Dungeon crawls are a staple of roleplaying. For this article, let’s expand the definition of dungeon beyond traditional tombs and caves. Crashed spaceships, inner-city sewers, and post-apocalyptic abandoned malls are all really variations on the dungeon. In a way, any remote location where bad things live can be a kind of dungeon. If you GM, odds are your PC’s will end up in some stinkhole sooner or later.
The drawback to dungeons (and remote wilderness areas) is that they may not provide sufficient roleplaying opportunities. In a village, city, sailing ship, or starship there are plenty of people to talk to. But not out in the bush. While there is no simple formula for running a successful session, providing varied encounters is generally sound practice. Varied encounters, including roleplaying opportunities, are more likely to hit the enjoyment modes of most players.
For myself, designing dungeons with more roleplaying encounters can be a challenge. So I spent some time listing some ways to get players talking to folks (and other things) in the dungeon. Here’s what I came up with:
Intelligent Opponents
While a bughunt often can be fun, room after room of unintelligent monsters or aliens can get old. Include opponents who can speak common or the language of the party. Also, consider having them not fight to the death. If they surrender or can be captured, then the party can interrogate or bribe them. This is a great way to get information to your party and keep the session moving towards a goal.
Prisoners
If your bad guys are truly bad, they may have captured some locals to serves as slaves, hostages, or even lunch. After rescuing them, they can be a great source of information or direction for the party. Also, prisoners are a classic trick for introducing new party members after a death or when adding a new player.
Intelligent Objects
Think talking statues, swords, books, computer interfaces. All of these provide chances for roleplaying, puzzles or riddles (if you use them).
Spirits
These folks might be bored, lonely, or angry that their peace has been violated. Also, they may hold ancient knowledge. Unless you think your party is liable to attack them, you might not even need to generate any statistics for them. If they do decide to attack and you don’t have stats handy, just say: “Are you sure you want to go up against this?” Use a menacing voice, maybe chuckle evilly. Might save you some effort.
Uplifted Monsters
David Brin wrote a series of science fiction novels in which dolphins and chimps had their intelligence raised. They were “uplifted.” Imagine if a traditionally non-sentient monster were suddenly able to speak to the party. Would they continue to try to kill it? Would they be curious as to what magic was used to uplift the monster’s brain? Is the monster truly happy in their new state, or have they been shunned by the rest of the pack? These kind of questions can lead to great roleplaying opportunities, and perhaps even serve as adventure seeds.
These are just some of the possibilities for providing more roleplaying in the dungeon. Why don’t you add your ideas to the list? Tell us below.
Excellent ideas. Getting some roleplaying into the traditional dungeon crawl is difficult but really important. I’ve been part of more than one campaign that died on the vine because we spent more time crawling through tunnels than actually roleplaying our characters.
Just had a session a little while ago that ground the adventure to a halt because a dungeon crawl popped up. Our group was pretty close to the end, but as we were escaping from a temple, we found a secret passage with a couple monsters and traps. I really wanted to move the plot along, and I really wish we hadn’t had to waste time with that.
Hopefully this column gave you some ideas or helped you figure out some of your own. I find published adventures are often really lacking in RP opportunities, more like lists of monsters, traps, and treasure.
A good game needs more.
Good list. I’m definitely going to try the spirits idea soon. One other thing I do as often as I can get away with is to send in an NPC with the party as a guide, ally, patron, etc. For example, on one dungeon crawl the party was accompanied by a sorcerer who had previously lost an adventuring partner there; eventually they discovered that he had betrayed his partner to escape some minotaurs with his own life, but was now recovering her gear to make amends to her family. Strangely, the guy ended up becoming one of the party’s best friends…
If your goal is to mess with the standard D&D mindset of “We are inherently morally superior, kill and rob everything” one of my favorite tactics is this:
If you have a lawful good paladin or cleric have the goblins/orcs/whatever surrender and beg for mercy. Most lawful good deities frown on the murdering of surrendered foes, and it might technically fall to the paladin to make sure the goblins get a fair trial. Which leads to a whole other side quest. Also have the, now captured, goblins express interest in converting to the cleric’s faith. Whether or not this is a ruse or actually sincere is up to the GM.
However your should only run this if you have players that would find this sort of moral questioning fun.
Dealing with enemies who surrender is a GREAT way to add rp-ing to encounters. Plus it helps stretch out an encounter. This is generally a good thing. You are getting more play time out of your prep, rather than just hack and kill and move on to the next room.
In that spirit, may I suggest that you make sure at least one of your humanoid enemies can speak at least some common? This really helps with negotiations.
I like the basics of the article. But as I like to think: Roleplaying is basically going through a series of interesting choices, as done from the mindset of your character.
The reason why talking characters add choices, in the above examples, is that they often pose moral and ethical questions, questions that characters *need* to answer to progress (Ignoring the question posed can also be a way of roleplaying, when made conciously though).
But now I am wondering, are there ways to encourage roleplaying in dungeons without adding things to talk to?
Or maybe posed differently:
Could there be things on a more strategic level that could force roleplay, preferably between players?
A long term BBEG in my campaign has been ‘uplifting’ various magical and non-magical creatures for years and is only barely on the scope for the most interested party. They have just encountered a micro-race of ‘scorpion-men’ in a place that should be plagued by dog sized scorpions. The race are Small and seriously low Int, but deadly. Their problem is they have no hands to feed themselves and the pincers are too small.
A dungeoncrawl turned into a Peace Corps operation!
These are low Int Halflings with a poisonous tail and grapple only claws.