Of Dragons and Dungeons...

[Walt Freitag]

You'll be glad to know that of late, DnD publishers have been very much returning to the dungeons.  Have you heard of "World's Largest Dungeon"?

Indeed. Though, I thought every novice GM went through a phase of "now I'm gonna design the biggest dungeon evar!" before learning that sheer size and playability are unrelated at best, inversely related if you're not careful.

It was my own "biggest dungeon" efforts -- a dungeon environment far too large in conception to fully populate in detail, or even map its entirety -- that guided me toward comprehension and early controlled testing of no-myth GMing techniques. This shift in focus away from pre-planning and toward greater focus on the player-characters as the true source of plot structure, though going against just about everything the books at the time said about GMing, helped make unconstrained adventuring outside of dungeons work for me, avoiding the kinds of plotting, control, and Impossible Thing issues that apparently led to bad experiences for many.

So yeah, I have a fondness for D&D while appreciating its limitations and perils. My own experiences with it were positive partly because I left major parts of the text behind fairly quickly, while continuing to use elements of the task resolution system for many subsequent years.

- Walt

[Bill Cook]

Are these really "weird?"

To a twelve-year old.