The Dungeon: the Sweeping Saga or the Bunker

 So I am responding to game-bud Ivan Richardson's "Dungeon Crawls to Stories." In this video essay gets into the ubiquitous question of why do these monsters live by each other? He uses the scenario "The Caves of Chaos" as his choice to show a working grid-grind type of work. He touches upon the concepts of gamism, narrativism, and simulationism, but mostly sticks to the point that disparate entities can be lorded over to explain why they live next to each other on a map with a bunch of rooms within a few meters from each other.

I'm not as he put it '...not criticizing, but critiquing.' I am taking up the subject the "dungeon crawl" versus its proclaimed opposite the story-driven scenario.
Sorry folks but narrative is going to happen. Whether it is because the GM has a narrative, or the roleplayers around the table get into the goofiness of the play-pretend that they are engaging in. It's what keeps people coming back to the table. The connecting thread can be based off of a rather linear direction and flow like say Ravenloft. It can be more haphazard and unrelated occurences in say In Search of the Unknown. It is because of the shared obstacles between the players and the GM stringing that into the yarn of whatever tale gets knitted together. It's not a compelling "ecology" of the encounters, or a detailed understanding rules and implied in-game physics, though those elements make for strong sessions.

Anybody that has had experience with even just a handful of GMs has probably met the Crawl-purist. They're the dude that insists that everything is random yet not arbitrary in the roleplaying session that is going on. Any story that occurs is because of the players' delusional belief that things are connected. This is despite the text of this of that classic dungeon being presented as the get-together's promised tale. If this last over more than a vignette of a room or two, they will then come up with a gladiatorial match where they want the PCs to fight one another or an all-powerful deity will demand that the group eats dog poop, or something similar. In their mind this visceral experience will restore balance in "roleplaying" and get things back to the war game details of a room by room collection of puzzles and Stat-attackers. Sure.

This is fine if you're this sort of GM. Fine if you want your players to get bored of roleplaying and finally move on into collecting card games maybe board games. While the more metered an RPG session becomes, without it basically being something akin to BINGO or amateur poker, there is a reason it only occurs in four-hour blocks at larger conventions. Meanwhile, at the smaller game festivals, kitchen tabletops, and computer screens, things get a lot more wordy than worldly.