How to make Dungeon Crawls fun for the DM

[Dr_Dinosaur]

So a few of my players want to play a more dungeon-crawly game while one of our players for the big, roleplay heavy campaign is out of town for a while. Problem is, I've never run a game with the sole intent of dungeon delving. It's always had some kind of overarching plot and a reason for the "dungeon" being there and a need for going through it. Or not, and they didn't have to.

What I'm getting at it, how can I make this more than "here's another room full of traps, monsters, and items that make you better and combating those first two things, again"​, because I'm clueless.

[Darth Ultron]

Give the dungeon a plot and a reason for being.

Like ''in the dungeon is the Bowl of Life that is needed to save Princess Pearla and there are three other groups trying to find it first''.

Or whatever you'd like.

A dungeon...or any place really...can be as complex as you want it to be. You don't have to just have monsters sitting around. You can have a whole ecosystem, politics and anything else.

[Katrina]

I often put what I call "Optional Intrigue" into a game. Where you drop hints that small little things are going on around the players and if they get involved, then you are free to let that spiral organically. If they don't, then the events will play out in little ways that you enjoy playing with throughout the campaign. It may seem strange, but it helps me get through my more "Kick in the door" style player driven games. I believe one of the reasons I'm not enjoying running Rise of the Runelords as much is that I'm not adding in much of anything. But, adding some stuff for the next session because they let one too many villians escape one too many times. We'll see what happens.

[Geddy2112]

You can add the dungeon into the greater plot of the campaign or setting, but a dungeon can be a plot in and of itself. It might not have anything to do with anything else in the campaign, but the monsters in the dungeon are there for a reason. Maybe something horrible happened there long ago. Maybe the kobolds are working for a dragon that lives in the bottom of the keep and would turn against them if given the chance. Maybe the goblins have been trapped inside and gone even more feral. Add the same plot elements you would give a city/kingdom, scaled down to a few rooms. Even if the original inhabitants are long dead(and it is just filled with oozes and other random dungeon monsters that call it home) have a story that tells the 5 W's. Maybe each room has some art or writing on it depicting the time, or something.

[Thrudd]

What's the system you'll use?
I also don't understand the confusion. If you know how to set up a dungeon, and your players want to go on a dungeon delve, then create a dungeon and have a way for their characters to learn about the dungeon. Or just start the game with the party at the entrance to the dungeon. Away they go.

How is it fun for you? It's an environment full of traps and monsters and secrets and dangerous things and you never know what the players are going to do or how the dice will fall. Of course, you have a wandering monster table and that provides some excitement for you with the unknown element.

A dungeon crawl is classically a treasure hunt, but there can be other objectives as well, anything you want. The characters hear about a certain artifact hidden within, they want to find it. They have an artifact and need to destroy it in the magic pool at the center of a maze. There is a series of portals to evil planes that need to be destroyed, get in there and find them all. You have been trapped in a cave by a landslide or something else, and now you need to delve under the mountain to find another way back to the surface world.

Create a setting where it makes sense for adventurers to delve into dungeons seeking treasure, and have long term goals that are only accomplished by doing adventurer stuff. In the old days, you delved dungeons gaining more power and wealth until you had enough to build your own fortress, support a small army and clear out your own holding from the wilderness. The giants or dragons or demons or whatever that live there now aren't just going to pack up and leave - you need to be strong enough to conquer the country for yourself. Maybe there is some other type of resource only found in dungeons that adventurers alone supply to civilization - energon cubes or warpstone shards or whatever - or magic weapons and armor and spells from a lost civilization - that the rulers of civilization will pay handsomely to possess (and also are kept by the adventurers, growing their own power until they become rulers themselves).

edit: Of course, another source of endless fun is coming up with devious tricks and traps and unusual and unexpected monsters - try to make designs that confuse and trick the players, make them deal with unorthodox situations, get them lost and panicked and paranoid. It goes without saying that they must make their own map as they go, and if something happens to the character carrying the map, well - hopefully someone has a good memory to remember the way back out again...
Basically, the fun is in creating a challenging environment and seeing the players explore it and discover it and seeing if they can defeat it.

[Dappershire]

What's the system you'll use?
I also don't understand the confusion. If you know how to set up a dungeon, and your players want to go on a dungeon delve, then create a dungeon and have a way for their characters to learn about the dungeon. Or just start the game with the party at the entrance to the dungeon. Away they go.


I agree. What more do you really need. You have a campaign. Assume that the characters don't want to continue further while the party barbarian goes home to bury his father, the Chieftan, or whatever. So, they overhear in a bar about the uncovering of the entrance to some ancient tomb, and the party of locals that never came back from exploring it. So, seeing some easy money, and the chance to murder hobo some possible undead, your players decide to be next in line to delve the depths.

You literally need no plot. Your players are asking for plotless fun. Go wild.

[icefractal]

I often put what I call "Optional Intrigue" into a game. Where you drop hints that small little things are going on around the players and if they get involved, then you are free to let that spiral organically. If they don't, then the events will play out in little ways that you enjoy playing with throughout the campaign.I've done this before, and it can be pretty fun. In a way, since a dungeon is a very player-controlled environment if you plan it out ahead of time, you can invert the typical GM/player relationship.

That is, instead of the players trying plans/schemes and you providing the opposition to them, some NPCs can try a scheme and whether they succeed or not is up to what the PCs do. Maybe some kobolds are trying to get to the dragon bones way down in the sub-crypts so they can resurrect it. Will the PCs end up clearing a nice path for them, or be the ones who ruin their plans? And the PCs can ignore them if they want, since it's all orthogonal to their primary objectives.

[Grod_The_Giant]

"Give the dungeon a plot" is a pretty decent summary, I think. Make the dungeon a big thing, with multiple paths and places in it, and then figure out a campaign arc that will take place entirely within its environs, complete with NPCs (other adventurers, non-immediately-hostile monsters, prisoners) and plot twists and all the stuff you usually include in a game.

[Jay R]

I think it’s fun to design a dungeon, draw a map, invent traps and encounters, and then run people through the map, and see how they react to the traps and encounters.

So I'm not sure I understand the question. How is running an encounter in a dungeon crawl any less fun than running the same encounter during a quest?

[Pugwampy]

What I'm getting at it, how can I make this more than "here's another room full of traps, monsters, and items that make you better and combating those first two things, again"​, because I'm clueless.

You dont have to do anything , just choose a cool official or unofficial mod from the net .
If you have a favorite monster species , you could look for a mod that has them .

[redwizard007]

I think the problem here is that many of us enjoy running dungeon crawls. Could you specify what you don't like about them, and give us an idea what you prefer to run?

[JAL_1138]

Plan the dungeon organically--instead of random rooms with random monsters and eandom traps, what's the dungeon for? Both originally, as in, why was it created, and what is it being used for now?

If intelligent monsters live there, there'll be areas they don't have trapped to high heaven, like kitchens and sleeping areas, meeting halls, workspaces, their leaders's hall/office/throne room, personal quarters, possibly the treasury, etc. (though passages to them may well be). They live (and work) here. These rooms may have been repurposed. They also let you give a bit more info on them and play them defensively; invaders are coming into their home, so how will they organize to fend them off?

If the dungeon is meant to house an artifact or treasures, who put them there and why? Why not build a vault in the middle of your city and post dozens of guards, like a treasury or bank? What good is gold if you can't get to it easily enough to spend it on anything because there's dozens of traps and monsters in your way? What needed to be kept secure in this manner, and why? Did the monsters get put there as guardians, or come in later after it had been abandoned by its builders? If it was abandoned, what happened to cause that? Etc., etc., so on and so forth--questions like that can help you flesh out a dungeon to be more interesting in and of itself, and have story hooks and bits of setting info. Depending on why it's constructed, it could have elaborate mosaics and frecoes depicting important historical scenes for its builders, for instance. (Sometimes that kind of thing can be way more important than the loot.)

As others have said, tying the dungeon into an existing story is a good thing to do too--the dungeon holds some artifact of terrible power, or an obscure bit of arcane lore needed to do something vital, or a portal they need to reach to travel to someone's private sanctum in order to stop Armageddon, or that kind of thing.

[Pugwampy]

I think the problem here is that many of us enjoy running dungeon crawls. Could you specify what you don't like about them, and give us an idea what you prefer to run?

I can relate to the OP . I very seldom create my own dungeons and dungeon crawling takes up only 50% of my campaign. My own dungeons are seldom more than 2 or 3 rooms . I find fighting in a hole to be very cramped . I also dont like a dungeon with more than two or three species of monster hiding or it feels like a zoo.

I prefer to use ready made dungeons from modules or I go fishing for a castle or house plan .

[MrZJunior]

Play the dungeon, things live there, are they going to just roll over and let these surface dwelling punks have their way with the place? Move things around, the party disables the traps in one room, have someone come back behind them and turn everything on again. Lay ambushes for them. Don't make it easy.

[mig el pig]

What I'm getting at it, how can I make this more than "here's another room full of traps, monsters, and items that make you better and combating those first two things, again"​, because I'm clueless.


Do they want actual dungeon delving or just a scenario with more combat-sequences than on average?