Why I Run My Dungeons as Pointcrawls

 I'm going to assume you're familiar with the concept of a pointcrawl. And a dungeon for that matter.

I realized a while ago that dungeon design is a lot easier if you pretend hallways don't exist. I was designing a dungeon at the time for a group that fell apart, Spinerock Keep, an abandoned fortress infested with giant spiders, goblins, ghouls, and demon cultists led by an antipaladin. While I was getting to work on it, I realized that drawing out all these rooms and figuring out how they connect with hallways and doors and whatnot was going to take hours. And for what? So my players could engage in the incredibly interesting task of drawing lines on graph paper?

I made an executive decision: I'm not drawing hallways, I'm drawing circles with room names and numbers and connecting them via lines. I made a pointcrawl. It took about 20 minutes, and much of that was coming up with cool ideas for stuff to put in the dungeon. 

I hate mapping (featuring the Caves of Chaos).

I despise it really. You're welcome to like it. I can see why people like it. I don't. I see it as needless busy work that makes simple tasks take longer and requires a very specifically designed dungeon to get benefit out of.

There are two scenarios I've seen people use to explain the virtues of mapping. Perhaps there are more but I have not seen them. The first is that the players might map in such a way that an obvious hole in the dungeon reveals a secret room. The players get free treasure and get to feel cool. The second is that the players might map wrong and suddenly end up in a scenario where they can't find the exit because their map is wrong, and their last torches are starting to go out. It's very dramatic, and I do love drama.

These are the Caves of Chaos. They're from B2 The Keep on the Borderlands from 1979. It's one of the modules that has achieved cult status. Chances are, you know about The Keep on the Borderlands, even only in passing.

You'll notice that the Caves of Chaos have two traits (amongst others): there's a lot of empty space between rooms and hallways, and you can navigate very well just by turning left or right and any fork in the road. Both of the examples I gave earlier don't really work in this dungeon. If there was a secret room between two other rooms, how would you ever know? It wouldn't appear any different then the rest of the dungeon, and unless you want to check every bit of empty space everywhere for secret doors, you'd never find it from a map alone. And the only way you'd ever make a map that would end up leading you astray is if you really misheard the GM and made something obscenely wrong. And that's ignoring that some parts of the Caves of Chaos look awful to map. Like, how do you even describe rooms 57, 58, and 59, or the cave system that is rooms 42-45.

That's the thing about mapping. It either goes perfectly, in which case it was busy work, or someone messes up somewhere, often by adding a square where they shouldn't have. I find that those scenarios aren't interesting, they're annoying. Especially when it involves redoing half the map, and especially when it was because the GM's description wasn't clear. I've used the Caves of Chaos as an example, but I could've used one of a dozen other modules instead. I think older modules do it worse (especially with being annoying to map), but I don't think anything has ever done it good. I'd love to be proven wrong here.

But what about the hallways?

Side tangent about mapping aside, you might be wondering about pointcrawl dungeon hallways.Well, they exist within the fiction of the game, of course. Characters still traverse hallways, it would be silly if they went through a door and teleported 15 feet away into a new room, though perhaps a teleporter door dungeon could be fun.

The simplest way to think about pointcrawl hallways is that they exist, but are not defined. Two rooms could be connected by a straight hallway, a zig-zagging hallway, a curved hallway, a corner hallway, or anything other shape of hallway. If the shape matters, just keep track of it somewhere. If not, it can be ignored until the moment it matters (it likely won't).You can do something similar with rooms. If the size of the room isn't important, then do you need to define it?

If something of note exists within a hallway, like a trap or weird intractable for the players, then that hallway transcends being a hallway. It becomes a point of interest within the pointcrawl. No longer is that ever-shifting tapestry between rooms 11 and 14 just kinda there, it gets its own stopping point on the dungeon map. The same is true of hallways with great importance on the map, such a dungeon highway.

So what's so good about a pointcrawl?

1. They take less time to make. Cutting out the making of hallways saves time. Cutting out most dimensions entirely saves more time. Of all the upsides, this is the greatest.
   
2.  They're way easier to map than normal dungeons. It's hard for players to mess up the act of drawing circles and connect them with lines, and the process takes seconds. No more repeating distances.
3. Room connections are easier to see at a glance. Seeing what rooms belong the ghoul bishop is easier when there's less fluff.

How to make a pointcrawl dungeon.

The same way you make any pointcrawl. Create points of interest, in this case rooms in the dungeon, and connect them. I like to draw the points of interest on my map in such a way that matches the spatial layout of the dungeon, and I also like to draw my bubbles in the shape of the room, and I use symbols to show anything important going on in the connecting hallways, such as stairs. It's an art, not a science. I can't tell you how you'll best like your dungeons.

Should you do it?

If you and your players really like mapping then no, you probably shouldn't make pointcrawl dungeons. Pointcrawl dungeons were made by me because I felt that mapping didn't add much to my game and thus removing the elements that exist for mapping didn't remove anything from my game. If you like mapping, it isn't for you. Pointcrawl dungeons also tend to be worse for games that have grid based movement in combat. Things work better if movement in combat is more free form.

If you are ambivalent to dungeon mapping, or are like me and actively dislike it, then there's no reason not to give it a try in my mind. It makes prep easier, and if you find out you like it then that's a good thing to me.

Help I need to know what shape a hallway is.

Sure, here's a table:

Roll (2d6)	Outcome
2	Repeated Zig-Zags
3	A Single Zig-Zag
4	Slant
5	T-intersection
6	Corner
7	Straight
8	Corner
9	4-way intersection
10	Winding, Cavern Like
11	90 Degree Turn (Curved)
12	180 Degree Turn (Curved)

If you need distances, roll 1d6+1 and multiply it by 5 or 10 for the length of your hallway. If you'd like a vertical element, roll another d6. On a 6 there are stairs up, on a 5 it slants up, on a 3 or 4 the floor is uneven but ultimately flat, on a 2 it slats down, and on a 1 there are stairs down.