosin]

Dungeons have their place. Its just like anything else; in the hands of a good GM and player group it can provide a grand stage for a fantastic adventure.

We disagree here. My time away from home is prime real estate and it is gaurded with some zealousness. I know what I want in a game and I play those games. When the group strays from my preferred play then I drop out for a few months or longer until we are again playing the games I enjoy (rather than forcing everyone to play what I want - even within our group we like different things.).

I don't think that everybody has to dislike dungeon crawls but I find them an utter waste of time. I also find games like Blue Rose to be a waste of time and nearly all "gear" type games. Pulp? Not for me. Don't even get me started on anything with the word "punk" in it. Again, that doesn't imply that others must feel the same but I think I am entitled to my own opinions :joint: As crack-headed as you may find them. :)

[CrosshairCollie]

For the sake of my argument, I'm defining 'dungeon' liberally, meaning 'any situation where the players' and character's choices are restricted to a semi-linear progression'. Meaning, the climactic encounter/plot solution is in the 'back', and you can't get there directly, but you *do* have choices on how you get there. That's basically what a dungeon is; an encounter flowchart.

"Did the PCs go through the north door or the west door?"
(North) -- proceed to room 3: Dolgaunt attack
(West) -- proceed to room 5: Kitchen

This is what makes them so accessible both to PCs and GMs; they streamline the situation, require less input and finagling to 'hook' the characters, and provide a definite direction to go and something to do. The game I was in last week was floundering because the DM failed to provide us with sufficient information for us to know what we were supposed to do; all we know, at this point, is that something invaded an old mine and kicked out the inhabitants, but we don't know what she's doing or why she's a threat; since the mine's inhabitants were gnolls, we're assuming they were simply living there as a hideout rather than actually working it, but NOBODY WILL TELL US ANYTHING. I hate to be a bad player, but if we can't get any information on the next leg of the game about why we should go in there and slap people around, I'm going to suggest to the party that we just turn around and go back. But I digress.

I voted balanced, because, well, I'm kinda retentive about that sort of thing. The Eberron game I'm running next week will technically be one (in the catacombs of Sharn, trying to track down an evil druid who's unleashing hordes of rats on the city to create an epidemic of filth fever). I'll also be taking advantage of the locale to drop some subplot hints.

The main thing you have to do with dungeons (even moreso with other scenarios) is make sure they make sense and are compelling to the players and their characters. For the former, you need a sensible ecology, aka 'why haven't half these monsters EATEN the other half?', or traps in illogical locations ('there's a poison needle on the BATHROOM DOOR?') and for the latter, you just need a good reason for the PCs to go there; an imminent threat, a personal vendetta, something other than 'we want to kill stuff and get money' ... unless you're running a mercenary game or something of that nature.

[Killer Shrike]

We disagree here. My time away from home is prime real estate and it is gaurded with some zealousness. I know what I want in a game and I play those games. When the group strays from my preferred play then I drop out for a few months or longer until we are again playing the games I enjoy (rather than forcing everyone to play what I want - even within our group we like different things.).

I don't think that everybody has to dislike dungeon crawls but I find them an utter waste of time. I also find games like Blue Rose to be a waste of time and nearly all "gear" type games. Pulp? Not for me. Don't even get me started on anything with the word "punk" in it. Again, that doesn't imply that others must feel the same but I think I am entitled to my own opinions :joint: As crack-headed as you may find them. :)

Im not saying youre wrong or not entitled to like what you like or choose not to play -- in fact Ive been known to withdraw from play that I don't enjoy or which I think would be an in-character move for my PC as well from time to time --, but I do think that you are potentially depriving yourself of some fun opportunities, and depriving the other gamers in your group of your presence if they would enjoy a bit of a delve with the benefit of your PC coming along and of course your own sparkling personality adding to the group experience.

;)

[CourtFool]

- mechanics take over from role playing since the characters aren't worth developing personalities for and won't be around long enough to really be role played.

This is exactly why I, personally, have difficulty roleplaying with gamists.

[Spence]

I was reading through and realized that 99% of you have a completely different definition of "dungeon crawl" than I do. To me a DC is a location (usually an underground complex, but it can be anything from city ruins to a castle) that has been delberately designed with things to kill and treasure to steal. Like a lot of the original "adventures" in the 70's. There is no reason or logic. Smash, bang, zap, kill, loot.

every once in the while the group just feels like goofing off and they just want to kill something, like CRPG. So you build a "dungeon" and they whip up some PC's or xerox their real ones, and then go loot. The next game session we pull out the real PC's and go back to the real game.

By definition (mine) a Dungeon Crawl is a "roll playing game" and can never really be "role playing".

;)

[Alcamtar]

I voted 4.

To me a dungeon should be a very dangerous place. The only reason you'd ever want to go in one is to get something, or to get to someone. Either way, if it was easy someone would have already done it, so for the dungeon to even exist it needs to be hard.

To me the dungeon is a critical plot element, the "hero's descent into the underworld" type of thing. Not something to be undertaken lightly or casually, a thing you don't want to do but know you must. Moria is a classic example.

I don't like to trivialize combat or cheapen death. A common theme for me is karma: if you deal death you better be prepared to face it (without resurrection). Since a dungeon traditionally is loaded with lots of combat in a hostile environment, stay out if you're not willing to take the risk. But you'll also forgo the reward.

That said, the player characters are the "smart and lucky." They are supposed to beat the odds, should survive if played well, and I expect them to play well. Lots of adventures feature risk and combat, but in a dungeon you are surrounded by foes, have no easy escape, no access to help, and very limited choices. It is a test with no seat belts, designed to push to the limit, but like any test it is intended to be passed.

(I do sometimes have "casual dungeons" for the purpose of blowing off steam, nostalgia, or minor side-treks to provide some action; these are less difficult, probably a 2 or 3.)

[Spence]

I voted 4.

To me the dungeon is a critical plot element, the "hero's descent into the underworld" type of thing. Not something to be undertaken lightly or casually, a thing you don't want to do but know you must. Moria is a classic example.


That is why I was in left field compared to the rest of you. To me a "Dungeon" and a "Dungeon Crawl" are two different things. Dungeon Crawl and Monty Haul are near to the same ;)