Whither the Dungeon? The Decline and Fall of D&D Adventures (Early Access PDF)

It's not just GMs not knowing how to run a dungeon, or an adventure. It's players wanting to play a character like an avatar from a paper-based video game. Which is usually fine until their PCs have to possess motivations that fit within a narrative framework. For instance, I have a player who, frustrated at having his dwarven cleric nearly die to a pair of poisoned gunslinger bullets (WDDH) -- asks me if he can switch to a god of death, no doubt having read somewhere that clerics of this faith get combat advantages. I told him, if he could come up with a compelling backstory for why a cleric of Moradin (the dwarven god of creation) would all of sudden worship a god of death -- without becoming evil -- I will allow it. Now in my campaign, I have a rule that no one runs evil PCs, and even chaotic neutral is iffy. This is to cut down on the gamer mindset which leads to a party of murder hobos and is completely incompatible with running a narrative-driven adventure IMO. I had to explain to him, the problem is, all too often you get D&D adventuring parties comprised of characters with wildly different alignments, and everyone gets along, because, well, we're playing a game, right? But if you were to take these characters and write them into a story, it would be completely unbelievable, for example, how a neutral evil drow assassin would hook up with a lawful good paladin of Selune for any reason whatsoever: they would try to kill each other inside of the first five minutes. Now, I am not against parties of very different alignments, but it demands a very advanced level of role playing most players simply do not possess. So, no evil PCs. But I digress. The problem is, all too often the GM is encouraged to run a narrative-based RPG (with more descriptions and less maps), while the players are encouraged to play like a paper-based video game, and there is this disconnect which can lead to a lot of frustrated GMs and frustrated players. If you're going to run a narrative-driven RPG, players need to be encouraged to role-play within a narrative framework. So that there is a balance. And right now that isn't being communicated in the D&D products either.

Joseph Balderson

Title does not quite match your subject: "running an adventure" is not the same as "running a dungeon". There is advice (sometimes good) scattered through the 5E books on Adventures, but I agree that there is not so much on Dungeons. Which is surprising, because the 5E game mechanics are entirely focused around small-group combat in enclosed spaces. Are there other RPG rulesets that spend more time on Running Dungeons? Say, in the last 20 years?