A lot of dungeon design advice focuses on “interactivity”, and to a degree this word can be a meaningless substitute for “stuff I personally like”. Yet one should strive to write locations with “interactive elements”. In the context of location based (or dungeon crawl) adventure design interactivity in an adventure means the degree to which there are obstacles and dangers beyond inimically hostile monsters and simple traps. An interactive adventure describes things in the area or room “key” that the players can ask questions about and do stuff with…
STEP INTO THE DUNGEON DRESSING ROOM
Interactive design offers elements of the adventure that aren’t a superstructure for simple die rolls - something beyond simple traps to “save” against and monsters ready to “fight until killed”. The more reliant one’s adventure is on these sorts of purely mechanical challenges the more the RPG becomes a sort of dice and board game. It’s likely that to some degree this was how Dungeons & Dragons was originally envisioned. That the dungeon adventure was originally intended to be played from something like the “zoomed out”, impersonal perspective of a wargame. OD&D reads like this at times, and one can imagine a referee running it who rolls each turn and declares new mechanical challenges or events … “You encounter three Ogres” or “One of your hired footmen falls into a pit trap as you go down the hallway.” Players then roll dice to fight the monster and remove resources such as their missing footman from their sheets, then they collect any treasure, move a few squares on the map and the next turn begins.
To run such an adventure you would need basically a map and set of random encounter tables, or a location with keys like this:
There’s not a lot for designers to do with this kind of adventure, the dungeon generation tables at the back of the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide can generate a decent version of this sort of adventure. However, this isn’t how RPGs have ended up being played by most, not even in the early days of the hobby. Some outliers like Dave Megary’s DUNGEON! and the amazingly charming Rules for the Game of DUNGEON by then teenage Craig VanGrasstek seem to have sprouted from Arneson’s Twin Cities game, but for most, and certainly in 2025, this style of dungeoneering board game is not considered an RPG.
Gygax also recognized this over time and didn’t want to play a board game. The few pages of “Solo Play” dungeon generation tables he originally published in the first issue (Spring 1975) of Strategic Review Magazine were included in the Dungeon Masters Guide as Appendix A, but had added random generation tools in Appendices C, G, H, I, J, K, L, and M - mostly adding description and specifics to the bare halls of the earlier version. Appendix H even includes “Dungeon Dressing” - the sounds, smells, air movements and mundane objects that might be found in a dungeon. This, along with Gygax’s dungeon design, show an appreciation for “interactivity” and a step away from the board game possibilities of early D&D. Gygax may have written more military or wargame style scenarios then some other designers, but he wasn’t playing a board game like adventure limited to mechanical challenges.
FROM PROCEDURAL GENERATION TO BESPOKE
Of course these type of random tables suffer a lot of issues - the most important being that the more complex randomly generated spaces become the less thematic and interactive they can be… that is the octagonal room filled with ... a feculent smell, mushroom patches, a chasm, 5 orcs and a portcullis trap doesn’t do much more than the ultra-minimalist room. The smells, sounds, trap, and room contents are only incidentally related to the room’s inhabitants and the contents of surrounding rooms. They are disparate descriptive elements that players can interact with by asking questions about, but they don’t “do” or “mean” anything that will help the players. All these sorts of dungeon dressing accomplish is to give a vague sense of the real to the dungeon - it is full of things and fixtures, just like real spaces.
