So, the goal is to create engaging dungeons with interactive elements that the players are encouraged to manipulate, or with clues that make the exploration more pondered compared to a "we'll go left cause there are two seemingly equal paths and no additional hints were given".
Here are few examples I was brainstorming:
>elemental dungeon with one zone per element; the water area is placed above the fire room, which is partly covered by molten lava. Redirecting water towards the fire room can help the players navigate through it safely.
>a multi-layered palace, and the players can guess the position of large hidden rooms by the layout.
>an old mansion, where an increasing number of spiderweb can be spotted while getting closer to a certain area on the ground floor. Exploring the area right about those room will reveal a precarious floor that could be broken down to smash whatever settled downstairs.
>an ancient temple full of tunnels; next to the entrance the diary of an old explorer that mapped part of it. There the players can find vague information about the rooms and their perils. By solving the logic grid they can map the safest route to reach the burial chamber. Monsters and threats can be dealt with by exploiting the traps explained in the diary.
How do you make dungeon delving interesting?
 |
 Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
|
No one?
None of your ideas have much guarantee it will be interesting or engaging. A lot of the fun of exploring comes from uncertainty with some information and procedural generative aspects that foster emergent gameplay.
If the elemental dungeon is a 5 room linear path, it will never be interesting.
If the palace isn't worth making an accurate map of, no one will bother finding your hidden rooms.
Having set pieces isonepart but also having some rooms were there are textual elements but nothing planned is key. This has to be combined with players who will engage with the game world and use materials in ways you did not expect or plan. This is also combined with what you misunderstand as random encounters and generic. They are not random encounters, they are wandering monsters, the dungeon is inhabited. The inhabitants have goals and interests that again, engage with the players in unexpected ways.
There has to be incentive to explore. If you use a system that only rewards combat, you will always have combat dungeons.
It's a combination of
>rewarded exploration
>uncertainty with informed decisions, not necessarily fully informed
>time bases stakes
>living environment
>then things like vertical rooms and whatever
When you do shit like this it makes it seem very unlikely you'll bother understanding though.
>None of your ideas have much guarantee it will be interesting or engaging.
This could be true and I never stated otherwise, I was merely starting a possible exchange of opinions.
>they are wandering monsters, the dungeon is inhabited. The inhabitants have goals and interests that again, engage with the players in unexpected ways.
Random encounters are not necessarily wandering monsters.
Wandering monsters with goals are a potential nice touch to the dungeon, and worth being discussed. Random encounters by itself does not trigger any conversation, just like any other generic line.
>When you do shit like this it makes it seem very unlikely you'll bother understanding though.
What is this moronic line supposed to mean? What a dumb, smartass attitude that you have.
You don't really have to read, you can simply write your own ideas and read whatever you want.
>I never said that
>it's not the advice you gave is the bad idea I don't even want I do
Didn't bother reading the rest of you being moronic. You're not worth trying to explain anything to.
Get a life, idiot. You clearly cannot interact with people. Everything you write doesn't even make sense.
>Dude no. They're not a nice touch. They're a necessity. If they're not wandering around there's no time limit to exploration.
I wouldn't say they are a necessity, since a time limit is not a necessary condition to make exploration good. Having a time constraint can certainly motivate the characters.
What makes your wandering monsters a tangible threat?
>wandering monsters [...] are a potential nice touch to the dungeon
Dude no. They're not a nice touch. They're a necessity. If they're not wandering around there's no time limit to exploration.
Alternative: the dungeon gets flooded by midnight. Be fast or be dead.
Another alternative: torches weigh two pounds each and burn for half an hour. There's a limit to how much you can carry. There are adventures out there that combine all three to really make the PCs move their asses.
your adventures must be very autistic
his games must be games actually
Strict time records, loss of resources, random encounters, different factions, a layout with all four represented (close by, far away) x (easy, difficult) with some shortcuts and secret doors to change the layout. Also, make it big enough. Some of the ideas you have sound like fun but will never work if the dungeon is too small. Ask /osrg/ for more.
I'd advise against prepping solutions. Players will think of five solutions but not the one you prepped.
Do random encounters make dungeon delving interesting? Isn't that a bit generic?
>I'd advise against prepping solutions. Players will think of five solutions but not the one you prepped.
The goal is not to prep solutions, but to offer possibilities to the players.
They do not have to follow the explorer's diary, nor to flood the fire room to be able to pass through it. I they can think of different strategies, that's more than fine.
You can expect that a singular random encounter will be less memorable than a bespoke combat encounter. However, rolling for random encounters is a different thing. Suppose you roll every half an hour and for every loud noise, with 50% chance that for the encounter, which you then roll on a table. First, it puts a price on every unit of timekeeping you use. I recommend ten minute dungeoneering turns. Second, some solutions ("we dig through it", "can I blow it up?") have an extra cost. Traps don't need to be brutal - just falling prone in full plate is a problem. Players will start counting how far into the dungeon they are because the way back isn't trivial - this makes shortcuts and mapping valuable. You have more freedom to add empty rooms.
And that's without going into the specifics of the encounters. You'll have to play with random encounter rolls to realize how much drama they bring. There's more monsters and their properties than you can think of, and paired with how the delve went so far and the random position in the dungeon that the fight takes place in, there's endless possibilities for combat and especially for its results. Said results can steer the adventurers in a completely different direction. Also, violence feels more violent with random encounters, maybe because there's an actual chance of getting a tough encounter with every roll and you feel more mortal.
As a small tip, some of the creatures encountered should be good-natured or at least reasonable.
>a bit generic
Too many folks are obsessed with "being original" in the TTRPG hobby space. There's nothing new under the sun, anon. Focus on presenting the tried and true in a way that's fun for you and your players.
My suggestion for "random encounters" - if you're using a table, pre-roll or manually select the encounters you find interesting, or you think will be interesting for your party to fight .Have those encounters ready should you need them, instead of the "roll mid-session, everyone waits while the GM sets up the combat" schtick.
It's not about obsessed with being original: some encounters and enviroments are simply better designed than others, and offer more decision space to the player. Like, if you roll for a random encounter and that ends up being a fight, the surrounding can greatly affect the quality of it, while fighting HP dummy in the middle of nothing is hardly interesting.
DCC has pretty good dungeons in their official adventures
goodman-games.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/DCC_PortalUnderTheStars_printRes.pdf
check out Sailors on the Starless Sea as well for a cool dungeon.
riddles, logic puzzles and similar encounters that rely on player metagaming aren't really that fun for the players, because they're either too easy/obvious or make no sense
DCC is indeed quite cool.
That said, I was curious in what anons here do to create their own dungeons with annexed mechanics and quirks.
since it went over your head, rip from modules. 'if-then-elif' type puzzles that affect sections later.
I've tried puzzles and other vidya stuff but it's not fun when you can't describe the tile discoloured by 5% which is obviously the pressure plate, or when the riddle has to be spelled out because the players don't think the same way you do, it loses all meaning.
My favourite which I always like to use is a dungeon/labyrinth where one player stays in a safe "control room" where they have to open/close doors, deactivate and reactivate traps etc. as the party progresses inside. You might think it's boring for the control room player, but actually they end up more stressed out than the party.
Sounds interesting, but how do you keep that player engaged? What do they have to do? I suppose it requires some decision-making processes to make it engaging.
yeah I played lethal company too man
>How do you (informal) make dungeon delving interesting?
By understanding the interests of the people whose characters will be engaging with the dungeon delving, and designing the dungeon around those interests.
>How do you (personally) make dungeon delving interesting?
I'm interested in randomly generating dungeons room by room, to see how far my party can get before they either get wiped out or have to retreat, or succeed.
What further interests me is using the level(s) and loot gained from the excursion to improve surviving party members' abilities and gear.
It's mostly the randomness and testing how well my party is planned against perceivably infinite arrangements of room dimensions and contents that I find interesting and fun.
this is the tried and true officially endorsed methodology, and if anyone's answers differ from it then they are patently wrong.
Despite it's flaws the 2d20 system encourages more "narrative" aspects when playing using momentum (Luck in Fallout) and rolls to be more specific in dungeon/world interaction and the DM is encouraged to reward players that do it
Funny system, the more you engage in the narrative and interaction the better for everyone altho I can see why thats one complain you see here about that system
How can that be used for whatever you wrote? Idk I didnt read everything
Does anyone have a cool wooden bridge in a cave trap?
I already did the ones were my players fall into a spider web and a huge spider attacks them like 4 times already, I need new material or I will rightfully accused of being a hack
Part of the bridge is a giant seesaw. There are stalactites on the roof
>brigde gives out when first character crosses
>remaining players need to figure out how to cross
>allow creative solutions
>when they pass and move forward, floor tilts away from pit like a bucket mouse trap sliding them back into the pit with a medium-high save threshold
Google OSR topics, read 1E ADnD DMG.
You'll be gucci OP, you're reinventing the wheel.
The old ADnD modules about Giants will help you a lot.
Make it a multifaceted puzzle where the party has to take different paths and the players have to work together to solve it without verbal communication, only by pulling levers or activating things in other rooms.