D&D General How often do the adventures you run include a "dungeon" element?

[el-remmen]

So the frequent discussion on these board regarding short and long rests and number of encounters per day made me wonder the frequency with which dungeon environments are a part of people's games and how long characters tend to spend there. While dungeons are a part of my games, wilderness and town encounters (or town outskirts) are much more common. As such, retreating to a safe place to get a rest or sleep the night is less of a concern - at least in terms of safety. PCs in my games are much more likely to forego a rest because of time concerns than safety - though in dungeons and some wilderness environments safety is also a concern. Only once since we started our current game has the group taken a long rest during an adventure, and even short rests are not that common.

By "dungeon" I mean an underground network of caves, tunnels, chambers lairs that require entering into or emerging from and is distinct from the surrounding environment to some degree and might holds the possibility for more than one encounter (so just a owlbear cave is not a dungeon - an owlbear cave that connects to a variety of tunnels occupied by goblins, and is the top layer of a buried temple complex would be). The kind of place PCs might spend more than one adventuring day.

And to be clear, the entire adventure does not need to involve a dungeon, but has a dungeon aspect. Thus, while the classic adventure, N1 - Against the Cult of the Reptile God, mostly takes place in the town of Orlane, the finale does involving raiding the a swamp-located dungeon lair. Something like X1 - Isle of Dread (if I remember correctly) does not have a dungeon aspect.

 

[Musing Mage]

I guess about 25% or so...

There's often a dungeon present and they occur regularly, but players don't always go in. My group tends to be the traveling kind, and have more overland and wilderness adventures, with a healthy dose of in-town shennanigans than anything else.

 

[iserith]

Every adventure in my campaigns has a dungeon. I am running Dungeons & Dragons after all. The game just tends to work better in that context in my experience.

Some of my one-shots will be set-piece encounters with no dungeons. But even for one-shots I prefer to present a dungeon or other adventure location to explore.

 

[aco175]

Seems harder to pin down based on your parameters. Most of what I would call an adventure involves some town/NPC intro with some investigation into leads or smaller encounters and some sort of larger dungeon, but most of these are in the 4-10 room range that can be run in a night or two. I tend to never have anything larger than this.

 

[Charlaquin]

You leave a 40% gap there between “about 50%” and “more than 90%.”

 

[el-remmen]

You leave a 40% gap there between “about 50%” and “more than 90%.”

Oops! I got distracted while drafting this post and missed one! I'll see if I can edit.

Edit: I can't Treat "about 50%" as 50% to 75% and "more than 90%" as anywhere around 75% and 99%. This isn't meant to be scientific anyway.

 

[jmartkdr2]

The game doesn't work the way I want without a dungeon to make attrition happen - so 'always'.

Although I wouldn't define dungeons as necessarily underground - just in a bounded space, so an island or demiplane or drifting ship or Domain of Dread or whatever else I can come up with.

I haven't done it in a while but a hexcrawl, to me, is just a huge dungeon with walls that are really far apart.

 

[Lanefan]

Oops! I got distracted while drafting this post and missed one! I'll see if I can edit.

Edit: I can't Treat "about 50%" as 50% to 75% and "more than 90%" as anywhere around 75% and 99%. This isn't meant to be scientific anyway.

Voted 90% but it's a bit less than that I think.

And "include" can mean anything from the entire adventure is a dungeon (common) to there being a dungeon as just a part of something bigger (less common but it happens). I can even think of a few adventures that in the end didn't have a dungeon element but would have if the party had ever got to it...

 

[Charlaquin]

The game doesn't work the way I want without a dungeon to make attrition happen - so 'always'.

Although I wouldn't define dungeons as necessarily underground - just in a bounded space, so an island or demiplane or drifting ship or Domain of Dread or whatever else I can come up with.

I haven't done it in a while but a hexcrawl, to me, is just a huge dungeon with walls that are really far apart.

If you treat scenes as rooms and transitions as halls, any adventure can be a dungeon

 

[HJFudge]

I'd say that about half have a dungeon element, even if it's only used as kind of a 'break' from what the adventure is about. It provides context, in many ways, to combat and puzzles.

Now this is true in adventures where the PCs are on a quest, where they are acted rather than being acting upon. Those where they are travelling or searching or what not. I tend not to have the actual travel scenes give them combat, because in my world the roads and travel paths are GENERALLY pretty safe (I do switch this up on rare occasion, as that provides a good narrative twist and keeps them on their toes).

In adventures where the PCs are being acted upon primarily, where they are running or what not, that adventure tends not to feature a dungeon.