D&D 5E Dungeon Length: How long does it take?
Horwath
Legend
Predicting dungeon length is like predicting weather 6 months in advance. If it's winter it is going to be cold, if it's summer it is going to be hot.
If it large dungeon it will take very long, if it's short dungeon it will be little less than very long.
Never underestimete players power to sideline, derail, search and ransack everything and also mandatory "paralysis of analysis".
Charles Rampant
Explorer
You also get the opposite - where the players mysteriously find the perfect route to visit only the end boss, murder him, and then leave by the back entrance with all the loot. It's something to respect, and great for player autonomy, but it plays merry hell with session planning when it happens 
Imaculata
Hero
You also get the opposite - where the players mysteriously find the perfect route to visit only the end boss, murder him, and then leave by the back entrance with all the loot. It's something to respect, and great for player autonomy, but it plays merry hell with session planning when it happens
This is something that also comes down to good dungeon design. If you want the dungeon to last longer, then design it in such a way that not all rooms are skipped that easily.
In last week's session, my players skipped quite a bit of rooms in my dungeon, but it was designed that way. I had designed it in such a way that a lot of optional rooms could be skipped, but important content was not. I also made sure there were some consequences to skipping some of the rooms; the players were at a disadvantage when facing the boss, because they didn't bother to lower the water level. This meant that they ran through the dungeon a lot faster. They could use the murky water to launch a surprise attack on the boss, but the boss battle took a lot longer because of reduced movement speed due to the same water.
iserith
Magic Wordsmith
You also get the opposite - where the players mysteriously find the perfect route to visit only the end boss, murder him, and then leave by the back entrance with all the loot. It's something to respect, and great for player autonomy, but it plays merry hell with session planning when it happens
One good way to deal with that is to make acquiring treasure part of an exploration challenge rather than as a reward for overcoming a combat challenge. In my one-shots, the loot is always hidden or behind a trap. Monsters almost never have any treasure. You get XP for killing the monsters. You get treasure (and other benefits) by exploring.
So yeah, you can in theory skip to the "end boss" and take it down for XP, but you'll be poorer in the doing!
Libramarian
Adventurer
I think there are two functional dungeon paradigms: old-style and new-style.
Old-style
- 1 square = 10 feet
- 35-50+ rooms per level
- 1/3 to 1/2 rooms are empty, 1/4 to 1/3 semi-random content, 1/4 to 1/3 special content
- Players are expected to map
- Time is tracked in turns
- Random encounters are checked
- XP: exploration/combat
- Prep time: 3-4 hours/level
- Play time: 12-20 hours/level
New-style
- 1 square = 5 feet
- 8-12 rooms per level
- Every room has special content
- Players are not expected to map
- Time is not tracked in turns
- Random encounters not used
- XP: combat/milestone
- Prep time: 3-4 hours/level
- Play time 6-10 hours/level
Although there are some overtures to old style dungeon generation in the 5e DMG, the new style is ultimately a more natural fit for this edition.
Old-style
- 1 square = 10 feet
- 35-50+ rooms per level
- 1/3 to 1/2 rooms are empty, 1/4 to 1/3 semi-random content, 1/4 to 1/3 special content
- Players are expected to map
- Time is tracked in turns
- Random encounters are checked
- XP: exploration/combat
- Prep time: 3-4 hours/level
- Play time: 12-20 hours/level
New-style
- 1 square = 5 feet
- 8-12 rooms per level
- Every room has special content
- Players are not expected to map
- Time is not tracked in turns
- Random encounters not used
- XP: combat/milestone
- Prep time: 3-4 hours/level
- Play time 6-10 hours/level
Although there are some overtures to old style dungeon generation in the 5e DMG, the new style is ultimately a more natural fit for this edition.
It's been my experience that you can't really plan how long a dungeon will take. Sometimes you plan an encounter that you're sure will give the party a hard time and take a while and they just steamroll over it. Sometimes you plan a quick, easy encounter as a warm-up and they get stuck on it. The dice can be fickle and never underestimate a player's ability to make a bad and out of the blue decision. Also never underestimate a player's ability to solve a big problem or encounter easily with some clever ideas. So you can't really measure these things. I just plan a dungeon for whatever makes sense in the story and populate it with whatever makes sense. It takes the group as long as it takes them. You may clear out a shorter dungeon in a session or two. Or the dungeon could be the whole adventure and take several sessions. It really depends on what you're building the dungeon for. You can make quick, shorter dungeons to help new players get a handle on the rules and their characters. Or you could make vast, complex dungeons that are key to the story you want to tell. So don't worry about figuring out how long it will take. The most important aspect of a dungeon is if your group has fun going through it.
Tony Vargas
Legend
Over-generalizing and generation-gappy. I should just ignore it but...
Oh-so-true (IMX) & nostalgic - and oh-so-boring after a while. ;(
and 1 turn = 10 min. And the balance of a turn spent in combat is assumed to be used resting/binding wounds/repairing weapons & armor, etc - ie, a short rest.
Don't recall exp for exploration, itself. For killing monsters, certainly, for gaining (and keeping) treasure, certainly.
I think the expectation of scale was more true in 3e & 4e, where it was explicit, in 5e you might use any scale, or no scale at all running 'default TotM' (with 0 support from the rules - that still gets me). The expectation of mapping was very much still there in 3e, and could be in 5e, it just depends on the group. In 4e, though, Skill Challenges could be used to abstract the navigation of labyrinths based on dungeoneering & other skills of the PCs, instead of players going through it in exhaustive detail, so it's fair to say mapping was dead that ed.
It's more in a cadence of rests. In 3e, the few minutes to charge everyone up with a WoCLW, in 4e the 5e minute short rest, in 5e the 1hr short rest.
Depends entirely on the DM. Not expected as a necessary part of attrition, anyway.
No exp for treasure. Exp for 'story awards' (that could be trivial or significant), and, in 4e, for overcoming out-of-combat challenges, that could easily include 'exploration' and 'social encounters' (on the same scale as that for combat encounters).
Varied wildly with ed. 3e called for a lot of prep time if you wanted to challenge an optimized party with equally-optimized monsters & npcs - it could exceed play time, and PC optimization could also sink a lot of prep time. 4e prep was a breeze, you could get by with minutes of prep for a session, but...
Sessions could be short, especially in the Encounters program, just an hour or two. Hrs/level is an interesting metric, though. In 5e, for instance, it'll vary with level. It might be only a few hours of play to get from 1st-2nd, while levels in the sweet spot should take a lot longer. In 4e it'd've been more consistent, since level widths in terms of encounters were fairly consistent, and encounters were mostly limited to meaningful ones that'd take an hour or so to get through. 3e? Depends on how optimized and deep into rocket-tag the campaign got, and how many hours of table-time 'planning'/prep went into each rocket.
It's consciously designed to go either way.
The basic pdf and the PH w/o optional rules can feel very old-school in a lot of ways. A DM taking to the rulings-not-rules philosophy and running very much in the player-states-action/DM-narrates-results mode of the core resolution system will probably end up slanting the game towards that style, including things like mapping, because players /need/ to keep track of where they've been and what they've tried to succeed in that mode...
...but it's not gaurantee, and if you turn on the optional rules you invoke more of the WotC era, and, presumably, with players accustomed to that era, will get more of that style.
Libramarian
Adventurer
@Tony Vargas
my comment was more prescriptive than descriptive: I think those two styles of dungeon work the best. You can mix the styles of course, but bringing in some features of the older style without the other supporting elements usually makes the feature you're bringing in feel vestigial. E.g. I don't think there's any point in using random encounters when you're not tracking time in turns and there are only eight or ten rooms, each of which has a specially designed encounter.
An important advantage of the old style dungeon from the DM's perspective is you get about double the play/prep ratio, in my experience, due to more time spent on logistics and random content. Whether that's a good thing of course depends on how much the group enjoys those.
my comment was more prescriptive than descriptive: I think those two styles of dungeon work the best. You can mix the styles of course, but bringing in some features of the older style without the other supporting elements usually makes the feature you're bringing in feel vestigial. E.g. I don't think there's any point in using random encounters when you're not tracking time in turns and there are only eight or ten rooms, each of which has a specially designed encounter.
An important advantage of the old style dungeon from the DM's perspective is you get about double the play/prep ratio, in my experience, due to more time spent on logistics and random content. Whether that's a good thing of course depends on how much the group enjoys those.
