How to Make GOOD D&D Dungeons

starting Friday noon South Korea's loudspeaker propaganda broadcast resumed in 11 locations along the border hello explorers it's me Antonio damiko this is pointy hat and welcome to tip of that [Music] that's right it's time for another one of these this is a show where I take something about playing or running d d i look at it talk about it for a minute and then give you something that can help you down the line with that thing ideally and you know how to read so you know what we're doing let's talk dungeons [Music] but also really quick I'll be a Gen Con like soon like very soon in fact I'm going to send my human familiar there say hi hi don't worry I'll be taking control of his mind and seeing through his eyes hey so be like I'm there Gen Con is happening the first week of August and I'll have a panel with other d d creators and I'll be participating in a massive game called an epic run by the dungeon dudes and it has gdd on it and d d shorts and me and then I'll just be generally loitering around the convention hall for the whole thing so please say hi if you're there and you see me okay back to dungeons just had to let you know because I'm terrified of not knowing anyone there so please say hi for now dungeons I think if you play a lot of d d or just RPGs in general you're kind of desensitized to how ungodly weird the concept of a dungeon actually is we all understand them but if you spend like three seconds actually thinking of what a dungeon is you kind of realize how strange they actually are a dungeon is an enclosed space in which there are a series of challenges that people need to overcome in order to finish it after which those that completed will be rewarded with advancing the plot or by actual material rewards probably both okay think about that for 3 seconds foreign that's wild imagine if we actually lived in a world where you can take on like American Ninja Warrior courses that are just sort of scattered around the country for profit and self-actualization I think it's one of the rare aspects of DnD that has escaped the chase for very similitude in general nobody is out there trying to make dungeons truly make sense people that care about narrative and very similar to those people including me will worry about how to make it so that the monsters that live within makes sense and are not just random stuff pulled from a hat or make it so that the puzzles and traps make sense with what the dungeon actually is instead of whatever comes up on the first result of Googling DND traps for children 2 and up but the very existence of dungeons is so alien that we just accepted the closest real world equivalent I can think of to a dungeon in the DND sense is like maybe Egyptian tombs and even then those are not built like Dungeons are yes they are filled with traps and dead ends but the goal is not to conquer those it's precisely the opposite it's so that thieves don't get the goodies hidden within there's also no con concept of a boss or anything close to combat Encounters in any Egyptian tomb and to make it very clear I'm not saying this is a negative I think it's important to be aware of what we're doing when we're designing and playing a game which is why I'm drawing attention to what dungeons actually are but I have like little to no interest in making dungeons more realistic so what am I interested in doing then well dear little viewers I want to help you make cool dungeons but before we do that we gotta examine the place dungeons occupy in d d today and what plays they use to occupy but I don't feel comfortable delving into this topic blind get it delving dun dun anyway if only we could get some insight the need to peer into the future is not new for Generations cultures across the globe and the plains have sought the power of clear voyance tarot cards have been used as tools for this very purpose but what if I told you that after a millennia of Mortals wishing for these conduits to peer into the future that energy has managed to awaken the most powerful of these tools animating them to send the bounds of normal tarot cards that'd be cool and guess what it is because they are real and headpoint press is sponsoring me to tell you all about them this is the animated D Tarot deck at Tarot deck that moves in real life like in your hand and the deck comes with a guidebook that gives you ways to include a Tarot deck in your ttrpg campaigns and the illustrations are sick and if you're not a DM don't worry they also have animated spells that's right the DND spells you know I love but animated perfect for players come on they look like this they look so pretty and I have a code that's right if you use the code pointy hat HPP pointy hat HPP like a point press you get 10 bucks off of your order of the tarot box head and the animated spell bundles so if that sounds intriguing go and check it out in the description the link is down below don't forget the code and with the knowledge of the future in our hands let's go back into the dungeon so there are basically two camps when it comes to dungeons one I'm gonna call the Dungeon Crawl camp and the other one I'm gonna call the dungeon level camp at dungeon crawling game is a game of d d or of any RPG that calls itself a Dungeon Crawl where most of the Playtime is spent inside of a dungeon these are literally multi-level dungeons I'm talking like an underground mall of dungeon seventh floor deep Dungeons and the whole fun of the game is to get to the next floor some floors are bigger than others some have more combat than others some are safe floors where players can rest and lick their wounds and some are boss floors but the dungeon is basically the entirety of the game time spent outside of the dungeon is either too prep to enter the dungeon like by equipment and potions and 10-foot poles that are used to tap the floor in front of you in case of like spike traps or Throne darts or whatever and if you remember playing this way you qualify for a senior citizen discount or time spent outside of the dungeon is spent traveling to the next dungeon most of these games are loot based and magic items are like just as important as levelops are when it comes to measuring your character's strength this is considered very very old school it almost feels War gamey war game adjacent not true war games but kind of related but this style of play as is by no means dying it is less popular but not dying there are very modern video games nowadays that replicate this somehow it feels like dungeon crawls have had more of a staying power in the East rather than the West atrion Odyssey is a relatively new series that does this and shin Megami tensei is still going strong and they do this often when they're not busy making people trip up when they pronounce the name of the series but d d is very very much not trending in the Dungeon Crawl direction we can talk for ages as to why this is the case is it because of the influence of video games like the Legend of Zelda is it the emphasis on role-playing rather than combat and puzzle and exploration is it because dungeon crawls with their extreme Reliance on grid-based traversal and not just combat are just better suited for a medium-like video games where constant calculus can be done in the blink of an eye by a computer and not by a person who knows the point is DND is very much moving away from this to a new way of playing where dungeons are very much still a thing but they are smaller more contained more story relevant and take more of a secondary place to the main narrative the group is collectively telling the rise of the five-room dungeon what I would consider the most popular approach to dungeon making in 5D is emblematic of this dungeons are seen as like a break of pace for a game that is more about talking amongst the party talking with NPCs making big narrative decisions and traveling around dungeons in this new style of play take the place of the last obstacle to overcome in whatever Arc your party is playing yes I think of DnD campaigns as being divided by arcs yes I have a weeb no I will never admit it wait wait games that run dungeons like this tend to go this way the party travels for a while they face all kinds of encounters on the road and find themselves confronted with a plot hook that the DM has ever so subtly put in their way they role play hash out what to do about said plot hook maybe make some narrative choices talk to some NPCs decide on what to do and then they'll be told that if they want to return the snuggle of necromantic power to the ruler of the zombie Kingdom they will have to go into the spooky graveyard dungeon and that's when the dungeon comes in two to five sessions later the party will hopefully emerge out of the dungeon snuggy in hand and then it's right back to role-playing and concluding The Arc and then the end now I'm not gonna beat around the bush I'm gonna beat around the bush on the top I am firmly in the second Camp I am very much a dungeon as part of the game rather than dungeon as the entirety of the game and now that we've defined that I'll say that this guide is very very much geared towards that play style both because it's the one I use but also because it's the one that is most popular and therefore the one that most people will find useful even hardcore Dungeon Crawlers can take something away from this video why because I mean I want people to DM as much as anybody else playing D I literally make videos to help both DMS and players but I'm not gonna sugarcoat it creating a full dungeon from scratch that's that's hard it takes time and even if you're willing to put in the time I think it's easy to go wrong with it so I'm hoping that this video will help so how do I plan to do that well I'm gonna take you on a little dungeon of my own in video form to show you how I make dungeons my method is less strict and by the numbers than the five room dungeon method it's more like a set of rules to help you create dungeons which means it's a hundred percent compatible with the five room dungeon method if that's the one you like you can still use my method in conjunction with that one or you can just use this one so what can you expect of this method let's set some expectations the first as I already said is that this won't be a Dungeon Crawl dungeon those are fine those are valid you're valid but it's just not what I run so I can't help with that the second is that my dungeons can be considered short by some people's standards I tend to have like a four to five session limit to my dungeons I just find it tedious for a singular dungeon to last longer than that I feel like people need a break from it after that long or at least my players do but you can always make a dungeon longer if you or your party just absolutely love never seeing the Sun the third is that I enjoy a lot of variety in my dungeons if you're going in expecting like maybe one Spike trap and then 10 combat encounters those are not the dungeons I tend to run and finally and this is the most important one I Define my approach to dungeon design as both video game inspired and also theme park-esque I work in Game Dev and I've studied it so I apply a lot of game design principles to my dungeons but I also really really care about theming and creating a Vibe and when I say that I don't mean I spend five minutes describing each room but rather I use game mechanics to contribute to the theme of the dungeon you'll see okay that's enough setting up expectations let's get into this pointy hat dungeon making method I will be doing this as a numbered list because those scratch my tiny lizard brain near an activation goes through the roof when I hear number one I'm sad that being said number one select a theme I would argue this is the most important step you might think this means select a setting and you're only partially wrong that's part of it but not all of it I start thinking of my dungeons in terms of themes is this dungeon about on death about death about healing about lies about friendship these might seem very high brow but stay with me here let's say that our theme is lies cool what can we do with that lies artifice Illusions we can make a dungeon that is set in a carnival ride a house of mirrors or we can make a dungeon that is some sort of haunted magical ball of masks see we've decided on a setting based on our theme I like lies as a theme so I'll continue on with it for this example and I'll say that the actual setting of The Dungeon is a carnival with different rides being all part of the dungeon listen I love circuses trains and boats my interests have not changes I was age seven if I have a chance to put any of those anywhere I will so please indulge me now that we have a theme let's go to number two pick a mechanic this is where that game design part of my method kicks in mechanic is a very game designed word along with I don't know action space feature creep crunch torturing VR Team all of those so what do I mean by mechanic well I'm looking for a system in the game that is gonna let me express my theme through game mechanics oh God I'm reading the script and this feels so like insufferably game designy please stick with me here I'm looking for a system of rules in the game that is going to convey the theme of the dungeon both to drive it home but also to make the players really feel that theme I think people are pretty good about doing this when they talk about narrative but less so with mechanics like you can make a dungeon about death and have zombies and necromancers that have NPCs talk about sad deaths they experienced but they often don't take that into the realm of the mechanics of the game or when interacting with the rules of the game I'm going to give you two examples imagine if the theme I chose was sleep I could then choose mechanics that connect to the concept of sleep in the game I could mess with short rests I could mess with rolling hit dice during those short rests I could play with exhaustion levels and of course the Sleep condition see we can very much use game mechanics to express a theme for our little lie example that I outline in step one I'm gonna use a very simple mechanic Illusions in d d players are very familiar with those and I have so many spells to choose from enemies can use those the dungeon can use those I can mess with stuff like perception checks that's a super super easy way to use mechanics to reinforce your theme so now that we have that what do we do number three select a goal this one is pretty self-explanatory and also kind of hard to miss but this is a guide so I gotta say it select a goal for your dungeon how do your players win do they need to reach the end do they need to defeat the boss at the end of the dungeon do they need to find something hidden inside of the dungeon do they need to get someone through the dungeon in one piece as you can see there are indeed more goals for a dungeon than just kill the monster in The Big Empty circular room having some variety to your dungeons might be a good idea especially if you run them quite often if your game has a very video gamey setup like find the seven mystical teacups of the elements in the seven dungeons it might be good to switch up goals once your players have grown accustomed to the Baseline setup instead of having all mystical teacups just laying somewhere after the big boss room have one of them sit in the open behind a force field and make the dungeon about deactivating that force field okay so now we know why players are going into this dungeon let's talk about what they actually do for the majority of their time there number four out of variety of encounters so we have a theme we have a mechanic to express that theme we have a goal let's create some situations that can lead you to express those mechanics these are called encounters now here's a little-known DND fact that people seem to forget encounter does not mean combat exclusively that's right there are other types of encounters did you know because sometimes it sure feels like it isn't the case I tend to find combat only dungeons with the occasional trap thrown in extremely boring combat is fun for a while but you need Hills and Valleys in your dungeon you need to keep a good pace and a good Pace cannot be kept by constant fighting 24 7 all the time forever that's where different encounters come in so let's go over them really quick number eight combat you know what this is this is a combat encounter you don't need me to explain this it's something you set up for your players to fight a set of baddies no need to bore you moving on number B trap and puzzle yes I am rolling them both into one because boiler alert I run all my traps as puzzles so let's get some definitions a trap is something set up for others to fall into step on a tile and darts fly off hitting your little guy a puzzle is something set up for others to solve you gotta step on the tiles in the right order to open the door now why run traps as puzzles I could probably make a whole video about this and maybe someday I will but long story short I find that traps tend to be boring or at least they can be if d d was a movie maybe it'll be cool to show how someone Dodges the darts but at the table it's it's rolling a die it's rolling a deck save that's it you can maybe make it slightly more interesting with I don't know consequences but the action of falling or succeeding at avoiding a trap is just it's not very engaging it doesn't take any actual skill from your players even if they use their actual characters skills to avoid it I will heavily heavily advise you to start thinking about what the player actually does when interacting with your encounters rather than what it looks like in your head because some stuff is fun to watch but not fun to play to make them interesting I run my traps as disguised puzzles here's an example the room the heroes are standing is filling with water quickly and they will drown if they don't do something they can tear the protective cover out of the Vault that releases the water but they have to figure out how the console works and now the players are engaging in a Bioshock pipe puzzle to stop them from dying you've suddenly turned this trap into an actually exciting and challenging test for your players that requires actual skill to solve rather than just taking turns rolling to Beta DC certainly more exciting than roll a check anyway you're welcome to run them how are you please be mad in the comments about that I'm just here to let you know that this is another encounter type and speaking of number c role play here it is the often forgotten encounter type when it comes to dungeons roleplay encounters are all about talking with someone to get them to do something for you how you go about that is for you to choose there's a guardian that stops your progress and demands your help in exchange for letting you through do you intimidate them do you help them do you talk to them and figure out what their deal is that's RP baby okay neat we've gone through all different encounter types now that that's fresh in your mind we gotta figure out a way to insert our mechanic into these encounter types back to our theme of lies and our mechanic of Illusions a combat encounter that uses that mechanics to express that theme might be a fight in a Hall of Mirrors where players have to use the mirrors to discern which enemies are wheels and which ones are fake Illusions but if they're looking at the mirrors they're not looking at the enemy which means the enemy gets Advantage exciting a trap with the theme of Lies might be the easiest incorporation of the theme Here by maybe the players need to find a key but it's in a room filled with hundreds of thousands of illusory keys they could spend a lifetime manually checking or figure out a way to disable the crystals that are displaying the illusory Keys finally a roleplay encounter featuring illusions at the theme of Lies also basically writes itself the NPC is lying the NPC does not appear to be what they originally are maybe the smpc is the one that set them into the dungeon in the first place and they had hidden motives for doing so encounters are the way to communicate your theme and play with the mechanic that you've selected to convey it this is the meat of the dungeon and players will remember encounters leading up to the boss more than the boss itself most of the time at least because that's most of the dungeon but they are not only relevant to my whole idea of theme and mechanics they are also you know vital for actual dungeon design dungeons are there to deplete the resources of your players before they get to the final boss this might be news to some of you but that's the main reason why we have dungeons with encounters and places where players will spend resources because if you don't players can just what's up to the boss and go Nova on them using all their abilities and all their resources in the beginning stages of the fight and burning through your boss in one Fell Swoop balancing exactly how many of those resources is tricky particularly because you are not actually the one spending them and players can choose to spend them however they please so here is my trick if players get to the boss with more than one hit dice still in their hit dice pool you might have gone a little bit too easy on them I have seen some people say that you can measure if your dungeon was too hard or too easy looking at how many spell slots they have left and I think this is garbage advice Mama this is garbage first not all classes have spells second spellcasters vary widely in spell slots and spell slot recovery and third and most important some players play more cautiously and conservatively with their spell thoughts than others there's way too many variables for that to be your way of tracking if your dungeon is hard but all classes have hit Dice and they also scale in level so try tracking those I can give you a specific length or a specific number of encounters that dungeons should have you will find that by running your Dungeons and adjusting them as you go and as you make new ones but if you absolutely need a start I found that four to six encounters is a good start for a dungeon plan okay so we have a theme we have a mechanic we have a goal we have the encounters to get to that goal there is just one final Point number five give your dungeon an ending notice how I didn't call this a boss a dungeon needs an end but it doesn't necessarily need to be a boss it often is and most of the dungeons I run have one because I like bosses and players do too but it could very much be a skill challenge or a final puzzle the most important aspect for your dungeon ending if you're following this method is that your dungeon ending must be the combination of your theme and your mechanics this sounds hard but it actually is very easy if you've been following this guide in order you're gonna take all or most of the ways you've expressed your theme through mechanics in your dungeon and you're gonna dump that bucket on your ending this is a very common principle of game design where a mechanic is introduced to the players in a safe or safe fish area so they can learn it AKA your encounters and now they're ready to fully engage with it in a not so safe area like a boss battle for example for our theme of lies and illusion mechanics let's say that you had the aforementioned Hall of mirror fights but also one where the enemy would divide itself in several illusory copies of itself and the players had to figure out which one was the real one by using aoes or simple attacks cool you're gonna take those two expressions of the Illusions mechanic and give those to your boss your players will love this because they know how to engage with this now they know what they must do and they can focus on fighting the boss and putting the knowledge that they have acquired throughout the dungeon to the test while they battle I can assure you this is cool this gives really really good results at the table at least in my experience and if you've been a very very good boy and followed all the numbers in my little numbered list you should have a pretty snazzy dungeon by now look at you oh oh wait what what do you mean you weren't actually writing a dungeon as you were simultaneously watching this video oh oh man that blows because we're gonna have to go back and listen to the advice again and pause regular thing then go back to the video man blows if only someone had written this whole thing in an easy to follow format that you can use to write your own dungeon better yet it'd be cool to see this method actually reflected in you know an actual dungeon that you could use or at least read to see it in action good thing I did that's right the point he had dungeon making guide is in the description of this very video for a hundred percent certified free and that's not all you might not have seen it in case you skipped the feywow video in which case how dare you that video took ages but in that video I made a dungeon using this method before I ever explained my method it's not just a dungeon but a whole adventure with a dungeon included inside of it and it's in the description of this very video for you to use I use Illusions and also sleep to really drive the faith theme across on that one so if you want some inspo you can check that out too both links are in the description of this very video you're watching so go out there get some graph paper some dry erase boards and some markers and put your friends through a series of torture chambers for fun hey now that's it that's the end of the video you did it I am proud of you there's more game designy videos are always a gamble for me I legit don't know if y'all like them but I find this stuff to be you know quite hard to grasp if you haven't poured like hours into game design or into studying this sort of stuff if you do like these do let me know in the comments and do let me know your dungeon Concepts because I would love to hear them especially if this method has inspired you to create some fun thematic dungeons I'm off to work on more stuff but I'm also off to Gen Con I'll be there and this is my first convention in the US and certainly my first Convention as any sort of content creator so I really don't know what to expect say hi if you see me around alright I'm off to pack I'll see you soon don't overpack for any trips triple check your gate if you're flying get to the airport at least two hours before the flight leaves I do three if I have to check backs or if it's an international fight just be sure okay enough travel tips see ya bye bye see you at Gen Con if you're going see you here if you're not good great bye bye bye

Channel: Pointy Hat

Views: 399,838

Keywords: DnD, D&D, DnD with a twist, 5e, TTRPG, How to, Illustration, Dungeons and Dragons, D&D with a twist, d&d battle music, pointy hat, animation, rant, hat, homebrew, trailer, D&D trailer, OneD&D, one d&d, onednd, OGL, Wizards, wizards of the coast, WotC, WOC, OGL drama, dungeon, dungeon crawl, zelda dungeon, d&d dungeon, dnd dungeon, encounters, dnd encounters, dnd traps, dnd puzzles, d&d puzzles, d&d traps, how to make a d&d dungeon, how to make a dnd dungeon, traps, puzzles, dungeon tips

Id: KgdBB7D2u6g

Length: 23min 6sec (1386 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2023