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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 376180" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

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