Anyone else like smaller dungeons?

[JamesIntrocaso]

I'm not one for huge dungeon crawls and I wrote about it today on my blog.

Anyone else out there not like the big, huge crawls? Anyone who does, how do you design your dungeons to keep them interesting and engaging? I'm not looking to start a fight, I'd just love to hear people's opinions on the matter since so many published adventures for lots of systems are huge crawls and I'm wondering who out there loves them and what makes them great in your eyes.

[AxeAlex]

I'm like you.

A BIG dungeon once in a while is ok. But I prefer a small tomb with alot of story elements and plot points.

My small dungeons usually have a "gimmick":

A 6 room Sun-Temple, a Mirror in each room, must get sunbeam from on point to the other.

A 6 room Pyramid, where they must use the sand trap in the first room to fill out pits in the lower rooms.

A 6 room (Ok I like 6 rooms, I plead guilty!) cavern with a sleeping dragon in the middle of all rooms, where they must fight predators in silence. (The predators are also silent, they are not stupid enough to wake the dragon).

When your small dungeon lacks originality in it's layout, you can make up with originality in it's story.

A small (4 room) tomb of a Wizard-Queen, betrayed and slaugtered during her wedding, who became a banshee and wakes up at her wedding anniversary to kill everyone. Since the crypt is full of nameless graves they must fight undeads and use speaks with dead to find the body of the Wizard-queen and purify it.

Here is my creative process:
If you want a small dungeon, try to make every room relevant in one way or the other.

Like:
I need an entrance, so that's one room.
I need an end, so that's one room.
I want them search for a key (or pass a hard lockpicking and trap disarming challenge), so i need another room for the key.
If I want them to search for the key i need more than 1 entrance-1 exit-1 keyroom, so i need an additionnal room for them to actually search for it.

So, let's say an entrance (A) leads to all others rooms, room B, C and D. Room D is the goal and is locked with an awesome trapped door. Room B and C are guarded and only room B has the key to room D.

Then, when I have the layout, you throw in a twist or gimmick linked to the style and story of the dungeron... That will often change the final layout.

It's an Elf Wizard Tower overtaken by bad guys? Add Wizard traps and fake cursed keys. The invaders in room B and C are looking for something, and they have "fake keys" on them. If used on room D's door, they explode. (But can be identified as such with skills and/or magic, and as a clue there's invader corpses and scorch marks near the epic door). The epic door has an inscription "The Key was in your heart all-along" The real key is flying and invisible just in front of the big Mirror at the entrance (room A), and is flying at about the height where the average elf's heart would be reflected in the Mirror.

You should probably allow the thief to say "I don't have time for this idiotic riddle, WHY DO THEY DO THAT, really?" and lockpick the door and disarm the magic trap with the help of the party wizard (But you can make these hard challenges).

Room D has the friendly elf wizard in it, but he summonned a demon to fight the invaders, oh no! Boss fight!

[Razanir]

I don't think I have a preference, although I'm keeping them smaller in a campaign I'm planning. The exception is one adventure that will play like a massive continuous dungeon crawl. The idea is that on the way back across the mountains, due to Schrödinger's Gun and the lack of a guide, they'll get lost and stumble into the Underdark-equivalent, and have to find their way through.

[noob]

I remember of one of my castles where the player simply entered and where they grabbed the local noble and made it sign a treaty of submission.

[Lord Torath]

I like my dungeons big enough that there are several ways to go through them. Enough rooms and corridors that running and hiding is a viable tactic, and that I don't have to hit all the rooms in any particular order.

[Flickerdart]

A dungeon's size has very little to do with physical area, and a lot to do with density of things. A nice size for a dungeon could be 6 rooms with encounters (so that the PCs go through a day, then have to find some way to rest, then go through a little bit of work before meeting the "boss"), 1-3 rooms with treasure, and an arbitrary amount of hallways, dead ends, locked doors, and setpieces in between.

[Comet]

I like bigger dungeons because those are easier to get lost in. That way the dungeon itself becomes a dangerous thing, not just a container for dangerous things.

[ArcanaFire]

I know the game is dungeons and dragons but I very rarely actually put any dungeons in it. I come from the political intrigue camp of gameplay. Every once in a while we do end up running dungeons (because the players wanted it or because there's a good in story reason for it) but on the whole I'm not a huge fan.

As a player, if there's a long dungeon crawl I'm probably going to tune out through a big chunk of it. Any time things aren't happening
(and I mean "we've been in this combat for four hours" qualifies as things not happening) I'll just doodle.

My group knows I'm there for the RP. I know some of them are there for the mechanics. We've come to a relatively easy understanding that, at times, we're going to have to be bored for a few minutes so the others involved can get their fix.

Short dungeons are really helpful with this.

[mephnick]

Large dungeons are too time consuming to make for me these days. I'm generally scrambling to get stuff ready for the next session between all the other stuff going on in my life. Designing a 20 room dungeon generally doesn't make the cut. I'd say I average 5-7 rooms. Usually tombs or sewers or something like that.

[VoxRationis]

I don't build dungeons from the perspective of "rooms first, justification second"; I develop the reason for the structure first and develop it like a person designing a normal, sane building for that purpose would. This often results in small to medium-sized dungeons. But I come from the political intrigue camp.

[JamesIntrocaso]

This is all very, very helpful. Thanks for responding with this wealth of opinions and keeping it civil! Given me lots to think about... now I want to grab my graph paper and start making a dungeon...

[NichG]

I guess for me, its more about density and connected-ness. I don't want a huge floorplan that contains only a few things of interest, and I don't want a big collection of completely separate sections that are just together in one place to make the overall dungeon bigger.

The bigger something is, the more important it is that there be a strong consistent theme running through it. At the same time, it has to be done in a way that doesn't strongly encourage skipping the entire thing. That is, something where the goal is to get to the guy at the end (and you knew that all along) but everything in the dungeon is just a series of obstacles or guardians to make that hard, isn't very interesting. But something that actually holds together its theme, where exploring reveals more information, and where that information slowly ties together to create a growing understanding, that I like.

So I think what I'd say is, its not that I don't like big dungeons, its that I have a higher bar for them than I do for small ones.

[Oberon Kenobi]

I mostly play Dungeon World these days, so the dungeons I run are of the "add new rooms as you go along until things reach a satisfying narrative conclusion." This tends towards smaller dungeons, as I run out of novel ideas and my players get itchy feet.

Never participated in a megadungeon on either side of the screen, but I have played through Legend of Grimrock, and that was a lot of fun. I could see doing something about that size, with its own self contained story that makes the dungeon more than a pit stop.

[Mechalich]

I don't build dungeons from the perspective of "rooms first, justification second"; I develop the reason for the structure first and develop it like a person designing a normal, sane building for that purpose would. This often results in small to medium-sized dungeons. But I come from the political intrigue camp.

I tend to do this as well. People rarely build vast sprawling complexes just for kicks (and the 'made by a mad epic-level wizard angle is overdone). Construction in a medieval tech scenario is expensive, so someone bothering to build something would have expected to use it.

That being said, if you take a large castle add erosion, water damage, and a little sinkage, then you've got something resembling a more traditional dungeon. Also positively weird beings, like beholders, may order their residences constructed accordingly to inhuman priorities, leading to something resembling more traditional dungeon design.

[Spartakus]

I don't build dungeons from the perspective of "rooms first, justification second"; I develop the reason for the structure first and develop it like a person designing a normal, sane building for that purpose would. This often results in small to medium-sized dungeons. But I come from the political intrigue camp.

I'm making my dungeons quite similar.

First I think of a theme for the dungeon (if there isn' already a plot that determines it, otherwise the plot will develope from said theme). Examples could by a haunted wizardschool or a conflict between order and chaos.
From said theme a lot of rooms comes natural (a wizardschool already has enogh for a small to mediumsized dungeon)
Fill it with encounters that fit the theme
And most important: I'm never satisfied with a dungeon if it hasn't at least one riddle! Inventing these is by far the hardest part for me.

[Taejang]

Due to the story, my group has been fighting exclusively above-ground for... well, I can't remember the last dungeon I made. I've been making road side and forest maps. At first these were pretty featureless (here is the road, here are the baddies), but I've come to learn some neat things you can do above ground. The tactics and tactical considerations are quite different outdoors than in an enclosed space; for instance, whenever somebody does Erupting Earth in a forest, I've been rolling die to determine how many trees fall, where they go, and how much damage they do to whatever was there if it fails a Dex save. I think mixing a nice, prepared above-ground encounter into the mix should be a thing for any campaign.

More on topic, I have no preference between large or small dungeons. The level of detail is what matters to me. As a DM, that means a big dungeon becomes a lot of work, but we don't play every week, so I can do that.

[Knaight]

I very rarely use dungeons in the classic sense, and while there have been fights in indoor environments, it's usually not in the sense of dungeon clearing. This tends to work out to fairly small areas, though there have been occasional exceptions. Said exceptions are also rarely in typical fantasy games, and instead tend to be things like hidden futuristic mining facilities with extensive underground structure between the mines, the processing buildings, and the hidden compounds necessary.

[Winter_Wolf]

While realistically a string of encounters is a string of encounters, I definitely prefer overland and on the water adventures, then city encounters, then underground/dungeon types. Typically smaller is better for my tastes, because I'm not terribly keen on them and hopefully smaller means less time underground. There's just this sense of confinement which bothers me. I've been in a couple of big freaking caves, but even if you can't see the ceiling, I certainly can still feel it up there. Makes it rather difficult to play a mountain dwarf, though I generally like dwarves over other standard fantasy races.