But yeah, my argument that you can fit an entire campaign environment into an area the size of Sherwood Forest (sorry, I can't find the link) stands. If you need pacing, just make the terrain difficult, suddenly it's the Ranger's chance to shine!
Yeah, Great Britain and Ireland combined are less than half the area of Alberta, it gives you a different perspective.
For
@The Heretic's benefit, Alberta is 95% of the size of Texas by area.
Nah, it was a player-preference thing. I know because they told me. They like dungeons, but only in short bursts - they missed overland travel, regional politics, natural environments, interacting with civilization... People barely remember what happened in the last session, let alone what happened twenty sessions ago. And because the megadungeon is a singular unit, all the keys go to existing locks, all the McGuffins go to NPCs, all the factions link with other factions... and breaking that stuff up over the long term just caused things to get lost in the shuffle.
I'm pretty sure I remember reading that in Gary's game the players did a lot of stuff between hitting the dungeon - or rather, dungeons, because they might go to a different dungeon before they completed the first, then go back to the first after a while, pretty much on a whim.
I have also read - and I don't remember if it Gygax, or about Gygax, or someone like
@robertsconley who runs a big sandbox - that part of the trick to that is having McGuffins outside of the dungeons that point back into the dungeon. Maybe something as obvious as a key, or a map, or maybe a puzzle with insights to solving a problem in one of the dungeons, or maybe the party just gets resources - like access to passwall, for instance - that makes an impassable door passable.
And that got me thinking about how Gygax's dungeons have a lot of interesting and interactive rooms, there are usually only a few that are really big deals, and those are clearly marked as being something special, often with detailed illustrations. Like the big whopping doors and marble corridors to Drelzna's chamber in S4, or the sealed doors in ToEE, or the thone on the Temple level of ToEE. Of
course sitting in the throne is going to do something, you would think that even if the DM didn't hand you a colour-coded diagram of it. And if it doesn't do something, you either haven't figured it out, or you need something you don't have. And then motifs are created, so when you find a thing with marking, you know it probably has something to do with the
other thing with the same markings. And because there are fewer of them, you actually remember what they are. Plus, since you aren't actually there, and everything isn't tangible to the players the way it would be to the characters, the DM can give hints like, "You think you have seen those markings before," and send everyone rummaging through their inventory lists and wishing they had taken better notes.
So yeah, if every room is a special snowflake rooms, then no rooms are special rooms, and nobody is going to remember them. But if the important things to remember really stand out, they probably will, at least with a little nudging. It's like what
@Agonarchartist says about tricks and traps (paraphrasing), important things should be telegraphed, even if
why the thing is important is not immediately clear.
Also, those dungeons, as self-contained products (or series of products, like GDQ), need to have self contained solutions. But if you are running a campaign, the ToEE golden orb doesn't necessarily have to be found in the ToEE (or maybe it does, I don't remember, but you get my point). More or less like playing Ultima.
