Friday 8 December 2017

Megadungeons - Why is Stonehell praised and Dwimmermount condemned?

So, I'm running Stonehell. I nearly decided to run Dwimmermount, but Stonehell is much easier to fit into my established Wilderlands campaign. Been doing lots of megadungeon reading & thinking. My Stonehell campaign is going great I think, both the tabletop and online sessions. From what I can see, Stonehell generally gets a fair bit of praise and not much criticism, although the elegant "1 page dungeon" presentation means *extremely* sparse description. It certainly has plenty of "5 rats and 2000 coppers" - yet this doesn't appear to be a problem. Yet Dwimmermount, which was heavily influenced by Stonehell, was mercilessly attacked for, well, being the same as Stonehell (the final version is more verbose, and that gets attacked too). 

AFAICT, the criticisms directed at Dwimmermount in Joe the Lawyer's game could just as well be applied by my players to my Stonehell game - no 'story', empty rooms, torch sconces that (usually) don't move - yet they seem to love it, both the grognards I GM for online and the tabletop group who include complete newbies, and three players who came with me through 64 sessions of often-linear Paizo hackfest 'story' AP adventures and seem very very happy with the change of pace, with exploring vast dungeon complexes in search of gold and carting it in triumph back to town.

Is it a group thing? Did Tenkar run a bad game that night? What was the difference, I wonder. Maybe they were looking at it as a one shot, not campaign play. Maybe - I suspect this - they were thinking in Paizo AP or TSR competition module terms, of the dungeon as a place to go to achieve goal X then leave. But megadungeons are environments, not modules. They are a setting, designed for campaign play, with a mix of exploration, combat & social interaction - use of Reaction checks (2d6 or otherwise) is absolutely vital IME.

Finally, hostility to James M for the late Kickstarter delivery and/or for his personal qualities (being a traditionalist Catholic, his professorial air, his liking for minutiae) could be a factor I guess.

Anything else I'm missing?

Discussion here

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