Gelatinous Icosahedron

 While D&D combat has a pretty clear order of operations and economy of actions, outside of combat I've tended to play things fast-and-loose regarding sequence, timing, and number of actions. I wouldn't be at all surprised if many other DMs handle things similarly. There's nothing inherently wrong flying by the seat of your pants, if that works for you, but if timekeeping becomes a tangled mess and/or you have some very assertive players who tend to monopolize the game between combats while passive ones barely get a chance to participate, a more structured exploration sequence may help. The editions I've played (B/X and BECMI, mostly) do give some guidelines, but for most of my DMing career I've struggled with how to apply them. Below is a more detailed, but still hopefully simple, step-by-step procedure for dungeon crawling. 1. Party moves, either until its exploration movement rate is exhausted or a keyed location or other point of interest is reached.  2. Des...

 Traps have always been a staple of dungeon-delving adventures. There's more than one way to classify traps, but here I'll be looking at them according to their purpose in the dungeon, both in-fiction (i.e. the purpose they serve to their creators in the game world) and in-game (i.e. what they add to the experience for DMs and players.) Of course, there is a fair bit of overlap, and any given trap might fit into more than one general category.  HAZARD: Not truly a trap, per se, but some feature of a dungeon that presents a danger to explorers. Unlike a true trap, a hazard is not intentionally constructed, but functions in the game in a similar way. Hazards may be natural features, such as a sinkhole, an unstable pile of rubble, a pocket of toxic volcanic gas, or the result of deteriorating structures, such as a crumbling bridge or loose ceiling block.     Purpose:  In the fiction, being products of impersonal forces, they have no purpose per se. In a game sense...