Blog book club #3: Dungeon layout, map flow and old school game design

Collaboration
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Edit: At the request of @yochaigal I’m going to close discussion of this week’s blog post due to the problematic nature of the author of the original post. I will put up a new post later today or on Monday to discuss something else.

Welcome to this week’s blog club. This week we are looking at “Dungeon layout, map flow and old school game design” from 2006 by Melan.

Next week we’ll discuss “How to awesome-up your players” by Jeff Rients. You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.

I just got back from a holiday so I don’t have much energy to post today. But I wanted to suggest that in addition to discussing Melan’s post, we all might like to try our hand at making a Melan diagram of a dungeon - anything from an award-winning published module to something you doodled on a napkin last time you ran a game.

Edit: Justin Alexander talks about how to make a Melan diagram here.

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Again, very interesting for the way in which core parts of the OSR manifesto are being articulated before the OSR exists per se:

What makes a map good or bad? Fundamentally, a good map should enhance the factors which make dungeon crawling enthralling: for instance, exploration, player decision making, uncovering hidden areas and secrets, as well as maintaining the pace of action.

To find a lower level, a section the PCs have never been to, or simply some entertaining and imaginative room, is one of the great joys of dungeoneering. However, for all this to feel like an accomplishment, there has to be a meaningful effort on the part of the players and a challenge on part of the DM. There can be no real exploration if the dungeon isn’t large enough or complex enough to allow failure, as in certain areas being missed.

Player skill, player decision making, the possibility of failure, emphasis on the exploration elements.

And again, I find it very interesting that the second comment is representing a completely different philosophy:

it’s the encounters, not the hallways, that make or break the dungeon.

There’s a saying that my parents are fond of: “Getting there is half the fun”
That saying is a lie. Getting there is Boring and Painful. Being there is fun.
And adventure maps, no matter how carefully planned out are all getting. The being is in the encounters. Mazes of twisty passages, all alike? They’re getting in the way of the interesting stuff. And the more complex the maze? the less fun it is.
Things are in the adventure so that the players can encounter them and interact with them. Nobody wants to pay good money for an adventure module and then not get to use half of it because the players took the left fork first.

There are plenty of people in the discussion that follows in agreement with Melan, but there are also lots of discussions of how we could achieve some of the feel of dungeon crawling with exploration via Illusionist techniques (the “quantum ogre”). Fascinating!

Questions:

  • Were you familiar with Melan diagrams before reading this week’s post?
  • What do you think of their usefulness for analysing dungeons? Are they just useful for establishing the initial point (dungeons with loops and branches are more interesting than linear dungeons - i.e. we should xander the dungeon) or are they an evergreen tool of critical analysis in our hobby?
  • Is exploration with player skill and player choice an important part of your play? I know that giving the whole map to the players is in the zeitgeist at the moment (e.g. His Majesty the Worm) - does that change or invalidate that skill and choice?
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Unfortunately I was familiar with Melan…

This post is interesting, and generally I find Melan’s approach to dungeon design fairly similar to my own.

I also don’t want to derail the discussion - but it’s worth knowing that the guy is trouble. He’s one of those proud political reactionary types who seems to have huffed all of Victor Orban’s talking points over the years and made them his world view. I won’t go into details because I don’t have the time or energy, but I’m sure you can figure it out.

That said, I think while the pathing questions here are useful, they’re one of the aspects of “OSR theory” that has gotten the most contorted - in that a fundamentally worthwhile concept and consideration has gotten distilled down to “Jaquaysing with looping corridors!”

This is a bit unfortunate, because if dungeon exploration is a spatial puzzle for the players excessive looping is almost as choice destroying as linearity. If everything is connected to everything else it doesn’t work.

Additionally, yes, maps are important, but without some signposting and clues in the keys they are mostly an annoyance. A good dungeon designer will not only be thinking about paths, connections, and secret doors but also about ways the players can understand the dungeon and make educated guesses about how to find their way through. This can be anything from environmental clues (a draft indicates a nearby exit), indications of monster types and presence (signed stone near the dragon lair), old clues left by past expeditions (graffiti or partial maps) and indications of the dungeon’s history and rooms’ former uses (a kitchen will likely have storerooms and maybe a dining room near it). Anyway, my point is largely that yes, making interesting maps shapes exploration and play and understanding how players will move through them is helpful, but it is not only a mapping issue.

I wish the Jaquays’ work on this were better understood in these early discussions, and the purpose of her complex (for 1976) keying and descriptions in Caverns were recognized in mapping discussions. For me looking back at 1970’s map design one sees fairly complex design. The LBB’s suggest complex maps (though perhaps smaller then the results migh indicate), and the maps of the era follow suit. What early adventures often suffer from isn’t bad maps, it’s a lack of naturalism or more directly a lack of comprehensibility. What Jaquays’ (and Gygax though using slightly different tools) design bring to mapping and dungeon design isn’t the complexity of loops and sub-levels - it’s description that allows players to guess about the arrangement of the dungeon and content of keyed areas.

I wrote a couple of long articles on how the LBBs might have expected dungeons to look, and how Gygax designed commando raid style dungeons that were dependent on providing players information about the space and its defenders they can use.

On the LBBs Dungeon Design

On Gygax’s Dungeon Design

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Indeed, let’s not discuss Melan/Gabor Lux on this site, please! I know that no harm was intended.

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Okay noted!

Fascinating!

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At the request of @yochaigal I’m going to close discussion of this week’s blog post due to the problematic nature of the author of the original post. I will put up a new post later today or on Monday to discuss something else.

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Unfortunately I don’t think they have a blog about it, but an interesting, and not 1-to-1 redo of this idea, is the Cyclic Dungeon Generation document by Sersa Victory.

Mentioned just as a potential discussion point around similar topics without the above concerns. However it does lack quite a bit of the OSR history aspect that this series may be going for.