Empty rooms everywhere and not a thing to do

[clownboss]

D'yer ever feel a lil' bit daunted when you gotta come up with a dungeon/room/monsters layout and the rules explicitly say that monsters will inhabit rooms only 33% of the time? And even then the remaining 66% would only have a 1-in-6 chance of there having treasures. The rest of the rooms are just..... empty. Nothing but rock walls and doors.

Now considering the tales of zany things that Gronan said he had encountered and some of the modules of the time(Wee Wariors' Dwarven Glory really loved tackling this), I get the impression these rooms are not meant to be barren, "nothing-but-walls-and-doors" affair but rather that every single room has to have at least something interesting. It can be as little as a dining table or a bedroom, but it seems like every story I hear from the past is that every room had some really interesting diversion in it. Some unusual piece of furniture, or a gadget, or a machine, or books of records, or a pile of useless sawdust, or a zoo, or casual non-threatening characters you can chat with. I'm just wondering if I really need to strike my creative juices for this sort of thing because it seems hard to think of incidental, inconsequential furnishings on the fly and use them to furnish so many darn rooms to pad the time before fighting monsters. It feels like there should have maybe been a supplement for this to ease the labour of thinking, but maybe people back then were much more eager to be creative than me, so I don't know. I try to have at least something interesting in most of them, even if it's a tiny thing. Maybe like a former prison cell with skeleton remains hanging.

How do you handle the problem of so many rooms that are seemingly empty? How much of your rooms are truly empty?

[asaki]

When I ran the Tower of Zenopus, a lot of empty rooms ended up having wandering monsters in them.
The ones that didn't, the player would do a quick bit of searching before giving up and checking the next room.

[rredmond]

And so moved!

Sometimes I force a wandering monster in the rooms if the players are antsy. Other times I allow them to gloss it over. But I try to make it an interesting part of the environment, give them more clues about the dungeon (or whatever) they are in, as much as possible.

[talysman]

Yeah, I've long said that "empty" rooms shouldn't be empty. And technically, so has Underworld & Wilderness Adventures. The rules for dungeon stocking don't use the word "empty" at all. It says "uninhabited". After placing special rooms with unusual treasures and guardians, 1 in 3 of the remaining rooms will be occupied, and 1 in 6 of the unoccupied rooms will have a treasure. It doesn't say anything about decorations, furniture, or miscellaneous non-treasure items. Nor, as already mentioned, does it say a wandering monster might not enter the room while the party is there, or just happen to be there already.

I figure at the very least most rooms should have containers or other searchable contents just so that players won't know which rooms are "empty", which contain hidden treasure, and which have a monster waiting in ambush. You need to encourage players to make decisions about how long to spend in each room.

[rredmond]

Where did the "1/3 monsters, 1/3 traps, 1/3 empty rooms" rule come from? Probably not a real rule, likely a house rule, but I've heard it tons of times. Is it a warping of the rule you are talking about talysman?

[talysman]

Dec 10, 2020 14:20:25 GMT -6 rredmond said:

Where did the "1/3 monsters, 1/3 traps, 1/3 empty rooms" rule come from? Probably not a real rule, likely a house rule, but I've heard it tons of times. Is it a warping of the rule you are talking about talysman?

Off the top of my head, I don't know. Not sure if I've ever seen that, except maybe in a blog. But I do vaguely recall that the proportions change in the instructions for the geomorph sets and in the AD&D DMG, and various other editions like B/X or BECMI may also have different rules. It's possible that every official dungeon stocking suggestion is different from all the others.

The rule I'm referring to, for the record, is on pages 6-7 of U&WA.

[scottyg]

Yes, Uninhabited is more accurate. And you also have to remember that mapping was considered part of the challenge. Look at the dungeon geomorphs sets to get an idea of what those rules anticipated the PCs would be exploring. There's very little unused space on each sheet of graph paper and most of the rooms were there to add to the maze factor. If you're using a different map style then a different ratio of inhabited rooms might be more appropriate.

[thecoldironkid]

my latest abandoned project was a dungeon where every room would have a [randomly determined] POTENTIAL MONSTER, POTENTIAL TRAP, POTENTIAL TREASURE, etc. that is, each room had an assigned monster, trap, special, and treasure, but only ONE OR SOME of those elements would actually appear [as determined by the dice]. the confluence of these elements suggested what the room actually was.

e.g: potential monster = BALROG; potential treasure = CANDELABRA IN THE SHAPE OF TORTURED SOULS --> the room is a BANQUET FOR THE DEAD, whether or not the balrog or candelabra actually are present. (in practice, i chose monsters and their locations based on scenarios i had in mind that i thought were cool, then brainstormed ideas for alternate encounters that could take place in such a space. by alternate encounters, i mean: monsters OR traps OR specials ((and then appropriate treasures were selected, because a treasure can appear alongside any type of encounter)) )

[Zenopus]

Take a look at Gygax's 1st level of Castle Greyhawk:
odd74.proboards.com/thread/13166/notes-greyhawk-dungeon-level-design

18 numbered encounters on a sheet filled with rooms to the edge in every direction. Some numbers are repeated in clustered areas, although it is unclear whether the number indicated is total for the area, or the total in each numbered room of the area.

Part of the challenge is just finding where the monsters with treasure are hiding out.

Empty rooms may have stuck doors, secret doors and/or traps. Dealing with these takes time that increases the chances of encountering wandering monsters, which can happen in empty rooms as likely as in corridors.

[delta]

Dec 10, 2020 20:08:13 GMT -6 Piper said:

I have to admit, in all my decades of gaming? I don't recall* ever seeing a result of empty room interpreted as completely bare (just walls, floor, door).
ETA: don't get me wrong, I've used completely bare rooms for effect (i.e. scare the beans out of players) but not as an interpretation of that rule).

Have any of you actually encountered this interpretation?

I might be a little OCD, but when I read "empty room" in the text, I assume it means "empty room".

Plus the example of Gygax's Greyhawk level 1, where most of the rooms don't even key entries (pretty emblematic of those early dungeon designs)... was he improvising random dungeon dressing in all of these locations? Seems unlikely to me... I suppose we could ask someone that played in the last few years he was with us whether those places, which we now know were unkeyed, all had furnishings or not (although even that wouldn't be ironclad for the starting days).

[talysman]

Dec 10, 2020 20:08:13 GMT -6 Piper said:

I have to admit, in all my decades of gaming? I don't recall* ever seeing a result of empty room interpreted as completely bare (just walls, floor, door).
ETA: don't get me wrong, I've used completely bare rooms for effect (i.e. scare the beans out of players) but not as an interpretation of that rule).

Have any of you actually encountered this interpretation?

Yes, in high school. Or maybe a year or two after graduation? I was usually the GM, but this time, one of my other friends GMed. And I think it was technically Rolemaster, not D&D. But yeah, the one night he GMed, we explored a couple rooms and did not find a single monster, treasure, trap, piece of furniture, or even junk. Most of the rooms we went through were empty, but a couple had minor features like a crack in a wall or a bump in the floor that we wasted some time on. But we found nothing, and nothing happened that play session. It became a legend among my friends. "The adventure where the most interesting thing we found was a bump in the floor."

To this day, I have no idea what he was planning that night.

[clownboss]

Dec 11, 2020 0:22:36 GMT -6 talysman said:

Dec 10, 2020 20:08:13 GMT -6 Piper said:

I have to admit, in all my decades of gaming? I don't recall* ever seeing a result of empty room interpreted as completely bare (just walls, floor, door).
ETA: don't get me wrong, I've used completely bare rooms for effect (i.e. scare the beans out of players) but not as an interpretation of that rule).

Have any of you actually encountered this interpretation?

Yes, in high school. Or maybe a year or two after graduation? I was usually the GM, but this time, one of my other friends GMed. And I think it was technically Rolemaster, not D&D. But yeah, the one night he GMed, we explored a couple rooms and did not find a single monster, treasure, trap, piece of furniture, or even junk. Most of the rooms we went through were empty, but a couple had minor features like a crack in a wall or a bump in the floor that we wasted some time on. But we found nothing, and nothing happened that play session. It became a legend among my friends. "The adventure where the most interesting thing we found was a bump in the floor."

To this day, I have no idea what he was planning that night.

Pffthahahahah, see, that's exactly what I mean.

The LBBs never spelt it was important to keep the rooms interesting!!!! That's why it was such a shock to me when I read "Dwarven Glory". Every single room had tons of fascinating things to occupy your attention and time and players could easily run into rooms like these where they'd get so asborbed in them that they would forget they were out to fight monsters and find treasure.

In just the first page the "Dwarven Glory" had stuff like a theatre stage, a bed bunk room, a jewerly store, a refreshment stand, a mine, a vault, and a striptease bar. And that's not to say for the other rooms that have a barbeque, a well, a police HQ, a mysterious Ogre playing Chess, kitchen, smithys, libraries, a boutique, an 'incense' room, and so on. It feels like a lot.

I just wonder where do people find the inspiration to come up with this kind of variety and originality. It is a lot of very taxing mental labour. And that's why I'm wondering if there were ever supplements that added room furnishings on the fly or sparked some ideas. Other people might attempt to shake things up and put a table with some chairs in their empty rooms to kill the monotony, but trading in "empty rooms" for "rooms with a table in them" is its own kind of unoriginality, too.

How do you do it?

[Deleted]

I have come to embrace the concept of empty rooms.

These are "breather spaces" and blank canvases for which players to project their fears and insecurities upon.

[scottyg]

Sometimes the dungeon backstory will be a factor. In my main OD&D primary campaign dungeon based on Greyhawk there are lots of "empty" rooms. The dungeon has been there a long time. most of the original interesting objects have already been taken by adventures, moved to occupied rooms by the current inhabitants, or rotted away. There really isn't any rationalle for hundreds of empty rooms full of interesting items. Most of the empty rooms have some amount of litter in them, but that's it. Who wants to spend a session searching room after room to find nothing valuable. Generally a room that I've taken the time to detail has a monster/treasure/trap in there. Also, only having the occasional detailed room with nothing in it always makes the players feel like they're missing something.

If I was detailing an occupied orc lair or a small dungeon under a currently occupied castle/tower/etc there would be far less empty space.

[tombowings]

I enjoy decorating the dungeons walls and floors with engravings, bas reliefs, statues, and other (relatively) immovable pieces of art.

[rredmond]

Same here about when I started DMing (college or so) and empty rooms were just empty. When I got more comfortable in my DMing skills, I got more creative with them.
Also this:

Dec 11, 2020 7:58:31 GMT -6 scottyg said:

most of the original interesting objects have already been taken by adventures, moved to occupied rooms by the current inhabitants, or rotted away.

is fun. Not only as a historical aspect of the dungeon having been looted, but maybe the room has just been emptied. Fun to add a (whether real or imagined) rival party in the mix.

[rredmond]

Dec 11, 2020 7:06:21 GMT -6 @ampleframework said:

I have come to embrace the concept of empty rooms.

These are "breather spaces" and blank canvases for which players to project their fears and insecurities upon.

And depending on how deep they are in, the party is usually looking for a spot to somewhat safely rest. Last Saturday one of my friends asked "why can't we find a place to rest!" And the plaintive answer from another, "because Ron doesn't want us to have any hit points or spells!"

[geoffrey]

I have a strongly-held opinion on this topic, but I want to make it clear that I am not claiming to be "right" or others "wrong". The following is only my opinion.

My D&D group and I have found dungeons with a majority of uninhabited rooms to be tedious.

I discount the advice in The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures (as well as other places) to have lots of uninhabited rooms in dungeons. Instead, I follow the lead of Gary's modules, which (as a rule) are chock-a-block full of monsters. Some, such as the giants trilogy of modules, have monsters in upwards of 95% of the rooms. The most widely-printed and widely-played and widely-read module of all time (B2) has monsters in a little over 80% of the rooms in the Caves of Chaos. I have taken this as my own typical practice: Roughly 4 out of 5 rooms in a dungeon will be inhabited.

The other 20% of rooms I fill with tricks, traps, treasures, weird things, or something trivial. A truly empty room is a rarity indeed.

[Zenopus]

A few more thoughts:

-An interesting room, by definition, will always be better than an empty room. But a series of empty rooms may be better than room-after-room of random uninteresting mundanities like broken furniture, garbage, piles of dirt. Unless there's something interesting for the characters to find or interact with, that kind of stuff will quickly become a repetitive slog of searching and a waste of game time. Every room becomes a rote "search the garbage for the treasure".

-It's size-dependent. Empty rooms become more important the bigger the dungeon is, and particularly when trying to create a megadungeon level in the style of Gygax, i.e., something like the Castle Greyhawk level 1 with 100 rooms on a single sheet of paper. Gygax describes the dungeons in OD&D Vol 3 as "labyrinths". Leaving a lot of empty rooms lets you finish a level like this in a reasonable amount of time. Try to stock every room with something and you will never finish it.

-One empty room may not be interesting, but 10 empty rooms can be interesting in aggregate in how they define the shape of the labyrinth that is the dungeon, and the areas surrounding the interesting areas (i.e., the monster lairs). Empty rooms allow for multiple approaches/means of escape from the inhabited areas.

-Sometimes "rooms" are actually just "corridors". On Gygax's Greyhawk map, it's not even always clear what spaces are "rooms" and which are "corridors". Is a 10' by 30' long space with a door at each end a "room" or a hallway between rooms or corridors? One doesn't worry about making every hallway in the dungeon interesting, right?

[tetramorph]

Dec 11, 2020 13:04:06 GMT -6 Zenopus said:

-Sometimes "rooms" are actually just "corridors". 

Right.

I have no "empty" rooms.

But if you count all the corridors, then my ratios probably work out to U&WA suggestions.

I agree with geoffrey 's experience. Just straight-up "empty" rooms are boring.

As others have said, there are rooms without monsters or treasures.

These are the rooms filled with puzzles and clues for the players to figure out.

In other words, these are the most fun rooms.

[retrorob]

I've started with empty rooms (and by empty I mean bare walls & floors), but quickly got tired of it. On the other hand, I don't like highly detailed rooms (for example B1).

I believe talysman is right about vol. III, 1 in 3 rooms with monsters are the remaining rooms, e.g. ones "not already allocated". I use this rule. Every room has also a special feature that I roll from DMG (p. 217-219) or Judges Guild modules (a lot of tables). It's good to combine results, so my players often find a jewelry buried in the pile of dung, gems in the cracked walls etc.

[tetramorph]

How about (in order of how cool it is for players from least to greatest):

1d6 : Result
1 : Monster
2 : Clue* (to puzzle, treasure, trap, monster situation, etc.)
3 : Puzzle**
4 : Monster & Treasure
5 : Clue & Treasure (trapped, hidden, enchanted, etc.)
6 : Puzzle & Treasure

Really, never use the table. Just use the relative ratios for even distribution of the above throughout the various rooms of a given level.

*Clues can be, of course, in any of the rooms and, in fact, probably should be to be fair to players. The "Clue" room means that that is all they're going to find there. No monsters, puzzles or treasures. In other words "empty," where "empty" means no occupants or treasure, nothing that will generate XP directly.

**By puzzle I just mean something clever for the players to interact with. This could include NPC negotiations and factions, I suppose. Folks really like that. It can, of course, include just weird rooms that are fun to interact with but don't add up too much. Like the famous pools in B1. But what I really mean is cool magical stuff that needs to be solved, the rewards of which are anything from mechanical character sheet benefits (like healing or score bonuses), through gaining access to a new passage or room or area or treasure, all the way up to solving major dungeon level or even campaign stuff. It's what the books call "tricks," but that just doesn't quite get across what I mean. The king of this kind of stuff is "Bloodmaster," Lawson B. Check out the module Tomb of the Sea Kings put out by austinjimm 's Scribes of Sparn. It is simply chock full of this kind of goodness. It is what I've finally come to believe (on top of a good map that allows players to figure out things through good mapping) is what actually makes D&D fun -- at least for me and the types I play with.

[Zenopus]

I think empty rooms are more important for dungeons designed like this. This is ~40 rooms on a 1/3 of a sheet, so a single sheet would have ~120 rooms.




And less important for dungeons designed like this. Here there are about 42 rooms on a single sheet.

[retrorob]

"Solo Dungeon Adventures" addition has a nice table as well:

1-12 empty
13-14 monster only
15-17 monster and treasure
18 special or empty
19 trick/trap
20 treasure

[waysoftheearth]

I simplify it down to:

1-3 empty
4 monster
5 monster+treasure
6 treasure

Which is pretty darn close to the U&WA frequencies, and has the added benefit that I can throw 10 or 20 d6 all at once, and randomise a dungeon level in one fell swoop.

Of course "empty" doesn't have to mean "boring". Put in a planetarium, a wheeled Troy horse, a life-sized chess-board, a pool or drinking fountain, an abandoned cafeteria, reversed gravity, time dilation, the scent of elderberries... you name it.

[tetramorph]

Dec 14, 2020 5:12:00 GMT -6 waysoftheearth said:

Put in a planetarium, a wheeled Troy horse, a life-sized chess-board, a pool or drinking fountain, an abandoned cafeteria, reversed gravity, time dilation, the scent of elderberries... you name it.

waysoftheearth, please sign me up.

Seriously, under Covid-19 crisis VTT conditions, why am I not playing in your campaign?

I run a lot of VTT these days, I sure would like to play. What you describe is my kind of crazy.

Fight on!

[Paladin]

Dec 13, 2020 17:13:19 GMT -6 Zenopus said:

I think empty rooms are more important for dungeons designed like this. This is ~40 rooms on a 1/3 of a sheet, so a single sheet would have ~120 rooms.




And less important for dungeons designed like this. Here there are about 42 rooms on a single sheet.

I caught myself sitting here painstakingly describing in my mind the top dungeon to my players in such a way that they'd have a chance of mapping it correctly. That was an exercise to make my brain cramp. I've been lazy for so long and had more dungeons like those on bottom.

But since the labyrinthine complexity of the first example does require more description from the DM just for players to map effectively, I can see where a truly empty room might be a nice break for the brain!

And as you say, it provides different avenues of approach to rooms which ARE filled with threats. I need to design a real maze now and knock the dust off.

[Vile Traveller]

Just the exercise of mapping was a mini-game in itself on the old days, so the large number and complexity of rooms and corridors made a lot of sense. Nowadays I find fewer players who are that interested in mapping, so you can get away with simpler layouts and fewer rooms. In fact for us it started in the mid-80s when we got the Games Workshop cardboard cut-out floor plans, which made mapping much easier.


I still like my empties, though. Players need something to waste their turns on so I get to roll more wandering monsters.

[tetramorph]

Dec 22, 2020 10:43:58 GMT -6 Paladin said:

Dec 13, 2020 17:13:19 GMT -6 Zenopus said:

I think empty rooms are more important for dungeons designed like this. This is ~40 rooms on a 1/3 of a sheet, so a single sheet would have ~120 rooms.

I caught myself sitting here painstakingly describing in my mind the top dungeon to my players in such a way that they'd have a chance of mapping it correctly. That was an exercise to make my brain cramp. I've been lazy for so long and had more dungeons like those on bottom.

Zenopus, thanks for these two examples. It really helps me understand why empty rooms were so important at first.

I think what I should say is: I would simply never use a map like your first example. Just never.

(A spurious note: the first example map feels "Gygaxian," and the second "Judges-Guildy" / "Arnesonian.")

[Red Baron]

tetramorph I know someone with a copy of the JG book First Fantasy Campaign, and Arneson's Blackmoor maps are even harder to describe than Gary's. I do not think that second map looks "Arnesonian" in any way.

It is possible to make a Gygaxian (high density, paper walls) and have it be easy to describe, the dungeon geomorphs simply do a very poor job at it. It takes a conscious effort and a bit of time to make things "easy to describe, easy to visualize what is being described, but hard to map", but it is possible.

Lots of Gary's tricks are actually very useful for this: circular rooms with similar looking and evenly spaced exits are wonderful for making players go in a wrong direction. Sloping and slanting passages are also a great tool.