Help with a dungeon

[Silma]

Hi!! I'm a new and inexperienced DM, and I want to create a dungeon for my campaign, but I don't want it to be just a series of chambers that the players can easily navigate through. I was thinking of some sort of a labyrinth, with corridors, doorways and chambers not even portrayed on a playable grid. I intent the PCs to go through this dungeon by using their skills only, without having any actual battlefield. So... how the heck do I do that?

[Totally Guy]

You need to make the game about the things that don't need to be gridded out. There are plenty of dungeon activities that don't require battlemats and grids. I saw this list on another forum just earlier today. Use the game mechanics to resolve these things.

1. Climbing to descend or ascend vertical pitches. Climbing to traverse a pitch (for instance if the floor has fallen away).

2. Passing through water-filled chambers (test to hold breath) or crossing or traveling along a water hazard with a swift-flowing current (some kind of stat test).

3. Dealing with hypothermia or severe chills after a failed water-based test.

4. Relighting a torch, candle or lantern following its loss due to a stray wind, dip in the water or just dropping it (usually a result of a failed test).

5. Wriggling through a squeeze. Vertical one that require you to go head first (so you can figure out which way to wriggle) and which don't easily allow you to back out are especially fun.

6. Finding your way through the maze of corridors and tunnels (maybe intelligence or a knowledge skill).

7. Digging out from a collapse.

8. Shoring up a tunnel.

9. Deciphering the strange marks and sigils left by miners.

10. Making new light sources after yours have been used up, lost or destroyed.

11. Finding signs of the monsters and tracing them back to the source (Tracking).

12. Leaping a chasm.

13. Setting an ambush in the tunnels.

14. Spotting a trap.

15. Disarming or arming a trap.

16. Managing not to disturb the bats or to send them winging into the faces of your enemies.

17. Identifying and deciphering the strange script on the artifact the miners dug up.

18. Determining what the magical device's purpose is.

19. Holding up the Slowly sinking ceiling as your friends escape.

20. Mapping the place as you go (Cartography).

21. Foraging for edible stuff after your supplies get lost/ruined.

22. Finding potable water. (Survival)

23. Making sure those luminescent fungi aren't poisonous/carnivorous. (Herbalism)

24. Turning it all into something tasty to raise your friends' spirits and stave off starvation.

25. Stringing a rope bridge over a chasm.

26. Fixing a rope bridge that has been cut.

27. Carrying treasure, corpses or unconscious miners out of the mine network.

28. Coaxing your stubborn (and probably very wise) mule into a cave complex when he doesn't want to go.

29. Identifying that foetid stench.

30. Setting up a system to pump the water out of a flooded complex.