Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
Because RPGs have to be biased towards interesting stuff. That means you give them interesting things that they have the option to poke at, rather than having them continually poke at random things and discover that said random thing is boring.
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Of course, but (a) if your definition of "interesting stuff" is limited to dungeons, then you need to have multiple dungeons, and then you don't need to steer them toward a specific dungeon; (b) if you define "interesting stuff" more broadly, then you don't have to have them find a dungeon to have interesting stuff to interact with, so you don't need to steer them toward
the dungeon. The classic "wilderness adventure" model in original D&D and in RQ had rules for populating spaces on maps with interesting creatures and encounters, but didn't assume that dungeons were there at all.
And then (c) my experience has been that players whose characters are in a vacant square on a map will either pass on quickly to the next square (because discourse time, the time spent presenting a story, is not proportionate to story time, the time experienced by the characters in the story) or find interesting things to do on their own. In fact, that's just the same as if the characters are in an unoccupied room in a dungeon. Surely you don't put monsters, traps, or treasure in every single room in your dungeons?