OSR How to make dungeon crawls interesting

[overgeeked]

Near as I can tell the play loop of a dungeon crawl is:

1. Kick in the door.
2. Kill all the monsters.
3. Loot the bodies.
4. Search the room.
5. Find a new door.

There are places where this can be expanded.

Make step 1, kick in the door, interesting by including traps or puzzles that must be dealt with before the door will open.

Include things like morale and secondary goals in step 2, kill all the monsters, to keep the combat short and sweet. Also things like cinematic set-piece combats with lots of interactive terrain, moving terrain, etc can help. This is generally the bulk of the play loop so

In step 3, loot the bodies, there's always the obvious hand out interesting rewards like treasure and magic items. My personal favorite is what Numenera calls cyphers, aka one-use magic items. Tying treasure to the game world and any story threads is always a winner. Tying treasure to the history of the world, if the players or PCs care about such things, is another good touch.

For step 4, search the room, you can add all kinds of exploration mini-games, traps, and puzzles...but the danger is turning this into pixel sniping.

You can turn step 5, find a new door, into an exploration mini-game like the previous step.

There are also overarching things you can do like add clocks, timers, and countdowns. Making the setting more interesting than endless halls and rooms, like say the mythic underworld, can also greatly help spice up dungeon crawls. This is also where the near-ubiquitous faction play comes in. Spice things up by making denizens of the dungeon fight each other.

So what else is there? What do you do to make the dungeon crawl more interesting?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

What do you do to make the dungeon crawl more interesting?

Reaction rolls. Sometimes you kill the monsters with dungeon politics.

 

[SableWyvern]

The things that make a dungeoncrawl interesting tend to be the things that make D&D interesting in general. Factions, mysteries, exploration, a variety of challenges and obstacles, a sense of purpose.

I would start by discarding kick-kill-loot as the basic gameplay loop and, as @Whizbang Dustyboots mentions, lean heavily onto reaction rolls. However, for reaction rolls to really shine, you need to have an underlying understanding as to what encountered people/creature are doing there, what they want, who their friends and enemies are, etc.