We analyze the eruptive products of Holocene Dotsero volcano (Colorado, USA; ~ 4.15 ka), which record evidence of a progression from effusive magmatic activity through explosive phreatomagmatic maar-forming activity to a final explosive magmatic phase. The nature of the deposits suggests that the irregular and mountainous pre-eruptive topography strongly influenced the formation of directed pyroclastic density currents (PDCs) during the phreatomagmatic phase, where the topographically high northern crater rim acted as a barrier and promoted transport to the south. Furthermore, the crater shape strongly controlled the grain size of the final deposits, providing further evidence that deposit grain size can be a misleading proxy for fragmentation or explosion intensity. We test these hypotheses, as gleaned from fieldwork, by implementing a multiphase numerical model to simulate discrete explosions and their resulting PDCs at maar-diatreme volcanoes. We confirm that a crater shape where one rim is higher than the other promotes multiple pulses of particle transport in the direction of the lower rim. The initial PDCs contain both coarse and fine particles, whereas PDCs generated by later pulses contain, predominately, finer particles. This mechanism provides an alternative explanation to the formation of lapilli tuff/tuff couplets often found at maar-diatreme tephra rings (including Dotsero volcano). Additional modeling shows how the crater depth can control grain size of the resulting PDC deposits. In the case of a deep crater and a relatively weak explosion, it is possible that only the fine particles escape following collapse of the eruptive column, resulting in a fine-grained deposit. This work allows us to improve models developed to describe emplacement of PDCs for different crater geometries and informs on the dynamics of maar-diatreme eruptions, but also highlights the limitations of our knowledge of key parameters, especially those related to the processes of magma-water interaction and syn-eruptive hydrogeology, during such events.