[Joe]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

When running games with a large hack and slash component, do you prefer dungeons, wilderness adventures, or something else?

I'm in the mainstream here - I find that dungeons suit this style of play very well. At least to my taste.

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

A big downside of dungeons is plausibility.

Yes! I think everything you say about this is spot-on.

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

In some ways the wilderness adventure seems better-suited for a straightforward hack and slash experience.

I think that's true too, in some ways (as you said!). It's certainly easier to make plausible.

But to my mind, standard wilderness adventures lack one of the main benefits of dungeons, which is that dungeons are tailor-made for iterative, procedure-based play - a style of play that suits the RPG medium very well indeed, since it is all about player agency.

To explain, I guess I think of the "dungeon" as an arbitrary narrative structure designed to provide the players with an extended series of discrete, meaningful choices, each of which has real consequences. That is the great virtue of this otherwise totally weird tunnel-chamber-tunnel-chamber structure: it's a kind of architecture that presents the players with meaningful choices at every crossroads, at every choice between this tunnel and that, or this door and that, etc. And then each chamber, area, region, or whatever, provides a series of discrete encounters that ca be gamed out in a manageable period of time, before we return once again to the iterative choice of tunnels, etc. It's just a great narrative structure if you want to constantly provide the players with meaningful choices, i.e. agency.

Yes, the dungeon is weird, but if I try to create an outdoor setting that provides the same benefits, I'm forced to create even weirder and more arbitrary structures: vast labyrinths of forking paths, impenetrable barriers of thorns, complex sequences of canyons, etc etc. And then I might as well be using a dungeon.

Wilderness adventures naturally follow a different narrative structure, I think: one that provides less opportunity for iterative cycles of meaningful decision making. Hexcrawls are one classic solution, but that's another topic...