Is there any satisfying, narrative reason for ancient tombs or prisons to be filled with the sort of elaborate...

>I want for thieves to steal my belongings so I can't enjoy them in the afterlife that's why I literally leave the door to my tomb open
Are you dumb?

Chinese used reservoirs with mercury in tombs to poison potential robbers

Wizards man. They have a bad habit of trying to bring life to everything, and this time they brought life to a building. This building is run on the exact artifact you need to continue your Quest and the building isn't going to ask you to stop trying to steal it's guts nicely.

I had a dungeon with a similar idea, only in reverse. Essentially a long-lost empire was at war with Necromancers.
The empire's religion wouldn't allow them to profane the elements with cremation, burial, or dumping corpses in the ocean (think Persians), so they built trap-filled vault-tombs to keep the Necromancers from sneaking in and animating their dead right under them

There are Things in the Depths that live off Light, need the Light... They worship the Sun. And when They sing, the Sun wakes up from Its slumber and shines brightly onto Their flesh - as entire continents burn to cinders in hellish fire, and not even the Gods were safe.

Unable to bind the Sun, the Gods bound Them in darkness instead, and left Them there to starve eternally, deprived of the Light They crave. The Sun began to sleep again with no songs to please Him.

But mortals became greedy for the spoils of the Depths, gems, metals, ancient bones of dragons and beasts... and they dug deep, and carved into the Hallways of the Gods. They unleashed some of Them, not all, but enough to cause horrifying cataclysms as great civilizations crumbled to dust in blinding Light.

Among the mountains of the dead, people prayed to the Gods, and the Gods came down and smote Them into the dark Depths again. The mortals realised that in the darkest dungeons of the Earth, no Light should ever shine, no mortal should walk. So they trapped every inch of the Hallways of the Gods. If anyone was to enter the Depths, they should die for their foolishness.

Unfortunately for mortals, this happened ages ago, before the Northern Gods betrayed the Southern Gods and encased the world in ice for 10,000 years. All this knowledge is gone.

No one knows that They are asleep deep in the Earth, hungry for Light, waiting to sing the song of the Sun...

to keep grave robbers out

Sometimes it's easier to lock a terrible monster away forever than it is to kill it.
Sometimes you wanna leave it alive just in case you need it one day.

In either case, keeping other people out while you can still go in is prudent

Depends on the setting

It's actually to keep the dead in, in case of massive necromantic surges and the dead becoming undead.

>Privatized
Prisons started out as private ventures you libtard. They were only nationalized after protestors got laws passed against debtors prisons, executions, and forced labor.

Words Of Warning
Random CAPS ruins the Mood.

Not him but
Why did we privatize them back?
Genuinely dont know shit about anything.

Because money, user. Baby Boomers rode on the wave of "Fuck you, I got mine" and Millenials didn't realize how fragile a system of human respect is before it was too late.

Next step: privatizing public education and turning kids into a profit margin.

Because the people that are buried in those crypts want them to be guarded, and not by guards that could steal the treasures they wanted to carry into the next life.

Or, the BBEG or one of his lieutenants moved into an ancient crypt to be sure they wouldn't be disturbed, and set up traps there just in case they were.

They are new. The ruins, the ancient tombs and what not. Adventures finish one death trap and low and behold a new one is 'unearthed by farmers' or some random unnamed adventures 'unearth a new level' of a perversely explored death trap a few years later.

Why you ask? Why would you build a dungeon for the sole purpose of distracting large groups of adventures? You see, the thing about adventures, one of their defining traits is that they adventure. They go from place to place murdering, hoarding and fucking around until they find a place that interests them, grind at it until its too hard, boring or empty. They usually don't die and when they do they are quickly replaced.

Then they move on to the next place. They're locusts you see, using place up until it ceases to entertain before moving on to the next place.

No one knows were they come from; no one can point to the village their from on the map, has seen any member of their family before their inevitable demise and many seem to run on an alien logic found nowhere in the known world.

So, knowing these creatures come looking for gold, entertainment and blood, what would you do?

Private schools are generally much better than public schools. Government employees shouldn't have unions, period.

Why wouldn't you want a safe and secure hidey hole? Genuinely curious. Subterranean bunkers are the most secure and defensible kind of structure possible, better insulation, all around good.

Tombs are obvious (deathtraps to protect the leader or whatever), but prisons? Well, I find the idea of dungeons that are also real dungeons, as in prison type places, to be pretty interesting, moreso if they're huge and sprawling to make you wonder why the fuck someone would bother, but yeah.

Because the up-front tax cost of running private prisons is cheaper, since there's a guy in charge who wants to make the place run as slim as possible, because he gets the leftovers. However, it costs more in the long run and has more hidden costs, including

-increased recidivism
-the creation of a market demand for inmates
-higher rates of prisoner abuse, leading to excessive lawsuits

etc

>-increased recidivism

This is a pretty retarded argument. The higher rates of prisoner abuse may be true, though.

There's probably some good answers in this thread, but I look at it like this:

Either you're going to sacrifice a little realism in your worldbuilding for the sake of a fun thematic dungeon, or you can just find a more fitting place to put a shitton of traps into. Either way works.

Its not even a problem with "realism," underground complexes filled with traps aren't implausible at all. Some traps are more realistic than others, though.

Maybe it's created and filled with an assortment of monsters both intelligent and dumb to weed out the weak and leave only the strongest and best creatures. These creatures will be forced to procreate with other surviving fittest to breed the most horrible beasts soon to be released into the wild free to wreak havok in the name of whatever villain did this. Till those damn heroes came along...

Yes. This is honestly good. Things that ought to be bleeding edge and high quality shouldn't be monopolized, and the US government is the best in the world at both facilitating and literally being monopolies.

For something as complex and important as education, a rigorous and competitive environment is the best environment. They'd have the same problems as colleges, though, where predacious costs reign, and anybody can pay to hear whatever they want to hear (I shudder to imagine creationist primary schools getting even MORE popular).

It's only retarded if you don't believe that prisons are capable of rehabilitating people, which is the foundational principle of the our system of justice.
Otherwise, a well-run prison should have a low recidivism rate, and a shoddy one should have a higher rate. And the numbers say the rate goes up in regions where prisons have been privatized:

doc.state.mn.us/PAGES/files/9613/9206/2382/MN_Private_Prison_Evaluation_Website_Final.pdf

>It's only retarded if you don't believe that prisons are capable of rehabilitating people, which is the foundational principle of the our system of justice.

yeah, that's intrinsically retarded. Serious criminals usually have malformed brains, they were broken from the start.

Usually this is used as an argument for leniency, but I don't care.

I'm a little iffy on my history regarding them but my general understanding is that prisons for criminals were typically more like holding cells until they could undergo their punishment. Prison itself was not seem as a punishment for crimes for a very long time.

Later there were also debtor's prisons that you'd get thrown into if you didn't pay your debts.

>Private schools are generally much better than public schools.
because private schools get more money, thanks to caring parents, and get to choose which kids they take. Same as in the private prison system, actually - for profit prisons boost their income by extorting money from prisoner's families to give them basic necessities, and if a prisoner has a medical condition that might cost a lot to treat the private prison dumps them back on the state system.

The traps weren't really intended to be traps. They used to have a practical uses, but having been abandoned for so long they've either broken, or the sophisticated knowledge required to operate them safely has been long since lost.

For example, the floor that drops away suddenly into a cavernous pit was originally intended to be a lift to the lower levels, but the ropes have long since rotted away. Or the chamber that starts flooding was intended to be a reservoir for the hydraulics that power the doors.

Or if you prefer something slightly more esoteric, pic related.

Magical artifacts must test those who lust after them to see if they are brave, sharp of wit, and pure of heart. If you want to make sure the magical sword stays out of shitty evil hands, yeah, build a dungeon.

For a prison, fill it with false corridors and alarm traps. The guards are trained over months on how to navigate the place. This way the place just becomes immensely more difficult to escape from or sneak into.

How about you people don't start a debate about what kinds of criminals are salvageable?

For the amusement of the audience. Around half the house's cut on the bets ends up being used to maintain the dungeon and refill the final level chest.

and I would've gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for those meddling kids!

>implying state-run prisons aren't brutal, inhumane places.

Fun fact; charter schools generally have worse grades in math and science but are more likely to be accepted to college and graduate, degree non-specific.

No but there are fewer abuses and less lack of oversite along with fewer cases like that judge who would give extra-harsh sentences to minors, to be "tough on crime" for the kid's own good of course :^), and then send them over to his relative who ran a private facility and would keep the kids as long as they could with arbitrary extensions on time while giving a share of profits to the judge.

>Private schools are generally much better than public schools.

Private schools also have the ability to turn away potential students who are mentally retarded, emotionally disturbed, or are low-achieving.

Public schools have to take every kid in the district regardless of what kinds of problems they're dragging in.

>which is the foundational principle of the our system of justice.
That is so totally wrong it isn't even deserving of a response. The foundation of Western Justice is retribution, which is why pillory, rather than giving a baker another chance after he cheats people on bread, was an accepted punishment up to the 20th Century.

Only the first private prisons made "rehabilitation" their focus because they were originally founded by Christians who believed that people could be redeemed. Then this idea was spread around and people decided that the government's job should be to rehab people. And because it's a massive bureacracy which has to keep costs down to justify itself to the taxpayers, it's the worst fucking rehab system in the world.

Prisons are places of punishment.

Sure, you're right, I misspoke. What I meant to say up above is that the idea that sending people to prison (and other punishments) will curb their criminal tendencies is a foundational principle. The other guy's basically saying you can't tell a good prison from a bad one by looking at recidivism rates, because people commit crimes due to mental illness and therefore prison doesn't do anything I guess?
Which isn't backed up by numbers -- good prisons have lower recidivism rates, which shows they do reduce crime, whether it's by punishment or rehabilitation, they serve their purpose, so arguing that modern privatized prisons suck because their recidivism numbers are terrible isn't "retarded."

Security is not just physical barriers but also institutional controls. DnD adventurers can opportunistically loot old tombs where most mundane institutional controls have degraded and they only have to contend with physical barriers. If there are leftover magical wards or undead guardians, then they represent the remnant of the institutional control. Active staffed organizations are the most challenging to infiltrate since they employ manned guards and information control as well as physical deterrence and response.

Nevermind that those numbers vary widely across nations.

If Americans would start using Norwegian or Dutch prison systems, 75% of all prisons in the USA would have to close shop because woah, all those small time criminals have become actual upstanding members of society.

Cue a complete crash of the American prison economy... it will never happen, the prison economy in the USA is just too big.