RPG Design: Building a Better Dungeon
I spent a good deal of time last night going over visuals for dungeons - real-world dungeons, as well as artist renditions and video game dungeons. Of course modern, fantasy dungeons are very different in both form and function from their real-world counterparts. Real-world dungeons were not much more than white-washed stone pits with cells. Though as time goes by, the white-washing has gone away to be replaced by lime deposits and mold.

Which I guess is supposed to be the point of fantasy dungeons. They are generally old and no longer maintained. And they are huge complexes that serve as lairs more than a place to hold unwanteds.

Naturally, I was doing this because I was busy building content for Frayed Knights. Experimental content, but content. In some ways, this is a follow-up of last week's article, but getting down into the details. Yeah, I write about what is currently obsessing me.

The tricky thing about dungeons for fantasy adventures is that they have to ... uh... not be realistic. Realistic is boring. I mean, really - if there's only one entrance into the dungeon, all you need to do is lay siege to the entrance, ring an alarm bell, and sit in for a long siege. Or block off the ventilation. If there's an organized force of orcs or whatever in that dungeon, they should REALLY just attack as a unified swarm, overpowering the Player Characters by sheer mass of numbers.

Part of the fun of designing the world of Frayed Knights has been coming up with justification for some of the goofy logic we D&D players have to assume in order to suspend our disbelief. Like why the freak are there all these gigantic, underground complexes everywhere. Dungeons & Dragons has subtle explanations, in the form of dwarves & other creatures that were superhuman miners, and the availability of spells like "Dig" (which disappeared in 3rd edition), and "Stone Shape" and "Rock to Mud / Mud to Rock."

But what we lack in logic, we can at least make up for in consistency, and appealing to real-world conventions where they make sense (or even where they don't). Things like arched ceilings are a pain to model, but are architecturally more sound than squared-off flat ceilings we are used too. Lacking that, frequent support pillars and cross-beams to keep the tons of earth and dirt from collapsing the dungeon in on itself can help with visual appeal.

I was halfway through with this post when I discovered Shamus Young - by some bizarre act of serendipity - had addressed some of the same issues for making more "realistic" dungeons. Not realistic as in behaving realistically (in the aforementioned boring fashion), but to maintain enough verisimilitude that the details bring the world alive. Since I was just going to talk about how a certain Hackmaster module had a creature living in the kobold's latrine (and just enough kobolds would get drunk and forget to keep the monster fed), I'll simply refer to Shamus's article. He saved me about a thousand words.

GM Advice: Dungeons that Make Sense at Twenty Sided

Finally, another factor to consider is history and the effects of time. I'm not necessarily talking about ancient history (like the fact the Temple of Pokmor Xang was originally created for a much more terrible deity, a fact which might not ever even be useful in the game itself), but simply the problem that most fantasy adventure locations exist in some kind of stasis. Nothing beyond the basic routine ever seems to happen until the player gets there. The monsters just sit patiently in their little dungeon-apartments waiting for the day when the door will burst open and adventurers will appear, like the evil opposite of opportunity knocking, and kill everything in sight and take their stuff.

One aspect to consider is to consider the history of the location - from its original construction (it was originally built for a dragon, so everything is BIG) down to what happened yesterday. Barg the goblin and his mate got in a fight, and now Barg is sleeping out in the hall. That hanging bone decoration in the chieftain's sleeping chamber is actually the missing adventurer the people in town were talking about last week.

The problem with adding time details is that they risk becoming obsolete when the player comes back to the location a second time. In a pen-and-paper RPG, the GM can try and wing it (in fact, the old Against the Giants module series for AD&D made suggestions for how the giants would react to repeat forays by the players). But in a computer RPG, the static nature of those details makes it glaringly obvious its all a setup. Not that this surprises the player, but it still interferes with the suspension of disbelief. So these have to be added with care.

Dang. And I thought my job was done when I connected some 30' x 30' rooms together with short 10' wide hallways.

Labels: Frayed Knights, Game Design, Roleplaying Games

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