I’ll state my bias up front and say I’ve always found dungeons tiresome, crushing and flattening the ambit of play into mechanical ‘roll’ playing (roll to discover secret doors, roll to disarm traps, roll to make an accurate map, roll to cross the pit, roll to translate the inscription, roll to hit the kobold) at the expense of every other aspect of the hobby. That said, I can see the case for a looser construction of the word ‘dungeon’ to refer to ‘a discrete environment’.
I’m curious to know whether and how you think themes are compatible with random dungeon generation? There seems to me to something approaching a contradiction between adherence to a theme and randomisation. To use your metaphor, it seems a bit like trying to build a pergola using components selected by sticking several pins in a garden furniture catalogue while blindfolded.
Fundamentally I think the idea of full dungeon randomization - in that every single aspect of the dungeon is randomized - is a fool's errand. There needs to be a theme or a common thread that helps establish the story of the dungeon, why it's there, and why the players should care.
If not, why not just have AI do all the randomization and you just run it out of that?
In my opinion, everything the players do and everywhere they go should be advancing their story. A dungeon with an underground river, bioluminescent, fungi, and an ancient forgotten temple all seem relatively random and may have actually been rolled on a random table, but the GM's job is to connect the dots between those random elements and start to peace together the story of the dungeon and why the players should care to be there.
If the players are just randomly going into dungeons to get treasure to fund their continued delving into dungeons to get more treasure to fund their continued delving into dungeons ... that just seems really boring to me.
“If the players are just randomly going into dungeons to get treasure to fund their continued delving into dungeons to get more treasure to fund their continued delving into dungeons…”. From what I can discern given my limited exposure to online TTRPG culture, this is a flourishing play-style with a lot of very … confident adherents. Personally, I think this a bit like believing that ‘Donkey Kong’ is the apotheosis of computer games when compared to, say, ‘Fallout’. Which is fine as a matter of personal preference, but a strangely limiting one, given all the possibilities.
There's certainly a playstyle that hardcore adheres to the "we are here to dungeon delve and that is IT". I wish those players and GMs luck in their endeavors and will kindly avoid playing in those types of games.
To be frank, like I mentioned before, if you're not going to allow your imagination run wild and have your actions truly have reciprocated consequences, why not just have an AI generate an infinite dungeon of bits and bobs for you to endlessly explore? If there's no narrative tying anything down, nothing needs to inherently make sense - you can have one room brimming with giant apes and the next one with swarms of scarabs. You don't even need a GM at that point because you're more or less just running generated characters through the gauntlet to get what amounts to a "high score".
Now, I say all this having created my own dungeon crawling game three years ago called Dungeoneering. With that the goal IS to get a sort of high score and "clear" dungeons. But the game wears that on its sleeve and is very clearly outlined as a rules light game to play in between bigger more narrative experiences.
Creating Dungeoneering was more of a design experiment than a representation of the exact type of game that I personally would want to play.
The interesting thing is that one room being full of giant apes and the next being occupied by swarms of scarabs with no rhyme or reason is part of the appeal. It gets labelled as ‘gonzo’ or ‘mythic’ and one could argue that this is a form of ‘unbridled creativity’. But I think randomness implies (or can imply) ‘absence of choice or decision’ - which is at the core of my hesitation about AI as the ultimate machine for ‘output without conscious decision’. Like you, in the context of TTRPGs, I’m not that interested in replicating what a mindless machine can do with equal (or even greater) facility.
I’ll state my bias up front and say I’ve always found dungeons tiresome, crushing and flattening the ambit of play into mechanical ‘roll’ playing (roll to discover secret doors, roll to disarm traps, roll to make an accurate map, roll to cross the pit, roll to translate the inscription, roll to hit the kobold) at the expense of every other aspect of the hobby. That said, I can see the case for a looser construction of the word ‘dungeon’ to refer to ‘a discrete environment’.
I’m curious to know whether and how you think themes are compatible with random dungeon generation? There seems to me to something approaching a contradiction between adherence to a theme and randomisation. To use your metaphor, it seems a bit like trying to build a pergola using components selected by sticking several pins in a garden furniture catalogue while blindfolded.
Fundamentally I think the idea of full dungeon randomization - in that every single aspect of the dungeon is randomized - is a fool's errand. There needs to be a theme or a common thread that helps establish the story of the dungeon, why it's there, and why the players should care.
If not, why not just have AI do all the randomization and you just run it out of that?
In my opinion, everything the players do and everywhere they go should be advancing their story. A dungeon with an underground river, bioluminescent, fungi, and an ancient forgotten temple all seem relatively random and may have actually been rolled on a random table, but the GM's job is to connect the dots between those random elements and start to peace together the story of the dungeon and why the players should care to be there.
If the players are just randomly going into dungeons to get treasure to fund their continued delving into dungeons to get more treasure to fund their continued delving into dungeons ... that just seems really boring to me.
“If the players are just randomly going into dungeons to get treasure to fund their continued delving into dungeons to get more treasure to fund their continued delving into dungeons…”. From what I can discern given my limited exposure to online TTRPG culture, this is a flourishing play-style with a lot of very … confident adherents. Personally, I think this a bit like believing that ‘Donkey Kong’ is the apotheosis of computer games when compared to, say, ‘Fallout’. Which is fine as a matter of personal preference, but a strangely limiting one, given all the possibilities.
There's certainly a playstyle that hardcore adheres to the "we are here to dungeon delve and that is IT". I wish those players and GMs luck in their endeavors and will kindly avoid playing in those types of games.
To be frank, like I mentioned before, if you're not going to allow your imagination run wild and have your actions truly have reciprocated consequences, why not just have an AI generate an infinite dungeon of bits and bobs for you to endlessly explore? If there's no narrative tying anything down, nothing needs to inherently make sense - you can have one room brimming with giant apes and the next one with swarms of scarabs. You don't even need a GM at that point because you're more or less just running generated characters through the gauntlet to get what amounts to a "high score".
Now, I say all this having created my own dungeon crawling game three years ago called Dungeoneering. With that the goal IS to get a sort of high score and "clear" dungeons. But the game wears that on its sleeve and is very clearly outlined as a rules light game to play in between bigger more narrative experiences.
Creating Dungeoneering was more of a design experiment than a representation of the exact type of game that I personally would want to play.
Love this article Nate! Your worksheet and spark tables are really cool. Thank u!
The interesting thing is that one room being full of giant apes and the next being occupied by swarms of scarabs with no rhyme or reason is part of the appeal. It gets labelled as ‘gonzo’ or ‘mythic’ and one could argue that this is a form of ‘unbridled creativity’. But I think randomness implies (or can imply) ‘absence of choice or decision’ - which is at the core of my hesitation about AI as the ultimate machine for ‘output without conscious decision’. Like you, in the context of TTRPGs, I’m not that interested in replicating what a mindless machine can do with equal (or even greater) facility.