How big is too big for a dungeon?

[ranix65]

I've got the "Big 3" Dungeons in my campaign, the Underdark, Castle Barbacan(my version of a Castle Greyhawk-esque dungeon crawl), and 1 styled after Castlevania. So I had a question: How big is too big for a dungeon? The Castlevania one I'm still tinkering with to find the right balance between being of challenging size and making sure the PCs do NOT have to camp and try to sleep inside of it(at least not the first 1 anyway, when the lord of the manor returns his castle comes back with him, but bigger ), and Barbacan is feasible to be camped in, and well, the Underdark is underneath almost all of my world so it's the biggest by far, but nobody explores the Underdark all in one shot. A bit of feedback would help me out, I don't wanna go TPK on my players, just give em a really good fight.

 

[Kal Torak]

If you don't whant your PCs to camp out it really depends on things like if every corridor is trappen, every room has it's pet monster ecc. It really is a hard question. My guess is that no bigger than the DMG dungeon (at the most) if there are moblie monsters (i.e. you can't go back along the cleard path) and just about any size that you can travel in half a day if they can just scoot back to the surface every time they whant.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Anything bigger than my BattleMat is too big.

 

[Celebrim]

In general, the dungeon needs to be only as big as it needs to be to hold the story you want to tell. Anything extra is probably wasting time you'd better spend elsewhere. I know it seems strange to say this when you are young, but at some point as a DM you have to start thinking about cost/benefit relations of the time you invest in creation. I was young once too and had dreams of making the dungeon to end all dungeons, but eventually I realized that no one was ever going to explore that dungeon, and I had forgotten to give them a good reason to do so (other than it was there).

I try to keep dungeons small when I'm running serious campaigns, and focus on detailing what the party will face so that it will be as interesting as I can make it.

On the other hand, simple dungeons do have the advantage that you can probably create them faster than PC's can explore them while spending only a few hours a week. If your party is still very much into dungeon crawling, then mapping dungeons and stocking them is very efficient. If your party is NOT much into social interaction and role play, then detailed NPC's aren't going to be a very good time investment. If they are into RP, then a handleful of detailed NPC's and a good plot can entertain people for weeks with little additional overhead (assuming you are fairly extemporanous) which gives you time to elaborate other things.

Even my small dungeons (15 rooms is pretty average) are generally at least a day away from civilization (unless it is a town adventure), so the PC's are pretty much expected to do a lot of 'camping' - that's part of the hazard and the reason for having skills like Profession-Boating and Wilderness Lore.

 

[willpax]

I remember when I was a young and foolish DM.

I designed a monstrous, jam-packed dungeon full of creatures, traps, possible allies, and mazes. It covered nine sheets of small-rule graph paper with over three hundred separate encounter areas (realistic dugeon ecology be damned!). It was, in my humble and naive opinion, the dungeon crawl to end all dungeon crawls.

The party suffered a TPK at a kobold ambush in the second room. No one had any desire to return.

It lacked exactly what Celebrim rightly insists on: a reason to be there, and a story to tell. Distance and size should be subservient to story.

 

[ranix65]

Good point, I'm creating all 3 dungeons as big as I need em now, Castlevania one is not gonna be too too big, at least this version, I came up with the idea after noticing how much the castle changes in between the original Castlevania video games, plus I wanted 1 that I could redesign over and over again. BArbacan has to be huge though, I know my players, and they have a bad habit of going wherever I haven't prepared yet, so I try to prepare as much as possible as I hate ad-libbing dungeon material. And the Underdark most of it's staying undetailed as there's no way they could explore it all.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Depends on the type of dungeon, if it is a one time crawl 5 levels 100 rooms but if you are talking about someplace they players can go back to over and over the bigger the better.

Once had a valley that had 100 different dungeons of 5 levels or more.

 

[ranix65]

That's basically what the Barbacan is, it's gonna be a few levels(not sure how many yet; how deep was Castle Greyhawk?) but probably close to like 1000 rooms or so, easy, probably more than that. IT's also got some major story tie-ins(a couple of artifacts sit down there, like how the One Ring sat down in it's little cave with Gollum; also, rumors of dead gods[unsure if this one is gonna be true or not] in the deep levels are spread around by some adventurers and cultists). The Castlevania dungeon(still don't have a good catchy name for it, anyone wanna throw me some ideas for a good one?), at least in it's first incarnation, is a huge, sprawling affair, but not one that needs to be camped inside of it(unlike the Barbacan, where that's gonna be part of the fun, is the PCs trying to find a relative safe haven to camp at), I'm saving that hellish experience for the 2nd incarnation of the CV dungeon. And of course the Underdark is frickin huge, I have no idea how many spaces there are gonna be in the Underdark.