What makes a dungeon crawl fun

Throughout their crawl, the characters face monsters, traps, and hazards in the darkness of the tunnels. There's not a lot of joy in the forbidden depths and that lack of joy can drain not just the characters of their resources but the fun out of the players. In this book, Robin talks about hopeful and fearful beats of roleplaying games, in the context of upward and downward beats in movies. Too many downward beats and a story can feel depressing and hopeless. People give up and their immersion breaks.

Too many upward beats and things get boring and stale. The excitement wears off. Hamlet's Hit Points also offers definitions of the types of story beats including procedural, dramatic, commentary, anticipation, gratification, bringdown, pipe, question, and reveal. For this article, we're going to worry less about beat types and focus on beat resolution; how the beats feel to the players.

Oftentimes we don't have to worry about beats too much. We need not keep the model in mind because our game naturally hits the right mix hopeful and fearful beats as we run it. As we become more experienced game masters, we naturally fall into a pattern of storytelling that resonates well with our players. Sometimes, though, the nature and direction of our game pushes us into an area where one type of beat resolution might be far more common than another, pushing us into the domains of hopelessness or boredom.

For example, if the characters travel to a peaceful and well-guarded town with few threats, they might enjoy shopping and meeting powerful people. They might enjoy their downtime, for a while at least. But without a threat, without a challenge, their time in the town can get boring. Waterdeep, the jewel of the north, still has a vast dungeon beneath it and a whole city full of smugglers, thieves, and assassins in a vast cave right near by.

Conspiracies abound. Residing in peaceful towns is only interesting for so long. We love James Bond movies when he travels to exotic locations but the movie would be pretty boring if the whole movie consisted of Bond traveling by gondola between casinos like Anthony Bourdain in Parts Unknown. Dungeon crawls are the opposite. Unlike safe and clean cities, dungeons are full of constant and continual danger. They are filled with terrible monsters, vicious traps, and deadly hazards.

Because of this, remembering the importance of adding hopeful beats to offset the many inherent fearful beats of a dungeon can be critical to the fun of the session. Its important to note that beats are a blunt tool for a complicated situation. We might have a table where, for whatever reason, one player has had a series of bad rolls down beats while everyone else is doing fine. The same can go the other way; one player is having a great time while everyone else feels like they're being dragged through hell.

Though not all players feel the same beats the same way, we can generally keep an eye on the beats of the overall adventure and how its affecting the players. The following is a list of twenty hopeful dungeon beats we might drop into our game if our dungeon is becoming too hopeless. You can read through these or roll 1d20 to get some ideas for your own dungeon-based hopeful beats.

As constructs inherently designed for downward beats, some common themes emerge in dungeons that amplify the dungeon's fear, leading potentially into hopelessness, frustration, and eventually disengagement from our players.

Here are some common downward-beat themes we should be aware of. Unreasonable hurdles elsewhere are fine though. This article gave me some good points to think about. I also like that fact that is give the basics. I can find ways to spruce up a dungeon. Finding how to make a good dungeon- really hard. I will definitely have to think more about purpose with the dungeons. This is a great way to challenge the PCs being good. Why did you kill the workers who ran at you because you were trespassing?

You do the math. Matthew J. Neagley — I totally agree that all these points are important to making a great dungeon. The only point I might differ on is your number 3 and only because I think that is what can be different, when you talk about purpose.

But maybe it fits better to call it the purpose of the dungeon crawl, than the purpose of the dungeon. For example, if I want to tell a story, I am totally in agreement with your point 3. But, on the other hand, if we play under the assumptions of a more Old School game, where the goal is not the story but exploration, treasure and resource management, I would design very differently and would create the dungeon more like a death trap that is unbeatable for the players should they decide to check every room and fight every inhabitant.

The challenge would be more to plan ahead and avoid unnecessary fights to have enough resources left for whatever baddie awaits the party on the treasure horde. Oh, and just in case it was not clear, I also liked the article very much and think it will be really helpful for my next dungeon. What happens if the PCs fail? The entire session, and sometimes the entire campaign screeches to a navel-gazing halt. Your email address will not be published.

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Flinspach on September 27, at am. JohnnFour on September 27, at am. Love the checklist. I especially liked the Individual Challenges section. Scott Martin on September 27, at am. Neagley on September 27, at pm. Glad you both liked it! Razjah on September 27, at pm. Flinspach on September 28, at am. In my experience, dungeon crawls tend to come in two varieties: explorations and excavations. Decide which you want to be possible if not both , and plan accordingly.

My players seem to always want to explore every inch of every dungeon, and take anything that isn't nailed down. After that, they move on to trying to take everything that is nailed down. So when I give them a dungeon crawl with no constraints around it, I expect them to systematically explore and try to figure out a way to take everything home with them, or optimize the subset of things they are actually able to take. I think of this as an excavation , and it needs the most dungeon-plot to succeed.

The players are really marking time until they find out if they survive, at which point they steal everything. Choices matter a bit less in excavations, because the major question is in which order the players will visit every room. That they will try to do so is never in doubt.

The alternative is some kind of external constraint that prevents that sort of careful, systematic exploration and looting. A ticking clock on some other challenge, some plot reason why they can't spend much time in the dungeon, or any other plot reason you can think of will do.

I think of these as explorations , and I plan them under the assumption that the players may not or may not be able to!

Explorations require extra care to make sure that enough of the dungeon-plot will be revealed by the time they leave for the dungeon to be interesting and feel cohesive. If they'll only realistically be able to get to 6 out of 10 rooms, then the 6 rooms need to be enough to tell the story.

If they do manage to get to more rooms, then they get more detail and more loot, but the goal is to make sure they can't miss out on the dungeon-plot. Especially if they won't be returning to the dungeon again.

PCs go to dungeons for some purpose. They're looking for an ancient artifact, or they hope to become rich, or they're on a plot MacGuffin hunt. What drives a given adventurer should factor into how their choices are presented to them. Choices matter a lot in explorations, but should be signposted both at and immediately before the decision is to be made. Players may not ever get the opportunity to understand what they missed out on in the unexplored areas, and so need some kind of clue at decision time.

I like to use enticements and warnings: glittering contents seen through the door of one room might suggest treasure, while unearthly screams coming from another room might suggest danger.

And those signals may or may not be deceptive Recurring symbols or patterns are also features I've used to good effect-- it's a puzzle to work out as they explore, and gives them an opportunity to guess at what consequences a given choice might have. Whether they're right or wrong, it's exciting, and they were the authors of their own exploration.

I once created a maze for my players, but instead of drawing it out as they went, I described it to them and told them to do their own drawing.

You follow this one for 15 feet and come to another corridor on your left This heightened the tension and made it feel more like being in an actual maze, because if the draw-er got his directions mixed up, they could wind up well and truly lost. The choices my players made were still essentially meaningless-- they had little indication which choice was the right one at any given time-- but they still talk about the maze as being a highlight of that campaign. Since you specified "theater of the mind" I assume you already aren't drawing out the dungeon, but you could try making physical layout important in some way.

Have your players know or suspect that there's a secret compartment somewhere, but they don't know where it is so they have to try and deduce it from room dimensions. That way, every door they choose is important even if the room it reveals is empty. They should not be. If the has some kind of internal logic, that should also offer information the explorers can use.

The geometry itself can also offer such clues, since most dungeons obey the typical laws of geometry. The exceptions are explicit navigational challenges and mind twisters. If some creatures live in the dungeon, the leave tracks and other traces of living there. If it is an ancient building, then its purpose provides clues. If nature has formed it, then it should make sense with respect to that. The latter point provides a link between exploring the dungeon and interacting with whatever is in the dungeon.

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Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Ask Question. Asked 1 year, 4 months ago. Active 1 year, 4 months ago. Viewed 2k times. I've tried a few things: "And then you enter another room with X, Y, and Z" provides no choices, even if stuff in the rooms is interesting. I think I'm missing the core concept of what makes exploring a place fun.

Improve this question. Ruslan Osipov Ruslan Osipov 3 3 silver badges 10 10 bronze badges. If you think that's a good solution to the problem please put it up as an answer along with the support to back it up.

You've tagged this system-agnostic, but this seems like a situation where understanding your game is extremely relevant.