Although it’s important for dungeons to feel challenging, they should also be fun for the players to explore. When every room is filled with traps, mimics, and hostile creatures, the players won’t want to explore (until the Plot™️ forces them to). We want our players to interact with our content, therefore we should ensure the players feel encouraged to do so.
Here are my thoughts on how to keep dungeons fun:
- Not every room needs to have dangerous traps or hostile creatures. Certain areas might even help the players (a healing fountain, for example) or provide the players with useful information.
- Clever and careful play should keep the characters safer. One example of this is adding visual indicators for traps to reward observant players. You can also include environmental challenges in lieu of traps to facilitate create problem solving.
- When the party does encounter a setback, make sure they are rewarded. After all, why have a trap if there’s no valuable treasure it’s protecting?
- Random combat encounters should not turn into slogs. Save your deadly encounters for the boss flight.
- Don’t throw in setbacks for the hell of it. They should serve a purpose.
- Keep in mind the party’s motivation for entering the dungeon. Overcoming obstacles should move them closer towards their goal (or at least provide some cool information or loot for their troubles).
(This is something I noticed as a player, not a DM. Being a player and watching other DMs can give you valuable insights and perspectives as to what’s fun and what’s not!)
I use random rolls or draw lots from a relevant pool of encounters to set up my fights, and it's fine for the system and style of game that I run that deadly encounters are always possible.
ReplyDeleteI'll typically use a bell curve of results over 2d6 through 2d12 to set the chance of the encounter having more or fewer foes, or a captain or commander enhanced version.
That way, irritating pests are less likely to bog down my players with a swarm of hard to kill nuisances, but things like minotaur are likely to occur in pairs, triplets or have a more dangerous "big brother" along with them. On the other end of the bell curve, they might also have debilitated or badly injured versions as a slightly more common occurrence too.
Playing the odds like this means that there are deadly fights peppered around at random, but always something memorable to fight, that normally doesn't have immunity to most of the party's damage or some other irritating ability that makes the fight drag on.
It's always possible to land on the really thin odds of a pack of these same irritating creatures, I admit, but that's part of the consistency of the system I use. The one encounter out of a hundred when this happens is usually extremely interesting, especially when the players know what the creatures are and begin to tactically improve their odds through weaponising the environment or splitting the group for example.
Just another perspective :)