Purpose and Mystery in the Dungeon

I think DMs are often amused by the things that players seize on to try to make sense of things. Some little off-hand detail looms large in the players' minds. Maybe it's just a single word, maybe it's a hint from the DM that got misread. The DM chuckles to themselves. Silly players!

Conventional wisdom is to quietly absorb these suppositions and, behind the curtain, perhaps make them real.  One could argue whether this constitutes a Quantum Ogre or whatever. I'm not interested in that.  I think there's something else important going on here.

I think this indicates a hunger in the players, a desperate yearning, for things to make sense and be interesting.

Some people realize this desire but they chalk it up to some natural reflex to see patterns in things. Perhaps some smart person will demonstrate that they know the word apophenia, and then this useless knowledge will close the matter.  But to me that's not the end of the matter, and so I'm going to all-caps shout what I think is the lesson of this:

PLAYERS YEARN FOR SENSE/LOGIC/SIGNIFICANCE, AND YOUR GAME IS NOT GIVING IT TO THEM.

Right now a lot of thinking about making a dungeon logical or rational tends to drift towards "Gygaxian naturalism". Is there enough for the owlbears to eat?  Can the hydra actually fit through these hallways?  This is all back-justifying.  It is answering HOW is it like this, when I am talking about WHY is it like this.

And hot on the heels of "WHY?" is: "SO WHAT?"  Players want the answers to be actionable to them.  Where is the hook for them? What can they do with it?

Why is the hydra here? Is this its normal hunting ground, or has it fled from somewhere else? Why did it need to flee the other place?  What does it mean that there's a hydra in the area?  What effects does this have -- what SIGNS of these things will there be, that the players encounter, to give mystery and texture to the players experience?  Why was that weird hunter guy in town?

I want to yell at myself some more:

THE COMPANION OF PURPOSE IS MYSTERY

When something is set up with purpose, but the players don't know the purpose, that is a mystery.  Mystery is not just about "whomst did what to whomst where?" logic puzzles. It's about "Why is this happening? Why was this done? Why was it done this way?"  Again we need the WHY, because it's the WHY that drives the WHERE WHEN HOW.

Most dungeons are necessarily bags of rather random things, and players are struggling to make sense of them, but there is no sense to make.

I'm not saying that everything needs a reason. In fact, there should be randomness and whimsy and silliness. What I'm saying is that most dungeons are lacking the element of mystery and purposefulness, and players are hungering for it.

But it is hard to do.  It's hard!!!

Against the One-Level Dungeon

Ironically it is the small dungeon, the one-level lairs, that are the biggest culprits here.  A mega-dungeon is old, random, it partakes of the mythic underworld, it can have factions (who bring their own purpose and mystery).  A one-level dungeon is not like that. It has immediate questions of why it is like this, what's going on here. The one-level lair cries out for purpose. It can have mystery in itself, but it is ultimately something to be consumed and thrown away.

These small dungeons cry out for integration into bigger mysteries, but that is exactly what a published one-level dungeon you get from someone else can't provide.

Arnesonian Mazes

Building on my previous post about Making Mazes Fun...

The Maze is the space between dungeon rooms. Yeah that's right it's a liminal space -- fuck you. It is a place that random encounters can arise from, and where fleeing monsters can melt back into. When you huddle in a room and something shuffles by the door, it is from the Maze, because that corridor can lead anywhere, it doesn't just link up a couple rooms. The Maze is the wilderness of the dungeon, it is the "outside" of the inside.

Arneson's Blackmoor had the Maze:

Here corridors are king. With so many stairwells, who knows where the Maze might lead. Sometimes they extend out beyond the confines of the rest of the dungeon:

How do you even run these at the table? This was before VTTs, so I have to think they were simply described by Arneson, and probably not with perfect precision. I imagine they would be navigated from intersection to intersection, often times only advancing a few feet before the next intersection. This becomes a tangle, even a "tanglefuck". All players have to go on is DM language, an assault of information and decisions.

Even finding a room to go to is not guaranteed. The Maze is a haystack and the rooms are needles.  This is not like a normal dungeon. It is not like the usual hedge maze we might imagine either, with long twisty hallways that mostly dead-end. 

On the lower levels of Blackmoor the Maze seems to become all-important, until the special chambers disappear into strange nubs, little closets so small that Mr. Alexandrian wondered if they were just placeholders or teleporters to large rooms.

To me, all this is good.

Is it boring to play? I don't know.

But I suspect that even the players who are not mapping will feel the Maze. I think they will become afraid of getting lost. I think they will mark up the dungeon with chalk. I think they will know not to split up. I think they will definitely feel that they have extended their necks into an unsafe space that it might not be so easy to return from.

(update)

To be honest I'm not sure how you WOULD do a maze-like thing -- on a standard sheet of paper with a vaguely standard number of dungeon rooms -- in a way other than highly interconnecting corridors. It might even be necessary to use 8 directions.