How do y’all go about numbering your dungeon rooms for your keys? I’m not talking about the 5-room basements, I meant the standard 30+ room dungeons? Do you number left to right, top to bottom? Just pick an entrance/path and start “walking” through?
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I honestly don’t think too much about it, but I admittedly don’t make dungeons for publication, so I’m the only person who sees the numbers. From my last dungeon, it looks like I roughly used a “breadth-first” traversal building out from the “main” entrance.
That said, for much larger dungeons (especially those printed), I generally prefer rooms close together to end up with numbers close together for easier lookup.
To the best of my ability, I start with a room and go clockwise from that room (as if is the center of the clock, so I start with the room to three “north”). Then I’ll go to the lowest number room after doing that, and try to start again.
I try to order them so that rooms physically nearby have numbers nearby each other, to minimise flipping back and forth when PCs move between rooms.
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I usually start numbering in the most probable place to start investigating the dungeon.
After that I do a walk and follow the example of His Majesty the Worm (and hotels): this depends on the vertical orientation but lower floor starts with 0, next starts with 1, next starts with 2, etc.
Continuing with xaran’s algorithm example, I prefer depth first numbering, starting with the main entrance (whatever that might be), continuing all the way down the leftmost path, then leftmost side paths, then all the way down the next path and side paths, et cetera.
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Whatever you do, if there are multiple dungeons, indicate this fact. If you have a mansion dungeon and then a cave dungeon use M1 and C1, for example. For different floors in the same dungeon you can just keep the number going, of course.
I read modules that have numbers 1-30 used for multiple dungeons and it makes flipping through the book more difficult than it has to.
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Sometimes I follow the likely movement of the party through the dungeon within reason - but also do the counting clockwise from the entrance thing sometimes. It’s a surprisingly tricky thing and I think the best way to do it is to break the dungeon up into nodes/sections in you head and number those. In larger or very complex areas you can number each of these as a subsection. E.G. Area A - The Catacombs contains rooms A1 - A12 while Area B The Porc Fortress contains rooms B1-22 (or even B13 - 34 if you want to make things confusing for some and perfectly sensible for others).
I’ve found that top left to bottom right is the wrong way to go. Paths thru the dungeon were best for keying and probably for play with the larger amount of rooms needing less flipping randomly. Sucks I had to renumber 200+ rooms though, but its a lesson I shan’t soon forget!
I also use roman numerals for level numbers, then a, b, c, etc for sublevels/side levels. Room references looks like II.23 or IVa.1. Pretty easy for me, personally.
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I’ve been inconsistent in how I do it due to varying sizes of the dungeons. With the shorter ones, it’s been according to whim as I drew the maps– had no idea what all the spaces would hold, even. Larger ones would have numbers preceded by a level/storey/region indicator.
Having now spent a bit of time considering it, I find the use of letters to indicate general regions is really useful. How I go about numbering the rooms in each region is something I need to get more consistent with.
I think doing that numbering after I’ve filled in the locations for a space is likely best, and that the ordering should be based on likelihood of PCs advancing in that direction next. It’s difficult to predict where they’ll go, certainly, though I can usually gauge what’s at least 50% likely, so the likely next space after rooms #12 to #17 would begin with room #18.
Yeesh. Numbering for other people to follow along is a lot different than just numbering for my use. 