This Streamlined D&D Dungeon Concept Takes the Hassle Out of Adventuring

Dungeons & Dragons taps into every possible storytelling idea in fantasy, including fairies and steampunk, but any campaign or one-shot is bound to stick to the game’s well-established roots: dungeon crawling and battling monsters. No matter the storyline or setting, an adventure in D&D is bound to send the party to a few dungeon complexes, so it’s up to the DM to run a fun dungeon crawl with lots of monsters, treasure, traps, and puzzles. Dungeons vary widely in their features, layout, and lore, and many DMs and players have preferences for each encounter’s specific tone, pace, and duration.

Fans of old-school dungeons may enjoy navigating massive dungeon complexes loaded with traps and unfriendly critters, while newer players may prefer modest, to-the-point dungeons that can be explored without taking too much time. The latter is why the D&D community has developed the five-room dungeon rule, which is a nifty guideline for DMs to consider when designing new dungeons or modifying the existing dungeons in an official adventure book. There are compelling reasons to try this method, though it won’t work well for every group. Discretion on the DM’s part is advised when considering the five-room formula, as shown here.

How a Five-Room Dungeon is Designed For a D&D Session

The Rooms Represent Different Phases of a Story Arc

The Five Phases of a Short Dungeon:

• Initial obstacle (guardian monster, finding the dungeon)
• Mental challenge (puzzles and traps)
• Setback (NPC betrayal, more traps, environmental hazards)
• Climax (boss fight, talking down the dungeon owner)
• Payoff (quest story completed, treasure)

DMs will have different opinions on how practical or desirable the five-room dungeon formula is, but regardless of how it’s implemented, this concept is a concise, intuitive way to tell an entire story in one short dungeon crawl. Aside from the obvious angle of making dungeons short and efficient to explore, the five-room dungeon is meant to create a well-paced and cohesive story within a dungeon’s confines.

Such a story will likely tie into one particular phase of a campaign or may be the basis for a one-shot. This is because each of the dungeon’s five rooms has story hooks and features that represent different phases of a traditional story structure. A five-room dungeon has rooms for an initial challenge, a roleplay/puzzle challenge, a trick/setback, a climactic battle, and the resolution/reward. These can be plot-heavy rooms or just have a mechanical function, as the DM prefers.

As some online guides state, the first room of a five-room dungeon must present a serious obstacle to the rest of the dungeon and provide a clear reason why bandits and other parties haven’t already picked that dungeon clean of treasure. This can take a few different forms, with the most obvious and exciting example being a guardian entity that fights off casual tomb robbers and other parties.

This might be a stone golem with a sword, for example, bound by duty to guard the dungeon’s rooms for all time. Or, the initial obstacle may be the challenge of finding the dungeon at all. The dungeon’s owner or creator may use illusions or the natural landscape to hide their dungeon, challenging the players to actually find it. This may call for some creative thinking from the perfect ranger build or a good rogue build, classes that are good at tracking things down.

The dungeon’s second room should present a tough puzzle or roleplay challenge to the players to get them thinking. This is an especially good idea if the first room had a guardian to fight, so a puzzle in room two provides some variety. This also allows different classes and players to shine, such as a rogue with the Dungeon Delver feat or a bard who is ready to argue with or swindle a hostile denizen of the dungeon in this room. Above all, players naturally expect dungeons to have traps and puzzles, so room two checks off that box.

Room three in the five-room dungeon should throw a major setback at the party since any dungeon crawl needs brutal plot twists or problems to boost the tension and create a sense of danger and stakes. This makes a dungeon crawl more than a string of monster fights or just a series of cool puzzles to solve. In particular, if room two had a puzzle rather than a trap, then room three is the one for a trap, and that trap should be dire and tough to solve or escape. Room three’s setback can also be roleplay-oriented, such as rescued prisoners suddenly going berserk or a friendly NPC turning traitor. NPCs are an important part of any inhabited dungeon, and they can help or hinder the party a great deal.

When the party reaches the dungeon’s fourth room, it’s time for the climax of this short dungeon crawl, similar to the final fight in a movie. In plenty of cases, this really will be a fight, such as going up against the monster who owns this dungeon, with a beholder being a great example. Or, the dungeon boss is a non-combatant NPC who has their minion(s) do the fighting for them. It’s also possible that if the DM or players intend to, the final encounter can be something aside from traditional combat, such as a heated debate, a bargain, or anything else. The important part is that the dungeon owner is dealt with and neutralized one way or another, and once that’s done, the dungeon is secured.

The fifth and final room in this dungeon is the payoff for exploring this little dungeon complex, which is when the DM richly rewards the players for a job well done. The obvious payoff may include shiny treasure that can be sold at local shops and cool magic items that suit the player characters, but there may be more. The payoff may also include finding a story-heavy person or item that advances the overall plot or a personal arc.

What Are the Benefits of Using the Five-Room Dungeon Formula?

These Dungeons Are Quick, Efficient, Easy to Design, and Can Appear Anywhere

One of the biggest and most obvious upsides to using the five-room dungeon formula is that such dungeons don’t take too much time to explore and complete. Some groups may enjoy vast, old-school dungeons that take many hours to complete, but other groups may not have the time or patience for that, so an alternative is needed. A group may prefer these lean, to-the-point dungeons if they enjoy the main plot of their campaign and don’t want to disrupt the pacing with epic, multi-hour dungeon crawls, a preference that may flatter the DM and their storytelling efforts.

Some campaigns are more story-oriented than others, especially if the DM wishes to make the story the #1 priority, so five-room dungeons are a fine compromise between a well-paced story and the fun gameplay mechanics of delving into dungeon complexes. The party may also prefer this if their sessions are on the short side, such as 2-3 hours rather than 4-5. Some groups may not have the free time for long sessions, so everything they do must be condensed somewhat, from monster fights to conversations with NPCs to dungeon crawls.

Another reason to use the five-dungeon formula is that five-room dungeons don’t require as much time, effort, or ideas for the DM to design and run. Even when a DM uses a large dungeon complex from an existing, official adventure book, it still takes serious time and energy for the DM to study the entire dungeon and figure out how to run it. Major examples include Tomb of Annihilation and Dungeon of the Mad Mage, both of which allude to dungeons in their titles.

Such dungeons shouldn’t be compressed into just five rooms, of course, but other dungeons in other adventures can be compressed like that to save the DM some trouble. In other cases, a DM might even take out an adventure’s original dungeon and replace it with a five-room dungeon of their own design. This works best for dungeons that aren’t the entire point of an adventure.

Other benefits to the five-room dungeon formula include the fact that these dungeons can be easily modified, put anywhere in a canon or homebrew campaign setting, and they can have a few rooms added or removed as needed. The default size of such dungeons may be five, but it’s not absolutely critical that the number of rooms be five. The general point of these dungeons is retained even if a dungeon is shrunk to a modest three rooms or expanded to seven or eight, giving the DM more flexibility with this formula. It’s convenient to use the default blueprint with those five rooms, but that’s not a must by any means.

Since a five-room dungeon is small and focused on a single narrative, such dungeons are easy to place anywhere in a campaign setting and may appear at any phase of an ongoing campaign. The monsters and obstacles inside can be adjusted to suit the party’s level, such as kobolds or goblins for low-level parties to fight or tough monsters like iron golems and death knights for high-level parties to contend with in these small dungeons.

What Are the Downsides of the Five-Room Formula?

Players Miss Out on the Classic Dungeon Experience and May Feel a Little Railroaded

One potential problem is that a five-room dungeon simply feels too limiting in the eyes of players who enjoy and are used to larger, more traditional dungeons. Casual players want to dip in, have fun, and get out, while experienced and committed players want to immerse themselves much more deeply in the game world, and five-room dungeons won’t cut it. As some players might put it, such a lean and to-the-point dungeon may ruin the spirit of the game and limit a rogue’s ability to show off their Dungeon Delver feat.

Players may also feel underwhelmed by these mini-dungeons, because even if the traps and monsters are formidable, there aren’t very many of them, so the players’ resources aren’t tested to a serious extent. In fact, some gameplay features are evidently designed with marathon dungeons in mind, such as spell slot conservation, and five-room dungeons make that too easy.

The other issue is that a five-room dungeon may feel like borderline railroading since the five rooms work best in their clearly established order, and there’s no room for the party to wander off and explore freely. The DM can take the edge off this issue somewhat by adding a few extra rooms or presenting the original five rooms in a different order, but the fact remains that the players have to focus on the dungeon’s core chain of events, and some players may not like that.

The good news is that any sufficiently skilled and experienced DM can mitigate these two downsides by adding enough content to give veteran players the freedom and tests of endurance that they want, while also keeping things lean and streamlined for players who don’t want to spend five hours slogging through a single dungeon. The DM can discuss this with players who have differing preferences, and then find a suitable middle ground with the five-room dungeon formula.