From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (October 2006) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

This article is about the general style of adventure. For the computer game named after it, see Linley's Dungeon Crawl

A dungeon crawl is a type of role-playing adventure in which heroes negotiate 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 (or dungeon bash) 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.

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.

The word "dungeon" probably became a standard term in the role-playing context through the popularity of Dungeons & Dragons.^{[citation needed]} However, the word does not refer exclusively to prisons but to any dangerous area used as the site for an adventure, such as a cave, ruin, or shipwreck.

For pen and paper RPGs, visual aids such as maps, models, or miniature figures are often used to represent the landscape of a dungeon crawl.

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. The first dungeon crawl computer game was pedit5 written in 1974 by Rusty Rutherford.^{[citation needed]}

The dungeon crawl has also been a major influence on action-based first-person perspective computer games, notably Doom, Doom II, and Quake.

• Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance series
• Champions of Norrath series
• Diablo series
• Dungeon Siege series
• The Elder Scrolls: Arena
• Gauntlet
• Guild Wars Eye of the North
• Grandia Xtreme
• Munchkin
• Swords and Serpents
• The Sorcerer's Cave
• Gold Box series

• The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Cliches