Dungeon Crawling So Old It’s New Again

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 13, 2014

One concept of early dice-and-paper role-playing games (and some of the old CRPG counterparts) that has been somewhat lost in the modern era is the idea of avoiding combat encounters. Old-school D&D has a not-entirely warranted reputation for being about killing everything in sight. After all, that was how you got XP (experience points), right? For killing things?

Well, actually, no. In the actual rules, you got far more XP for treasure than for killing things. Some dungeon masters chose to ignore this rule, which resulted in far slower-paced games where the only way to make progress was to kill everything in sight. You had to kill a LOT of enemies to get to level two, and in a “properly” run game, you were unlikely to survive that many encounters.

But in the game as designed, there was a huge emphasis in these early games on exploration, and really searching hard for treasure. This was one of the big tricks of the game – if you look in the very early modules for the game, the most interesting treasure (for intelligent monsters) was well-hidden and/or well-trapped. You’d have magic swords disguised as torches via illusion, or false bottoms on chests that were already hidden behind a trapped secret door. That kind of thing. If anything, killing the guardians was “bonus” XP.

Wandering monsters acted as a timer to force a balance between exploration and leaving no stone unturned versus resource depletion (and risk of death). In order to get the big experience points from the treasure hidden deep in the dungeon, it might be best to avoid some encounters even if they weren’t that risky. It was a constant decision-making process – do you keep poking around, or do you move forward? Sure, you would get some experience points from these encounters, but very little loot, making them extremely inefficient sources of progress.

You combine these factors: An emphasis on the “loot” for your reward regardless of how it is obtained; a regular depletion of resources (especially when confronted with obstacles and conflict) which increased risk and made necessary the need to leave the dungeon and lose momentum; and a relatively smaller reward for defeating enemies (again, regardless of how they are defeated). Now mix in some low-risk / low-reward encounters, and some extremely high-risk (nigh-impossible) encounters, and now you have a cost / risk / reward structure that leads to all kinds of interesting experiences.

How about bribing a monster? It’s a small depletion of a plentiful resource (for adventurers) – money – in return for more efficient future encounters without depleting more important resources (potions, scrolls, wand charges, hit points, spells-per-day usage). Hiding from an encounter? Negotiation? Trickery? Fleeing?

What happened over time was that DMs ignored the rules to force the game to play the way they wanted it to play… and, in a sense, they “won” – later versions of the game (and their computer RPG cousins) followed this new style. XP was no longer given for treasure, as treasure was its own reward. Combat was exciting, so it became the only real source of XP. And there are a few articles and letters in old copies of Dragon Magazine suggesting that DMs would reduce the experience point reward if the players won too easily because they were clever about it. After all, what did the characters learn when all they did was drop a rockslide on a giant’s head instead of fighting it toe-to-toe?

(I’d submit they learned the most important lesson: It’s far easier and less risky to drop a rockslide on a giant’s head than fighting it toe-to-toe).

With the growth of computer role-playing games, things only accelerated in this direction. Now you look at the “mainstream” single-player RPG experience:

* Most XP is given as a combat award (there’s often quest awards too, but this is typically secondary)

* There’s little to no emphasis on resource management. Characters often have all their health and mana restored between encounters in many AAA CRPGs.

* There are few (if any) interactions outside of combat with “enemies”

* Few “optional” combats. You are expected to fight to the death all the way up to the end-boss.

* If you can flee an encounter at all, it only means you’ll have to face them later when they are fully restored as well. You’ve lost any resources you expended the first time (ammo, potions, whatever limited resource depletion occurs in the game), with no advantage conferred. You don’t get to bypass the encounter the second time around.

* Having enemies flee is rarer still. Getting any reward for defeated-but-escaping enemies is unheard of.

* There’s little variation in difficulty of enemies. Sure, you have plain ol’ mooks, tougher leaders, and an end-level boss. But you don’t often have a mix of Seriously Too Tough to Handle creatures with “speed bump” packs that present no risk but to your resources. You don’t have an Ancient Dragon mixed in with the level 1 kobolds. Or if you do, the game will treat it entirely like a non-combat encounter and won’t even give you the option of being stupid.

What we’ve ultimately lost is the emphasis on exploration rather than combat. From a CRPG perspective, there’s motivation for this: combat is generally a lot easier / cheaper to develop than exploration content. But if gamers are willing to accept that not every corridor is completely custom and unique (which was a big “if” maybe ten years ago, but a lot more common today), a tile-based approach with a few custom or unique alterations and locations seems adequate.

I keep talking about how we may need to take a few steps back in order to move forward into new and exciting directions. I feel that especially among the indies, that has been happening to a degree. We’ve got a lot of fascinating new RPGs that are rooted in design approaches from twenty years ago. But maybe there’s a lot more fertile ground to mine if we’re willing to take a few even larger steps back.

 

 

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