Zhu has written an absolutely cracking post. I thoroughly recommend you head over to his blog and give it a read, as his erudite and well-researched musings are far more intellectually rigorous than my own half-baked ramblings on the subject.
Seriously, there’s so much to unpack. The part where he mentions “dungeon-as-code” was a lightbulb moment for me. I’ve already said I’m fascinated by the space where paper, digital, and physical intersect, and the idea of “dungeon-as-code” seems like it belongs in a similar kind of transitional space; a halfway house between boardgame, wargame, and our contemporary notions of tabletop RPGs.
I’m glad he’s adopted the term “ludological”. I was using it in a deliberately wanky way to be pretentious (without really knowing if it’s appropriate), so I’m happy to see it may actually have legs. I’m going to be even wankier and suggest a second form of ludological influence. As well as “positive ludological influence” (i.e. borrowing bits from other games) can I propose “negative ludological influence” (i.e. the struggle to distinguish and define a type of game by what it is *not*).
As CRPGs have advanced, tabletop RPGs have struggled to justify their existence. This has, I think, led pen and paper gamers to emphasise the qualities of tabletop RPGs that are difficult to simulate with a computer. Early CRPGs like Wizardry, Might & Magic, Ultima, etc., basically nailed the concept of “dungeon-as-code”. Collaborative storytelling, meanwhile, has traditionally been seen as a unique (and difficult to replicate) strength of TTRPGs.
Negative ludological influence from computer games (i.e. the desire to define and distinguish TTRPGs as a medium offering an experience computer games cannot replicate) was conceivably partly responsible for pushing TTRPGs away from “dungeon-as-code” and towards “we are telling a story”. I’m not saying it was the main influence (I have no idea), but it seems entirely possible it was a significant factor.
I haven’t done enough (any) research to back up this hypothesis, but it seems plausible. Anyway, my main point is that types of games can influence the evolution of other types of games not just through cross-pollination of ideas and concepts, but also through competition and a desire to speciate as a matter of survival. TTRPGs (particularly commercial TTRPGs) had to distinguish themselves from CRPGs in order to attract and retain gamers / customers.
To be clear: this is all just speculation. It’s just me rambling. I haven’t researched this methodically (unlike Zhu, so go read his blog).
Some other random thoughts provoked by reading Zhu’s blogpost:
1. It is possible to “win” D&D. If we adopt the “dungeon-as-code” approach, then it is possible to “solve” dungeons in the same way it’s possible to “solve” a challenging and carefully constructed combat encounter. To “win” D&D, you solve enough dungeons to advance in level until you reach maximum level. Or, more likely, you solve levels in the campaign megadungeon (e.g. Castle Greyhawk, Castle Blackmoor, Tar Norgard in Rythlondar, etc.) until you reach and complete the lowest level of the dungeon. At this point, you have “won” D&D.
2. Adversarial DMs are not automatically bad. The DM has two hats. The first is as coder (i.e. dungeon designer) actually coding the “dungeon-as-code”. As coder, the DM is adversarial. They are trying to prevent the PCs from solving their dungeon. They are the opposing player. They do not necessarily need to take a “balanced” approach when coding the dungeon and, in fact, can be quite cruel and devious (though there should at least be consistent rules that they follow). The second hat (during play) is as judge or referee, running the “dungeon-as-code” and interpreting it for the PCs to interact with. Here they are essentially a “human computer”, a neutral arbiter of the “dungeon-as-code”.
3. D&D is not about telling a story. The DM should not be corrupting the “dungeon-as-code” in order to fit narrative or genre expectations. They should be interpreting it faithfully and neutrally. Story might emerge naturally from player interactions with the code, but it is not the DM’s role to support that story by editing the code on the fly.
The above aren’t really supposed to be hard rules or axioms. They’re just a set of observations that occurred to me while ruminating on Zhu’s post, and I’m not confident they necessarily stand up to scrutiny. I will ruminate further…
Image from Dungeon, The Code Works, 1979.
Arthur says
Interesting thoughts.
On D&D as a winnable game: I do wonder whether this is part of why D&D has often struggled with its “endgame”.
In OD&D there seems to be a strong assumption that after honing their skills and gaining resources and funds through dungeoneering, higher-level characters will go to the wilderness, carve out a little barony for themselves, and then do… something.
Unfortunately, OD&D didn’t really have much in the way of stuff to support ongoing domain management etc. once characters had got to the point where they’d built their fortress and gained their followers and whatnot, and more generally didn’t seem to have much of a clear concept of what characters would do when they reached that point. This is probably because in Gygax and Arneson’s own games, not enough characters had reached that point to make it necessary to think about that stuff.
B/X had more or less the same issue due to it being a clarified restatement of OD&D (and the “best of” the OD&D supplements). BECMI tried to bring in a domain management game and, eventually, ascension to godhood, but I don’t think many people at all have really played in campaigns where that was a significant element (or even reached that point). 1E to 3E didn’t take things much further either. 4E actually had some neat ideas with its high-level game, but 5E seems to have flinched back from taking on too much 4E influence.
On this basis I do wonder if, in campaigns which put a strong emphasis on D&D-as-game (rather than D&D as an exercise in experiencing a vividly realised fantasy world, or D&D as a storytelling medium) that’s why dungeon-as-code (and, less widespread but also a legit application of the same concept, hex-wilderness-as-code) is often the most successful model of play, if you’re going for that.
It certainly seems to be something which D&D is pretty good at. And it’s particularly good at it in editions which are happy to focus on D&D-as-game – I’m thinking here about OD&D or Basic with their strongly assumed dungeon emphasis, or 4E with its tightly engineered tactical combat.
I think there’s also a case to be made that whilst other approaches to D&D are possible – and it certainly markets itself as a big-tent game you can do anything in – if you’re not doing D&D-as-game/dungeon-as-code, there’s going to be a bunch of stuff in there which is either not useful to you or actively getting in your way and you will probably get better results using a system designed from the ground up to support the thing you want to achieve.
David says
@Arthur
Although I get what you mean, I think this perspective is backward (no condescension or insults here). Pre-D&D started as wargaming campaign which allowed individual heroes to go on invididual missions. Those evolved into dungeon delving and so on. I’m simplifying massively here, but the point remains: it started out as controlling armies and domains, and ended with players “getting there” through dungeon and then wilderness. In other words, I feel the end-game of pseudo-wargaming campaign was probably clear enough for the OD&D booklet that they didn’t needed to be explained. I’d say the “late-game” (if we say “end-game”, it denotes an “ending” to D&D which I think is misleading since all early drafts and booklets clearly points out to the fact there are no ending and the dungeon can be ever-expanding) is not well defined, but it is implicit in the design: control a domain, build armies, wage wars; i.e. Braunstein, Bath, Chainmail. This is of course my perception of this, don’t take my word for it.
Arthur says
For the purpose of the Braunstein-like thing Arneson was running and Gygax tried to capture as a commercial game, sure, I see that. I can also see that being possible for someone with a very similar wargaming background to Gygax etc. to infer that from the OD&D booklets.
Thing is, almost as soon as the book hit the shops it escaped that audience and ended up getting read by a wider range of people. Many of them would not have had the same background and had to figure it out for themselves (early Alarums & Excursions discussions capture this process playing out), and many of those designing for D&D later on didn’t have that much of a wargaming background and only really knew D&D as it was played in the wild, not D&D as Gygax/Arneson originally devised it.
(I’d 100% argue that Gygax’s later D&D work was shaped in part by a response to D&D as it was played in the wild rather than retaining some sort of pre-OD&D purity – it was commercially sensible to play to what was catching on in the community, after all – so not even the founders of the game were immune to that.)
The upshot of that is you get editions like 3.0 where not much thought (if any) has been given to the late game/endgame because the designers don’t seem to have understood why TSR editions of D&D had that domain management stuff (or actively disliked it) and just kind of dropped it all without really finding anything to replace it. (3.X is possibly the edition where the oft-cited linear fighter/quadratic wizard issue is worst, and though the fighter’s army probably isn’t enough to balance the sheer potential of a wizard who has gained sufficient spell slots to really take the system to town, taking the fighter’s army away certainly hurt the late game.)
Gus L. says
One of the things that strikes me in the early D&D space (lets say pre-1979) and about the early D&D rules are the various traditions and play-styles that it seems to generate almost immediately. In Lake Geneva Gygax is slowly ossifying into his own play-style, pushing back against Arneson’s Braunstien influenced game of faction conflict for one more concerned about polearm variety, tournament rules, and how best to murder orc babies.
This leaves space for others to step in with their interpretations of OD&Ds many voids. The Caltech folk of Dungeons & Beavers look to pulp genre emulation and focus on combat starring more heroic PCs, something that ultimately leads to the Hickmans, Dragonlance, CoC and eventually 5E.
Others reading the mechanistic rules for traps in Underworld & Wilderness adventures or Gygax’s procedural generation system for dungeons in early Strategic Review I think very much find the Dungeon as Code. Palace of the Vampire Queen and Dungeon! (the board game) seem of this tradition, but I think you are right that it becomes the roguelike CRPG. I honestly wonder how much the code of the original Rogue takes from those random dungeon generators in Strat Review?
I’d also point out that this tradition is still going strong with megaboardgames/minigames like Kingdom of Death and Blackstone Fortress.
Uncaring Cosmos says
@Arthur said:
Excellent point. From reading about the early history of Greyhawk, it sounds like Gygax struggled with the endgame (and that his endgame was quite different from Arneson’s). When characters finally reached the lowest level of the dungeon and effectively “solved” Castle Greyhawk, they encountered a “slide to China” and an extra secret level in the form of a trek across the Outdoor Survival board.
In practice, it also seems most groups do de facto adopt a “win condition” that has nothing to do with the implied D&D domain management endgame (e.g. the “win condition” might be completing whichever published campaign or module they’re playing). Even in homebrew campaigns there will often be a climactic boss fight with a BBEG, and defeating the boss then becomes D&D’s win condition. Rare is the group that truly plays an open campaign for decades and decades (though they certainly exist). However, from what I’ve heard, these multi-decade campaigns anyway seem like they often just stretch out the dungeon-delving / adventuring mode of gameplay over years, rather than moving into domain management and commanding armies.
Again, spot on. The question is: was D&D designed for this kind of “dungeon-as-code” play? And then, when released into the wild, was it co-opted into multiple different playstyles, effectively becoming a “generic system” for what the Retired Adventurer calls the shift from “Classic” to “Trad” cultures? Or maybe this tension was at play all the way through (even before the rules were published), and D&D was always all things to all people?
It feels like many people who play D&D-as-story want to tell the story of playing D&D-as-code. I’m not saying they are having badwrongfun. The aim is quite rational: to cut out the boring, mundane, procedural stuff and just get to the “good stuff”. Yet the stories D&D-as-story ends up generating are often still the stories of people going down into dungeons, fighting monsters, claiming treasure, etc. (just done without the fiddly bits that make dungeon-as-code more of a game).
Uncaring Cosmos says
@David said:
This is very true, though I think the points made by Gus L. and Arthur (and by the Retired Adventurer) are important here. A hundred flowers bloomed as soon as D&D was released into the wild (or perhaps even pre-publication, with the designers never able to agree what D&D actually was “about”).
Uncaring Cosmos says
@Gus L. said:
And Dungeon! would lead to weird RPG-ish boardgames like Arkham Horror (and Talisman, which I owned and played a ton as a kid). I would say certain gamebooks also fall into this camp (I’m particularly thinking of very boardgame-y / RPG-ish gamebooks, like Fighting Fantasy’s “Legend of Zagor” which was actually structured around a boardgame released at the same time). However, plenty of gamebooks also emphasise the “book” part more than the “game” part (I think the Lone Wolf books, for example, were often focused on telling a compelling story, though I’m less familiar with them).
Gus L. says
Speaking of gamebooks, the ones that really feel like a leap into code would be those weird mid 80’s Lost World Combat Game Books. Each described a fantasy creature e.g. Skeleton with Scimitar and Shield) were full of illustrations featuring its combat moves. As a player(s) you fought two books against eachother.
I think this may be the most “Coded” gamebook I can think of, at least if one takes it to mean a sort of automaton for play, created by a designer to be used solo or deliever the designers vision through mechanics that cover every situation.
Certainly these books are something that would be better as a computer game. Yet I think they are also a sort of joyful artifact, not ludic exactly, but a sort of obsession one sees in game designers for creating a complete, perfect, set of mechanics that allows the designer to control and direct the play experience. It’s something that TSR and WotC keep struggling for, ways to make the GM a mere purveyor of the designers intent, to create a consistent play experience. Gygax tried it to push back against homebrew and build tournament play. TSR started crwating paths, like DL, to avoid allegations of moral hazard and WotC does it to promote organized play and better emulate streamer experience I think.
It’s the sided of “Coded” design that makes me uneasy both the lure of mechanical perfection and the dulling of the RPG experience.
Arthur says
On D&D-as-story telling the story of Dungeon-as-code, I guess this is a key to the appeal of games like Dungeon World.
On gamebooks and their different approaches, the much-cited Deathtrap Dungeon is one I’d argue takes the Dungeon-as-code direction too far. I’ve gone on at length about it back on my blog but to give a potted summary: it’s very arbitrary, and it involves a bunch of decision points where taking the wrong decision locks the game into an unwinnable state – often non-obviously – and very often the game gives you almost no basis, at the point when you are making these decisions, to figure out which the correct one is.
That means that you almost certainly won’t beat the book on your first try without cheating unless you are extraordinarily lucky; what’s much more likely is that you will need to replay it a bunch of times to find the one true route.
This is absolute dogshit from the perspective of gamebook-as-story or gamebook-as-immersive-experience, because it requires your character to make decisions based on information that they don’t have, breaking both the narrative logic of the story and the internal cause-and-effect logic of the world.
I’d also argue that it’s pretty bad for *most* flavours of gamebook-as-game – it’s reminiscent of an annoyingly arbitrary point and click adventure or something. In general, this sort of “heads you might win, tails you definitely don’t” arbitrary choice isn’t considered to be particularly meaty.
It *is*, however, a prime example of dungeon-as-code – right down to the iterative play needed to solve it!
David says
@Arthur & @Uncaring Cosmos
Both of you are correct in your interpretation. I think I miscommunicated my point here: I was mostly trying to say that “the author’s intent” was most likely, from both Arneson and Gygax side, trying to imply the late-game as including Chainmail and management (even if Chainmail was abandonned); while the “the work’s intent” was indeed brought into many places where the critical aspect of dungeon-as-code was seen as the essence of the game, hence in no need of a late-game addition.
Btw awesome blog. I’ve been reading for a while now some of your blogpost (you are in my blog feed so it’s easier to catch), it was my first time commenting.
Uncaring Cosmos says
@Gus L. said:
Gus, that is a deep cut. Wow. I had never heard of these. I agree with the “joyful artifact” label (though I think they sound more interesting as a curio than as an actual game). Fascinating how much variety and experimentation there was among gamebooks (I was also thinking of Fabled Lands, with its keywords and open world sandbox, as an example of a “coded” gamebook series).
I am 100% with you. The DM should never be a “mere purveyor of the designers’ intent”. The DM should be able to add their own creativity and ideas into the mix, not just slavishly follow someone else’s code.
For me, “dungeon-as-code” doesn’t mean the system needs to be incredibly mechanical and prescriptive, with rules for every single permissable action. It also doesn’t mean the DM cannot adopt a “rulings not rules” approach. Rather, it means the DM (when wearing her referee hat) has to run the code in a neutral and impartial way, ignoring narrative or genre expectations. The player’s job is to solve the dungeon, not to be a character in a story or to inhabit a simulated world.
I was trying to think of examples of “dungeon-as-code” that I’ve seen online. The one that immediately sprung to mind was Mailer’s “B/X Misadventures in randomly generated dungeons”. He wasn’t actually creating the dungeons himself (they were randomly generated), though it felt like he was running them faithfully and impartially. The result was a level of lethality that I think most (me included) might find hard to enjoy. Narrative and realism were sacrificed entirely to gameplay. Yet, despite the constant TPKs and the lack of consistent plot, characters, or world… it was somehow still compelling.
I think the whole concept of having AD&D “tournament modules”, with separate parties running through the same module and competing for points, feels like it fits in the “dungeon-as-code” camp.
Uncaring Cosmos says
@Arthur said:
Absolutely. Dungeon World is all about this. However, it strikes me that most Storygames are actually the polar opposite of “dungeon-as-code” (and aren’t interested in even replicating the experience of “dungeon-as-code”). They would, for example, typically be more interested in achieving a narrative following the genre beats of the stories D&D is based on (e.g. classic fantasy fiction) rather than modelling the experience of playing “dungeon-as-code”. I would actually argue that it’s mostly Trad games that are trying to tell the story of “dungeon-as-code”.
I’m drawing on Retired Adventurer’s recent scheme of “six cultures” in RPGs, which makes quite a lot of sense to me. Trad games sit somewhere between Classic and Storygames on the “dungeon-as-code” / “dungeon-as-story” spectrum. Trad was a reaction to the boring, fiddly bits of Classic (i.e. the “code” bits), whereas Storygames were a reaction to the way Trad system mechanics no longer seemed to support the desired outcome of telling a satisfying story (i.e. if your aim is “dungeon-as-story” then why still have lots of vestigial “dungeon-as-code” mechanics?).
Actually, maybe that doesn’t quite make sense. Trad games still feel very “coded” (and, in fact, so do Storygames). Perhaps it’s rather about where and what you code. Maybe, for example, there’s a distinction to be drawn between “system-as-code” (e.g. Pathfinder, 4e) and “dungeon-as-code” (e.g. OD&D, B/X). I think the definition of “dungeon-as-code” is also getting a bit hazy in my mind, and I may need to restate it for clarity:
“Dungeon-as-code” means you are playing a game (not telling a story), and the game is about solving a dungeon. The dungeon is a cipher, set up by one player (the DM) to be solved by other players (the PCs), though there can be multiple solutions. When coding the dungeon, the DM can be adversarial. When running the dungeon, the DM must be neutral and impartial, not “editing the code” of the dungeon on the fly, for example to provide a greater challenge or to support a more satisfying story.
Ok, back to my point: Trad games are telling the story of “dungeon-as-code”. If it takes players an hour or so to make a character (e.g. 3.5 / Pathfinder) then the DM has a massive incentive not to run “dungeon-as-code”. Yet the characters are still telling the story of solving a dungeon: delving into dungeons, killing monsters, and stealing treasure, as if the dungeon was the game. In practice, the DM is (almost certainly) handwaving / fudging parts of the dungeon, rather than intepreting it neutrally. Most want to tell a satisfying story about how the dungeon was solved, not actually solve the dungeon (because actually trying to solve the dungeon would mean there should logically be a good chance the dungeon could go unsolved).
You are completely right, Deathtrap Dungeon is pure “dungeon-as-code”. In fact, Zhu in his blog post originally meant “dungeon-as-code” to mean a “cipher” to be solved (as in the boardgame Mastermind), but I went off on a tangent taking “code” to mean “computer code”. Gamebooks like Deathtrap Dungeon are pure ciphers (Ian Livingstone was particularly notorious for implementing a “one truth path” approach in his gamebooks). There is one solution to the gamebook, and your job as the player (through persistence and luck) is to guess it. That is a recipe for frustration, and shows (I think) how “dungeon-as-code” can lead to annoying and unsatisfying outcomes.
Having said that, I really loved Deathtrap Dungeon as a child, even though I never completed it (and I don’t know why I just didn’t cheat, tbh). I still have it sitting on my shelf, but have no idea what happens in paragraph 400. I suppose I must have given up after a couple of tries and moved on to other FF gamebooks. Still, I enjoyed the experience despite the failure.
Maybe this is the key? “Dungeon-as-code” could mean dungeons go unsolved, which is not necessarily a bad thing. However, forcing players to solve a dungeon by learning the arbitrary strictures of the DM’s dungeon code through trial-and-error and grinding repetition is surely a recipe for frustration.
There seem to be a couple of ways to cope with this:
1. Do not have “one true path”. There should be more than one way to “solve” the dungeon (in fact, ideally there should be nigh infinite ways to solve a dungeon).
2. Don’t enforce repetition. The dungeon should be sprawling, with plenty of options. If the players fail to solve part of the dungeon, there should be other parts they can turn to for variety. Or there could be a wilderness with multiple dungeons. However it’s handled, players should have options. If they fail, they should be able to go off and do something else instead of repeating the same thing over and over (using the gamebook analogy, if you fail Deathtrap Dungeon, you should be able to put it down and pick up City of Thieves instead of replaying Deathtrap Dungeon over and over).
3. Don’t make failure too onerous. Failure to solve a dungeon in D&D is usually synonymous with death (though failure could also be through giving up in boredom or frustration, or due to insanity, mutilation, mutation, paralysis, petrification, magical effects, because PCs are unable to solve a key riddle or puzzle, etc., etc.). Regardless, don’t make the consequences of failure so onerous that there is a strong incentive for the DM to avoid it ever happening. Rolling up a new character shouldn’t take too long, if there is an XP or level penalty it shouldn’t be too difficult to catch up, etc. There should be consequences, but failure should be fun (or, at least, a core part of the experience).
Uncaring Cosmos says
@David said:
Very true. I wonder if Arneson and Gygax had the same late-game in mind, though (Gygax’s “slide to China” at the bottom of the dungeons beneath Castle Greyhawk seems so different to the armies and domains reported in Blackmoor).
I gather that Gygax did run linked Chainmail mass combats like the Battle of Emridy Meadows (I could be getting this wrong), but I don’t think it was the “endgame” for PCs in the same way as in Blackmoor (and it’s not even clear how many PCs had armies and domains in the Blackmoor campaign).
It feels like even Gygax and Arneson had different approaches to the D&D endgame. I could be getting this mixed up, though, so take it all with a pinch of salt.
Ta very much! I really appreciate you taking the time to read + comment! I’ve found the discussion with everyone really thought-provoking, and it helps to bounce ideas off others.
Gus L. says
**For me, “dungeon-as-code” doesn’t mean the system needs to be incredibly mechanical and prescriptive, with rules for every single permissable action. It also doesn’t mean the DM cannot adopt a “rulings not rules” approach. Rather, it means the DM (when wearing her referee hat) has to run the code in a neutral and impartial way, ignoring narrative or genre expectations. The player’s job is to solve the dungeon, not to be a character in a story or to inhabit a simulated world.**
This strikes me as a core element of what I call “Classic Play”, though I don’t use the label in the way Retired Adventure does in his recent post.
It’s the way I try to run my games, open about the rules and their effects, and with an effort to show unbiased adjudication. The goal is to engender mutual trust between the players and GM — because in an open world and utilizing minimal rules, especially (as in early D&D) when those rules exist primarily to resolve negative consequences, the GM has enormous power. Historically it seems like Arneson and the Braunstein school of early play got closest to this, with Gygax frequently encouraging the use of tricks and antagonistic GMing and suggesting punitive measures to punish players for any objections. Nor does the Dungeons and Beavers group seem (from the little I’ve read) much concerned with fairness, or if they are it’s secondary to drama and genre emulation. This last approach really seems to have become dominant today, starting with Hickman’s influence on TSR (read his XDM sometime, it’s horrific advice on almost every level). At least with contemporary Perkins’ style adventure paths though it’s more concerned with offering consistent cinematic fun rather then expressing designer virtuosity.
For me then the “Dungeon as Code” idea sparks the idea of a another way, the desire to encode the dungeon (and so adventure) outside of the social interaction of play, almost the inverse of the Braunstein method of a referee that will adjudicate and invent the setting’s response to unexpected and infinite possible player actions. I don’t think this codification method is bad (a lot of work though), but I suspect it leads away from table top games and shines in computer RPGs or boardgames where for various reasons the game world must be more constrained. Like those Lost World combat zines I mentioned – an excellent model for a video game perhaps, but very strange as a book.
Uncaring Cosmos says
Gus L. said:
I both agree and disagree. I agree that the idea of “dungeon-as-code” speaks to something distinct from (though perhaps related to) the “Classic” style of play. However, I disagree that it is necessarily the inverse of what you call the Braunstein method.
I think it might be possible to have:
a) simple (but flexible and lightly-coded) rules
b) a simple (but heavily-coded and heavily-bounded) world
and then generate:
c) emergent complexity from a) and b) interacting via player input
I’m going to try and spell out what I mean more precisely in future blog posts, but basically I see the dungeon as one of the most highly-coded environments in D&D (with perhaps only combat encounters being more coded). I’ve been wondering if it’s possible to turn the entire game into a dungeon (an approach I’m provisionally calling “Dungeon Mode”) in a similar way to the CRPG Might & Magic.
I haven’t played Might & Magic in decades, so my recollection may be fuzzy. However, from what I remember, and unlike Ultima (which had a distinct “Overland Mode” and “Dungeon Mode”), Might & Magic basically stays in Dungeon Mode all the time. You walk through forests, deserts, mountains, towns, and dungeons all at what appears to be the same rate of movement, with units of time and space remaining constant (i.e. you move at feet per turn in both dungeon and wilderness, rather than switching to miles per day outside).
I think that might be one way to apply “dungeon-as-code” to D&D. Stay in Dungeon Mode (i.e. the most “coded” mode of play apart from combat) for the entire game, instead of switching to Overland Mode, Town Mode, etc.
I’m also playing around with creating a super-abstracted and super-simplified campaign world. So, my “world” would be roughly 80 grid squares east-west, and perhaps 160 north-south (i.e. two A4 sheets of graph paper), and 100 grid squares deep (i.e. 10 dungeon levels deep). That’s roughly the same size as the first Might & Magic world, which I think is more than big enough (though I could always expand outwards from there if necessary).
Yes, I’m under no illusions here. Despite abstracting and simplifying the world down to Minecraft levels, it would still be a colossal undertaking. I was thinking of following the old AD&D DMG advice: start humble, with a town and one level of a dungeon, and work your way outwards from there.
Yes, you’ve hit the nail on the head. In some ways, the world in Dungeon Mode will have to be much more constrained.
On the other hand, all D&D campaign worlds are abstractions. I would just be abstracting details in a different way. Whereas most campaign worlds have abstract populations of millions, my world would have a very detailed population of dozens (at most hundreds) of NPCs. Once those NPCs are dead, they’re dead.
Navigating a town in most D&D games is quite an abstract affair. I would still employ “fast travel” so players don’t literally need to walk from shop to shop, but the town would be mapped out exactly like a dungeon.
So, this is my idea of “dungeon-as-code”. To use B/X D&D to essentially simulate playing Might & Magic. Why not just play M&M? Because, as I said, I think simple (unbounded) rules + simple (bounded) world = emergent complexity.
For me, the best bits of D&D have always been the dungeon. So, why not make the whole world a dungeon crawl (with fast travel between locations that have already been visited). I’ll hopefully be writing more about Dungeon Mode soon.