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A dungeon crawl is a type of scenario in fantasy role-playing games in which heroes navigate a labyrinthine environment, battling various monsters and looting any treasure they may find. Because of its simplicity, a dungeon crawl can be easier for a gamemaster to run than more complex adventures, and the "hack and slash" style of play is appreciated by players who focus on action and combat. The term can be used in a pejorative sense, since dungeon crawls often lack meaningful plot or logical consistency. For example, the parody game Munchkin is about "the essence of the dungeon experience… Kill the monsters, steal the treasure, stab your buddy."[1]
A dungeon crawler (alternatively a dungeon bash, Monty Haul, or loot game) is a specific title that focuses on contained areas where the player proceeds through a dungeon collecting treasure, usually culminating in a boss battle. The enemies and items (and sometimes boss) normally reappear after exiting and re-entering a major section. There may be only a token plot involved, in order to allow focus on extensive combat, skill, item creation, and loot drop mechanics. Luck is usually heavily involved, controlling which monsters may spawn in the area or the treasure they carry. Low percentage rates for powerful items encourage the player to repeatedly clear the dungeon in order to obtain them.
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Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeon crawls in the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons were influenced by J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, the Lankhmar short stories by Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions and by the "Cugel" stories from the Dying Earth books by Jack Vance.[2]
According to Gary Gygax (in an interview with Dungeon #112), the first dungeon crawl was part of a wargame in which the invading force entered the enemy's castle through a former escape tunnel dug from the fortress' dungeon. The group had so much fun with this scenario that it was repeated over and over with increasingly complex dungeons until the wargame aspect of the game was dropped in favor of exploring the dungeon.
For pen and paper role-playing games, visual aids such as maps, models, or miniature figures are often used to represent the landscape of a dungeon crawl.
Video games
Due to their potential for simplicity and the limited expectations most players have for plot and logical consistency in dungeon crawls, they are fairly popular in computer role-playing games. The roguelike genre is a common and typical example, with endless randomly generated dungeon terrain and randomly placed monsters and treasures scattered throughout. While early applications of programmable calculators and computers in fantasy roleplaying involved their use as random-number generators, the first actual dungeon crawl computer game was pedit5 written in 1974 by Rusty Rutherford.[citation needed] [3]
Variations on the dungeon crawl trope can be found in other genres, for instance the environments in the Doom series of video games and "deadspace complexes" in EVE Online.
See also
- Azure Dreams
- Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance
- Champions of Norrath series
- Class of Heroes
- Dark Cloud and Dark Chronicle
- The Dark Spire
- Darkstone
- Demon's Souls
- Diablo series
- Digimon World 2
- Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
- Dungeon Hack
- Dungeon Siege series
- Dungeon Runners
- The Elder Scrolls: Arena
- The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
- Etrian Odyssey
- Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard
- The Fantasy Trip
- Fate
- Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles series
- Gauntlet
- Grandia Xtreme
- Guild Wars: Eye of the North
- Hellgate: London
- Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom
- Mabinogi
- Might and Magic
- Munchkin
- Mythos
- Neverwinter Nights series
- NetHack
- Phantasy Star Online series
- Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series
- Record of Lodoss War: Advent of Cardice
- Shining in the Darkness
- Shining the Holy Ark
- Stonekeep
- Sword of Fargoal
- Swords and Serpents
- The Sorcerer's Cave
- Temple of Apshai
- Titan Quest
- Too Human
- Torchlight
- Wizardry series
References
- ^ Munchkin
- ^ DeVarque, Aardy. "Literary Sources of D&D". http://www.geocities.com/rgfdfaq/sources.html. Retrieved 2007-02-23.
- ^ Unpublished notes for an article, from telephone and e-mail interviews in 2002 by Peter Zelchenko. Subjects included Rusty Rutherford, Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood, Dirk Pellett, Paul Resch, Daniel Lawrence, Chuck Cranor. The research stemmed from Lawrence's claim of having written the first dungeon crawl. See http://www.armory.com/~dlp/dnd2.html, http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/mudtimeline.shtml, http://members.tripod.com/~rancourt/default.htm
External links
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