The Lost Art of Dungeon-Crawling

There is a certain type of adventure that in recent years seems to have fallen out of popularity: dungeons.

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Picture courtesy of Pixabay.

"I Look Up!"

The release of several old D&D modules got me looking at some of these old original adventures, and they are quite eye-opening on the subject of dungeon design. These are the first games of D&D we played and while some are a little dated, it's easy to see why they kept us playing. While almost everything in those adventures was dangerous, there was magic and mystery in the rooms you found. There were rooms with strange orbs suspended from the ceiling; mysterious indoor gardens full of medicinal plants, poison and monsters; ghostly feasts that share a tragic history; and mysterious keys guarded with fiendish traps.

I think I know why dungeons fell out of vogue. Way back in the early 80s we discovered city adventuring. Modules then became quests or investigations across a cityscape full of NPCs and role-play opportunities with all manner of details and cultures. This new way of gaming outside a maze opened a whole new sandbox. This change in adventure design opened new vistas for adventurers, but crowded out the traditional dungeon crawl as a result.

A Return to Form

Luckily, in recent years we have seen a more interesting return to dungeons. More designers are coming back to them and trying to break the myth. Mork Borg has its share and a other ‘old school’ games have sought to blow the dust off the idea of raiding underground facilities. Its fun to dive into these lairs once again, and a simple diversion from what has become the usual kind of game. While I’m certainly more on the side of narrative play and character interaction, sometimes it is nice to know that you just need to pick a door rather than work out the villain’s plot and craft an elegant plan (that one of the players may just ignore anyway).

If you are thinking of crafting a dungeon of your own, here's a few pointers.

Give the Place A Reason

Whether it is an old ruin or an underground laboratory, make sure the dungeon has a reason to exist and some sort of history. A hole in the ground isn’t very interesting so give it a back-story, even just a small one. It might be a tomb, an old ruin creatures have taken over or a lab where magic went wrong. It need not be especially clever, just as long as you can place it in your setting.

A Dungeon Need Not Be an Actual Dungeon

What you are creating is a place full of rooms linked with doors and corridors, so it need not be underground. A house or a castle is basically the same, as is a sky city, large airship, underwater citadel or even a walled in town (put a roof on real world Venice and you have an epic dungeon).

Don’t Construct It with Only One Path

When you are making a lot of cool stuff it is very tempting to make sure none of it gets missed. But you should avoid the temptation for having only one path through the dungeon that takes in every room. If the player characters miss out rooms 34-48, you can use them in the next adventure. Nothing is wasted. But if you insist they follow one path you are ruining the fun of exploring a dungeon and taking away the agency of choice. If you offer several different paths, when they enter the room of certain death you can point out with a clear conscience that they didn’t have to open the black door with the skull on the front.

Corridors Are Rooms Too

Don’t reserve encounters just for rooms. They can happen anywhere in the dungeon, in corridors, on stairwells; anywhere the player characters don’t expect one.

Add Some Mystery Not Just Monsters

While you will need a few monsters to fight to gain some treasure, put in traps and just weird stuff too. Not everything need be deadly, just something weird to make the player characters think can be fun too, if only to cross a room (the Crystal Maze will be a big help here). With magic in the world you can put some very odd places in a dungeon. Just imagine something that would look strange and enticing when they open the door and then figure out what it does. It might be a room full of glass spheres, a garden with odd looking plants, a table set for a feast with only statues as guests. The weirder the room the more the player characters will be intrigued.

Make Sure There Are A Variety of Encounters

This relates to the above; don’t rely on one sort of encounter. Make sure you have a mixture of traps, monsters, weird rooms and role play encounters. Try to avoid having the same type of room twice in a row if you can.

Don’t Skimp on the Role-Play

Even dragons might chat; just because it is a dungeon doesn't mean there are opportunities to role play. Trapped creatures, intelligent monsters under a curse or a contract and even the odd guard might be talked to as easily as fought. You can let the player character make this decision, by who they choose to attack on sight. But remind them that they can talk their way out of situations as well.

Make Every Door Worth Opening

If you do the job right, each door the player characters come across will fill them with a mixture of fear and anticipation. What lies beyond this door, a trap, a fearful death, untold riches or wild magic? If a room or encounter doesn’t’ feel that interesting to you, cut it from your dungeon. Maybe consider it a little and use it later on when you’ve made it work better. A dungeon need not be a sprawl, and a shorter one has the advantage of potentially allowing the player characters to escape and try another one some other day.
 

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Andrew Peregrine

Andrew Peregrine

Emphasis mine. You keep asserting that, yet multiple people have said repeatedly that isn't necessarily the case.

As to the issue of a merchant in the dungeon: you don't think actors in the dungeon environment need stuff? You don't think there is trade between the factions and important/powerful monsters?

You have a very specific image of a dungeon that seems to be a static environment where monsters wait in rooms to be killed by the PCs. If that is based on your experience, i am going to reiterate that your experience is one of badly designed and/or run dungeons and are not reflective of other peoples' experiences or the potential of dungeons as settings for D&D play.
My last post for the night as I head to dreamland here i France. I do believe that there is a skewed view that exists on the playability of Dungeons and more importantly what they are perceived to be. This view is a composite of many things, including that Blackmoor, Greyhawk and my Castle El Raja Key were meat-grinders, that this was the philosophy promoted in TSR adventures in large part thereafter (even though there are examples to the contrary, like ToEE), that RA is an overdosed TOH, etc Most of this has to do with the perception derived from published adventures even though the DC evolved in singular unpublished games beyond these stereotypes and despite the published adventures themselves, the latter which in large part are the only cited sources for the continued negative assumptions about DCs. IOW the market has been constantly fulfilling a skewed and stereotypical view of something that is improperly sourced (published only examples). "Old Schoolers" of the fanatical variety (like OD&D) do not create to publish but create to play; and thus this huge example of DC evolvement and its history, on the main, is missing from the discourse taking place and instead a repeating circular view is forwarded and rewound time and again.

To this I can only add: G'Night!
 

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Well I think they include a lot of exploration as well. It’s not exploration... Dr Livingston’s style... but it’s exploration nevertheless.

The options for roleplay are just limited. Playing dungeon factions off against one another isn’t really cutting it.
Boundless opportunities for roleplay are always present in one respect, that being engaging with other members of your own party.

Is, for example, your PC slowly falling in love with the party Cleric? If so, what are you-as-character going to do about it? At the same time, is the Fighter trying to make a move on him also? Instant rivalry!

Just like a soap opera, this stuff can be endless if you want it to be!
 

GIVE INFORMATION TO THE PLAYERS. It's something that many modules lack. Have prisoners provide two truths and a lie about where things are.
I would, if the damn players would only have their PCs ask some questions!

I jest - somewhat - in that my lot these days are pretty good about getting info from prisoners and rescuees. But I've DMed groups that wouldn't think of asking a rescuee for info if someone walked up to them and told them to do it.

For a module, though, to add this in would also probably require adding in suggestions of what those truths and lies might be so as not to leave inexperienced and-or uncreative DMs stuck for answers. The drawback, of course, is this stuff can get unwieldy to read sometimes, partiuclarly if there's lots of rescuees and-or the party take lots of prisoners.
Same goes for interaction. Far too many DM's make the NPC's 100% hostile and 100% uncooperative. I remember a recent adventure where we captured a drow. We let the drow go, after a bit of interrogation, with the message for her fellows that we were not interested in them, had no real beef with them and please, just stay out of our way and everything will be fine. The DM then had the Drow immediately attack us on sight, and we wound up having to grind our way through multiple, frankly pointless encounters. All the while, my character is saying, "We don't want to fight you, just let us through, and we'll be on our way." To me, this was a perfect opportunity for interaction missed. ((Honestly, looking back on it, I realize I was out of step with at least half the group who was just there to throw dice and kill stuff, talky bits be damned.))
Well, that, and you did in effect merely warn the Drow you were coming... :)
It's not difficult to balance the three pillars in a dungeon, but, the DM has to be willing to engage with the PC's in ways other than combat.
The players/PCs likewise also have to be willing. Some are, some aren't.
 


Call me crazy but I think they should model dungeons after Skyrim dungeons

Skyrim dungeons are 3-4 things
1 - a tomb with a theme. Usually Draugr but sometimes something takes out the draugr and makes it a layer
2 -a mine
3-a dwarven/Dwemer abandoned city
4-a dug out bunker type area under a building

Most are short but at times deadly and have a theme. days of the 100 room dungeons filled with dragons mixed in with all sorts of creatures should be done away with

the starter box adventure dungeons work because they are smaller crawls
And they're shock full of items to loot! [emoji846]
 

Boundless opportunities for roleplay are always present in one respect, that being engaging with other members of your own party.

Is, for example, your PC slowly falling in love with the party Cleric? If so, what are you-as-character going to do about it? At the same time, is the Fighter trying to make a move on him also? Instant rivalry!

Just like a soap opera, this stuff can be endless if you want it to be!
Oh no, please god no. This is the worst kind of role playing. It may be an entertaining dalliance to the type of people who enjoy it, but its utterly dismaying to the rest of the party that are subjected to it. Reverse PvP. I’m aware it can be endless, it’s the gaming equivalent of pus.

If given a choice between a soap opera and an adventure story. I’d choose treasure island every time. You can’t just put four people in a box and get treasure island though. The DM has to put some work in.
 

Oh no, please god no. This is the worst kind of role playing. It may be an entertaining dalliance to the type of people who enjoy it, but its utterly dismaying to the rest of the party that are subjected to it.
I think that's kind of a wild assumption there. You're thinking of the kind of inept exclusionary stuff that's boring/irritating for everyone not directly part of it, but people who know what they're doing can make that sort of RP non-exclusionary and highly entertaining. I dunno about you, but I've seen both. Some people are just not capable of doing it "right", sure, but others, either they work it out, or they just innately have an instinct that makes it work.

There's not really any clear line between soap opera and adventure story, either, and indeed they're often combined (c.f. everything from Farscape to Romancing the Stone).

Certainly with people who aren't adept at that kind of thing, one definitely wants to go with adventure story, but not everyone is inept in the way you're describing.
 

Unless the characters can walk through walls, they can't pick a random direction and start walking in a dungeon. You can pick a random direction and start walking in a forest or desert. The enclosed nature of the dungeon limits options. It also happens to focus play through those limited options. Which would be great, if those limited options weren't almost always combat focused. There's also the question of what makes sense in a dungeon vs what makes sense in a wilderness. A wandering merchant could make sense in a wilderness, a wandering merchant would be a lot harder to make sense in a dungeon. Monster ecology and all that.
And yet, funnily enough, traders were a common random encounter on the tables back in the day. Caused no end of confusion at my table when, due to noise levels and whatnot, my players couldn't for the life of themselves understand why I announced that they met a group of traitors. :D
 

/snip

Well, that, and you did in effect merely warn the Drow you were coming... :)

The players/PCs likewise also have to be willing. Some are, some aren't.
See, but right there, that's a problem. Number one, we trounced the group that we took prisoners. To the point where we overwhelmed them without taking any damage. So, obviously, we were not pushovers. But, all that does if you treat it as "warning them you're coming" is mean that I would never attempt it again. We'll just frontally assault everything because trying to avoid confrontation obviously won't work.

It's extremely frustrating from the player's perspective that every plan will catastrophically fail and no matter what, the DM will interpret the situation in the worst possible manner, and then complain about why players treat dungeons as 90% combat. When the players hand you a plausible (even if it's not particularly great, it's still plausible) plan, let it succeed. Otherwise, the players just turtle up and treat everything as something to be killed.

Why bother taking prisoners if every prisoner does nothing but lie, or obfuscate? If it is never better to take prisoners and it is always worse, then, well, don't expect the players to take prisoners. And so many players have been taught that lesson by DM's out there that treat information like it's the most precious of resources, only to be doled out in the most dire of circumstances.

One thing about running online games like I do is that I see a lot of new players over the years. And that lesson is one that so many players have learned - that the only real solution to anything is to kill stuff. Otherwise, the DM will simply screw you over and then you have to kill stuff anyway.

So, yeah, I totally get why people think that dungeon crawls are nothing but dice fapping hack fests with zero interaction and virtually no role play. They are taught that that's how a dungeon crawl should be by DM's who probably learned from other DM's who treat dungeon crawls that way.
 

This is what I know, and what I have derived from this thread (so far):

1) That early published DCs put combat first for various reasons including through the timed constraints of the RPGA tourney (the latter being aimed at relaying the "correct" interpretation and use of TSR's standardized AD&D rules as well as forming a company sponsored player-contact apparatus). There was a heavy emphasis by TSR on "redefinition" going on as they went from open rulings in OD&D to standardized rules in later editions, thus there was a need to re-forward what had been changed.

2) Into this mix were thrown various products such as TOEE that had a main dungeon complex but with an area, a ruined keep and a well defined village with interactions going on amongst the various powers centered upon this area. This, though delayed in publication for too long, is probably the best example of integrating the "world" to-from the Dungeon and making everything specific and tangible for various play functions. Playtested as far back as 1977, it was published in 1985, way too late, IME, to provide a solid example of how RPG play, according to its author Gary Gygax, had been evolving in our Lake Geneva group (for the concept he penned and playtested in 1977 is a mirror reflection of what I posted above, re Greyhawk Sewers and Catacombs).

3) That at sometime during all of the above, as @Hussar noted, that the idea of KILL as the main concept manifested despite #2, above.

4) That this is a skewed perspective driven by lowest common denominator DMs and players who are not representative of a majority of RPGers; and in fact are not even representative of OD&Ders who do not publish their creations but engage them for personal uses only. This is a big point IMO that I posted above and has gone unresponded to, to my surprise, which keeps the convo as presented locked into examples of the published variety only. This route, IMO, will never reveal the overall truth in the matter and must therefore default to what we know from what has been published BUT not from what has been PLAYED.

5) That there is need of a re-forwarding of the dimensional aspects of DCs to refute the skewed views that it now labors under. I would start with something akin to a TOEE construct as a base and drive it home as an example of how to integrate into such areas what players and DMs feel is needed. Show don't tell.
 

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