Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 Gnollbane Jan 14, 2015 20:24:05	Whenever players are in a dungeon, I sum up up the distances between different caverns/rooms if nothing interesting happens. For instance, they will say "Lets go back to the kennel room" and I'll say "Okay, you find your way back to the kennel room". For another example, if a player wants to interact with something in the same (monster-less) room, I just say that they go up and interact with it. Basically, I only use distance rules when the party is engaged in combat. Am I supposed to treat dungeons as combat encounters all the way through? If so, please explain. Thanks for being patient!
#2 AaronOfBarbaria Jan 14, 2015 20:49:46	When not in combat, you should be tracking movement at the travel pace rules, if at all.   If it is not going to take a considerable amount of time to get from point A to point B, there is no issue cause by glossing over it - but if it is hundreds of feet through the dungeon, or many miles over land, it may seem like the world is "empty" if there aren't occasional things which occur during travel. In the case of a dungeon, a long trip through it might include encountering  monsters or other adventurers also moving through the dungeon.   Characters can normally move at a rate of 300 feet per minute in a dungeon environment, and can choose to move an extra 100 feet per minute by accepting a penalty to their perception scores (making it more likely that they not notice a trap, or get surprised by monsters), or can slow their pace to 200 feet per minute and attempt to move steathily.
#3 Razintarr Jan 15, 2015 2:32:33	Last session with my players, I used a beefed up version of the Cragmaw cavern from the Starter Set adventure. We used miniatures and terrain pieces throughout. They were acting on initiative order all the way through and that worked great, because the dungeon is small and has a few traps that depend on the players locations. Also, the encounters with monsters ended up locking together when the resident goblins became aware of the players.    Then there were (bigger) dungeons were I made the players draw a map (or I drew one for them as they progressed). Usually in larger dungeons. Miniatures and terrain pieces would only be used when the players hit something interesting, like a room with monsters. This works well for your typical dungeon, where there are (large) gaps between the action.    In other dungeons (mostly in 4th) I didn't even use a map of the dungeon, just a set of interesting rooms. Traveling through the dungeon was narrated in broad terms "after a few corridors with only abandoned rooms, you come at a big locked metal door". The length of the corridors or the amount of empty rooms didn't matter in that style of dungeon. This had the effect that encounters would be confined to the rooms they were found in. This approach works best for "dead" dungeons, with undead, constructs, summoned creatures and traps, each waiting in their own rooms for the players to arrive.    So to answer your question: it depends on your dungeon. As a guideline, ask yourself if keeping the players on initiative order and taking actions serves a purpose, or if it's just boring. "I move up to the rest of the party, just like last round and the round before that" is something you want to avoid.
#4 iserith Jan 15, 2015 6:09:12	Gnollbane wrote:
#5 Imaculata Jan 15, 2015 6:27:52	Lately some of my players have been using a completed dungeon as a base of operations. Whenever they go back to a particular room, I simply skip to that point, and calculate how long it would take them on foot. There's no longer any monsters in the dungeon, so there's no need to drag things out.