The Five Room Dungeon

You may have heard about the five room dungeon but were too afraid to ask, well I'm here to be your friendly jargon buster!

The concept of the five room dungeon contends that there are five rooms that every dungeon needs and helps you build more satisfying crawls. If you start to think about a dungeon in these terms it can help you make more fulfilling dungeons and encounters for your players.

1. The Entrance
As the name suggests its the start of the dungeon and typically is guarded by minions or has some barr to entry.

2. Puzzle/Role Play Challenge
This is an important room that often gets overlooked by dungeon masters (myself included). Some players are not in it for the fighting, they want to be challenged with a riddle or puzzle. This area typically leads to the Boss or treasure areas, the players get a sense of achievement from this room or get to learn each other's characters better.

3. Decoy
A room that is supposed to add depth to the dungeon. The Decoy and the Boss rooms should be on separate paths so the heroes have to double back on themselves. This room can be bypassed with no effect on the overall dungeon. This room could also be designed to deplete the party's resources in-order to make a boss fight harder.

4. Boss/Culmination
Typically a harder fight than in the entrance. This area should be foreshadowed in the surrounding rooms and could potentially be linked to the decoy room thematically with the nature of the boss.

5. Plot Development 
An area that moves the overall story or the dungeon's story forward. 

So with this system you can improve your dungeon building. This doesn't mean that every dungeon has to follow a set structure of these five rooms in sequence every time or that a dungeon should only have five rooms. When you look at the system in hindsight it seems obvious but these things pointing out to us occasionally to keeps us ontrack! 

Have fun and may you roll well!