This requires an introduction. Two introductions. One’s going to date this Feature a bit, but it’s necessary. If you ain’t reading this around the turning of the calendar from 2025 to 2026, disregard the disregardable parts.

The December Disasters

December didn’t go according to plan at all. If you’ve been reading my updates, you know I had to change my release schedule, I got laid up with the flu, and then I lopped off a finger and put myself in the emergency room for Christmas. Don’t worry, it was only part of a finger. A small part. I’ve got to be careful joking about injury and illness. Last time I cracked a joke, I got a bunch of e-mails wishing me a speedy recovery from my stroke.

I didn’t have a stroke.

Practically speaking, I’ve got to change plans. I can’t hold a pen, I can barely use a mouse, and I can only type slowly, clumsily, and painfully. I desperately have to catch up so I’m on schedule on January the first. But you pay me for content, not complaints, so the show must go on. Content’s going to be a little shorter, right now, and a little more direct. It might also have more typos. Forgive me. I’m doing my best.

Fortunately, I’ve come up with a plan. Which brings me to the second introduction.

Building a Restful Dungeon In Several Painful Steps

Some time ago, I did this long-ass thing about the adventuring day. It was a good discussion, but it led to a rambling mess of a plan. I was gonna use it as the lead-in to a discussion about adventure design, but I was talking to both my True Scenario Designery students and my more casual readers who just want to homebrew okay adventures for their friends, and I didn’t plan it very well, and it led to a lot of rambling and random promises and shit like that. I intended to close the loop with a long essay about building dungeons around daily rests. That ain’t gonna work. Especially with the broken wing I described above.

So, we’re gonna do a little project. We’re gonna design and map the dungeon I was planning to merely talk about. Maybe we’ll even do the encounter planning. Who knows. It’ll be a joint venture between my casual Mere Adventure Builders and my True Scenario Designers since it’ll touch on a lot of concepts I was going to get around to introducing in that series anyway. In fact, this ain’t really gonna be about resting and D&D mechanics. Instead, it’ll be about mapping a dungeon like a game designer. It’ll be about planning a play experience and working within the system you’re running and allowing the players space to explore and all that other crap I’ve been talking about.

Sound good?

This ain’t gonna be a quick thing though. It ain’t gonna be one-and-done. This project will probably last us until the New Year starts to give way to spring, and I’ll intersperse it with my other content, where I was planning to do True Scenario Designery shit already.

But, as I said, I’ve been conceptually all over the place. There are a bunch of ideas I need to pull together from several different places, and a few basic principles that need explaining. I don’t want to get too bogged down in conceptual crap for too long, though. I really do want to get to practical building. Which means this project’s a perfect fit for my needs right now. As I explained in the first introduction, I need to catch up fast, and I’m nursing an injury.

So, I’m gonna bang out a couple of short essays to get us all on the same conceptual page, and then we’ll use those essays to map an actual, factual dungeon.

Let’s Build a Pretty Good Dungeon

Let’s do a project!

As explained in the Long, Rambling Introduction™ double feature, I want to bring a bunch of the crap I’ve been yammering about for months together to build a dungeon adventure. Now, this ain’t going to be a work of True Scenario Designery art, but nor will it be a Quick and Dirty Dungeon, like I’ve already taught you how to make. I want to use basic game design principles and an understanding of a game’s mechanical systems to build a Pretty Good Dungeon. One that provides the players with a really solid fantasy adventure role-playing gameplay experience.

I know some of you think the phrase game design principles is really loaded and nothing I’ve said since has gotten you to check your mental baggage at the gate. I ain’t wasting any more time arguing what game design principles aren’t. You guys are lost causes, and that’s your loss.

For the rest of you, in this project, I’m gonna focus on a few core ideas that I’ve already mostly kind of vaguely discussed and which I’m now going to neatly and carefully summarize. That’s what we’re going to call game design principles.

The Path of Least Resistance Must Lead to the Best Gameplay Experience

In the end, a roleplaying game adventure is just a sequence of events and challenges. As the players explore a dungeon, for example, they’ll visit rooms, discover things, and encounter encounters. The order in which the players experience the game’s events has a drastic impact on the gameplay experience. If things happen in good order, the players are empowered to overcome challenges and make meaningful choices.

I explained all that shit in Order Matters: Guided Nonlinearity and Closed Openness.

More importantly, though, if things happen in bad order, the players might be disempowered or challenged in unfair ways, or they might even be screwed.

I discussed what it means to be screwed in The Anatomy of a Screwjob.

What I didn’t cover is that order also matters for reasons of pacing and narrative. Pacing is a huge part of the play experience. So is narrative structure. Gameplay experiences feel best when tension bounces between high and low but generally rises over time. Narrative experiences feel best when the players properly understand the context in which events happen and the motivations of the characters, and when conflicts are properly introduced, built, and resolved.

I also didn’t cover yet that changing the order of things is one of the ways smart adventure designers regulate non-mechanical difficulty. See, stats and game balance change the mechanical odds, but player skill is about more than just playing the mechanical odds, and for non-mechanical challenges like puzzles and obstacles, player skill is all you’ve got.

It’s easier for players to figure out how to overcome an obstacle if they see the obstacle before they find a tool useful for overcoming it. That’s how brains are wired. That doesn’t mean you always have to show the lock first, as the kids say. Instead, it means that you can change the difficulty by choosing to show either the lock first or the key first.

Players Can’t Choose to Ruin the Experience

If the players’ choices can’t change the game’s outcome, they’re not playing a roleplaying game. If the players can’t decide which way to go first, they ain’t really exploring. Agency matters, right?

There are two parts to this. One we care about and one we don’t. The part we don’t care about when we’re making adventures is the whole open-ended, creative experience thing. In a roleplaying game, the players are always free to engage with the world in whatever sensible way they can imagine. There’s a mechanic that ensures that. It’s called the Game Master. The part we do care about is giving players freedom to choose how to approach the adventure, even when they’re not coming up with cunning plans and crazy capers. In encounter design, that means building deliberately telegraphed possibilities into different encounters and clearly communicating goals and shit like that, but we’re not sweating that part so much either.

The part we really have to worry about is giving the players freedom to explore the space on their own initiative. After all, a dungeon delve is all about exploring a space. Exploration’s the primary engagement in a dungeon adventure, and thus it’s the primary way players express their agency.

So, while the path of least resistance must lead to the best gameplay experience, players must be allowed to deviate from the path of least resistance, and doing so absolutely cannot lead to a substantially worse experience. If the players go left instead of right, they might make a challenge a little harder, but they can’t make it a frustratingly unplayable screwjob.

The System Must Be Respected

Every roleplaying game system is built to provide a specific kind of experience. Every system’s built around some assumptions about how people want to play it. This is especially true of systems like Dungeons & Dragons that take game design and the core experience seriously and thus ensure a reasonably good quality experience no matter the players’ and the Game Masters’ levels of skill and experience.

In The Lost Adventuring Day (Part I): Merely Building an Adventure Day, I talked about one of the biggest core assumptions in the current edition of one of the world’s roleplaying games. No dangerous encounter, be it a fight or a trap or a hazard, is meant to pose a substantial challenge in and of itself. Instead, the game system primarily challenges players to manage their resources well enough to get through several encounters without rest, and the characters have enough resources to get through four to six encounters before resting should be required.

That assumption ain’t an unbreakable law or straightjacket. As I already discussed, you can have days with just one encounter or build adventures with twenty encounters between the players and their goals. If you want such a game to feel like a fair and proper challenge, though, you’ve got to account for your deviation from the game’s assumptions. For adventures with too few encounters, you need to ramp up the difficulty or find other sources of challenge. For adventures with too many encounters, you’ve got to give the characters opportunities to recover their resources or else give them more resources to work with.

Reclaim the Place: A Pretty Good Dungeon Adventure

Now that I’ve firmly established the rules of good game design I plan to demonstrate in this project, let me lay out some kind of premise for the actual dungeon we’ll eventually map. My intent, originally, was to steal the End the Goblins premise from my True Scenario Designery course, but it ain’t a great fit here without adjustment. The general shape is good, but End the Goblins is a little too complicated.

You see, I was trying to illustrate some concepts about dynamic adventure design, Momentum, and Inertia for my True Scenario Designery students when I came up with End the Goblins, so the adventure involved this restocking dungeon with the encounters changing based on the players’ actions. For this project, we need something a little more static so we can focus on the ideas I laid out above without slathering on a lot of noisy complexity.

The actual details don’t matter much yet — we’ll figure them out when they do — but the basic idea is that there’s this place the quest giving faction wants to reclaim. Maybe it’s an old temple that fell into ruin, and the church wants to restore it. Whatever.

Unfortunately, the place’s underchambers or cellars or catacombs or whatever are infested with monsters and need to be cleared. There are, in fact, three distinct infestations in three different wings of the underwhere and the players must decisively clear all three to make it safe for the faction to reclaim the place. That requires the players to reach three specific locations in the underwhere and therein deal with a specific source of infestation.

In the past, I’ve created confusion by spelling out design premises like this. Y’all seem to have trouble understanding the difference between an adventure’s design — its background simulation — and the goal as it’s presented to the players. The players won’t be explicitly told there are three infestations and three wings, and that an infestation won’t be considered cleared until a specific task is complete. They’ll be able to put a lot of that shit together through play, of course. They’ll figure out that freeing the restless spirit will keep the undead from coming back and that collapsing the tunnel to the Underdark will stop new aberrations from getting in. Hopefully. If they don’t, they can expect a nasty letter from their employers and a demand for a partial refund. Call it an element of challenge.

The point is, the players don’t have to know how the whole adventure works and how it’s designed. They only have to know enough to start and figure out enough to win.

So, that’s it. That’s the project, that’s the principles, that’s the premise. That’s how we’re going to build Reclaim the Place as a Pretty Good Dungeon.

Before we start mapping, though, I’ve got three short discussions to bang out with one-and-a-half hands. Come back soon, and we’ll talk about critical paths. After that, we’ll discuss how players approach explorable spaces. Then we’ll talk about checkpointing and shortcutting. Once we hit those three topics, we can start the blockout process, which is the first step in actually mapping an adventure.

Hopefully, by the time we get to that, I’ll be able to draw diagrams again.