D is for Dungeon

Surely no one has ever written this, have they? If I was only accidentally derivative in my attack on "Zeb" Cook in my last post (and I was, as it turns out "being Zebbed" is even a term I've found between that post and this in some online places), I have to know that the topic of the dungeon has been done to death. I don't care. I'm writing this anyway because this series is meant to explain my AD&D campaign, and the way that the dungeon functions is key to it. It should be obvious that I'm not even looking to see what's already been said by others before I shoot my mouth off.

I appreciate the suggestion that my writings here might be soulful or imaginative, but my take on the dungeon is neither of these. This is the sausage grinder of the game, the part that makes players and their game pieces (characters) capable of participating in the campaign. The campaign is not the series of "adventures" PCs undertake prior to achieving name level. The campaign is the battles they fight, military, economic, and political, once they get there. The dungeon, conceptually, exists to teach the game, to develop tactical and strategic thinking, as a mine of experience points, and to build the fiction of the game world.

In my campaign world, the dungeon is almost perfectly formulaic. Appendixes A and C of the Dungeon Masters Guide describe exactly how it is expected to work: what's in there for both risks and rewards, how accessible it is, just how trick- and trap-filled it is. And these appendixes are loaded with information about how to fight the dungeon. They describe exactly what an adventuring party should look like: 9 members, 2 to 5 of them PCs, the rest men-at-arms or henchmen, depending on how deep we are. And that men-at-arms won't delve deeper than the 3rd level beneath the surface. We can infer that by 4th level, PCs should be employing only henchmen rather than mercenaries for this kind of hazardous work.

Appendix C also tells us about how the surface of the world is populated with monstrous opponents, and, with the Monster Manual, what those opponents have and how they protect that treasure.

In my campaign world, these random monster encounter tables initially establish what opponents are in an area or dungeon when player characters first enter it. Once the dice have set the precedent of what is in a particular area, that dictates or limits what else may or may not be found. The DMG gives very specific guidance  on pages 90 & 91 for the migration and "re-stocking" of monsters if the PCs annihilate or evict what has been found. My campaign world follows this guidance. Once players have "moved the frontier," as Gygax puts it, the guidelines for territory development on pages 93 & 94 apply for determining whether anything has "wandered in."

Since I'm not trying to write a letter post every day in the usual A to Z challenge sense, there's no "challenge" component to this series of posts for me. Rather, I'm being inspired by following someone else who actually is a writer. As such, I'm going to risk burning some of the later letters' material by expanding this post into the potential "M" topic of meta-gaming.

Knowing that we are playing our game by-the-book, and having unfettered access to the DMG, as I pointed out earlier, players in my game are welcomed and encouraged to use this information to their benefit. Here's an example from a Dungeon in our last session.

In the first level of the dungeon, reputed to be a lost temple, they learned about, and found, under the Stone Fort of Flowers (Cathair Bhláth), the party encountered what they figured must be a vampire and fled. Fleeing and regrouping was a smart choice in the face of the unknown, especially in the last half hour of the game session. It's significantly more dangerous for PCs in a 1:1 time-keeping game like ours to end play outside of civilization than back in it.

Now that the players have had time to reflect (and consult the rules, as they should), I hope they will realize that what they found could not have been a vampire. From the rules-of-the-dungeon point of view, such an opponent will not be encountered closer to the surface than the 8th level in a dungeon. Even if they were tricked by sloping passages, as sometimes happens, they hadn't gone far enough in to get that deep, and they should know this. This is an example of the dungeon teaching the game.

Further, vampires live on the blood of humans, right? Who the hell would this vampire be feeding on while lairing in a remote mountain on the Dingle peninsula with the nearest settlement miles away being tiny and not apparently suffering from disappearing citizens? This reasoning helps players internalize the fiction of the game world and also learn the rules of the game.

If I hid the rules from my players, or violated them myself, how could they get better at the game? They couldn't. I'd have Zebbed the game for them and all they could get out of it is whatever shitty little story I could come up with to tell them through a "game" that was never intended to tell stories.

The game doesn't tell stories, but it does create them as the characters interact with the setting an rules. It creates these stories in the same way that our real life interactions with the world and each other create stories. Or rather, we, like our characters, create stories to make sense of the events that have transpired. No story-teller required.