Five Dungeon Design Mistakes in Dungeons and Dragons 5e

greetings my name is monty martin and i'm kelly mclaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we cover everything dungeons and dragons including advice for players and guides for dungeon masters we upload new videos on tuesdays and thursdays so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode this week's episode of our show has actually been sponsored by our very own dungeons of drakenheim kickstarter campaign which is now live through to the end of july we've partnered with ghostfire games to bring this campaign to life as a 5th edition module for characters level 1 to 13. if you've watched any of our live stream shows and been inspired by the mix of dark fantasy and cosmic horror and wanted to run a campaign of your own in our world well now is your chance we have taken all of the original notes from the first season of dungeons and dragon time put these into this book polish them all up into a complete campaign that you can run with your very 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to blow past so many of our goals so with that let's take a look at this week's episode so one thing that's occurred to us is we got a show in a book called dungeons and drackenheim we're called the dungeon dudes we actually haven't done too many episodes about how to make a dungeon jerks so today we've compiled some of our tips together and we are going to talk about five common dungeon design mistakes that we've made uh so that you can avoid them when you're designing your own dungeons for your own campaigns monty and i have learned a lot building dungeons for our players and watching them foil everything that we've put in front of them so from that we've compiled our five top mistakes that we've made that we assume most people out there have made as well when getting started with designing dungeons so how can you make your dungeons more challenging interesting dynamic and fun at your game table there's a lot to discuss so let's get rolling so one thing to note is that a lot of the mistakes that we list today actually lend themselves to each other you're going to want to take all of them into account when you're designing your dungeons and one of the first things that we're going to start off with is the idea of two-dimensional thinking this is a very common mistake and a lot of people do this when designing dungeons you might grab a piece of paper and start drawing out your dungeon not realizing that most dungeons exist in three dimensions this is a bit of a byproduct of the fact that if you did it old school style you're probably used to drawing your dungeons on a piece of graph paper like this or maybe you're using a dungeon design application to use with a virtual tabletop like dungeon draft or you're working in roll 20 or fantasy grounds or one of the other great virtual tabletops where you get this top-down view of the grid and so even if you're not playing on a grid but you're designing dungeons in this way working on a flat plane makes you think of the world in a squished down format and with many virtual tabletops in fact it's actually really hard to represent the world in three dimensions if you want to have a room that has say a balcony or multiple levels or you want to have the outside of a tower this is a really easy mistake to make because the tools that we use when we draw dungeons draw two-dimensional things they don't think about things in a three-dimensional way and i really didn't realize how limiting this actually was until i started working with terrain and miniatures and i think that as much as people like to say that um theater of the mind can be very freeing in a lot of ways theater the mind is still you work with a piece of paper to draw out your your layers and don't necessarily think oh things are three-dimensional there's a whole world out here we can we can really explore things in a different way by thinking in three dimensions you also open up many pathways which give character choice and character agency a really important spotlight when they're navigating the dungeon by working in three dimensions if you have a ruined castle if floors have collapsed in certain areas if there's ruined chimneys and and drawbridges and windows and balconies these are all avenues and pathways that characters can move and navigate through in really interesting ways rather than just moving room to room to room they can move up and down and over and across and this gives more choice to your players rather than just all right you go into room one and you deal with what's there and now you're moving into room two when they can see and think about the environment in three dimensions they're going to start thinking and planning schemes and ways to navigate around their enemies or get the drop on their enemies that maybe weren't apparent to them in a two-dimensional setting yeah oftentimes we see a lot of dungeons even many of the dungeons and the d d starter sets and in the published adventures where the dungeon is basically here is the stairs down from the surface and then you go room room room room room and this ignores the fact that what if the players were like okay this dungeon is underground we're going to bust out the shovels and picks and try to break through the ceiling or we're going to try to dig through the walls and when you create a environment that is above ground like a castle or a tower or a fortress you realize that there's a lot of ways to get into that environment that are not just the front door the players can climb up the walls they might be able to break through the windows there might be more than one doors if you even think about you know many people's homes most houses have a front door and a back door and they have windows and those are all possible ways to get in you could even go down the chimneys now what this does mean is that it does make things a little bit harder to predict the other really important thing about thinking in three dimensions as a dungeon master is that if you didn't think in three dimensions there's a good chance that your players might and if they do and you weren't prepared for it but there's no reason why you shouldn't answer their questions if they get to the dungeon and they say where are the windows and you're looking at your map going oh yeah the building would have windows why didn't i think of that or is there a chimney and you have a fireplace that you made but you didn't think of where the chimney entrance was well then you now have a problem where you're starting to have to improv ideas and trying to create it on the spot but if you've pre-thought of the three-dimensional aspects you can then answer those questions more readily where the windows where's the chimney where are the extra entrances can they break through a hole in the wall up on the top of the roof these are very important things to consider and multiple entrances multiple exits and multiple points for the characters to ask questions about and engage with means that if you've thought of those you're more prepared as a dungeon master for the shenanigans your players are going to pull this is where the architecture of your dungeon and the your adventure structure and your encounter design all start to overlap with each other because not only are you making the whole environment and the adventure more interesting but you're also creating more opportunities for more interesting combat encounters too this also brings in the idea that it really is okay to have offshooting rooms that are dead ends even loops or different corridors that lead to different locations you can have a non-linear dungeon by thinking in three dimensions and designing ways that navigation can flow seamlessly through the dungeon in multiple ways a great way to open your mind into three-dimensional thinking is that instead of drawing your map simply in two dimensions on your graph paper draw a side view of your dungeon or even get some isometric graph paper and draw an isometric style map of your dungeon it's a fun thought exercise and will really open your mind into the way your dungeon is more dynamic so moving on from this topic one of the things that we love to get inspiration of when we are designing dungeons are all the video games that we've played um we kel between kelly and i we have played so many classic dungeon crawlers computer rpgs and much much more and oftentimes a great way to start planning an adventure is to just think back up to some of those memorable levels from your favorite video games and start using those as a template the only problem here that you really want to make sure that you avoid is video game logic because the rules and constraints that exist in video games are not necessarily present in a game of dungeons and dragons although video games are ripe with inspiration and there's a lot that you can take away from them your favorite puzzles your favorite dungeon designs and honestly a lot of three-dimensional thinking happens in video games but when you get into the limits of video games something like the resident evil series a personal favorite of mine is often filled with puzzles and most of those puzzles involve a door that has multiple pieces that you need to find throughout the dungeon and put them in the right place to open the door the problem is if you design a puzzle like that and the next thing you know there's a barbarian who's like well this is a wooden door correct and i have a giant axe correct and even if it's a magical door and your wizard says okay well i have pass wall or teleportation or any other number of spells that can bypass the door doors are surprisingly easy to get around in dungeons and dragons so this amazing puzzle that you designed where you have to go all the way down the left wing and fight a combat encounter and get one piece of the key and then the right wing where you have to deal with a deadly trap and get the other piece of the key well now they just broke down the door and bypassed half your dungeon now of course it is possible to design things in your dungeons like anti-magic feels or areas that are warded with private sanctum that block teleportation or doors that are made of adamantium and completely indestructible watch out for those adamantium doors because as soon as the players get past them they might try to drag them back to sell all that adamantium by the way players can get up to a lot of shenanigans um going in so far as the previous example of breaking out the mining picks in dynamite if they want to and sometimes i remember an example from one of our own campaigns where kelly you had designed this amazing haunted mansion and expected us to go in the front door and i went back to town and got a ladder yes if your dungeon can be undone by the use of a ladder you need to rethink your dungeon design and that's very important i also designed a dungeon that monty again foiled where they were in a volcano and i was using legend of zelda as a massive reference and there was a bunch of platforms that in my head i said well the characters will jump from platform to platform some of them will fall into the lava and they'll work their way up to the door that is above them well i think monty just teleported up and threw a rope down and everybody climbed and bypassed the entire room and i was a very new dm at the time but it was in that moment that i said oh i can't exactly design this the same as i saw in zelda because in zelda link has to jump from platform to platform but in dungeons and dragons the characters don't have to do that so keep in mind the characters abilities and what they might do and don't design a dungeon room that can be foiled just by a rope or a ladder if they do that you can't really get mad at them for finding the logical loopholes in your design you can if you want to simply circumvent these abilities in many ways but oftentimes that actually stifles player creativity so you want to have a measured response in my experience it is best to just remember the capabilities of my player characters and find opportunities where they can use their abilities in an interesting way if your players love using spells like dimension door to teleport around you might want to remember the fact that dimension door has a range of 500 feet what if the puzzle now involves a tower that is more than 500 feet in height now all of a sudden there you are stretching the bounds of what their spells can accomplish in a very interesting way if your player characters have magical flight well a few flying enemies can really make that a bad day if you're going to flood the dungeon the players might use a water breathing spell but water breathing doesn't give you the ability to swim and characters that don't have a swim speed are pretty vulnerable underwater even when they can breathe underwater as well so there's lots of ways to allow the player characters to still use their abilities but still challenge them in an interesting way and when you are trying to avoid that video game logic thinking i think it's really valuable to get into this mindset as you're designing your dungeon as a final idea for video games one thing that constantly causes me grief when i play video games now because i've played so much dungeons and dragons is invisible walls i'm gonna go back to resident evil here there are times that i'm in a haunted mansion and i see that there's a balcony and woods off beyond and part of me is like well if this was a real situation i would jump over the balcony and just run away but i can't do that because there's no jump button but in d d you don't need a jump button there are no invisible walls you can't build a linear path that can't be shenanigan by your players doing something so if you think that your players are not going to go in a certain direction because well there's nothing over there but a but a standard forest they might investigate the forest so be very aware of real walls and don't rely on invisible walls i will say that there are invisible walls in d d they're called a wall of force but you can use those in cool ways one of my other favorite things i've recently been really into playing valheim and one of the things that valdheim does is it has areas of the map that your character takes cold damage when they try to explore it so you need a cold resistance item to explore that area and i really like the idea of a dungeon that is either super heated and you take fire damage unless your characters gain the ability to be resistant or immune to fire or a dungeon that is filled with poison gas or a dungeon that is super cold and so rather than the dungeon having a door and a key the player characters have to have an item that allows them to survive in an extreme environment and i think that that's a really cool design in-road again for me that takes inspiration from something like breath of the wild where we can draw inspiration from video games but just be careful of the logic of video games that limits you because d has far less limits my other video game logic pet peeve is npc logic and video games i love games like skyrim or stealth games like metal gear solid but the npc guards in those games act like idiots and i've actually found that the behavior of npc guards in games like skyrim and metal gear solid have infected the expectations of my players players expect that like they can trick guards and they'll just be like oh must have been my imagination oh must have just been the wind um or that the guard will like walk out alone or that guards don't know how to recognize the other people that are part of their unit and are easily foiled by like illusions or that they don't know magic exists or that like you can trick your way into the hobgoblin camp by dressing up as non-descript hobgoblin number 146 as if the hobgoblins aren't human beings that know how to recognize their friends and are like you're a hobgoblin but i've never seen you around here before right like like so that idea that like the npcs are so easy to fool that they don't have their own internal consistency i can't stand that expectation with players and i so often see dms fall victim to it in skyrim my favorite thing to do is get my stealth so high that i could pop out shoot a guard and duck and they'd look right at me and go must have been my imagination with an arrow sticking out of your head this should not work in d and if you shoot a guard in the head and then duck behind some rocks guess what the entire camp is coming after you it actually gets worse and i think this is point number three that i want to bring up which is this this idea that we call locked in the dungeon syndrome and this is where you build a dungeon where every room exists for itself it's kind of this fourth edition encounter design philosophy where every group of monsters exists in their room and they don't leave their room ever so every single room in the dungeon is a perfectly balanced combat encounter that is precisely tailored for the right challenge rating and the monsters will never leave that room for any reason whatsoever so the players always have a fair fight in every single room i'm sick of this to be honest and it's such it is kind of an extension of the video game logic but i think that it makes the world feel so artificial i want to bring in this point that in most castles if the drawbridge is being lowered or the gate is being opened a horn is sounded so that everybody knows and also if you're ever at home and you are a few rooms away and there's a knock at the front door you usually hear it so that stands for reason that if there's a battle a few rooms away the creatures that are in another room are probably aware that something is going on i can hear somebody sneeze a few rooms over so you should be able to hear clashing swords and spell blasts oh yeah from pretty far away so think of your dungeons not as a room by room basis but as a living and breathing space where every creature in there is probably aware of something that is happening if players are being stealthy and then it breaks into an epic battle they're not able to just finish that battle up go back to crouching and sneak into the next room without the people in that room being like were you the people who just killed everybody in that last room because we heard it now sometimes this can be warranted if you're building a dungeon that is filled with traps undead guardians summoned monsters or creatures that aren't living thinking people then you might be justified in operating it on that way so there is a time and a place where this is okay like a crypt or a tomb that could make sense but if you're building an environment that is occupied by bandits or an or an enemy army of some kind or the intelligent undead servants of a vampire they're going to have a way of communicating with each other in a way of talking with each other and checking in and this is why oftentimes when i design my dungeons i don't design dungeons with these monsters go in this room these monsters go in this room these monsters go in this room oftentimes i do associate monsters with a specific room where that's kind of where they work but i like to know what the purpose of all my rooms are and i'll often make a roster of the monsters and talk about in my notes oh sometimes this monster goes here sometimes this monster goes here it might be pretty normal for example if you have a standard environment that maybe there's a workshop where the blacksmith works during the day and there's a kitchen where the cook works during the day but everyone in the dungeon comes to the great hall to have dinner and they're all sleeping at night a simple schedule like that can actually make the player's decision of when they arrive at the dungeon really really meaningful in our experience making the schedule and roster takes about the same amount of work as a random encounter table and works in our case better it doesn't have to be too too complex either just think of your own schedule in your life i mean most days i spend either working playing video games sleeping or eating and so you just need to decide where the monster is where they where they sleep eat work or play so a lot of these topics that we are discussing actually lean into our next point which is the snapping of the suspension of disbelief although we are existing in a fantasy world filled with magic and elves and dragons there still needs to be a logical through line that holds the world together and although we all have a pretty high suspension of disbelief when playing dungeon dragons there is a limit to that and if you cross that limit you risk losing your players interest in the dungeon if it just doesn't make sense it's easy to respond to this criticism by saying it's a fantasy world filled with magic i don't have to explain anything but that is a profoundly disappointing answer and think about all the movies that you've watched that have been in a fantasy setting whether they are the marvel movies when you've gone whoa whoa whoa that does not make sense that's how your players can feel sometimes when they encounter a world that has logical inconsistencies in it and so it is worth about thinking about how your dungeon is a dynamic breathing environment just as we looked at the schedule of the monsters if you have living creatures inhabiting your dungeon yeah they need to eat they need to sleep they need to have fresh water and things to drink they need to have things to do they probably really don't like being trapped in a single room all day for years on end never being able to go outside and see their friends and moreover they probably need somewhere to go to the bathroom and have a shower too now you don't have to go super far with this and come up with a complex explanation that makes like a perfect ecology for everything you might just simply say oh yeah the goblins go out every week to raid a caravan and that's where they get their food from or here's here's an underground lake i don't really yeah somehow it flows down in here i don't need to make sure that the water table is perfectly explained here just as long as you have something and this can also encourage you to think of more interesting environments because now if you need to have a source of water in your dungeon well now water can add a dynamic encounter maybe there is actually a water elemental hiding in the pool of water right maybe there is maybe the fact that the goblins have to go out to raid to get food gives you an adventure hook that brings the players into the adventure thinking about how you can make your dungeon more logically consistent can actually make your story more rich and complex your dungeon should have a purpose and by simply giving it a purpose and giving the characters who inhabit that dungeon purpose to be there you're creating a more dynamic experience for your players to explore you're giving them things to interact with if they're observing their schedule if they can get the lowdown on the different rooms in the dungeon and what they might be used for they can now start to think of clever ways to exploit that which means that they're going to have more fun digging into the dungeon if they come across a cave of goblins and as they go and it's like here's the room where the goblins are to stab you here's another room where the goblins sit but they jump up to stab you and in this final room there's a group of goblins here to stab you well what are the point of these rooms but if you go in and it's like here's a room where they're chopping up bits of meat from animals that they have hunted here's a room where they're sitting around a campfire relaxing here's a room where the boss of the goblins a bug bear has made a big pile of furs and hay that he sits upon and commands all the other goblins and this is his beautiful luxurious throne room well by giving these small purposes to these rooms you're creating a more dynamic experience and i think the goblin cave at the beginning of the lost minds of fendelver actually does an excellent job you have the dog pen you have the small camp you have the throne room you have the water trap the bridge uh the chimney shoot all of these have a purpose for being there and there's clear ways that the people who inhabit this area live there and they go out and they scout they camp they raid caravans they bring the goods back they bring back prisoners and that's how they eat that's how they grow that's how they live so it's very very simple you don't have to be complex but it just makes it so much more interesting and if your characters then ask questions like well what are these goblins doing here well now you have answers and this is where you also want to make sure that you avoid one of the most common pitfalls of this kind of illogical world building when you create a dungeon and that's where you have a dungeon that has like a killer death trap as the entrance and then is inhabited by creatures that are apparently coming and going all the time and so when you think about it logically it's like oh in order for the goblins to get into the cave on a daily basis they would have to go through this death trap yeah and so now you have to think about okay well maybe that death trap is there but the goblins have a secret entrance and so now the players can find that secret entrance or maybe the goblins have a bypass in their trap sometimes the trap might be simple like the trap only triggers for creatures that weigh more than 100 pounds which means now your halflings and gnomes actually have a cool bypass to it something that i love to do especially with goblin caves or cobalt caves is the main entrance is trapped but then there's some shrubs off to the side with an entrance that can only fit small creatures and it has little winding tunnels that these small creatures use to come and go that's actually a smart move by the goblins or cobalts the big entrance is trapped because they don't want big things coming and going but they have their clear easy route in and out that doesn't hinder them at all now on the flip side of this there are two sides of the same coin here you can bring logic into your world and you should and you should think about those elements but you also shouldn't be hindered by overthinking the logic of your world because at the same time this is a magical realm where creatures other than humanoids exist so you don't have to follow the architecture and structural requirements of standard human living because also it's kind of cool to see giant structures and unfathomable architecture in a fantastical world so you don't want to hinder yourself by building a perfectly realistic biosphere one of the great strengths of fantasy is imagining things that never were could not be but that we wish could be even within d d adventures that play things pretty close to the hilt if you look at uh castle ravenloft from curse of strod that is a huge castle it's over 300 feet tall at its tallest tower the towers are gigantic in size it is completely unlike any castle that you could really find in real life like there's there's ones that come close but even castle ravenloft you look at it like there's there's 10 foot blocks of solid stone that separate the floors and everything like that like there's there's the floors don't make any sense they don't line up perfectly either the towers don't make sense and like you even compare castle ravenloft to um famous real world fa like fantasy castles like muschwenstein and it's like this is way more way more unrealistic than even that but it's okay because castle ravenloft still has a good amount of internal consistency and we're willing to buy that yes this epic 400 foot tall castle could exist on a 1 000 foot high cliff because the image of a lightning bolt striking behind it as a vampire looks out on the starving village is cool yes the idea that there could be a dungeon high up 30 thousand feet in the in the equivalent of the himalaya mountains where the air is so thin that you could never bring the blocks up there because it just would be impossible for people at this technological level no that's okay you don't need to like constrain yourself in that way dwarves were fantastic builders they were able to build great things maybe they used magic maybe they used earth about elementals and you probably don't need to go much further than saying yeah dwarves built it to make your players accepted yeah and this is kind of a through line for a lot of the fantastical world is you do have things like dwarves elves and dragons that that can do things that humanoids can never do and also when they are building cities you don't need to worry so much about um i feel like i've seen people complain about the thickness of outside walls because we often have these images and fantasy artwork that depicts city walls like the walls of constant opal uh being like 200 feet tall and you know 50 feet feet thick and those being super commonplace and everywhere and they can be as common as you want them to be in your world you know what people in your world probably had to build walls against well giants ogres dragons these are actual threats so yeah they're not going to live by the same logic that we do here a 10-foot wall that is 5 feet thick is probably not good enough if a stone giant decides that it wants to raid your town now another thing that i see a lot is there are a lot of people out there who are really into proper biomes and geography and for those people who are into it that's amazing but you shouldn't feel bad if you aren't into it your placement of swamps forests valleys and mountains if somebody comes to you and says a swamp wouldn't be there that doesn't make sense well there is a million and one reasons in a fantastical world that a swamp could have appeared there i'm pretty sure i've heard of swamps that are the product of of ancient wizard curses so why not and you don't really need more of an explanation than that yeah sometimes throwing well it's just magical is a bit of a letdown but at the same time when the history of your world is that there have been many magical wars and the byproducts of those wars are changing biomes well then who cares where your swamp is or your forest is or your mountain is try to do it to the best of your ability and your players can explore that world as they see fit don't hold yourself too much to the restraints of real life now of course one of the other things that you can get carried away with too in this respect is looking at the game rules of dungeons and dragons and extrapolating those to an odd extreme like building a dungeon where every single npc has a magic sword or where every single castle of every single baron duchess duke or countess is warded against teleportation or where every single object in every single shopkeeper's place has a um glyph of warding on it and so unless you're building a high magic world where these kind of things exist don't worry about the world building implications of the rules of the player's handbook you don't need to then think oh because i live in a world where there are stone giants and where there are teleportation where that means that every single castle is covered in a mordenkainen's private sanctum that's not necessarily the case you don't need to always be foiling everything or having having npcs and villains and dungeon builders that thought of every single eventuality people do make mistakes when they design their dungeons as well so this idea that the world is perfectly formed is not actually indicative of the way reality is because if you look at many real world castles many real world environments these these were places that over the course of their years were renovated many times over and on this path this also means that you have to kind of blend those two elements of the illogical and magical fantasy nature of your world with the logic through line that you want to use keep in mind the resources available not every town has high level druids and wizards who can make that town prosper some towns are pretty poor and might not have any walls or a very small group of guards or can be easily infiltrated or destroyed by a stone giant and that's a big problem for them not every castle is going to have magical wards and secret entrances some of them might have just been built by men who are trying to build a castle to protect their land as best they can or perhaps if you look at your dungeon as being designed by a beholder or or it is a dungeon built by giants then what does that mean for that dungeon and what does the design possibly look like and maybe they're too busy worrying about themselves to worry about what a humanoid might be able to do when they encounter their dungeon so taking this all together it really is about balance both in how you design your environments for your players to experience them and in how you think about how your dungeon fits within the rest of the world we think about these things a lot now when we create our dungeons and environments because we like to create places that feel like they are living that they are breathing that they are alive and inhabited because that gives our players so many ways to engage with it in ways that even us as dungeon masters weren't expecting so this has been our five dungeon design mistakes in dungeons and dragons fifth edition tell us about some of the design mistakes that you have made or learned from in the comments below the videos that we make on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters from both kelly and i to our patreons and to all of our backers on kickstarter a huge thank you from the bottoms of our hearts if you enjoy the work that we do here on youtube please check us out at patreon by following the links in the description below and be sure to check out drakenheim.com for our current dungeons of racket 9 kickstarter which is now live and don't forget to check out our live play shadows of drakenheim which is tuesday nights at 6 pm eastern on twitch you can find all the previous episodes right up over here and we have plenty more tips for dungeon masters in our playlist right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 219,861

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: DGr8gJiE-8Y

Length: 34min 43sec (2083 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 08 2021