hey /tg/ do you prefer your dungeons vertical or horizontal? Tall/Deep Dungeon or Wide and Sprawling? How do you feel about traps? Never have 'em or they're a core identity of dungeons? Tell me about your ideal Dungeon to explore!

>>95939973 (OP)
>hey /tg/ do you prefer your dungeons vertical or horizontal? Tall/Deep Dungeon or Wide and Sprawling?
Very involved verticality is annoying to map, so my dungeons are usually fairly flat.
>How do you feel about traps? Never have 'em or they're a core identity of dungeons?
I much prefer "hazards" where the presence is obvious but getting past is difficult. Like you can see all the flame jets at irregular intervals up and down the hallway, now think of a way through that doesn't barbecue you.
>Tell me about your ideal Dungeon to explore!
I like them rather small, desu. My group doesn't have the patience for a multi-session delve, so I want to be in and out in four to six hours IRL. That translates to 20 or so areas and most of those missable or skippable.

They must delve deep

>>95940207
>wings

>>95940205
i like the idea of verticality but i usually dont do it because its a pain but going down a dungeon or up a tower is iconic. I've always wanted to run a mega dungeon but my friends hate that shit and i don't want to play with strangers.

I'd love to run vertical dungeons, but they're really hard to do on a battlemap,digital or otherwise.

>>95940478
this. I've done it one time in VTT and it was just the floors next to each other.

also do you guy do jaques your dungeons or more linear? I suck at dungeon design so I try to make set pieces that are pretty linear if i'm being honest.

Like others said love verticality but don't often bother as it's a hassle. I have a couple of times map dungeons as a virtual slice rather than a top down view for mountions and a beholder lair. The group loved it but it was rather gimmicky. I always have traps peppering my dungeons rangeing from mere annoyance to death trap. I like anons idea of hazzards over traps might have to give that a go.

>>95941170
a fun and evil one is putting traps bellow ankle deep water. Also a trap that turns an area into a hazard is also a funny and mean and a classic
>what do you mean the bog is on fire. I'm in the middle of the bog

>>95941137
>this. I've done it one time in VTT and it was just the floors next to each other.
do it sidescrolling-style next time. Have a giant pit, have your party rappel down it, and then spring a combat encounter on them

>>95941407
I did this in a campaign years ago. was pretty tite

>>95939973 (OP)
>prefer your dungeons vertical or horizontal? Tall/Deep Dungeon or Wide and Sprawling?
Yes. Fortunately my players enjoy dungeon crawling so I get to do a lot of dungeons, and I try to have variety. Ultimately a tight place that goes up/down (i.e. small castle, wizard tower) is better imo, but it takes more effort to design well.
>How do you feel about traps?
I'm in a bit of a vicious cycle, I include traps so that players who made characters good at handling them not feel useless, then players see I included traps so they make characters good at handling them.
I try to place them in places where they'd reasonably be placed for actual defences, and especially frequently for optional side treasures etc. Hazards and obstacles the other anon mentioned are my fave too, a dungeon almost doesn't feel complete without a chasm filled with spikes/acid/snakes and it's up to players to find a way to deal with it.

One thing I want to try having more is spotting and handling traps more by description rather than just plain rolling, but I'm not sure about how to handle it. I suppose for spotting I should just give a dry visual description on successful roll, "you see a pressure plate and on the walls a vertical pattern of 8 holes of a size you could fit your thumb into, and there's a barely visible magical sigil on the ceiling" rather than "you see a wall spear trap and a magic trap".
For disarming I'm thinking of making the roll difficulty overall higher, but then hand out generous bonuses for actually suggesting ways of disarming the traps.

Has anyone here played the reddit idea of the ‘five-room-dungeon’ or five-section adventure? Basically you have
1. Entrance
2. Puzzle or role-playing challenge
3. Trick or setback
4. Climactic battle
5. Reward, revelation or plot twist.
Just reading about it it seems pretty boring to go in a “dungeon” and have it only be five rooms. When I think of a dungeon I think of underground labyrinths where navigation alone is its own challenge, and that should be impossible to achieve with only 5 rooms. But I’ve never tried an adventure like this, so maybe it works better in an actual game.

This is the first web search result for the five room dungeon, and the author claims to have invented them. I can’t be bothered to fact check that right now.
https://www.roleplayingtips.com/5-room-dungeons/
He says 5 room dungeons are for short adventures that don’t take up an entire session, which seems more reasonable to me. But not everyone uses them this way. Matt Colville famously recommends one he calls The Delian Tomb to use as the meat of a session for introducing new players. If the players are all new and spend a long time just figuring out how the roleplaying game works I can see how that might work out, though I’m still a little skeptical. Not all beginning adventures are that short and if you try to use a similar structure for the 2nd, 3rd session or so forth I think it’d get old quick and the players would go through them quickly. If the dungeon’s only 5 rooms big a lot of dungeon crawling stuff like light and other resource management just isn’t going to come up in an important way.

>>95941863
AFAIK it's 5 "important" rooms, and "rooms" mean segments of the adventure just as "dungeon" means an area you progress through. If you ever ran a dungeon that concluded in one or two sessions, you've probably followed the guidelines of the 5 room dungeon anyway. Hell my last session wasn't even a dungeon and I could still fit it into the template:
1. Entrance: party travelling through mountains escorting construction workers, dealing with weather and monsters
2. Puzzle: organize the workers and construction site
3. Trick: demons try to infiltrate the workers, and there's a hidden enemy outpost next to the construction site
4. Climax: as the temple construction is finished, demons attack during the consecration ritual
5. Reward: Temple built, demons looted

It's basically a template for organizing adventures slightly more interesting than: combat-combat-trap and/or combat-combat-reward.

Get back to writing articles, Angry GM

>>95939973 (OP)
Vertical.
Each floor is a single room with staircase on opposite side to advance.
Just traps and mimics.
Unless party tries to rest, then it's got enemies (fuck you, wizard. You aren't changing your spells are refreshing slots).
20 floors minimum.
There MIGHT be loot.

Reading the article rather than just skimming it to remember the 5 parts has made me more skeptical of this method.
>They are called 5 Room Dungeons, but this is just a guideline. Feel free to make 3-area locations or 10-cave complexes.
If there's not 5 five parts then what's the point of calling it a 5-room dungeon?! Yeah, I guess if you make half the rooms empty you can make the 5-room dungeon philosophy fit into the ten-room cavern complex. But if the dungeon is linear, the empty rooms may as well not exist, and if it is non-linear (as dungeons traditionally are) then the players may skip most of the challenges, which defeats the philosophy.
>With just five rooms to configure, design is manageable and fast. Next time you are killing time, whip out your notepad and write down ideas for themes, locations, and rooms. Knock off as many designs as you can and choose the best to flesh out when you have more time and to GM next session.
This I can believe.
>A two to four-hour dungeon romp quickens flagging campaign and session pacing, and can be squeezed into almost any story thread. It also grants a quick success (or failure) to keep the players engaged.
I'd say that seems like a really long time to complete an adventure of only 5 rooms, but thinking about some of the 5e games I've been in with players that don't know the rules, more players than the DM can handle, and the fact that larger groups of people have more people to debate each other on what to do, I can unfortunately start to see it.
>Though I call them 5 Room Dungeons, they apply to any location with five or so areas. They don’t have to be fantasy or dungeons. They could take the form of a small space craft, a floor in a business tower, a wing of a mansion, a camp site, a neighbourhood.
Part of the point of a dungeon is they offer freedom in a limited area. I think this philosophy actually works better for non-dungeon adventures where linearity more expected.

>>95942533
Forgot to mention the article was the one in my earlier post here>>95941863
>Room Five: Reward, Revelation, Plot Twist
>Here’s your opportunity to change the players’ bragging to “we came, we saw, we slipped on a banana peel.”
>Room Five doesn’t always represent a complication or point of failure for the PCs, but it can. Room Five doesn’t always need to be a physical location either - it can be a twist revealed in Room Four.
>Room Five is where your creativity can shine and is often what will make the dungeon different and memorable from the other crawls in your campaigns.
>In addition, if you haven’t supplied the reward yet for conquering the dungeon, here is a good place to put the object of the quest, chests of loot, or the valuable information the PCs need to save the kingdom.
>Room Five ideas:
>Another guardian awaits in the treasure container.
>A trap that resurrects or renews the challenge from Room Four.
>Bonus treasure is discovered that leads to another adventure, such as a piece of a magic item or a map fragment.
Some of these room ideas can mean basically anything.
>>95941973
>If you ever ran a dungeon that concluded in one or two sessions, you've probably followed the guidelines of the 5 room dungeon anyway.
I doubt that, especially for a dungeon that took 2 sessions to complete.
>It's basically a template for organizing adventures slightly more interesting than: combat-combat-trap and/or combat-combat-reward.

I don't doubt that you can use a five-room dungeon model to get an acceptable adventure. But some parts and examples of this model are very vaguely defined, and if you define them vaguely enough so you can interpret them in any way you like you could probably get an acceptable adventure out of anything: Chinese alchemy, Hegelian dialectics, or the human digestive system. Maybe instead of complaining on the internet I should make examples of all these adventure models so we can see how good the 5-room dungeon really is.

>>95939973 (OP)
It depends on the medium for vert vs. horizontal. Normally I use a grid map with minis and base the dungeon design around the spacing. If I'm doing vertical (which is my favorite) I use a 3d VTT called talespire which has really cool lighting and water level effects. It's also how I'll do mega dungeons, cus you can have a lot of doors and multilevel secrets and that stuff is a lot of fun.

For traps, I kind of treat them like puzzles, but there is always some fucky feeling that telegraphs them. Only two extremes too, little ones that are hidden that cause ability damage, or big ones that cause instant death. But they're always showcased so players know somethings weird, e.g. exploring a dwarven vault/forge you come across a room with an unlocked door, 15'x15' and unadorned. Across a flat stone floor is the singular decoration of the room: a silver key on a golden chain hanging off a brass ring.

My ideal dungeon changes a bit, but I've always liked mega dungeons. What I've been doing lately to great success is a darkest dungeon style hexcrawl "arena", so a set area with 3-5 focal points or dungeons and exploration in between

>>95941137
Doing multiple entrances and paths really steps up the enjoyability of the dungeon desu. I find it also helps against railroading by changing your mindset a bit, helping prevent burnout

>>95941581
One thing I would suggest for traps is setting them as hazards and environmental stuff. For example, you could have a trapped chest be a snakes nest, or black widow spiders all over it.
You could also have delicate scenarios like a key in a grate that needs finesse to get out safely through sludge or the like

>>95941863
>I can’t be bothered to fact check that right now.
He distilled an existing idea down into a formula, but didn't invent the idea whole cloth. The idea that any dungeon worth damn has those five major story beats is as old as the internet.

>>95941975
A shame he never finished his megadungeon project. It was a cool read.

>>95939973 (OP)
I like a mix of both. Usually My dungeons are 2 floors at minimum, or at least have some kind of descent/ascent somewhere on the first level.

>traps
I think they're a good addition especially if it makes sense that the creator(s) of the dungeon would have them. It makes sense for kobolds, goblins, or a high-level lich to boobytrap the shit out of their houses if they expect intruders.

But if the dungeon is a natural cave just occupied by some ogres out of convenience, I won't add traps or hazards to it. A dungeon may also be the fortress of an elven army - equally unlikely to be rigged with traps.

>ideal dungeon
I honestly couldn't answer either as player or DM, I like a mixed bag.

>>95941581
>"I disarm the trap"
Have them roll.

>"I stuff the holes with water-soaked rags."
Automatic success and the trap is now effectively rendered useless.

If My players go into detail with something, and that something would reasonably work, I never have them roll for it.

>>95942022
This is the best method.

>>95946400
This is the right hand way. The sanctioned act.

And it's such a simple concept. Yet anons write thousands over thousands of inane words arguing about how to use traps, like it hasn't been a solved problem for decades.

>>95940219
It has wings in the book. You are illiterate.

>>95939973 (OP)
The ideal dungeon to me is one where the dungeon itself tells a story that ties into why it is full of danger.

For example: You hear about a dungeon that has just been discovered in a cave, and you are close enough to get to it before anyone else does. It is a building that has been sunk deep into the ground by magic, and the entrance is covered in warnings to stay away.
Inside, undead sentinels arise to fight you and prevent your further exploration, as well as physical obstacles like destroyed hallways, barricades, and magically sealed doors. As well as ongoing dangerous magical phenomenon, and evidence that some serious shit happened her with weird effects like an entire room of people who have been turned to glass.

Something happened here. Some magical disaster, so bad that the wizards did everything in their power to try and contain it, stop the spread of it, and when that failed they set their guards to keep people out and sunk the entire place underground as a last ditch effort. That was ages ago, and whatever magical disaster that caused them to flee has *lessened* with time, but is still not exhausted itself and is still a danger at the heart of this dungeon.

>>95939973 (OP)
traps are the meat of the dungeons, they come in many different forms, including monsters. managing resources and avoiding enemies because it means a tax on resources, might not make it out of the dungeon alive after too many fights. the goal is to find loot and escape.

take too long lockpicking a door? monsters are roaming around and might find you. bash the door? monsters might hear that. torches so you can see in a dark dungeon, monsters can see that glow.

ideally the dungeon is filled to the brim with traps, treasure, secrets, no way are players going to fully plunder it. Impossible.

>>95941863
>>95941973
>>95942533
>>95942609
Haven't read the article but it looks familiar

>>95947028
>torches so you can see in a dark dungeon, monsters can see that glow
I had a PC die to this. They were in the dungeon of a castle that was overrun with demons. In the pitch blackness, a demon saw the light from their torch and hit them with a lightning bolt from the darkness. He failed the save and was already considerably injured from the previous fight, so he went down instantly.

Mind you, they all knew this exact demon had lightning abilities and they had deliberately pursued it into the basement, so it's not like something I pulled out of My ass.

should every monster in a dungeon make sense or do you just throw stuff in it. i'm working on a dungeon full of undead of various types and some classic underdark shit like drow and deep gnomes and maybe goblins but as far as wandering monsters I have zombies and ghost but thats it. Also do you have wandering tables?

>>95952192
I try to have good reasons for the occupants of the dungeon to be there. A crypt cursed by a necromancer? There'll be zombies and skeletons. A goblin cave? You'll find bugbears too, maybe some wolves and possibly a slime or 2 in their waste corner.

But in truth, it doesn't really matter unless you or your players are autistic. Your players probably won't even notice if you put in a skeleton riding an owlbear when the hallways are only 5 feet wide. In your case, I'd just say one of the drow is a necromancer if your PCs might ask any questions. Otherwise, if it's not super important to your world or lore, go for it. A fun game will be more memorable than one that throws in a bunch of contrivances to try and "make sense".

>wandering tables
I don't use these, but I may have monsters wandering the dungeon depending on their type and specifics.