Approximate 2 hour dungeon size/example?

[Albions_Angel]

Hi all,

All right, while this hurts, I admit, Im not great with actual dungeons. I either make them tiny and easy to complete, or go totally overboard, stress myself out, and end up feeling like I have built something unfun.

That said, for an upcoming scenario, I need to build a large, egyptian style tomb. One that will keep my party occupied, with traps, puzzles and combat encounters, for roughly 2 hours. And be fun and engaging. Level 5, 3.P. New players to d20, but all seasoned 5th players, so combat wont be an issue. Low op.

I have a few encounter rooms planned (one an ashen husk, and some dustform people no class levels, another with a fire elemental, a couple of magmin, in a locked room with rising lava. Kill the elemental to open the doors and stop the lava. Air temp will rise to damaging so its a timed thing essentially. These seem a little over CRed but theres 6 players and I know what they can take). But I am bad at trap rooms that dont seem forced, and I suck at puzzles.

Any and all help would be appreciated, from ideas to a sample dungeon expected to take 2 hours (and by this, I mean "ok, you want 7 rooms, 2 secret passages, an extra treasure room that isnt the end goal. You want 3 of those rooms to be normal encounters. 1 room to be a trap encounter. 1 trap room. 2 puzzle rooms. And in this order.").

Thanks guys. I will treat this as a major learning experience.

[weckar]

2 hours is a bad meazure. I've played with groups that could do thr ToH in 2 hours and groups that took as long to get through a single door. We need to know more.

[Nifft]

The real-world time considerations for any dungeon are heavily specific to your particular group.

Do the players dither? Do they have one clear leader who makes swift decisions? Do they check their phones, go for smoke breaks, talk about non-game matters at the table, or otherwise distract themselves / each other? Are they mono-focused on the game and bang out combat actions rapid-fire when their initiative comes up? Do you need to remind each player of everything that happened since his or her previous turn?

Puzzles especially are difficult to predict, since they're player-oriented challenges rather than game-mechanical challenges.

My advice would be:
- Have real-world time limits on solving puzzles & traps. Give rewards for solving them before the limit; after the limit, the trap or puzzle expires and the party can move on, but no reward.
- Maybe the party is being chased by something nasty? That gives you an in-game reason to encourage urgency.
- Another way to use traps & puzzles in a time-limited setting is to make them part of a combat encounter. The trap or puzzle itself is trivially solved, but the fact that monsters are attacking you while the trap or puzzle is active makes it non-trivial. So the PCs can spend combat actions to solve the trap / puzzle, or just fight the combat and then auto-solve the puzzle when they're not under threat.