Why don't I like dungeons?

I am not a big fan of "dungeon" style adventures. But why is this? I write and play games in the FKR-sphere which, with its links to OSR/NSR, is a space heavily influenced by dungeons (Dungeon23 anyone?) but I still have always found them a little "off". 

This post is about my personal taste, and is not about good/bad dungeon design. I am not going to write, 'I didn't like dungeons until I read/played/ran this one and now I am a convert'. Nor am I defining dungeon - whatever you feel the term to mean, is probably pretty close to what I mean. Instead, I am going to reflect on my feelings as a player in a series of games I played in Dead Planet. 

As a player in this adventure, I found myself feeling like one of three things: a tourist, a problem-solver and a survivor. The first two tie in to my personal difficulties with dungeons, the third helps me to understand why I have that difficulty. 

The Tourist/problem-solver

One of the things I felt in playing Dead Planet was a sense that I was very much an outsider to the majority of the experiences that happened. Confronted with some pile of monstrous flesh, warped soldiers or strange landscapes, I would often have the feeling of 'huh, neat' followed by a sense of 'right what are we going to do about this?'. 

It was almost as though the monstrous elements were ultimately there for my entertainment. I was a tourist just flying through this horrifying realm of death and destruction in order to rack up cool experiences.  

The second part of that is often that the experiences then became some sort of issue to overcome, perhaps so that I could carry on having this experience.

We've come into a complex to try and find some answers. There's something blocking our way, or a baddy in our path. One of our friends appears to have been possessed, hmm how are we going to deal with this?

[To reiterate, this is in no way a criticism of these feelings, or of Dead Planet or how the game was run.]

There was a feeling of being just disconnected from the whole experience. The space meant almost nothing to me, if every other person in the region lives or dies I couldn't care less. 

The survivor

Funnily, the points where I felt connected to the world were when the player characters were just trying to survive as if they were ordinary people in that world. We all were ordinary people pretty much, employees of a soulless megacorp. I was a behavioural psychologist for example. 

At one point my character saw a weird ghost thing and opens up with the assault rifle they picked up. No attempt to puzzle out the meaning, just a reaction. 

But the big "survivor" moment was when we crashed a ship onto the moon. We landed on the moon, got into an altercation with some people also stranded, and some kind of hideous android came towards us. We jumped back on our ship, grabbed an orbiting wreck and hurled it down there. Boom, problem solved. 

Apparently this is about a third of the book, it's even mentioned on its overview as 'Moon Colony Bloodbath' (which it was, but just not for us). 

This might seem an extreme reaction, but it was the reaction of people who were not tourists/problem-solvers. We weren't going to sift through rooms looking for knick-knacks and clues, we weren't going to try and figure out how to make the most of these resources. Nope, we were three terrified people who were just getting the F out of there and making sure nothing came to get them 

It was a decision borne out of the "reality" of the situation, wherein we were just relatively ordinary people in a mind-bendingly horrifying situation.

The people who go into Dungeons. 

What this final idea suggests to me is that the actual space of the dungeon has qualities dependent upon the character who goes into it. If you're visiting the Keep on the Borderlands, it's going to make a difference if you're going as an adventurer or as a recipe-collector or a botanist. 

I think then for me there is an impact on how I should read and use dungeons. I don't particularly like "the adventurer" (my tourist/problem-solver) as a character to play. However, if I read a dungeon not from that perspective, they would surely be more valuable to me. I am going to try this out as an experiment in my next blog-post. We'll visit the Caves of Chaos as a set of restrauters. 

P.S. Impact on Design

There is a final thought that impacts on my game design. I think the assumption in the vast majority of non-story games is that characters are adventurers. They are outsiders with motivations that are insular to the group. 

In the current game I am working on in my Wyrd Lands setting, I have been writing with the assumption that the players would know that they were actually people from the region. That the stakes would be to do with their families, friends and community. 

In talking over with my editor though, it was clear that they were making the assumption that the players were going to be adventurers. It is also likely that nearly anyone who would want to play my game - particularly as it is system neutral - would be taking a similar line. This has meant me doing a round of edits more in line with "the adventurer's perspective" while retaining the potential for perspectives that are more integrated into the worlds in which they act.