Why DUNGEONs, Though?

Jim’s note: An older, lesser version of this article originally appeared via the TEETH RPG Newsletter!

This week, for reasons unclear, we played Heroquest on Tabletop Simulator.

It should be said that since many of our group are dwelling well within their forties, this was an act of lumpen nostalgia for most us. And yet for Olly, the spry, handsome young ‘un of the group, it was a brand new experience. “It was fun dipping into you guy’s childhood gaming memories,” he youthfully quipped, making me run my fingers through the thinning hair on my head and sigh in a sad, wistful way reminiscent of gamboling through the park with a fine head of hair and a beautiful woman rolling her eyes at me.

“Having you play Zargon sort of preserved your normal group role as GM and ours as PCs, except we were all Stranger Things type kids playing this ‘80s game with oiled up barbarians and pointy eared elves. Quite a palate cleanser from the sombre tone we usually seek out, even if that tone inevitably turns comedic as dice roll!” spake the youth, really getting to the heart of the matter. He was right.

The comedic dice rolls that furnish our usual RPG sessions really were available to us in Heroquest, but not always for the best of reasons. What was most striking about playing the old half-way house again after several decades was how so many of the aspects of the RPG-adjacent boardgame dungeon-crawler were in place — the stat-driven baddies, the piles of cards, the multiple applications of dice types — and yet it seemed utterly without finesse or deeper understanding. Heroquest is fundamentally nothing more than a system for moving and fighting, with a bunch of scenarios available, and the pseudo-GM referee allowing things to cater to some small human invention.

Sure, it was absolutely a game For Kids, but using 2d6 for random movement distances is straight out of the worst part of Snakes & Ladders or their clumsy ilk. The designers did not forget to include the most old fashioned of boardgame tropes as they put together something which heralded a future, of sorts. The random movement speeds lead to a mental image image of the barbarian dawdling one moment, zooming forward the next, untethered from need or intention, racing, then crawling, around rooms that he could not explore with any logic, or intelligence.

It’s still far better than the old D&D spin off Dungeon, though, which I also played recently, and is Not Good, despite what we pretend to remember.

Deeper & Down

All this had me thinking about the role of dungeons generally in our tabletop games, and why, why dungeons? Dragons, sure! Big wingy, fiery bastards. There’s barely anything more exciting or glamorous about fantasy. Ride them! Fight them! Have them transform into a human and fall in love with them only to realise that they are a timeless wyrm with an alien intelligence and connection to deep time!

But dungeons? Like, the places we keep political enemies in a feudal era? Or dank sex places? A strange word to have dominate our hobby. Not really a word you want to talk about out loud in public all that much. “Oh yeah, we spent a lot of time in that dungeon!” *barmaid narrows her eyes as she collects the beer glasses*

There are, of course, good reasons. Narratively, as Comrade Gillen likes to point out, there are key reference points to the root of our dungeon-theme in our vast, inherited literature of ages. The labyrinth of Daedelus in Greek legend, containing the minotaur, and The Mines Of Moria in Lord Of The Rings, containing surely the all-time grandfather of escalation-to-boss-encounter dungeon sequences. There are plenty of story reasons for dwarves and their many-sized friends to descend into a hole.

Yet it is not for lore that the dungeon exists in Dungeons & Dragons, but for gameplay: to go into a dungeon is the core activity, and one which provides definite scope and constraints to what is about to occur. To go into a dungeon and come out again is a clear thing for players to engage in and a definite set of obstacles to overcome. Delve deeper, get more platinum coins. That’s the deal. Other games are less focused, and arguably failed to exult in the same purity of purpose.

Later, pondering this, and being an extremely lazy and derivative essay writer, I simply Googled the answer to Why Dungeons, and, like a student beginning his essay with the dictionary definition of the topic at hand, stumbled into this to-the-point formalisation from the gloriously-named CyberDefinitions.com.

DUNGEON means Closed-Off Area in an online gaming context. In RPG (Role Playing Games), a Dungeon is a hostile Closed-Off Area within which a player will encounter enemies. DUNGEONs are usually found in enclosed areas, such as castles, fortresses, or caves.

That’s the Cyber Definition. I love that unneccesary capitalisation. DUNGEONs.

But yes, Cyber Definitions, you’re right about this. The germ of the truth is obvious and apparent: dungeons are about keeping the characters under pressure. They should not be able to walk away from this situation, and the drama of dwindling hit points and emptying spell rosters is felt all the keener if they are a mile underground with just a Balrog-analogue between them and the Sword Of Iconicus. You cannot take your oil-slick barbarian off the board, he must open the next door.

And that is where the dungeon speaks to RPG design on a deeper level. Pressure, arguably, is one of those key vectors to understand how your game works, as nebulous as it might first appear. Pressure means increasing peril, and no easy route to just walk away. And I think that’s as true of narrative games as it is of those with a board and some orks: providing building pressure works best if there’s no way to retreat and recoup, no time to tag out until the thing is done. A social dilemma is best dealt with if there’s no way to walk away from the people affected by it, just as you can’t retreat from the half-giant when the portcullis drops down behind you.

Pressure need not come from being enclosed in a corridor with traps ahead and a gelatinous cube behind, either. Consider this much-shared quote from Blades In The Dark’s Jon Harper:

“The primary factor is pressure. The design of the setting forces the PCs into a pressure-cooker situation. The lightning barriers around Doskvol mean they can’t merely “leave town” if the heat gets too high. Killing isn’t the easy solution to problems that it is in other games (because of ghosts). Every valuable claim is already held by other factions, so making moves means making enemies, which is good for drama. The specific qualities of the setting are there to drive exciting play.”

The pressure here is social, factional, persona, and legal. It is not merely spatial, but situational in a wider web of forces. The dungeon is made abstract: it’s the architecture not just of of the Lich King’s Crypt, but of the motivations which lock players into their adventure and their place in the fiction.

In Blades the dungeon is as much the interlocking agendas of the various gangs and institutions as it is the fact that you can’t simply get out of Doskvol. And does that matter for the design of TEETH? Yes. Yes it really does. We absolutely wanted pressure to mount, even as you roam in a blasted landscape. The Vale might be wilderness, but it is cordoned, quarantined from traffic, with the players there only for a limited time. And, with corruption building as they do their monster-hunting work, will they be done in time to leave? Or will they find themselves trapped forever, like a Theseus whose twine got nibbled by plague rats?

You probably already knew, to be honest. But that’s why.