Frequent trips back to town to recover and off load goods.
Getting out the deeper you go in.
Mapping.
No real world equivalent.
Little to no logic in their layout, arbitrary at best. Most dungeons are Gygaxian (map fills and follows the page size). Form doesn’t follow function. They’re independent of one another in this case.
Frequent use of traps and unavoidable ambushes slows party progress to a crawl.
Pseudo-naturalism: Creatures living and lairing in the dungeon. Trying to make it a logical and natural environment when it isn’t.
Standardized raiding tactics: listen at door, kick it in, kill the monster, loot the room, check for secret doors.
Nonsensical magical trick rooms. Challenge the player, not the character, my rear end. Most of these are solely for the amusement of the DM.
Concept relies on heavily on novelty rather than creativity on the part of the DM, and on the players’ esoteric puzzle-solving skills and ability to master raiding tactics.
Inherently unnatural environment for all occupants and visitors compared to a cave system (closest analogue), which has actual natural and lairing/temporary inhabitants.
Impossible logistics for most inhabitant creatures, especially intelligent ones.
Little rationale for building such a massive underground structures. Just calling them ancient structures of a bygone era, built for unknowable purposes doesn’t cut it.
Too many encounters, too close together. Hard to believe everything in the immediate area doesn’t attack all at once.
Explaining the presence of unplundered treasure amidst large numbers of intelligent creatures.
Creatures sitting around waiting to be slaughtered ("Keep on the Borderlands," yes, it’s still essentially a dungeon.) or trapped to the rafters waiting for adventurers to stumble in ("Tomb of Horrors").
If it’s famous and there’s so many valuable goodies within, why isn’t there a military presence there guarding and looting it for government revenue?
Ecological disaster. It’s hard of imagine some of the powerful creatures in the depths not uniting the less powerful ones above into taking over the entire countryside outside the dungeon.
Why are the most powerful creatures at the bottom, if for any reason other than meta-gaming?
Improbable environment for large creatures, unless they can change size, have a large exit, or don’t require any physical upkeep.
NPC’s in the dungeon: Hard to flesh out characters in unnatural and lethal combative environment. The dungeon itself is an NPC that overshadows everything in it.
Why not play Warcraft or Diablo on the computer instead? Same thing. Don’t have to make up maps, buy expensive mini’s, or put up with idiot players or DM’s (if you play by yourself).
Alternately, why bother calling it a "role-playing" game. Just set up your dungeon tiles and figures and play it like a wargame.
You’ve seen one; you’ve seen them all.
J.
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