Do you think there's room for trying to build Zelda style dungeons for TTRPGs? I'm contemplating taking over for my foreverDM, but dugneons feel a bit forbidding. There's that Donjon site that will generate dungeons but it's all just so boring. Long hallways with boring square rooms.
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No.
Build Metroid Prime style dungeons instead.
That's nice and jelqued.
>jelqed
Are you trying to rename Xandering (previously Jacquaying before being changed by the original creator's wishes)?
It's already a common replacement term in the OSRG.
>Xandering (previously Jacquaying before being changed by the original creator's wishes)?
Hope you get hit by a car Justin
Look up caverns of Thracia for a good 3D dungeon that has good continuity.
The biggest problem with "Zelda" style dungeons is that there are so many puzzles in that game that only have one solution and their sequences are so over-designed that you won't get the same feeling in tabletop that you would in Zelda.
I know you are giving long hallways and square rooms a hard time, but also consider how difficult it is to describe the shapes in your picture to most players. Squares, rectangles, octagons are kind of lame, but they're easy to convey and the shape of the room is rarely interesting anyway.
Also, long hallways are meant to eat at resources like HP, time and torch/lantern light.
This homie is right. Also Metroid should and actually can be emulated with dungeon crawling RPGs.
To add to this the majority of Zelda design is about 3D spaces, even from LttP days. That sounds obvious but thinking about how you will need to convince players to climb several floors to drop down some, readjust to where they are, then ascertain if that even accomplished what they were hoping is just tedium for everyone involved
Man, I would love a Metroid-style scifi dungeon crawl game.
Play Mothership. You're welcome.
all that backtracking, Metroid Prime has abysmal level design. every region in the game is like this.
Dungeons in Basic & Advanced were like Zelda, you weren't expected to fully explore them, you didn't have the resources, there were puzzles that could only be solved through roleplaying.
DCC is like that too, so /tg/ needs to stop hating on their guy.
>you weren't expected to fully explore them, you didn't have the resources, there were puzzles that could only be solved through roleplaying.
>t. never played a Zelda game
>DCC is like that too, so /tg/ needs to stop hating on their guy.
DCC adventures are mostly linear with few branches and you are fricked if you didn't pick up the right item at the beginning. Somewhat like old Sierra adventures.
Ever played Ocarina of Time? the game has large sections of the dungeons that are just extraneous shit. There's no point in fully exploring them. Maybe half of them, you have to come back with items from later dungeons if you want the extra shit.
Yes, at least five times from start to finish. The only things both of this holds true are a few Gold Skulltulas. The eastern half of the Fire Temple's 5F is even famous for being one of the few purely optional rooms in the game's dungeons (and it contains a Gold Skulltula).
I guess you could also skip some rooms containing only the map or compass, but they are clearly intended to pick up for first/normal playthroughs and can always be found with the items you're supposed to have at the point. Another exception from Fire Temple: When I first played it, I didn't have the bow yet, so I couldn't get the map. But most players would have done Forest Temple before.
Players are so meek now, they actively skip as many rooms as possible in the water dungeon using faeroe's wind. Truly the D&D experience.
Water dungeon is just tedious. I say this as someone who played the game at release - water temple does not hold up well on replay.
filtered
That's fine, I'm not particularly broken up about it.
>I'm contemplating taking over for my foreverDM, but dugneons feel a bit forbidding.
Okay if you don't know how dungeons ought to work then you should check out some well made dungeons rather than just some random generator.
I highly recommend the Incandescent Grottoes.
Zelda dungeon are great as long as you remember not to go overboard in copying them. The best way to copy a Zelda dungeon is theme and maybe a major puzzle or two. Just don't make every room a puzzle, but just the big stuff like our classic Deku tree puzzle and needing to break the web to get to the roots and the boss. Or Fire Temple with more of a going deep in the dungeon to free everyone before heading back to help a npc who fighting the BBEG. Maybe do a puzzle per floor and maybe one major puzzle fo the whole dungeon.
>I'm contemplating taking over for my foreverDM, but dugneons feel a bit forbidding. There's that Donjon site that will generate dungeons but it's all just so boring. Long hallways with boring square rooms.
https://spielknights.gumroad.com/
A whole bunch of PWYW one page dungeons. You can flip through them and find one(s) you like and plop them in front of your players.
Zelda dungeons would either be too hard to solve without playing 20 questions or too easy to solve based on the description. "You enter a room with a giant chasm in the middle and a metal hoop hanging from the ceiling" just doesn't work as well as looking for a platform for a second before glancing up. Having puzzles and even red herrings so they're not obvious is good though
I think this touches on an issue that more broadly impacts trying to port / be inspired by vidya dungeons.
In visual media of all kinds, seeing things is low impact. In a video game in particular, visual exploration can cover everything in as much or as little time as the single player wants, details can be there for players to spot out of character, subtle differences can creep in and not be noticed until they take hold more. Meanwhile in anything purely descriptive, you are
>at the mercy of players' imaginations
and either
>describing far too much, washing out detail in a flood of guff OR
>only speaking the details, reducing scenes and rooms to "the room with the hooks" "the room with the chasm"
this applies to things like character animation and design, too. You can actually GET an overall impression from someone's appearance in a visual medium, whereas in print you're leaving details to be filled in by the players' minds and after you say something like
>he looks like a hardened pirate
>she has an air of imperious condescension about her every action
your players will get tired of hearing a character's motion tic described every time, but it'd be a charming part of a game or movie.
The most unusual example I have is that I am, unlike much of /tg/, a LARPgay. I've played, crewed, and run them for years. There are some things that players learn to gloss over in their heads - the system needs to be simple enough that you are not distracted by it, which is the fundamental flaw of the old Vampire LARP and why my local scene used a different system back when vampire LARP was the big thing. You can make costume but it takes time, you can use the physical aspects of roleplay to suggest things, you can never have an actual visual fireball in a battle, etc.
I'm not saying that copying zelda is BAD, I'm just saying that when copying from one medium to another, consider your media formats and try to play to the strengths rather than trying to slavishly copy.
I was doing the "dungeon 23" challenge last year and tried some Zelda style rooms/floors.
Problem is Zelda dungeons have one solution and translating it to TTRPGs means either they're so easy they're nonpuzzles or just aren't very fun to play through because interactivity is generally low, or the puzzles are very easy to break and solve "wrong".
>d23
How many rooms of your dungeon did you get made?
I'm wondering why there wouldn't be "any room" for anything in a hobby that's supposed to be about playing what, and how, you want.
But okay, it's a bot thread so whatever OP said means nothing.
Because it's not just what I want to run. Making a dungeon and playing through a dungeon are two different experiences I think. I don't have enough experience with the first, and a lot of lackluster experience for the second. There's been a lot of good opinions in the thread that I hadn't taken into consideration. Things like having single correct answers to a puzzle, the verticalness of a lot of Zelda style dungeons. It was easy to think "Man, I really like Zelda and have fun with the dungeons I'd like to do something like that" and then realizing that the reality of making something like that on paper isn't that easy.