Rampant Games - Making Epic 3D Dungeons

Jay Barnson writes on the difficulty of making good dungeons for 3D RPGs:

In 1988, I attended a lecture by Tracy Hickman, author of a lot of … well, juvenile fantasy literature back in a time when such a thing hardly existed. He was also the author of the classic D&D module, Ravenloft. The lecture was specifically about adventure creation, and he spoke a few minutes about maps. He commented on how, if you tried to create a 3D model of one of the castles from these classic D&D modules, it would come out very “dumpy” and un-castle-like.  That was part of his thinking when he designed the castle in Ravenloft. He tried to make it more realistic. He also discovered how terribly the third dimension tripped up pencil-and-paper gamers. They’d be convinced that some awful teleport trap had happened, when in reality they’d just made a mapping error.