Tuesday, 3 April 2007
Not sure of the usefullness
WotC has a Free Dungeon Tile Mapper available online. Yawn. Sure the features are nice, but…
I haven’t played D&D in a loooong time, but I never remember dungeons like this. Do campaigns really exist in settings like this? Such dungeoneering was never something that was actually played in my circles back in the day.
“Oh look, another cave! Let's go set off some traps, kill some monsters, ponder the stoopid reasons some lost soul turned necromancer collected bones and horded treasure,” never seemed like a reason to play the game. Where was the “world” that my character lived? Or was the original game that Gygax made like this: there only needed to be an idea that a world existed above ground out of the dungeon?
I never played this way. Did/Do you? Sure, we explored ruins, fought dragons, battled a liche, sought better armor and greater challenges, but almost never went spelunking a random dungeon. I mean, the luminaries and my—our—collective influences do not spend lots of time in caves or dungeons. How much of LotR is in the caves of Moria, or do Weis and Hickman spend below ground looking for dragon hordes? Maybe my influences are grossly dated.
To each their own, yet I can’t see much use for this tool in my gaming.
Technorati Tags: dungeons
[Trackback URL for this entry]
The mapper is pretty useful if you own the tilesets that wotc has produced. I have them and they are very nice but haven't had a chance to use them yet. I don't think this is supposed to be used for creating random dungeons. It's just a tool for designing them with the tilesets.
And yes, I have played a lot of D&D games that involved mostly dungeon crawling. With a good group and dm, it can be a lot of fun.