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Submit Your Questions for the November Q&A Livestream! (Patreon)

Published:
2020-11-13 20:44:16
Imported:
2026-06

Content

Our November 2020 Livestream will be a DUNGEON BUILDING WORKSHOP! Join us on Thursday, November 26th from 6 PM to 8 PM ET.

NOTE: We realize this is on American Thanksgiving — we’re Canadian and had our Thanksgiving a few weeks ago! If you can’t join us live, be sure to catch the stream when we upload it to YouTube!

Please submit any questions you may have about designing DUNGEONS for D&D 5e by replying to this thread.

We ask that you submit only one question for consideration.

Possible sub-topics might include:

Resources and methods for mapping dungeons

Creating adventure hooks and dungeon concepts

Fantastic and creative and exciting

Filling a dungeon with monsters, traps, puzzles, and riddles

Running the dungeon

Common dungeon design mistakes

What you “need” to have prepared to run a dungeon

Avoiding the “dungeon crawl” feeling

Please leave your questions in the comments below by Wednesday November 25th at 11:59 PM.

We hope we can answer most submissions, however we may need to narrow our selections occasionally depending on the quantity. We’ll curate the questions to avoid duplicates, and we encourage you to LIKE questions submitted by other patrons which are of interest to you so we can prioritize if necessary. We’ll read out your questions out during the stream, and hopefully take a few extra questions from the live chat as well.

If you miss the live stream, don’t worry — the full recording will be available on YouTube a few days later.

Cheers

Kelly & Monty

Comments

Robb Van Eck

How to effectively use elevation and "the third dimension" in dungeon building and encounter "staging".

Derunis Nil

Any Tipps for clever Trap-Building outside of usual spears, darts, pits etc. - i feel like magic traps are either way to OP or way too predictable.

Derunis Nil

Any Tipps for Dungeon-theme riddles ? I feel like im not creative enough to be a genius and build a riddle that involves the whole Dungeon like some "Zelda" titles do.

Catherine Holt

once you've come up with your concept for the dungeon how do you go about building/ mapping it

Derunis Nil

How do you Guys Map your Dungeons in online tools like Roll20. I feel like there are no enough good Dungeon maps you can actuallay play on. - Any Tipps for Map Building ? Where do you guys get your Maps from ?

Dennis Kambskarð

What do you think is crucial for a short & fun dungeon one shot for a new DM ? Cheers from Iceland !

Preston Walker

Where do you find inspiration when trying to make a "dungeon" that isn't a cliché, like catacombs or ruins?

Michael Geyer

Invested some time in campaign. Several other players do way too much roleplaying with completely unnecessary things and slows things down to a halt. DM seems to not mind and spends more time laughing. I'm all for having fun, but not 3 hrs of pointless goofing. Tips on how to handle?

Roger Bron

From the list, my favorite topics would be: 1 - Resources and methods for mapping dungeons 2 - Common dungeon design mistakes 3 - What you “need” to have prepared to run a dungeon One other design consideration might be "does it need to be realistic, with kitchen, dining, bedrooms etc?" Does more realistic, full setup help players understand and plan or is this just a lot of DM time spent on areas that players don't care about, not much pay off?" (You guys are fantastic!)

Daniel Gray Webb

How long can a dungeon be before it becomes a slog? What specific types of variety do you need to include and what suggestions do you have for tempo?

Jordan Rogers

What is the best way to make a dungeon interesting with role play and not just a normal dungeon crawl?

Castier GM and Actor

I ran TOA module a few years back and my players were bored despite my best efforts to make it interesting. I seem to always hit moments in my games where players don't know how to move their characters outside of combat like they just sit there silently waiting for something. My question is how do you run a dungeon in terms of trapped hallways without making it obvious there is a trap? Like I run into this problem if there is no trap I usually have the players progress no issue but if there is a trap I ask how far they walk down the hallway. Like I know I'm giving too much info but I need help.

Seth V

How to best manage the enemies inside the dungeon. I want it to feel fluid and living, (not just 3 skeletons per room, over and over, and the boss just sitting in his room doing nothing) but I don't want to bring EVERY dungeon inhabitant into the first battle because they heard the noise. How can I make it feel natural, but also fair?

Samuel Cavender

If you're planning for your party to spend a decent amount of time in the Dungeon (let's say, 1 or 2 levels) what sort of Rooms/Amenities do you need to stock for your players? In the campaign I'm playing in, our DM made this really cool Dungeon that is Davy Jones' ship where he has a "Room of Respite" (short rest room), many floors each with different purposeS/features, and a "Boss Door" which requires two "Boss Keys" to get to the final battle.

Michael Epp

Thanks as always for your good work DDudes! My favourite dungeons usually involve puzzles, which are very difficult to design - so often they are too easy or too hard. Any tips for making a puzzle that is just right?

RitalinGamer

What are some examples of non-traditional "dungeons" - something beyond the usual cramped corridors and underground lairs, but still with that feel of a relentless dungeon crawl?

Kevin Yamaga-Karns

I always look forward to your new videos on YouTube, and your advice is a guidebook for the groups I DM. I like to play with minis on a map (or built set when I have the time), but I sometimes struggle with preparing maps for the minis. I am not very good at making my own maps on something like Dungeon Fog, and don't always have the time, but finding the right pre-generated maps appropriate for my encounters is also not always easy. And once I've found a good map, printing it to the right scale can sometimes be difficult, with the grid coming out much bigger or smaller than one inch squares, so I have to keep fiddling with it, usually using Posterazor, then collect the A4 or letter size pages and cut and tape them into a large map suitable for standard minis. This can be a time consuming and frustrating process, and not where I want to spend my prep time for a game session. Is there a better way to do this, or is it unavoidable?

KrushIt

I'm going to be starting a nautical campaign soon. Now I want to raid your DM's Dungeon!

Ancalagon_TB

How important is dungeon ecology? Does everything have to make "sense"?

Joey Johnson

For a while I've been using the 'Book of Challenges: Dungeon Rooms, Puzzles, and Traps' for 3e to make more creative traps for my players. However, I've had some trouble converting from 3e to 5e where some traps become trivial for the CR and others are way too deadly. Do you know of any good resources for well balanced trap encounters for 5e? (A simple example of a trap encounter would be a pitfall trap that has a gelatinous cube at the bottom.)

Joey Johnson

I would recommend you check out the Redbrand Hideout from Lost Mines of Phandelver (the WotC intro adventure) as a good example of how to do this. They use a mix of enemy type and motivation to keep this from being a problem. (SPOILS) For example when the characters are fighting some skeletons in one room, the Redbrands in the next room take ambush positions instead of joining the fray. If the evil mage notices the commotion, he will flee for his life instead of backing up his underlings. (END SPOILS) In general they use a pretty clever spacing of combat rooms vs non combat rooms as well as mixed "monster" motivations to prevent the start of a death train.

Benjamin Burke

Most of my dungeons I pilfer from existing modules and adventures. Are there any dungeons from D&D history that you really liked and would be easy to borrow from?

TimberWolf

Back in the crossbow expert video Monty made reference to a hardcover adventure that potentially will give a player an extra attack... what adventure?

Benjamin Lewis

How much of a dungeon's contents should be fixed, and how much should be flexible? I am currently writing a 1-shot and am playing with the idea of planning several different versions of the contents of my dungeon so that encounters can be added in, removed, or switched out depending on how well the players are doing and how easy/difficult they are finding things. This will of course increase my planning time dramatically so i am wondering if it is necessary or worth it? Thank you, love you guys and what you do!

Vaughn Wassmer

What spells should I be aware of that may ruin or subvert a dungeon crawl? I know you've mentioned Arcane Eye as one and that having doors helps to mitigate that, but what other spells should I look out for and how would you keep those spells from ruining the session?

KrushIt

Maybe some of your favorite non-ruins, -catacombs, -temples dungeons?

KrushIt

I feel like they've actually done a video on this, if you look through the YouTube archive. Not that I'm objecting to revisiting to topic (at all), but if you want something more in-depth than what they might cover in this, then you might take a gander there. If I have a chance, I'll look over the video titles and see if one rings a bell.

Walt Flood

Sometimes players find a "safe spot" in a dungeon and get into running back and forth from there for rests - really turning a dungeon into a crawl and also taking away encounter difficulty by being able to rest all of the time (the front end of Wave Echo Cave that happened, for example). Any recommendations on how to "encourage" the party to keep moving forward and driving the action rather than the video-gamey, run back to base and restore approach, but while still balancing the ability for the party to get a break?

Terry Southard

How do you keep your encounters fresh (i.e. not using the standard gelatinous cube, etc.) and not have the party find it stale or plodding?

Kate

What even is a dungeon? Is it the use of resources, the lack of long-rests, the fact that it's indoors, something else? What defines what is and isn't "a dungeon"?

Shea Bishop

How do you handle the players taking rests (short or long) in the dungeon?

Peter Jorgensen

How do you Plan, design and Spring traps.

Ole Larsen

How do you best use 3d elements to add some additional options and challenges and does that even work at higher levels where flying becomes more common.