Is it a good idea to base your dungeon design around classic Zelda dungeons? I don't mean rip them off 1 to 1, but the general design philosophy is pretty neat I think. I like the focus on mechanical puzzles, but I feel like "push button to open door" stuff is also a bit too video gamey to be interesting in pen and paper.
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Nintendo makes very good dungeons from a gameplay perspective, but they're also so gamey that it's hard to imagine them as real structures that originally had a purpose other than hosting puzzles, monsters and loot
So I'd say it depends on how much emphasis your group puts in versimilitude
I think unless your players are super autistic about this (mine aren't) versimilitude is just a matter of framing. If you are good enough at flavouring things, almost any "puzzle box" room can feel like a real place. Even if it's just a torture chamber or something along those lines.
My reservations are that the things that are fun in Zelda dungeons - physical exploration, mechanical experimentations with haptic objects, spatial awareness - might not translate well into a medium where most observational things happen in the theatre of mind.
>they're also so gamey that it's hard to imagine them as real structures that originally had a purpose
This depends on which Zelda game. Up to TWW, you're absolutely right, but TP and SS both did a lot to address this.
https://www.architectureofzelda.com/
I often use video game dumgeons as base for mine and this is very easy to work around.
>Assign uses for rooms, add a couple of relevant props
>Change passages that don't make sense to sections that are clearly part of an older dumgon, passages carved out by looters or damage
>Add collapsed sections to branch off of areas that still don't make sense
>Replace all puzzles
>Consider possibility that locked doors will be forced open. Anything that needs to be a real locked door should not look like a door at all. Sliding statues, acid-flooded tunnels or hidden doors are almost always better.
>Replace critically important keys by information or something else more interesting
>Setting doesn't matter. One of the best dungeons I ever ran was Area 51 from Deus Ex refluffed as a corrupted Dwarf Fortress
all puzzles
At that point, how is it still a video game dungeon rather than any random building that you could have gotten by drawing random shapes on ms paint? I mean, it's a decent approach, but isn't the point of lifting content from a different source to have less prep work to do compared to making things up from scratch?
NAYRT. You can use the concepts of puzzles, but many video game puzzles don't make sense in RPGs because the limited control scheme or mechanics aren't there.
As an example, I once ran a version of the PAYDAY Branch Bank heist as an RPG scenario, and the players immediately started breaking the bag movement mechanic and dramatically accelerated the climactic gunfight at the end. Things like stacking bags on wheeled office chairs, etc.
My go-to is Doom wads, especially vanilla-style ones like Ultimate Doom in Name Only
The thing I'd take away from Zelda dungeons isn't the individual puzzle chambers where you push a block or hit a switch in order to find a key or open a door. Instead the thing to take away is the idea of large scale environmental interactoins.
The water temple is a good example, where raising and lowering the water level fundamentally changes portions of the dungeon and opens up new areas, but in a very natural way. A door that was submerged can now be accessed, or a wide gap is filled and can now be swam across.
However, that's less artificial because the players have the option to interact with it on an environmental level. They can swim down to access a door, perhaps with added risk of drowning. They can climb across the gap, potentially avoiding some aquatic threats that might inhabit the water they're expected to swim across. Because the puzzles are a large scale environmental change, the solutions are less linear and don't feel as video-gamey. There isn't a puzzle contained to a singular room, but instead a dungeon-wide change that changes the context of many rooms at the same time.
It's hard to say because Zelda is an action game while D&D is a turn-based RPG. Some things might work well, others might not. You'd have to be more specific about how you plan to do it.
My group isn't playing DnD but TDE, so there are more rules for interacting with your surroundings I guess. (Is DnD turn-based even outside of combat? That sounds dumb.) But yeah, I do get the point.
Anyway, I don't really have anything concrete planned, it's just a thought that crossed my mind. I feel like something like the OoT Forest Temple or the MM Pic Hibernia are the gold standard for 3D Zelda dungeons. And while the central themes (hunting down ghosts to re-ignite magic torches, and manipulating a central pillar respectively) are relatively obvious to turn into an RPG puzzle like this Anon
said, the "micro puzzles" would probably be quite dull if you try to translate them 1 to 1.
Then I'll give you some general tips.
One of the weaker parts of Zelda dungeons is backtracking if you forget something or need to go back to use an item you just received, or getting lost. Travel can be instantaneous in a tabletop game, so you can feel free to scatter a variety of items and puzzles around the dungeon. If the area is safe, players can make their characters go back and forth as many times as they need by just saying they do so.
Your creativity decides what happens, so you can have much more interesting consequences for success or failure than taking damage, gaining an item, or needing to redo your attempt. Just an example.
>player needs to jump over a gap with flowing water
>player fails, falls into the water
>they notice an item from their bag floating away in the stream
>roll to see if they can catch it before it slips away
>if they fail, it drifts into a tunnel that is difficult to navigate and might be dangerous. you decide what's in there and if there might be any additional reward for exploring it
The idea of returning through areas and looping design works well at the tabletop. A hub area crossed several times but with changes each time is great.
Maybe it's a tall room which is entered several times at ascending height, or maybe activating mechanisms elsewhere makes the hub change. Maybe changing things causes ghosts to repeat different scenes or something.
The core of it is that rpgs thrive on consequences. Loops give directional choices, as.do hubs with multiple exits. Incremental change gives feedback on those choices: consequences.
Might have a problem in that in video games when you bang your head against the wall and slap every surface with every item you have it's all done on your own.
In a tabletop game everything you do has to get parsed through the GM and you (and the GM) might start feeling like you're an idiot and it turns out you're just in the wrong room or some such and that sounds like it'd really suck.
Do the swastika dungeon
How many video games did Dee Horton and Lew Hewitt played in 1954?
Did HG Wells play a lot of video games when he wrote When the Sleeper Wakes in 1910?
That ancient Chinese Emperor Yang of Sui, who reigned from 604-618, probably played a lot of video games too, huh?
And I'm willing to bet Heron of Alexandria did nothing but play video games when he was inspired by the idea of automatic doors back in fricking 10 AD.
It's all video games.
What the frick are you talking about?
Pushing buttons to open doors (also known as automatic doors) is video games, and therefore bad.
No, please ignore the fact that they were invented before video games and definitely ignore the gact that they were conceptualized a fricking thousand years before video games were invented.
My seething rage for video games exceeds all logic and reason. I will blame video games for everything I dislike.
Just because something has a historical precedent doesn't mean they remain divorced from other cultural resonance.
Fascism dates back to Rome but most people won't picture togas when you use the word, no?
Recency bias is not an argument.
It's one of the many resident autists of /tg/. This particular specimen seems to get triggered by comparisons between RPGs and vidya.
What's nayrt?
Not Anon You're Replying To.
Anon, I know you are currently in the middle of a tardrage, but let me try to explain this to you. "Pushing a button to open a door" is not bad. It's just not as interesting in a pen and paper context as it would be in a video game (where movement alone can be inherently enjoyable). When I call it "video gamey" I don't mean that the concept is bad, I mean that the concept fits vidya better than RPGs.
I'd argue that automatic doors fit ergonomics and infrastructure better than video games, because it was an idea people considered thousands of years before the inception of video games, therefore they actually would fit into a TTRPG, because using them is something people would have done.
"Video gamey" as a descriptor is just as inappropriate and moronic as "anime bullshit" as a descriptor.
Learn how to communicate.
Anon, we are not talking about door buttons as thematically appropriate objects. We are talking about them as a puzzle. In a video game, locating a button, navigating there and pressing it, can be enough to be a fun puzzle. In a theatre of mind style RPG however, locating a button, navigating there and pressing it, isn't in itself enough to make an engaging puzzle. This does not mean buttons are bad. This just means in interactive media, they are more fitting for those with a visual connotation.
I hope this clears everything up. If you insist on still being anal about the term "video gamey" rather than trying to understand the given argument, I will not reply any further. Merry Christmas.
And once again, ascribing how you feel to a thing's state of being is both inappropriate and moronic, and you ought to either
• learn how to properly communicate
or
• frick yourself.
Merry Christmas, and a happy New Year too.