Advancement, Dungon Ecology,

First of all, it goes without saying if you need characters to advance quickly, there is no reason not to hand out more XP and treasure. I regularly hand out far more XP for roleplaying than I EVER do for combat. (House rule: Rate their RPing from 1-5, add a +1 bonus if they are not the highest level in the party, multiply -that- total by the highest level in the party, multiply by fifty.) In a gamist game, you might not want to be rating their RPing, but you could rate overall quality of play.

I'm a math and science person, not an arts and crafts, so I end up finding that the design of a dungon works so much better if I ask myself some questions as to, if all things, ecology?

Ok, so this is an underground fortress. There is no sun, which means no trees. So where does the food cycle start?

Sometimes I had creatures feasting off the magical slimes that sucked up ambient magical energy from the dungon (the whole building was magical.) Sometimes I established things like "tourist traps" outside a dungon, since after all adventurers were coming loaded with gold and needing better weapons, and the shops were RIGHT THERE. (This particularly good if you want to stick it to the wizards on their material components...)

In my experience though the best kind of dungon is where the encounters are all building up to a theme. So you slaughter the first three batches of orcs that you run into, fine. Now the orcs are starting to call in their friends, the orc wizard is pulling up some undead and calling in some favours from his ogre mage buddies, and the goblins have informed the gnolls that "we will let you in and get tasty human meat if you kill these people off"

But in the back of your head consider the idea that perhaps the goblins and the ogres HATE one another, and there's a fragile alliance between the two species, at least as far as eliminating this threat.

I find this kind of depth gets my player's attention MUCH faster, because it's a BROAD scope so there's less to keep track of. They are killing things, but they are dealing with the general sense that perhaps there is something bigger going on. And when they see two enemy races going at ONE ANOTHER, suddenly the dimensions of how to play the game change remarkably. Maybe kicking in the door ISN'T the best idea. Let's see who wins this one...

That's not to say that mapping isn't useful. Or that plotting the way rooms are laid out isn't useful either. BUT, by adding character to the monsters the enemies face, showing them to be tactical thinkers making mistakes, the gamism becomes a bit psychological, and adds a nice element of narration in as well. Players still get to advance and still get to kill stuff, but being smart about it helps.

Of course, in the game I run the players have gotten so attached to some of the monster NPCs they don't WANT to kill anything. In the words of my monk "Just once, just one freakin time I'd like to run across a monster that DIDN'T suddenly turn out to be too nice to kill."

... and they are the "evil" party...