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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wedgeski" data-source="post: 4771887" data-attributes="member: 16212">Welcome! Don't be depressed, you're about to dive head-first into something awesome!Having a good idea of the overall layout of a dungeon is the best idea... hence why published adventures have large keyed maps. But, most of the action only takes place in localised sections, which is why individual encounters can be keyed to specific rooms or areas. It's a bit overwhelming to expect the players to visualise the whole thing in their head, but their perspective naturally contracts down to what's going on in their immediate surroundings anyway.If you want things to be slightly more 'realistic', then you need to be aware of areas around the PC's, whereby the noise they're making, or the actions they're taking, could attract the attention of monsters which aren't necessarily listed as part of the current room or encounter. Also, a monster may retreat from a fight by running to a room where he knows a lot of his pals are waiting. But, none of this necessary to running an enjoyable dungeon. The monsters could be far too hung up on their card game to worry about the noise from down the corridor, the dungeon could be an inherently noisy place at the best of times, and monsters could always just fight to the death.For encounters, I have a dry-erase white-board with a 1-inch grid printed on it, which is always front and center at our game table. Any time tactical positioning becomes important (so, most, but not all fights in 4E) I sketch out the outline of the encounter area and use D&D mini's to represent players, monsters, hazards, traps, and so-on. It takes just a few seconds to draw the room, terrain, and what-not, and if you do it *while* you're describing the room to the players, no time is wasted, and it becomes a neat little bit of exposition.Before the players take their characters into an area, they know nothing about it (other means of gathering intelligence -- such as scrying or having an informant -- notwithstanding). But, after they've been there, I assume they can find their way back out unless the structure is specifcally designed to not allow them to do that easily (such as a maze, or building that changes shape). This means that unless another fight breaks out, they can usually say something to me like, "Okay, we retreat through the north corridor past that statue of the minotaur and rest in the room with all the rubble", and I'll just allow it.This is just my own personal way of doing things. There are DM's out there who like to build entire dungeons from tiles or drawn out on gridded paper, or from miniature scenery like the cool Dwarven Forge stuff, and gradually 'unveil' it as the characters progress. I don't really have the time for that level of preparation, though... nor the square footage on my gaming table to do it justice. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Good luck! I'm sure you'll have a blast.</blockquote>

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