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Whither the Dungeon? The Decline and Fall of D&D Adventures (Early Access PDF) (Patreon)

Published:
2020-05-24 19:34:00
Imported:
2023-02

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Anonymous

Title does not quite match your subject: "running an adventure" is not the same as "running a dungeon". There is advice (sometimes good) scattered through the 5E books on Adventures, but I agree that there is not so much on Dungeons. Which is surprising, because the 5E game mechanics are entirely focused around small-group combat in enclosed spaces. Are there other RPG rulesets that spend more time on Running Dungeons? Say, in the last 20 years?

Joseph Balderson

It's not just GMs not knowing how to run a dungeon, or an adventure. It's players wanting to play a character like an avatar from a paper-based video game. Which is usually fine until their PCs have to possess motivations that fit within a narrative framework. For instance, I have a player who, frustrated at having his dwarven cleric nearly die to a pair of poisoned gunslinger bullets (WDDH) -- asks me if he can switch to a god of death, no doubt having read somewhere that clerics of this faith get combat advantages. I told him, if he could come up with a compelling backstory for why a cleric of Moradin (the dwarven god of creation) would all of sudden worship a god of death -- without becoming evil -- I will allow it. Now in my campaign, I have a rule that no one runs evil PCs, and even chaotic neutral is iffy. This is to cut down on the gamer mindset which leads to a party of murder hobos and is completely incompatible with running a narrative-driven adventure IMO. I had to explain to him, the problem is, all too often you get D&D adventuring parties comprised of characters with wildly different alignments, and everyone gets along, because, well, we're playing a game, right? But if you were to take these characters and write them into a story, it would be completely unbelievable, for example, how a neutral evil drow assassin would hook up with a lawful good paladin of Selune for any reason whatsoever: they would try to kill each other inside of the first five minutes. Now, I am not against parties of very different alignments, but it demands a very advanced level of role playing most players simply do not possess. So, no evil PCs. But I digress. The problem is, all too often the GM is encouraged to run a narrative-based RPG (with more descriptions and less maps), while the players are encouraged to play like a paper-based video game, and there is this disconnect which can lead to a lot of frustrated GMs and frustrated players. If you're going to run a narrative-driven RPG, players need to be encouraged to role-play within a narrative framework. So that there is a balance. And right now that isn't being communicated in the D&D products either.