Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
Dungeons
In RPGs of a certain type charcters go into things called 'dungeons' to fight monsters and collect treasure.

Imagine that you tried to explain this concept to a non-roleplayer:

GAMER: It's a game about going into dungeons and killing monsters and getting their treasure.
NON-GAMER: Dungeons? You mean prisons?
GAMER: No, dungeons. They're like big underground mazes full of monsters.
NON-GAMER: No, you're wrong. Dungeons are underground prisons, normally found under castles. I've seen Errol Flynn films - I know about this stuff.
GAMER: Ah, well, in gaming language we use the word dungeon means a network of underground tunnels and caves that's full of monsters and traps.
NON-GAMER: Why?
GAMER: Why what?
NON-GAMER: Why is it full of monsters and traps?
GAMER: Well... it just is.

I mean, what the fuck is this idea of dungeons all about?

I can see where it comes from. A big inspiration for it has to be the Mines of Moria in Lord of the Rings. Add to that tales like Perseus and the Minotaur with its unfathomable maze the Labyrinthe, tales about the tombs of Egypt which had mazes filled with traps to stop graverobbers, and you can glimpse the origins of it.

But now look at the title of the first commercial RPG, Dungeons and Dragons. It's there in the title. It seems to me the Gygax wanted a game about going into these underground mazes, kill monsters and get their treasure. To my mind there are three staggering questions:

1. Why did Gygax want to write a game about such a thing?
2. Why did other people accept the idea as reasonable when they played it for the first time?
3. Why has it been unquestioningly accepted by generations of roleplayers as a perfectly nornal-seeming thing to do?

And, just incidentally, why did he call them 'dungeons'? The word 'Labyrinthe' seem a lot more appropriate to me. But then the game would have been called 'L&D' and would have flopped immediately. Who would buy a game with such an uninspiring set of initials?