This Dungeon Could Have Been An Encounter

By Jubal

Dare you enter? We have *checks notes* some rooms with orcs and stuff.

Welcome to an article about the "this meeting could have been an email" of the RPG world. Whether you're designing dungeons for a computer game or a tabletop setting, this is a brief set of thoughts on whether you should, in fact, be doing that. For our purposes, a dungeon is an environment that is enclosed (distinguishing it from an explorable wilderness) and essentially hostile (distinguishing it from settled environments). They are part of the bread and butter of role-playing games and always have been, as exciting places to explore and discover and as build-ups to key story elements. But can you have too much of a good thing?

Some dungeons, in short, are just too long for the purpose they were given. Especially in certain computer RPGs, they can become a hack-fest where numerous rooms of generic enemies just need to be plodded through in order to gain experience, loot, or some singular end-point encounter or item. There are of course ways to spruce up that experience – better pathing design that interlocks between levels, more complex intra-dungeon ecology and politics, more of a mixture of puzzles and story encounters to break up dungeoneering – but this isn't an article about how to do dungeons better per se.

This, instead, is an article that seeks to pose an alternative question, which is whether a dungeon always needs to be there in the first place. Time spent dungeoneering in a game is subject to narrative opportunity cost the same as anything else in a game: in general, that time shouldn't just be expended as a way to jump through hoops, and combat and puzzles ideally shouldn't just be "plot locks" that need to be passed through to get to the next bit of actual story.

So when should your dungeon just be an encounter? There are various parameters to consider.

First, consider how much story your dungeon needs to tell. This is perhaps the most important element for RPGs. The dungeon – whether as part of a wider core plot, or on its own terms – has a story to tell, and everything in the dungeon should help tell that story. That can include a variety of types of content or encounter, but it should all fit with the wider theming.

If the whole point of the dungeon is to have an enemy encounter at the end, could you just... skip the dungeon? Even if the enemy has a mighty fortress, you could give the player a stealth mission, entry point, or catching a villain unawares if that avoids a slog through thirty arbitrary rooms full of guards who inexplicably don't attempt to attack the player en masse or do anything else useful.

A real smallish castle's floor plan. Not actually many rooms per level!

Unless a dungeon has a good reason to sprawl, sometimes it can be condensed. Fortresses don't need to involve endless interlocking rooms – in a real environment, in general things should be accessed pretty quickly from one another, so the average castle has maybe two main layers of defence (a curtain wall and a keep), and the lord's hall will be big and central in the keep. Once an enemy is in the base, the defence is essentially lost: whilst you're unlikely to want a protagonist or player character to do a whole siege, it still applies that few, large barriers are the norm rather than numerous fights with small numbers of enemies conveniently matched up against a party of rag-tag adventurers. That may reduce build-up to fighting a major villain, but the time you save by not having a ton of dungeon rooms could be used in wilderness or settlement encounters having tussles with the evil lord's subordinates who are bullying villagers, or deposing one of his corrupt reeves who lives in the hall of a village on the other side of the valley: things that will still raise the stakes, and will ground the players more effectively in why the villain is a problem than a dungeon-style base full of minions.

The same might be true of finding a special item: sometimes items might be behind many many guards and traps, but sometimes it's a case of finding and talking to the right person, or items can be guarded in ways that aren't a single dungeon location. They could for example be moved around regularly, making the problem more a case of identifying who has the item and making the environment much more dynamic. They could equally kept in a location that is singular but hard to access. In general, if something is kept very high up a mountain or in the bottom of a mine, it may well not have a very wide sprawling base of operations because it's really hard to supply such a place.

If a game has exploring and dungeoneering as a core gameplay element in and of itself, that's a good reason per se to spend more time in dungeons. But – and this is where a lot of games falter – dungeoneering isn't the same as combat. Dungeoneering includes puzzles, survival, tactics, navigation, and other such challenges and toolkits. For many people, much of the time, a sequence of combat encounters per se won't necessarily be highly rewarding.

Yet another room like this containing d6 bugbears! My favourite!

If you need to introduce an enemy or mechanic, then there might be good reasons to build them up through a dungeon. In general if you want players to know how to fight something, whatever the system, they might need 2-3 goes to get used to a new enemy before that enemy or system is 'integrated' into their knowledge of how to play. This can be reduced if the enemy obeys pre-existing rules, however, and can also be reduced if the enemy is a single, solveable puzzle. As such, "introduction" encounters are often best placed early in games, or when introducing something that will be repeatedly used thereafter. If the change to the game's mechanics is relatively small, or is unique to the encounter, you might be better simply having it as a one-off.

This can also be used narratively: if you want a dungeon's ending to be a unique villain or encounter, having the dungeon build up to that can be important for introducing suspense and explaining who the villain is, or exploring the world in which they function. But if that's explained elsewhere, the dungeon might not need to be present – or might be able to be boiled down to a much smaller sequence of encounters and explorations.

Sometimes, then, the dungeon isn't the solution. Avoiding them becoming the universal gateway to plot elements can remove quite a bit of drudgery for players, and provide some elbow room to spend more time on other parts of the plot. Rather than building everything into a static location, having encounters in different locations linked with overland travel & encounters or having an environment where the players' targets are fluid and mobile can help change the pace of game design. The result might be more variation in play – keeping your villains, protagonists, and players alike more engaged with the story.

I hope you found these thoughts useful! Let me know if this inspired you, or if you hated it and think we actually need more dungeons, or if you are stuck in a room with d6 hobgoblins and need help from an itinerant bard. Until then, have fun designing new worlds - whether or not you're heading down a dungeon door.

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