Designing Dungeons: Goals

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Before you sit down to design your dungeon, you should first figure out what it is you want to accomplish with this dungeon, or perhaps, what do you want your players to accomplish.  This is the goal of your dungeon.  Your dungeon can have multiple goals.  Perhaps one of your goals is for your party to achieve their next level.  Perhaps you want them to discover an important clue or information that will advance the plot.  Perhaps this dungeon will involve a climactic battle with the villain.


Level Goals

Do you want your party to level up at the end of this dungeon?  If so, you'll need to plan encounters and experience accordingly.  Following the guides in the core books, it takes 13 to 14 encounters to achieve a new level.  This assumes the party is encountering challenges appropriate to their level.  For example, a party of level 1 characters facing a level 1 challenge is awarded 300 experience to divide among the party.  If there  are 4 players, this is 75 each.  75 times 13 is 975, and 75 times 14 is 1050.  It takes 1000 experience to reach level 2, so 14 level 1 encounters will be enough for a party of level 1 characters to reach level 2.  However, it is quite boring to face the same type of encounter every time.  You'll want to vary the difficulty of your encounters.  According to the DMG, it is recommended that about half of the encounters be equal to the party's level.  About a tenth of the encounters should be lower than the party's level, and only a few should be higher.

Challenge ratings are a measure of the overall difficulty of the challenge.  A challenge that's the same level as the party will consume about one fifth of the party's resources if handled correctly.  You can safely assume the party can go through 3 or 4 encounters equal to their level before they have to rest.  Because of the random nature of criticals, never assume that the party will survive the maximum amount of challenge they should survive.  Theoretically, a party of level 1 characters can go through four level 1 encounters before they need to rest.  However, two orcs are considered a level 1 encounter, and the default stats for an orc assume they are wielding falchions, which deal 2d4+4 damage with an 18-20 critical chance.  This means each orc deals an average of 9 damage per hit.  Most level 1 characters can't survive more than one hit like that.  If that orc happens to score a critical hit, that's an average of 18 damage, enough to drop a level 1 character (a level 1 barbarian with an 18 consitution and the toughness feat has only 19 HP).  The lower the party's level, the more likely they'll need to rest between encounters.  Take that into account as you design your dungeons.

While designing dungeons, you should have an idea of how much experience the party has and try to plan your encounters based on how much experience you want them to gain.


Plot Goals

Is the dungeon itself the entire adventure, or is it just a piece of a bigger plot?  If the goal of the adventure is a simple fetch quest, perhaps the objective is in the dungeon.  Perhaps the fetch quest becomes more complicated when the party discovers the objective isn't in the dungeon.  For a more complex plot, you can leave a clue to the actual location of their target within the dungeon.

Dungeons can easily serve as a means to advance the plot, because a party goes into a dungeon with clear goals in mind.  They expect to have achieved that goal by the time they've cleared the dungeon.  If you don't want the dungeon to be the end of the current adventure, then instead of putting the party's target in the dungeon, put some sort of clue in the dungeon instead that leads them to another location.

When designing the dungeon around the plot, you need to keep in mind such things as what information you want the party to gain from the dungeon, and how you want to deliver that information.  If the adventure's target isn't in the dungeon, you need to make sure the party doesn't miss the clues, and a diligent party won't.  Most players who go into a dungeon looking for something specific, who don't find it, will examine everything they can to figure out what they missed, however some players, particularly new players, won't, and will instead look to you for a hint about their next step.  While it is important that you make sure they find the clues, it is also important that you don't make it too obvious.  You want them to feel like they found the clue, instead of you handing it to them on a platter.  I'll try to go into more details about delivering subtle clues in a later post.


Encountering the Villain

An encounter with the adventure's villain, or perhaps a recurring villain, is always a great moment in any D&D game.  As a DM, your objective in such an encounter is to make it memorable.  First of all, if a recurring villain is about to show up, you may want to drop a few hints leading up to the encounter that the villain is about to show up, especially if the villain doesn't realize the party is nearby.  If the villain is aware of the party and plans to ambush them, then you'll want to keep that a secret.  Any good villain will cover his tracks.  However, not every villain can prepare for everything, and you may want to reward a clever player who does something you didn't expect by dropping a hint of the villain's presence.

Turning an ordinary encounter into a memorable one is actually fairly simple.  The easiest way to do this is to change the environment.  A fight with a wizard and his two bodyguards could be just another encounter.  That same encounter taking place in a room with a large pit in the middle, and the villains making use of bull rush and spells that threaten to knock the players over the edge makes it into a much more memorable encounter.  However, adding such an element increases the difficulty, so you should take that into account.  I'll go into more details on this in a later post concerning creative encounters.

Want to make your villain memorable without increasing the difficulty of the fight?  There are ways to do this, too.  If the villain threatens something important to one or more of the players, you can be sure they'll remember it.  I had a dragon once take a barbarian's weapon while the barbarian was frozen in fear.  The player wrote the dragon's name on his character sheet along with "took my axe" so he'd never forget why he was angry with this dragon.  One of my player characters got married within the game, so for the final encounter with a succubus attempting to become a demon lord, I had his wife chained to a wall, and the succubus had polymorphed his wife to make her look like the elf queen the succubus had been impersonating, and the succubus had herself chained to the wall and altered her appearance to look like the character's wife.  Both appeared to be unconscious.  The succubus had a nondetection effect on her, so the party couldn't detect evil to determine which was which.  There was literally no way of knowing who was who, and the succubus appears to "wake up" and warn the players that elf queen was really evil and was only appearing to be chained up and helpless and that they should kill her now before she attacked.


This covers the basics of defining the goals of your dungeon.  I'll go into greater detail on some of these points in later posts.  Hopefully, this will get you started when thinking about what your dungeons are trying to accomplish.