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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Quixote" data-source="post: 6242375" data-attributes="member: 694">Dungeon combat is cramped.  If the corridors and the rooms are small, that's just the way it's going to be.  Expect bottlenecks, difficulty maneuvering, and other problems.  Powerful attack spells might shake loose a piece of wall or ceiling.  Setting a fire on a puddle of oil can be an effective barrier, but it'll make a lot of smoke in a small space.  Ranged attacks probably hit the ceiling rather than the target if you aim past three range increments.  And you definitely can't shoot arrows or spells through a door blocked by two fighters, not without hitting your friends in the back more than half the time.But if you want more open combats with lots of mobility, you have to add areas with wide corridors and large rooms.  There's nothing stopping you from designing your dungeon that way in the first place, if that's your preference.  You just have to make it happen.Regarding random encounters, I don't know what edition you're playing, but in classic D&D a random encounter without surprise has the enemies appearing 2d6 x 10 feet away, which is usually plenty of room for either side to maneuver around corners, duck into rooms, and set up whatever tactics they might think is most advantageous (accounting, of course, for the particular monsters' intelligence and what they want).Ultimately, dungeon crawls are games of attrition.  The player characters know very well that there are lots of monsters and traps ahead of them, just waiting to wear down their hit points and spells, or even kill them outright.  And so they adopt tactics to minimize this problem: they fight dirty.  They sneak around, listen ahead, poke and prod, set up ambushes and bottlenecks.  If they had grenades and flashbangs, they'd use them just like a SWAT team.  It's not sport, it's war.  That sort of thing.So it comes down to making the unexpected happen, just every once in a while.  Just often enough that they players have to think twice about over-using tactics that seem to be perfectly effective.  If they camp in a doorway at every room and wait for the monsters in the room to come meet them on their terms, well, that's a great time to have a wandering monster sneak up on them from behind. Or to use monsters capable of ranged or area-based attacks. (Critters with breath-weapons are great for this.) If, the very instant that the mage finds his first wand of fireballs, the party now insists on nuking every room smaller than 40' square before entering it, make sure that a few rooms contain only flammable, destructible treasure (and toss in at least one fire-resistant monster, for good measure).So you're in a tomb full of undead?  The undead don't make noise, don't give off heat that can be seen by the demi-humans' infravision, and they can remain perfectly still until they want to reveal themselves (even ostensibly mindless undead like skeletons and zombies can use this tactic).  That means that they can hide *anywhere*.  A room with 1 foot of water concealing the floor.  A burial niche full of soft dirt.  Sealed up in a coffin sticking half-way out of the ceiling, hidden from view by soil and dangling roots overhead.  Inside of a stone-lidded sarcophagus several tens of feet away from the chamber door, which is also where the treasure is kept.  Inside of a small closet behind a secret door that the whole party, squishy wizards in back, just walked past unwittingly.  Throw in the odd incorporeal wraith, and the very dungeon walls and floors and ceilings become potential hiding places.</blockquote>

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