Hey all,
probably my favorite genre of game is the Dungeon Crawler. The whole concept of working through a confined space, taking out monsters, finding loot, all while completing a quest, just really appeals to me. However, there are also a lot of problems I see over and over again that I'd love to have tweaked. I want to open this thread up for people to express what they love about the genre, what they think needs improvement, and what you wish would be taken out all together. Full disclosure, I'm designing a dungeon crawler myself, so part of my inspiration for this thread is to see what some common complaints from the fan base are.
I'll go first.
Strongly Implied Class/Character Combinations - Some dungeon crawlers allow you to choose a character, then a class that is available to that character. For example, both Hero A and Hero B are characters that have access to the Thief class as well as the Ranger class. However, the artwork and design of Hero A is very clearly that of a Thief, while the artwork and design of Hero B is very clearly that of a Ranger. I dislike this because even though I have the option to pick either class, it will feel weird thematically. This leaves me with the choice of either always going with the implied character/class combination, or going a route that makes the game feel awkward to me from a thematic perspective. I don't like being forced to make that choice. To resolve this, I feel like there should either not be character/class combinations, meaning that each character is, in essence, its own class, or design the characters with sufficient generality to fit either class.
Shop Items and Loot - Many dungeon crawlers have a "shopping phase" between quests, where players can buy new weapons and upgrades before delving into the next quest. While I don't have a problem with this in and of itself, I do have a problem with shop items having the BEST items in the game. Thematically this doesn't work for me, because if there's some all powerful demon plotting the world's destruction from within a castle up in the mountains, I shouldn't have to dish out gold at some old man's shop to get the most epic item in the game. No, those kind of items should be found during the course of the quest, I believe. That doesn't mean there isn't a place for shopping phases. However, the way I see it is that the loot you find IN the dungeon should be something like 80% common and 20% epic, and the shop items are somewhere in between... so if you're just getting common items in the dungeon, at least you can sell them and upgrade to something better, but those will never be better than the epic loot that actually drops in the dungeon.
A revealed map from the start - One of my favorite things about dungeon crawling is revealing one room after another and finding a new surprise in each one. But dungeon crawlers that have the entire map set up from the beginning feel more like skirmish games with the dungeon master player rather than a true dungeon crawler. Instead, I would rather the game start with a single room, the one you are in, being revealed, and all other rooms being revealed only as you enter them. Descent 2E's Forgotten Souls expansion handles this very well, in my opinion.
Those are just some to get the topic started. I'd love to hear your thoughts as well!
What if there were different colored doors and tiles? For example, a room you are in has a green door and a yellow door. Going through a green door means laying a tile from the green deck while going through a yellow door lays down a tile from the yellow deck. You know that green rooms are relatively safe, but yellow rooms have a 50% chance to be harder, but also have better rewards. Would this kind of decision making start to solve that problem?
Totally hypothetically of course, it's not like designing a game with that as the central mechanic or anything.... *whistles*