Whether the premise of the Dungeon Crawl is "appropriate" or "ethical" is a question of what you consider a monster to be. In modern-day D&D we have redefined the word monster to exclude most "humanoid" monsters that have societies and cultures, so like Orcs and Goblins are not in the same category as Rust Monsters and Gelatinous Cubes. In old-school Dungeon Crawls, there was no distinction between an Orc and a Zombie, they were both evil monsters that you didn't have to feel bad about ruthlessly murdering.
Dungeon Crawls however can be done in a way that doesn't really pose this ethical question or offend modern players today. It's all about what you put in a Dungeon. If it's filled with Zombies and Skeletons, does anyone have a moral objection to killing the undead? I doubt it, hell you have entire classes dedicated to murdering undead without remorse as a virtue of gods work.
This is what it comes down to.
People want the combat and they want the HP bags.
They don't want ambiguous villains, (like the real world has), they don't want complexity, and this is reflected in the complaints that you hear about players who just rush rooms and beat things up and automatically think because they are the heroes they can do no evil..
And to say that the younger generation don't have the same biases or urges that the older generation has is a fallacy, it's just sanitized or decontextualized so that people never feel bad. Hate week from 1984 or the point to much of The Giver (and not the crappy movie)
The gag rule on offensive and questionable content means that those issues never get addressed nor do they come up in a way that actually addresses issues.
DM's are also incredibly inept at handling issues, and that's a separate issues that leads to gratuity that people justify as gritty realism.
In essence the old dungeon crawls were because they didn't care and the new ones, people still have those wants and desires, they just want them in a decontextualized form.
So for all the talk of story, nobody wants stories, they want HP bags.
Which is a complaint for someone like myself who wants to write things that are now questionable that make people think or consider moral greyness.
What people instead want is an absolute black and white morality. Us vs. Them. It's just the trappings and decoration are different.
EDIT Thank you OSR for helping me find the words to make my point.
I also said the world is "safer" that the players inhabit. This isn't an implication of liberalism, it's to address the comment about slavery still being part of the mindflayers.
All of that is sanitized and it happens off screen and it's just windowdressing to justify why killing a sentient race like the mind flayers is ok.
Even the creation of a mindflayer (which has great mind body problem philosophical implications), is one that the books would rather use as "the old person is just gone" so that even that "intelligent life" is easier to get around.
I'm a person of books and words. I live and die on fantastic stories that make me feel and make me question. There's just so much out there that's just... dead now. It feels very Fahrenheit 451, in that the people themselves wish for the world to be sanitized, and this isn't a justification for racism, in fact the push to santize against it has only increased is prevalence somehow. but the loss of Dover Beaches .
The lottery is another story.
It's also strange to me. The late 90's and early 00's were a high point for post modernism, intellectualism, and deconstruction. The regression is a strange thing to watch.
2nd edit: the reason modules for stories fails is because of what you said, often it's a forced narrative and very railroaded. If you want to write stories you need something more like the 5th edition dmg with it's focus on world building and setting up scenarios (this isn't to rationalize or excuse the garbage pile of the DMG), it's supposed to be up to the player to decide the rest.
The closest you can come to this is something I remember from the late 80's/early 90's, in the form of a choose your own adventure book that used d6's and you fought monsters within the CYOA book.
It was weird, and I found out later on there were a handful of them published, by the name of it escapes me.
Even those have a dungeon crawl aesthetic and feel though mostly because even just mapping out a dungeon crawl requires a lot of narrative forks in the road.
Even though I've talked at length in the above about the need for darker things to be explored and some lifting of taboo, and generally the things we don't want to accept, the flip side is that as humans (the players that is) we also have a weird empathetic ability to anthropomorphize things and give them stories...
The openness of the game allows for storytelling to emerge, but you need a group that is willing to explore characters (including characters they don't like). You start with a list of stats and then over time you want to flesh them out.... not the reverse.
Whether the premise of the Dungeon Crawl is "appropriate" or "ethical" is a question of what you consider a monster to be. In modern-day D&D we have redefined the word monster to exclude most "humanoid" monsters that have societies and cultures, so like Orcs and Goblins are not in the same category as Rust Monsters and Gelatinous Cubes. In old-school Dungeon Crawls, there was no distinction between an Orc and a Zombie, they were both evil monsters that you didn't have to feel bad about ruthlessly murdering.
Actually the word 'Monster' in 5e seems to mean 'Anything living that isn't a PC.
And 'creature' means 'anything living,' including PC's (undead and constructs being counted as living for purposes of this definition).
True but it's based on books printed 10 years ago and without a specific setting in mind. D&D culture in the last year or so have started to look at the premise of monsters and raised issue with certain types of monsters being addressed as such. In particular anything that can be identified as "people", be it Orcs, Goblins or Drow.
As such the premise of Dungeon Crawls is by association under scrutiny as people are questioning the ethics of going into say a Goblin cave and killing everyone there. Rather than seeing it as a monster lair, they see it as "People who live in caves minding their own business"..
Just saying that if that is a thing for you, that doesn't mean the Dungeon Crawl baby needs to be tossed out with the "sensitivity committee" bathwater. You can simply put whatever you think qualifies as "Monster" into Dungeons and the issue is resolved.
This is not a sword I'm willing to fall on, but I don't think anyone has to, we can just redefine what constitutes a monster for ourselves and then build Dungeons around that concept. I mean, personally, I did this ages ago but I'm not about to tell someone with a different setting than mine what is or isn't a monster in their world. In the setting I use, Mystara, Orcs and Goblins are civilizations with their own dedicated cultures so they aren't monsters. In The Scared Lands, Undead aren't even monsters, they have their own city called Hollofaust. Every setting is different so I don't know why this has become a political ethics issue about racism. Its a setting thing, different worlds have different parameters. In Dragonlance, Dragonborn are monsters.. we know them as Draconin.
Edit: I will say however it's going to be interesting to see what WotC does about this in the next monster manual. I mean, its a book of monsters, if its in there, you're saying its a monster... so is that mean there will be two books... a monster manual and a people manual? Are there going to be official instructions about what can be put into Dungeons or not? Are they going to retcon all the settings? Im curious how they plan to enforce this new ethical code of conduct.
They don't want ambiguous villains, (like the real world has), they don't want complexity, and this is reflected in the complaints that you hear about players who just rush rooms and beat things up and automatically think because they are the heroes they can do no evil..
I have played with dozens upon dozens upon dozens of different people in the 20-30 range. I have had conversations about D&D with my much younger cousins, who are high school. In my experience, most of the younger generation loves a morally ambiguous villain. They love the questions of right or wrong. They love a bad guy who they think “huh, they might be right.” They love a good guy who they think “that person is a real bastard, I need to work with them, but I don’t like those methods.”
Are some of them sticks in the mud who don’t like moral complexity? Sure - but you go onto the forums any time Wizards tries to add moral complexity to something like orcs, and you’ll see a whole bunch of old school players whining about that (usually while hypocritically whining about the younger generation being soft). “I do not want moral complexity” is not something new to D&D, and it certainly is not the exclusive purview of the younger generation. Again, Gygax himself didn’t want moral complexity in the game - he wasn’t the kind of man who wanted his own bigotry on trial.
Wizards has also been pretty careful to include morally complex choices in adventures. Take Descent into Avernus - an entire campaign based on the moral question of “can someone who has done as much evil as a Prince of Hell” be redeemed.
Contrary to the assertions on this thread, the game is more open, and more welcome to moral complexity than it ever has been.
If you are seeing a decrease in moral complexity, the problem isn’t the game, the problem isn’t the younger generation - the problem is you. You are either telling a story you think is complex and isn’t, and therefore isn’t engaging, or you just are playing with sticks in the mud and should find new players.
Whether the premise of the Dungeon Crawl is "appropriate" or "ethical" is a question of what you consider a monster to be. In modern-day D&D we have redefined the word monster to exclude most "humanoid" monsters that have societies and cultures, so like Orcs and Goblins are not in the same category as Rust Monsters and Gelatinous Cubes. In old-school Dungeon Crawls, there was no distinction between an Orc and a Zombie, they were both evil monsters that you didn't have to feel bad about ruthlessly murdering.
Actually the word 'Monster' in 5e seems to mean 'Anything living that isn't a PC.
And 'creature' means 'anything living,' including PC's (undead and constructs being counted as living for purposes of this definition).
True but it's based on books printed 10 years ago and without a specific setting in mind. D&D culture in the last year or so have started to look at the premise of monsters and raised issue with certain types of monsters being addressed as such. In particular anything that can be identified as "people", be it Orcs, Goblins or Drow.
As such the premise of Dungeon Crawls is by association under scrutiny as people are questioning the ethics of going into say a Goblin cave and killing everyone there. Rather than seeing it as a monster lair, they see it as "People who live in caves minding their own business"..
Just saying that if that is a thing for you, that doesn't mean the Dungeon Crawl baby needs to be tossed out with the "sensitivity committee" bathwater. You can simply put whatever you think qualifies as "Monster" into Dungeons and the issue is resolved.
This is not a sword I'm willing to fall on, but I don't think anyone has to, we can just redefine what constitutes a monster for ourselves and then build Dungeons around that concept. I mean, personally, I did this ages ago but I'm not about to tell someone with a different setting than mine what is or isn't a monster in their world. In the setting I use, Mystara, Orcs and Goblins are civilizations with their own dedicated cultures so they aren't monsters. In The Scared Lands, Undead aren't even monsters, they have their own city called Hollofaust. Every setting is different so I don't know why this has become a political ethics issue about racism. Its a setting thing, different worlds have different parameters. In Dragonlance, Dragonborn are monsters.. we know them as Draconin.
Edit: I will say however it's going to be interesting to see what WotC does about this in the next monster manual. I mean, its a book of monsters, if its in there, you're saying its a monster... so is that mean there will be two books... a monster manual and a people manual? Are there going to be official instructions about what can be put into Dungeons or not? Are they going to retcon all the settings? Im curious how they plan to enforce this new ethical code of conduct.
I see this less as an actual thing and more symptomatic of a moral panic. (Yays. First the red scare of the 60's then the moral panic of the 80's and now.... whatever this is.)
People have no issue running roughshod through adventures, beating the crap out of kenku, at 4th level feels ng like they can beat the crap out of xanathar for the hell of it, steal his gold fish, whatever... because he's "evil".
Toss a morally ambiguous character in there and they cannot deal. New player or old, they loose their s***.
It's not about the orcs being a sentient species or skeletons not having souls...
People want the ability to do a dungeon crawl and that's what 90% of the game now is about. The rest is just window dressing, and the moral dilemma of orcs or goblins is just signalling, because as soon as you start doing that... well...
People want the ability to do a dungeon crawl and that's what 90% of the game now is about.
[Citation Needed]
Wizards is very, very good at one thing - data collection. They do a huge number of surveys and they combine surveys with sales figures to capture what players want. They then adjust product development to match what players want. If 90% of players wanted dungeon crawls, they’d be publishing dungeon crawls.
They are not. The published adventures have not been dungeon crawls for the most part - they have overwhelmingly been “here is a region, here is an objective, go do your objective.” Some of them have been more linear than others - Avernus, for example, is pretty straightforward, while Icewind Dale is extremely open ended - but they’re very rarely a straight “here is a dungeon, go to the end” dungeon crawls.
Given the overwhelming focus on non-dungeon crawl adventures, and the knowledge that Wizards based their products on data about players (and what they think 70%+ of players who use the content want) we can reasonably conclude the overwhelming number of players do not, in fact, want dungeon crawls.
They don't want ambiguous villains, (like the real world has), they don't want complexity, and this is reflected in the complaints that you hear about players who just rush rooms and beat things up and automatically think because they are the heroes they can do no evil..
I have played with dozens upon dozens upon dozens of different people in the 20-30 range. I have had conversations about D&D with my much younger cousins, who are high school. In my experience, most of the younger generation loves a morally ambiguous villain. They love the questions of right or wrong. They love a bad guy who they think “huh, they might be right.” They love a good guy who they think “that person is a real bastard, I need to work with them, but I don’t like those methods.”
Are some of them sticks in the mud who don’t like moral complexity? Sure - but you go onto the forums any time Wizards tries to add moral complexity to something like orcs, and you’ll see a whole bunch of old school players whining about that (usually while hypocritically whining about the younger generation being soft). “I do not want moral complexity” is not something new to D&D, and it certainly is not the exclusive purview of the younger generation. Again, Gygax himself didn’t want moral complexity in the game - he wasn’t the kind of man who wanted his own bigotry on trial.
Wizards has also been pretty careful to include morally complex choices in adventures. Take Descent into Avernus - an entire campaign based on the moral question of “can someone who has done as much evil as a Prince of Hell” be redeemed.
Contrary to the assertions on this thread, the game is more open, and more welcome to moral complexity than it ever has been.
If you are seeing a decrease in moral complexity, the problem isn’t the game, the problem isn’t the younger generation - the problem is you. You are either telling a story you think is complex and isn’t, and therefore isn’t engaging, or you just are playing with sticks in the mud and should find new players.
You're being very...... confrontational and accusatory of me without any context or reason to be so.
I find your attitude and overall assertions to border on the rules of conduct.
I purposefully gauge comfort levels and reactions with my players and I adjust accordingly. The complaint of players "just want combat" isn't just mine but echoed in the complaints of others I talk to as well as the descriptors of games as described to me by other players.
It's also a common complaint in many dm threads about the Avengers" style play, the min/maxer and so on.
Your experience may vary, and that's fine, but please stop attacking me with accusations of racism and other forms.of defamation.
People want the ability to do a dungeon crawl and that's what 90% of the game now is about.
[Citation Needed]
Wizards is very, very good at one thing - data collection. They do a huge number of surveys and they combine surveys with sales figures to capture what players want. They then adjust product development to match what players want. If 90% of players wanted dungeon crawls, they’d be publishing dungeon crawls.
They are not. The published adventures have not been dungeon crawls for the most part - they have overwhelmingly been “here is a region, here is an objective, go do your objective.” Some of them have been more linear than others - Avernus, for example, is pretty straightforward, while Icewind Dale is extremely open ended - but they’re very rarely a straight “here is a dungeon, go to the end” dungeon crawls.
Given the overwhelming focus on non-dungeon crawl adventures, and the knowledge that Wizards based their products on data about players (and what they think 70%+ of players who use the content want) we can reasonably conclude the overwhelming number of players do not, in fact, want dungeon crawls.
A lot of the published adventures are old content just updated with stat blocks.
Tomb of horrors, curse of strahd, etc.
A lot of them books are just updated re-releases spelljammer, for example.
The one that does strike me as purposefully designed without a need to solve via conflict is the circus one...
Which I have yet to see or experience. (I hate running stuff from the books, not for their content, but for their atrocious formatting.) It's probably also one of the ones that is original to 5e.
I may be over exaggerating a bit but the thing is, most people seem to play for relaxation and enjoyment, not terribly different than they do video games in my experience and if you challenge them too much with thinking bits they don't like it. They want something to swing a +3 longsword at and something to cast fireball at.
Wizards is very, very good at one thing - data collection. They do a huge number of surveys and they combine surveys with sales figures to capture what players want. They then adjust product development to match what players want. If 90% of players wanted dungeon crawls, they’d be publishing dungeon crawls.
They are not. The published adventures have not been dungeon crawls for the most part - they have overwhelmingly been “here is a region, here is an objective, go do your objective.” Some of them have been more linear than others - Avernus, for example, is pretty straightforward, while Icewind Dale is extremely open ended - but they’re very rarely a straight “here is a dungeon, go to the end” dungeon crawls.
Given the overwhelming focus on non-dungeon crawl adventures, and the knowledge that Wizards based their products on data about players (and what they think 70%+ of players who use the content want) we can reasonably conclude the overwhelming number of players do not, in fact, want dungeon crawls.
I'm not sure how you are making this assertion, I don't think this is really accurate. Obviously, I haven't read all the adventures, but I have quite a few and every single one of them has Dungeons in it. I think perhaps your confusing the concept of Dungeons as a "definition". Like, Dungeons doesn't just mean "Dungeons". Its any form of exploring a place, be it a crypt, a cemetery, a town, ruin, a jungle .. whatever. Essentially anywhere you go you are tracking movement on an area by area, where each area is defined with stuff that happens there which may include traps, monsters, finding treasure, meeting someone interesting or what have you.
Again i haven't read every adventure ever printed but to the best of my knowledge, there hasn't been an adventure printed in 50 years that doesn't have some sort of dungeon exploration. I would be curious for you to point me to an adventure that doesn't have dungeons, I actually would like to read it.
A lot of the published adventures are old content just updated with stat blocks.
Tomb of horrors, curse of strahd, etc.
A lot of them books are just updated re-releases spelljammer, for example.
The one that does strike me as purposefully designed without a need to solve via conflict is the circus one...
Which I have yet to see or experience. (I hate running stuff from the books, not for their content, but for their atrocious formatting.) It's probably also one of the ones that is original to 5e.
I may be over exaggerating a bit but the thing is, most people seem to play for relaxation and enjoyment, not terribly different than they do video games in my experience and if you challenge them too much with thinking bits they don't like it. They want something to swing a +3 longsword at and something to cast fireball at.
Yeah I have to agree. I know people get grumpy when I talk about my gaming experience so I won't say it, lets just say in my time with the game, for all the player posturing about story this, narrative that, background here etc, I see.. at the end of the day, players never disappoint when it comes to their approach to D&D. They want to wack stuff with magical weapons of doom and blow shit up with fireballs.. It really is.. that simple.
I'm yet to meet this legendary "theatre" group that circumvents expectations with their dedication to story, lore and focus on deep in-character storytelling. I have seen it a million times over.. "roll initiative" and suddenly everyone is paying attention and excited.
I would love for someone to point me to any evidence anywhere in which a group of players doesn't perk up when a fight starts. Like I want to see that group that is like "oh no, a fight, damn it, I hate these!". I don't believe they exist, so consider that a challenge! Proof or it never happened!
Yeah I have to agree. I know people get grumpy when I talk about my gaming experience so I won't say it, lets just say in my time with the game, for all the player posturing about story this, narrative that, background here etc, I see.. at the end of the day, players never disappoint when it comes to their approach to D&D. They want to wack stuff with magical weapons of doom and blow shit up with fireballs.. It really is.. that simple.
I'm yet to meet this legendary "theatre" group that circumvents expectations with their dedication to story, lore and focus on deep in-character storytelling. I have seen it a million times over.. "roll initiative" and suddenly everyone is paying attention and excited.
I would love for someone to point me to any evidence anywhere in which a group of players doesn't perk up when a fight starts. Like I want to see that group that is like "oh no, a fight, damn it, I hate these!". I don't believe they exist, so consider that a challenge! Proof or it never happened!
That's a better summation than my pages of botched misunderstandings.
I love the story telling, but to say that the motives and enjoyment of playing now are somehow more "refined" than in the past is just wrong..... window dressing aside, it's frustratingly annoying how much focus is just on hitting things and feeling justified because you've self proclaimed yourselves to be "the heroes".
All the rest surrounding it is just justifying why that's the case, and if anything the older editions didn't make you feel like the heroes out the gate, and that is why I feel today's version is even more of a dungeon crawl experience. That heroism is reinforced more now than ever, and there's no moments of reflection and there's somehow less moral ambiguity. You're always on the side of right, the HP bags are always the most vilest evil ever....
That's a better summation than my pages of botched misunderstandings.
I love the story telling, but to say that the motives and enjoyment of playing now are somehow more "refined" than in the past is just wrong..... window dressing aside, it's frustratingly annoying how much focus is just on hitting things and feeling justified because you've self proclaimed yourselves to be "the heroes".
All the rest surrounding it is just justifying why that's the case, and if anything the older editions didn't make you feel like the heroes out the gate, and that is why I feel today's version is even more of a dungeon crawl experience. That heroism is reinforced more now than ever, and there's no moments of reflection and there's somehow less moral ambiguity. You're always on the side of right, the HP bags are always the most vilest evil ever....
I would only add..... and that's ok
Like I wouldn't want anyone to think that I or anyone else has some right to proclaim how "it should be", but I do think conversations in which we are dishonest about "how it is" are equally unhelpful because it's quite natural for our reflections to be colored by our perspective on the game.
I think the problem with conversations about D&D in general is that everyone's experience is different and on a deeper level, even people who come from the same group and game session and have the same experiences, have a different perspective on what those experiences were/are and how they would describe them.
Like I could go to my players and ask them "what was last week's session about" and I'm going to get five distinctively different answers that will barely be related, it would sound like these guys played 5 completely different games. There is no "truth" that can be discerned from that about what really happened or what it was really about. But I did DM the game, I know as an objective fact that they crawled around in a jungle ruin, looted the place and then started 3 fights they could have avoided very much on purpose because they wanted the fight. Like.. that is objectively what actually happened in the session, but if I confronted them with that truth they would all argue with me.
I don't know if it makes any sense but its sort of like asking two guys to describe a painting. They are both looking at the same thing, but they see totally different things. Only the artist actually knows what the painting is. It then begs the question, is anyone right? That is what it's like trying to get people to describe what D&D is about. Everyone has their own take.... there is a bottom line, the guys who wrote the stuff know exactly what it's about but despite that, they still aren't an authority on the subject as they can't really control what people that use what they created see.
So this debate.. how much of the game is Dungeon crawling for example. Yeah.. for some its 100%, for a guy in the same group sitting next to the guy who thinks its a 100% its 0%. Who is right? I think the answer is.. both of them or maybe its 50%? split the difference? I have no idea, your guess is as good as mine.
What I do know is what my experience with D&D is and what D&D is to me and I also know that everyone who thinks they know what my experience with D&D is and what D&D is about for me, is 100% wrong.
That's a better summation than my pages of botched misunderstandings.
I love the story telling, but to say that the motives and enjoyment of playing now are somehow more "refined" than in the past is just wrong..... window dressing aside, it's frustratingly annoying how much focus is just on hitting things and feeling justified because you've self proclaimed yourselves to be "the heroes".
All the rest surrounding it is just justifying why that's the case, and if anything the older editions didn't make you feel like the heroes out the gate, and that is why I feel today's version is even more of a dungeon crawl experience. That heroism is reinforced more now than ever, and there's no moments of reflection and there's somehow less moral ambiguity. You're always on the side of right, the HP bags are always the most vilest evil ever....
I would only add..... and that's ok
Like I wouldn't want anyone to think that I or anyone else has some right to proclaim how "it should be", but I do think conversations in which we are dishonest about "how it is" are equally unhelpful because it's quite natural for our reflections to be colored by our perspective on the game.
I think the problem with conversations about D&D in general is that everyone's experience is different and on a deeper level, even people who come from the same group and game session and have the same experiences, have a different perspective on what those experiences were/are and how they would describe them.
Like I could go to my players and ask them "what was last week's session about" and I'm going to get five distinctively different answers that will barely be related, it would sound like these guys played 5 completely different games. There is no "truth" that can be discerned from that about what really happened or what it was really about. But I did DM the game, I know as an objective fact that they crawled around in a jungle ruin, looted the place and then started 3 fights they could have avoided very much on purpose because they wanted the fight. Like.. that is objectively what actually happened in the session, but if I confronted them with that truth they would all argue with me.
I don't know if it makes any sense but its sort of like asking two guys to describe a painting. They are both looking at the same thing, but they see totally different things. Only the artist actually knows what the painting is. It then begs the question, is anyone right? That is what it's like trying to get people to describe what D&D is about. Everyone has their own take.... there is a bottom line, the guys who wrote the stuff know exactly what it's about but despite that, they still aren't an authority on the subject as they can't really control what people that use what they created see.
It's fair to say that.
There's also different levels of skill, and one of the things to consider is that not many people are good at the role play.
Even though I'm not the best, throughout high school I definitely was the kid that got bullied a lot and whom everyone considered weird and creepy, and I just learned to lean into it, taking whatever weird things they thought my personal life was like, (I worked not one but two 20 hour part time jobs so not much of a life really), and how st spinning the most fantastical bullshit from it.
Somehow being tired and groggy from a late night washing dishes would turn into everyone thinking I was some sort of necromancer channelling the dead and speaking in Latin or German... lol... (Why is it always those two languages??)
It's a skill that's useful when it comes to games like this... plus the aforementioned love of stories.
But not everyone is like that. Even the theater people have their own hangups, becoming drama queens for a piece of the spotlight, etc.
But mostly people are just inexperienced, and I think that is why they do the dungeon crawl style of play as well. And why they shy from RP.
Hell, as I said, my first d&d was walking into a bar with my sword in me and I promptly got knocked out for not remembering to abide by custom.
It's not disregarding everything I said before but another reason why dungeon crawls persist. (And remember, all this is because someone said the dungeon crawl is dead).
My group is a bit large but not everyone shows.l, so for myself, I like to send a recap out to all players of the previous session. Typically I try to take the chaos of the night prior and weave it into a coherent synopsis while it's fresh in my head, and give some players and characters a bit more polish and shine and paint it in the best light. It makes players feel better and more confident. Hopefully one day they'll decide to search for clues than burst through doors and bum rush as a first response.
I AM tempted to one day have the police show up when they do that, and the villain to get away....
I have noticed that the edition affects the kinds of stories one can tell. Early published adventures often focused on episodic tales of dungeon delving and treasure seeking. While things were already changing even in that edition, over the decades, the focus has shifted more to pulp action. I think if you're trying to tell stories that are more focused on the former in 5E than the latter, you're going to find the experience is not as fulfilling.
That would be extremely early years of D&D like an original box set early. D&D adventures by the time 1st edition was middle-aged varied wildly from classic dungeon crawls, hex crawls, campaign adventures, dominion management adventures, even crazy stuff like linear railroads stuff where you would literally play through the Dragonlance novels using the Dragonlance novel characters and essentially following alone a pre-determined story. I don't think I could think of anything that wasn't tried during the 1e era, they did everything twice over.
It wasn't all good mind you, I would say in the 1e days for every 1 good published adventure you would have half a dozen that were... let's just say, poorly executed and leave it at that.
The thing that was true about 1e, mainly because it was a very light system and very modular, was that you could pretty easily add modular rules to focus on whatever aspect of the game you wanted the adventure to focus on. So like, you could do fast travel to avoid wilderness stuff, but if you wanted to make an adventure out of it, you had detailed wilderness adventure rules that you could deploy. If you wanted to do stronghold building and dominion running a narrative story thing, no problem, or you had a system you could add to turn it into a mini game.
Well, if you exclude the Greyhawk modules, ignore the Mystara modules, and focus solely on adventures and campaign settings written by Tracy and Laura Hickman, then yeah. You're absolutely right. Classic dungeon crawls were no longer a thing by the time 2E came out. 🙄
Regardless of how you want to look at it, though, the further you move from 1E, the more the storytelling style moves away from collecting treasure and more towards pulp action. 5E went even further than earlier editions, deciding to make it unnecessary for players to have an arsenal of magic items to take on high level creatures. As a result, the class means more than the items.
I'm not saying that's good or bad. In fact, my players have wondered aloud what would motivate someone to become an adventurer if fortune isn't a factor. I'm just saying that it has changed how people play the game and storytelling devices that worked in previous editions are not as satisfying in the current edition.
I think there's plenty of story hooks, it's just with a safer world, (because people are less able to handle offensive or controversial material in an adult manner, both from a DM and a player perspective.), The focus of the rules being on combat, and thus, combat dominates over role playing means a less and less of a drive for narrative, whether overtly or subconsciously, I'd argue players are more motivated than ever to find the biggest treasure hoard, be the strongest just cause, etc.
I see more PVP death match style play than I do quests to save the realm, rescue a long lost love, etc. Irreverent fun storytelling is nice from time to time, but when it's the norm it gets... tiring.
EDIT: I guess my point is, old actual dungeon crawls and hex crawls are gone, but in their place are thinly veiled narratives for what players are basically treating as dungeon crawls and hex crawls and...
People can handle controversial stuff fine. That’s why Wizards still leaves in questions about slavery in Out of the Abyss, mind control magic, and… literally a week ago… talking about how the Gith might use biological weapons “for the greater good,” collateral damage and innocent deaths be darned.
It just isn’t as in your face as prior editions, because 5e isn’t led by notorious bigot Gary Gygax, who seemed insistent on forcing his pro-genocide views into the game. Rather than a man who had all the subtlety of a Commander ordering his men to kill women and children (whom Gygax quoted to justify why good characters should be allowed to murder innocents), 5e has competent writers who know how to deal with controversial topics without also being offensive asses who hammer you over the face with their opinions.
As such the premise of Dungeon Crawls is by association under scrutiny as people are questioning the ethics of going into say a Goblin cave and killing everyone there. Rather than seeing it as a monster lair, they see it as "People who live in caves minding their own business"..
Just saying that if that is a thing for you, that doesn't mean the Dungeon Crawl baby needs to be tossed out with the "sensitivity committee" bathwater. You can simply put whatever you think qualifies as "Monster" into Dungeons and the issue is resolved.
No, it really isn't. What you have to fix isn't whether the contents are "monsters". What you have to fix is whether the contents are "minding their own business".
None of this prevents dungeon crawls. What it prevents is static dungeons. The reason you rush into Xanathar's lair and beat him up isn't because he's a monster, it's because he's got minions out there killing, stealing, kidnapping people for his personal arena fights, replacing people's brains, etc.
The reason you rush into Xanathar's lair and beat him up isn't because he's a monster, it's because he's got minions out there killing, stealing, kidnapping people for his personal arena fights, replacing people's brains, etc.
But why does that justify you smashing in doors, chasing after him on the whims of what some guy in a bar might say?
If he's doing all this is the middle of a city, what does that tell you about that city and it's inhabitants?.
It's not much different than a goblin party that raids.
In fact, being xanathar and humanized (remember his goldfish), makes him sympathetic too. His book on everything means he shouldn't be viewed as a monster to just set out to destroy everything.
Nihiloor is not just a mind flayer in service to an elder brain but an individual working for xanathar. He himself has agency, interests and fields of study and a modicum of what we call "humanity".
I'm not trying to be overly pendantic, but the lore has humanized a lot of these villains. More so than just saying "yeah, so goblins are people" (let's skip the comments about goblins being a race allegory for them moment. I get that. It's not the point I'm making).
There's a certain dehumanization or black and white morality needed to justify just taking down xanathar or some of his named minions.
Both come from the same emotional place, and regardless of who or what you put in there, it's doing to create limitations, and some of those limitations are going to be that you can only stray so far from black/white morality or you can only really kill the non-humanoid, non-intelligent creatures.
EDIT: I'm sorry. I misread what I'm responding to.
Yeah, motive is a huge part of it too. I was reading it as goblins because goblins and xanathar cause he's just xanathar. Both be doing what they usually do and seemingly unbothered by local law enforcement.
It's not disregarding everything I said before but another reason why dungeon crawls persist. (And remember, all this is because someone said the dungeon crawl is dead).
Don't get me wrong, I totally agree with you, to claim Dungeon Crawls are dead is more a statement of desire and/or some sort of weird attempt at gatekeeping. It's objectively false.
One of the things 5e actually does really well is taking old classic dungeon adventures and modernizing them. Ghost of Saltmarshes is an awesome remake. Definitely, the best Castle Ravenloft I have seen, better than the original, Princes of the Apocalypse is great sandbox dungeon crawl, pretty much everything in the Tales from the Yawning Portal, The Mad Mage is a freaking super dungeon, Rime of the Frostmaiden I just got...don't want to spoil it but yeah, good dungeon crawling in that one and of course Lost Mines of Phandelver and of course can't not mention the Tomb of Annihilation.
I mean, I don't know how anyone can play 5e and claim there are no dungeon crawls... can anyone actually name a 5e adventure without a dungeon? I mean I don't have all the books as many of them really didn't speak to me conceptually but I don't see any signs of any such thing.
As such the premise of Dungeon Crawls is by association under scrutiny as people are questioning the ethics of going into say a Goblin cave and killing everyone there. Rather than seeing it as a monster lair, they see it as "People who live in caves minding their own business"..
Just saying that if that is a thing for you, that doesn't mean the Dungeon Crawl baby needs to be tossed out with the "sensitivity committee" bathwater. You can simply put whatever you think qualifies as "Monster" into Dungeons and the issue is resolved.
No, it really isn't. What you have to fix isn't whether the contents are "monsters". What you have to fix is whether the contents are "minding their own business".
None of this prevents dungeon crawls. What it prevents is static dungeons. The reason you rush into Xanathar's lair and beat him up isn't because he's a monster, it's because he's got minions out there killing, stealing, kidnapping people for his personal arena fights, replacing people's brains, etc.
That seems to me almost entirely from a specific faction. They seem to be the ones who insist that orcs have to be evil so you can safely kill them without having to think about whether you are doing the right thing or not.
That's..... everybody. In day to day life, that's literally everybody all the time, 24/7.
"I'm justified in taking cookies out of the cookie jar because Mary in accounting did it first."
"That person who cut me off is an evil jerk face who kicks puppies. (The unsaid part is that I wasn't in the wrong by not paying attention myself...)"
"I hate the people who support the other political party because they are mean and want to make me do things I don't like..."
In groups out groups, choosing factions, simplifying our morality to make it easier....
The closest you can come to this is something I remember from the late 80's/early 90's, in the form of a choose your own adventure book that used d6's and you fought monsters within the CYOA book. It was weird, and I found out later on there were a handful of them published, by the name of it escapes me.
Endless Quest series, an entire product line. Rose Estes was the editor for the book line that was one of TSR's most profitable products. She saw an example of CYOA style effort, thought it was wonderful, told her boss we should do these. He ignored her. Eventually he said "just write it yourself.
So she did. The first six Endless Quest books outsold *every other product TSR produced*. In all 36 books were created, and the last official TSR products were Endless Quest books.
I think perhaps your confusing the concept of Dungeons as a "definition". Like, Dungeons doesn't just mean "Dungeons". Its any form of exploring a place, be it a crypt, a cemetery, a town, ruin, a jungle .. whatever. Essentially anywhere you go you are tracking movement on an area by area, where each area is defined with stuff that happens there which may include traps, monsters, finding treasure, meeting someone interesting or what have you.
any time you start to talk about Dungeons you should always introduce a definition of it, because after all, the term comes from the name for a castle, slightly deprecated to refer to the jail of a keep by mid 20th century. "Goin to the dungeon, dearie" Jas said as he grabbed his cap. "Prithee the Lord dun take mah hands!".
Note as well the shift in language around what was once called Modules and is now called Adventures.
Note that under the definition you provide, there is no adventure that cannot be called a Dungeon, even a Hexcrawl, which is historically used to describe the act of exploring a place, with anywhere you go you are tracking movement on an area by area, where each area is defined with stuff that happens there which may include traps, monsters, finding treasure, meeting someone interesting or what have you, butis typically considered distinct from a dungeon.
Note that I disagree, mind, just pointing it out. However, in so doing I will note that Dungeons, then, include every published Adventure, ever, and that they are not separated from moral quandaries or grey area issues or the assertion that folks just want or don't want to slice their way through things.
On complex, potentially controversial, possibly political stories/dungeon/adventures/settings.
This isn't to call out anyone here specifically. I have seen many threads, across different forums, on Reddit on private groups, and so forth and there is a strong, substantial minority of players (and yes, I am saying that correctly) who consistently assert that D&D no longer allows for there to be these "dark", "morally questionable", "edgy" things.
That's poppycock. WotC won't publish certain things themselves, but they did publish "let's all go to hell and drive armed dune buggies around". Anyone who has played both the original Curse of Strahd and the current Curse of Strahd will tell you they made Strahd more questionable, more powerful, and gave him a whole new layer of stuff in that vein. Yes, they have "fixed the Vistani" in order to avoid the issue with the Roma, but it is a partial fix, and to argue that 5e is now "free of racism" is both ignorant and asinine.
It is laughable to me that folks confuse things like "all the people of this sort should have X score because C" and "No kind of people are inherently evil" with everything suddenly being a moral challenge about "Should I walk into that Goblin's house and kill them and take their stuff?".
"But Wizards won't do it". Sorry, but if you want something that looks different from FR, stop bleeping looking to wizards for it, because it aint gonna happen. That's the old man shouting at the wind in action right there, unless one is not a man or old, in which case one is merely acting like it. WotC won't do that because it needs to keep growing the population of people who play the game, and the ore of that stuff you have, the smaller your market size will be. That's it.
That doesn't mean that it cannot be done. Or that it isn't being done.
There are a host of guides about "how to identify a fascist". Now, what if you took those guides, and used them to create a culture? Make it an empire. Use those philosophies an value systems, those ideals and Vices and made them the things that culture takes pride in, values. Have them spy on each other, have them do all the nasty stuff that you can think of. Do it with all the negative, horrible things you have heard about other political groups. It isn't hard. Hell, its easier to do than mashing two or three different cultures together to make something new. And you get an evil kingdom for your world. Then add in a resistance and a place where those who escaped those "terrible horrible places" can go and be free. bam, you have a place of evil and those who come from there are probably going to be evil or seen as evil and they could be of any species.
In a particular world there are three kingdoms. At the border of these three kingdoms lies a salt mine. Kingdom Abba says to its soldiers that Kingdom Baab and Kingdom Shiv are filled with nothing but the lowest form of scum, evil through and through. The other two kingdoms do the same.
A group of adventurers from different backgrounds meets up. Two are from each of the three kingdoms. They all see through the propaganda, but more importantly, they all understand that their party members aren't like the rest of those other people from those kingdoms.
That's a really basic set up with some peculiar details that establishes a lot of stuff (not just D&D, but also, for example, star wars) from pretty much any form or fashion of entertainment produced since 1980 for mainstream audiences. 1980 matters because it was the end of the first backlash to the Civil Rights Act.
That's how D&D currently handles it. Let me point out that the above *is crammed full of bad*. Life sucks, grab yer bucket, keep bailing.
On FR, is there any Red Wizard of Thay that doesn't deserve killing? Seriously -- I have no idea if there is or isn't. FR is like my least favorite setting of all time, lol. It is everything wrong with setting building to me (to me, not speaking for anyone else).
A moral quandary is the Evil Vampire ensures that people in the village always have plenty of food and are taken care of and their children are safe, but he also eats them (ok, ok, drinks them dry) when he gets hungry -- but if he is killed, the village will begin to starve and the people will be rendered homeless.
That's an adventure WotC would publish.
Calling it a dungeon? Sure.
Edit: Oddly enough, this is not a graded nor formal (and therefore paid for) inquiry. As such, citations are not required -- additionally, relying on citations is bad form, as it is presumed that participants on a forum access via the internet have access to the internet and the wit to effectively search for relevant facts on their bleeping own, not to mention that doing so is calling to authority. Also, i will personally attest to experienced racism from said individual.
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The reason you rush into Xanathar's lair and beat him up isn't because he's a monster, it's because he's got minions out there killing, stealing, kidnapping people for his personal arena fights, replacing people's brains, etc.
But why does that justify you smashing in doors, chasing after him on the whims of what some guy in a bar might say?
Having loose standards of evidence is a rather common component of adventure fiction. You could probably turn W:DH into a police procedural, but it would be a very different module.
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This is what it comes down to.
People want the combat and they want the HP bags.
They don't want ambiguous villains, (like the real world has), they don't want complexity, and this is reflected in the complaints that you hear about players who just rush rooms and beat things up and automatically think because they are the heroes they can do no evil..
And to say that the younger generation don't have the same biases or urges that the older generation has is a fallacy, it's just sanitized or decontextualized so that people never feel bad. Hate week from 1984 or the point to much of The Giver (and not the crappy movie)
The gag rule on offensive and questionable content means that those issues never get addressed nor do they come up in a way that actually addresses issues.
DM's are also incredibly inept at handling issues, and that's a separate issues that leads to gratuity that people justify as gritty realism.
In essence the old dungeon crawls were because they didn't care and the new ones, people still have those wants and desires, they just want them in a decontextualized form.
So for all the talk of story, nobody wants stories, they want HP bags.
Which is a complaint for someone like myself who wants to write things that are now questionable that make people think or consider moral greyness.
What people instead want is an absolute black and white morality. Us vs. Them. It's just the trappings and decoration are different.
EDIT Thank you OSR for helping me find the words to make my point.
I also said the world is "safer" that the players inhabit. This isn't an implication of liberalism, it's to address the comment about slavery still being part of the mindflayers.
All of that is sanitized and it happens off screen and it's just windowdressing to justify why killing a sentient race like the mind flayers is ok.
Even the creation of a mindflayer (which has great mind body problem philosophical implications), is one that the books would rather use as "the old person is just gone" so that even that "intelligent life" is easier to get around.
I'm a person of books and words. I live and die on fantastic stories that make me feel and make me question. There's just so much out there that's just... dead now. It feels very Fahrenheit 451, in that the people themselves wish for the world to be sanitized, and this isn't a justification for racism, in fact the push to santize against it has only increased is prevalence somehow. but the loss of Dover Beaches .
The lottery is another story.
It's also strange to me. The late 90's and early 00's were a high point for post modernism, intellectualism, and deconstruction. The regression is a strange thing to watch.
2nd edit: the reason modules for stories fails is because of what you said, often it's a forced narrative and very railroaded. If you want to write stories you need something more like the 5th edition dmg with it's focus on world building and setting up scenarios (this isn't to rationalize or excuse the garbage pile of the DMG), it's supposed to be up to the player to decide the rest.
The closest you can come to this is something I remember from the late 80's/early 90's, in the form of a choose your own adventure book that used d6's and you fought monsters within the CYOA book.
It was weird, and I found out later on there were a handful of them published, by the name of it escapes me.
Even those have a dungeon crawl aesthetic and feel though mostly because even just mapping out a dungeon crawl requires a lot of narrative forks in the road.
Even though I've talked at length in the above about the need for darker things to be explored and some lifting of taboo, and generally the things we don't want to accept, the flip side is that as humans (the players that is) we also have a weird empathetic ability to anthropomorphize things and give them stories...
The openness of the game allows for storytelling to emerge, but you need a group that is willing to explore characters (including characters they don't like). You start with a list of stats and then over time you want to flesh them out.... not the reverse.
True but it's based on books printed 10 years ago and without a specific setting in mind. D&D culture in the last year or so have started to look at the premise of monsters and raised issue with certain types of monsters being addressed as such. In particular anything that can be identified as "people", be it Orcs, Goblins or Drow.
As such the premise of Dungeon Crawls is by association under scrutiny as people are questioning the ethics of going into say a Goblin cave and killing everyone there. Rather than seeing it as a monster lair, they see it as "People who live in caves minding their own business"..
Just saying that if that is a thing for you, that doesn't mean the Dungeon Crawl baby needs to be tossed out with the "sensitivity committee" bathwater. You can simply put whatever you think qualifies as "Monster" into Dungeons and the issue is resolved.
This is not a sword I'm willing to fall on, but I don't think anyone has to, we can just redefine what constitutes a monster for ourselves and then build Dungeons around that concept. I mean, personally, I did this ages ago but I'm not about to tell someone with a different setting than mine what is or isn't a monster in their world. In the setting I use, Mystara, Orcs and Goblins are civilizations with their own dedicated cultures so they aren't monsters. In The Scared Lands, Undead aren't even monsters, they have their own city called Hollofaust. Every setting is different so I don't know why this has become a political ethics issue about racism. Its a setting thing, different worlds have different parameters. In Dragonlance, Dragonborn are monsters.. we know them as Draconin.
Edit: I will say however it's going to be interesting to see what WotC does about this in the next monster manual. I mean, its a book of monsters, if its in there, you're saying its a monster... so is that mean there will be two books... a monster manual and a people manual? Are there going to be official instructions about what can be put into Dungeons or not? Are they going to retcon all the settings? Im curious how they plan to enforce this new ethical code of conduct.
I have played with dozens upon dozens upon dozens of different people in the 20-30 range. I have had conversations about D&D with my much younger cousins, who are high school. In my experience, most of the younger generation loves a morally ambiguous villain. They love the questions of right or wrong. They love a bad guy who they think “huh, they might be right.” They love a good guy who they think “that person is a real bastard, I need to work with them, but I don’t like those methods.”
Are some of them sticks in the mud who don’t like moral complexity? Sure - but you go onto the forums any time Wizards tries to add moral complexity to something like orcs, and you’ll see a whole bunch of old school players whining about that (usually while hypocritically whining about the younger generation being soft). “I do not want moral complexity” is not something new to D&D, and it certainly is not the exclusive purview of the younger generation. Again, Gygax himself didn’t want moral complexity in the game - he wasn’t the kind of man who wanted his own bigotry on trial.
Wizards has also been pretty careful to include morally complex choices in adventures. Take Descent into Avernus - an entire campaign based on the moral question of “can someone who has done as much evil as a Prince of Hell” be redeemed.
Contrary to the assertions on this thread, the game is more open, and more welcome to moral complexity than it ever has been.
If you are seeing a decrease in moral complexity, the problem isn’t the game, the problem isn’t the younger generation - the problem is you. You are either telling a story you think is complex and isn’t, and therefore isn’t engaging, or you just are playing with sticks in the mud and should find new players.
I see this less as an actual thing and more symptomatic of a moral panic. (Yays. First the red scare of the 60's then the moral panic of the 80's and now.... whatever this is.)
People have no issue running roughshod through adventures, beating the crap out of kenku, at 4th level feels ng like they can beat the crap out of xanathar for the hell of it, steal his gold fish, whatever... because he's "evil".
Toss a morally ambiguous character in there and they cannot deal. New player or old, they loose their s***.
It's not about the orcs being a sentient species or skeletons not having souls...
People want the ability to do a dungeon crawl and that's what 90% of the game now is about. The rest is just window dressing, and the moral dilemma of orcs or goblins is just signalling, because as soon as you start doing that... well...
[Citation Needed]
Wizards is very, very good at one thing - data collection. They do a huge number of surveys and they combine surveys with sales figures to capture what players want. They then adjust product development to match what players want. If 90% of players wanted dungeon crawls, they’d be publishing dungeon crawls.
They are not. The published adventures have not been dungeon crawls for the most part - they have overwhelmingly been “here is a region, here is an objective, go do your objective.” Some of them have been more linear than others - Avernus, for example, is pretty straightforward, while Icewind Dale is extremely open ended - but they’re very rarely a straight “here is a dungeon, go to the end” dungeon crawls.
Given the overwhelming focus on non-dungeon crawl adventures, and the knowledge that Wizards based their products on data about players (and what they think 70%+ of players who use the content want) we can reasonably conclude the overwhelming number of players do not, in fact, want dungeon crawls.
You're being very...... confrontational and accusatory of me without any context or reason to be so.
I find your attitude and overall assertions to border on the rules of conduct.
I purposefully gauge comfort levels and reactions with my players and I adjust accordingly. The complaint of players "just want combat" isn't just mine but echoed in the complaints of others I talk to as well as the descriptors of games as described to me by other players.
It's also a common complaint in many dm threads about the Avengers" style play, the min/maxer and so on.
Your experience may vary, and that's fine, but please stop attacking me with accusations of racism and other forms.of defamation.
A lot of the published adventures are old content just updated with stat blocks.
Tomb of horrors, curse of strahd, etc.
A lot of them books are just updated re-releases spelljammer, for example.
The one that does strike me as purposefully designed without a need to solve via conflict is the circus one...
Which I have yet to see or experience. (I hate running stuff from the books, not for their content, but for their atrocious formatting.) It's probably also one of the ones that is original to 5e.
I may be over exaggerating a bit but the thing is, most people seem to play for relaxation and enjoyment, not terribly different than they do video games in my experience and if you challenge them too much with thinking bits they don't like it. They want something to swing a +3 longsword at and something to cast fireball at.
I'm not sure how you are making this assertion, I don't think this is really accurate. Obviously, I haven't read all the adventures, but I have quite a few and every single one of them has Dungeons in it. I think perhaps your confusing the concept of Dungeons as a "definition". Like, Dungeons doesn't just mean "Dungeons". Its any form of exploring a place, be it a crypt, a cemetery, a town, ruin, a jungle .. whatever. Essentially anywhere you go you are tracking movement on an area by area, where each area is defined with stuff that happens there which may include traps, monsters, finding treasure, meeting someone interesting or what have you.
Again i haven't read every adventure ever printed but to the best of my knowledge, there hasn't been an adventure printed in 50 years that doesn't have some sort of dungeon exploration. I would be curious for you to point me to an adventure that doesn't have dungeons, I actually would like to read it.
Yeah I have to agree. I know people get grumpy when I talk about my gaming experience so I won't say it, lets just say in my time with the game, for all the player posturing about story this, narrative that, background here etc, I see.. at the end of the day, players never disappoint when it comes to their approach to D&D. They want to wack stuff with magical weapons of doom and blow shit up with fireballs.. It really is.. that simple.
I'm yet to meet this legendary "theatre" group that circumvents expectations with their dedication to story, lore and focus on deep in-character storytelling. I have seen it a million times over.. "roll initiative" and suddenly everyone is paying attention and excited.
I would love for someone to point me to any evidence anywhere in which a group of players doesn't perk up when a fight starts. Like I want to see that group that is like "oh no, a fight, damn it, I hate these!". I don't believe they exist, so consider that a challenge! Proof or it never happened!
That's a better summation than my pages of botched misunderstandings.
I love the story telling, but to say that the motives and enjoyment of playing now are somehow more "refined" than in the past is just wrong..... window dressing aside, it's frustratingly annoying how much focus is just on hitting things and feeling justified because you've self proclaimed yourselves to be "the heroes".
All the rest surrounding it is just justifying why that's the case, and if anything the older editions didn't make you feel like the heroes out the gate, and that is why I feel today's version is even more of a dungeon crawl experience. That heroism is reinforced more now than ever, and there's no moments of reflection and there's somehow less moral ambiguity. You're always on the side of right, the HP bags are always the most vilest evil ever....
I would only add..... and that's ok
Like I wouldn't want anyone to think that I or anyone else has some right to proclaim how "it should be", but I do think conversations in which we are dishonest about "how it is" are equally unhelpful because it's quite natural for our reflections to be colored by our perspective on the game.
I think the problem with conversations about D&D in general is that everyone's experience is different and on a deeper level, even people who come from the same group and game session and have the same experiences, have a different perspective on what those experiences were/are and how they would describe them.
Like I could go to my players and ask them "what was last week's session about" and I'm going to get five distinctively different answers that will barely be related, it would sound like these guys played 5 completely different games. There is no "truth" that can be discerned from that about what really happened or what it was really about. But I did DM the game, I know as an objective fact that they crawled around in a jungle ruin, looted the place and then started 3 fights they could have avoided very much on purpose because they wanted the fight. Like.. that is objectively what actually happened in the session, but if I confronted them with that truth they would all argue with me.
I don't know if it makes any sense but its sort of like asking two guys to describe a painting. They are both looking at the same thing, but they see totally different things. Only the artist actually knows what the painting is. It then begs the question, is anyone right? That is what it's like trying to get people to describe what D&D is about. Everyone has their own take.... there is a bottom line, the guys who wrote the stuff know exactly what it's about but despite that, they still aren't an authority on the subject as they can't really control what people that use what they created see.
So this debate.. how much of the game is Dungeon crawling for example. Yeah.. for some its 100%, for a guy in the same group sitting next to the guy who thinks its a 100% its 0%. Who is right? I think the answer is.. both of them or maybe its 50%? split the difference? I have no idea, your guess is as good as mine.
What I do know is what my experience with D&D is and what D&D is to me and I also know that everyone who thinks they know what my experience with D&D is and what D&D is about for me, is 100% wrong.
It's fair to say that.
There's also different levels of skill, and one of the things to consider is that not many people are good at the role play.
Even though I'm not the best, throughout high school I definitely was the kid that got bullied a lot and whom everyone considered weird and creepy, and I just learned to lean into it, taking whatever weird things they thought my personal life was like, (I worked not one but two 20 hour part time jobs so not much of a life really), and how st spinning the most fantastical bullshit from it.
Somehow being tired and groggy from a late night washing dishes would turn into everyone thinking I was some sort of necromancer channelling the dead and speaking in Latin or German... lol... (Why is it always those two languages??)
It's a skill that's useful when it comes to games like this... plus the aforementioned love of stories.
But not everyone is like that. Even the theater people have their own hangups, becoming drama queens for a piece of the spotlight, etc.
But mostly people are just inexperienced, and I think that is why they do the dungeon crawl style of play as well. And why they shy from RP.
Hell, as I said, my first d&d was walking into a bar with my sword in me and I promptly got knocked out for not remembering to abide by custom.
It's not disregarding everything I said before but another reason why dungeon crawls persist. (And remember, all this is because someone said the dungeon crawl is dead).
My group is a bit large but not everyone shows.l, so for myself, I like to send a recap out to all players of the previous session. Typically I try to take the chaos of the night prior and weave it into a coherent synopsis while it's fresh in my head, and give some players and characters a bit more polish and shine and paint it in the best light. It makes players feel better and more confident. Hopefully one day they'll decide to search for clues than burst through doors and bum rush as a first response.
I AM tempted to one day have the police show up when they do that, and the villain to get away....
Citation needed re: Gygax.
No, it really isn't. What you have to fix isn't whether the contents are "monsters". What you have to fix is whether the contents are "minding their own business".
None of this prevents dungeon crawls. What it prevents is static dungeons. The reason you rush into Xanathar's lair and beat him up isn't because he's a monster, it's because he's got minions out there killing, stealing, kidnapping people for his personal arena fights, replacing people's brains, etc.
But why does that justify you smashing in doors, chasing after him on the whims of what some guy in a bar might say?
If he's doing all this is the middle of a city, what does that tell you about that city and it's inhabitants?.
It's not much different than a goblin party that raids.
In fact, being xanathar and humanized (remember his goldfish), makes him sympathetic too. His book on everything means he shouldn't be viewed as a monster to just set out to destroy everything.
Nihiloor is not just a mind flayer in service to an elder brain but an individual working for xanathar. He himself has agency, interests and fields of study and a modicum of what we call "humanity".
I'm not trying to be overly pendantic, but the lore has humanized a lot of these villains. More so than just saying "yeah, so goblins are people" (let's skip the comments about goblins being a race allegory for them moment. I get that. It's not the point I'm making).
There's a certain dehumanization or black and white morality needed to justify just taking down xanathar or some of his named minions.
Both come from the same emotional place, and regardless of who or what you put in there, it's doing to create limitations, and some of those limitations are going to be that you can only stray so far from black/white morality or you can only really kill the non-humanoid, non-intelligent creatures.
EDIT: I'm sorry. I misread what I'm responding to.
Yeah, motive is a huge part of it too. I was reading it as goblins because goblins and xanathar cause he's just xanathar. Both be doing what they usually do and seemingly unbothered by local law enforcement.
Don't get me wrong, I totally agree with you, to claim Dungeon Crawls are dead is more a statement of desire and/or some sort of weird attempt at gatekeeping. It's objectively false.
One of the things 5e actually does really well is taking old classic dungeon adventures and modernizing them. Ghost of Saltmarshes is an awesome remake. Definitely, the best Castle Ravenloft I have seen, better than the original, Princes of the Apocalypse is great sandbox dungeon crawl, pretty much everything in the Tales from the Yawning Portal, The Mad Mage is a freaking super dungeon, Rime of the Frostmaiden I just got...don't want to spoil it but yeah, good dungeon crawling in that one and of course Lost Mines of Phandelver and of course can't not mention the Tomb of Annihilation.
I mean, I don't know how anyone can play 5e and claim there are no dungeon crawls... can anyone actually name a 5e adventure without a dungeon? I mean I don't have all the books as many of them really didn't speak to me conceptually but I don't see any signs of any such thing.
Semantics.. but sure.
That's..... everybody. In day to day life, that's literally everybody all the time, 24/7.
"I'm justified in taking cookies out of the cookie jar because Mary in accounting did it first."
"That person who cut me off is an evil jerk face who kicks puppies. (The unsaid part is that I wasn't in the wrong by not paying attention myself...)"
"I hate the people who support the other political party because they are mean and want to make me do things I don't like..."
In groups out groups, choosing factions, simplifying our morality to make it easier....
Every day. All day.
*yawns, stretches, smacks, scratches under boob*
Mornin all...
Endless Quest series, an entire product line. Rose Estes was the editor for the book line that was one of TSR's most profitable products. She saw an example of CYOA style effort, thought it was wonderful, told her boss we should do these. He ignored her. Eventually he said "just write it yourself.
So she did. The first six Endless Quest books outsold *every other product TSR produced*. In all 36 books were created, and the last official TSR products were Endless Quest books.
any time you start to talk about Dungeons you should always introduce a definition of it, because after all, the term comes from the name for a castle, slightly deprecated to refer to the jail of a keep by mid 20th century. "Goin to the dungeon, dearie" Jas said as he grabbed his cap. "Prithee the Lord dun take mah hands!".
Note as well the shift in language around what was once called Modules and is now called Adventures.
Note that under the definition you provide, there is no adventure that cannot be called a Dungeon, even a Hexcrawl, which is historically used to describe the act of exploring a place, with anywhere you go you are tracking movement on an area by area, where each area is defined with stuff that happens there which may include traps, monsters, finding treasure, meeting someone interesting or what have you, but is typically considered distinct from a dungeon.
Note that I disagree, mind, just pointing it out. However, in so doing I will note that Dungeons, then, include every published Adventure, ever, and that they are not separated from moral quandaries or grey area issues or the assertion that folks just want or don't want to slice their way through things.
This isn't to call out anyone here specifically. I have seen many threads, across different forums, on Reddit on private groups, and so forth and there is a strong, substantial minority of players (and yes, I am saying that correctly) who consistently assert that D&D no longer allows for there to be these "dark", "morally questionable", "edgy" things.
That's poppycock. WotC won't publish certain things themselves, but they did publish "let's all go to hell and drive armed dune buggies around". Anyone who has played both the original Curse of Strahd and the current Curse of Strahd will tell you they made Strahd more questionable, more powerful, and gave him a whole new layer of stuff in that vein. Yes, they have "fixed the Vistani" in order to avoid the issue with the Roma, but it is a partial fix, and to argue that 5e is now "free of racism" is both ignorant and asinine.
It is laughable to me that folks confuse things like "all the people of this sort should have X score because C" and "No kind of people are inherently evil" with everything suddenly being a moral challenge about "Should I walk into that Goblin's house and kill them and take their stuff?".
"But Wizards won't do it". Sorry, but if you want something that looks different from FR, stop bleeping looking to wizards for it, because it aint gonna happen. That's the old man shouting at the wind in action right there, unless one is not a man or old, in which case one is merely acting like it. WotC won't do that because it needs to keep growing the population of people who play the game, and the ore of that stuff you have, the smaller your market size will be. That's it.
That doesn't mean that it cannot be done. Or that it isn't being done.
There are a host of guides about "how to identify a fascist". Now, what if you took those guides, and used them to create a culture? Make it an empire. Use those philosophies an value systems, those ideals and Vices and made them the things that culture takes pride in, values. Have them spy on each other, have them do all the nasty stuff that you can think of. Do it with all the negative, horrible things you have heard about other political groups. It isn't hard. Hell, its easier to do than mashing two or three different cultures together to make something new. And you get an evil kingdom for your world. Then add in a resistance and a place where those who escaped those "terrible horrible places" can go and be free. bam, you have a place of evil and those who come from there are probably going to be evil or seen as evil and they could be of any species.
That's a really basic set up with some peculiar details that establishes a lot of stuff (not just D&D, but also, for example, star wars) from pretty much any form or fashion of entertainment produced since 1980 for mainstream audiences. 1980 matters because it was the end of the first backlash to the Civil Rights Act.
That's how D&D currently handles it. Let me point out that the above *is crammed full of bad*. Life sucks, grab yer bucket, keep bailing.
On FR, is there any Red Wizard of Thay that doesn't deserve killing? Seriously -- I have no idea if there is or isn't. FR is like my least favorite setting of all time, lol. It is everything wrong with setting building to me (to me, not speaking for anyone else).
A moral quandary is the Evil Vampire ensures that people in the village always have plenty of food and are taken care of and their children are safe, but he also eats them (ok, ok, drinks them dry) when he gets hungry -- but if he is killed, the village will begin to starve and the people will be rendered homeless.
That's an adventure WotC would publish.
Calling it a dungeon? Sure.
Edit: Oddly enough, this is not a graded nor formal (and therefore paid for) inquiry. As such, citations are not required -- additionally, relying on citations is bad form, as it is presumed that participants on a forum access via the internet have access to the internet and the wit to effectively search for relevant facts on their bleeping own, not to mention that doing so is calling to authority. Also, i will personally attest to experienced racism from said individual.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
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Having loose standards of evidence is a rather common component of adventure fiction. You could probably turn W:DH into a police procedural, but it would be a very different module.