I still haven't played the full release version of Baldur's Gate 3 - as a Mac user, we're still in Early Access, so while I've just managed to biff on quietly eliminating the Arcane Eye in Grymforge to get a couple of disgruntled duergar to help me take out the cultists there and wound up having to fight basically everyone in the place (which was honestly fun - I had both Wyll and Gale in the party and bottlenecked a bunch of them through a Grease and Hunger of Hadar, and then dropped two fireballs, each hitting four targets apiece - and then kept knocking the villainous barbarian back through the Hunger of Hadar thanks to Repelling Blast... did I mention how much I love Warlocks?) I'm getting to a point where I think most of the quests I can actually do are complete (Grym, the guardian of the forge, was more like a puzzle than an actual boss fight, but my Paladin is now wearing some fancy adamantine splint and a cool helmet).
Still, I have been thinking about the way that the game treats its dungeons.
Early on, the first big conflict you can run into is a group of goblins assaulting a druid grove. The druids (and especially the nasty one who has been left in charge after their normal leader was captured) want a group of tiefling refugees to move on so they can seal the grove away from the attackers. Naturally, one way to resolve the conflict here is to go and take out the goblins.
However, there are also potentially NPCs amongst the goblins you might want to help you.
The "Goblin Camp" is thus a rather sprawling defunct temple. And if you go in guns-a-blazing, you can treat it as a difficult, long-term dungeon crawl where you'll probably be forced to retreat and take long rests in the middle. Alternatively, you can walk right in and talk your way into meeting with the gang's three leaders (one of whom, if you go along with the gang's evil plan, will join your party - I'm a little bummed that that's the paladin companion character).
If you play it really cool, you can even manage to take some of the "bosses" out without giving yourself away, making it easy enough to walk around the temple without anyone giving you any trouble. (Even if you are still ultimately trying to take them down).
I think perhaps because my first introduction to D&D was Acquisitions Incorporated - and specifically the grand PAX one-shots initially run by Chris Perkins (and now apparently run by him once again, switching off with Jeremy Crawford) - my sense of how to run D&D has bene a bit more guided - the DM makes sure the players move along and hit their marks and get to the big set piece battles.
Naturally, I've been running D&D a long time and have seen plenty of other actual-play, like Critical Role and Dimension 20.
There's this tension in D&D - for the players to feel like they have agency, you never want to tell them no - you want them to feel like they can do anything they want their characters to do, or at least attempt to do so. But there's also a need to make for reasonable challenges, and to provide a path for them to walk.
I read something I think from maybe the 3rd Edition PHB (an edition I'm not terribly familiar with) that suggested the Dungeons are actually the ideal way to build adventures - you create a space where the players can let loose, be destructive, creative, and imaginative, and you know that the only thing that will break is the dungeon itself. Get them exploring that dungeon, meeting NPCs within it, and let the consequences of their actions be limitless - but bounded by the dungeon's outer walls.
I don't know that I'd want every D&D game I ran to be so closed-off. I like having things take place in a broader world.
But I think I'm growing an appreciation for the idea of this kind of bounded space of a dungeon, and that a dungeon need not be just a series of combat encounters either.
My tendency is to plan things around the idea that "ok, they're going to have this fight, and then this fight, and then this is going to happen, and then they can probably take a rest here," and I think my goal moving forward as a DM is to build things in a more open-ended manner.
Now, balancing is still important - and combat is fun. And I want to have fights that are appropriately challenging while not murdering the party. I think, then, the key is to have those fights sitting around, justified by the world.
Today I put together a dungeon for 4th level players built around the idea of a Green Hag villain (using Flee, Mortals!' version of the monster). What wound up developing was a kind of Southern Gothic story in which the hag had taken over a wealthy family's plantation and grown a massive, corrupt tree up through the manor house, and was now forcing fairies from the feywild into indentured servitude (note here that if I were to try to publish this, I'd want to get some serious cultural consulting on the premise, given its themes and aesthetic) and holding curses over people in the nearby town.
The first part of the dungeon that the party will interact with is the camp with all the indentured servants (the idea is that she's been ferrying refugees from conflict in the feywild to the material plane but forcing them into a contract they'll likely never pay off to come to this plane.) There's a single big combat encounter that could be had with the goblinoid gang that the hag has hired (actually as part of a similar deal) to prevent any of the fairies from running for it.
If the party approaches as potential customers (the hag sells potions and poisons made from the herbs she has the fairies cultivating and harvesting) they could, potentially, talk their way into the camp and treat the hobgoblins leading the gang as NPCs to negotiate with. But they could also just start attacking, facing off against the many goblins in the gang (and here I use minions to make up 10 of the 14 gang members, allowing it to feel reasonable that this group could keep watch over twenty fairies.)
If the party enters the old manor house, things get a little more universally-hostile. There's one potentially friendly NPC - the bedridden woman who actually owns the house and who has been manipulated and exploited by the hag for thirty years - but then it's basically monsters all the way down.
But I think the approach here is also to just kind of imagine what would actually be there, and let all the "extraneous" details either lie there harmlessly, or get picked up by players and used in ways I couldn't anticipate.
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