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Comment by VonGuard | Hacker News Reader

The big reason we do this is that being a DM, it's REALLY hard to predict what your players are going to do. I used to spend days preparing for a game, only to have the party turn around and wander out of the dungeon 10 minutes into the session, negating all my prep. This way, I can just throw up a map and have them dungeon crawl.

I suppose it make a difference that we are playing Rappan Attuk and not a mainline D&D campaign. There's a lot less dungeon crawling in today's D&D, but Rappan Attuk makes up for all of it with about 600 pages of one dungeon.

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I don’t understand how dungeon crawling really felt fun for people. Or random encounters. It just doesn’t seem like a good system for fighting for fun.

I always hear the cursed phrase “I guess I attack?”

And that’s how I know the fight kind of sucks.

The dungeon itself is the game/puzzle/challenge that the players are trying to overcome, either for the default goal of finding its treasure or for a specific goal like find a specific macguffin or other target. In this mode, the players trade their resources to overcome challenges and if you can achieve your goal without fighting or expending resources at all, the more the players are able to achieve. The default is not to fight every monster you encounter but to decide if you need to engage to achieve your goal. Random encounters are a way for the dungeon to fight back against the players and to put a clock on them - the longer they take to explore the dungeon or the less efficient they are in their exploration, the more they will have to deal with encounters that are unlikely to have any treasure at all.

It’s a very complex and interesting game to play. Unfortunately newer editions have gutted this gameplay by removing xp for gold (thus removing the default goal of most dungeons) and removing all of the procedural dungeon crawling rules. The tabletop form is still superior to CRPGs as your ability to interact with the world itself and overcome challenges in interesting ways is only limited by your imagination and ability to creatively apply the tools available to your character.

The unlimited potential for creativity and collaborative story telling is what sets TTRPGs apart from video games. The mechanical side of D&D combat is fun, but I don't think going all in on encounters is what makes D&D shine. A good combo of game mechanics and creativity is the sweet spot in my opinion.

I often prefer "theater of the mind" over maps as that can be much more open-ended and encourage creativity. Many of the D&D podcasts use "theater of the mind", and they are great (special shout out to naddpod.com)

Nowadays we have multiple genres of combat and mechanics focused video games. (FromSoft games, to CRPGs like Baldur’s Gate, to tactics games like Xcom).

In the 70’s, that space was much less populated, so pencil and paper RPGs might have been the best small tactical games people could get their hands on (not everybody wanted to sell their houses for Warhammer miniatures).

I like dungeon crawls.

Not every story has to be about emotions and intrigue and a contest of minds. Sometimes you meet a monster and kill it, and loot its corpse and the only thing that's missing is taking a selfie next to it.

Then again Call of Cthulhu is one of my favourite games. I guess it's fun seeing things from the other side of the fence sometimes. But still, it's not all about feelings: you can tell a great story about how you keep running from madness-inducing monsters.

some people love and thrill on dice.

D&D is rooted in a dice and miniatures, wargame, light on the scenario building

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainmail_(game)

enough people liked it, and enough model,miniature, hobby was around that it held, and became more embellished over time.

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