common dungeon elements
drawing a maze as they explore is actually fine. you can easily put things in the maze while you sketch the paths and make decisions about which way is the right way. trick is to make those decisions before the players decide which way to go if possible
riddles:
difficult to come up with a good riddle on the spot
monsters:
a good monster can just be something stereotypical with a twist
traps:
seriously easy to think up... again just think of it before the players encounter it. blades in the dark jab out at you... there's a magical energy field generating blades. and uh it's coming from a little magic machine running in the corner. great trap.
treasure:
can actually be negotiated with players as described or invented randomly
puzzles:
I would say that you can actually make this up as the players solve it, similar to a maze. you see a bunch of colored blocks that can be rotated. green yellow blue orange. they correspond to... some charts on the wall. the charts? well there's a series of checkerboard patterns that have those colors... no, it's too difficult for me to draw out... yes, let's just have someone roll an intelligence check... you can bail out
secret passageways:
as convenient (goes without saying) and you get to use fiat whether they find any in a search. it's important to use fiat. because life is arbitrary
an overall sense of dungeon logic:
will emerge as you play.
advantages
- no prep
- don't need to reference prep
- dungeons are pretty random collections of elements anyways
- surmising quickly thought-up elements into larger overall themes is actually easy
- I might be better at improvisation than reference
- can elide easier, bring out the important bits easier
- can use fragmentary prep easily
- simple stuff is probably easier to play with
- good work flow: make or find fun fragments and improvise rest
- credible way to run a red & pleasant land
disadvantages
- some elements are hard to improvise such as riddles (solved via fragmentary prep -ed)
- a sense of prewritten secrets being divulged is perhaps lost
- requires the ability to improvise
- "fairness"???
Disadvantage: There is almost always only one way to do the dungeon, one entrance, one route, one boss, no choices. Without something like an overall structure, making something that's worth *exploring* can be difficult.
ReplyDeletewhy is there usually only one route? In the dungeon I improvised that inspired this post I had a choice of two routes and the players picked one.
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