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In the above article I talked about a tendency in many scenarios to have dungeons are non-habitable. For instance, a castle where you have to go through a gauntlet of traps, tricks, and other rooms and beasts to get to the main room at the end. Why would any intelligent creature build such a place? If you came home at night and had to go through every room of your house and your neighbors’ to get to the bedroom would you still live there? That article was focused on remembering that your monsters live where you put them, and the place needs to meet their needs. The places themselves also have to make sense. In the last three scenarios I have played I have encountered the following type of problem: You enter a tower and wander/fight your way around the first level. You then find stairs up on (for instance) the north side of the tower. You take those stairs and lo and behold 1) The second floor of the tower is larger than the first; 2) You enter a corridor/room which extends past the boundary of the lower level, for instance, continues north many squares; 3) You find yourself on the south (east, whatever) side of the second floor. None of these work physically for reasons which I hope are obvious, and which I call “bad geometry”. In general a second floor needs to be supported by a first floor. Sure, a good engineer could probably do it otherwise, but how many buildings like that have you seen? (We aren’t talking porches here, we are talking dance halls.) When you design an outdoor building with stairs from one level to another, the easiest way to insure you avoid the goofs above is to make all associated levels/floors the same size, and put the stairs in the same x,y locations. (For purists, adjacent x,y locations, since stairs take some distance...) Why outdoor? Because if you are dealing with caves or underground structures you don’t (generally) have to worry about having a support structure under your floor. You do need to worry about water, however. If you build an underground dungeon which includes underground rivers, consider how deep they go. If they are shallow, the party should be able to wade across. If they are too deep to wade, then there probably can not be a cave close by underneath. So when you make that second set of caves make sure that the geometry of the cave system does not put it directly under the first (or add a note that the stairs are long and you are going waaaay down.) Logical problems can kill the “realism” in an otherwise interesting scenario. Characters that you kill and then reappear next time you enter town, food with undead (they eat?), piles of loot just sitting around, linked rooms with no purpose but to house monsters... all are examples of things that make actively thinking players go “huh?” Many players play for the story, and if you get stuck on illogic enough the story falls apart. Bad geometry is one more (very important) item on the list to be aware of when building scenarios. |
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