10 Tips for Running Your First Dungeon Crawl

Tags Dungeon Master Tips author-riley-silverman Phandelver

Dungeons, it turns out, are an indelible and prevailing part of Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, it says it right there on the tin, doesn’t it? Delves into the titular dingy, typically underground labyrinths full of monsters, traps, and even sometimes loot remain a stalwart in the game. 

If you’re a relatively new Dungeon Master, you may have some experience and even some reverence for these lairs that you share a title with, but if you’ve never actually run a dungeon crawl, you might find them pretty intimidating.

Whether you’re running a dungeon as part of a longer adventure, such as Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk, or you’re using a campaign-spanning mega-dungeon such as the one found in Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage, here are 10 tips to help you run your dungeon-delving adventures.

  1. Play to the 5 Senses
  2. Give Everyone Opportunities to Shine
  3. Let Your Monsters Roam
  4. Know the Pieces of Your Puzzles
  5. Drain Character Resources
  6. Don’t Feel As Though Every Room Has to Be Special
  7. Read the Rooms Ahead of Time
  8. Keep Your Notes Handy
  9. Be Prepared With Your Traps
  10. Don’t Be in the Dark About Darkvision

10 Tips for Running a Dungeon Crawl

Artist: Lily AbdullinaA spectator leaps from the shadows.

1. Play to the 5 Senses

A common and valuable bit of advice for writers and storytellers is to remember all five senses. This is doubly important for DMs.

It can be easy to get into a habit of only describing what someone sees when they enter a room. Describing how a space tickles their other senses, though, can go a long way toward evoking the immersion of what your players’ characters are experiencing.

While you don’t per se want to seem like you’re trotting out your thesaurus, it’s wise to at least find strong words to describe something like the smells in a room. Acrid, pungent, or gamy, for example, invoke a stronger sense than bad. Similarly, a hushed conversation from a nearby room says more than quiet.

Search for lists that help you describe sounds, smells, tastes, and how something feels, and keep those notes handy for when your players enter a room.

2. Give Everyone Opportunities to Shine

A typical dungeon crawl is likely going to be devoid of many of the encounters that your adventurers might find in the larger campaign setting. For instance, while there is space for NPC interactions within a dungeon, players with more of a “face” role might find themselves feeling more in the backseat of a long dungeon crawl.

This doesn’t mean that every dungeon should have a tavern among its rooms or a gala happening in some mysterious ballroom. But a puzzle that requires a Performance check to solve, or a guard that can be persuaded to allow the adventurers to pass are definitely things that wouldn’t feel out of place in a dungeon. Similarly, religious or primordial symbols could require your clerics or druids to make some checks, or heavy equipment could require your fighter in order to lift it.

Every player getting chances to engage and participate can go a long way from preventing players from checking out or losing interest in the grind of moving from room to room.

3. Let Your Monsters Roam

Don’t feel like your monsters have to be glued to a specific location in the dungeon, even if you’re using a published adventure that tells you where the monsters are. Sometimes story elements require a monster to stay put, sure, but otherwise, some monsters should be free to roam around the dungeon at their leisure. This is particularly true if your adventurers raised a clatter in a nearby room.

Having monsters who may roam the space or having a table for possible random encounters that could occur inside the dungeon raises the threat level of the adventure. Characters might feel more pressure to move through a space if they know they’re also being pursued by a monstrosity. This can give a dungeon crawl higher stakes and even add an element of base-under-siege storytelling to your adventure. 

4. Know the Pieces of Your Puzzles

Look, puzzles are simultaneously some players’ favorite and least favorite parts of a dungeon crawl, and it’s important as the DM to make sure you know your table’s comfort level with them. I’ve seen puzzles breathe life into a dungeon crawl, but I’ve also seen them bring the game to a halt, where no one is having fun figuring them out or where players are frustrated by them. (Honestly, sometimes it’s me.)

I feel like puzzles can be one of the ultimate cases of “read the room” in a dungeon, and one of the best examples of a time when the rule of cool could be employed. The Dungeon Master’s Guide gets into this in the section on play style and is a good guide for thinking about what role a puzzle or any other game element plays in your game.

5. Drain Character Resources

Individual monsters and traps aside, one of the most interesting elements of a serious dungeon crawl is that it can quickly become a resource management game for the adventurers. Don’t go easy on them! Include encounters that tempt them to spend some of their spell slots or items without immediately giving them the option to replenish them. Part of the point of a long and grueling delve is that it is supposed to tire out and drain the adventurers so they don’t arrive on the other side of it all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

There are definitely dungeons massive enough for characters to need to sleep in, but a lot of dungeons will have been fully explored within the 24 hours that the Player’s Handbook advises it takes before a character can gain the benefit of another long rest, a rule that is frequently forgotten in my experience. And remember the above note about roaming monsters. If a situation does call for characters to take either a short or long rest, that doesn’t mean the monsters in the dungeon should or will wait patiently as they do so.

Running out of supplies, running out of ways to heal up the party, or running out of slots to cast spells to defend the party can do a lot to increase the dramatic tension of a dungeon and raise the adventure's stakes.

6. Don’t Feel As Though Every Room Has to Be Special

Artist: Wade AcuffGoblins play and eat at a banquet table.

It’s OK if there truly is nothing going on in some rooms of a dungeon. Maybe this really is a kitchen, maybe this really is the room where some respectful goblins know they’d better store their boots so the necromancer doesn’t chastise them for tracking mud all over the dungeon. When room after room has been an onslaught, it’s OK to give players a chance for their characters to take a breather or discuss info learned, plan strategies they’ve devised, or simply drink a potion of healing or two or six.

7. Read the Rooms Ahead of Time

If you’re using a published dungeon, familiarize yourself with the overall layout and challenges of the dungeon before you start running it. This way, you have a good sense of what threats and challenges await your adventurers, and you can foreshadow them.

8. Keep Your Notes Handy

I recommend keeping a short outline or a checklist of dungeon elements and rooms in your prep notes. There tend to be a lot of moving parts and things to activate within those dingy walls, and having a more guided list can help you keep track of things as you go.

9. Be Prepared With Your Traps

If you run a lot of dungeons or play with players who have crawled a lot of dungeons, you may run into folks who decide to check for traps multiple times in every room. This is often borne out of years of experiences in trap-filled dungeons, though sometimes it’s simply a new player who is scared that something bad will happen to their beloved character. 

You don’t per se want to encourage players to never check for traps because some characters are literally built to do that, with their fancy Sleight of Hand or Perception scores and feats like Observant. But at the same time, it can get pretty tedious and take some of the fun out of having traps. Here are a few thoughts on ways to mitigate this:

Make them specific. “Check for traps” isn’t magic, typically (unless they literally cast find traps). Make the player tell you where they check for traps and how they do it. If they want to do a more general sweep of the room, raise the DC of the skill check. 

Be aware of passive Perception and Investigation scores. Characters have a passive Perception and Investigation stat on their sheets that reflects the intuitive skills that they might have for picking up or detecting details without needing to roll for it. If, as a DM, you keep track of when a character’s passive Perception would detect something and declare it to players, you can cut down on their desire to roll to check because they’ll be more likely to trust your judgment with regards to their character’s natural abilities.

Set time caps. A skill check doesn’t have to be an instantaneous thing. You can rule that the process of checking for traps takes time and that the roll encompasses a certain amount of time and effort that can’t be easily replicated. 

Have trap trigger thresholds in your skill check DCs. It’s actually somewhat tricky to check for a trap without accidentally triggering it. If your skill check DC for an Intelligence (Investigation) check for looking for a trap is 15, and their check is fairly far below that, it sure would be a shame if that trap went off. Sorry about your fingers!

Consider raising the DC for subsequent checks. If a character keeps checking for traps and keeps not seeing any, you could conclude that they’re actually not spotting whatever it is that a dungeon trap designer did in order to cover their traps up. As a DM, you could rule that every unsuccessful attempt to find traps might make it that much harder to do it the next time. Players may be more conservative with their rolls if they know the DC might increase by 2 or so every time they fail one. 

Talk to Your players. Terrifying, I know, but sometimes it may be best to just have a chat with the table about traps and what their expectations and wishes are for them in the game. It could be that traps are a particular anxiety for some players and that’s why they’re checking for them so often. Or it could be that your players are fine with you using their passive Investigation and passive Perception scores unless they have something specific they want to check out.

10. Don’t Be in the Dark About Darkvision

A final piece of advice for your dungeon crawl is to be aware of how much can be seen in low light or total darkness with darkvision, and how far each of your players can see with it. Describe things in terms that bring darkvision into play. For example, how things might appear in shades of grey for characters with darkvision that other characters without it cannot see at all. Trust us, players won’t hesitate to tell you if they have darkvision, so it’s good to be prepared for what that actually means with regard to the challenges in your dungeon.

Explore for Yourself

Running a dungeon is a lesson in itself, and the more you do it the more you’ll find what works best for you. There are as many complications and nuances as there are rooms and dangers within a dungeon itself. So be patient—both with your players and with yourself—as you explore this specific type of D&D storytelling and find the things that work best and generate the most fun for you and your table.

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Riley Silverman (@rileyjsilverman) is a contributing writer to D&D Beyond, Nerdist, and SYFY Wire. She DMs the Theros-set Dice Ex Machina for the Saving Throw Show, and has been a player on the Wizards of the Coast-sponsored The Broken Pact. Riley also played as Braga in the official tabletop adaptation of the Rat Queens comic for HyperRPG, and currently plays as The Doctor on the Doctor Who RPG podcast The Game of Rassilon. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

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