Have a goal
When you go into the dungeon, know what you’re trying to achieve. Lacking a goal, parties tend to wander, waste time, fight too many random encounters, make bad choices, and get killed. If you don’t have enough information to form a coherent goal, make getting that information your goal. Keeping good notes and clear maps is helpful here. Sessions should start with reviewing your map and your notes, and deciding on the goal for the session.
Goals in the dungeon tend to fall into one of a handful of categories:
Skimming: Skimming is a tactic best employed against higher-level dungeons by low-level parties. It assumes that in a high-level dungeon, even small incidental treasures will be a big deal for the party. The focus is on exploring as many rooms as possible while avoiding all combat and ignoring anything that might be dangerous. Skimming is also a useful approach for scouting a dungeon before you determine what other strategies you will use.
Raiding
Raiding is probably the default dungeon procedure. Here, the goal is to find the highest-value treasure in the dungeon, strike quickly to either avoid combat entirely or else to defeat any guards before they can organise resistance, and then leave before a counterattack can be mounted. When raiding a dungeon, information gathering is key. Charmed or otherwise coerced captives are probably the best source of information. Beware of blindly blundering around the dungeon.
Clearing
Clearing a dungeon means systematically defeating every threat in every room, and preventing those threats from returning. When clearing a dungeon, information gathering is less important since every threat must be faced eventually. What becomes more important is holding areas of the dungeon. Slow, methodical progress through a dungeon means spending a lot of time and facing a lot of random encounters. Anything that can be done to seal off or capture parts of the dungeon will aid you. Use hirelings to control choke points, spike doors, or even install barriers in the dungeon. Clearing a dungeon in the face of determined intelligent opposition will be next to impossible. Consider a raid to eliminate the centre of resistance before you proceed with clearing.
The Yojimbo
A specialty play best used in Megadungeons or other situations where there are multiple enemy factions. By cleverly allying with various factions you can engineer conflicts which deplete the enemies while minimising your own risk. Preserve your good reputation with as many factions as you can for as long as possible. Never enter a fight unless your allies stand to suffer greater losses than you do. Support the weakest side just long enough for them to gain the upper hand, then switch, inflicting maximum damage with your betrayal.
An aside: Dungeon bullshit
"Dungeon bullshit" is all that stuff you find in a dungeon that’s not treasure, not a trap or a monster, but isn’t just decoration either. Magic statues. Fountains with unknown effects. A mysterious roulette wheel. An altar to some forbidden god. Absent some compelling reason, you should leave this stuff alone. While dungeon bullshit is as likely to be harmless or beneficial as it is to be harmful, the risks are rarely worth the rewards. Some minor stat boost or healing or such is unlikely to be worth the risk of death, which is all too common with this kind of encounter. That magic statue is unlikely to be hiding thousands of gold pieces, and that’s the only reward that’s worth risking your character for.
But this cost/benefit analysis isn’t the only reason to ignore dungeon bullshit. The real danger of these things is wasted time. Consider: Every moment you spend poking around at that statue, dipping your pinky in that fountain, inhaling the mystic odours of that altar, is time you’re not spending looking for more certain rewards in the form of gold and magic items. This is true both in terms of in-game time, where random encounters will sap your strength, and out-of-game time, where you can easily spend an hour of real time bickering about how to safely examine some dungeon bullshit.
Of course, your information gathering might change this calculation. If you learn how to make the dungeon bullshit work for you, or if you’ve identified that this particular dungeon bullshit hides a big score, then go ahead and poke and prod at the thing. Likewise, if you’re clearing the dungeon it’s probably better to at least confirm you’re not turning your back on a major source of danger.
If you do decide to interact with dungeon bullshit, it’s best approached decisively and systematically. Decide if you intend to trigger it or not trigger it. If you decide to trigger it, it’s probably best to do so from as great a distance as possible. In decreasing order of distance, here are the usual ways that dungeon bullshit is triggered:
- When it sees/hears/otherwise detects you
- When you enter the room
- After a certain amount of time (uncommon). This is things like slow poison gas, sleeping things.
- When you observe it closely (also uncommon). Most often this is things like mirrors, texts, images.
- When you touch it.
- When you interact with the thing for its intended function (pull the lever, drink the water, open the box, etc).