Tips To Run A Dungeon Crawl In DND

Summary

• Encourage map-making for immersion and player engagement.
• Establish clear objectives to avoid aimless wandering.
• Implement time limits or clear exit points to keep momentum up.

Dungeon crawls are a staple of any great Dungeons & Dragons campaign. If you’ve never heard the term before, a dungeon crawl involves your party traversing an expansive dungeon, or series of interconnected rooms and settings, defeating enemies and looting treasure everywhere you go.

However, for DMs who have never run a dungeon crawl before, there are some pitfalls you should try to avoid. It’s easy for the session to get tedious. That’s why we’ve created this list which has a handful of tips and tricks for DMs so that you can run the most successful dungeon crawl for your campaign.

10

Encourage Making Maps

Everyone Can Be A Cartographer

While it’s always possible for DMs to lay out a map in front of their players, using fog of war mechanics to hide various rooms from them, it’s also not a bad idea to encourage players to make their own maps as the dungeon crawl begins! This does a couple of things for your table.

First, it engages players and forces them to understand the dungeon layout, allowing you to make more intricate puzzles and traps. Second, it also allows theater of the mind to take over, which is always better for immersion anyway. Just hand out paper ahead of time in case players show up empty-handed.

9

Make The Objective Clear

What’s The Point Of All This?

Some tables may enjoy just looting through room after room, with no overreaching goal in sight. But, for the most part, it’s better to make it clear to your players what the primary objective is of the dungeon. Otherwise, dungeon crawls can feel low-stakes, or meandering.

For example, an easy objective for the players could be ‘finding an escape.’ Getting trapped in a dungeon forever makes for clear stakes, and a clear goal. If this is explained to players, the overall dungeon crawl will feel a lot more exciting.

8

Have A Clear Exit Point

Which Way Out?

While dungeon crawls can be an epic and expansive quest for your players to undertake, nobody wants to spend an entire campaign stuck in one. That’s why it’s important to make sure you have a clear exit point at which you can signal to the players that the dungeon is complete.

Sure, they might not have found every last piece of treasure, but they’ve collected a lot of loot, and completed the primary quest at the center of the dungeon. Give your players a clear out, so that they know it’s time to leave and continue on their grander journey.

7

Room Variety

Shake Things Up

Just because a dungeon is discovered in an urban sewer, or is part of a gothic castle, doesn’t mean you can’t have variety within the dungeon itself. While you’ll want the central motif of the dungeon to be clear, don’t be afraid to mix it up every now and again to keep things fresh.

If players are traipsing through similar rooms over and over again, the session can start to feel a little bit stale. Play with size, scale, biomes, and more to keep things interesting. Even having exterior sections of the dungeon can make for some great variety.

6

Different Objectives

It’s Not All About Combat

While fighting monsters and looting their corpses is always going to be a staple of any dungeon crawl, don’t be afraid to also add non-combat objectives to dungeons, or even entire sections that are just about puzzle-solving or exploration.

If players are going from room to room, fighting various enemies over and over again, the dungeon can feel repetitive. Keep on your toes, and make sure to improvise if your players happen to be stumbling into similar rooms. Change up the layout on the fly if you can to keep things feeling fresh.

5

Keep Things Moving

Move It Along, People

Everybody is familiar with the classic overthinker player archetype, who wants to examine every single object in a given room. While it’s great to have players engaged in discovering every hidden nook and cranny in the dungeon, you also want to make sure the pace of the dungeon doesn’t slow to a crawl, so to speak.

If players have discovered everything there is to find in a given room, make that clear to them. Don’t waste time being mysterious or avoidant. Explain to them that the room seems to have been cleared out, and they can move on.

4

Choose Enemies Carefully

Nobody Wants To Feel Stuck Out Of Place

There’s a sort of classic version of a bad dungeon crawl in which players enter a room and find a beholder, and then enter another room and find a vampire. Why would these two creatures ever inhabit the same space? To keep dungeons feeling specific and narratively coherent, choose your enemy types carefully.

The 2025 Monster Manual has creatures broken down by habitat, including urban environments like dungeons. Try to keep monster types consistent with one another so that the dungeon doesn’t just feel like a larger version of a random encounter table.

3

Impose Time Limits

Tick, Tock

While this next tip should probably be saved as a last resort, it’s important to have a failsafe if you feel the dungeon crawl has overstayed its welcome. Say you’ve planned for the dungeon to take about two sessions, but it’s creeping over into three or four. This is the perfect time to implement a time limit.

This can take a lot of different forms. As one example, you could explain to your party that the dungeon has mysteriously started flooding, meaning if they don’t leave soon, they’ll drown. This makes for an exciting climax and helps move the party along.

2

Leave Signposts

Everybody’s Got To Ask For Directions

While exploration and untangling the knot of a dungeon is an exciting and rewarding experience for players, you also don’t want them to get so hopelessly lost that they just start opening doors at random. If you’re trying to lead players to a specific location in the dungeon, consider creating hints and clues, or signposts for them to follow.

For example, if you’re trying to lead your players to a giant ooze-like boss at the center of the dungeon, place splotches of ooze in front of certain doors for players to follow and pick up on. This creates a rewarding puzzle for players to solve while also making sure they don’t get lost.

1

Provide Meaningful Rewards

You’ve Earned It

The worst issue that can plague any dungeon crawl is not having meaningful rewards for players peppered throughout the space. If players aren’t getting gold, magic items, or any kind of tangible reward for making progress, the dungeon starts to feel meaningless.

Make sure you’ve either got a random treasure table prepared for the crawl, or have specifically placed treasures all around the space for players to find. Make sure to grant a large reward or a treasure hoard at the end of the dungeon too for a sense of completion.